Another Update

No meaningful post as I'm really tired. We got some things unpacked today, took Dot for a long walk, and I fixed four of the seven thousand things that I need to fix in the house. Go me. I also set up my Flickr account so I'll upload pictures of the house and Dot tomorrow for all to see. I'm really excited about the house pictures because I'll keep adding more as we fix and renovate things so I'll have sort of a photo journal of the progress.

On that note, Caleb and Tisha are headed to Omaha on Friday for an MMA fight (Caleb's brother fights) and so Virginia has decided that we must unpack everything and get the guest bedroom painted before they get here. The chances of this happening are -12%, but I will wait until later this week to crush her hopes. Okay, more tomorrow.

Update

So we're in. We're not unpacked, but we've got all of our stuff in our new house. I think there's a coffee table and a lamp left at the old place, and a hefty amount of cleaning, but it's all tolerable after moving. We fought a couch that we were putting in our basement for over an hour today. The couch won with a final score of two holes in the wall but it came down to the wire because we shredded the top of it. That'll teach the bastard. Virginia and I have already decided that it will be coming out in two pieces courtesy of a saw whenever we decide to replace it.

The holes in the wall didn't phase me as my honey-do list is pretty extensive. The people who owned our house before us half-assed every single thing inside of it, so now I get to redo it. Some examples:

Our main bath is a claw foot tub that they installed a hand held shower head in. They also installed one of those nifty shower curtain rods that attaches to the ceiling and allows you to cover all around the tub. One side is anchored into the wall, the other into the ceiling. Except they only put one of the two screws into the stud, so the other one has pulled out of the drywall. I get to fix it.

The garage door safety sensors are aligned using a block of wood. This was obviously a better idea than just installing them correctly.

Rather than get a three inch piece of wood to mount the door catch onto for the porch door, they had a two inch piece of wood that they just screwed the top of the catch into. Except it doesn't align with the door lock.

I could go on for days about this but there's no point. It will be good for me to learn all of these man things that I've never known how to do. I've decided that I'm just going to write down between one and three things every week and just knock them out slowly. If I try to do it all at once, I won't be able to afford to do everything right and I'll just be furious all of the time.

One thing that will relieve my stress is Dot. Yep, I bought a dog. That's the little pooper at the top of the post. I've had her for roughly a month now, but I've been keeping her a secret. Today we went and picked her up and I drove straight to my sister's to get it over with. She actually wasn't mad at all. I thought she would be. I consulted her before I bought the dog and she told me it was a bad idea. I agreed with her. Then I went and bought her anyway. We have a ton of pictures of her already, but I don't have a Flikr account yet to post them all. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for the one above. She's a Boston Terrier, but she's all white with one black spot on her. Typically Bostons are mostly black with a white belly and some marbling, but the white ones are rare. Like redheads. You'll definitely hear about her more, but in the meantime, enjoy the photo.

Quick Update

So we got all of the paperwork squared away for the mortgage, but there's one last snag. The appraiser said that the outside door that leads into the basement and the top portion of the back of the garage need to be scraped and repainted before he will sign off on the house. He's afraid that Virginia and I are going to eat paint chips and produce five-legged offspring. We found this out Wednesday. About the painting, not five-legged offspring. It was supposed to get done yesterday (Thursday) morning, but alas, mother nature decided we finally needed some more rain and so they couldn't do it. So now the ridiculously close schedule is that the painting will be done by 1pm, which is the time that the inspector will drive by again. We're still on track for a 4pm close. I'm not sure how, but I'm going to make this happen. Okay, bedtime.

Mortgage Crunch, 200 Posts

So I got a call from my mortgage lady today and she needs more documents. Now. On friggin' Tuesday. When we close Friday. Oh, I forgot to mention that she wants documents that don't exist. Very long story short is that Virginia's federal student loans can only be deferred one year at a time according to federal law. The law that the underwriter hasn't read because she wants proof of 5 years of deferment. Tomorrow I get to figure out how to make her understand that I can't give her something that doesn't exist. I hope she doesn't read this blog.

This is my 200th post on this blog. It is pretty weak as it is late and I need to get to bed. Hooray blog! It has lasted longer than I thought it would, and at the ripe old age it managed to produce and offspring. I hope I can still breed when I'm 194. Bed.

