Genius In Progress

Following my fun weekend in Toledo, the longest week of all time began. It was the culmination of the last 6 months of stress in trying to purchase a home. The whole week was a roller coast of ups and downs…. first it was a go, then it wasn’t going to work, then it was a go again, and so on; back and forth the news went… talk about emotionally taxing. Thursday, March 17th (my original closing date) came and passed with no house. Friday rolled around, with the closing time of 12 PM come and gone. We rescheduled for 1 PM, and at 12:30 PM I still did not know whether I would get a house or not. I was sitting at work, stewing and debating getting food, but not wanting to be inaccessible if the 1 PM was a go.

Finally, I gave up and decided to get food. 3 seconds (literally) later the phone rang with the news that the closing was a go and that I needed to hurry to the bank and get the downpayment. The closing was a long process, starting with about 2 1/2 hours of waiting for the proper documents to get faxed / emailed / whatever to the title company, followed by 30 minutes of signing documents. Just as we finished signing, a phone call came from the bank saying all the documents were wrong and they were sending new ones and I would have to sign it all over again.

At 5:15 PM the papers were finally signed, though sadly the funds didn’t transfer until Monday, and I was leaving the next morning at about 4 AM, so I had a house, but no keys. I came back to the office and shared the news, at which point a party at my house was suggested. I mentioned my lack of keys, and someone pointed out that it was my house, why didn’t I just break in? As amusing as the concept was I held off and headed home to pack, with this house in my thoughts:

My New House

So, it’s been about a month since I last posted, and quite a month it has been. As I have stated before, my posts never come in single entities, so I will try and post the major events as seperate entries.

Starting off the month last month (as it does every month) was the Club Christ concert. The turnout was not quite as spectacular as the previous month, but it was enjoyable, as it always is. Qedem played their second to last show (last Club Christ) in their current form, and Dawn Xiana Moon played again, which was quite enjoyable.

Later that week (well, the Friday following that Saturday), I saw Dawn again, this time playing at a coffee shop in Dexter. I really enjoy her music, and despite her claims that it is depressing, I find a lot of the songs peaceful and even uplifting. Anyhow, we started talking between sets and then continued after the show, and it came up that she was going to Toledo for a show the next day, and had no ride. One thing led to another (ie I offered to give her a ride) and I ended up having the pleasure of spending a day wandering around Toledo with Dawn.

Highlights of the trip included driving on some of the worst roads I have ever experienced, some cool photography, excellent chineese food at some little place that I still don’t understand how she knew about, and another chance to hear Dawn play her music. All in all it was a Saturday very well spent, even if I didn’t get my normal sleeping in.

It’s turning in to quite a month (as in, a block of 30ish days, rather than the month of February or March). Joy departed for Ireland after 2 weeks in the US visiting. It was quite a pleasure having her visit and getting to see her and Johannes together, despite the fact she kept poking the bear and doing that thing with her eyebrow! The Pinkness also came to visit on Saturday, so we got to see her, which we hadn’t in a while, so there was all sorts of excitement going on.

In addition, the house purchasing process continues… I got the 3 lbs of paperwork in the mail yesterday for the loan, and it should probably take me a couple hours to finish that off. The inspection last week went very well and there was very little problematic with the house. Assuming all goes well, and that the loan can be completed in time (they were worried slightly about being able to complete the process in less than 30 days), I will be closing on the house on March 17th. The shame is, I leave for a week-long developer’s conference in Florida a day later, which will probably drive me nuts. Ah well.
All in all, life is quite excessively busy, but enjoyable. Thank you God, for answering prayers about the little details and the big ones.

Yesterday I went and visited a house, and put an offer in on it in the same visit. The sellers countered and I accepted. Now, providing nothing goes wrong, the following will be my house on March 17th, 2005!!!

My new house

The inspection is on Saturday. I’ll probably post more about it later.

Unrelated to Christmas, though still exciting, I got myself a new guitar. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay anything close to as much as the price that they list, though it is certainly worth every penny I did pay. The thing sounds gorgeous. It has an awesome, full sound and just plays very well. The pre-amp and pickups are pretty cool too. It has a bridge pickup as well as a soundhole mic, and a slider on the pre-amp to select the mix between the two. So, huzzah for me finally having a really good guitar.

So, in my slew of postings, I am relating things somewhat out of order from my life. About a week and a half ago (Wednesday), which would be before the power outage post, I was driving to work. Now this normally is a fairly routine experience, but I had a little variety that day. I was driving down Huron River Drive, coming up towards one of the big curves, when I saw someone come rocketing around the curve. My first thought was that the car was moving way too fast. The roads were a little wet, not too bad though.

Anyway, this car comes rocketing around the curve while I am a couple hundred yards back, so I slow down. Then suddenly the back end breaks out on the car, so she overcorrects, and starts an uncontrolled swerve towards my lane, at a high rate of speed. I am going fairly slow when I realize that the car is not going to be able to regain control, and is heading straight for me.

