| Profilo di BrianBrian's SpaceFotoBlogElenchi |  Strumenti  Guida |
|
31/12/2007 Recaps and Resolutions: 2007 EditionSo here it is, with two hours left of 2007 and I haven't even started my recaps and resolutions yet. RecapsLooking back at the year, it was pretty durn good. Work: I landed a new job with an incredible team. Though it's more challenging than any job I've had before, I'm loving it and doing well, if not stellar. I'm still able to balance work and life and happy that I'm adamant about that. Remodel: The house remodel made a bit of progress in 2007. Dave moved back to town and lived here for a few months, paying rent in construction projects. Chris moved back to town and is working for Dave now. It's good to have them both back in town. I missed them while they were away. Yard: I did a little more with the yard this year, but not as diligently as I probably should have. I started my first vegetable garden and got a lot of carrots, a few peas and beans, some beets, onions, and a hint of spinach. Travel: I left the US for the first time in my life this year, too (I'm not counting a few weekend trips to Vancouver, B.C.). Work sent me to China to transfer my old job responsibilities. I had a much better time than I thought I would and look forward to traveling abroad again, if I can afford it with the weak dollar. Budget: As my previous post details, I went rather overboard digging into my finances and planning for the future in the past month. I found some great online resources and am making a commitment to getting back on track with saving. ResolutionsI'm not much for a bunch of nitpicky goals, mainly because I'm lazy and don't like having lists of stuff to get done. I like having nothing to do and all day to get that nothing done in. However, I have made a few commitments to myself. Budget: The big, obvious one is the budget. I plan to be able to retire early (by 50 if all goes well). Whether or not I do retire when I'm able will be up to me, but I want to have investments that generate more income than I need to pay for my living expenses. This is a pretty aggressive goal, especially with the mortgage payments I have to make. However, learning to live well below my means and hoard away large chunks of money every year is now a goal.
Health: Lose weight. Nine years ago, after I went from 245# to 180# in the span of 6 months, and then kept around 180 for a few years, I told myself that I'd starve myself if I ever got above 200#. Not a smart thing to do, but it helps underscore how strongly I felt about it back then. Well, earlier this year, I was up to 220#. I'm now at about 210. My plan is to get back under 190 again and keep it off as long as I can. Luckily, the mindset that helps me keep on my budget is very conducive to keeping me honest about workouts and eating well. For example, cooking at home will save money and allow me to make healthier decisions.
House: I will work with Dave to try to figure out how I can get the rest of the house remodeled on the budget I've created. This could be tricky, but if the downstairs is finished, it will generate rental income, greatly helping my retirement plan. So there it is. I'm guessing that there will be a lot of other things that happen in 2008: work, yard work, some travel, some personal development, but I'm not at a point in any of those where I'm comfortable committing to a resolution. I hope everyone's year has been as solid and pleasant as mine was. Here's to hoping that 2008 is even better. Budget: 2008 EditionI've spent the last month really looking into my finances. After buying the house four years ago (wow, I've been a homeowner for four years), I didn't really have a budget or savings goals. The house and its remodel were pretty much my only financial goals to speak of since all my reserve money and a good chunk of credit (paid off by various refinances) were all devoted to the house. I was constantly living on the edge of my equity until a couple years ago. Just after the kitchen was installed, I decided that I'd slow down a bit and let my finances settle. This was after adding $100,000 to the mortgage, making it nearly unaffordable then, and barely affordable now, but it's at 5.25% fixed for 30 29 years and I have no HELOC. If I play my mortgage payback cards right, I might have it paid off in 20 years instead of 29.
The upstairs remodel is about finished, but there's still pretty much everything left to do downstairs (walls, paint, lights, tile, bathroom fixtures, fix any electrical issues, carpet, etc.). However, I think I'm done living on credit or trying to roll the remodel costs into the equity of the house. I want to get back to the pre-homeowner days where I was out of debt, saving 50% of my after-tax income, and spending the other 50% anyway I felt. That's currently impossible, however, since house payments and bills take up about 60% of my after-tax income. I have to live off another 20-30%, leaving only 10-20% of discretionary funds (read: save for an emergency fund; save for more remodeling; save for a car to someday replace my 10-year-old one; save in accounts that will pay passive income and compound).
10-20% isn't very much to spread around to all of those financial buckets. What's worse is that without a real reason not to spend that 10-20%, I do spend it. For example, I went through all of 2007 without an actual budget and have no savings left over to show for it.
I spent a day downloading, formatting, and compiling my credit card statements for all of 2007 (yes, yes, I know that they sell software for this sort of thing, but I got a cheap copy of MS Money and it sucks for the kind of detail I'm looking for). I think there are plenty of spending categories that I can cut back pretty significantly so that I can actually live debt-free (minus the huge and glaring mortgage debt, of course) and build up some savings. Whether or not the downstairs remodel gets done is still up in the air. Since it can generate rental income once it's done, it's an investment, but as I said, I don't want to go into debt to finish it. The question is whether it's worth using up the newly created emergency fund. I'll have to figure that one out as I go.
I've created a pretty detailed budget plan for the year, with monthly goals and enough flexibility that I won't feel deprived. I may try to be more aggressive in 2009, but I figure I'll ease myself into this annual budget thing by being as realistic as I can.
My goal in 2008 is to save $10,000 in an emergency fund and to live debt-free (again, with the convenient exception of the mortgage debt) for the entire year. I considered going credit-card-free for a month or more, but after the ease of seeing 90% of what I spent last year by downloading my credit card statements, I may instead make it a goal to put everything I can on a credit card to ease my analysis throughout and especially at the end of 2008, as long as I pay in full and on time every month, which hasn't been a problem for the 12 years I've had credit cards.
