Podcasts

Today I have a weird work day... only have to go in for a couple of hours in the evening. That gives me a little extra time during the day to enter some long neglected mail-in sweepstakes (those are them in the pic above) AND catch up with a bunch of podcasts that I subscribe to, but don't always have time to listen to.

One of my favorites is the NPR Story of the Day podcast where I learned more about the new "Super Earth" found in the constellation: Libra. I REALLY want to go there, it sounds wonderful.

I also listened to my first episode of The Mopod Show where I learned that I have a little crush on Rufus, or at least his voice.

While catching up on missed episodes of Jason Bellini's Here and Now podcast from LOGO I learned that he has just adopted two very adorable puppies. You really need to see the video, they are cute. I ALSO learned that I THINK Jason is dating Will Wikle from Big Brother and that Will now works at a hospital. Who knew!? By the way, get that podcast from iTunes... the Logo site is S L O W, at least on my mac.

I'm a big new fan of Ragan Fox's show Fox and the City. Today he introduced me to a Pussy Pilot and read a HYSTERICAL poem about what it's like to go to school at Arizona State University (sounds a LOT like Washington State by the way). This is really good show in my opinion. He is very smart and very funny and that show is TIGHT as a drum, edited to within an inch of it's life.

Jason, Chuck and Kevin on Jive Talkin' entertained me with tales of Clothing Optional vacations and introduced me to some Musical Theater I'd not heard of before. Y'all are going to have to let me know where the name for your show came from because as the old lady on "Airplane!" said, "You ain't Jive." You're entertaining, but Jive?

I went back and found the very first episode of A Shanty No Lemon to find out why it's called that... I still have no idea. Something about an anagram generator I think.

Dan Savage and his callers made me very uncomfortable (in a good way).

Who needs TV?

Cute!

I don't remember where I found it, but there is a very funny webshow called "Cute with Chris."

Chris sounds Canadian, lives in Southern California and knows his cute.

Today on Chris' blog (different site than his show - but you can get there from either and vice versa) a very special puppy named KALI is being featured! Many of you may recognize her from her many appearances on Matt's Blog.

So while you are NOT WATCHING TV check out Chris and Kali!

I'm not as creative as I think I am

I was trying to create a livejournal account today so I could post comments on some of the other 12 of 12's that are posted on that service. I don't really NEED another account at another website with another password but in the spirit of community I thought it would be nice to have an account there so I could say nice things to people who use livejournal and don't allow anonymous comments.

I filled in all the fields in the application and hit the "create account" button. Then this message came up, "Bad password: Your password is based on a commonly used password." Wha, wh, WHAAAAAA? COMMONLY USED? I am fairly certain that no one has ever selected this password before me! It's far too creative and well thought out!

It's a beauty too, it has numbers AND letters and it's a longish string, but not TOO long. It has great significance to me so I never forget it, and has served me well. I must admit however that recently after a weird thing where some of my Yahoo! mail junk mail started showing up as "read" I changed most of my more sensitive passwords, banking, email, eBay, stuff like that to a random string of letters, symbols and numbers that is taking me FOREVER to commit to memory. But for basic goofy stuff, my old password has always worked just fine.

Kind of bums me out that the password that I, for so long, relied on for most of my internet security is SO COMMON that the computer that controls access to a second tier site like livejournal won't even ALLOW me to use it!

Guess "internet security consultant" would not be a good choice for my next career.

100

One Hundred posts... wow. Compared to the folks in my "library" (the blogroll over there on the right) (maybe scroll down a little) that's not much, but it's a nice mile marker never the less.

I had been planning to take down all the Linkshare & Amazon banners and buttons as part of my 100th post extravaganza, but honestly, I kind of like them. I'm a huge mac fan so I'm proud to be an affiliate for Apple's stuff, and the Amazon banner is actually kind of cool in that it automatically displays items based on keywords on the page. Sometimes it works better than others. For example a link for a Danish CD called "Your Orgasm" is nearly always included in that banner. Writing about it in the body of this post probably is not going to help alleviate it's persistent presence either. It also went through a "Roxette" phase for a while, where all the CD's from THAT band (also Danish if I remember correctly) were displayed. Maybe they are included in the banner because I talk about Ikea some times? The 1-800-Flowers button is there just to remind me to send flowers to Mom on holidays.

What do y'all think? Ad's or no? They are certainly not revenue generators, so they could go just as easily as stay... would be less work maintaining them if they were gone.

On to this new condo... FLOORS. Many people in my building are complaining about their floors. They are wood, probably some kind of laminate. They look nice but they ARE kind of delicate. They scratch easily. Some people are also reporting some discoloration in areas they have laid rugs over. I don't have any rugs yet, so I haven't had the discoloration issue, but the scratching I can relate to well. My floors are VERY scratchable. There have been very quiet rumblings about the possibility of taking some kind of "action" against the builder as some of my neighbors feel they may have been misled about the quality of their floors.


