cin1607: (Default)
Those of you who have bought houses before, why didn't you warn me what an utter pain in the ass it is? Closing day was Thursday. The day before, I had a friend visiting from out of town, so I took her over to the house just to show her where it was. When we walked around back, I discovered that the heat pump hadn't been replaced, which was added to the contract since it wasn't working on the day of the inspection. I called my realtor right away, and she started making calls. The seller said it would be taken care of that afternoon.

Next morning, my realtor and I did the final walk-through before closing, and the work still hadn't been done. And a non-functioning HVAC had been a walk-away point for me, before the seller signed the contract agreeing to replace it. Turns out, he apparently decided that he only needed to get it working again, due to our misunderstanding of the integral nature of heat pumps and air-handlers. (Wtf do I know about HVACs? The heat pump wasn't working; the air-handler was. He signed off on replacing one and servicing the other. If it turns out you can't replace the one without the other, too damn bad.) Both sides have lawyered up at this point. I'm told it's very clear he's in breach of contract and to just sit tight. We're just not sure how long he'll dig his heels in over this.

Meanwhile, my entire house is packed and I have a free weekend. I think I'm going to spend a chunk of it refinishing a table that I stripped and sanded down and never got back to a few weeks ago. So maybe there'll be one small accomplishment before it's over.
cin1607: (Default)
It's been ages again. I said I'd stop doing that. :P

No news was bad news on the impending house purchase last winter, which is the reason for all the radio silence. To make a long story short, I found out at the last minute that new FEMA laws meant I couldn't get flood insurance for the usual $400/year that property had always carried, and had to get it at the new rate of $2200/year. That put the monthly payments out of my reach, so I had to call the bank and ask them to deny my loan and get me out of the contract. I think I cried for a month--worst Christmas ever.

Fast forward 6 months and I'm now 10 days away from closing on another house. It's a better house than the last one, I know. It's larger (and more expensive, which makes me a little nervous) with some neat architectural features and bigger rooms, in a great complex with an excellent reputation and resale value. And on the western side of town, so no flood insurance required. It doesn't have a garden, which is a bit disappointing, but it does have a nice back deck that overlooks the woods, so it's nice and private and I can do plenty of container gardening.

I'm so completely not attached to it at all. I know this is a defense mechanism, but it's getting annoying. I'd like a little excitement at least to help motivate me to pack, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it might. The bank has conditionally approved my loan, and I've met (to the best of my knowledge) all of their listed conditions at this point, but they're eyeballing the line on my paycheck stubs that outlines the "temporary pay" that I've been getting for the last two and a half years for doing three people's jobs. That situation probably won't be resolved until fall, but I doubt all of the reassurances from my director will amount to much with the loan underwriters. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I seem to be slipping into the Captain America/Avengers/Marvel movie verse fandom. Although the BUCKY!fandom would be more accurate. :D I've packed six boxes. After every two, I get to watch another Bucky vid, so I suppose I've got some motivation after all. :)

Mold wars.

Sep. 10th, 2013 06:14 pm
cin1607: (Default)
Cut for things that will make you want to clean your house right now! )

Boy do I miss interpreting! Can I just go back outside? I never had these kinds of problems in the fort. *g* And in the midst of all of this chaos, I delivered my "I'm serious!" check to my realtor this afternoon and the offer for the house is all signed and delivered now. Hopefully I'll know something Friday.

Hello?

Sep. 1st, 2013 09:19 am
cin1607: (Default)
I haven't posted anything anywhere since Christmas of 2010, so I suppose I'm past due with my annual "I'm not dead" post. So, I'm not dead! :)

Some days I feel like it's a close thing, though. Work responsibilities have doubled in the last 18 months, when everyone stepped up a level to cover for the loss of our senior director to cancer. So I've been in an acting position again, doing a job that is supposed to be done by two people because it manages over 100 staff across two museums. And after the last year, I can vouch to anyone who will listen that IT TAKES TWO PEOPLE, JESUS! I'm working my ass off and barely treading water trying to keep up. After a year-long international search, we're finally getting a new senior director from outside the organization, so I'm expecting all of our acting-position dominoes to fall back into their usual positions. I have a faint hope (faint, because I know what our budgets look like) that I'll stay where I am, so when the domino over me falls, we'll be back to having two people in this position. But we'll see.

