So today I decided to try to catch-up on some lingering issues with people who I pay money to. The two I targeted today was an odd phone message from a company claiming to be connected to Boston Sports Clubs and Verizon. To boot I also had to reschedule a delivery of my elliptical runner. Many of these actions were done while showing Madeline internet programs adding to the challenge of resolving them.

The Verizon story begins with the fact that I now have FiOS but I do not have any bills for FiOS. Since ‘tis the season to pay bills I decided to investigate. I chatted with a helpful online clerk who informed me that I was chatting with Verizon the phone company and not the Verizon the internet provider and that she understood my problem. Apparently online accounts for Verizon are now so high tech that they don’t bill you via the standard mail system but instead using a secret Verizon account that is ultrasecure. In order to determine what you owe for Verizon online you need to have the email address and password. The email address is “something”@verizon.com”. So I tried about a hundred variations of email addresses in the online form to login to my account and failed while listening to them put me on hold for half an hour. When I finally got through to the person on the phone after successfully answering the questions that a computer tried to ask me like what zip code I was in it then cut me off and hung up on me. So I needed to try again in the later afternoon.

Meanwhile in the morning I called a number that had been forwarded to me from my dad. An organization had been calling my parents house leaving gruff messages about my owing money. When he finally asked about why the organization told him that I owed Boston Sports Clubs $132.00. So I called the number and a woman answered the phone. She responded to the item number and told me that I owed money but seemed to have a great deal of difficulty understanding the basics of what I told her as I walked through my credit card information. Then after I gave her the credit card information she started asking a series of personal questions that had nothing to do with my relationship to her or Boston Sports Clubs including “Are you married?” and “How long have you lived in your current residence?” I refused to answer either of these questions and after the call figured that I probably didn’t want these creepy people to have my credit card information.

I decided to call the Boston Sports Clubs people to verify that they may have sent my information to this creepy collection agency over whatever charge they had. I did successfully cancel my account with BSC a few months ago and could understand how they might need money from me but I’m not sure they are buying themselves anything by taking me to a collection agency instead of sending me a letter or calling the phone number they had on file for my account which is my cell phone and hasn’t changed in 8 years. How the collection agency found my parents is a mystery. So upon calling BSC I talked to Dominick who found that I did have a record in their computers but could not answer my question about whether BSC had decided to sick the collection agency upon me. He needed a manager to do this and there are no managers at BSC or anyone capable of looking up what happened to a delinquent account on the day after Christmas.

Luckily Sarah recently lost her credit card and needed a new one. So on my long list of to dos was to order her a new credit card to replace hers. But the Citi people let me know that the best way to do this was to order two replacement cards with new numbers to replace the old numbers. So I did this and felt better about the potential for the collection or whatever they were folks to commit identity theft on me.

Then in the afternoon as I was at the Decordova museum I received a call from the collections agency asking me what was wrong with the credit card I had given them. I told them that I had cancelled it and was waiting to verify whether I should pay them or not with the folks who had sent me to them. The woman then forwarded me to a manager who acted like the typical angry collections agency person talking to a deadbeat trying to weasel their way out of a debt. She let me know that I needed to pay them either via a credit card or via western union money order by the end of the day OR they would make a note in the file to continuously pursue me, notify their client that I was not willing to pay, and potentially cause damage to my credit score. After a long conversation with her explaining that I was happy to pay any debt that I had but that I wanted to confirm with her client that I actually owed money we parted ways on a rather unpleasant note.

So when I got home I was ready to listen to another 30 or forty minutes of musak on the Verizon line. This time I had dug up the official documentation that they had sent me with the installation of the modem that included the phone number to call for help. I again went through the complex menus to finally get put into a nice queue where a person answered after fifteen minutes. The person was surprised that I was calling Verizon about service not relating to a Verizon phone number but then did understand that my problem was that I didn’t have a bill from them for my FiOS or any way to know how to pay them if I did know the amount since I didn’t have an account. The crux f the problem was that I somehow don’t have the “name”@verizon.net email address and password that they use to produce bills. So she nicely let me know that a technician can solve these sorts of problems by resetting the verizon.net email address on the account. All that was left to happen was for her to connect to one of these technicians and then they would change the username and password. I would then get that information and could then login to this account to retrieve my bill so that I could pay it.

So during the extra 15 minutes I was put on hold waiting for the technician to come onto the line I began writing this little blog entry about my experiences today. As you may be able to tell by now I have had a lot of time on my hands to write during the musak experience from Verizon.

Since that issue is not yet resolved to date I can now mention the matter of the delivery of my elliptical runner. I ordered it from Gym Source a couple weeks ago and they scheduled a delivery for last Friday. This was fine since the Friday before Christmas break is a pretty slow day in general. I was home from 2:30 PM on as they requested. Sure enough at 5:30 I received a call from someone outside who was the driver of a truck who had effectively wedged his truck between the small lane on my side street and the more major road of Glenn Avenue. The truck was a rear wheel drive truck with the rear wheels spinning on Leeson lane and the front cab sticking into the snow bank across the street from it. So the driver and his other guy asked for help getting the truck unstuck so that they could get on with their delivery and their day.

Now it isn’t like it hasn’t been snowing the past few weeks so I understand how a truck might get stuck. In truth the problem with the ice on Leeson lane is probably the City of Newton’s fault. They plowed the lane during the first snow storm of the year but for snow storm number two and number three they didn’t do anything. So the lane itself has become a big stream of ice. On my side I did happen to have a bag of quick melt that I happened to have purchased a few days before. I had learned after the first storm that I could go through massive amounts of quick melt trying to clear the ice. My father had offered me a 50 gallon drum of the stuff so that Sarah wouldn’t slip in our sloped driveway while 9 months pregnant. I worked but had run out before the second storm started. For the second storm I had been clever enough to go out to National Lumber in Natick to purchase a heavy metal shovel and an ice chopper. Afterwards I had slipped over to the Gym Source store to purchase the elliptical runner since I was wasting the day anyways planning for a snow storm. At the time I still had some ice melt and the crappy shovel that I had bought at Building 19 thinking I was clever about 3 months earlier. I had no idea what I was in for.

So I had a shovel and ice chopper to fight the build-up but it was not enough to clear Leeson Lane due to the lack of plowing by the City. But I did find those two 50 pound bags of quick melt on the Wednesday morning at a local hardware store. They were about 25 bucks each which astounded me. When the third storm hit on Thursday night Joe A was coming over for dinner and I was getting overwhelmed by all the snow continuously falling. So my dad mentioned that he had a solution – to purchase a snow blower at Home Depot for me. So a few minutes after Joe and his wife Sarah arrived at my house my dad also arrived with a snow blower to clear the snow. I happily tested it out quickly before we ate a random dinner selected from Bills Pizzeria and then cleared things more afterwards.

The basin in the sump pump in the basement was starting to get very full during this storm but that’s a whole other story. So anyways when the truck was wedged between the streets it was snowing a bit and I offered one of the two 50 pound bags of quick melt to them and was shoveling along with them with my shovel and ice breaking tool. After about two hours the team all fought with several neighbors to free the truck and have it climb up the ice to the driveway of my house.

BTW: After 25 minutes of being on hold with Verizon waiting for the Tech support person who would reset my username and password I decided that nobody was coming. There is no way to call out from the limbo of being on perpetual hold. So I hung up and tried to call back only to find out that they have subsequently closed for the day.

So after that truck had reached my house I walked the installers into the front door to show them the door to the basement. He looked up at it and then let me know that the model I had purchased was extra long and too long to fit through that door. The only way to get it into the house would be to go through the basement bulkhead. Well after picking at ice for two hours I had no issue with revving up my new snow blower to clear a path to the basement bulkhead. The did so and not only cleared the snow out from the path but also a large amount of green material from the freshly grown fall grass and a large amount of black material from the soil beneath the grass. The installers were impressed with my path to the bulkhead but let me know that they were sub-contractors and weren’t going anywhere near the back of my house until the ice thawed. They recommended spending a few days once it got warmer pouring the quick melt onto the snow in the path and to reschedule to a later date… which is what I have been trying to do for the past couple of days.