Reading/Listening, Still Sick, Packing

Reading: I actually read another story in No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. I had actually read about half of it before, but it had been so long I had to go back and reread it. Again, a big epiphanic meatball over the plate and a swing and a miss. I don't mind resisting the epiphany, but what July does is the literary equivalent of missing so bad that she spins around and falls down. She TRIES for an epiphany and never finds one. This is more commonly known as trying too hard, as I've said before. She would be a better writer if she just let what was inside come out rather than try to be the best author alive. She would probably say different in person. She would probably say that she is just writing what she feels, but what she feels is that she wants to be the best writer alive. She wants to be a part of the modern literati. She probably is. I can picture people in drab color clothing massaging her ego after a reading like an illegal immigrant in a rub and tug joint. Hemmingway would put down his coffee and look her in the eye and say "You're trying too hard kid, just let it come."

Listening: I made Jessica a hip-hop compilation. Jessica is a girl I work with at the bank. She's a big music buff and has very good taste, but she's less experienced in the realm of hip-hop. She was very interested when I one day mentioned the song Latyrx by the group of the same name. Latyrx is Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker, both from the Quannum label. In this specific song, DJ Shadow (a Quannum turn-tablist) laid down a simple beat for the two to rap over individually. Then, he overlaid the two freestyles to make a song where the rappers are rapping different things at the same time. It's pretty cool, and Jessica wanted to hear it. I threw a bunch of other stuff on there that I figured she may not have heard of. The album includes songs from Mos Def (Umi Says, Hip Hop), The Roots (Quills), Lateef & The Chief (Ambush, Matter of Time), A Tribe Called Quest (Check the Rhime, Oh My God), The Pharcyde (Passing Me By, Runnin'), Gift of Gab (The Writz), Outkast (Ghetto Musick), Kelis (Millionaire), DJ Honda (Trouble in the Water, Travellin' Man), Big Boi (The Train), Andre 3000 (She Lives in my Lap), Slick Rick (Memories), and Jemini (Knuckle Sandwich). It's so good I don't really want to give it to her, so it's in my car until I finish listening to it. I should put it on iTunes.

I've still got the plague. Right now I'm coughing like a ninety year old chain smoker. I hate being sick. I really need to get unsick before I have to move this weekend, but I can imagine that I'll be fairly sleep-deprived this week as I work at 7:15am every morning. Bleh.

Virginia had one of her eight weekends off this past week and we spent the time doing fun couples stuff; packing. The only things left are our bed, big furniture, electronics, bathroom stuff, and clothes. Our apartment is without adornment. We have no kitchen items. No plates. No spoons. My bookshelf looks like an old cowboy, empty and dusty. I'm starting to get excited to move. Not to actually move, but to be in our new house. I got really pumped at the idea of sitting out on my patio and playing poker on my laptop. Virginia says I need to get outside more. Hopefully I'll keep up with posting this week in preparation for the move, but it may be tough as we have a lot to do.

Sick, House

I'm sick again. I'm bad at being sick. I have two modes; pissy and angry because I'm only sick enough to be irritated or a total baby because I'm horribly sick. I'm borderline the second at the moment which makes it bad because I'm at my most irritable. Adding fuel to the fire are some minor annoyances that normally wouldn't bother me too much, but currently just irritate the bejesus out of me. One of them is the house.

I just found out today that the sellers can't manage to get out of the house before 6pm on the day that we close. Keep in mind that they've owned another house for nearly two months and have had our accepted offer for a month and a half now. Virginia works at least eighty hours a week and I put in another forty or fifty and somehow we've managed to find time for all of these things, but apparently this couple hasn't figured it out. My real estate agent was trying to assuage my anger by telling me the trials and tribulations of their remodel but I cut him off because the bottom line is they said they would be out on the 22nd. If they couldn't do that, they shouldn't have said so. So I guess we're rounding down from the 22nd and 3/4ths back down to 22. Whatever. At this point, I'm just taking these lumps as lessons. I really feel bad for the next people that we buy a house from because I'm not going to get jerked around again. Okay, I'm apparently in super-angry mode so I'm just going to quit for the night.

New Blog

In case you didn't notice, the posts here no longer have a Poker section. That's because I have created The Poker Plecostomus, a dedicated blog for my sinful escapades into the world of gambling. Even if you don't like reading about my poker, I'd appreciate you all popping over so my StatCounter isn't at zero anymore. Hopefully, with the separation of the blogs, I'll be able to expand both of them to be better than they were before. I've changed the links off to the side and will hopefully be adding some new ones. I have a blog that I want to link but it seems like the owner fell off the planet at the end of last month so I'm waiting for him to post again before I link it. Okay, bedtime.