Category: Talore

General Update

It’s been a while, but I’ve been busy.

I found out the week I got back from Florida that my mortgage application (conventional mortgage) wasn’t going to go through because I only had one credit score and alternative credit (paying rent/bills on time) wouldn’t work for that. It’s surprisingly hard to gain debt when you have never had any. That led to a somewhat frantic scramble to get a new mortgage application in, first a conventional with a different lender, but thanks to much higher fees and higher rates that wouldn’t have been cheaper than the FHA mortgage the first lender could offer, even with mortgage insurance charges on the FHA. It turns out that after a certain amount of the FHA loan is paid off the mortgage insurance goes away, and since I’m putting enough down for a conventional loan (20%) I only have to pay a few months of the insurance (and the initial fee) before it goes away. I think that’s taken care of: I delivered the last alternative credit paper on Tuesday (took me a week to get it from Comcast, I eventually had to go to the service center during business hours and wait in line, but it took 4 calls for them to tell me that).

I also received a letter saying my loan request was denied due to lack of credit history in the middle of trying to get alternative credit papers, but that was apparently from the first application and I just wasn’t warned that I’d be getting it. That was a surprise when I got it, and Talore didn’t much appreciate it either:

Talore has been opening my mail lately. Usually when I get mail I put it on the floor when I get home, then open it when I get to it. I’ve had to change that recently since Talore pounces on it and starts chewing the corners off. It turns out that if I leave a piece of paper folded in thirds on the floor she’ll attack that too.

Anyways, I finally heard what the appraisal on the house came back with ($5,000 more than I’m buying it for), which is nice, but I don’t have the confirmation that the underwriter has accepted the loan. That was expected last Friday, and considering that the deadline for backing out of the contract due to loan issues was last Tuesday I’m a bit nervous about it. Being past the deadline means that if it falls through and I end up not being able to buy the house I’m out my earnest money with nothing to show for it.

Besides that I have to transfer utilities on the house to me starting Wednesday (meant to do that on Friday, but forgot), and figure out how to get internet there. I’ve been decidedly less than impressed by Comcast customer service (as usual), but the numbers I’ve seen on cable internet (and what I’ve experienced) put it well above DSL. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get it hooked up at their central location and I just show up and plug my modem into the wall and don’t have to have a technician come out, but I need to actually call and see what they’ll do. I’m also trying not to further interrupt my gaming (since I don’t have a convenient replacement so the rest of the group can still do stuff), which means I may be coming back to my apartment for WoW for a couple days after I move everything but my computer.

Speaking of moving, closing is Wednesday afternoon and I’m planning to take the rest of the day off work to start moving what I can move without help. I’ve been boxing stuff up and arranging it along one wall to make it easy to move stuff when I have help (possibly Thursday), but I’ll probably be trying to move everything I don’t have boxed on my own. Talore isn’t much appreciative of me packing stuff up, even to the point of getting in the way (big surprise):

She happily jumped into that box and started chewing on the edges of it till I went to put the top on and shut her in. When I tried that she got well out of my way and hasn’t done that since, though she has been following me around as I rearrange stuff. Since I took down the shelves I had in the corner (where her bed that she only used when I was reading was) she’s been even less sure of where she should be. Currently she’s lying on the freshly cleaned off dining room table watching me.

I’m planning to get another cat to keep Talore company after I move. I nearly went to get it Saturday (assuming they still had the cat I’d liked from the previous week), but I read that introducing cats to each other to the point that they’re civil towards one another can take months, and I wasn’t sure that I needed to have a new cat shut in my bedroom (with food and a litter box there also) for most of a week before I move. Wouldn’t really be pleasant for me, and probably not for either cat. Current thinking is that I’ll keep Talore shut in a bedroom (with the bathroom door open so the litter box isn’t on carpet) for the first few days after I move to let her adjust, then get a new cat next Saturday and move it into that room and let Talore out.