If you're interested in personal finance, budgeting, living below your means, and becoming rich in the process, check out http://www.thesimpledollar.com and http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog. Use it as a starting point to go to a bunch of other blogs. Read an entry or two every day and keep the inspiration up. Or just come talk to me. I love talking personal finance. :) 04/06/2007 Taking Stock and Catching UpI haven't been writing here for a variety of reasons: general laziness (though I've had the urge to write a lot more, I haven't been writing much); embarrassment over my Mr. Overseas situation and a desire to have that story finished before writing any more about it (the story seemed to fizzle after about six months; I was hoping for something more interesting and blog-worthy at least); and a general lack of anything terribly exciting that I haven't told everyone I know through other modes of communication. But, it's about time to take stock of life and try to see where it's headed. Before I can do that, I think I need to catch up with what's been happening.
The house is actually coming along now. Slowly, but coming. My really good friend, Dave, moved back to town and is now living in my basement. He has started a contracting company and is paying rent in house projects. The upstairs is almost finished. It's textured and painted and the bamboo hardwoods are in. Most of the materials to finish the half bath are purchased along with the trim, so it should be done shortly. The rest of the house will probably wait until the cooler fall and winter months while Dave builds his business through the summer.
The yard is doing okay. I neglected it last year and have been focusing more on the back yard this year. I finally got some vegetables planted, which is pretty exciting, since I've been planning a vegetable bed for a couple years now and just didn't do any yard work last year. The spinach is about ready to start harvesting, I think, and I'm hoping that some peas show up soon. After that, there should be some beans, lettuce, carrots, beets, and onions. The fruit trees are doing fairly well, too, especially the peach/nectarine.
I decided that since I have quite a few fruit trees and other flowering plants, it might be cool to get some beehives to help with pollination and to get honey from. As strange coincidences go, a friend of a friend happens to be a supercool beekeepin' chick, so I now have two bee hives in the back yard, on the slab that was once the base for "the structure."
I've been cooking a bit, but my food blog hasn't reflected that. I think it may be about time to start updating over there, too.
All in all, life is going great. My roommate rocks; the remodel project has started up again and is going to be much cheaper and really high quality; I'm excited about the yard again; I'm cooking quite a bit; and finances are just about to start working themselves out (having free labor on a remodel certainly helps in that respect).
Work has become "interesting" in a variety of ways recently. I'm not sure exactly what's going on next week or next month at this point, but I hope it's fun. Suffice it to say that it won't be what I'm doing this week. I won't say too much more about it now, since I don't know much about it and since blogging about work generally invites trouble. But "interesting" is probably the best word for it--possibly ominous, possibly exciting, possibly terrifying. I'll let you know when I figure it out.
Not much more to report so far. Mr. Overseas never made it back across the sea, so that story is pretty much done. I hope everyone's summer is starting off well. 31/12/2006 Recaps and Resolutions: 2006 Edition2006 has been an interesting year for me. It was largely unique in my excessive laziness in the second half of it. For some reason, I just didn't feel the urge to do much of anything. I watched DVDs, read quite a few books (for me at least, slow reader that I am), played some online games, and generally stayed away from the gardening, yard work, and other at-home stuff that would have gotten me more into the world. And I loved it. I kept thinking "maybe I should get to the gym more" or "I should really do more with the yard; there's a lot of weeding to do" or "I should get off my ass and start some more of the remodel projects around the house." And then I realized how relaxed my life was and how much I enjoy being relaxed. And I really have enjoyed this year. It was unremarkable on the whole, but I only had a handful of bad days, I got plenty of sleep, and I simply enjoyed being myself. That's not to say that the entire year was a complete bust for getting things done. My kitchen was finished at the beginning of the year and I cooked my first dinner party in it on my birthday, which was one of the coolest things ever. I've learned how to bake bread and have accumulated kitchen gear, "recipes," and skills that will serve me well in the coming years. I refinanced the house just a couple weeks ago, which will allow me a little more leeway in financial terms and more security with the payments since I paid off the variable-rate HELOC and rolled it into a fixed-rate mortgage. I was lucky to have bought three years ago, as I would be priced out of the market today. The remodel work done so far has been very expensive, but even after all of the money spent, I have about as much equity left as the remodel has cost so far. If all goes well, I won't need to borrow any more money to finish the house. But if I need to, the money will be there. On a more personal level, I saw a lot of friendships wane more as I kept fairly happily to myself, and a few friendships strengthen. I am particularly happy that a foodie friend that I met last year has become more of a frequent brunch and dinner companion, and I'm elated to be welcoming Dave back from St. Louis in the early part of 2007. A few other friends who have moved away for various reasons have different plans, a couple of whom will probably never be returning, another changes his plans every few minutes. It was also a great year for my professional life. My team adopted a different approach to getting things done (Scrum/Agile instead of Waterfall), and the new approach really works well for me. My financial situation looked up fairly considerably both because of this team change and because I had pretty much been due with my skill set and contributions to the team over the past years. It would probably have come earlier if I could keep my mouth shut about my laziness when talking to my managers. But frankly, I value honesty over money, and I'm quite confident about my contributions despite my lazy streak. The love life was yet again non-existent, but didn't leave me bitter as it has in the past (I think a bad relationship a few years ago showed me that being single isn't the worst thing that can happen). There was a prospect that I was excited about for the last quarter of the year, but he has been incommunicado for all but two weeks of that quarter year for reasons beyond either of our control. Some of the excitement is still there, but largely dulled due to the waiting. I have been hoping to write the follow-up posts to my earlier entries on the subject, but the waiting just kept (and keeps) going on. Maybe someday. So that's been the year. What about the turn of the year and 2007? Well, the end of the year has been spent entertaining out of town visitors. Dave was here from St. Louis over Thanksgiving and now, Chris from San Jose, Chris from London, and Chuckles from Gilroy are all in town for New Years. Luckily, they seem to get along, so I don't have to spend too much time picking and choosing which time to spend with which, but I would like to have some one-on-one time with each of them before they take off out of my life again for months or years or forever. 