The Real Estate Ride Is Over

After three long months of being in the real estate market, we're finally out of it. When we started this whole process, someone told me that buying a new house was about as much stress as a death in the family. At the time I thought he was grossly exaggerating, now I'm not so sure.

If everything would have gone smoothly, we would have gotten away with a moderate amount of anxiety. Instead, the day before we were supposed to close both the sale of our condo and the purchase of our new house we found out that our buyer was having difficulty with their lender because our condo's home owners association was suing the complex's builder. The original basis of the litigation was mold that was discovered in a few other units and had nothing to do with our condo, but that didn't matter to the bank.

Soon the whole deal fell apart. Our buyers were still interested so we extended both the sale and purchase for a couple of weeks while they found another lender. Fortunately the people we were buying from were very patient and understanding. Then we found out that the buyer had a rocky credit history, and their mortgage broker (who was also our mortgage broker) had to fight an uphill battle to find a bank that would approve a loan on a unit involved in litigation and with a sub-par borrower.

Things were looking bad, so Becky and I had to decide whether or not we'd allow ourselves to loose the house if our sale didn't work out. We calculated that if we were to carry both properties while the condo was for sale, our cash flow would go negative by over $2,000 a month. We could handle this for a while, but obviously it wouldn't be sustainable.

Becky is generally more conservative when it comes to our finances, and didn't think the house was worth the risk. I was sure that we had gotten a good deal on the house, and by this time my heart was set on it and I had a hard time letting it go. It was a great house in a wonderful neighborhood and there weren't any others we liked nearly as much. After several heated conversations and a bit of soul-searching, we decided to take the risk.

Finally when the broker was able to get the loan approved, our buyers decided that they had had enough and cancelled the whole deal. This was a real blow to us, but we bought the house as planned and moved in thinking that this would bring us the closure we were looking for. Unfortunately I couldn't really let go of the fact that we still needed to sell the condo. I had trouble sleeping at night as I worried that my enthusiasm had put my young family on the road to bankruptcy.

After three weeks, we got two offers on the condo, and we accepted one. I was on pins and needles wondering if the lawsuit was going to burn us again, but apparently it wasn't an obstacle for a buyer with decent credit.

Now here I am, after a quarter of a year of riding the real estate roller coaster, I can finally enjoy my new home knowing that I haven't failed my family. I am starting to believe that because this endeavor was such a struggle, in the long run I am better off for having experienced it, but I sure as hell hope I never go through it again.

I Give Up

Something had to give. When I originally started working on the website, Hovenkotter.net, it was a lot of fun building it and hosting it myself. After a while, it became a major pain in the butt and you may have noticed some serious lag time between updates.

First of all, resizing all of the images took quite a bit of time, though this was improved once I started using Photoshop batch operations. Both the photo album organizer and the blog required me to write a fair amount of XML by hand. I thought of ways I could automate some of the mundane activies, but it would require some up front work, and I wasn't all that motivated.

Then someone introduced me to Flickr (the 'e' is left out intentionally) and I immediately thought, "what am I doing spending all of this time maintaining my own site when I could use something that is obviously far superior to anything I could develop." Now it is really easy to upload pictures as soon as I pull them from my camera, so I plan on updating my Flickr site several times a month.

If I'm going to let another service do the heavy lifting for my pictures, then it made sense to offload the blog to a third-party service as well, which is where you are now. Blogger is a service owned by Google, and again is much better than anything I could come up with in a reasonable timeframe. You'll notice that all of the pictures incorporated with this blog link to Flickr.

I have to admit that it is a tiny infliction to my ego that my once glorious (at least I though so) website is now being pulled apart into third-party services, but this will allow me to spend more time with Becky and Kyla... and maybe on some other hobbies as well ;)

10 Year Reunion

After graduating from Ellensburg High School, I remember having a number of conversations with my friends about our 10 year reunion and what we thought would become of everyone in our class. That was a long time ago, and as high school faded from my memory, so did my curiosity about what became of my classmates, save those I kept up with.

The reunion turned out to be a lot of fun. There was a barbecue Saturday afternoon in Cle Elum where we could bring our kids, and Kyla had a ball playing with the other progeny of EHS alumni. Then that night we met at a local lodge where we chatted, drank some beer, and watched a slideshow of our Senior year.

On the day we graduated in 1995, we filled out questionnaires about our lives at the time and our hopes for the future, which were returned to us at the reunion. It was amusing to read about what was important to me at the time (college, girlfriend) and my aspirations to become a psychologist. Obviously I've changed considerably since then, but it still sounded like me.

I did enjoy hearing what did happen to all of these people whom I did share a lot of time with a decade ago. Some were obviously trying really hard to impress me with how well they've been doing. Most were married or in serious relationships, a few were divorced. I heard the line "I'm just enjoying being single right now" a few times. I was surprised by how many have children, but then ten years ago I did not expect to be a parent myself before I was 30.

By and large the alumni EHS Class of '95 seemed to have settled into their lives and were doing rather well. There were some that still seemed to be searching for themselves... I hope they manage to find what they're looking for by the 20 year reunion in 2015.

The Switch

After using Windows for a decade, I am now the proud owner of a Powerbook. I have had to resist the temptation to get a Mac since I saw screenshots of OS X in 1999 and was enamored with what Apple had been able to do with its UI. Plus I learned to develop on Unix in college, so I was thrilled to learn that OS X had BSD underpinnings.

In the past, my employer has always given me a laptop, but my most recent career moves have left me without one. My last laptop had WiFi, and Becky thoroughly enjoyed having mobile Internet access, so I didn't have to work too hard at convincing her we needed another computer.

I've been a Linux user since 2001, but it was a struggle to use it as my main desktop due to compatibility issues and the lack of good financial software, plus Becky really hated it, so I had to give in and use Windows on my primary machine, and Linux was relegated to my server.

The last straw was a trip I took to the Apple Store and played with iPhoto and iMovie. My newest hobby is taking lots of pictures and video of Kyla, so I was really impressed with this software that comes for free on the Mac which looked better than the stuff I had paid for to run on my PC.

Thus far I have been delighted with my new toy. It's incredibly user-friendly, stable, and has all of the goodies a developer needs. I won't be scouring through Steve Jobs' trash for souvenir toe clippings any time soon, but I am definitely Apple's newest convert.