Author Archives: Alan V

Adventures in house hunting

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We signed a contract on Friday and spent most of Saturday afternoon going to see houses with our now-official agent.

The first one we saw needed a *lot* of work. The bathrooms were rather old and hideous (and had tile coming off the ceiling), the front porch was having problems and was cracking and sagging, the kitchen needed updating, and the carpet was kind of sketchy. Cheap-ish, but definitely easy to pass over.

The second one we saw was huge and had a super-modern kitchen with granite, stainless steel, and the nicest fridge I’ve ever seen. The bedrooms were all large and one of the bathrooms had been renovated and looked really nice. The biggest surprise, however, was when we went down the stairs to the basement, opened the door that wasn’t to the garage, and found a full two-room apartment, complete with its own kitchen, shower, toilet, and entrance on the side of the house. It was cheap for what it was (especially given the complete apartment with the house), but the location (and lack of a back yard thanks to the hill) made it reasonably easy to pass over as well.

The last one we saw I had been excited about from the listing online, and the house did not disappoint. The bathrooms were fully renovated and so amazingly nice. The house itself had central air and forced air heating, really good quality hardwood floors, and updated wiring throughout the house. It also had a huge backyard, really nice bedrooms, and space for me to have an office on the third floor (which was also really nicely done). Its only real downsides were the lack of covered parking (but it had off-street parking) and distance from things we care about.
I spent the rest of the evening and this morning worrying about the house and wondering if we should make an offer on it or risk losing it. It had been on the market already for 2 months with no offers, so it seemed fairly safe to wait on, but I was concerned that we could lose it and not find anything remote comparable again (given that all the other houses we’ve seen so far have needed significantly more work than this one). Still, given that we’d only seen 8 houses total and were therefore at the beginning of our search in a slow market, it didn’t really make sense to jump on it. But it still didn’t stop me from worrying.

In the end, the problem was solved for us, as our agent called this evening and told us someone else had put an offer on the house, to see what we wanted to do. The result was a rather strong, “Don’t do anything now, and wait and see what happens” sentiment, and made the decision to potentially pass up this house much easier. (Neither of us was willing to jump on the house tonight, which is what would have had to happen if we didn’t want to risk losing it. So fate kind of forced our hand.)
Our agent also sent us examples of comparable listings sold in the last 6 months that did a lot to assuage my concerns, since there were many well-priced houses on the list that were also nicely updated and had many of the important features of this house.

So it’s been an interesting hunt so far. Things will continue more in earnest after I return from my San Francisco trip, and we will hopefully find something awesome.

Life, games, TV shows

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Life goes. Rather busily, in fact. It hadn’t occurred to me how busily until Chloe asked about dinner plans last Sunday and I had to stop before automatically responding that I was free “any evening”. My schedule now consists of climbing two evenings a week, board games one evening a week, and Tartan on Monday afternoons and all day Sunday, in addition to other random things that come up (like dinner plans, impromptu board gaming, or parties).

The benefit of all of this, at least, is that I now am guaranteed to leave the house at least once every 48 hour period. It’s a big change from a few months ago where I would often not even change out of pajamas most days, but really nice. (Yeah, yeah… working from home makes you lazy. :P)

For Christmas, we acquired the new board games Ticket to Ride, Yspahan, Hey That’s My Fish, Bananagrams, and Word-A-Round. Euphoria also arrived recently. Each of these (except for the new Euphoria) have been played many, many times. Yay for new board games.
(There was a mishap with The Agents where I both entered the wrong shipping address, and the package also didn’t arrive at the wrong address… so I need to figure out whether it’s worth my time and money to hunt down a new copy of the game. Le sigh.)

I received the first three seasons of The Walking Dead for Christmas and have watched through the first season and half of the second. It’s a really, really well done show, and I can see why it gets all of the acclaim it does. It provides a really character-centric focus on the zombie apocalypse (much like World War Z [the book] provides a global view of the disaster). I’ve also finished through season 4 of Supernatural and should start season 5 at some point. At least all of these DVDs are getting some use. :)

The hunt for houses has begun. It’s looking like houses with our constraints in the neighborhoods we want are going to run between $350,000 and $450,000… a bit more than I had expected. It’s not like we can’t afford that, but it just feels weird to be spending so much on a house. We went to two open houses last weekend on the opposite ends of the spectrum (a modern 4-bedroom house by CMU at ~$470k and a townhouse in Squirrel Hill at ~$280k), so we’re getting a better idea of what we can get for the money, at least. At some point we should figure out financing and find an actual agent to work with. Argh I wish buying a house was easier.

Work… has been work. In general, I tend to come back from breaks feeling like I want to quit my job and just travel, rather than feeling refreshed. This was particularly true coming back from this Christmas break, and it feels like I still haven’t gotten back into the swing of things three weeks in. I’m stressing out about really minor things, irrationally irritated at bugs, and generally feel like I’m getting less done than I should be doing. Sigh.

Life, Christmas, New Year’s

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Well, we’re back. It was a fun break with trips to Ohio and Toronto. Life has been updated, with both stats and photo journal updates.

Haven’t done a photo dump in a while.









Toronto photos can be found at photos.

Happy new year, everyone! :D

Climbing, board games, TV shows, card games

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Life has been pretty uneventful lately.

I recently celebrated 80 months of companionship and love and awesome. I guess in some ways it’s silly that we still track months together, but it’s also nice. So yay relationships.

There was a Thanksgiving. There was lots of tasty food and lots of fun games.

I’ve started climbing again after Groupon had a $70-for-a-three-month-membership deal. I actually haven’t gotten too much worse (finished a couple V2s yesterday), which is nice. A gallery of December climbing photos will be posted in about a week (since I batch together all related photos from a month).


There has also been copious board gaming, which is always fun and awesome. Eight Minute Empire Legends recently arrived, and it was played, and it’s a really nice filler game. For some reason, all of the recent Kickstarters I backed seem to have all finished production early November, so they’re all shipping around Christmas time. I’m expecting the Machine of Death card game and The Agents card game soon (or, I guess, when I get back from Christmas break), and Euphoria is arriving in January (but only because I used the “delay shipment” option, since it would otherwise arrive Christmas week).
(More board gaming photos will likewise be posted in about a week.)

I’ve become re-addicted to the show Supernatural, after Amazon had it on sale for Black Friday and I bought the seasons I was missing (7 and 8). Watched through season 2 in a few days and started on season 3… and I don’t know why I ever stopped watching. Yay awesome TV shows.
Also bought the last two seasons of Smallville that I was missing (9 and 10), as well as the first three seasons of The Walking Dead. Have a lot of TV to watch now. Maybe at some point I’ll get re-motivated to work on the Investigations card game. I’m thinking of making a tweak to the game where every deck card has a “conspicuousness” value, and every character provides conspicuousness, and exceeding a random conspicuousness value makes you automatically fail the investigation. (Would provide another value to tinker with on cards, and some more strategy in deck building to get good abilities with low conspicuousness cards or worse cards but be able to throw more characters at things.)

Work continues on People Wars: Gatherings. The theme of the set is “dual characters”, so I’m adding a bunch of dual characters along with abilities and skills that key off of them. Also, in an effort to make hybrid decks more feasable, I’m adding cards that reward working characters with kill counters as well as tasks that can provide items and attacks/skills. There’s also new abilities to help score tasks late game, and to help deal more damage early game. (Also notice the new “Climbing” and “Game Group” attributes, which I’ll flesh out in later expansions.)

Work has been super stressful lately. Not much to really say about that. I need to get better at separating work and life, and stopping work when it’s not work time. Hopefully that will come.

So yay for life, at least.