So with regards to the rescheduling of the delivery of the elliptical runner I have made great progress. On Monday I reached someone who told me someone would definitely call me back first thing on Wednesday to schedule the delivery. At 4:30 on Wednesday, before I called Verizon, I called back the office and the man who sold me the runner let me know that he wanted to schedule it quickly but the only way to do so was to go through the warehouse. So he had the warehouse call me back. The warehouse then called me to ask me if I was able to take the delivery on Friday of this week. I thought that would be great and then they told me that they would call me back on Thursday (tomorrow) to tell me whether they would be delivering in the morning or the evening on Friday so that I could be available at the house when the delivery people (probably the same ones from last week) would be there.

In all I am 1.5 for 4.

Citibank – Successful card cancellation and new cards in the mail

Verizon – Still don’t know who much I owe them or how to pay them. At least I know what needs to be done if anyone there ever decides to help me.

Boston Sports Clubs/Collections folks – Awaiting confirmation that I actually owe them money and an explanation for the whole deal with the collection agency. A major nasty note to the BBB might be in order since BSC seems to have the worst business policies I have encountered. I will chalk that up to the company being a bunch of steroid using jock idiots.

Gym Source – Almost done. They are the replacement solution to the BSC people. I think they will come through on Friday.

I am seeking new legislation like the stuff they have in China where CEOs or ministers may need to face the death penalty for issues with quality or customer service.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The holiday season is now in full swing. The only real event where we have a lot of people over at our house is our holiday party so this is almost a house warming event for the Newton house. Sarah has managed to co-ordinate the party thus far but I have been involved doing things like purchasing and carrying in a Christmas tree on Saturday. Madeline was very happy to see a Christmas tree and quickly proceeded to place ornaments onto the bottom branches. Eli the cat then proceeded to knock the ornaments off of the tree. Our tree this year is fatter than last year so the beads didn’t make it around. Since I am Jewish I don’t have a big set of ornaments but we have decided it makes sense to place some dreidels, menorahs, and gelt decorations into the mix on the tree to represent multiple cultures. My other contribution was to go out on a wine cellar stocking expedition with Dave F. to purchase a case and a half of wine at the various wine establishments. We learned the important point that the 15-20% discount when purchasing a case or more at each store still applies if you purchase the case with a friend and split it on two credit cards. So it pays, from a discount standpoint, to shop together for wine. Thus far I have successfully avoided all post Thanksgiving trips to the dreaded holiday mall parking lot. Given how pre-occupied I’ve been with work it will be an interesting question as to whether I’ll have the time to paint Madeline’s new room, the one she’ll be moved to when the new baby arrives, before this holiday party or not. If I start tonight or tomorrow I should be able to pull it off but after Wednesday it will be impossible to do two coats of paint.

The new go-to-sleep routine with Madeline has become for Sarah to rock Madeline in the dark while I pull a chair in and talk with Sarah about life until Madeline goes to sleep. It has been a good way to actually talk with Sarah about life rather than our standard running around chasing tasks or sitting watching DVDs. But Sarah did go out to dinner tonight and Madeline tried to revolt when I went to put her to bed. The various activities prior to sleep including taking 3000 licks on a tootsie roll pop before I needed to bite into it for her to get her to finish it, reading books and watching a baby Einstein video in bed, a trip downstairs for an orange juice, then rocking with her while screaming that she wanted mommy until a few minutes later she suddenly and inexplicably instantly fell asleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I went back to Brookline briefly. I was looking in the mailbox for a check. Afterwards I finally cancelled my BSC membership. Yesterday I cancelled the Verizon service. So other than forwarding the mail to Newton things are all getting wrapped-up in Brookline. Whenever I wrap something up I get the feeling of a new start which might have contributed to my stopping into TJ Max to purchase a new button-up shirt. It also could have been that I didn't want to deal with the parking people at the BSC Allston club. The experience of cancelling at BSC and their whole business model has left a bad impression on me about them. They seem to be the kind of business that works hard to acquire a new customer and then not only doesn't care about the customer's experience but actively works to prevent the customer from leaving to the detriment of the overall customer experience. When you try to cancel you can't do so online, you can't do it on the phone, and you can't do it via the mail unless it is through certified mail. Upon receipt of the cancellation it is considered cancelled 30 days later. This means that you can use their gym for the next 30 days but it is also another revenue cycle for them to charge despite an attempt to cancel before another billing cycle occurs. If a customer happens to be "in a contract" then they claim that you can't cancel at all without filling to the end of the contract. While I somewhat understand their point on the contract situation since they offer preferential pricing for longer time commitments than month to month BUT it isn't like they are giving me a big piece of hardware like a phone or DSL router that they need to sell off. The most similar thing is that they need to pay off the commissioned sales rep who pushes the high cost memberships.

All of this lead me to believe that they have determined that once someone cancels their membership they are never coming back. This is a self fulfilling prophecy on their part since my reaction to the hard-line you can't leave policy and the difficult scenario of my not using a service for 4 months at all that costs over $50 per month makes me not interested in recommending that anyone join or ever joining again.

This is in contrast to NetFlix which I cancelled a few years ago because the movies weren't coming fast enough. They rescued their relationship at first by offering a plan that was more attractive to me as I was cancelling. The new plan had fewer movies for a smaller price. I liked it for a while then cancelled anyways because the local video store allowed me to rent 3 movies at any given time and I could just grab them off the shelf. But now that I moved I don't have that same opportunity with a local video store. Instead I looked at Netflix and Blockbuster and found that Netflix had added a good video download service and had a reference from my parents that their delivery is now much faster. Blockbuster will have a video download service through an acquisition and offers in store exchanges which are nice but the downloads aren't a real offer now so I just signed-up with Netflix figuring that if the movies take too long in the mail that I could watch stuff through some crazy computer-tv hook-up. So I signed-up for Netflix this week and I already have three movies and tested the online downloads with my new super fast FIOS Internet connection. So they never permanently lost me as a customer. I can't say the same is true of the BSC folks. I eagerly await the better managed business model for a gym/fitness club to eat their lunch (probably salad).

Now my main issue is NESN. I don't mind that NESN owns the rights to broadcast the games but it is silly that I can't watch NESN broadcast games on my computer no matter what I might want to do. I don't want to buy a cable package so that I can watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in New York (well I'm cynical after the last two games) but in general I should be able to buy the game online somehow. MLB.com would let me do so IF I lived in Texas. But I live in Boston, which is why I am a RED SOX FAN.... so I am urging the folks at NESN to think about their business model and come-up with a way to service the younger generation, the folks who hate cable and love the Internet, to capture a younger audience in Boston and make some money off of serving them. I don't mind paying for baseball. I just don't want to pay for other crap that I don't want along with it and the folks at NESN's marketing department are free to quote me on it.

So I've closed the books on a long chapter in Brookline without a lot of tearful emotions despite feeling like I am losing city life but am giddy with the new start in Newton and doing things like watering the lawn.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We moved into our new house in Newton on Saturday. It was one of the hotter days of the summer but luckily we hired movers to handle the heavy lifting and had the air conditioning working in the nick of time on Friday to keep things a little cool at the destination house. The movers were drenched in sweat to the point where they changed t-shirts between the loading of the truck and when they arrived to unload. My parents and Nancy came by to lend a hand and were instrumental in the unloading of the kitchen contents. Sarah’s parents took Madeline and the cats from Friday night until Saturday afternoon that also was a big help to allow us to focus on moving rather than herding the family about the house.

We seem to have unpacked about half of our boxes and I haven’t found much in the other half of the boxes that I actually need so those items remain in their boxes. Most things that I own don’t need to see the light of day more than once every three years. Those things probably should be tossed. It’s that fear of loss that keeps them around allowing them to survive moving. Many items didn’t make the cut including socks that I have deemed to be un-wearable and clothing that bothers me when I wear it like a pair of comfortable but odd looking green corduroy pants.

I have discovered some of my new responsibilities in the house. Today while taking Madeline out to play on the swing set I noticed that we now have a yard that is in disrepair. It is littered with sticks that fell from trees, leaves that are getting a head start on fall, shrubs that were starving for water, and a lot of long yellow grass. The neighbor’s yard across the way is a verdant paradise that they were watering as I looked at my lawn so I grabbed the hose and started spraying things that looked like they were dying or dead.