The pic above shows scratches caused when I accidentally stepped on (while wearing sneakers) a thumb tack which I'd dropped. You know the plastic topped kind? The ones you see stuck into cork bulletin boards.

Having never had to maintain a wood floor I'm not certain how upset I need to be about all this. Maybe this is how durable ALL laminate wood floors are. The only other time I had wood floors was in a house I lived in with 4 other guys in college and we trashed them. I think those were REAL hardwoods though, they actually stood up really well to our punishment, I don't think that in 2 years of living in that house we ever once mopped. Maybe when we moved out thinking that would be the key to getting our deposit back, but I'm pretty sure we kissed that goodbye within a week after our first party. My current floors would not fare as well.

There's a homeowners meeting coming up next month... I think the floors will be a big issue then. In the meantime, I'll be careful not to step on any more tacks!

UPDATES

'Couple of benchmarks coming up... Tomorrow I turn 39 and next week I'll hit 100 posts on this blog.

Birthdays and round numbers tend to inspire retrospectives for some reason... so I guess this is as good a time as any to take a look back and update some of the events I blogged about over the past 4 and a half months (seems like so much more!).

Kitchen Accomplished:
My first home improvement project. It's holding up very well! The biggest issue with this room is that paint around the new switch plates had to be touched up, but the touch up paint my builder provided me is not an EXACT match. So there are some flaws... I should just repaint the entire back splash with the touch up paint.

The Train:
Frustrating issue for me right now because I specifically chose This New Condo based in LARGE part to it's proximity to public transit. Two months into living here my supervisor changed my hours to a shift that will not allow me to take mass transit to work. This is a temporary change, but a long term one. I still ride MARTA whenever I can.

Robot Banking:
AWESOME!!! One of my most successful plans of action. Having my mortgage and my HOA dues are paid AUTOMATICALLY via a system of automatic deposit and online banking makes home ownership possible for me.

The Chocolate Wall:
I’ve learned that dark walls are hard to keep pristine. Even just brushing past the wall with a light colored shirt on or can leave a mark. And FORGET about putting your hand on it.

My Favorite Things:
MOST of the things I listed there I still love... the one exception is the OXY CLEAN clothes detergent ball. I'm starting to wonder if it is all that it claims to be. My clothes ARE clean, but I don't know if they are AS clean. I miss the smell of GAIN too.

The Hole in my Bathroom Floor:
All fixed. Don't know if I mentioned that I ran into the foreman on the Ted's Montana Grill build a few weeks after the repair had been made and I thanked him for taking care of it so quickly. He assured me it was no problem, after all it was their fault. He also mentioned he was surprised at how much it cost to fix. It was over a thousand dollars... which does NOT seem right. Not my bill to fight though.

Paulo:
Haven't seen him since.

Flashback Fridays:
Never really caught on.

The Sign:
Much ado about nothing as it turns out. From inside this new condo you'd never even know there is a giant neon buffalo hanging just below my living room window.

MAC:
I was really worried about being a pet owner, but MAC is doing just fine! I even bought her this cool fake rock/cave thing that she can swim around and through.

Guests:
Still not very good at this. I haven't had an official "house warming" event. My only overnight guest (other than P) has been my Mom. I just don't give good parties, so I'm reluctant to do it...

Fitness:
Yeah... um... about that... not so much.

Trying to be Funny:
This just didn't work out. I was really trying to mock that dumb Beyonce song, because I REALLY DO NOT understand it. I get that she's kicking him out, but what is the deal with the box being to the left? TO THE LEFT OF WHAT?! In the end it turned out to be a post about my unpacked boxes, but that wasn't what I was going for.

Niles unwraps his Xmas present:
He's still the bestest, smartest, cutest dog in the whole world. I love dog sitting!

Dream Home:
I didn't win.

Bathroom noises:
No movement here. That's a pretty good pun by the way.

Taxes:
BOTH my refund checks showed up yesterday! A very nice way to start off what I hope will be a very nice weekend.

I over reacted:
Turns out Mr. Keillor wasn't trying to malign gays. I wrote that I don't like to use this blog as a soapbox because we (the universal "we") tend to get worked up about things without having ALL the information and that is exactly what I did.

Dishwasher D'Odor:
Getting it's vinegar bath as we speak.

Big Mouth:
Haven't been to church since, though I was invited to attend the Easter service... and I intend to.

Work:
Everything went really well. A couple of rough patches, but nothing that affected air. I'm stopping short of calling it a complete success... but maybe by next Friday I will.

Finally... a shot of your’s truely on the eve of his 39th. This way, next anniversary I’ll have something to start my updates with!

What's keeping me up at night?

Happy Holidays!