So anyway, I've pretty much been out of the fannish loop, but it's been really nice seeing people posting again! So I thought I'd try it! Daily might be a shock, but at least weekly? Although stories about ducks might be all I manage--work's eating my life, and of all my staff, the ducks give me the least trouble. :)
cin1607: (Default)
I've just shoveled about seven inches of snow to and around the car, and then down the drive, and off the sidewalk. And it's still coming down like crazy. But I'm hoping that if I tackle it in six inch increments, it won't kill me later. *g*

This is my annual, "I'm not dead!" post. Unless the blizzard gets me tonight. :) The museums were closed today due to weather, and probably will be tomorrow, too, but I'm off for the next two days anyway, so I think I'm just going to enjoy being snowed in and get caught up a bit on Doctor Who and Merlin. And maybe poke around Yuletide. :)

*hugs everyone*
cin1607: (Default)
Seriously! Everyone's in a good mood. Staff bring in enough food to put everyone working into a diabetic coma by afternoon. Visitors are happy and laid back, and generally a little slow to to show up first thing in the morning, so we have time to socialize with each other a bit. And we all like each other, so it's particularly nice. Today I'm in costume on the ships. We entertained ourselves for the first hour of the day, sitting on the pier, drinking hot chocolate, and taking turns reading aloud (some more dramatically than others) from Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

This evening after work, I'll make a mad dash to the southwestern corner of the state to my mother's, and hope that I beat the ice storm that's on its way. But at this moment, I'm perfectly happy right where I am.

Happy Christmas everyone! :)
cin1607: (Default)
My computer at home has been dying a slow death for a while now, and I'd already been planning to get a new laptop after the first of the year, once I recover a bit from holiday bills. It never occurred to me that it wouldn't make it another two weeks, but the monitor died last night, so it's not good for much now. *sigh* So I'll be computerless, except at work, for a couple of weeks, unless I come up with a good enough excuse to check out one of our work laptops and go home with it. Which I'm very motivated to do. Yuletide is coming up! *g*

I'm also getting ready to abandon my usual email address of cin1 at cox dot net, because it's just a swamp of spam lately. Yahoo's doing a better job of filtering it out, so I'm going to make my cin1485 at yahoo dot com address my primary email account.

Whee! :)

Dec. 18th, 2009 06:34 pm
cin1607: (Default)
Snow! \o/ Lots of it, too! It's coming down hard and heavy here. I know we absolutely need every butt through the door we can get right now at work, so I feel a little guilty about wishing for a snow day tomorrow, but I have so much to do before Christmas. /o\
cin1607: (Default)
It's funny. I hadn't realized until fairly recently (thanks to [personal profile] meri_oddities who reminded me that there was life outside of work) just what an absolute bunker mentality I've had for the last half of the year.

Cut for museum budget woes. )

Cut for changes in my job. )

Fannishly, in spite of my "I've been to this war before!" first impressions of Merlin, somehow I got sucked in by the 10th episode of the first season (which up until that point I'd only been casually watching, since it was on NBC this summer) and fell kind of hard. At first I was a bit annoyed with myself, because I wasn't really ready to leave SGA yet. But there was a lull and I'm weak and Jesus, those boys are pretty. Now I've just resigned myself to another fandom where I'm practically old enough to be the main character's mother and have stopped trying to wash the dirty off in favor of combing through people's delicious tags looking for fic recs. :) It's been a great distraction from real life. I didn't go to a single con this year, and I've missed the fellowship and shared squee. I'm hoping to see more of people this winter and Con.txt can't get here soon enough. :)
cin1607: (Default)
Like many people in fandom, I first met [personal profile] minotaurs via one of his "Sex Tips for Slashwriters" panels at a con, in my case, Connexions back in 1999. I can't imagine how red I was by the end of the panel, but I remember laughing throughout it, the way you do when you realize that you're a lot more naive than you thought you were and were more embarrassed by that than the topic at hand. The above quote made an impression; I've never forgotten it, nor the arms-spread finger-waggle he did to illustrate it, and it never fails to make me smile to think of it.

I didn't know [personal profile] minotaurs well, but he was a fixture at cons for me and we always chatted here and there during them. He was smart, funny, and a genuinely warm and welcoming person. He's leaving a huge hole and I'll miss him.
cin1607: (Default)
Deadline from hell has been met and work is turned in for review! \o/ So I thought I'd take the evening off and bake some cookies or something. It seemed like a good idea at the time. *g*

Good: Cookie dough with apricots, almonds and pine nuts looks fab. :)
Bad: Dropped the flour canister when putting ingredients away. /o\
Good: Was almost out of flour anyway.
Bad: Solid black kitty was caught in blast radius.
Good: At least it missed the big rug in front of the sink.
Bad: I got flour on the dining room table in the next room.
Good: I now have a very clean kitchen and dining room.
Bad: Kitty will never speak to me again.
Good: At least until the cookies are baked. :)

I'm working tomorrow--day five of five, finally. I'm absolutely spending Monday catching up on everything I've missed in SGA fic in the last month. Plus, it looks like everyone I love to read is playing kink bingo! Maybe I can get Tuesday off, too. :)