2007 looks like it could be a great year. Dave is moving back from St. Louis in February and will be moving in with me. He's going to start a contracting company and while he builds clientele, he'll be finishing the rest of my remodel. I have had 70-80% of the materials necessary to finish it sitting in the garage for the past three years, but couldn't afford the labor and didn't want to attempt it myself. Dave will trade me the labor for his rent, and since I'll be paying the same amount of money every month until it's finished and I can get a paying roommate, it seems like a great deal for both of us. Words can't express how happy I'll be to have Dave back in town, to have him living so nearby (downstairs), and to have my house get finished. I'm a happy camper. Because of the refinance, I have some money left over, which I'm going to earmark the better part of for the remodel costs, but which I'm also planning to spend on a trip to the UK. The foodie friend I mentioned earlier is from there and one of the Chrisses who is in town now lives there for at least a few more months, so I should have cheap room and board as long as I can manage the vacation time properly and get an affordable flight. It's about time I got out of the country. I've been thinking and talking about it for the better part of a decade now and I want to do it before the rest of this decade passes by. With luck, before another year passes by. Though I enjoyed being lazy this year, I'm going to make it a goal to get back into the garden in 2007. I loved the yard work and gardening last year but just couldn't get into it this year. I'm hoping that I'll have some veggies growing for the kitchen and in general get things looking good again. So remodel, vacation, and gardening. I really have no other plans yet. I hope to hear from my incommunicado guy at some point, but the hope of that happening has dwindled over the past three months and seems to be draining at a quicker rate these days. I'm sure there'll be a post about that at some point either way. Wow, well, that was dry, boring, and singularly lacking in any of the wit or soul I try to put into these when I actually get around to writing them (I think I missed a couple years), but really, that kind of goes with how life has been this year--not bad, just not exciting. Maybe there'll be more of a spark to next year's. Until then, I plan to enjoy life as much as I have this year, and hopefully have more to show for that enjoyment in a year's time. I wish you all a swell closure to 2006 and an absolutely fabulous 2007. Get in touch sometime and let me know how it's going. 18/12/2006 A Long Overdue PostI had figured that when I got news about my man situation I'd write more. That was nearly three months ago. Since it seems it'll be another month or three till there's real news, I guess I'll just go ahead and write about other stuff.
Things have been going well 'round these parts. I'm coping admirably with the winter dreariness. And in a couple days, there'll be more rather than less light every day. Yay for Winter Solstice! I threatened last year to throw a Winter Solstice party annually from then on out, but since the house is still not done, a real party would be difficult.
The house hasn't gotten much done to it in many, many months, except for the week when Dave, a friend who's been out of town for three years, was visiting over Thanksgiving. That week I got a new vanity mirror and lights for the master bath, an entry light, and the downdraft vent in the kitchen rewired. Luckily for me, Dave is moving back to town in February and starting his own contracting company. Until he builds a client list, he'll be living for free with me and beginning the end of my three-plus-year remodel. And there was much rejoicing. I also just signed the paperwork for a refinance of the house. The mortgage is a lot bigger than when I first bought the place, but the equity has outpaced it by a wide margin. I'll be paying a little less every month AND I'll pay off all of my other outstanding debt. It'll be a very good thing.
Brian's tip for the month: your computer doesn't like wine as much as you do. Just trust me on that one. In other news, the new laptop is FAST like lightning! Unfortunately, updates to my most recent online gaming addiction have rendered the game unplayable in the extreme. Instead, I've been keeping myself busy with Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series (11 books averaging about 700 pages each--just started the fourth).
I've also started cooking a little bit more. I'm going to try starting my own sourdough and see how that turns out.
Aside from all that, there's not much to report. I lost power last week during the big Seattle area wind storm, but had it back on in just under 24 hours. Many coworkers and friends are still without power four days later. I'm hanging around here for the holidays and have taken next week off to laze about and hopefully hang out with some friends. I hope everyone's holidays will be as swell as mine should be. 01/10/2006 Wicked thoughtsOne might think that I'd learn not to blog (or send emails, for that matter) when I'm drunk (though one might be surprised at my ability to compose coherent sentences when in such a state). One might also think that I'd learn not to be too negative about life or men in blog postings due to the amount of people who think I'm about to apply a freshly sharpened razor to my wrists over a bad day or week. One would, of course, be wrong.
While I do like sympathy every now and then and while I do have bad days and like to write about them, on the whole, I'm quite well-adjusted. I tend to see the few bad days that I have scattered amongst the many average days and more-frequent-than-I-probably-deserve good days as a good contrast in a well-balanced life.
However, I do love to wallow for a day or two when I have bad days, and I tend to get a bit of an itch to write when wallowing, and I always find my rants to be so much more fun to read and write than my standard updates. Anyway, I'm fine, and I don't hate men, but I do see a hint of my old, not-pretty bitterness sneaking back when I thought I'd seen the last of it. I'm hoping that expressing it may help me be honest with myself about how I may be sabotaging potential dates as well as give those who are confused why I am sometimes bitter an idea of why I am sometimes bitter.
Now that that's out of the way, I can get back to the real story. So I did, indeed, get stood up for my dinner and theater date. It has now been a full week since I've heard from Mr. Overseas. I don't know what happened to him (and, "no name" comment guy #2, I'd love to tell Mr. Overseas off face-to-face (or really, have dinner or go to a show face-to-face), but the whole point is that I can't get him to answer an email or even prove that he's alive, so that'd be a bit hard). I'm beginning to think that something bad has happened to him, since he didn't seem the type not to reply to email or be offline for a full week. I do hope that he's okay.
Oddly, once he missed the show on Friday night, my anger dissolved. I think its left-over residue may be staining the mountain of disappointment which is still standing strong, but I'm just not all that angry about it anymore. I've quit waiting by the phone and moved on. I wouldn't say that I'm wallowing anymore (which means that it'll likely be many weeks before the next blog posting ;).
