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Heather Armstrong posted this today. We went through the same thing with Jonathan between his 3 and 4 month birthdays. It was painful process but it worked like a charm. He sleeps like a champ every night. Marissa is another story. She shares a room with Jonathan and when she hit that time when we wanted to get her to sleep through the night, Erica was afraid if we were too hard on her that she would keep waking him up. So we went soft on her and she has been a stinker about sleeping ever since. Next kid we are gonna use the patented “let ‘em scream” process. It works.

We’re rapidly finding that we can’t afford what we want in a house, and we don’t want what we can afford. Or, at least, to be able to afford what we want in a house we will have to make major changes to our lifestyle, grit our teeth, tighten up our belts and in general prepare to weather a storm. The most enlightening thing is finding out just how little you get for how much money some of these trash heaps are listed at. I thought we had it all figured out about a year ago when I sat down and looked at prices. Now, of course, the houses we thought we would be able to afford in a year have appreciated by about $20,000.

We met with a lender back at the beginning of March, and found that we could qualify for a much larger mortgage than we had figured out that we could pay for. In fact, he told us we could qualify for approximately 33% more money than we thought we’d want to spend. I suppose that is good in that it means our credit is in decent shape. The trouble is that in this market we are having a difficult time finding a house that we feel like we can be comfortable in, given our monetary constraints.

Erica has historically had a difficult time finding her way around, which is ironic since she grew up in Utah and most Utah towns are layed out on a very simple grid system: 350 N 400 W, for example, instead of 13 Fred’s Corner. She has begun to face her inadequacies, however, in the interest of being able to find her way to homes listed on the internet by address. The other night she enlisted Google Maps and about two dozen sheets of paper and constructed a map that covers the areas we are looking in:

She’s hung the map on the wall and figures the route to each house she wants to see before heading out the door. In her words: “I need to see how it all works together.”

We’d ideally like to be somewhere more or less in the middle of that area, because it puts us close to where we both work and where Jonathan will be going to school. Unfortunately, the middle of that includes the two most inflated real estate markets in the area. I know that our housing prices are nothing compared to some of the areas around the country… $1,000,000 for a two bedroom bungalow, etc., but nor are the salaries in this area as large as what some of my esteemed colleagues around the country are taking home. In particular, one of the drawbacks of working for a small company, as I do, is that you end up getting payed somewhat less than you are probably worth. There are many intangible, or at best non-short term, benefits that can help make up for this deficit, but it’s difficult to wave your Stock Options at a bill collector and have him take any notice, if you take my meaning.

We’ve found one place that is extremely attractive. It’s in a good area and is in quite good shape. It’s a foreclosed property and the listing agent listed it for about $15000 less than the bank probably wants for it, and now we have to make an offer to the bank and sit back and wait while our offer battles it out with all the sharks looking for a deal and the other honest folks looking for a place to live. Erica seems to have fallen in love with the house and is now using it as a yardstick against which she measures every other place she sees. I’d love to be able to swoop in and make an offer that would satisfy the bank and still allow us to have some instant equity in the property, and I think I even know about where that sweet spot would be. The trouble is I can’t make the numbers come anywhere close to working in my budget. And so the search goes on.

I had something a little strange happen with my truck yesterday. In the morning it had just a little trouble cranking the engine, as if the battery was not completely charged. It’s had this kind of thing happen before, most notably when the battery was almost completely dry just after I bought it, so I didn’t think much of it. I checked the water in the battery and it was fine. Of course once a battery has gone dry it is never the same, so I didn’t expect this one too last too much longer. Anyway, it went through the day with no problems, except we drove it to my mother-in-law’s house last night and visited her for a little while. When I went back out to leave it turned over a few times and then the battery went completely flat. I let it sit for a few minutes and then tried again: crank crank, click click click, car alarm goes off.

So now I am sitting in my truck whose battery doesn’t have enough juice to crank the engine, but does have enough juice to run the siren on the alarm at full volume. And, I don’t have the keyfob with me to turn the alarm off. It’s sitting at home in a desk drawer because it is a delicate little thing after many years of abuse by previous owners and I don’t like carrying it around when I don’t think I am going to use it. So, what option did I have left? I leapt from the drivers seat, popped the hood, and ripped the siren out. It occurred to me later that it might have been a little smarter to use my leatherman to just cut one of the leads to the siren.

I called my family to tell them I’d be late for dinner (Erica had already rushed off in the other car) and my brother, Andy, offered to come give me a jump start. I had planned on going inside and asking my brother-in-law who was there, but since Andy offered I accepted. He came over with my dad in Dad’s truck and we tried jump starting mine. It didn’t work. No crank at all. It dawned on me that since the alarm was still tripped (even if silently) it might have disabled the ignition switch, in which case it wouldn’t matter how hard we tried to jumpstart the thing it would not work. So we gave up. We went back to Mom and Dad’s and had an excellent Sunday dinner.
After dinner and the requisite familial laying around and complaining about having overindulged, we piled in the car and went back home to retrieve the alarm control keyfob. With the alarm disabled the truck started right up without even requiring jumper cables.

