Tag: home ownership is not for the faint of heart

The Monday Review

On By BekkiIn The Weekly Review3 Comments

1. This.

2. 2106 5, A&B 0.  So far, 2016 has pretty much kicked our asses.  A’s mystery bug was finally diagnosed as post-infectious gastritis, which is a fancy way of saying he got food poisoning so bad it seriously messed up his GI tract.  We’ve had the plumber out twice so far, once for a leak that had water cascading into the basement and once because the garbage disposal backed up into the bathtub. The roof needs to be replaced when the rain stops. The garage door broke, and because there’s no other entrance we had to call a repair company to get us in. So if I’m not managing to blog as regularly as usual, it’s probably because we’ve had another crazy week.

3. I’m making the Facebook hiatus semi-permanent. About a month ago, I uninstalled the app from my phone. I’ll admit, it made me a little twitchy at first. I’d gotten used to having those dopamine pings, in the form  of the constantly scrolling news feed. But when it comes down to it, there’s very little of substance in my feed. Back in the days of the 140 character limit, people posted less, and posted more meaningfully.  Now, it’s largely click-bait and life events.  So I log on every couple of days, to catch up on photos and announcements – and thanks to Facebook’s algorithms, they’re almost always at the top – make a few comments, like a few photos, and log off.

4. Austerity month. After seeing the credit card spend for December and January, A and I decided to make February “austerity month.” Our goal is not to go crazy with not spending money, but to hold off on the impulse buys that always end up adding up at the end of the month. Like the Target runs that somehow top $100, or the never-ending Amazon cart. Of course, given the spend on house repair and maintenance this month, it’s looking like we may be trying for an austerity quarter. What I’ve found interesting is that this has made me very aware of all the things I want but don’t really need, like new shades for the ceiling fixture in the office, or a laptop/camera bag, or another pair of sunglasses.

5. This is what Valentine’s Day looks like when you have a toddler. A and I dropped Z with the sister after her nap on Saturday and went to go see Zoolander. In a theatre. With actual other people. Then we came home and promptly fell into bed. Sunday morning we slept in. Until 7 am! We went to IHOP for breakfast, looked at the calorie count next to all the dishes, and split a breakfast sampler. Then we yard-worked for a few hours. The rest of the day was pretty much spent sitting on the couch.

Closing Tabs

An exploration of the rise and fall of waterbeds.

OK Go’s new video takes place in an S7 airplane, in zero-g, and it is every bit as cool as it sounds.

I bookmarked this article on parenting a toddler awhile ago, and recently found it while cleaning out my bookmarks. The advice in here is spot on, at least for my kid, and I’ve found that turning things into games or “contests” has made life easier for both of us.

I’m seriously thinking about going to this writer’s retreat. It’s short, it’s nearby, and it’s fairly affordable.  Bay Area writer friends, any interest?

The Monday Review

On By BekkiIn The Weekly Review1 Comment

1.   The mystery bug.  A’s doing better than he was a week or two ago, but this thing just doesn’t want to quit. The official diagnosis from the doctor was “I’m stumped” – he suggested it may be a 7-10 day virus. Rare, but not unheard of. It’s now been 16. I’m not sure what’s next… More tests maybe, or more time. It would be nice to have a diagnosis, a neatly labeled way to understand what’s going on.
Continue reading “The Monday Review” →

The Monday Review

On By BekkiIn The Weekly Review2 Comments

1. The holidays wrecked me. This was the first year that I felt completely over-scheduled during the holidays. We packed in a ton of family and friends time over Christmas and in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, with something going on almost every day.  By the time we got to New Year’s, I was frazzled and fried and pretty much wanted nothing more than to go to sleep at 8 pm.  I’m not sure there’s anything different we could or would have done – I think that’s just the reality of life with a small kid.  I do know that I’m really excited that I’m going to vacuum the house this afternoon.

