With Proper Training…

I started writing this post about a month ago, way before I knew what house I was going to be moving into. Originally, “Suburban Home” was included just for the house reference because I was sure we were going to be living in Seattle proper, but now, living on the Eastside still, it seems even more appropriate.
Apologies to everyone out there that was eager to hear about my awesome set of techno music, but this post is about the house I will be buying with Yaeka.

The other day I was thinking about moving into a new house and the first thing I would do. Changing the toilet seats is definitely near the top (actually not anymore, the place we got has been completely remodeled), but the real winner is setting up the stereo and turning it up to a volume you just can’t do in a condo. So now the question is what is on that first set of music you play in a newly purchased house?

Here’s the list in progress (suggestions are definitely welcome in the comments):

• The Descendents - “Suburban Home”
• Blur - “Country House”
• Loretta Lynn - “This Old House”
• Benjamin Gibbard - “You Remind Me of Home”

When you’re jumping, it’s kind of important to have a landing pad. Right now Yaeka and I are in transition and living at her mom’s place. Last Friday was our last day at the Quahndo and it’ll be almost a month (24 days now) until we get moved into our new house. Before I share a picture of the new place (which I’m guessing you’ve already looked at) let’s discuss what I like and dislike about it and just some of the process Yaeka and I went through.

Because we were trying to be flexible with the location allowing ourselves the maximum opportunity to find the ideal home, we spent a full weekend just driving around Lake Washington for 2-3 full days looking at all sorts of places. None of them were really nice since we were being reasonable and looking within our price range, but there were definitely some ghetto places including one located across the street from a trailer park - it’s amazing how little 300K will buy you in Seattle sometimes.

In the end we selected a place in Sammamish, which wasn’t even one of the places we were considering due to it’s less desirable location (closer to 520 which is always the bridge with worse traffic and not even close to any real freeways to begin with). When it comes down to it, the location is really the only thing that I could complain about the place; everything else about it is great. It has a 2-car garage, no shared walls (say hello to rocking out!), 3 bedrooms (now Yaeka and I each get our own space), 2.5 baths, CAT5 wired, stainless steel appliances, gas range, porch, and did I mention no shared walls? I’m seriously considering setting my drumset up. Another cool thing is that it is actually part of a condominium complex, so even though we have the house setup with no shared walls, we still don’t have to worry about taking care of a yard and all that.

I’m sure this is all more interesting to me than it is to you, but if you’re in the Seattle area, let me know and I’ll take you on the grand tour. Maybe I’ll even let you sleep on the couch. Speaking of couches, we spent everyday of Memorial Day weekend driving around looking at furniture stores. I believe we’ve decided on the South Beach model from Ethan Allen. It doesn’t really look that great in the picture on the website, but trust me, it’s a gorgeous and comfortable piece of furniture.

So without further delay, here’s the picture of my new landing pad:

So obviously a week or two ago I changed the theme of this blog. Overall I think the theme, Blix, looks more lively than the standard default Wordpress theme, but there are a couple things I’ve noticed that are bugging me a little bit. The main one is that the link categories are not being used. They are all just mixed together under the single header “Links”. I’m going to try and take a look at some of the template code and get that back to the way I like it soon. We’ll see how long that actually ends up taking.

I hope that one day (in about 8-12 months) I’ll be able to post my own gallery of images like this one of opening a 17″ MacBook Pro. Although I think I’d elect for the smaller 100GB hard drive at 7200 RPM over the 120 GB at 5400 RPM.

As I mentioned before, my copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? is currently packed up. Since I wasn’t planning to do any job hunting until I completed the book it may be a surprise that I have just landed a new job. It’s actually a bit of suprise to me as well.

I found the job on Craigslist and the title, Business Manager In-Training, and industry, tech, appealed to me so I figured why not send in my resume. I didn’t expect to get a response since I hadn’t come across the posting until a full week after it was posted, but it obviously turned out a lot better than I had thought it would.

I’m going to stick with my not naming or linking where I work so I’ll just describe what they do. The company has two main sides to their business, the first is mainly a tech support with field technicians setting up/helping small businesses while the second, and main part of the business, provides web event registration services primarily for Microsoft.

I’m still going to finish up the book once I move and free it from its box, but until then, we’ll see if this job is what I’m meant to do at the moment. First day is on May 15th so job updates will begin then.