The house also comes with a new concept for me. We now have specialized rooms for different functions. While before we had a living/dining/tv room, a bedroom/office, and a child/play room these functions are now distributed throughout the house. Our large 42” television is now in the basement out of sight and for now out of mind since it has been separated from it’s couch set so there is nowhere to sit and watch it even if I had set-up the wires. The living room is just a pair of couches but there isn’t a stereo or radio in it because that is in the basement with the TV. The dining room is a welcome change. It allows the kitchen to stay a food preparation area and gives us a real place to sit with the table extended and eat. We even have an empty room for the expected new baby planned for arrival in January.

The office was set-up through a half day’s toil by the Verizon FiOS installation guy and it now is a very nice set-up with the fastest net connection I have ever had at home. I tested using NetFlix download service on my laptop through the wireless and it was amply fast to take advantage of my ridiculously large laptop screen. Furthermore while I type in the office I don’t need to worry about the keystrokes pounding out noise that would keep Sarah up all night. Unfortunately we are still stuck with out of date computers like the Windows 2000 box currently running this machine that won’t show movies because it is incompatible and the old media box I created in 2003 has a hard drive that is whining out of control if I plug it in. That drive happens to contain the full set of all of my photos for the past few years so everything needs to get migrated to some new PC set-up.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Sunday morning we decided that we would have a little ceremony to inaugurate our new house in Newton. So Sarah and I invited our parents over for a tour of the empty home. We bought some orange juice without pulp so that we could make mimosas. Venkat had given me a basic picture of the ritual in an Indian household on Friday. They put milk onto a burner and cook it until it boils over spilling over the stove. Then you put rice into the milk and make rice pudding. Our plan seemed simpler but lacked the tradition of a milk worshipping culture. Venkat also mentioned that when coming to the US that people are given instructions on names that wouldn’t culturally work well despite being very popular in India. The one he pointed out in particular was Gopi.

Jeremy has been having nightmares lately. He told me one of his nightmares was that bugs were eating his feet. Maybe it’s the season but I had nightmares on Saturday night as well. The first nightmare I was in Vegas at a key conference for my business. While doing a printout through the computer I somehow accidentally requested that all of the money in my life savings accounts be liquidated as cash to be output in another room as $100 bills. I then was running around for the rest of the nightmare trying to get the money back where it belonged. I probably would never have remembered the dream but later in the dream I had Madeline in a backpack and she fell out of the backpack backwards onto the ground from the height of where I was standing onto a hard marble floor. In the dream she instantly died when she hit the floor. It was too much to sleep through so I woke-up. It’s not tough to analyze that with buying a home, having a start-up in the middle of lots of negotiations, and having a child under 2 years old – I have some natural anxiety about money and safety. The cats that keep me up at night don’t even have to work that hard.

Sarah and I arrived about a half hour early for the ceremony at the house on Sunday morning and I was still a bit freaked out from the nightmares. To keep Madeline occupied I went outside to swing her on the playground. She likes to order who goes on which color swing, with her on the red one and me on the yellow one swinging at the same time. I hadn’t thought she would be able to use the swings but we had lightly tested her on a set while returning from Bar Harbor and she was able to hold the chains. On Saturday night we had gone to the Park by Zaftigs, which now has a totally new mural, and she had swung on those. The child next to us was about a year older and kept asking her mother to swing her “super high” and Madeline was interested in going to such a height but I kept her at a reasonable safe height and counseled her that the “super high” height was for older kids. So I was swinging her on Sunday morning on a beautiful cool summer day and she wasn’t too high but for some reason she let go of the chains while on an upswing and fell backwards onto her back landing with her back flat on the hard backyard ground faster than I could think to catch her.

Madeline was shocked and hurt so she wanted Sarah for comfort. The fall looked innocuous since she fell with a uniform distribution on her back and only from the height of the smallest swing, about a foot. But she was upset for about an hour as both sets of parents arrived for the event. Sarah was rocking with her and we all were concerned that she might pass out with a concussion or head injury so when she got tired and started to close her eyes Sarah kept her awake. We gave up on the mimosas and as Madeline settled into more normal behavior we drove the half-mile to the Atrium for a Cheesecake Factory brunch.

After brunch we went up to the play space and we couldn’t help but note the very cushy foam floor that was installed there. It squashes under your feet like you are walking on a piece of hard memory foam bedding. The idea is that the mall doesn’t want any falls by the kids climbing around on their play equipment. I got a recommendation that I’ll be following-up on shortly to install rubber mulch under the swing-set both for Madeline’s safety and any other kids who might want to play on the swings. It cushions falls up to 9 feet. They sell it by the pallet for $500 per pallet at Home Depot. We may also buy a swing with a back to it for her and a baby swing for her sibling we are expecting in January. After reading the book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding, I and other parents need to take the fall by Madeline as a warning sign and fix things before it happens again. Other folks could also consider this event as a reason to put safety mulch under their backyard swings and take other precautions.

I’m looking forwards to an end to nightmares but I’ll need to be more vigilant when I am awake. The nightmares give me practice drills for things I need to be careful of. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual about this stuff.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I did the final two steps in concluding our home purchase today. We did the final walk through and then had a closing. The walk through was simple enough as we wandered the house looking for some kind of horrible thing that might have appeared between the last time we saw the house and the walk through. We spent some time with me, Sarah, and the seller’s agent’s top boss trying to figure out how to open the child proof cabinets all failing until we realized the magnet needed to be turned facing towards the magnetic latch rather than away.

The only thing I could notice was that the door in the back of the house was scraping against the wood kitchen floor leaving a mark. I figured that they had taken the door off to facilitate the move and when it was re-attached to the hinges it was lower to the ground. But since the sellers had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge to congratulate me I decided to ask the crew we had hired to move a giant swing set from one of the seller’s broker’s other clients to plane down the bottom of the door. I spent a chunk of the closing chatting with my Redfin broker about the future of the real estate industry and how Redfin is rapidly growing to take over lots of the market in the Seattle area with a likely growth in places like Boston and San Francisco. Since they have a volume business model they can do things other firms can’t – like offer rates to a large institution like Microsoft for all their employees. Seems like a great idea so it’s good to see they are thinking of building new barriers beyond the rebate component.

During the walkthrough I stopped to check some things I never had checked before looking more carefully into the insides of the closets, seeing if the refrigerator had ice in the automatic ice maker, and shaking loose bolts like the railing on the back. We then were hanging out in the yard and met our new neighbor who let us know which of our trees were slowly leaning into our fence that would eventually break into her yard. But more importantly we bonded on some common topics like how Sarah is involved in early intervention and generally what life is like with kids. I think we’ll need to resolve the falling trees problem. I hadn’t thought of that so it may cause some loss of sleep.

Among our challenges in switching our services for gas and electric was that the house is like a criminal. It has an a.k.a. (also known as). Apparently the house is a subdivision of the great Leeson estate. The other neighbor who drove past us on her way out and said hi as we stacked many cars in a disruptive formation blocking the lane lives in what appears to be the original Leeson home. The rest of the houses on the block apparently grew as subdivisions of what might have been a horse farm with acres of land and a stable, probably a garage turned small brick rental apartment next to our new house. The lane was just the access road or driveway from the street on Glenn Ave. to the main house. But as the new houses appeared they got addresses that the city recognized like 80 Glenn Ave. which is the official address recognized by the city of Newton. Since the house faces out onto the old driveway rather than Glenn Avenue it seemed odd to have a street address of Glenn Avenue. But since the city of Newton doesn’t recognize this winding driveway that runs through the sub-divided former Leeson estate as Leeson Lane. It is just some thing that they don’t want to plow. So the postal service made some form of exception for the house to be called 80 Leeson Lane so that if you saw a sign for Leeson Lane you would know to turn and could find the house. So when calling for a service like electric or gas the right address is to call it 80 Glenn Ave. For mail or giving directions it is to be called 80 Leeson Lane. I haven’t figured out how to make headway of this but hopefully I can use the a.k.a. to my advantage to avoid the paparazzi when they finally figure out that I am someone who In Touch magazine needs to know more about.

