Not a Coincidence

I had several electronic devices fail within days of each other. Strangest thing. All the same brand battery. All from the same carton. When the first device failed (a Tivo remote), I thought it was weird because I had only changed the batteries a month earlier. Then, we had a wall clock stop working and I had changed that battery recently. Yesterday, the other Tivo remote and a wireless mouse failed on the same day. Coincidence? I think not.

---

And now a haiku:

Replaced batteries
Multiple devices failed
Explain Rayovac

Cheaper Water Bill

And now a haiku:

Daughter in college
House feels empty without her
Cheaper water bill

Where Animals Go To Die, Part 3

You may want to catch up on part 1 and part 2 before venturing onward.

I recently joined a poker league that is run out of a local bar. There are two tournaments per night. One starting at 6:30, the other around 9:30. Last Thursday, I busted out about 1 hour into the second tournament. I left the bar disappointed and headed home around 10:30pm.

On our front stoop, by the front door, we have a large planter. Since my wife and I are not very good at keeping plant-life living, the only thing in the planter was an empty wicker basket.

As I walked up the stairs toward the front stoop, I noticed something out of place in my peripheral vision. I turned my head and was startled to see a bird perched on the wicker basket.

As a child, my family had a pet parakeet. Because of that, I know that when a bird is ready to sleep, it settles down on its perch and its feather fluff out and can look like a big puff ball. This bird looked like that…like it was getting ready to sleep. However, the bird did not appear to be asleep, since its black eyes were wide open, coldly staring at me.

I would expect that when a human being approaches a bird, that the bird would startle and fly away. However, this bird did nothing. I looked at it and it was frozen like a statue. I moved toward it and the bird did not budge.

I felt like I had to document this, so I took out my phone and got pretty close to it and took a picture. The bird did not flinch. Either this bird has had a particularly tiring day or it was approaching the end of its life. I instantly thought of the cat and the rabbit that died in my yard and thought, “Here we go again!” Is my house built on some sort of Wiccan burial ground? What is it about my house that attracts animals with limited time left?

I gave up on the bird and unlocked the door with my key. I was hoping that when I opened the door, the bird would get scared and fly away (and not into my house). I turned the door knob and opened the door. The bird moved! Just slightly, but it definitely turned its head toward me. It’s alive! At least for now. I went to bed worried about what I would find when I woke up in the morning.

When I woke up the next day, the first thing I did was go downstairs to see if the bird was a) still there, and b) still alive. I slowly tilted the blinds opened and peered down into the basket. The bird was gone! Fortunately, it did not seem to suffer the same fate as the cat or the rabbit. Well…as far as I know. It is certainly possible that a predator got a nice meal in the middle of the night, but there was no evidence of that.

I feel a bit more secure that my house will not be the setting for a Pet Sematary sequel. I truly hope that the bird is ok. I would offer it our house as a resting place any time it wants, but hopefully not its “final” resting place.

---

And now a haiku:

Fluffy and tired
Please just be here for the night
Not for your last breath

Cable card failure

The cable guy came out again today. No one would believe me that the Tivo Series 3 needs 2 cable cards even if one of them is an M-card…until one card only activated one tuner like I said would happen.

When they finally believed me and tried to add the second card, for some reason, it wouldn’t pair.

Then, Time Warner told me something ludicrous about the Tivo, which I confirmed was ludicrous when I called Tivo. Now I have to call Time Warner back to figure it all out. Not fun and a waste of my time.

On the plus side, Time Warner called and I think I will definitely get my tuning adapters tomorrow.

So, now I have one Tivo with two tuners that gets half the channels and one Tivo with one tuner that gets half the channels.

And now a haiku:

Cable card failure
One tuner is not enough
What’s it gonna take?

Cable Card Incompentence

Time has passed since my last post. We are all moved into our new house in Wake Forest. However, the purpose of this post is to bitch about Time Warner Cable. As I feared, the one thing that I would miss the most when I moved from Maryland is my Verizon FiOS service.

The Internet service from Time Warner is not too bad — 30 down and 5 up. Verizon was superior with 35 down and up (and the option for much faster speeds), but I will not complain, since 30/5 seems like it works ok for my purposes.

