The Raging Tech

The New House, Hot Dog, and Chairman Meow

Tags: Bungalow, Chairman Meow, Hot Dog, House

A Crazy Moving Weekend Ahead

Yes, I know tomorrow is the Fourth of July, Independence Day here in the United States. And yes, I know it’s probably foolish to move the day afterwards. But gosh darn it, I’m excited about being in my new house.

Verizon sent me the wrong modem. They were supposed to send me a wireless router modem, but instead they sent me a plain, one-port DSL modem. Oh well. My roommate is giving me his wireless router DSL modem, so I’ll probably use that.

Satellite should also be a breeze - I’m just packing up the satellite boxes and taking them with me, the installer will be there on Monday to put the dish up on the new house.

I’m picking up the U-Haul on Saturday morning, and we’ll move everything then, and then probably need to come back to the old house to clean Saturday evening and maybe Sunday afternoon.

A four-day weekend is nice, but it’d be nicer if it wasn’t already planned out with tons of stuff to do! I don’t like moving, but it’ll be nice to get it all done and over with. I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed in my own house, and spending my evenings after work for a while unpacking and finding places for things.

Maybe I’ll even get to paint in the next month or two. I’m thinking about deep navy blue for the living room with white trim. I need more wall art though. So far I have one painting and just a few posters to decorate with, along with some framed family photos. It’s weird to go from apartment-sized living to a whole house to fill. I will have some furniture, but not a lot. Enough furniture for me, for now at least.

Tags: furniture, House, moving, personal

The Tech Wishes He Had a Place to Rage

I’m not really angry about anything. My brain just hurts. Today is one of those days where I just didn’t get started out on the right foot, and every step after that seems slightly off.

This morning I woke up at 7:18 to get ready for work at 8am like I always do on Monday mornings. After I got out of the shower Kylara called to ask me to bring her some files she left on my computer at home. I wasn’t able to, and I felt bad not being able to help her.

When I got to work, I set down my stuff and called her to let her know I was downstairs in the call center, and she said she’d come down later. Then my coworker reminded me I didn’t have to be there until 10:30am, because I was staying late until 7:30pm. Great, grand, wonderful.

I went up to take her the files at that point, and the door was locked. I had to call her to come back towards the stairs to let me in. I told her what was going on. I felt sick to my stomach and head. She then let me know her project in GarageBand was broken because a nightly script wipes the drives on the iMac she was using. I went and got the Digital Media Director to come over and help her. I stayed for about an hour trying to help anyway I could. I finally just had to leave, my stomach hurt so bad.

I went home, let my stomach settle, ate some breakfast, and then came back at 10:30am. I got to go update the director’s iMac with the latest VMWare Fusion and fix another couple of issues on it while I was there. That’s always neat when you get to fix things for the big bosses, so not everything was so bad this morning.

There are more issues with the DNS servers at work again today. We have a small percentage of users whose DNS settings aren’t automatic, and so when the first server fails, they don’t automatically fall back to the secondary and tertiary servers. In layman’s terms, about 30-40 calls for each technician where someone can’t access some websites, but can still get to others.

In house news - Country Classic real estate, one of my past landlords, are holding up my closing on the house because the one guy authorized to return the rental history form to the bank is out of town on vacation until Wednesday.

Apparently they “lost” the first one sent to them three weeks ago, so when my banker sent them the form again last Friday they said it’d be Monday or Tuesday. But now it’s going to be Wednesday before they can fax it in. Which means we can’t order the appraisal until at least Wednesday, which means we probably won’t be able to sign the contracts until another week out.

Then it all has to go off to the headquarters at the state capital, where they’ll either finalize the approval or reject it, and then I can close. So I won’t officially own the house for probably another two-three weeks from now.

I’ve got to pack things up pretty much every night this week, and then I move out of my rental on Saturday and into my new home - since I know the owners they’re letting me move in and rent the house on a weekly basis until I can close, so that I don’t have to keep paying my current landlord rent. I’ve got DSL and Satellite scheduled and all that’s left to do there is to switch the power and water once our closing date is firm.

My life, it is crazy. It’s good, but it’s hectic, and I think I’m stressed out a pretty good bit today. Thankfully, all the callers while I’ve been on duty this morning have been pretty nice people, and I think God’s giving me patience with them.

Oh, and official GMAT scores came back: I got 590 (out of 800, 65% ranking) on the Verbal/Quantitative sections, and 5.5 out of 6 on the Analytical Writing (83% ranking), so - not too shabby, statistically doing better than the average GMAT test-taker. Waiting now to hear back from the Grad School about whether or not I’m in the program.

That’s all for now. At least today’s pay day.

Tags: GMAT, grad school, House, personal, update, Work

Maybe a Home Owner After All

The house I was looking to buy the other week, but decided not to, actually went down in price. The owners decided to make an offer to me that was significantly lower than the market listing. I’ve since gone to my Mom’s house and retrieved last year’s taxes, and I have my two pay stubs to take to the bank. I made the appointment for Thursday afternoon, and then it’s do or die. I either get approved or I don’t.

I’m nervous, because I might not be able to get it still. Then if I do get it, there’s closing costs and things. The bank said they would probably cover up to $1,000 of the closing costs. Everything after that will have to come out of my pocket. At least if I don’t get it, I’ll still have a good assessment of my finances.

Tags: home buying, House, personal, real estate

Spend Your Energy Wisely and Be Happy

I’ve written before on how I’ve developed a different attitude towards wealth and money. I used to believe you had to be rich and have everything easy to have a happy life. I know that’s stupid and childish, and somewhat selfish, but I’ve always envied people who had more than me. In the last couple years though, I’ve learned it’s more about the quality of life through things like relationships with friends, family, and loved ones.  It’s about having fun and not taking yourself too seriously, but being serious about taking care of yourself and the aforementioned people in your life.

That being said, as much as I really really wanted to buy my friends’ house, I’ve canceled my meeting with the bank in the morning because I just can’t deal with the stress and financial stretching I’d have to do to make the house payment and other payments and still do things like eat. Even though I could do it, and I’d probably learn a lot and grow in the process, I think it’s wiser to wait until my financial situation is better.

I’m going to wait two years until my car is paid off, and hopefully my credit cards will be too, by then. That will leave just my student loan and utilities and gas and food. With the extra money freed up, I will research the market again and see what’s available. I know God will bless me if I’m faithful and responsible in the small things first.

I’ve almost applied to grad school - just waiting on my letters of recommendation from a couple people and I will probably need to borrow the application fee from someone since it probably needs to be in before I get paid in a week. I think I’m pretty much a shoe-in for getting accepted. I’ll also have to be on the ball about getting all the signatures I need for tuition waiver from my workplace. That’s one of the nice benefits of working for a university - they give you almost-free classes!

Tags: faith, financial, happiness, House, mortgage, wisdom