I had envisioned the closing itself as being a room full of people with us and the sellers discussing something then all sitting together to sign, with sweaty brows, the final agreement where we pay lots of money and they relinquish their beloved house. That wasn’t the real scenario. Instead the sellers were represented by their attorney who had the power to sign for them and our attorney walked us through about 50 documents about the purchase, the mortgage, the title, the government, the revolution, whatever. We even had to sign our middle initials on one document. We were useful at one point when I noticed that the document which was to set-up notification from the mortgage company to the government of what payments had been received so that we could deduct them from our tax returns had some bizarre social security number that was definitely not mine. I gave my real one and we initialed the change in 20 places then proceeded. Among the annoying thing was that the only important document to keep, the one with all the real terms and hidden costs that could be removed from the final sale for tax purposes was not on 8.5 X 11 paper. So it’s some long thing that will never fit in any file cabinet. Why is all this stuff not electronic?? Our lawyer also mentioned how he found a problem in the title where someone had gone bankrupt who owned the place and there was no closure on the issue in the records and it looked like a headache for the selller's lawyer who was going to have to use the title insurance to pay for resolving the documentation to close out that hole in the records. I suppose I didn't need to know about it but it was odd that a previous transaction hadn't uncovered this information and it made me think that I had gotten a good lawyer as a recommendation from my dad.

Anyways. My favorite document that I signed today was an affidavit that essentially said that I was who I said I was. Given that if I wasn’t I would still sign such a thing since I was already pretending to be someone else for trying to steal a house or set-up a mortgage falsely the document seemed entirely silly and useless. Our lawyer pointed out that he thought so before I could mention it and I decided that the purpose of such a document was to add humor to an otherwise tense situation.

As I was driving home I got a call to tell me that the registry of deeds had closed before the deed could be processed and that we couldn’t go into the house until tomorrow morning. So technically the deed isn’t done yet. But it will be done at about the same time the HVAC folks start tearing holes in closets to install our central air tomorrow morning.

This weekend we begin the fun stuff… figuring out a plan to fix everything and make everything work the way that we need it to.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the way home from work today Jeremy and I passed a new restaurant on Harvard Street that we hadn't noticed before. It was the B Good real fast food place. Thinking we could try something new I pulled a u-turn, got a nasty look from an elderly pedestrian who didn't seem to believe that I was turning around and not attempting to murder her, and pulled into a full lot at the store. I had been reading the Metro in the morning and among the information in it was an interview with William Gibson. The discussion in the interview centered around how he was able to successfully predict certain developments in his science fiction like cyberspace and robotic sex daemons. So as I reviewed the menu I realized that I had thought a similar idea a few years ago about how the world was ready to accept a more family friendly health conscious fast food. Folks who I talked to about it including Yuval and Peter can testify that I was thinking something similar although not identical to the B Good concept. I don't want credit since it's the environment that creates the trends. I just was interested in the concept. Another chain that seems to be benefitting from this trend is Panera Bread. After reading about the founder in Brookline magazine I am likely to buy some stock in the company.

What I discovered upon arrival at the B Good store was a sign that said "Our dream house will be opening tomorrow." It was interesting enough since Sarah and I are closing on our new home tomorrow as well. But having invested in a Brookline U-turn Jeremy and I weren't about to come up empty handed and not eat a freshly ground healthy burger with non-fried french fries. At B Good these are called real fries which still doesn't make sense given that the French part isn't the issue in describing the product using the word fries. BTW - Their web site is www.bgood.com. So we poked in the window and asked whether the busy crew inside was open or not. The answer that came back was that they were opening tonight at 7PM and giving away free burgers.

JACKPOT!

Since it was 6:40 we had somehow inadvertently stumbled upon a free burger scenario. So to kill time we parked in the TJ Max lot, wandered inside TJ Max to find they have great deals on dress shirts for men but didn't purchase one because the line was too long, and then returned to the growing scene building at the B Good dream house. Things were beginning to buzz with a band setting-up shop inside, roller derby people with matching shirts skating around, and a crowd building. We realized we needed to focus on being near the door for the 7PM opening and managed to be among the first 20 people to get our free burger and a seat. I vowed to blog about it as a return for the free burger.

The burger I got was a guapo and had a piece of bacon, onions, and some sauces in it. I was surprised that it came in a whole wheat bun since that never happens with burgers but it was quite agreeable. They offer some odd combos like removing your bun and replacing it with veggies for 25 cents extra that I thought were noble for those weight reduction times in my life. I'll need to make a run of such things after the business passes by. I rate the food as quite good and probably fast in a different situation where we wouldn't be in a mob queued for a free burger. I liked their "style" which includes some 50's styled logos, a car with fire painted on it, a clean internal look, and odd references to weird family members who probably don't exist. They suggest they don't need a fry cutter because there is some guy who does it and have his picture in it. The web site gives some evidence of the style as well. I'm not sure if they will succeed, have succeeded or what and Jeremy cited Boston Market as a failure in the healthy food fast market. But they are certainly a welcome tenant of Brookline and fit with the local culture well. But I won't be living in Brookline for long.

Today is the big day for the closing on the purchase of our house. It was easy enough to put the concept of moving into the future tense until recently but now things have moved into full gear. The money is ready for the down payment to be put into one big scary check, the arrangements have been made for executing the mortgage and purchase and sale including co-ordinating the lawyer, insurance company, mortgage broker, buyer's broker, and seller's broker. All of these people have been very nice and helpful but it is hard to have them all know what is going on. Mostly I feel like mixed messages get passed around between all of these folks and it would be better if there was a secure site where all of the information could be consolidated amongst the parties with utilties to co-ordinate the closing time, upload the insurance binder, post the P&S, etc. and different views depending on role. Maybe the Redfin's of the world can build such a thing. It likely isn't anyone's priority but as an example of collaboration it seems like there is a lack of simple tools.

