long time no see-well lots to catch up on, so let’s get right in to it shall we?

so, as i mentioned the house closed and this past friday we closed/settled. i tell you the final number on the sheet stung a bit, but not as much as 2 mortgages. well, i take that back, we’re about 4k short on our bridge loan, but hopefully we can figure something out. while i’m greatly appreciative that the moons and stars and all that aligned for use to sell a house in less than 10 days in this market, i’m sick of people tell me how luck we were, and even more sick of people saying “well obviously it was priced right”–

yes we’re lucky, and no it wasn’t priced properly, they still low balled us but 15 k on our asking price that was 9 k lower than we actually wanted to list at. granted we got about 3.5k back in bargaining, so in the end, they beat us up a bit. but i suppose karma is a bitch, as we beat up the people we bought from. and will it may have been ‘priced right’ and it sold i’m still pissed we didn’t make more on it, cuz of the sucky market. ok there i got that off my chest, i feel better ,ok i don’t but lets pretend i do ,ok.

last weekend we did the annual trip to the renn fest. this was a particularly good year as the capt seemed to really enjoy it, he clue’d in to the freak show element of it as well as the wonders of ‘all food on a stick’ and really enjoyed the jousting. other than that, i have to say it was basically the same thing as all the other years. which is not to say bad. just the same.

this past weekend, right after the weight of a house was taken off my neck, we got some sort of hurricane offshoot or something, and as near as i can caluculate got about 9 inches of water over 36 hrs. (at least that’s how much was in the previously empty recycle bin.

much of that water flowed every so naturally from the front of our yard in to our basement, some through seepage, some through a hole in the foundataion under a 60 year old window. the water would then rush down the foundation wall and then behind the panelling, finally out on the floor. after a few hours of soaking up the water with towels that we wrung otu in to an empty tote container, i finally got pissed and went after the panels, to see where all this shit was coming from. hours later, i figured it out, was covered in mud and was about to try to stop the leaking with my beloved spray foam insulation.

suddenly the deja vu hit me. i was right back to our first winter in the old house, can of foam in hand, trying to fix all problems. cursing my words “next house we buy something where people have lived–so i don’t have to deal with this sort of shit”. instead of depolying the foam i went to home depot.

there was a gathering of men around the sump pumps at the depot. seems others were having some flooding problems as well. unlike the others that were getting pumps to drain their basements, i was actually trying to get something to drain the 1+foot of water that gathered directly in front of the window with the leak right beneath it. all oh 6000 gallons of water wanting to drain to lower ground, in this case, the lower ground was my fucking basement.

i got one, as well as some more corrugated drainage tubing, some redi lock hydraulic cement, and some other shit and headed home.

with the capt’s supervision, i was able to drain out the window well, then some of the standing water wanting ot get to the window well and mix up some cement and sorta patch up the hole beneath the “window”. then back down to get the rest of the water up and pray for sun.

ah home ownership.

baby 2.0 is doing well, for those of you keeping score at home. due date is halloween, natty and i are still working over birth/logistic plans-see, working 1.5 hrs away (give or take) and then planning on delivering in a birthing center 1 hr away from the house makes for some interesting contingency planning. interesting indeed.

i thinki may have mentioned that after we moved in to the new place, we put in a 5k fence to keep mr. henry in his new, semi wooded and wonderful yard. he then systematically tested every inch of said fence to figure out ways to get out. after about the 9th time, i laid out 300 bucks for a do it yerself invisible fence kit. after much himming and hawwing, i laid the wire (you don’t techincally have to bury it–who knew?) then weeks when by as we tried to find time to train him on it. so then finally, one saturday, in a fit of enthusasim, i put on the collar, and run him toward the wire, waiting for the beep, to know when to pull him back and praise him accordingly. well, little did i realize that the collar shipped with the active ‘zap’ prongs on it, not the training ones. so henry got a jolt, and judging from his reaction, a pretty big one. (whooops)

long story short- he won’t even go in to the lower, larger yard AT ALL now. so 2 fences, no dog. fucking jefke.com classic, no?

he’s all depressed now to. fucking perfect.

so lets see, what’s been new. last week was hell week at work, i was involved in putting on something of a mini convention, that was overlayed on another, bigger convention, as well as there was something of a meeting day with the members of the group that i sorta helped build over the last 2 years.

so i stayed down here in DC and natty and the capt came down for a couple nights. one of which natty and i went to a fancy pants dinner, it was nice, overall the week was exhausting. i cant think of a time where i was so tired that either coffee, diet coke or booze couldn’t wake me back up, except for last week. i think i’m. getting. old.

