Our housemates had a pumpkin carving party again. Lots of interesting pumpkins happened this year. I carved a fake foam “carvable pumpkin” that was actually pretty neat. (More photos at photos.)

But this weekend was house things! Austin was awesome and drove us to Home Depot yesterday, where we proceeded to spend over $200 on things like hedge clippers, garden hoses, gardening gloves, a step stool, brooms, buckets, dryer things, and other house stuffs. We spent the day cleaning the first floor rooms, as it unfortunately rained most of the day.

Today the rain stopped, and the awesome David, who lives at the other end of our street, loaned us his manual lawnmower and battery-powered weed whacker, and we had a pretty fun day mowing, trimming trees, and generally doing yardwork. My big accomplishment was reconnecting the dryer exhaust pipe and hooking up our new flexible dryer tube to it, to replace the old solid pipe that had fallen off and dumped lint everywhere (including inside the wall where the pipe had also detached). That was fun.

Yay for home ownership?

I’d been feeling rather melancholy for the past few weeks — nothing much happening other than work and the usual routine of board gaming and rock climbing. There was some softball practice with Greg’s softball team, and I got a few nice shots out of that.

David also hosted a bonfire at his house.

But today was special for a couple of reasons…

Today is Back to the Future day, where Marty and Doc go to the future (October 21, 2015) to help his son and set an entire series of events in motion. William hosted a movie night at his house where we watched the movie. I think the best part was the end where we were watching the credits and everyone, seemingly at once, spotted Elijah Wood’s name as some random kid character. So we return to the scene, and it is indeed him.

And secondly, we bought our house today! (Here’s me with our agent and a celebratory bottle of champagne.)

This weekend will be full of yardwork and house cleaning things, and it will be awesome. We need to get some electrical work done, but after that, it should be totally good to move in to. Looking forward to buying furniture and getting everything into place. :)

I once again find myself on my own (this time for 2.5 weeks), and Max and Yubin once again rescued me from isolation by inviting me along to dinner and a movie.

Dinner was once again at Mitchell’s Fish Market, where my mussels didn’t taste quite as fresh as last time, but where one came with a surprise tiny crab inside it instead of a mussel.

(Apologies for the terrible photo. I think Yubin has a better one?)

Then we went to see Ant Man. I thought it was a pretty good movie (and only $10 this time since it wasn’t IMAX 3D). I haven’t really seen any superhero movies in a long time (I think the last one was Batman Begins or something like that), so I didn’t really know what to expect, but I guess they tied in to the rest of the Marvel universe pretty well?
But the movie itself was enjoyable, if a bit predictable. I liked though that the movie was mostly plot instead of the explody fighty scenes that I it seems movies these days have a bit too much of. And even the big fight scenes were done very well, and amusingly, because of the small scale of things. They also did a lot of comedic parts very well. Overall, a reasonably good way to spend a few hours. :)

On the house front, things are pretty much done other than the loan. Our “inspection response” was accepted, and since the sellers are not in the country and aren’t able to do any corrective work, appropriate credit was given. The house is now empty and ready for us to fill it with things as soon as we close.

So that’ll be fun adventures in October. We need to get some rewiring and brickwork done before we move in, so if anyone has recommendations for either of those things, that would be most excellent.

Life otherwise has been fairly uneventful. Work has settled down, and although we’re rather behind on the feature front due to a recent influx of bugs and security issues, it’s not being crazy like it was a few months ago. Board games continue to happen, which is awesome. I’ve gotten a bit back into Kickstarter again, although I’m trying to be more selective about what things I back.

Yay life and things.

life has been updated, since it’s again the end of a 4-month period. Yay life.

House is happening, slowly. We’re in the contingency period through next Monday, and it’s been a whirlwind of phone calls and appointments and papers to sign. I’m really glad I had last week off of work, because even then, I didn’t have a chance to go and do non-house related things until Thursday afternoon. (I guess a day and a half off when you take a week off isn’t too bad, when the rest of the week is buying a house. :P)

Today was the home inspection with the awesome Russ Kowalik, who I would totally recommend to everyone looking at buying a house. It was basically a 5-hour careful tour of the house, examining everything that could be wrong or problematic (inside and out) and pointing out the things that could, should, and must be fixed so we have things to ask the sellers for. He was really good at pointing things out and talking to us and giving us information, and was also extremely thorough.

The good news is that there are no structural issues or other huge dealbreakers. The inspector commented a lot, actually, about the great shape the house was in. Of the issues, I think the biggest ones for us are the lack of grounded outlets on the second floor (which we’ll need to fix if I’m going to work from home and plug lots of computer equipment in), and the potential mold in the walls from when the roof had previously leaked (which, yeah, needs to be dealt with).
Amusingly, the things that would be the most expensive to fix (third-floor air conditioner is dying, and chimneys need repointing) are things that probably would affect our day-to-day lives less, even though they probably do need to be done soon as well. (You certainly don’t want chimney bricks falling on the roof shingles…)

So yeah. House! With luck, the sellers will be reasonable about things and give us some credit so we can get things fixed. Closing is in October. Then we shall have an awesome dwelling and we can start filling it with things.