Sarah worked with some local high school students to pack a lot of stuff in boxes. I cancelled the monthly subscription to Hollywood Video rentals. We got the gas and electric set to be assigned to our name when we arrive. We had Nick and his team move a swing set/play structure that the seller's agent offered us for free if we could move it from a more posh home near Brae Burn. I haven't even seen it but I heard from Nick that they need another day to move it because it is so big and complex. An HVAC company is coming on the 16th to install the central air conditioning. We are moving with a moving company on the 25th. Lisa and Dave are going to move into the condo in Brookline in October giving us time to move out. Things are happening all around. I'm thinking as I walk around the condo... I'm going to miss this place.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I have been keeping it quiet for a while now but in the past two weeks we have broken the news to most people who need to know. Sarah is pregnant again and is due in early January. If all goes well we’ll have a tax deduction for 2007. We already know the gender. The baby should be a boy. This helps us to plan room allocations for the new house we are moving into at the end of the month. The two children’s rooms are decorated today in boy and girl colors so we can place Madeline in the one with girl colors and the boy in the one with boy colors without having to paint the rooms. Somehow this is a great comfort to us to know that we don’t need to modify wall colors amidst a flurry of other issues we need to deal with to migrate from the condo into the house. The closing is next Wednesday. The HVAC will be installed starting on Thursday. Someone offered us a swing set that we’ll have moved by Thursday. Two weeks later, three weeks from now, the moving van will appear and take us to Newton.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While visiting Amy and Max the other day I noticed that they had posted a writ on the wall at the request of their 4 year old son that listed rules for eating at the dinner table. I don’t recall the exact rules but they had to do with not playing with your food and other eating related etiquette. I went off on a tangent about it and started thinking about how every family over time creates their own sets of rules and sometimes they are codified into laws like the piece of paper hanging from the dinner table and other times they are simply verbally agreed upon. I poked around and there are sites like Kids Contracts where people have spent time building some legal agreements for kids and parents. What I didn’t see was the idea of a household constitution where a family sets-up a small-scale democracy or other form of government with a base set of law that then guides the construction of additional laws for the family. While it might be nice to have a pre-built system it would lack in the fit for a given cultural style for a single family. Working through the process itself to gain consensus and buy-in from different parties (kids and parents) and likely multiple of each could lead to the formation of a set of family laws that would be respected. I’m interested in setting-up a government of sorts in my own household to sort through the rules as Madeline becomes old enough, probably another year, to appreciate how rules can help to define expectations and ultimately drive success based on incentives in the rules. I also am generally interested in anthropology so it gives me a chance to run a little experiment with my own family unit. If all went well I can imagine that we’d create a great little blue-print family constitution and laws in a wiki that could be copied and modified by other families who might find it interesting as a point of reference to save time. Ultimately we might end-up recreating a lot of what’s already in religions since they rightly took a lead in this type of framework a long time ago. But I’m not interested in the antiquated stuff and don’t subscribe to anyone else’s religion. Plus they involve praying which doesn’t seem to help much for most things I would worry about around the house.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Sarah, Madeline, and I had been looking to purchase a house througout the spring. We went to many open houses with an open mind regarding the pros and cons of continuing to live in the city versus going out to the country. So we looked in both Brookline and Newton. Well it wasn't that adventurous but we saw our share of interesting properties and learned a bit about the inside of many people's homes. We saw one home where the entire back yard had become a concrete swimming pool with a thin walking area behind it. They were handing out sheets to let us know that the pool could be filled in for $15000. Another place reminded me of Graceland because it looked preserved from the 50's in all of the decor and electronics. Some places were too expensive although very impressive including a house that we loved but felt like we would be paying for it for the rest of our lives in mortgage payments. We took a tour of the conversion of the Water Works in Cleveland Circle hoping to see the part that they were going to show the big two bedroom units they were hoping to sell for $4-5 million but only saw some crappy stuff. While looking one day we had brought Stephanie along and she recommended signing-up for RedFin as a broker since her brother Eugene had done so. I signed-up with RedFin. I tried to track which homes were going up or down in price. I watched locations come on or off the market. I called some place that had come down $750,000 dollars that came with a pool and a mini-house only to find that they were pulling the property from the market because of a lack of interest. We almost made an offer on a house that my whole family had toured thinking it might be the right one and watched as it kept coming down in price but then while we were travelling to Orlando we foundd that it had disappeared. We toured one house on Lake Avenue that everyone had seen before while strolling by the lake to gawk at the beautiful porch and flowers only to be disappointed after seeing the interior of it and then getting into a fight with the realtor who hated the concept of a discount broker.

Then one day while touring an open house found on Redfin Madeline found a cool toy that beeped and played music that she could play with for a few hours in a family room. While to we decided that the price was within the expected range of the market, the house was within a reasonable distance of Newton Centre, and that we could afford it and live there. So we worked with our online broker, negotiated a little bit, and to a Tudor house. We completed the purchase and sale agreement last Monday after discussing who would pay for the removal of some asbestos in the attic so that we could install central air conditioning as our way of combatting the effects of global warming. On August 15th we should close pending the success of securing our mortgage and putting down a payment. Then some renovations and we are in our new home.

It actually was a lot of work and energy surfing the net looking at every blip that might be the right place. Now with the All Star Break and no Red Sox to view on Game Day and no houses to scan on real estate sites I am trying to figure out what to be searching for next on the Internet? I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday morning the ground was covered in ice from the stuff that fell from the sky. Sarah’s car got stuck so I used my steel-toed REI Kilimanjaro climbing boots to knock the ice from under her wheels. Afterwards I wandered around the corner to look for some ice melt to help get my car clear and to get the ice in her spot to melt. What I found was a large supply of day old marked down Valentine’s day candy and a new set of more expensive Easter candy. I did not find any ice melting substances. I then went to Stop and Shop and had the same experience. So my conclusion was that someone should make “Ice melting Valentine’s day candy” or the local venues should stock things that are useful in winter despite the predictions of tropical weather and parrots flying through the Boston rain forest until they actually see a passion fruit plant growing in Boston Commons.

On Saturday morning I watched “Good Morning America” since I was already up for three or four hours from the earlier showing that Madeline put on to demonstrate that she was bored at 4 AM that included readying some exciting board books, testing a new farm music CD, munching on blue berries, and playing pick-up quarters from the floor. On the show they featured a guy who had invented a robo-plow out of an old golf cart frame. It was actually not robotic but instead a remote control device that he could either control by looking out his window or control from his television using the cameras and lights mounted on the front of the plow.

That was the interesting thing to me. Maybe the true application of telepresence is to outsource common household tasks like lawn mowing, driveway maintenance, and vacuum cleaning to people living in countries where they can use fast internet access to control household appliances in other countries. I can imagine saying that we outsource our vacuum cleaning to India and our lawn to Africa at some point in 2015. The key is for the manufacturers of these pieces of equipment like Toro and Electrolux or some smart Japanese manufacturers to figure it out and start making these appliances and the service contracts now. They have outsourced the person who takes your order at McDonalds over that intercom so the time is near. Maybe it’s time to get a patent on the whole business model for remote controlled outsourcing of household chores before it is too late. But what will the neighbor’s kids do for cash?

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to the gym today and did about an hour of elliptical runner. My main thought while spinning my legs in circles was how lately no matter what area of my life I am looking at I feel like I am starting over when I finally get around to doing something. When it comes to going to the gym the idea is that I should get into some rhythm where every Wendesday afternoon and Sunday night I would go and do an hour of excercise but instead it is patchy and I go a few weeks without going to the gym. Then I start-up again with the same thoughts on one random day that I actually excercise that I am about to get regular with it. The same is true with writing in this blog, doing work to sell new accounts and build the business, keeping the car in good repair, keeping the apartment clean and upgraded, getting the computers tuned to work properly, programming at work, writing at work, reading books, going out, or taking care of Madeline in the times I am alone with her. Lately it always feels like I am starting from scratch whenever I am doing something. Maybe the list of things to keep regularly doing is too long and too conflicted. The one thing I have gotten consistent at is watching a DVD once per day. That's a good 90 minute investment that I might need back. So for today as I begin the work week on a Sunday night I think my best bet is to create a schedule and stick to it for a while and even lay off the DVDs wherever possible and substitute work-outs for every other one of them. Maybe that will work?

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had my last experience with my first Christmas tree today. At least I think the tree has reached the end of it’s life. We left it up for our little New Year’s Eve get together with Sarah’s sister, Nick, Matt and Kate. The idea was to leave things festive for the evening. So it smelled of pine while we played electronic Taboo and a hearty game of Apples to Apples. Unfortunately for us a late night with lots of wine drinking rapidly becomes an early morning with a demanding baby looking for food attention and fighting off new diapers or a much needed bath. So Monday morning was filled with a headache combined with some baby crying. Sarah and I took it easy for the day by driving out for lunch at Charley’s at the Chestnut Hill Mall and then returning home. I didn’t really feel human until I drank my second iced tea and had a chunk of bread. Madeline was a champ with the crayons though making drawings that looked like dashes both on the paper and in the table. We rented some videos and watched Accepted.

Madeline went to sleep but despite being exhausted I couldn’t really sleep after the movie so I was reading my Murakami book. Then at about 11 O’Clock Madeline started crying. So we tried to calm her down by bringing her into the bed. But she was just bothering Sarah and kicking us a lot while we watched Superman II hoping she would fall asleep. When we gave up on getting her to fall asleep we placed her in her crib where she proceeded to make awful sad crying noises for about twenty minutes. The melodrama of a baby crying because they don’t want to be in a crib is hard to bear. It sounds like some medieval torturer with a lack of mercy is torturing your baby in the other room and she is crying out for help. So we ignored the cries until they quieted down and then when they went silent I fell asleep for a few moments only to be overwhelmed by the fear that the reason she had been crying so much was that there must be something wrong like the cat had suffocated her to make her quiet. So I went into her room to check on her and it startled her so she was awake once again.

