After a few months of stress and effort, the grand House Project of 2014 is finally over. We've moved into a new house (still in West Seattle about a mile from the old house) and after much toil, have a lovely comfortable place to live. With the Pumpkin moving to Seattle for school in the fall, we will have a full house and the new place has much more room to breathe--for one thing, we have 3 toilets instead of one!

We are renting my original house to some friends at least for a year. The market is tight and there are a number of houses on that street for sale, so we are going to tread water until that stuff moves. The "distressed property" next door remains a problem, but hopefully some flipper will get it soon and fix it up. It's been quite a slog to get that old place ready after so much work on the new place, but we are (hopefully) finally done now that our renters have moved in.

Professor X and the Pumpkin both love the new place, and it's been really nice to be able to spread out a bit. We've each got our own little corners in it, and mine is nicely situated under a skylight--which in Seattle mostly means a uniform grey, but it is natural light. And the best part is that it never glares on my monitor.

We've spent most of the past 4 days painting away in the new place. It's twice the space of the current house with much higher ceilings, so it's a lot of work. Still, it's looking better every day. For my first house, I spent 6-8 weeks working away on it before having a housewarming party. This time I'm not doing the work alone, but having to juggle a toddler in the mix is a new twist of the schedule. Taking time off work while Professor X is at day-care works for a few days, and Saturday he went to a Parent's Night Out at the Y for a few hours as well. Today, he just got all into the paint and messed up an outfit while having a grand ole time.

So our house renovation plans didn't survive contact with the bank... or rather the appraisers. They would have done it, but we'd have to come up with double the down payment we had planned. So, instead... we bought a new house. We are out $20k and a lot of my brother's time, but bridge. water. under. Instead, we will be landlords cuz we are going to be renting out our current place. The kids love the new place, it's double our current square footage, and it's not all that far from here. In fact, the zoning changes just enough to improve the elementary school and let's us keep the same middle and high school. The yard itself isn't as interesting, but it backs up to a park so it really has a forest as a backyard. So, all-in-all, a good find.

Last weekend we all went to Maryland to visit cuddlyeconomist's mom. My brother and his S.O. came down to meet us, and we had the Pumpkin flown out so it was a good family time. Professor X had a great time. He and I flew back Monday and DrB stayed to help her mom through cataract surgery. And then snowpocalypse hit. She's been bouncing from hotel to hotel for 3 nights and is finally supposed to fly back tonight. So been solo on the baby after my first solo flight with him, but its all good practice for the big plans for this summer—more details to come.

Finally got back finishing up Dresden Files and the new books in The Laundry series. I used to get a lot of reading in on flights, but for most of Professor X’s first two years he was too much work on a flight to get in reading. He’s more self-sufficient these days.

I’ll be speaking at Game Developer Conference this year. After all the re-org fun, I’ve ended up back in a ‘developer-facing’ group that does that kind of thing. Shouldn’t be major amounts of travel, but it’s not all heads-down coding either.

Been a busy couple of weeks. I've been spending a lot of time the past few weeks doing the fence staining project a few hours most days (when it was dry) after coming home from work before the sun set, and it is finally all finished including our side and the neighbor's sides of the fence. It was a hell of a lot of work this summer getting it built and getting the new sections and last year's section stained, but it looks great and I'm super happy to be done.



Last weekend we went to Baltimore for cuddlyeconomist's mom's 65th birthday, and we met my brother Todd and his b/f Jason there. Todd's birthday is this week, and it was only a few hours train ride for them to come down from NYC to meet us in D.C. Rhys flew in from Houston as well. We had a good time, and plenty of great food.

I got news today that my mom is deciding to go ahead and retire. She was going to try to work 2 days a week for another year or so, but apparently she's not been able to regularly get in 1 day a week. The heart is doing fine, but she's just not in good physical shape and her other conditions are apparently making it hard to get up and get going in the morning. My dad seems okay with it, and he's looking to see if he can get down to just 3 days a week himself.

This weekend we finished up the last few details on the fence (a little 1 foot section in front to meet up with the front gate, and filling the last remaining 'odd board' gap in one section), and then built and hung the gates (a front gate on the side of the house, and a double-gate out back). This week we'll try to get all the posts trimmed and the toppers installed, and weather permitting we'll stain it this coming weekend and be completely done.

It's been quite the project, but I'm very pleased with the results. We used 3216 linear feet of lumber, 18# of deck screws, and spent about 50 hours all told building 187' feet of cedar fencing. I'm really glad we paid someone to post, as it has been a great foundation to work from and it would've taken us a month of weekends or more to get it in. Paying a crew to do cleanup beforehand was a bit pricey in retrospect, but it saved us another month of backbreaking labor so I think it was definitely for the best.

Last season we built a fence along the back of the house, and this year we are doing both sides. I hired a crew to come in and tear out the old fence, dig up all the crazy junk in the yard (I think there were the remnants of about 3 fences back there) and take out a bunch of the blackberry and ivy coming in from the neighbors' yards. We having another contractor coming in to post next week, hopefully earlier in the week.

So Memorial Day will be a Fencing & BBQ. It should be a fairly straight-forward fence, and most of the fiddly stuff we will try to take care of during the week (setting the rails). We'll be looking for the help of our Seattle friends to help cut, drill, and screw up a lot of boards. Since both neighbors have dogs, we are keen to get it completed soon.

But this weekend we are on hold waiting for the posts. cuddlyeconomist is in Houston visiting family and attending a graduation for some students she taught a few years back. Koshka is still hanging in there, although the poor thing can barely walk more than a foot or two before resting.

So while we were at work today, someone stole 139 1x6x6 boards from behind our house. $395 worth of wood.