As for the show, I wasn't able to find anyone to go with, so I went alone. It turned out that that may have been a good thing, since I needed both seats to keep myself from being engulfed by the two women of ample size on either side of the seats. It could have been cozy for a date, but not so much for a friend. It was probably the only empty seat there, though.
The show itself was fantastic. It was everything that I wanted the book to be, but the book just didn't do it for me. The story threads were tied together well; the acting and singing was amazing; and it was just fun. I would very highly recommend seeing it if it comes to your city any time. 28/09/2006 Unlucky in LoveYeah, I'm bitter. I get that. I've been much better in the recent years as opposed to when I was numbering the consecutive guys that I was interested in but who weren't interested in me (it got up to seven, if you're curious), but of course I still have my issues.
One of those issues is with guys who flake or who don't seem to treat my time as important. I met a guy online a few weeks ago who had an emergency 2-week trip overseas. During those two weeks, we chatted pretty much daily online and it was my expectation that we'd be meeting very shortly after he got into town. Well, I haven't heard from him in four days and he's been back in town for almost three. I'd invited him to take my extra ticket to "Wicked" tomorrow night, assuming that it would be our second or third date, and I don't even have his phone number to call him and see if he's still interested and he hasn't responded to the email I sent last night. I'd put a hold on trying to find a backup date to give him plenty of time, but today I decided to try to find someone else to go with. Unfortunately, all the usual suspects are busy. So it looks like I'll have an evening out by myself, an $80 theater ticket wasted, and a guy who didn't care enough to call before the show that I told him about last week (and to whom I had mentioned my issues around flakes) that I have to decide whether to forgive or not.
Yeah, I get it, I overreact; I have an irrational disappointment and rage when people stand me up. I'm sometimes passive-aggressive in that I decide not to call or write to guys specifically to see if they'll flake on me--and of course, most of them do (and, of course, this post is also a passive-aggressive attempt at eliciting sympathy from most of you and redemption from one of you). But I tried this time to put that aside. I tried to work through my anger and my disappointment. I tried to write him and call him. Chances are that he has valid reasons for not writing in four days, but I'm not sure that those reasons will be enough for me. Is that wrong?
I guess he still has about 20 hours to get back to me before I fly solo tomorrow night, so maybe this post is premature. But maybe it helps explain some of my bitterness to those who have noticed it. It's just a sample of what usually happens to me when I meet a guy I'm interested in. 29/08/2006 Fat MusingsI got back from the gym last night and was thinking about weight loss and fat. "A pint's a pound the world 'round", Saint Alton tells us. A pint of water weighs a pound (or close enough thereabouts to call it such, technically, it's 1.04317556 pounds, but that's pretty close, wouldn't ya say?). That makes a gallon of water roughly 8 pounds. But that's water. Of course, fat floats on water, which makes it less dense and take up more volume. How much volume? That's the question that I asked myself around midnight last night and couldn't go to bed until I had my answer. The net seems to agree that fat is about 90% the density of water (approximately 0.9 grams/milliliter whereas water, by definition is 1.0 g/mL, and muscle is 10% denser at 1.1 g/mL). Luckily, Google offers an instant conversion from pretty much everything to pretty much everything else (you might ask why I didn't use Windows Live Search and if you were to ask, my answer would be "because Windows Live Search sucks ass and doesn't even load any results for me"). Doing the conversion, I found out that a gallon of human fat weighs approximately 7.5 pounds. So go pull a gallon container out of the fridge. Look at it. When you lose 7.5 pounds, you've lost that much fat. Gross and awesome at the same time. Now, since I've lost almost 15 pounds since starting at the gym a couple months ago (10-12 pounds net weight loss plus guesstimating a gain of 3-5 pounds of muscle, displacing the same mass of fat), I've lost 2 whole gallons of fat. Of course, with 30 pounds to go, there's the better part of a 5-gallon bucket to go. That's a long way to go, but swell progress. Just 20 or 30 weeks left till then... 4 freakin' gallons of this shit. Time to go. 16/08/2006 An Update on Brian's LifeI always start these things with a "yeah, yeah, it's been too long." And this one is only slightly different. Maybe I should just start assuming that and move on... or realize that nobody cares how long it's been and that few even bother reading this drivel. But chances are that I won't. So get used to it. :P
So what's been up? Not too terribly much. I've been lazing about this summer. I'm still pleasantly addicted to World of Warcraft, but not so addicted that I haven't been able to do other things--like get back to the gym. I'd really blimped out in the past three years of not gymming and something just clicked in early July and since then, I've gotten to the gym 3-4 times a week. The results are showing, but as always, not as quickly as I'd really like 'em to.
I've been reading a little, too. I re-read the entire Amber Chronicles, which was good fun and made me miss gaming and think back to the kick-ass Amber roleplaying campaign I was a part of many years ago. Then I quickly popped off "Animal Farm" in a couple days (which was amazingly successful with me--made my blood boil). Now on to some Chuck Palahniuk. I liked "Fight Club", loved "Survivor", and appreciated "Choke", so let's see about "Diary".
"The Guy" that I mentioned in my last post a month or three ago is no longer a prospect. Great guy and we still keep in touch, but he's on his own for the first time near a big city and needs to go experience life before he settles down. I, on the other hand, need to stop being so damn settled and get off my ass and get social more often.
However, after reading a cool essay on the differences between introverts and extroverts, I realize that my not being terribly social all the time isn't necessarily a bad thing. The line that really struck me is this: "introverts are people who find other people tiring. Extroverts are energized by people..." It hit me then exactly how true this is. I'm not antisocial, I'm just tired out by other people. I enjoy a good, long, fun party, but feel like I need a day of down time to recover from it. Same with vacations; they're great, but I need a few days of vegging out at home to recover from 'em.
