Mobile Hippie

Well, it might be more appropriate to say that we, my wife and I, are considerably indebted to the bank with a small amount of equity due to an excellent purchase price.

The hurry-up-and-wait process ended this morning in a flurry of activity that began with a phone call late yesterday afternoon.

So to sum up the week, my daughter couldn’t hold down anything on Thursday; the title company called yesterday and wanted us to sign with two hours notice—we declined until this morning due to “scheduling” issues, but were fine with signing first thing this morning; which we did, despite the fact I was awoken this morning by my son’s projectile vomitting in my face. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

The next two weeks are guaranteed to be crazy, but at least I have my Internet connection back—oh yes, that is another story for another day.

When I heard this statistic—which is a statistic for Pacific University, though likely to be fairly typical—I couldn’t help but be a little discouraged by it. Pacific’s growth plans include the development of residence halls (dorms to anyone not used to higher-education speak) with rooms that will house individuals—no roommates. If 90% of incoming students have never had to share space and resources with a sibling, how can we expect them to share space and resources on a larger scale.

While I will readily admit to having a room of my own for the majority of my middle and high school years, I experienced the benefit of compromise-laden living with my younger brother for about 10 years of our lives together. Including my married years, I can say that I have spent twice as many years sharing a bedroom as not. There is a lot to be gleaned from the ability to share a relatively small space on a regular basis. With siblings, or with a life partner, there will inevitably be arguments and clashes of opinion, but it is the response to these conflicts that helps to shape our emotional intelligence.

While I believe you can learn empathy in a number of ways, it seems to be that the lessons learned from compromising with a roommate could be extremely valuable. While there may be some merit to the solitude that an individual room in a residence hall could afford, I would hope that the incoming freshmen would be encouraged to share a little of themselves in a way more intimate than instant messaging—which increasingly seems to be the choice of the college-age crowd.

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia – Made me laugh. I wish all legalese could be translated with such acumen. Did I mention I’m buying a house?

I believe I thoroughly despise Dreamweaver over FTP. It has literally stolen a good hour of my time today. Using Dreamweaver over FTP has probably stolen more than a week of my time since I started using the product.

To be fair, it helps if you are connecting to a decent server. For some reason the servers at Pacific are always painfully slow, which is something I have pointed out to the IT guys. Part of the problem could be related to heavy student use during peak hours. (What else is there to do on a Monday night?) Though, there has to be something else that is causing the problem—the hosting service I use for contract work and my personal site is in New Jersey and I get better performance out of it.

Great photography and a great cause—what more could we want.

Can you spell Mobile Hippie. This is a slick trick and some fun use of photography. It even gives you the code to drop into your site. Only one problem I can see with this—bandwidth. This is going to generate a ton of traffic on both metaatem.net and flickr.com.

This weekend my wife and I went house hunting. We thought we had our loan in hand—more on that latter—so it should have been as easy as finding something we liked and going from there. It wasn’t quite so easy.

First, there is the little issue of how much home we could afford. We didn’t want to stretch our budget too far. Unfortunately, an entire Saturday was spent depressing ourselves with just how expensive property values in Portland are becoming—or more appropriately how run down and off the beaten path an affordable home is becoming. We finished the day with a short list that wasn’t all that reassuring.

With thoughts of rent dancing in our heads, we visited the first home on our list. Ack! While my kids thought an empty house with oddly shaped rooms and a floor that echos when you jump was great, Diana and I are a little more discerning. The house was at the top of our range, and we thought, “well, with another $20,000 we could make it livable.” One down.

The second place was a long shot. We were only looking at it because it had three bedrooms. The outside was/is…1950’s California ranch. Not bad from the street, but not the height of architectural elegance either. The drive by the day before was a fading memory, and we kept getting it confused with the 15 other houses we’d looked at. Then we walked up to it. Nice flower bed on the front of the house, well trimmed yard, it was beginning to grow on us. When we stepped inside, our attitude towards the day did a 180.

Suddenly, the thought of home ownership was exciting. The enterior had a few updates, but more importantly it was clean and spacious and had a kitchen that met all our requirements. The backyard was huge by urban standards. The only thing it lacks is a garage for the bikes, but it has storage and we could easily replace the carport with a garage.

It all seemed too good to be true. We followed the realtor to one more house that we didn’t even want to see, then followed her out to her office to fill out the paperwork to make an offer. Things seemed to go from a lull to full speed in a matter of hours.

The next day, we were a ball of nerves. The realtor called to say the offer was in and the current owners were talking to their realtor. What seemed like days later, but was really just later that evening—when do they take off—the realtor called to say the offer was accepted. We were in the neighborhood—despite the new neighborhood being a 20 minute drive from our current townhome—and were thrilled.

Now, I’m sitting at the computer a little over 24 hours later telling this story. We still don’t know if the whole thing will work out. The lender hasn’t got back to us with some needed paperwork that we have to have by 2:30 p.m. tomorrow. We are stressed and excited and nervous and everything else you can be.