Month: May 2011

House Hunting

I’m finally getting somewhat more serious about looking at houses (townhouses), prompted by the fact that my sister is visiting in a couple weeks and one of the things she’s supposed to do is force me to find a real estate agent and go actually look at houses. On my own I’ve been kind of looking for over the past year, but by that I just mean every few months I find a real estate website and look at the townhouses available. I have at least managed to narrow down the area I’d like to live in, but until the last few days I didn’t have any specific townhouses I was considering.

I was talking to someone today about how to find out the crime statistics in a neighborhood and he pointed me to myneighborhoodupdate.net. It’s a remarkably well done map based report of what the police have responded to. The data is based on computer aided 911 dispatches and not everywhere participates in the system, but Colorado Springs supports it. I don’t know how far back the data goes, but it includes the police event number, the number of cars sent there, and how long they where there, as well as trends by event category over the past year.

The reason I commented on the map based searching being well done is that I experienced the other end of the spectrum last night on a real estate site. It said to zoom the map in to the area you wanted to search, then select the type of housing and min/max ranges on various fields and hit “search.” I zoomed in to northern Colorado Springs, selected townhouse/condo and the top result (of over 6,000) was way, way out of my price range. It was also in Breckenridge. I quickly gave up on their map.

I’ve used a number of sites for searching real estate in Colorado Springs. They’ve mostly had the same houses listed (and where I didn’t see the same ones it was probably because it had been months since I last checked and some had sold), but they’ve presented them different ways. The ones I prefer are map based, where you start with a map with houses marked on it (they’re usually also listed below the map) and can just browse. By far the best of these is Zillow, though some of their filters seem questionable (I had to turn on single family homes to have it show some properties that are flagged as townhomes in the details). Zillow also includes estimated values for all houses (not just the list prices of ones for sale), sale prices of recently sold houses, and listed price history of homes for sale. On the other hand, Zillow is missing information that some other sites have (HOA costs for townhouses for one), and some of the other sites present the full listing details better (though Zillow does quite well).

I guess I need to check my credit report and see what I can find out about mortgages.

Surprise Holiday

I found out today that next Monday is Memorial Day, which is one of the paid holidays we get. Yay for a 3 day weekend. If I’d actually looked it up I’d have noticed, but I’ve been busy lately and didn’t think of it.

Today was graduation at the Air Force Academy, so they had the Thunderbirds out for their yearly air show. Unlike last year, I actually found out when it was and got to watch it from the balcony on the back of our building. It was neat, especially when they flew somewhat low right over us on the way back to the AFA.

Leaving work today (later than I intended, which has been common lately) I saw a rabbit trekking across the parking lot. I’m guessing it’s one of the ones that lives in the landscaping in front of the building, but I’m wondering what would prompt a rabbit to go that far from anything green or all hiding spots besides cars. Perhaps it spotted a bush and decided something along the lines of “that’s green, I’m going to go eat it despite standing next to all these other plants.”

Game Night

We had another organized game night on Friday (organized meaning Michelle hosted it).

I finally had a chance to try my portable ping pong set, and it went over very well. We set it up on a table that was somewhat smaller than a standard ping pong table, and since the balls are standard and the paddles are good quality it was hard to keep from hitting the ball off the other end of the table. The other problem was that behind one end of the table was the top of the stairs down to the basement, so we had a few shots make it downstairs. I wasn’t interested in keeping score (I was just enjoying hitting the ball back and forth), but Calvin and Ryan played a game where they kept score. They were planning to start another match as I was leaving so I left it. Before I realized they were going to use it more I’d packed it up and Ryan commented on how compact it was, which drew a startled look from Calvin who apparently had thought I’d brought the table (a sturdy oak table) as part of the set.

Other entertainment included a demo of Battlefield 1943 on PS3 where we passed the controller around on death. The only map we played on was Wake Island, which I believe was in the demo for Battlefield 1942. As expected, the most fun I had was when I managed to grab a Zero and fly around, though the control stick wasn’t inverted like I’m used to so I didn’t do particularly well. I’m considering finding my disks for BF1942 and my joystick and playing that a bit.

We went out to a Mexican place for dinner. Best (only) Mexican food I’ve had in at least a couple years. It was good, though I’m not generally a fan of Mexican food. I don’t go out to eat much and I generally just get a cheeseburger when I do, but the only burger I noticed on the menu had jalapeños on it so I just went with a quesadilla.

Besides game night, I spent a significant amount of time this weekend playing co-op Portal 2 for achievements. We still are lacking a couple, but we played every level in co-op at least once, and several got a number of play-throughs. The worst achievement we got was to complete all of course four (the one with excursion funnels) with no deaths. I think there were 9 levels in the course, and the last two were very easy to die in. We also got sloppy a few times on the earlier ones and died, but we know that course very well by now, including several short cuts, since we had to start over on each death.

I meant to get some WoW in with a couple people I’ve been playing with recently, but since school is over for them their schedules are somewhat more random and I don’t think we had all three of us online at the same time all weekend. Perhaps if I’d left game night earlier I could have caught them, but oh well.