I still have the braces and they're going well. I haven't directly asked the orthodontist when they'll be coming off, but as the final wire is in and the final rubber band configuration (top teeth need to move a couple millimeters to the left), I'm hoping that they'll be off by the end of the year. Then I'll get to see how much it'll cost me to get them whitened. Since the teeth themselves are stained, they can't be bleached nor can they be laser treated. They have to be either veneered (about $10k) or essentially painted over, which is a new process, but seems like it'd be MUCH cheaper than veneers. I sure hope so.
No. Nothing new is done on the house. Quit asking. If you want more to be done, send a few thousand dollars my way and I'll happily to post pics of my credit card being paid off. Send a few thousand more and I'll take pictures of the house renovations that you would be paying for. Until that happens, I'm taking it easy on the remodel.
Okay, that about catches y'all up. Over and out. 25/06/2006 My Bite is UnsurpassedWow, lots going on. This’ll be a long boring one in hopes of being able to be a bit more narrowly focused in the future. I’ve become pleasantly addicted to World of Warcraft. I have a guy I’m interested in who has just moved to town (and is staying with me till he can move into his apartment). My yard looks like a jungle from the lack of dry days to mow and weed. My little brother graduated high school and I went back to Minnesota (possibly for the last time) to attend. A high school friend that I haven’t seen in nearly a decade is visiting me in the middle of his cross-country trip. The orthodontia is going fairly well and might even come off in a few months. Let’s start at the beginning. World of Warcraft rocks. My internet service (some have tried to convince me that it’s my router, but they’ve been proven wrong) seems a bit spotty at times, but in general, WoW has been pretty smooth sailing. It can be much more fun than City of Heroes/Villains due to the extra content it has (it’s not just “mission mission mission”, there’s auctions and items and professions, which are cool), but it can also be a drag (no quick way to travel for a very very long time). Moving on to the next item, I met a fun, geeky guy online who lived eight-hours-by-car away. He was graduating with a Computer Science degree this spring, so I tried hooking him up with a job here, but the interviews didn’t go as well as we’d both hoped. He came back to interview for a contract position and got that one. Now, he’s in town and staying with me till his apartment opens up. We’re WoWing together. :) It has been unseasonably wet . Yeah, it rains in Seattle—all freakin’ winter—but the sun comes out in the spring and stays out till fall. Or so it was for the past seven years. This year decided it wanted to be special, so it just kept right on raining. While it has helped the yard stay green and the plants grow, it has also kept the weeds green and helped them grow, too. That, the entertaining, and the trip to Minnesota (oooh, look at that, foreshadowing!) have all conspired against me and my yard plans so far this growing season. I don’t know if I’ll really get back into it soon enough to do anything spiffy this year, but we’ll see. I’ll leave the story about what I found buried in the yard while I was digging up my raised beds for another time. Suffice it to say that I hate the previous owners of my house even more now, which I wasn’t quite sure was possible. I keep amazing myself. Speaking of Minnesota (a segue built on previous foreshadowing... I’m a literary genius), I was just there a couple weeks ago for my little brother’s high school graduation. My parents are building a nice house out in the Black Hills of South Dakota and selling off the house they’ve lived in for the past 16 years, so chances are that I won’t be getting back toward Minnesota for a long while. I was able to catch up with a bunch of friends while I was out there, which was nice. My first boyfriend back when I was 18 now has a kid! Wiggy. A high school friend who has been living in Boston (after having been a nuclear engineer in the Navy, married, and divorced) decided to take a cross-country road trip this summer and has been hanging out with me for the past week. He’s a great guest. I’m a horrible host. Note to possible future hosts of out-of-town visitors out there: it is impolite to impart your World of Warcraft addiction onto visitors. “Your bite is unsurpassed.” That was my orthodontist talking. Heh. Apparently, the orthodontia are going well. My bite has completely changed and my massive overbite has been changed into a proper overbite. I think the next time I go in (early next month), I’ll get the final final wire, so then it’s just a matter of very fine tuning. Very cool. Though it’s not mentioned up there, work is going well. I had a few stumbling blocks getting back into the groove after the Minnesota trip, but am grooving well now. I just installed the Office 2007 Beta 2 yesterday and aside from having the Windows Search Service bring my system to its knees begging for mercy (I’ve now disabled it and can again experience the wonders of computing), it’s pretty cool—and much better than the first beta. In fact, I’m using Word’s blog feature to blog this right now. I can type it all up in Word and publish it to my MSN Space with the click of a button. Hot! Okay, I’d better click that button now; lunch break is about over. 14/05/2006 Odds and EndsYupyup, I know. It's been over a month. And there's been some stuff going on that I probably should have been unlazy enough to type up, but I wasn't.
First, I got back to a poetry slam after a year or two of not catching any. Lucky for me, it was the Grand Slam. And finally, Buddy made it onto the Seattle team. It's about time.
I've been helping a friend build a retaining wall in his back yard on the weekends, and this weekend started digging in my own yard for the raised beds that I've had planned and staked out since October. The pics will be somewhere in this gallery once they finish uploading. And check out the sage bush. Damn! And the growth on the bay tree. The herbs are gonna go nuts this year. I might even have the area for the raised beds dug up enough to plant some veggies out back soon. Though if I run into any more rolls of chain link fence or cinder block pieces used as backfill, I might snap and take out a few people first. I'm not sure if they allow vegetable gardens in prison.
So the yard is going well. Only a couple of deaths over the winter. The tree ferns, again, dammit, though I see a couple new fronds on one (again in the yard gallery above). I think the other one might have kicked it permanently. The new fruit trees are doing fairly well and I might get a few pieces of fruit off them this year, but I'll probably be too busy picking all the plums I'll have to worry about much else. The cherry tree seems like it'll be a lot more productive after being pruned pretty severely last year. All in all, the yard is going well.