Enter God and video games. At the last second I floored it and swerved into her lane (thank goodness for fast cars), just as she crossed into mine. She missed the front of my car by about 1 1/2 feet. I have no idea how I did it… it wasn’t really even a concious decision. God was certainly looking out for me that day. (I think He worked through all the car video games I played to help) I looked in the rear-view mirror and didn’t see her in the road, so I quickly pulled over, put the flashers on and got out.

She was down in the ditch and the car was totalled, so I started running back to make sure she was not hurt. I was quite scared at first when I heard screaming coming from the car.. I assumed something bad had happened. As it turned out, she was just panicking that her parents were going to kill her for wrecking the car.

So, that was my experience with almost having my engine sitting in my lap. Whee

Well, actually more specifcally, less to us. We lost power for about 2 hours on Monday. It was kind of odd, as it was mostly just foggy and not blowing or storming, but it happened nonetheless. There I was, sitting at my computer minding my own business when FWOOP, the lights went out, apparently in a pretty hearty brown-out… always great for electronics and motors design for 120 volts to run at 35 volts. Thankfully my UPS saved the day, and the computers were shut down properly.

At this point only Johannes, Abbie and I were home. I suppose we could have turned on the generator and gone back to life as normal, but instead we broke out the candles, including the Advent wreath. We even did the advent ceremony to light the wreath. We then proceeded to just hang out and sing songs by the candlelight. Johannes played piano, I grabbed my guitar, and Abbie alternated between singing and attempting to do homework. We did this for about 2 hours until I noticed that one of the electric candles in the window was glowing slighly (indicating that the house was getting a small amount of voltage… wow that’s horrible for motors) at which point I sprinted into the basement to throw the main breaker off. A few minutes later the electricity was restored.

Hmm, methinks it’s been a while since I posted, so I figured I might have at it. Not much of overwhelming interest has been going on recently. The house hunt continues, with the major step at this point being in securing financing (pre-approval). This will somewhat determine what sort of house I end up with. Either way it’s pretty exciting. I’ve found one house that I really like, though it seems to be a bit on the expensive side. There are also some slightly less expensive options that I really like, so we’ll see how it ends up. Other than that, work continues in the same lovely pace as usual. The weather has been absolutely gorgonomous, which makes it harder to sit inside in front of a computer, but either way I love the fall. I leave my camera in my bag all the time just so I can take pictures of the awesome scenery.

In other news, I keep debating mountain-biking to work, and I’ve resurrected the RC car for a little break from work now and then. Also I’ve had the pleasure of getting to talk to Francine lots recently, which is always a welcome addition to the day. She’s way too much fun to talk to, as always.

Well that about wraps it up for the time being. Perhaps I will write another entry in another month or so… hehe, maybe sooner. Oh yeah, and Go Blue!

Well here I am back from El Paso, and at work, though running on a limited amount of sleep. I had a wonderful time there. It was quite enjoyable seeing El Paso, and particularly getting to hang out with Francine. I got to meet some of her friends, and to see the El Paso scenery. We went to a concert, where I witnessed one good band (Blacklist, for which I cannot find a link) and a couple of the worst performances I have seen in a while by a few other bands, unless wordless screaming into a microphone with heavy guitar distortion in the background is considered good.

There were many other highlights of the weekend, but we’ll leave them for the asking, for those of you who might even care. Then on Sunday night I boared the plane to head back to Detroit via Las Vegas… ah, it would have been nice to take a stopover there, but sadly no. I upgraded the second leg of my flight (the 4 hour plane ride) to first class, and didn’t regret it for a second. I arrived back at the house at around 7:30 AM, sent of an email saying I got in, then said hello to visiting relatives who were just waking up and zonked out for a couple hours. And past that, here we are, wide asleep, gazing unfocusingly off into the lines of code…

So Thursday was quite a cool day. Work started out normally, but then we went to Creekside for lunch and pretty much the whole gang joined, so it turned into one of the enjoyable long lunches that have been sadly missing from this summer so far. After a couple hours we headed back to work for the rest of the afternoon.

At 5:00 I headed over to the house to get changed into my pretty clothes so that we could go to the fund-raiser opening of the Father Gabriel Richard production of Les Miserables (involving an expensive ticket and black-tie dress). I got to hang out with a friend from middle school / college and her sisters (who are apparently Abbie’s adopted sisters, since their little sister and my little sister spend all their time together). Anyway, afterwards, since we were all dressed up, we busted out the camera and took pictures… way too much fun. You can see the results of that here.

After that I got to talk to Francine for a long time, which is always a pleasure. I am definitely looking forward to going down to visit her on Friday. It should be an awesome weekend, though I may be distracted to distraction at work all week. We shall see. Well, that’s all for now ladies and gentleman.