Sarah left me in charge of the problem since I was responsible for the second awakening of the little one. So I tried a host of techniques recommended in popular magazines and that I had seen work for other family members or baby sitters like rocking in the chair, singing popular children’s songs, giving her a dropper full of Tylenol, holding her on my shoulder and swinging back and forth in a soothing pattern, offering her some juice to drink. None of this worked and she could be used as a Geiger counter for identifying her crib since every time I got close to it she would raise her voice exponentially. So I gave up and decided to just play along with it. We started with playing with the Tylenol bottle. It has a dropper on the end and she was biting on it but found it much more funny to feed it to me and watch me chew and suck on it. So we played that game for a while. Then I read her a story. Then we went into the other room where the miniature Christmas tree is and we removed, reapplied, and dropped the mini gold ornaments on it about 1000 times. My one stroke of genius was that after she dropped the whole tree off the counter (it is only about a foot high and made out of plastic), I reached over and noticed that I could pull the power cord out of the tree while picking it up along with the ornaments that she had dropped. So we found darkness again at about 3:00 AM. Finally at about 4:00 AM, as the sun was rising,, we went back into her room and I managed to rock myself to sleep only to find her asleep in my arms when I awoke.

So as I was driving home Sarah mentioned that it would be helpful if I were to take the Christmas tree downstairs because it is garbage day tomorrow and we already removed all of the ornaments from it. As a first time Christmas tree owner I had no idea what this entailed. Just walking through the room with the tree left a hurricane of pine needles, attached sap to my hands, and had branches breaking off on every piece of furniture. When I got to the door to the apartment the nine foot tree neither fit through the door nor would it hold on to about 50% of it’s needles so a storm of needles fell on either side of the door. I then dragged it down the stairs brushing against each banister freeing the remaining needles and smaller branches as I made my way out of the building. Finally I threw it in on the curb, looked at it amazed that there was any green part of it left attached and returned to review the path of pine destruction I had made on my way. I then spent the next hour and a half trying to sweep the hallway, clean the scraps off the floor, vacuum wherever the pine needles could be found, including my ear, and pour out the sappy water in the base that held it into the sink.

I did enjoy my first tree. Too bad I wasn’t more alert when I took it out. Luckily Madeline still has that little fake one to play with. And with this vacation done I am ready to get back to some relaxing work.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After spending a little time with our friend and contractor getting an idea on pricing we started on the process of thinking through the kitchen and bathroom design to select key things like appliances, cabinets, tiles, layout, etc. I was resistant to having a design from the contractor since I wasn’t sure it was the right place to start given that I didn’t even have measurements. Sarah and I went to Home Depot and they told us they didn’t do much to propose cabinets without measurements so I borrowed a tape measure and took measurements of the room. Since I don’t like keeping things on paper I went online to find a place to put the measurements. I found a 3D home design site that works like an ASP so I registered and paid them $30 for an annual subscription to put in the dimensions of the kitchen and start to lay-out cabinets. It was fun to play with the software and I also purchased a book on kitchen design while walking around at Expo, the high end version of Home Depot. I had a nice little lay-out with the sink in the back by the windows before I realized that the height of the windows was below the counter top. So I modified the design and brought the floor plan to Home Depot figuring they would know what to do next with my rough measurements and design.

When we asked the folks at the store how the process works and when we could put our measurements into their hands they let us know that the process they follow is that they only work with their own measurements to quote or build cabinets and that they offer free design services as a part of the cabinet and countertop sales process. The deposit for measurement and design services is $60 and it goes towards the cost of the cabinets if/when you buy them. I was quite happy with this so we had a Home Depot measurement guy come over today to measure the kitchen in a more thorough and reliable way than when I measured it. Next Saturday we are going to go in to work through a design. I better keep my contractor friend updated on how things are going on that front. I did feel confident that the Home Depot folks know what they are doing with the cabinets they sell and I like the whole idea that I pay a $60 fee to get the thing designed and I can take the design if I don’t want the cabinets and counters from them.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The desk and credenza

I never would have known what a credenza was if I hadn’t gone to Crate and Barrell with Sarah and Madeline. I probably never would have decided to renovate the kitchen either. We went looking for the latest in kitchen gadgets after having some breakfast at Abe and Louie’s a few weeks back. The actual purchases included a snowman replacement doormat for our leaves doormat. the curse of the seasonal doormat is that you need to replace it three times per year. We also purchased an oven safe bowl for cooking a frozen French onion soup that we had bought at Trader Joes with the hope of making our own soup with tasty cheese on top. The rock hard soup has been in the freezer since summer. We still haven’t heated it up.

But the main important fact about our trip to C&B was that we made our way to the third floor where Sarah enjoys gawking at the Vendome collection. She has wanted a Vendome bed since I have known her but because of problems like our already having a bed and that once we bought the bed we would have to purchase every other item in the set or else our bedroom would get out of synch. So we left Crate and Barrell without a furniture purchasing incident.

My general experience with furniture purchasing of any sort is similar to my experience with car tune-ups. The simplest change in a system in equilibrium can tip everything that has been waiting to tip over the top. With the car when I go to fix a gas cap I end-up with new brake pads, some bracket needs to be replaced in the back, and a computer chip that needs replacement. All of these repairs are required because not fixing any of them most likely leads in one way or another to death. Electronics and furniture are also linked.

The last big furniture revolution came when I purchased a new 42” projection television. In order to make it work I decided it would be best to get a new DVD player and since I don’t subscribe to television through cable I also went into a large project to acquire proper satellite television equipment and acquired some hacking equipment to test various hacking with the satellite dish. I also couldn’t just install a television without purchasing a new couch and comfort seat fit for two. Once the new furniture was installed I decided to also purchase a TV friendly computer so that I could send images over to the television. And that could only be made possible by purchasing a receiver to split the signal from all of the components, a universal remote control, and a surround sound set of speakers from Cambridge Soundworks. That was the end of the last home revolution.

So after we got home from C&B I thought I might see if I could use craigslist to find a vendome style bed. People sell everything on that thing. As it turned out someone was selling a desk and credenza at a highly discounted rate that was advertised as a Crate and Barrell Vendome styled set and the whole set was going for $250. I jumped on this advertisement and replied to find that it was available if I could pick it up. Sarah looked at it the next day to confirm that it was something she wanted and I committed to pick it up on Saturday in a U-Haul truck.

So Saturday rolled around and Sarah managed to rope her brother Matthew into the moving process since a desk and credenza are large items. Matthew was to come over by 10:30 because according to Sarah the woman would only be available until 12 noon.

Since it was the beginning of a big furniture transition day I took my PT Cruiser over to Valvoline to get the fluids checked. While I was there I learned that they offer a tire rotating service. So I took them up on that too. Tire rotation at an oil change shop takes about six hours from what I could determine so it was approaching 10:30 when they were finishing the tire rotation. They let me know that my lug nuts are rusted out so my tires could pop off at any time but they did fill the tire that was running low on air.

I then drove home and Sarah was getting quite worried that we were going to miss the window of opportunity to pick up the desk and credenza. So I biked over to the U-Haul which is across the street from the Valvoline but there didn’t appear to be a simple way to exchange cars. The folks at U-Haul have an interesting pricing model. They rent the truck for $19.99 or so but then they charge $1 per mile. They expect the run to be fairly quick since I told them we’d be gone from 10:30 – 3:30 PM and that was about enough to keep them from charging some other late fee. They try to sell all sorts of extra things as well including plastic bags for $300/bag and insurance that costs about $30. So the advertised rate is only there if you refuse the apparently helpful insurance. The sales person let me know that someone had crashed a truck the day before and they hadn’t bough the insurance. I think they are trained to say scary things like that.

I finally hopped into my vehicle to find it to be what looked like a very old front of a truck with a big box attached to the back. How anyone would notice if I did get into an accident is beyond me. I returned to the condo to find Matthew there along with Sarah, still worried about our getting there late, and then hit the road. I called the woman selling the desk and credenza to find that she hadn’t meant that we had to be there before noon but that she wouldn’t be there until noon. So we were on the road in a U-Haul paying a buck a mile and were about to become very early. Matthew was quick to point out that when other drivers see a U-Haul they run scared because they know that you can’t see anything and have no idea how to drive a truck. This made life a little easier making the ride down on 128 towards Norwood where the items were.