saturday night after a concert by a large folksy artist i won’t mention there was the staff after party, when semi required to dance by the president of the group with which i primarily work, i, you guessed it, brought the moves. catching most of my coworkers off guard, which is how i like it. oh trust me, me dancing is a sight to behold. not necessarily a good one. but i’ll say this-no one can accuse me of not givein ti my all. just think of the ellen dance, on crack, mixed with the humpty dance. oh, its dead sexy, i’m telling you

new house is still the new house, natty is working diligently to unpack stuff, i think she’s hit the nesting stage. the onus falls on me to get a lot of crap that i threw together without rhyme or reason at the end there sorted out. bleck.

old house came through inspection pretty well, we have some odds and ends to fix-and we need to clear out the basement, which is more shit that i need to do. what was the phrase ‘bleck’ got word today the house appraised suffciently and the loan is all good. so we’re cruizing to the 26th for settlement. that’s right. bitches.

kiddette 2.0 seems to be doing well, natty is squarely in the tired/uncomfortable stage. last monday we went down to the birthcenter she wants to use for our ‘dress rehersal’ bascially it was a bunch of people sitting in a room for an hour. after the house, and work and all that shit, i think it was the first time that i actually realized that we’re gonna have another kid, like in the house, for ever (well you know what i mean). natty’s gonna go in to labor and we’re gong to get in a car and drive an hour and do what it takes to deliver the kid and then take the kid home and then we’ll ahve 2 kids. oh sure it’s been 7 months, i shoudl have digested all this before, but well, i hadn’t. gulp.

we’ll figure it out. i guess.

ok kids, i don’t want to pull somethign on the first time back out on the blog, so i’ll cut it off there.

have a good weekend.

actually before i go, i should say a couple words about the fall of an idol, or a idle or something, late last month, ACW hung up his blogging hat, i can totally understand-there come s a point where being a super genius gets tiring (oh shut up you, you come back here for a reason-and it’s not the nudie pics)  and while it’s a damn shame it’s a sign o the times people, when facebook makes it easier to tell people that you just took a shit than to post up a honest article/journal entry, it’s clear the times they are a changing. yeah i’m talking about tweeting, or twittering or twatting or whatever its called. i’m happy to say i’ve been at this crap since 2000 (for the life of me i can’t the find the original posts before 9/11-weird, damn bin laden!) so i feel like to a certain extent i’ve fully played out this whole movement. i evolved with everyone else…hand (dreamweaver) coded site i manually set up, figured out movable type, went to a hosted service (typepad) went back to my own hosting account (dnn then WP) and now it’s all gone. sniff, blogging, i loved you so.

well i’ve never been one that actually hopped on a new trend. so as far as i can, i’m gonna keep the dream alive…..

ARE YOU WITH ME?

fine then….dicks.

• i actually traded in my corporate whore wings to go work for the DFTU client. i can’t get in to the details but it was a long, painful, stressful process. but tis over now. i’m no longer a consultant. i dunno if any of you care but it’s a big big big deal. ok not really. but whatever. anyway, i have a real job now, ok that’s not true, the shit i’ve been doing for the last 2 years is now somewhat more offical. go me.
• natty’s pregnant. i hinted toward that in the last post, uh 3 months a go or whatever. well here it is, she’s preggers and i’m the goddamned father. err well at least i think. she’s at 17 weeks tomorrow and just getting out of the pukey, i hate the world especially you jefke phase. it seems the wow i’m huge and this really sucks phase is already starting. apparenlty baby 2.0 likes his/her space and is trying to set up a condo in there. what’s that saying? if men had to have the kids there’d be none. damn. fucking. straight.
• we have a realtor coming by the house on saturday. kid 2.0 calls many things in to question, firstly our 14.5 ft wide house. it’s fuckign small kids. oh sure, people raise 22 kids in a studio appartment in queens. yay, good for them, jefke don’t rock that. so we have 2 choices. either add on to our house (which is fairly doable) or move. adding on will be a process similar to pregnancy, but this time i’ll be feeling the physical pain. adn will not be done by the time 2.0 arrives. moving will suck big ass, as we’d need to ’stage’ and sell our house. then actually move, and hten fix the new house. fucked on both fronts if ask me. a dp of badtimes. but somethign has to change. ok well maybe not. but perhaps. we’re entertianing both scenarios.
• the subie, while all that and a bag of old school taco flavored doritos, is a gas hog (yes i needed the goddamned turbo, fuck you) and actually doesn’t have that much space in the end. espcically for the air craft carrier sized double storllers natty is looking at. so on top/instead/or never, we are considering the jump to the mini van. yes, i understand people have 2 kids in a camry. they’re idiots. we have a dog and 3 cats and lots of shit. we neeed a big car. get over it.

