Category Archives: Personal News

Personal News

Burned Out

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You may have noticed a lack of posts the last few days. This is because I’m a bit burned out. Doing the things that need to be done for buying the house got a bit stressful at the end of last week. Getting people to understand what I needed (which meant first understanding what I was being told I needed), dealing with technical issues, and one hiccup with the deal itself just all coalesced into a major stress cookie (my least favorite kind of cookie, maybe second only to oatmeal raisin) for me.

And then on top of that, we had the fun of trying to get a week or two worth of groceries in a store with many bare shelves and quantity limits on just about everything. I hope stores are able to get restocked soon, because right now, trying to get enough food for any serious length of time (that is, more than a day or two) in order to practice social distancing and/or sheltering in place is a real challenge.

So it may be a few more days before I get back on schedule. Please bear with me.

Personal News

Working from home while working to obtain the new home

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Monday morning, members of the leadership team at work walked around the building and told everyone that they should go home immediately if they did not have to work in the lab. Apparently, they decided that the coronavirus situation here in Rochester merited that kind of action. For at least the next two weeks, we are supposed to work from home as much as our duties allow us. We should only go in to work — and we should get approval from the director “on duty” that day — is when we need to do something in the lab or generally access equipment beyond our work laptops.

Heck, my boss even sent out an email telling us that we should feel free to grab our monitors and bring them home if we feel it will help. I’d do that, but I don’t really have any place to set up another monitor here at the house. Now, if we were int he new house, i’d have some options.

That brings me to the home-buying update. The owner of the house I mentioned in my previous post on the topic accepted our offer. Well, our adjusted offer. We had to go up little bit to edge out the other offer(s). This past Monday, we also did the home inspection. It was an interesting experience. The inspector took us through the whole house and around the grounds. In addition to pointing out things we might want to ask the owner to either fix or give us a credit on — we decided only two rose to that level — he pointed out other, more minor things we might want to take care of ourselves as time and money permits. Lots of preventive maintenance/improvement things. Today, we sent the owner our requests of what we’d like fixed or credit to cover our costs of fixing ourselves. We now have to wait for her agreement or counter-proposal, which would mean further negotiations. But overall things look good and we feel like we’re one more step closer to having our very own place.

Of course, next comes the fun part: Pulling the trigger on the actual mortgage application and going from being pre-approved to being fully approved. After that, it should just be signing a butt-load of checks.

Daily Life, Personal News

House-hunting brain is a thing, right?

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You may have noticed that posts have been a bit spotty and occasionally light. This is because Joe and I are in the process of finding and buying our new home. We just got pre-approved on our mortgage last week and started touring homes with our real estate agent this past Sunday.

It’s been an interesting experience, sorting through the listings to find the ones that we actually even want to look at, then find out which ones already flew off the market while we were making that decision or turned out to be no good upon looking at the details. (I’ve quickly learned that “rehab loan” is code for “run away as fast as you can,” at least if you’re a first time buyer looking for something you can actually move into.) We ended up giving our agent a list of five properties we were interested in checking out. In the end, we ended up seeing three of them, plus a fourth one that just came on the market Saturday evening. By some miracle, she was able to get us in to see that one Sunday as well.

That’s the one we made an offer for. Just twenty four hours after it was even put on the market. Ours isn’t the only offer, either. In fact, the listing agent will present our offer and the other offer(s) (we know there’s at least one) to the seller this evening, who will then give us a final decision. After that, we either learn how to walk through the process that gets us into the home or we start the search again.

The process hasn’t been too terrible, especially now that we have an agent helping us. It’s mostly just a matter of keeping things moving. Responding to emails, texts and calls. Looking at new listings as soon as they are sent to us. Reviewing and digitally signing the offer. And then waiting. The waiting is probably the worst part.

The net result is I’m often mentally exhausted. So posts my be a bit sporadic here, though I do want to keep the momentum going as much as possible.

Gender and Sexuality, Personal News, Politics

personal update 2019/04/13

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[Content Note: Harassment, misogyny, war on agency]

Since I dropped a post on here about a week ago and have been getting a small but steady trickle of traffic, I decided to do a “personal update” post. Especially in case any of my long-time readers (all five of you) are still around.

I’ve actually been wanting to blog more but have been struggling. There are a number of reasons for that. (Have I mentioned that I have a growing and possibly obsessive love of lists lately?)

  1. I’m trying to figure out what my “voice” should be. That is what I want to communicate and share with people.
  2. I’ve struggled with that process because it’s leading me to wonder what I’m really qualified to talk about.
  3. I’ve also struggled with it because it’s leading me to question what i can say that hasn’t already been said better by others.
  4. I’m married now and I need to balance my blogging time with spending time with my Hubby.
  5. Most of what I feel I want to and am qualified to say fits in a tweet or a string of tweets, but would not really make a good blog post (in my opinion at least).

That last point is why I’ve been spending a lot of my time on Twitter and Ive been pretty active over there. In fact, here’s another list (told you I was obsessed with the silly things) I’ve been up to on Twitter.

  1. As I mentioned in my previous post, I made an effort to get Pete Buttigieg, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, to acknowledge how some of his “defenders” are harassing and attempting to silence his critics, particularly those who face oppression in ways Buttigieg does not (nor do I) and speak out against such harassment. At this point, I am declaring my attempt ineffective (other than hopefully making some of those who have been harassed feel seen). I’ve tweeted at him. I’ve emailed the only account I could find associated with his campaign. I just don’t see what more I can do.
  2. After watching people promote the anti-choice propaganda film, “Unplanned,” I started promoting counter-proposal and alternative to seeing the movie. [tweet 1115216412488892416 ]
  3. I’ve been getting much more involved with the exvangelical community and have enjoyed both hearing about other people’s experiences with evangelicalism and sharing in bringing people’s attention to the toxicity of evangelical culture.

On a more personal note — and because I realized I never actually blogged about it — I’ve been a happily married man since August 2016. Hubby (I have not asked his permission to use his name on this blog. He’s a fellow geek, a gamer, and a fellow witch. That last one is absolutely amazing to me, because he was only the second guy I’ve ever dated that was a Pagan (and the other relationship I had with a fellow witch lasted like a week). He’s also given me my first chance to actually play Dungeons and Dragons, and I love it.

So, that’s my life in a nutshell right now. What’s going on with all of you, dear readers?