Ramblings of a Martian

Trying to start back up again, FWIW: tithonium.us

planning day at work. rain. too much salad.

Video games. Momentary power outage. Fixing other people's computers.

Early breakfast at Leena's, family meeting, followed by looking at some houses and emailing our agent.

A summary of the situation, probably redundant for most people:

• Nerdvana is for sale, and we moved out in September.


• We moved into Nördhöll, the house we were attempting to buy, in Edmonds.


• We are sharing the house with our friends Mickey and Ogre. Four adult humanoids, four cats, and a dog, in one house. It's been working out surprisingly well, possibly because we've got about 3800 square feet to work with.


• Nerdvana wasn't selling. Time passed.


• In late December, two things happened:




1. We found a notice of default on the front door, and discovered that the seller of the house had not paid his mortgage. Starting in June, three months before we moved in. Before the house was listed.


2. We finally got an offer on Nerdvana. The foreclosure will likely happen sometime between late March and late April.




• The offer to buy Nerdvana included as a contingency the sale of the buyers' home. Our purchase contract on the Nördhöll required seller's approval of subcontingencies. However, it expired at the end of the year, so we decided to wait until it had, then accept the offer.


• They've done their inspection, and come back with a few things they want us to spend money dealing with. We are investigating what those things will cost. HOWEVER, their offer was $30k below our asking price, so we are reticent to spent more money, particularly money we will likely need to move a second time.


• We started looking at alternative houses. We found one we really like. It has its own special issues, but unlike this one does not need any immediate or short-term repairs to make it workable.


• As a token towards not having to move, today we decided to make a new offer on Nördhöll. It is significantly lower than the previous agreement, but if it is accepted, it will save us a lot of money and effort.


• On the assumption that it will not be, however, we are going to start packing, and as soon as it is rejected we will begin negotiating with the seller of the new house to come to a sale price AND - I desperately hope - a rental agreement so we can move in when our lease expires on 22 March and live there until we can close. As the house is currently vacant AND has been on the market for a while, I am as close to hopeful as I am capable of being. Which is not very.


• If we have to find a place to live in between, that will suck for a number of reasons, including that I will likely have to pay steep early termination fees on both Comcast contracts, as well as have all of my servers offline for an extended period. I will have to set up a new virtual server somewhere to take over mail/dns primary duties from Sarin.


• However, we have established that there /are/ options for places to live, within acceptable location/price ranges and which accept animals.


• The Nördhöll name will be moving with us. I've already bought domains and everything.

Fixing bugs at work. Dinner at outback. Everything is terrible. As usual.

Trying to deploy a two-major-versions upgrade. It's not going well yet but better than last time.

brunch at leena's, then looking at houses. they were all.. not good. until the one that we looked at because there was an open house sign, as opposed to because we specifically went to look at it.. turns out somebody somewhere came up with a house plan that is more or less perfectly designed for a four-adult two-pair household. It has two, identical-but-mirrored master suites, on different floors on opposite sides of the house. Also 1.5 other bathrooms and 3 other bedrooms. It is our new fallback position.

The RE lawyer we contacted is too busy, need to find a new one this week.
Meanwhile, there were a few questions out of the inspection on nerdvana. They were trivial, which seems like a good sign?

work. cooking. audiobooks.

Planning day. So very much to do. So very little me to do it. Quiet bemused panic. Narrowly avoided a parking ticket.
Got a bunch of things transferred off my Simple account to a new BECU account. Lots of non profits don't provide a good way to update your payment information, so they're gonna hafta try and fail to charge the old card. Maybe they'll contact me to fix it.

Finished prepping Thuban for Mickey to use. ... not sure what else I did today. Nothing much to speak of, I guess.