The TV service is where I am currently having the most issues. Time Warner contracts out their installs, so a tech from Kablelink (which sounds eerily similar to 30 Rock’s fictional cable company Kabletown) came out last Monday. I requested 3 cable cards for my 2 TiVos. In my experience, it seems like every time a tech (from any company Comcast, Verizon, TW) arrives for a cable card install, at least one of the cards is bad. This time was no different. Two of the three cards were bad and, as usual, the tech did not bring any spares.

The tech says that he should have new cards in by Friday and that another tech will come back. A new tech came back on Friday WITH THE SAME TWO CABLE CARDS THAT DID NOT WORK ON MONDAY!! The tech said they should get more this week. I am not holding my breath.

Can I live with one operational TiVo? Of course. Can I live with one operational TiVo that only gets half of the channels that it is supposed to? No, but that is what I am dealing with (First World Problem…I know). I am only getting half of the channel lineup because the tech failed to tell me that Time Warner requires tuning adapters because they use Switched Digital Video — something I never had to deal with before. I called up Time Warner and they supposedly shipped them to me. I am expecting them today, but, again, I am not holding my breath.

Fortunately, everyone at Time Warner and Kablelink have been very pleasant to deal with, so I have refrained from “asking to speak to a manager”. Hopefully, by the end of the week, I will be able to watch the other half of my channels. Fortunately, AMC runs the most recent episode of The Walking Dead many times during the week.

---

And now a haiku:

Cable incomplete
Partial TiVo is like hell
Want to watch zombies

Final Stages of Packing

We are in the final stages of package. I think we’re about 80% done content-wise, but the last 20% of stuff  seems like it is taking longer to pack. The moving trucks come on October 9th, so we have plenty of time. We thought we were going to settle on the new house on October 11th, but it may be Friday, the 12th or Monday, the 15th. I’m not too happy about the delay because I really wanted that weekend to unpack and set up my home office before I have to start working again. We just have to keep telling ourselves that this is a temporary setback and, in a couple of months, we will not even remember the delay.

I think the product of Excitement and Disappointment is stress.

---

And now a haiku:

Packing up the house
Stuffing our lives in boxes
Tape can’t seal it all

Making Tracks

My wife and I went down to NC this week to register our kids for school. The county we are moving to has been experiencing a lot of growth and it has complicated things a bit regarding school assignments. For starters, some schools have year round schedules while some have a traditional school calendar year. We wanted our kids to be on the year round plan. The way it works is that they attend school for 9 weeks and then they are off for 3 – 4 weeks. We did get our kids into a year round school, which I think will be a good experience for them for a few reasons:

1. the kids will retain more information because they will not have the whole summer to forget what they learned
2. this will allow us to visit Maryland more often for longer periods of time
3. this will allow us to take vacations at odd times and avoid crowds

The year round schedule does have its drawbacks. There are 4 “tracks” in each school. They are on rotating schedules, so there are always 3 tracks in and 1 track out. It is possible to have kids on different tracks. If that is the case, our kids would only be off at the same time 2 weeks of the year.

The registration experience was a little nerve racking. Because of the growth, the school you attend may not be the school that is closest to you and it may not even be the same school that your next door neighbor attends. We knew that there was a slim chance of getting the schools closest to us and we were not surprised when we were not able to get those schools. The only bummer is that we were hoping that our daughter would be able to be attend the same middle school as my wife’s cousin’s daughter, who is in the same grade as my daughter. Fortunately, they are on the same track, so they will be out of school at the same time.

Here’s the procedure for registering the kids:

1. Go to the Board of Education
2. Wait
3. Talk to someone who shows you the list of schools near your house
4. Choose a school that has space for your kids – they show you the number of seats available at each school on a computer. I think they do this so you cannot try to beg or bribe the county employee. The computer will not let them assign you to a school that does not have an available seat.  The school that we wanted my daughter to attend had 71 more 7th graders than the school can accommodate.
5. Go to my daughter’s school to see what tracks are open. Fortunately, she will be in a beautiful, brand new school and they are doing a soft opening, so there is only 1 track for 7th grade at her school. By default, she got track 1, which is what we wanted.
6. Go to my son’s school and pray they have an opening for track 1.
7. Panic when we discover that track 1 is full
8. Profusely thank the data manager at my son’s school who talked the principal into letting my son be on track 1
9. Sigh
10. Rejoice

The problem with the registration process is that the board does not have a list of seats per track. For instance, if there are 100 kids allowed in 3rd grade at a school with 4 tracks and there are no seats available, you cannot tell the distribution per track. For all I know:

• track 1 could have 20 kids
• track 2 could have 27
• track 3 could have 27
• track 4 could have 26

Theoretically, track 1 can accommodate 5 more kids, but you cannot tell that when you register your child. If you are resourceful like we are, you can go to the “full” schools and verify that they really are full.