I hate people sometimes.

I guess we should be happy it stayed there a week, so it probably means it was not a neighbor. Police report has been filed, and I called the West Seattle Home Depot and Alki Lumber to warn them of possible stolen property in case someone shows up with that amount of lumber without a receipt asking for a refund.

Last weekend we started on our fencing project. While we intend to replace the whole backyard with a new 6' fence (the neighbor's segments are years past needing replaced), we are starting with just the back of the lot. Since it is fairly straight, and we want a bit of a high-maintenance fence, we are doing the first runs ourselves. Last weekend while cuddlyeconomist's mom was in town, we started with digging 10 post holes using a power auger. We did it in a few hours, but the machine is pretty nasty to work with and we felt pretty sore afterward. Except for one hole the digging was fairly easy, but the last one was a real bear with lots of rocks, the neighbor's cement footing for her fence, and the remnants of an old fence to boot. This was in addition to going to see the Blue Angel's at SeaFair on Saturday, and Harry Potter IMAX on Sunday.

During the week we managed to get two fence posts in and cemented, but with the threat of impending rain next week we took Friday off to do the rest. Hand-mixing 3-4x 60# bags of cement for a post sucked, so we rented an automatic mixer for the day. It made a world of difference, but it was still a hell of a lot of work getting a total of 10 posts in, positioned correctly, braced, leveled, and cemented in place. At least it was an overcast day and relatively cool compared to the heat waves of last week. At this point, we have an excellent Les Nessman fence.

Saturday we went to the Washington Ren Fair with Rhys and some of Margo's friends who have recently moved to Seattle. Today we kicked around the house, then went to the EMP/SFM to catch the Muppet exhibition before it left. The Ren Fair was nice, and the EMP/SFM was kinda lame. The SFM should have been cool but it seemed mostly to be a collection of Paul Allen's rich friends SF toys from their attic on loan and stuffed in a too small corner of the EMP; things that looked far cooler in the movies/films/tv shows than it does in real-life.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
-- The Declaration of Independence


It was a good, if rather busy, long weekend. We had originally planned to take Rhys to Rainer National Park Friday, but as we were also throwing a 4th of July BBQ Saturday it seemed like not the best timing for a 6+ hour trip. I was also still feeling rundown as I had stayed home from work Wednesday sick with a cold. So instead we spent Friday relaxing--Rhys didn't get out of his jammies 4pm--, doing some light lawn work, made a trip to Ikea for some outdoor furniture, Fred Meyer for a shade pavilion for the back patio, a visit to the rat, er, Chuck E Cheese, for a bit of Rhys entertainment, and then dinner at Red Robin. In addition to making lunches nightly during the workweek and getting up much earlier than I did living on my bachelor's (aka borderline insomniac) schedule, we've also been actively going to 'family places' rather than assiduously avoiding them as I once did. We still haven't worked my way up to a "kids eat free" night, but it has certainly been more kid's space activities than I've been involved with in 25 years.

Saturday we had a BBQ at the house. jeliza, drakemonger, Olivia, and Elisabeth were present, along with one of cuddlyeconomist's friends from high school, his wife, and their one year old twins. jeliza made the observation that if someone had bet her two years ago that we'd be hanging out at my house with 5 children under the age of 7 and one of them would live here that she'd have thought that person was crazy. We had a number of cancellations, and loree was too sick to attend, but my gamer friend Denise and her husband Dave arrived later in the evening so we basically had an extended small gathering all day. The indoor/outdoor entertaining worked very well, the shade was great because it was damn hot outside even in the shade. Within minutes of sitting down to eat the 4 year old tipper her whole cup of drink onto the table and ground and it wasn't remotely a big deal since we were sitting on the back patio. Had Margo and I been sitting next to each other at the time there would have been a high-five at that point.

That evening we finished up with HDTV fireworks, which were enhanced by the constant sound of cheap fireworks being blown off all around the neighborhood. There was some discussion earlier in the week about maybe going out to see them live but we decided against it in terms of timing. Later we spotted a headline on the Seattle Times that read: "Going to Gas Works Park? Good luck." With the on-going Great Depression II: Revenge of the Derivatives, there were fewer local public firework displays this year. In fact, they had 50,000 people turn out in the park (a record), and the HDTV viewing was probably higher quality with better sightlines anyhow. Plus, since Rhys passed out 5 minutes into the 10pm show, it meant not dragging a sleeping 6 year old home through hours of traffic jam.

Today we was a birthday party for Elisabeth at a gymnastics studio, and then Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

All in all a really nice weekend, but I feel a bit like I need a vacation from my holiday :>

Busy weekend. My brother came into town to visit for the weekend, and it was fun to get to show off the various house and yard improvements since his last visit over a year ago.

Saturday we went out to Mount Rainer National Park for some day-hiking. We drove up to Paradise thinking we'd do some of the local trails and check out the recently built visitor center. It was evident though that more than two-thirds of the mountain is still covered with ice and snow. The little status board inside listed that the average yearly snowfall is 684". Year to date they've had 711". It was pretty, but not the kind of thing you want to hike over without special gear. We headed back down to Cougar Rock (which was lacking in older women looking for younger men) and walked up to the falls. We were pretty proud of ourselves for making it up and back, but a jogger guy was running up and down past us the return trip, so it took away some of the sense of accomplishment.

Sunday we went to Alki Cafe and spent the day making a big meal featuring cuddlyeconomist's homemade lasagna (described aptly by my brother as 'big as a corn field') and I contributed an America's Test-Kitchen recipe strawberry, blueberry, and cherry cobbler. loree got back from Portland in time to join us for desert and a short visit.

We also squeezed in some gardening work, and of course the watering continues.