so that’s pretty much teh update. i have heartburn and i’m getting my sympathy fat groove on.

so, yeah. that’s my update.

love and kisses

jefke

right

it’s tuesday, i’ve always felt tuesday has sort of gotten the shaft. i mean it’s pretty benign, sandwiched between the dreaded monday and oft maligned ‘hump’ day. tuesday is the jan brady of the week. not sure where i’m going with this. but anyway…

let see, what’s new. well not all that much. really.

commuting sucks. it took a year for me to get sick of it, but it has officially happened. the stupid trains dont’ run on time, and i’m sick of getting home so late. there i said it. otherwise life at the DFTU client is pretty quiet. i have  a big ass, widowless office to myself (though i still have a playschool desk) the project i am managing requires about 20 hrs of work a week, at the most. the other stuff they have me doing is another 5 hrs, or so. so there’s a fair amount of free time.they want me on site  40 hrs a week in case something comes up, hey i shouldn’t complain. i’d trade busy days for not leaving the house though. oh well grass is always greener.

we headed up to my parent’s compound this weekend for visit. it’d been a long time since we were up there and now that natty has free time on the weekends we can do such things. we decided with some prompting from my folks to take the train up. and i have to say, except for hauling the capt’s car seat around, it was rather pleasant. apparently, we also sidestepped a huge delay on the hutch on friday, so really, you can’t beat that. The visit was short and pleasant, the capt seems to have a natural ability to butter up my parents. not a bad skill to have-certainly one i never had, tee hee.

life at the fort is quiet, i seem to have lost all my gardening skills and have really gotten good at killing plants that i am trying to help/move/care for. that sucks. mr. henry has had some health issues. his shoulder was hurthing him again, so 300 bucks at 3 prescriptions later, he’s back in good form. well an there you have it. you’re up to date.

write some comments–lazy people!

so while superpatio has techincally be done for over a week and a half now, there are still some issues-the 15 bags of sand that were in the yard, there was grading to be done to backfill up to the patio, oh and the fucking huge pile of dirt–can’t forget that. all in all it was starting to get me down. the patio guys kept giving me the “oh well we’ll be around in a few days to pick up the sand” story (why again is the dirt my responsibility?) and i was getting antsy, so after about 2 years of talking about it. I got up early, trucked on up to home depot and rented a slit seeder. i know i’ve mentioned this before, and have false started on this like 10 times, but i assumed a slit seeder would be the machine that woudl answer all my lawn renovation prayers–a machine that magically makes little cuts in the ground and then inserts grass seed in to said cuts–pretty much ensuring they’ll grow…man what could be better? really, what?

so i get there, at like 6:50 or so, and i ask if i can rent a slit seeder, the guy says sure and we go adn he gets this shiny red machine, with a bin on the front. the bin, it appears, just drops something on the ground…I should have stopped right there–shoulda just left. but no, not me, i was too excited for my climatic slitseeding.

so we walk through the whole ID/creditcard thing, and i say–yeah sure gimme it for the 4 hour window (yeah, like i was gonna get it back in 4 hrs) and we struggle to get in the subie and i went and got some seed and shit and was off. in no time i was back home and scraping my shins unloading the thing into the alley to come through the useless double gate. i then helped wiht the capt for a while and then headed back outside. the first thing to do was to mow the lawn, then try to get as much shit off of it as possible. then adn only then i fired up the seeder. and quickly my dreams fell apart.

you see, what i was able to later confirm was, yes–the thing i rented is an overseeder, which is bascially a power rake with a seed spreader bolted on. and yes, in theory the tines or whatever are under the fucker, do mess up the soil and i suppose the seed that is comign out of the spreader could in theory make it in to the soil–but there is no PENETRATION err, sorry, no INSERTION,, um, of the seed.

what’s interesting, ironic, in a alanis sorta way, is that teh ground was so dry the think couldnt’ dig in the soil, which is exactly the opposite of why the ground got all torn up to begin with. ok not so interesting to you, but it ws for me. so for about 20 mins, i was dragged around the yard by this thing, man did it not like rocks–sparks and shit flying everywhere. i guess that was sorta funny.