Inside is comin' along, too. The upstairs still isn't done, and I've told the handyman that I'm too far over budget to keep paying him every month, but he wants to see it done so is going to put in a few hours a week for free till it's at least textured and painted. He does good work, even if he does it slowly. I'll worry about the basement when I can get some cheap labor to help me with it. It sounds like there might be a few prospects for that help on the horizon, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. I figure it'll be a few more years before it's all "done."
Work is going well and I'm enjoying it more than I have in quite a long time, though dealing with team members in China can be a real drag, as they get to work at 6PM our time, so if we have to chat with them, we have to stay late. But the team seems pretty functional and we're all doing good work, so I'm pretty happy.
So all in all, things are going well. There's even a guy I'm interested in and if he didnt' live eight hours away, it might go somewhere. We're tryin' to fix that, though. I'll keep ya posted.
Anyway, the sweet temptation of South Park is luring me away. Hope all is well out there. 11/04/2006 Agile? Agile!As I say every once in a while, I don't like to talk much about work on a public blog (that all my coworkers have access to and most see change updates fo) as not to incriminate myself, give away trade secrets inadvertently, make my work life awkward by saying anything about coworkers that makes them uncomfortable, or announce things like a promotion, raise, demotion, good or bad review, etc. (it being against company policy to talk to peers about such things) but work is a part of my life and when exciting (or horrible) things happen, I do like to share them. This will be an attempt to do so without treading too near those fears up there. Wish me luck.
I work on an internal software tools team at a large company. We provide tools that allow other software developers and testers to be more productive. We've been doing a good job over the past few years and accomplished some big goals--some goals that many would have thought impossible. Nothing earth-shattering, but getting a few dozen teams to agree to a similar tools framework when most already have teams dedicated to providing them tools is not an easy task.
So, it is time to go on to the next big thing. And the next big thing appears to be Agile. Agile software development is essentially a revolution in the way software projects get run. In the past, the standard methodology was prescriptive: it assumed that every person's deliverables would be delivered at a specific date and unblock the rest of the team to continue; it assumed that requirements could be known before development began and wouldn't change until development ended--sometimes months or years later; it was process-heavy, artifact-heavy (produced a lot of documentation about what was going on and what was supposed to go on) but weak on showing results (it probably wouldn't be a stretch to say that most of the projects managed with a prescriptive method failed in one way or another). But, unlike robotic factories, you cannot predict when a developer will have a certain feature written and debugged; you cannot predict what functionality a customer may want months or years in advance.
So Agile methodologies talk about how to work within a non-predictive environment, with an empirical process--one that understands that you cannot predict timelines on creative processes. Agile methods works within that framework to produce results ("results" being defined as actual working, demonstratable functionality) on a very short timeline--sometimes a few weeks, usually once a month.
Agile is an umbrella term for a bunch of different development methods: Test-Driven Development, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Pair Programming, and many other things. Any process that focuses on the customer, promotes rapid releases, and allows a development team to self-organize (rather than have organization decided by someone not writing the code) is pretty much Agile. Each of these things have many books written on them. Our team is now starting to look at evangelizing these techniques across multiple product teams. In order to do so, we must first know what the hell we are talking about. So we've been adopting some of the processes, with (in my opinion) pretty durn good results. I think that some of our team doesn't quite grasp the key principles of the specific methods we're trying to adopt (Test-Driven Development and Scrum--and I may even include myself in that "some of the team" as well), but I think we're all surprisingly willing to give most things a shot.
With all that being said, I think that my personal work style is fitting in much much much better into Agile methods than it ever did before. It may be due to all the changes on the team (it feels like a new team and I always have huge bursts of productivity for a few months on any new team I join, to settle into a much mellower general pace after it has worn off), but I get the feeling that it may be a permanent thing. If so, it should mean some good things to come for me in the future.
Exciting stuff. Headgear free!There was an orthodontic appointment today. I attended, as it was my appointment. I've had orthodontic gear for just over a year now (not necessarily braces, though those have been on for almost a year now). The one constant since the first round of gear has been the nightly headgear. It didn't bother me all that much, really, but it precluded some positions and was just rather annoying to remember. Well, the orthodontist took the damned thing away from me today. No more headgear! Hooray!
Next up is adding composite material to a few teeth to make them wider--hopefully within the next month. After that, he puts in the final wire on the top (the bottom has had the final wire in for months now) and the end is near! Woo! 09/04/2006 I HAVE A WASHER AND DRYER! IN MY HOUSE!I'm just now uploading a ton of pics (well, 74 anyway) to my smugmug site. One, buried deep and alone in the galleries, is of the new washer and dryer. Of course, I don't have plumbing to or from the washer, or electricity for either the washer or the dryer. But dammit, they look nice!
In other news, Spring appears to be sprunging. I mowed the lawn for the first time last weekend and have been trying to get to all the dandelions before they go to seed. Since I'm trying to go without the chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides as much as I can, I gotta go pull those suckers by hand. So far, it hasn't been too much of a problem.
Apparently, tree ferns just don't like me, but rosemary, oregano, sage, and garlic all do. The new pics are, of course, up at the site. It looks like I'll be having a lot of plums this year, and trimming back the cherry tree definitely seems to have helped make it more productive. I'll have to lop a whole lot more off it this year so that I'll actually be able to reach the fruit someday.
Of course, there's always the kitchen, too. New pics of the kitchen and food in the kitchen have also been posted. I'm hoping to update my food blog sometime soon about my kitchen adventures and misadventures, but who knows when that might happen.
Finally, I got a stirrup hoe for weeding the plant beds that I have. Oh. My. Gawd. That that thing is handy. It beats my standard hoe that I have (even after making it razor-sharp) so much that it's not even funny. Yay for handy gardening implements! 26/03/2006 Negligent BloggerWow, time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Has it really been over a month since I posted anything here? There's been a bit going on. A lot of it in the kitchen, as it's all now fully functional (well 90% functional but fully usable). More on that over at my food blog.
