house hunting – Still Not King

Decompressing

Just finished fighting with a Linux server that somehow ended up re-activating a service which it didn’t need, but which interferes with a service that it does need. *grumble*.

Boss returned this morning from a week out following back surgery…and has jury duty. Figures if he actually gets called in, he can easily get it dismissed, but for now, the only number he has is for the automated message.

Managed to mostly avoid fire+smoke problems this weekend, except Sunday afternoon why my eyes just wouldn’t stop itching. A co-worker had to evacuate his parents from Yorba Linda on Saturday, but their house made it through okay.

Got together with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean for Andrea’s birthday and monopolized a table at Cosi for about 4 hours on Sunday. Fortunately they didn’t seem to mind!

Caught up on comics & Netflix over the weekend. Read Crecy, about the 1300s battle in which the English longbow triumphed over vastly superior French numbers. Mostly about medieval war tactics, swearing, and xenophobia. Narrated by an utter bastard who breaks the fourth wall a lot. Did I mention it was by Warren Ellis? Also read Chrono Mechanics, about a squad of techs whose job is to repair time. A bit too crazy even for me, and I loved Tales from the Bully Pulpit. And finally Harley and Ivy, a collection of stories focusing on Batman villains Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was great fun.

As for TV, we’ve finished season 1 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I also wrapped up watching season 5 of The Batman (though I haven’t watched the earlier seasons, and based on this one, probably won’t). And then there’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed…I had to watch it because it’s about a speedster, but OMG it was awful. At least now I know Netflix’ "Watch Instantly" service works well with our system/connection. Snarky commentary will go up at Speed Force in the next week or two.

We’ve backed off on the house hunting for a bit. We actually got a counteroffer on one of the places we looked at a few weeks ago, but decided not to take it. We need to reevaluate what we’re looking for before we dive back in.

Drove alenxa to an interview this morning. Thought it was in one of those two new buildings by the spectrum until she told me the address, and realized it was actually across the street from where I work. Highly convenient for today, but the actual job location is off in another direction.

Bees and Cheese

1. House-hunting continues. Just about every place we’ve put an offer in on has gone for ~10K over the asking price, so we’re starting to factor that in. Looked at yet another condo in a complex we’ve looked at repeatedly: fantastic condition (except for the door, which looked like it had been kicked in — alenxa figures it was probably a forced repo), but right in front of the pool. A place that needs work can be fixed up more easily than a place in a bad location can be moved.

2. We have bees again. This time they’re setting up shop in the bathroom wall, crawling in through the handle in the plumbing access panel in the back yard. One actually made its way into the bathroom through the bathtub overflow before we taped it over.

3. I spent the weekend watching the new DVDs of the 1967 DC super-heroes cartoons by Filmation. Fun in a cheesy, over-the-top way. Only ~2 hours (18 episodes at 7 minutes each), but had to spread them out. Plus I was trying to do a write-up of the Flash episodes, which meant re-watching, taking screencaps, etc. I’ve posted a review on another blog.

4. Speaking of cheesy, we finally watched Aztec Rex. We’d been warned, and it was only because some of the Farscape production people were involved It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected (even if the first ~40 minutes were interminable), though that may have been the sidecar talking.

Weekend: Concert & Home

alenxa and I went to see Aimee Mann at the House of Blues on Friday. Rather than trying to eat somewhere in Downtown Disney, where no one takes reservations and everything is crowded on a Friday night, we just ate at Taco Rosa and drove up after dinner. It worked out pretty well — we ended up there after the doors had opened (so we didn’t have to stand in line), but early enough to secure a spot on the main floor, putting us closer to the stage than we’ve ever been before. The concert was good, but a bit strange in that her new album had only been out for 4 days, so most people didn’t know the songs. Older songs got cheers as soon as people recognized the intro, but the old songs were met with silence until she finished and the audience applauded.

And she told a funny story about how one of the songs started out as a sort-of commission for Shrek III. Unfortunately they wanted a happy, encouraging, “Come on, you can do it!” song, and she said she’s not very good at that kind of message.

House-hunting on Saturday turned up a few prospects. Meanwhile, did some cleanup at the apartment. Finally arranged the front of the living room so that the display case doesn’t block access to the window.

As for the goals I set for myself:

Sort through old magazines. – Done. Tossed 2 bags of magazines & one bag of old papers (seriously, brochures for wedding services for a company we didn’t use?) into the recycling.
Find desk lamp. – Tried, no luck.
Put some actual content on Facebook profile. – A little, but not much.
Finish website update on the Silver-Age Flash. – Wrote a lot, but didn’t finish.

Current Music: Tori Amos, Blood Roses

Moving! Stage 1 of 2

With our move-out date (May 17) rapidly approaching, it became clear that we weren’t going to have a condo in time to move straight from our current apartment. We asked about moving to another unit in the same place and staying month-to-month, but they wanted a minimum 3-month occupancy, and $200/month on top of the market value for the privilege of not signing a lease. With the post-renovation price hikes, the result was that it would have cost us more to rent a studio than we’ve been paying for our 2-bedroom apartment. Not an option.

alenxa found a place just a few blocks away that does everything month-to-month, was reasonably priced, and isn’t in a scary part of town. We toured the property and filled out an application on Monday, and signed the paperwork this morning.

So we have a place to live!

Pros:

We don’t have to put all our belongings in storage and move in with my parents for a few weeks.
Once we find someplace permanent, we won’t have to break a lease to move out.
We already know the nearby grocery stores, restaurants, etc.
It’s quiet.
It’s reasonably located for my commute.
It’s on the ground floor.
Laundry room uses a card system instead of quarters.

Cons:

It’s smaller (1 bedroom), so we still have to move some stuff into storage. But even including the storage cost, it’s still cheaper than that studio would have been.
There’s no guest parking, and street parking is extremely limited.
There’s no dishwasher. I think I can deal with that for a few weeks/months.

Current Mood: 🙂relieved

Sound and Image

A month or two ago I dug out a bunch of CDs I hadn’t listened to in years, including some musical-related stuff, and started importing songs into iTunes. My plan was to play the albums first, then pick out which songs I wanted, but it didn’t quite work out, so I put a lot of stuff on just from memory, or in some cases just imported the whole album with the idea that I’d remove anything I found myself skipping. Some worked out well. Others… well the Man of La Mancha suite from Quantum Leap just wasn’t as good as I remembered.

So today, as alenxa and I were driving around to look at condos, Bernadette Peters came on, singing “Cupid.” It was a bit more easy listening-sounding than I remembered, but not cringe-inducingly-so… and then my brain stepped in to “enhance” it.

You see, we’re also working our way through the third volume of Animaniacs on DVD. I found myself picturing Rita (as in Rita and Runt) singing the song.

“Brain, stop it!” I said.

Katie: “Is yours doing the same thing mine is?”

“I think so…”

“On a fence post?”

“Yep.”

In house hunting news, we found a couple of good possibilities. Well, one good possibility, and one that was really nice, but the rooms were way too small. Fantastic view, though.

And then there was the place that had been trashed so badly that when I dropped my sunglasses, I refused to pick them up. Ugh.

Current Music: Cupid (still in my head)