Since we were driving to get office furniture I decided to stop at Staples to get a chair. Our chair by our desk, being in equilibrium, was a chair that I found in the condo when I first arrived. It was a yellow wooden chair that hadn’t been covered when people had painted a room so it had white strips of dripped paint on it. For a long time it had been covered by one of those slips that makes ugly chairs look fancy but time had destroyed it and we were sitting at our old desk with an old wooden chair that looked like it was a part of an artist studio.

So we purchased a nice office chair that spins and tilts at Staples. I also bought lots of desk stuff for our new used desk including holders for items and a drawer stuff organizer. We then went on to the real estate agent’s office that was selling the items. The woman there was quite a real estate agent. Despite the fact that we were looking to purchase used furniture from her because her expensive furniture didn’t match her new Ikea cheaper furniture she decided to try to sell me on moving into a new home and using her as an agent. When Matthew and I entered the office we saw a desk and file cabinet. I thought to myself. A credenza must be a file cabinet! But upon asking her I learned that a credenza is actually a large piece of furniture with a bunch of drawers and cabinets and a top piece with cubby holes in it. Now I was thinking that a desk should come with it’s matching file cabinet so I asked the real estate agent whether the file cabinet was on sale. Her response was that anything is for sale but that she had a use for the file cabinet but not the other two items which was why the other two were less expensive. So I decided that we already had rented the U-Haul and settled on a price $50 higher for the file cabinet than I had paid for the desk and credenza together.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the cash for it so I had to go on a little journey down the street to find a bank machine to get cash to pay her. The bank machine at Bank of America was occupied by three employees of a local grocery store who were annoyed that the grocery store had stopped using Sovereign Bank to cut their checks because now they had to go to Bank of America to deposit them. I wasn’t that interested in correcting them that it didn’t matter which bank issued a check for when you deposit them. Two of the employees were fussing around the bank machine because one was confident that you could deposit a check in the bank machine while the other was sure it would just disappear. They had no choice since the bank itself wasn’t opening for another hour or two. The main problem seemed to stem from the fact that they were going to write another check for the rent on Monday and they didn’t want it to bounce because the deposit didn’t get through at the bank. But eventually I got all the cash I needed for the transaction and purchased the furniture.

We loaded the furniture into the U-Haul and as we were driving back to Brookline it struck me that having a U-Haul is not an ordinary event. I can’t usually carry much in the back of my car. We kept passing the Christmas tree vending shops and I had recalled that Sarah had said that she didn’t want a tree this year because it would be too messy. But after passing three tree dealers in a row and when I thought there would be none left I turned into the Winston’s lot, Winston’s is apparently the Cadillac of Christmas trees, and I then negotiated a nice tree along with a stand that we then threw into the back of the U-Haul.

So finally Matthew and I returned to Brookline full of items including a surprise tree. When we brought it into the condo I needed to get my camera to film the reaction from Sarah. I wasn’t sure if she would be angry or elated when Matthew charged into the apartment with a nine foot tall tree. So we first brought the new file cabinet in. I then went back down with Matthew and we tried to set-up the tree in the hallway. I thought that Sarah wouldn’t come out but she walked right out to where she could almost see the tree. I got the camera out and then proceeded to wait about two minutes while Matthew cut all sorts of cords off of the tree and got it attached better to the stand. Sarah was suspicious because I had the camera out so I figured she had seen downstairs and knew what was coming. But when Matthew charged in Madeline started jumping up and down excited to see a tree inside and Sarah was also very happy and excited.

The rest of the afternoon I discovered that moving furniture in my condo is difficult. I finally started to make use of the storage room in the basement and placed the old desk, secretary (looks like a credenza), and file cabinet down there. We returned the U-Haul, I biked home and all was well.

But that is not the end of the story really because we had upset the fundamental equilibrium of the apartment by doing this. I had placed items into the basement for storage for the first time. Other people had placed items into storage before and over time other unit owners had built enclosures to keep the items sorted out so that you could throw out items not in the enclosures. But since I was placing items without an enclosure I needed to build an enclosure in the basement. In order to do this I was going to need some construction help so Sarah and I chatted and decided we could call Nick F. who could do the work.

But if I was going to call Nick F. to look at the condo then I might as well call him about the project we have been thinking about doing for the past three years. That is to install a bubbly tub in the bathroom and replace the kitchen appliances and cabinets. So we are embarking on a new project to plan the kitchen and bathroom replacement stuff. To install a hot tub we needed to consult an electrician so I figured I’d bring-up that I would like to stop the circuit breaker from shutting down everything in the summer and he mentioned that he could put the air conditioners on a separate circuit. To run the new circuit we figured it would be easiest to cover the current popcorn ceiling in the living room with a new ceiling and run the circuit down the middle. If we were going to run wires through the living room it also would make sense to hide the speaker wires for the surround sound, connect the wire to the roof for the antennae and/or satellite dish, and move from a projection TV to a flat screen while placing the components in a media closet. All this sounded very logical until I saw an estimate of what it might cost without the hardware. But the point here is this:

Beware that loose strand on your sweater. If you pull it prepare for more than you expected.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was thinking this morning about finding a new home again. Every hermit crab must someday leave their shell. My thoughts were turned to the available information online and I came to the conclusion that despite the increase in availability of information to make the real estate market more transparent it has a long way to go. The big problem that I see is that people are still dealing with web pages and not XML data. I can go to the Boston Globe Online and find all the open houses in the area but if I wanted to track that over time and get a real time data feed all I can do is subscribe to an RSS data feed. The RSS feed doesn't provide any organizational/parametric features about the homes that would be helpful for automatically filtering or highlighing the ones that I am interested it. Instead it just gives a list with a link to the site where I can see more information. But I need to know things like listing price, square feet, proximity to T, sales history (has it been reduced? is it a new listing?), condo or home, taxes, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood, date/time of open houses, etc. and I would rather not have to know any of these things unless some of them meet my basic requirements for a home. What I envision for a future to the real estate market is that somehow and somewhere each home is attached to a piece of changing data like a stock that has all of this parametric information in it. It might be managed by a realtor or by the owner through a public site. The home can then be located through either newspaper style web sites or advanced tools for visualizing and alerting me about my home search. I don't really want a realtor... I want a more transparent real estate market with Internet geeks working hard to get my attention with better ways to present the information that is publicly available. In a sense this has happened in the unstructured world of text search with folks like Google but for structured data like real estate, even with the Zillow's of the world, it is still not an easy process to see what you are looking for in the market. Maybe the real estate agents don't want this but as always -- the heretics like me are only the bad guys for the people in power. If the realtor folks listen to us and give us what we want then they can stay connected to real problems and provide real solutions of value in a changing world.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I turn 33 today. Madeline has her first birthday tomorrow but we are all celebrating a hodge-podge of birthdays, anniversaries, harvest, pagan, and Indian holidays today. I’m surprised we aren’t getting Madeline dressed in her turtle Halloween costume. Maybe we should bring it? I am hoping this birthday isn’t like that 16 candles birthday. I watched part of that movie last weekend and continually thought how in retrospect Anthony Michael Hall deserved an Oscar for best actor for his performance. But maybe I’m just a little too ready to empathize with the ‘80s high school freshman geek who transcends geekdom by going after glory by betting his friends he can get Molly Ringwald’s underwear. But I do think it was under appreciated in its time. So for my birthday I bought myself an 800GB Seagate Barracuda internal drive. I don’t know how to install it but it can’t be as complex as putting a supercharger in a car. It will be a fun little project for me and can make space for video storage. I probably should have gotten a DVD burner along with it but I’ll get to that next year.

Madeline is wandering about in her birthday dress with yesterday’s salt and pepper grinders from our steak dinner and managed to find an old Ibuprofen pill on the floor of our bedroom. I took it away from her. It is quite hard to be fully baby proofed. In a few more years she will be able to open the bottle herself! But the real treat of the day was that Sarah told me that as I walked past Madeline in her high chair she said “DaDa”.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Among the many reasons why it is hard to write these days I must include that the cat actively attempts to interfere with any attempt on my part to use the computer on my desk. She begins by hiding behind the flat screen monitor and periodically swipes her paw at my fingers as I type. After I get frustrated by this and stand-up to get her to follow me away from the computer she will then reseat herself in front of the keyboard in order to block me from resting my hands in the typing position. If I manage to brush her away from this position she will then walk across the keyboard itself in hopes of clicking on a key that will permanently lock the computer in an awful funk like running in Norwegian mode or setting off control keys that show strange symbols for paragraphs while using MSWord. Luckily she appears to be at rest for the evening at the moment and I have been spared the routine. Otherwise this would never have made it out.