I've finally been getting back to the gym. Not as religiously as I would hope, but I'm getting better. I'm starting to see results already, which is nice. Not huge results, but it's beginning. The goal is to shed the 30 extra pounds I've gained in the past two years over the next six months. We'll see how that goes.
I'm always reluctant to talk about work on this blog, as pretty much everyone I work with has MSN Messenger and sees the sparkle (MSN officially calls it a "gleam," by the way) next to my name in MSN Messenger and so are probably reading this to see what I have to say about my life and house and stuff. So I try not to say anything that could be construed in a negatively. But when something is going well, I feel free to mention it tangentially at least. Anyway, there have been some pretty huge changes on my team at work. I'm not 100% on board with all of them, but if you're going to work with other people, you're going to have to accept change and roll with it. I am, however fully on board with many of the new changes. Any way you slice it, it's looking like pretty exciting times for me at work.
Life has pretty much been busy with work, gym, and cooking. Not much new to report on the house. The handyman does good work, but he does it at his own pace, which is decidedly slower than the pace I'd choose. The roof will be replaced on April 10th, weather permitting, and there was enough money left over between what I budgeted for the roof and what It'll actually cost me to spend some money getting the hardwoods redone and probably even to buy a washer and dryer--which is something I should probably do ASAP.
Well, my little brother is in town for his spring break (making the aforementioned washer/dryer shopping or springtime yard work a little tricky, but it's a good excuse to be lazy around the house), so I'd probably better stop typing and get showered. Here's to hoping I update this thing before the end of next month. 21/02/2006 Ocean Shores 2006A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. I'm sure you'd rather have the visual summary rather than have a 60,000 word essay from me. So go check 'em out. I also took along my old digital camera and begged anyone who forgot or didn't have one of their own to use it liberally. I only got one or two takers, but the results were worth it.
This was my second time at Ocean Shores with this group, and about 80% of the people were the same from last year. And it was another fan-freakin'-tastic weekend.
I left early with a 1/2 gallon of lemon drops, a gallon of cookie dough, and a broken CD changer (the fucker did the same thing three years ago and I got it replaced and it's burnt out again... pisses me off). It seems that 1/2 a gallon of lemon drops is about enough for the first ten minutes of a party with the Camping Crew. Maybe I'll make a 5-gallon bucket to take along next year...
Highlights include the speed winning of Cranium by Dylan and me, my loss of the reigning Settlers of Catan title to James, bowling with the mentally challenged, a great breakfast provided by Robbie, two more pitchers of Lemon Drops, all of the cookie dough getting eaten in one form or another, Antknee's "Resonace With The Earth" sleeping yoga position, ungodly low temperatures with high winds, and puddin'.
I was completely exhausted when I got home on Monday, but managed to unpack a bit and post some of the pictures (linked earlier) and comment on 'em. For now, I'm in the middle of putting my kitchen crap into the cabinets... it's a lot prettier there than it is taking up 80 cubic feet of my bedroom. Wish me luck.
Update: 02.22.206: fixed links 08/02/2006 The State of the KitchenSo I've been promised for over two weeks now that my kitchen will be done by tomorrow night. Cooktop, down draft ventilation, refrigerator, dishwasher, tile, electricity, paint, cabinet trim, countertops, ovens, sink, the whole shebang. At the time of the promise, the countertops, ovens, and sink were working. Now, the tile is completely finished, the walls are painted, and the 70% of the electricity is in. So that leaves the cooktop, down draft ventilation, refrigerator, dishwasher, 30% of the electricity, and cabinet trim left to do... uhm. Tomorrow.
You might have thought that when I first said "I'd like it all to be done by the first of the year" back in September, when I first handed him a check, he would have maybe planned ahead to get the work done within four months. But five and a half it is... Hopefully, my announcement that it will be my birthday party will guilt him into putting whatever time he needs to tomorrow in to get it done. Hopefully.
I really do still give it a 90% chance of being done in time for the party. He was almost this far behind the day before the cabinets were to be installed and he stayed until it was ready--like 1AM. But it does seem like a lot of work and not much time left to do it in. There is a day and a bit of buffer time, but that would mean that my kitchen prep suffers, and there's a whole hell of a lot of kitchen prep to do when you have new, unwashed EVERYTHING (mixing bowls, silverware, glasses, etc.) and nothing is stored in cabinets yet and you're planning a seven-course meal for eight people.
I'll let you know what happens. It oughtta be an interesting few days. Tacky Birthday AnnouncementI'm usually really passive-aggressive about my birthday. Well, I guess more just passive. I have always felt it to be rather tacky to announce that one's birthday is coming up; it seems to me to be saying to whomever you announce it to "I expect you to do something for me on this day." Maybe it's supply a present, maybe it's take you out to eat, but announcing your birthday has always seemed a bit forward to me.
Even though I don't publicize it, I still love my birthday and love when it's special. Especially since I don't do Christmas, it's a time that I like to celebrate a bit, whether in private or in public. Some years, I've gone to the theater; other years I've stayed home; but my favorite ones have been when people have done something for me. I love it when people remember without my having to remind them or prompt them a week or a month in advance. It feels like I'm really wanted and loved when people remember it and do something nice--not necessarily expensive. But, since I so seldom go out of my way to ever tell anyone when my birthday is, most just never know.
This year, however, I decided to go the opposite direction and be tacky. In case I hadn't mentioned it, my birthday is this Saturday, February 11th. It's my 30th, so in gay years, I'll be dead come Saturday morning. Why have I decided to be forward about it this year? Well, for a few reasons.
First, I want to do a little extra celebrating for a big round birthday like 30. Something with friends. Something fun.