2. Smarter than the house. The Philips Hue bulbs are going back to Best Buy. I’m a bit sad about this.  I can’t tell you how much we liked having the ability to change the tone of the bulbs throughout the day, from warm yellow early in the morning to a bluer, daylight color in the afternoon, and back to warm yellow at night. The color part was fun too, although it was hard to get anything to match the color wheel in the green/blue/purple spectrum. Apparently Philips traded in the ability to do true blues for the ability to have more flexibility with whites.* That isn’t why they’re going back, though.  As I mentioned last week, Philips has closed down their ecosystem so that it no longer works with most bulbs or other smart things. In the end, that’s a deal-breaker for us.  I think we’ll be switching to a combination of Z-wave dimmers and Lifx bulbs, and possibly some Hue knock-offs A found on Alibaba.

3. The year of tracking. This is the first year I’ve collected and reviewed stats for the year. I definitely want to do it again, in a somewhat principled manner.  And because it’s easier to decide to do something in early January than it is to actually do it throughout the year, I want to make it simple. That means finding apps that run continually in the background, without me having to do anything about it (Google locations, UP by Jawbone) or that have a ridiculously simple user interface (Clue, the non-pink period tracker).  I’m still searching for a good travel app, and I’d love to see a life tracker type app that let’s me track the “everything else.”

4. I would really like to buy a house with a roof that doesn’t leak. We noticed a wet patch in the ceiling on Christmas Eve, right under one of the solar panels.  The solar company sent someone out to look at it immediately, and he was awesome.  He got all the way into the back of the crawlspace (which is maybe two feet high), poked around, went up onto the roof, did a bit more poking around, figured out where the leak is coming in, and put a temporary patch on it. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the solar panels, which means that the solar company won’t cover it.  On my to-do list today:  calling roofers. If you live around here and have a roofer you like, please please please send me their contact info.

5.  We’re taking a toddler to Mexico for week.  I have researched toddler activities (whale watching on a pirate ship! a semi-submersible submarine!), found not one but two babysitting agencies that cater to tourists, and (mostly) penetrated the Mexican rental car thicket. We also bought Z a tapper of her own, a 7″ tablet that will be much less expensive to replace when she breaks it than either of our phones. She’s not one of those kids who will stare quietly at a screen for three hours, but I figure it’s probably good for 30 minute stretches of semi-self entertainment.  Anyone have recommendations for good toddler games?  Especially games that lock the screen so she can’t inadvertently exit out?

Closing Tabs

Questionable Advice and Advertisements put up a fun pie chart of New Year’s resolutions from 1946.

T-mobile isn’t throttling you, you’re just being down-graded.  For all practical purposes, I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction to be made. You’re still getting lower-quality service because we haven’t yet figured out who’s in charge of paying for the Internet.

Season Six of Game of Thrones will be out before The Winds of Winter.  Considering that I stopped around Season 4 of the HBO series, largely because I couldn’t take all the senseless violence any more, I’m not much troubled by this. In happier news, here’s a teaser for season two of Outlander.

CNET compared Philips Hue bulbs to Lifx, and the difference between the two is pretty telling.  If we weren’t already planning to switch, this might have convinced us.

Question of the Week

I got this new poll app, but someone mentioned last week that they were having trouble answering.  I think I’ve got it figured out now, but let me know offline or in the comments if it’s still broken.

[yop_poll id=”8″]

“Welcome to the Jungle”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

In case you’ve wondered where I’ve been for the past few months, the answer is that life has simply been chaos.  A and I are in the process of buying a house, which has got to be both the most terrifying and the most bewildering thing we have ever done.  So far, the process has contained a great number of “two steps forward, one step back” moments.  The broker and the lawyer don’t seem to think there’s anything extraordinary about the lack of progress.

Meanwhile, because our lease ended at the end of September, A and I have been moving from sublet to sublet.  We spent October in Ridgewood, which is this cute little neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.  By the time I’d finally figured out how to direct taxi drivers to the place, the hurricane hit and the midtown tunnel closed.  By the time I figured out the directions for going over the Queensboro bridge, it was time to move.

We’re now up in Harlem, in a ground level apartment that A has taken to calling the “Love Palace” because the living room has five couches and pictures of naked people on the walls.  It’s steam heated, which means that when the heat is on, it is ON, at which point we call the apartment the “Love Jungle.”

No idea where we’ll be next month.

In other news, we’re planning to head back to the Bay for part of January.  Because nothing says “tropical vacation” like San Francisco in the rainy season.