The baby on the other hand offers a different form of interference. Basically I have come to the conclusion that if you have a life and a hobby and then you become a parent you will need to choose from among the following options. A – Sleep, B – Doing a hobby. When you no longer have time for sleep this generally means that you will also have no time for playing poker on Friday nights, working out three days a week, writing a blog, creating nify nick-nacks out of pine cones, and other such nonsense. The challenge is simply that a baby is not a fully capable person able to do things like eat, clean, use the toilet, entertain themselves, or play poker on Fridays. Because of these challenges you can’t leave them alone. They have funny hours that they keep for their day including sleeping at 8PM and waking-up at 6AM. This means that you have to be home a few hours before 8PM, like 6PM and awake at 6AM. Doing some simple math on the free hours. If you work from 9 AM to 5PM this basically leaves you with the drive home and the bleary hour or two you have to feed the baby in the morning and then figure out who will care for her while you are at work as your extra time. You also have the hour and a half of time after she sleeps to squander at your leisure only to wish you had spent it sleeping the night before. If you work an hour or two later in the day then it leaves you with nothing in terms of spare time. So this is the more likely reason for not producing anything in writing on a regular basis. It means that information needs to be condensed into forms like haiku. For example here is a brief passage recalling key events from the trip that Jeremy and I took to Vegas.

Circus Circus Vegas for kids with women in lobby giving birth to more kids. Chinese taxi driver – ‘you want to get raid?’. TI club good. Dancing with Nebraskan woman 6’4”. Stripper tells story of popping eyeball out with long heel and coroner’s office job. Jeremy recognizes porn producer at club. Old Vegas – Freemont street experience during the day is mainly looking at a bunch of crack dealers. Old casinos have $2 blackjack. Win money but watch wives gamble their wedding rings. Hard not to look at just the stage during ‘O’. Mayors convention in town meeting mayors. Rio floor no good to dance on because of beer glue. Too many grinding dudes on floor. Next time go to Rio roof bar not dance club.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have now lived with Annabelle the cat for about three weeks now. It is nice to have a pet at home again. She appears to have thwarted the mice. I have seen no evidence of them in the last few weeks. Because of this we have gotten careless and this week alone have had two taco nights where we fill the counter by the stove, the favorite picnicking spot of Brookline mice, with a cornucopia of Mexican foods like onions, tomatoes, tortilla chips, avocados, cheese, and ground beef. No mice have chosen to join the fiesta. Annabelle does not appear to be spending her evenings policing the kitchen. I know this because instead she spends her time waiting for me to fall asleep and then tries to vigorously rub off some form of scent from behind her ear onto my hands. I must admit that I feel a little violated by the experience of Annabelle trying to not mark just her territory but pretending to be a possessed bottle of cheap cologne aggressively marking me. She is headed for a showdown with the vet regardless of this behavior since we signed a contract to spay her as a part of our contract to rescue her from the MSPCA. I am hoping that spaying her will alleviate her need to rub up against me while I am sleeping as I generally don’t get much sleep to begin with given the other new inhabitant of my apartment.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The cat

On Saturday we finally managed to pull together and go to the MSPCA to adopt a cat. We were undecided on the key question of whether to get a new kitten, a teenager cat, or a mature one. The basic rationale was that the kitten is the most desirable of cat and that is a pro and a con. In adopting a cat we wanted to get a cat that would benefit from adoption so kittens are likely to get adopted because they are cute and cuddly.

So we arrived at noon on Saturday to a surprising new MSPCA adoption center at the Angel Memorial Animal Hospital. The sign on the door as we walked in informed us that they look for donations and in particular this week they were looking for bleach. The waiting area you first reach when you arrive gives you the impression that you should wait to be escorted into the cat observation area. But things are very busy and actually nobody comes to greet you until after waiting for about 10 minutes you realize that you should just walk into the area with all of the cats, go through the door leading to the dogs, or take a look at some critters like bunny rabbits, mice, or ferrets.

The cat area was chock full of cats. We went first through the hall of tall cages where mainly adult cats were living on their own. I figured these ones were less tolerant of other cats because on either side of the hall the adoption center had large monkey house style rooms facing out the window. The monkey houses were filled with ten cats each all living in a communal lifestyle complete with high walks, windows, and cubbies to nestle into. But just before we entered the first big room we were stunned by the kittens. Two pens on the side had kittens in them. One had a single kitten and it’s mother, both white with calico markings on the top. The kitten was feeding from the mother’s chest. The sign on the pen suggested that they were a packaged deal and that these cats were already pending adoption.

Next to this pen another pen held four or five kittens. Sarah and I held a couple of them and were very interested in these tiny fun creatures. Madeline, who was sitting with us in her stroller, also wanted to say hello to the cats. To avoid the charms of the littlest ones we moved into one of the big open rooms filled with cats. I found one cat that reminded me of Thumper. She was a black cat, somewhat fat but mainly muscular, that looked like she could chase mice. I told Sarah that I was impressed with this cat and we interacted with it for a while. When we asked more information about this cat, nee Fluffy, we were informed that she was a de-clawed cat. Now I don’t think it is right to de-claw a cat but I also don’t think a de-clawed cat would be effective at scaring mice. The woman giving us cat backgrounds also introduced us to a Mane Coon cat that was very interesting looking and seemed quite friendly. Again she let us know that this was a de-clawed cat. The woman asked what I felt was wrong with a de-clawed cat as Sarah looked on at me and I was forced to admit that one of my reasons for wanting a cat was to catch and kill our local mouse population. The adoption center volunteer changed from looking at me as a good potential paternal figure for her beloved cats to how someone might look at a slave owner that beat his slaves mercilessly. She then explained that cats can’t kill mice unless their mother teaches them how and that they kill mice with their teeth and not their claws.

Regardless of her attempt to enlighten me, Sarah and I moved on to searching for a cat in an unassisted fashion to avoid the judging eyes of this adoption volunteer.

We did see a cat that looked thin, young, and strong in a three story cage. She looked much like Cloey, Jeremy’s cat, with a brown speckled body but with a very bushy Coon style tail. I chatted with a helper about this cat and found that she was found abandoned in an apartment when someone had left her there alone after moving out. She was given the name Pigeon at the shelter but was still very thin. The woman helping us this time was very excited to see me, Sarah, and Madeline. She could see that we would be a good home for this cat and told us that she really wanted Pigeon to go home with us.

The adoption process included an hour and a half wait to get to the front of the line to go through the process with the forms. The forms included questions like whether we had pets before and if we no longer had them what had occurred. I put down a brief sentence about Bijoux but the adoption person never asked a question about it. Soon we were home with a cat.

Later in the afternoon Nick and Christina came over and they helped us to cut Pigeon’s nails. I was hoping for a better name and someone called her Annabelle which is now her official Housman family name.

Annabelle is a bit crazy so far. She rolls around in her litter and runs at top speed throughout the apartment. Madeline likes to chase her or at least to chase the beeping electronic mouse at the end of the plastic fishing rod and string that I bought at Stop and Shop. Unfortunately it hasn’t been easy to catch sleep since we brought Annabelle home. Madeline has been very fussy at night and is apparently refusing to sleep in her crib. Our solution for now is to get her to sleep on the floor of her room on the carpet. This plan worked two nights in a row. The first night I got a nice sore back from sleeping with her. The second one I decided to leave her and to sleep in the bed. She slept fine but was about twenty feet from where I laid her down. She is a sleep crawler. So tonight we are trying to put her on the floor within a makeshift pillow barrier system. It was working for most of “The World’s Fastest Indian” but she woke up and Sarah had to go back to try to nurse her and calm her down. Hopefully things will improve on the sleeping front soon. I feel like the mouse front is under control of commander Annabelle.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)