Yup... I am going to use the generic, much maligned, Happy Holidays because it is not yet Chanukah (12/15), Kwanzaa (12/26), Christmas (12/25), Winter Solstice (12/22) or any other holiday yet. I don't wish anyone "Happy Independence Day" the week prior to the 4th of July. I don't call friends and family to wish them Happy Birthday during the weeks leading up to their date of birth. I don't hide eggs starting in February so they will be ready to hunt by Easter. I do those things on dates that correspond to the events being acknowledged. So why would I say "Merry Christmas" to anyone when it ISN'T YET! I will wish you a Merry Christmas when the calendar says it is, MAYBE the day before.

That's one of the nuggets that have been running through my brain this week... I think that its the pressure to keep things organized this time of year. There are lots of dates to remember: parties, end of the year deadlines, a surprising number of meetings at work for some reason, the holidays themselves, three family birthdays. I can't think of any other reason that I have been keeping a list of the random worries and non sequiturs in my noggin. Mostly I am freaking out about gifts... I suck at picking out gifts and I hate to give gift cards. Luckily my list of recipients is fairly low and there is still lots of time, but it's definitely starting to press on me a little that I have only bought ONE gift, and it's a secondary thing, a stocking stuffer. I still have to come up with the "under the tree" gift.

So while that nagging issue is playing the loudest electric guitar version of Deck the Halls on the mainstage in my brian, there are several other acts that are also trying to draw a crowd to hear their acoustic carols on the smaller stages. The variety of stuff is pretty interesting:

- I want to go back to school and study architecture, or creative writing, or marketing.
- My laundry and closet doors are ugly.
- What will I make my guy for his present?
- "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" by Rufus Wainwright - on headphones: slightly slurred, melancholy, off key, layered, lush, awesome, awesome... why don't I like more of his stuff?
- Why can't I have two key cards to my building?
- Do subway designers have to take into account the wind pushed out of the tunnel ahead of a train coming into an underground station?
- Getting Christmas cards from friends and family makes me feel guilty that I don't send them.

It also dawned on me today that I have not turned on my TV in over 48 hours. Since Monday night I think. Not like me at all. I have been discovering and reading a lot of blogs though... a couple of them are blogs written by guys who are moving, or have recently moved or are just dealing with condo living and got me to thinking that the reason for this blog is to chronicle the experience of my first home ownership. Write about all the little stuff no one warned me about. Thing is I missed a lot of that good stuff by waiting till AFTER I moved in to start blogging... so starting tomorrow I'm going to take a look back at the process (trust me, it's WELL documented, you've never seen so much paperwork) before it gets too foggy.

Tomorrow: Flashback Friday - A tragic lot

the blog

I waited till I was 38 to become a homeowner (technically this is my second foray into home ownership, but the first experience didn't really count, I'm sure that will come up in future posts). It's been an interesting process involving a lot of paperwork, many many trips to Target, some serious soul searching and the biggest checks I have ever written.

Frankly this blog is something for me to use to keep track of all the stuff that I'm trying to keep up with as I continue this process, but I think it could also be interesting to others who are considering buying a place or who are just moving into a place.

How much about myself and my address I want to reveal are issues I'm working on... so in the meantime here are some generic tidbits that will hopefully provide a base to build on:

Little about me: I'm a 38 year old guy living just outside Atlanta, GA. I'm 6 feet tall and carry about 20 extra lbs around. I am in year three of my relationship with my boyfriend who does not live with me. I work behind the scenes in broadcasting. My salary is in the mid 40's which is good for my line of work. I mention that because lets face it, the financial aspect of this process is of paramount importance. If I am going to write about what it's like for an individual to buy/own/maintain a home those reading need to know how deep the financial pool is.

Little about this new condo: It is, in fact, NEW. The building is still under construction as I write this. When I moved in there were only 13 other units occupied in the building and the units on the upper floors were still being sheet rocked. I'm the first person to live in this space which is a very new experience for me. It's a small (relatively), one bedroom unit at just over 780 square feet. It's on the 3rd floor of a 7 story building in what my friends tell me is a very "hip and trendy" area about 10 minutes away from downtown Atlanta, but outside the city limits. I paid around $170 for my space. This number is less than what the units of similar size go for in my building thanks to a program that my city has in place to make sure that people from all walks of life can live here... I'm sure that we'll talk about that program again in future posts. The unit has wood floors, 12 foot ceilings, granite counter tops, a small balcony, stainless steel appliances (my only upgrade) and travertine tile in the bathroom. Now that may sound like boasting, but that's what the place came with, and again, it's important to document some of the details if I'm going to have an honest dialogue about what it's like to live here. Frankly all that fancy stuff has made me more nervous than proud.

Why blog? It occurred to me that every day since I moved in something NEW has been added to this new condo. Sometimes it's a piece of furniture, sometimes it's a friend. Sometimes it's an annoyance, or a bill. Sometimes it's a new cleaning product. Usually though it's just an insight that I gain simply by being part of the process. At any rate, I thought that might be a cool point of view from which to keep a journal and so today:

THIS NEW CONDO has: a blog