ljplicease | events

It has been a while since I wrote anything here with any meat to it. So I went back to see what the last thing that I really wrote about. It was when my brother and sister came to visit at the end of June. There was this crazy storm that knocked the power out. Or I should say there was this crazy power operator named Pepco that couldn't keep the lights on in a little wee bit of a storm. I've been lately glued to the election predictions, although that is diminishing now that the outcome is more or less known. Is it a sure thing? I kid. There was a brief respite in that whole poll watching thing when Sandy came through our neighborhood. It looked like it might hit us bad since it was headed directly for us, but it glanced up slightly and spun through Baltimore instead, and the worst of the damage (as probably you are aware) was up north in New Jersey and New York. Everyone we know seems to be okay in the aftermath, the second relief once you are sure that it missed you by a comfortable margin.

Work is pretty awesome. I spend my time working on various Perl distributions for NASA. We share our code as open source through CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). I even have a few of my own distros on CPAN now. It makes me happy, and it is more or less the complete opposite of working at NetCon^[1]. One day Brian showed me around the clean rooms at Goddard. I saw where they are putting together the James Webb Space Telescope, which is going to look like an honest to goodness James Bond villain Death Ray out of the 1970s. The room they are building it in is the largest clean room in the hemisphere, large enough to hold two shuttle loads one of the informational panels helpfully informed. Not that it will be working on shuttle loads anymore. There was also this huge centrifuge which they appear to be using for storage now. When The Right Stuff came out I saw it about a million times with anyone who would take me. Now I work at NASA. It sounds more exciting than it is, but it is still exciting in a Perl/Computer nerd kind of way.

Our apartment complex has been warning for a while that we would be responsible for paying utility bills, so it wasn't much surprising that they were “altering the deal” as Darth Vader said, when it was time for us to renew our lease. The wanted us to pay utilities and they were raising the rent (again) in excess of the county executive recommendation. Obviously unfair, but again not really surprising given the dealings that I have had with apartment complexes in the past. If they had cut us a deal on the rent, instead of just dealing us a double whammy then I am pretty sure that inertia would have set in and we would have stayed there another year. So I think it was a good thing that it spurred us to look for a house (!) yes really.

We settled on a nice little town that wasn't too bad a commute for either of us and looked at a few places when we found a nice little three bedroom townhouse walking distance from the shops and restaurants. Made an offer / counter offer / counter counter offer and eventually accepted. We were and are excited. The seller caused some stress when he refused to fix any of the repairs that we requested (I did not expect him to agree to all of them, but was surprised that he was so inconsiderate to refuse all of them). We decided the house was still a good deal and went forward. Then when we asked for access to the house so that the contractor could give us an estimate (since after all we had to do all the repairs now), he refused even that minor courtesy. He clearly needs therapy and/or a stronger prescription. For a while I became sorry that we hadn't walked away when he refused to make any repairs, but in a fortunate reversal the selling agent had talked her client into giving us access. It wasn't the most convenient access, but it did let the contractor in so that we could get an estimate and order materials. Today was supposed to be our closing date, but there was some hiccup in the paper work which was not the fault of the seller or of ours, and now we are closing on Friday. Our lending agent said that he'd give us a break on the closing costs (an significant one too) as an apology for the mix-up, which was nice. The seller was apparently livid. I was surprisingly calm given the stress and tension that the process had provided up until that point. I'm moderately confident that things will be good.

Last weekend we went up to New Jersey since Lena had been missing her family, and had missed several trips up there recently due to illness and then Sandy. We played at the arcade in Redbank and then went to Brooklyn to meet her new nephew who was five days old at the time. When we got back we went to see the new James Bond flick. Everyone was looking more than a wee bit tired and had “how did you talk me into this” written in their faces. I tried to rally the troops, and I think afterword everyone agreed it was a pretty good film. Week before that we went to see Wreck-It Ralph which I really enjoyed for all the retro awesomeness.