Second, my kitchen has been so close to being done for so long now that I decided to give the handyman a deadline. He seems to put in the hours when I give deadlines and show up every now and then when I don't. He agreed two weeks ago that it would be doable to get done by Thursday night (so I'd have two days to prep for a huge dinner)--more on the current state possibly in another post--so I have invited 7 other people to join me on Saturday evening for a seven-course meal. It will be my first ever dinner party in my own house. That plus the 30th birthday seemed like some sort of planetary alignment of a day all about me. And the world is always working properly when it's all about me.
Third, let's face it, I love presents. While it really is enough to have my kitchen (and those of you coming on Saturday, February 11th, seriously, presents aren't required or expected, but will be gladly accepted if offered... ;), I am admittedly a materialist bastard who needs to fill a kitchen with nice toys. I feel that I do fairly well in the gift-giving arena, buying the bulk of foodstuffs at weekly dinners, essentially gifting my brother with an XBox and quite a few games, dropping off handy kitchen items--sometimes permanently, sometimes on extended loan--in multiple people's kitchens over the years. I figure a seven-course meal oughtta be worth something in return. And if not, I get to cook. IN. MY. HOUSE!
So this year, I'm shouting it from the rafters and leaving nothing to chance. I'm planning my own party since I just don't trust that anyone else will do it. And if my credit card bills in the past few weeks are in any indicative of the evening that will be had on Saturday, February 11th, you can bet it'll be an event to remember.
The food and prep process will be blogged about at my other blog. Eventually. Blogiversary #1Apparently, it was a year ago today that I wrote my first "maybe I'll update this, maybe I won't" blog entry. I got off to a pretty slow start, but have been pretty happy with the results so far. It's been an interesting exercise, trying to write for the audience that I have. It's quite small, but also quite diverse. People from work, conservative family members, liberal friends, gay, straight... It's hard to find topics to write about that won't upset someone. Work is out of the question, since the little sparkle by my name in MSN Messenger shows that I've added an updated entry to my boss and coworkers; politics are iffy, given my middle-of-the-roadness (too conservative for the liberals, too liberal for the conservatives). So, generally, I've stuck to the house. Innocuous enough, and sometimes even entertaining.
At times, I wish I could be as open and brash as Heather B. Armstrong, but she proved that doing so has some consequences (she was fired for her blogging). But, then I'd be alienating everyone and that just ain't good.
I'm pretty sure I'll keep at it, if only to see if MSN Spaces ever gets really nice and easy to use. I've enjoyed this medium of expression much more than my previous mass mailings, which I spammed people with, rather than simply writing what I want and letting people come find it. There are RSS feeds and the MSN Messenger Sparkle (technically, I think the marketers call it a "gleam," but Microsoft GLEAM is "Gay and Lesbian Employees At Microsoft" to me) for people who want to know when something new is added.
Anyway, I just figured I'd give a quick blurb about the 1-year mark before moving on to talk about--what else?--my kitchen... 07/02/2006 CapoteIt was a good movie, even though not really into biopics. This one was more interesting in that I'd already read the book that it was about (not based on--the movie is about the time it Truman Capote's life where he was researching and writing "In Cold Blood," it was not a movie version of that book, though it included many of the details).
A few years ago, I had a "first person psycho killer literature" phase, where I read "In Cold Blood," "American Psycho," and "A Clockwork Orange" (and I can't remember, but it seems that there must have been one or two more--drat that memory of mine) in close proximity to each other. (I do, however, remember reading "American Psycho" on Waikiki beach what must have been five years ago... wonky how memory works... and my choice for vacation literature, but I digress.) "In Cold Blood" was a fantastic book. It prompted me to reevaluate the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (now one of my favorites) and read the book.
"In Cold Blood" centers around (the true story of) the killing of a four-member family in rural Kansas by two men. Mistakenly thinking that there was a good deal of money in the house, these two men tied up the entire family, searched the house, then as things got worse and worse, they ended up killing all of them. They were caught and subsequently (while on death row) befriended by a very effeminate New York socialite/writer, Truman Capote, who had at that point written "Other Rooms, Other Views," and "Breakfast at Tiffany's." "In Cold Blood" would be his last book. For four years, the courts juggled the case while Capote wrote his book and waited to be able to write the conclusion.
It was good for a biopic, like "The Aviator," and because I was at least tangentially aware of and interested in the subject matter, it made it a good deal more interesting. Philip Seymour Hoffman, of course, was exceptional. I think, were I an Academy voter, however, that I'd go with Heath Ledger. It's hard to play a person who actually existed, rather than get to make one up out of your head, and in that Hoffman had a much more difficult task, but I simply felt that Ledger became Ennis Del Mar whereas Hoffman was acting--though granted at times he was more channeling than acting, it wasn't all the time. If you've seen "Murder by Death," Truman Capote plays Lionel Twain, the antagonist of that film. Having seen him there, I had a firm idea of his voice and mannerisms, which at times, Hoffman has down perfectly, but at other times seems a poor copy. In particular, Hoffman's natural grunts and non-verbal vocalizations are much deeper than Capote's, which broke the mood for me a couple times.
The movie deals with some of the seedier, selfish side of fame. Capote focuses so completely on his own book and struggles that he misses the importance of a little book one of his closest friends has just written--and during the time that the film captures, turned into a film--the book that brought us Atticus Finch and Boo Radley: To Kill a Mockingbird. He's so taken with himself that when Harper Lee asks him at the movie premier "so what did you think of the movie" his response is "I don't understand what all the fuss is about." And toward the end of his four-year ordeal, he openly wishes it to be over, nevermind the two lives that hang in the balance. Of course, if it hadn't been for him, the appeals ball would never have gotten rolling three years prior. It is a tricky portrait of a man in love with his own fame and confident of his own talent, but who still has some pesky human emotions.
I won't rank it up there with my favorite movies, but as a multiple Academy Award Nominee and as a well-done and superbly acted movie, it's worth a watch: MMMM (out of 5) |
|
|