so the plan was to pack up the captain and we’d all go to return the beast. now everything takes time when the capt is involved, so after this and that, i was 2 pm before we were even close to heading to the store–i then loaded the thing in to the subie. I made a ramp out of soem wood and it worked really well, too well in fact. i got the thing up in to the car so quickly that i couldn’t remember how i packed everything in originally. but that was just i minor problem. then up to the store. natrually the capt fell asleep in the car, and you know, never wake a sleeping baby so we drove to a quite spot at the edge of the parking lot. once we stopped moving, the fumes from the beast got a little overwhelming. so natty asked if i could get the thing out with out waking the boy–i didn’t think so, but hell i’d give it a try. funny thing is , that we were naturally at the other end of the parking lot from the rental door.

So i lifted the thing out ok–but couldn’t really get ti on the ground, with out sacreficing my shins.

there’s something very pure about shin pain. maybe it’s b/c there’s just a few layers of skin between the bone and whatever you bang into…it’s just a pure almost shit yourself pain. it’s blazingly intense for about 30 seconds and then it’s just a dull ache for about 20 more, then is goes away until the next day, when if you bump anything, you pant leg, anything, you want to cry. good times.

so i then wheeled the machine over to the proper doorway and proceeded to wait 15 mins to be checked in. naturally i had forogtten the little plastic overwrap cover thinging that goes on the seeder part, and the douche bag at the counter gave me this speech that he could do me a favor and check the machine in now, to stop teh billing, but techincally it’s not complete and since he couldn’t rent it out again–well it was still mine. ok great, back home and then back up to HD. you’d think i’d be in heaven.

well i wasn’t. i was annoyed. no one to blame but myself. but i was annoyed. i asked the guy–ok how much does it cost i mean, can i just pay you for it (i figured another 30 miles or so in the subie back and forth –gas at 3.30/gallon i would have spent 10 bucks to avoid the hassel). nope can’t look that up.

ok can i bring it tomorrow, and i got that “oh geez man, i mean i am doing you a favor”  ok fuck it. i got myself more grass seed (since i didn’t even get enough earlier, and got some change and got hotdogs from the hotdog cart–

aside: i dunno who the 16 year old chicks in the hotdog cart are expecting to see, but they get all slutted up to sell fat old men (such as myself) hotdogs as we try to extend our time out of the house and feel like we’re actually hunter gatherers and out getting shit for our tribe. i mean sure, it makes sense show a little skin, maybe get some tips. but that said, dont’ give me the “ohh man, another short unshaven, sunburned and dirty (litterally covered with dirt, and err well scumbaggy too, i guess) this sucks” look. i mean who are they expecting? anyway

so went back to the car, offered natty one of my dogs (and she took it! doh!) and stragerzied about what to do, the plan became this-drop her and the capt off at target and then go get the thingy, return it, then pick them up. sounds like a great plan. so we did it, and it worked (ha, bet you didn’t see that coming).

so, lets say i returned the thing at like 4:45 (the 2nd time)–it was at that time i looked at the 4 other “overseeders” and the 2 ‘power rakes’ and figured out the difference–well anyway. when we finally got home after dropping a LOT of money at target, there was a message from home depot on the voicemail

 err, mr. XXXXlastname pronouced incorrectlyXXX?
um, i have here that you’d said you’d bring the cover back and well it’s 4:30 and
you haven’t brought the cover back and well, i dunno what to say but you said that you’d bring it back and well we would like you to bring it back so we can rent the machine–
if someone comes in and wants it, well we’d have to charge you b/c we can’t rent is like this. so, either call or bring back the cover, ok?

really? so they turn a machine around right away–instead of renting out the 5 they have that are just sitting there? fuckers 

blah blah blah, did more work sunday on the yard, then went to some spring fesitival a couple towns over and well, saw a whole mess of very fat people in very tight clothes. i’ve covered it before, and frankly it bores me. so much that i just don’t want to leave the house. i’m not disgusted, i’m not offended (fully) just completely bored by it. stop being fat, or stop wearing lycra based clothing. please. for the love of god. just stop.

 I will say this, i dunno if people were saying this about me in 1990, but i’m glad that i tried to be a semi punk rocker when i was young rather then the way kids do it now. sure i worn a leather jacket and really stupid combat boots all the time (still have them great boots) but man at least i didnt’ have to wear pants the size of tents with all sorts of zippers, rings and doodads all over them. seems like a pain in the ass to be alterna (90’s term). anyway lets wrap up

/end recap.