Overall, we think we are happy with the schools are kids will be attending and they are not too far away from our house (2 miles for my son and 4 miles for my daughter).

---

And now a haiku:

School registration
Harder than it has to be
Show my kids their seats

The Stars Have Aligned

People that do not understand the real estate market in the area that I currently live thought we were crazy to think that our house would sell quickly. I stand by my assertion that the only reason it took two months to sell our house was because of our proximity to Route 104. Another house in my neighborhood went on sale about a week ago and it is already under contract.

Our buyer sold their townhouse the first weekend it was on sale, so they lifted their contingency. They have already conducted the home inspection and we have very few items to fix, which I am happy about.

What does this mean? We were able to lift the contingency on the house that we bought. We pretty much came down to the wire on our house. Our contract on our new house expired on 8/30, which is right around the time our buyer dropped their contingency. We actually had three days where we were at risk while we had to sign some additional paperwork to move forward with the new house.

We are currently scheduled to settle on our house here on 10/22. We are trying to get them to move up the date to earlier in the month, so we can move in to our new house and have the kids start school in Wake Forest.  We will see what happens.

---

And now a haiku:

The next chapter starts
Ready for new adventures
The stars have aligned

Going Once, Going Twice, Almost Sold

The couple that had the baby came back. They made us an offer, which would normally make me ecstatic. Unfortunately, the offer is contingent upon them selling their townhouse, which isn’t even on the market yet. The good news is that the offer was very good…even better than we were hoping for. Since they wouldn’t consider withdrawing the contingency and since we really haven’t had any other serious interest lately, we accepted.

Now, we play the timing game. Here are the critical dates:

• 8/20/2012 – The date our buyer’s house is supposed to go on the market. Yes, that is today.
• 8/30/2012 – The date that the contract on our house in NC expires. The builder said that if we have a buyer on our MD house, he will extend the date. I don’t think under contract with a contingency is good enough, but we’re checking.
• 9/17/2012 – The date that our buyer’s contingency expires. By that date, we will know if we actually sold the house.
• 10/5/2012 – The date our rate lock expires on our loan for the new house. Our lender said that we may be able to extend, but we won’t know until we have an actual settlement date.
• 10/22/2012 – The date that our buyer is supposed to settle by assuming they drop the contingency.

The buyer has indicated that they may drop the contingency before their townhouse sells and they say they are financially able to do so. Hopefully, this will all work out to our advantage.

---

And now a haiku:

So close yet so far
The timing is everything
The stars must align

Close Calls

I’ve lost count of the number of days our house has been on the market. I could look it up, but I’m sure the number will depress me.

It looks like we have no choice but to re-enroll our kids in school here, since there’s no chance we’ll be out before the start of school. While my kids are happy to see their friends again, moving in the middle of the school year is not what I had in mind. The way things are going, it’s possible they could get through the whole school year here.

We had another showing last week where the feedback was:  “The house shows very well. Buyer is concerned about the noise from the very busy road.”

I don’t know what is typical, but we’ve had a lot of close calls during this process.  The first week that the house was on the market, we had two interested buyers say they were going to make an offer, but both changed their minds.  We had two couples where the wife was ready to make an offer, but the husband was hesitant.

The latest:  a couple saw the house about a week ago. Their feedback was very positive and their agent indicated that they wanted to write an offer. The problem is that the wife is pregnant and they needed to figure out the timing of everything. The wife, unexpectedly, had the baby two days later. Their agent still says they are interested, but I can’t imagine trying to organize a move with a brand new born. We moved into this house when my son was 4 months old, which wasn’t easy, but was doable. A brand new born and I think this is their first child, so who knows what their state of mind is like right now. Hopefully, they’ll get into a routine quickly and decide they need to raise their child in our home.

My fingers are crossed, but I’m not holding my breath.