I’m hoping that this coming week is a lot less stressful than this last week was. Monday we found out that we’d have a demo on Tuesday, so we were there till 12:45 am trying to be ready for that. Tuesday we set up for the demo, did a dry run, and decided that it wasn’t demo ready and since we had the option of pushing back that demo to Friday morning we just did that. We thought we were pretty close to being ready, with the plan being that we’d have it all ready to go Wednesday night and practice Thursday. I thought we were pretty close when I left on Wednesday (I didn’t want to stay later than 7 and I didn’t think there was much to do anyways), so then on Thursday we did a run that went almost right, then it all fell apart after that. Stuff that’s worked for months quit working, and we were there until 1:30 am getting it all going again. It turned out that the display (what I was working on for that) did almost completely work starting late Thursday morning, so once we got the system in general back up we were done.

The first demo was an internal demo, and it didn’t go perfectly but I did my best to mask the part that broke and it didn’t seem like it went too badly. The afternoon demo was to the customer and a different part of our team, and we’d taken out the feature that had broken stuff so it went exactly as expected. Since we were showing new features the lack of the features that weren’t working shouldn’t have been noticed. This coming Tuesday is a higher profile demo to the customer (I’ll have to actually dress up), and I’m really hoping everything is flawless from now till then. I worked 55 hours last week (and since my manager was on vacation I suspect I’m not getting paid overtime for that because it requires pre-approval), and it was miserable.

Ping Pong

I received a portable ping pong set (the important part is the net that extends and clips on to a table), but Talore refuses to play with me. Clearly we need to have a game night at some point to try this instead of just playing rock band/guitar hero.

The paddles feel smaller than standard, but my table is significantly smaller too, so I’m pretty sure that would work out, and it does make everything fit in a fairly compact carrying case.

Post-Thanksgiving Report

My family left for Texas last night. As expected many things ended up in different places than where I put them, but I’ve been able to find pretty much everything I looked for so far. Despite how nice my closet and pantry look when organized I very much doubt it will last. The only thing I couldn’t find was a clean bowl last night. It turns out bowls get used much faster by four people than by one, so I loaded the dishwasher and ate my jello desert off a plate.

While my mom was here I got her to make a cushion for Talore for my desk. It covers the corner of the desk, but has a notch for Talore’s cup of water and the squirt gun I use for discipline. All yesterday afternoon/evening Talore slept on the new pillow, and a good bit of today too, so it’s clearly appreciated.

The roomba died again today. It stopped in the middle of the room Tuesday or Wednesday when I forgot to cancel the schedule and we weren’t here, but it had also picked up a large portion of Talore’s tissue paper so I hoped that was the cause. Apparently cat hair managed to build up in the gear box to the point of jamming it again (not at all surprising). I took it apart and cleaned it before supper, then some time later started putting it all back together. After I’d put together the entire brush module I realized that I had 6 extra screws from where I’d fitted the gear box back together before I ate and didn’t realize the cover wasn’t fastened down when I got back to it. It’s all back together now and seems to be in working order, but the vacuum sometimes cuts out, so I’ll probably clean the contacts on that sometime soon.

Since I didn’t want the roomba trying to eat the things that were left on the floor while my family was here it was deactivated pretty much the entire week. That meant that kitty litter got tracked into the kitchen and wasn’t cleaned up automatically, and my mom couldn’t stand that. She got Talore a fluffly bath mat to go in front of the litter box. The first time Talore stepped on it she decided she didn’t want to walk across it and just jumped (scattering litter a bit farther than usual) but now she seems used to it and it’s doing quite a good job of catching litter (meaning it has plenty of litter on it, not that it’s 100% successful in stopping it from getting tracked into the kitchen). The problem right now is that it’s too thick for the roomba to roll over really easily, and it’s not heavy/stiff enough to prevent the roomba from just smashing it against the litter boxes. Putting the roomba in the middle of it works, but I’ll probably try taping the corners down or something.