I think it’s time to replace that battery.

Jonathan demonstrates the strange phenomenon of his arm diminishing in width as he brings it closer to his face.

Thank you, that is all.

From: zenaida@email-value.com

Subject: best deals here. anus

We’ve been putting the kids to bed early on Friday night lately to have Mom and Dad’s movie night. It’s almost like going out on a date… but a lot cheaper. Last night we watched The Triplets of Belleville and I think Erica and I probably sat there open mouthed and engrossed through the whole film in much the same way our 5 year old son Jonathan did through E.T. (Actually, that’s not fair, all four of us sat engrossed through E.T. It’s that good a movie no matter how many times you’ve seen it.) A good film has the ability to immerse you in it’s world within the first few minutes, and good animation is particularly effective that way. The same way Spirited Away put us deep into the realm of the Japanese spirit world, The Triplets of Belleville sunk us into a 50s-ish French suburban lower class grandmother’s life of devotion to her grandson. The movie is only an hour and 20 minutes long but it is packed full of more mind bending visuals than any movie twice its length. It also features a few extremely funny and innovative moments (Mafia thugs chasing after the good guys in stretch Citroen limousines, fishing for frogs with a WWII german grenade, and the dreams of an aging dog, for example). The world that director Sylvain Chomet created is strange and wonderful, but also hard and sinister. It’s a great way to spend 80 minutes.

Although The Triplets of Belleville is animated and may appeal to some children, it is rated PG-13 in the U.S. for several potentially frightening or disturbing scenes. That said, my 5 year old and 3 year old are both watching it now with the same sense of awe that my wife and I did last night. As with any movie not strictly made for children, parents will want to preview it before letting their kids take a look.

I’m fairly certain that my dear mother spent some time on the rack this morning. She had her shoulder scoped a few months ago to correct a long standing problem. Over the past couple of months the shoulder has gotten progressively stiffer and more painful. She went for a checkup yesterday and the doctor told her that she would need another surgery. She went in this morning and I called to check on her a few minutes ago. She said that there wasn’t as much pain as after the last surgery and that she hadn’t been under anaesthesia as long this time. The “surgery” was done without any incisions. The doctor described what happened while she was out as “manipulation of the shoulder.” I expect that’s a euphemism for either 1) we hung you from a meat hook by the bad arm and twisted your body around until the should became elastic again, or 2) we tied your legs to the end of the operating table and used a geared wheel to pull your shoulder out of the socket and stretch the scar tissue till it broke. It would have been an interesting procedure to watch.

In other news, this is the first post done on my new laptop. I’m now running Ubuntu, because it seems to be able to go to standby and resume properly, as well as connect to the wireless network. Setting up wpa under ubuntu was a little more involved than under Mandriva, but the steps are well documented on the web, whereas the trick to get it going under Mandriva was not, as far as I could find. I’ll try it out for a while and see what I think. Under ubuntu the media buttons on the front of my Inspiron 6000 work out of the box as well, which is a nice bonus.

Got a laptop this week. Put linux on it. Yep, linux. Mandriva 2006 to be exact.

The machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000. The initial install of Mandriva went very smoothly. As far as I could tell, everything worked except WPA on the wireless card (Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG), the SD Card Reader and suspend/hibernate/resume. The card reader doesn’t bug me too much, since my camera uses compact flash and when I plugged in my USB CF reader it popped right up and asked if I wanted to import pictures. The WPA support issue was important because our wireless network at work uses WPA and I need to be able to connect at work. The suspend/resume thing is also important cause who wants a laptop that you have to power down and then boot from scratch everytime you take it somewhere. Not very portable.

As it turned out, getting WPA to work was just a matter of installing a missing package (wpa_supplicant), which I guess must have been missed in the initial install, or it is not part of the Mandriva 2006 install at all? Ironically, the KDE wireless network manangement software was actually writing a config file for wpa_supplicant when I configured the connection as wpa, complete with the SSID and pre-shared key. Of course a config file for a piece of software that is not installed doesn’t do much good. The connection manager must have been trying to turn things over to wpa_supplicant and just sitting and waiting forever. In a perfect world, it would have given me an error messsage saying it couldn’t find wpa_supplicant. Open source software is not a perfect world.

I still haven’t been able to make suspend/resume work properly. There is quite a bit of info on the web about kernel patches and things to help with this situation, so I expect I will be able to make it work at some future point. It’s more of a simple inconvenience where the lack of WPA was more like a deal-breaker, so I can live with having to power down completely for a little while.