Author: Andy Scheffler

I forgot to watch the stupid lunar eclipse tonight!

Dangit!

We opened escrow yesterday. This whole “I’m going to be a homeowner” thing hasn’t quite sunk in yet. YHOO had a nice run on Monday, so I shot off some stock options… not work nearly as much as they could have been in the past, but enough to make my down payment a bit larger and reduce my monthly bill. Of course, now I have to figure out how to shuffle money around my different accounts. I’ve got 44 days to figure it out until escrow closes, though.

I finally cancelled my PSO for Game Cube hunter’s license. I hadn’t played in almost two months, so that was twenty wasted dollars. At least I ended up using my efax.com fax number just recently for house stuff, otherwise that $10/month would seem wasted as well.

I’m almost done with cataloging my Magic: the Gathering collection. I’ve got one and a half sets to go, then I get to compile all the stuff I’m missing and all the extras after setting aside the folders with the cards I’ll actually use. When I’m done, I’ll take a picture of the pile of extra common cards. It’s already quite impressive… and you have to consider that I’ve already done a great purge of giving away extra commons about four years ago… so this isn’t as many as it could be.

Time to go to bed, tomorrow morning I go back to Washington Mutual (which from this point on will be referred to as The Bank) to give them updated paperwork.

I just called the landlord. We agreed on a price and we’re meeting Monday night.

With paperwork.

To buy the house.

I’m still not believing this…

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been looking for a new roommate ever since bigdumbthing got laid off and decided to finish his education. Well, last night desslok agreed to move in starting in July. So Leon and I have to shoulder the rent by ourselves, but there’s a definite light at the end of the tunnel. And we don’t have to room with a total stranger!

I just have to comment on the Dante’s Inferno test. I’ve been doing this LiveJournal thing for a while now, and I have never seen a meme propagate that quickly. And the rumors that it installs spyware is not true… at least it wasn’t for me, and I was using the unwise browser/os combination of IE on Windows.

So, I supposedly got the loan last week, but the admin said she mailed the letter on Friday, and I haven’t gotten it yet. Grumble grumble grumble.

hamstergal refuses to ever show up on my list of users with similar interests, but bigdumbthing seems to have edited his interests quite a bit since I last looked. I think he was copying off of my test or something, because he all of a sudden shot to number one by a significant margin.

Lastly, this new iTunes is sort of cool, I’ve already noticed two other shared libraries on the network… whee.

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	Low
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

Man, I was shooting for Limbo. Oh well, I get to hang out in Dis with all my friends!

Yesterday, I drove up to the city for lunch at the Cheesecake factory, then to visit WonderCon. Well, I ended up waiting longer than I would have liked for people to show up, but at least I got some shopping done in Union Square beforehand.

At WonderCon, I saw a few people of interest: The folks at the Fanime Con booth, Susan Van Camp, who’s name was familiar to me because she drew art for some Magic cards, way back when. I also ran into Shaenon Garrity, who I totally freaked out by recognizing her. (Although I did mispronounce her name, and I did sort of know who she was because she was in the Cartoon Art Museum booth.) I also saw Judd Winick and Sergio Aragones from a distance, but I didn’t have anything for them to sign… why, oh why didn’t I bring stuff to sign?!

This morning, I finally got to play DDRMAX2, but my enjoyment of it was diminished by the pad I have… the stupid down arrow is going bad, and it’s a practically brand new Konami pad. Grrr…

Also, danpa just came by to pick up the last remnants of kken‘s stuff from the garage. He loaded up the plastic tubs and boxes, and we noticed a cooler. Well, I cautiously opened it, only to discover a substance that, a year and a half ago, was bread. Now I need to figure out how to dispose of this stuff…

Washington Mutual finally called me back today, after I was continuously pestering them. Well, it appears that I got approved for the loan… of course, now the issue becomes less “Can I buy the place?” and more “Should I buy the place?” We still haven’t found a third roommate, although desslok may possibly be interested (depending on how his situation plays out), but not for at least two months.

The real question it all boils down to is “can I afford to live without that extra $600/mo?” It would be tight. No more amazon.com packages of bunches of DVDs… No more buying video games that I don’t finish… No more buying every comic that looks interesting every week. I draw the line at lunches though. I refuse to take my lunch to work. That $5 * 20 days stays right there in the budget, thank you very much. Of course, even with a second roommate, there would still be less money flowing… of course, I could always tweak down my 401k temporarily or blow some stock options at less than optimal prices. The fact that next month is my last car payment helps things tremendously.

Another trick to this whole equation is exactly how much I would be paying for the house. Because there won’t be a selling agent, I can possibly talk down my landlord’s asking price. It wouldn’t amount to much in the monthly payment, but every little bit helps.

Once again, that listing is at http://www.craigslist.org/sby/roo/10600507.html. Holy crap, there’s a lot of listings on craigslist right now. This is so depressing.

On a completely unrelated note, I got DDRMAX2 in the mail today. I have an excuse to start DDRing again. Yay.

I have discovered a four-length loop of degrees of separation while browsing my friend’s friends page.

has both and listed as friends (and they her in return), both of whom are on my friends list, and they on mine.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Monday.

Diagonally, because I’m not quite moving forward, but I’m not exactly staying in the same place…

Just called the loan broker again… the underwriting department was in “training” all last week, so they should have an answer either tomorrow or Monday. Yeah, right, I’ll believe it when they call.

So, last week I bemoaned about how my VCR wasn’t recording. Well, I figured out why it wasn’t… boneheaded little me forgot to press the last button (“Timer”) which puts the VCR into timed record mode. I tested it on Monday, and sure enough, it recorded. So Tuesday night, when I came home and found the tape wasn’t sitting at the beginning like the last two weeks, I went to sleep happy.

Wednesday night when I put the tape in and found that instead of recording 24 on channel 2, I had recorded the 9 o’clock news on channel 4, I wasn’t as happy. I swear that I had set the program to channel 2. Next week (yes, I’m a masochist, I know), I’ll get it right and set the VCR to channel 2 before I push the timer button.

If that doesn’t work… grrrr…. I’m tired of having to watch the encore showing on Monday nights at 11 on FX. I’m just glad that it exists, not many shows actually have a regular encore showing.

So, last night was the first night of Passover. Last weekend, I went to Mollie Stone’s (after meandering lost around the Stanford campus a bit), a kosher market in Palo Alto. Last year, I was all so excited to find the section at Andronico’s in Palo Alto; they had a whole end cap of various Passover foodstuffs, as opposed to one section of one shelf at the normal supermarkets (which were mostly unusable during Passover anyway). Well, I was blown away. There was an entire side of one aisle, floor to ceiling, and islands… filled with various kosher for Passover products. I stuck to stuff I was familiar with, but I could have gone so hog wild there. It was also slightly odd to see people running into people they knew in the aisle. The Jewish community in Palo Alto must be pretty small, even if it’s probably the largest in the Bay Area.

For two weeks in a row now, I’ve tried recording 24 on Tuesday night. Both times, I come home, and the VCR hasn’t done a thing. It’s very frustrating. The time is correct. The settings are right (I even used VCR Plus one time). It just refused to record. I’m going to have to do a test record while I’m there to watch it over the weekend…. very frustrating.

Want to go home. Want to go home… 4pm meeting? D’oh!