• 3 bedrooms
• 2 bathrooms
• <30 minutes from work
• Move-in condition or little work
• In our price range

With all that we are hearing about the housing crash and it being such a buyers market you would think that it would be easy to find something.  But, it still wasn’t.  This area of the US is less affected by the sub prime crap that happened becuase most of the houses around here are 500k or more and typically over 1M.  So, the people who can afford those prices are the ones least bothered by sub prime loans.  Or, at least their houses are.  I haven’t seen much of a dip in price in a lot of the houses around here.  We did get about 30k off the price of our condo, and that was after the sellers had dropped 20k already.  They had moved to FL and were pretty desperate to sell since they now had two mortgages.  So, we did get a decent price on the place, and we had enough left over to actually put furniture in it, but let me tell you, buying a house is something I don’t want to do again for a long time.  Dealing with all those people and spending all that money really wore Jen and I out.  We were at each others throats for a little while the stress was so high.  And after moving in I started to feel a little buyers remorse, which didn’t help matters.  After moving in, we noticed a lot of road noise coming from the street outside and that it was pretty humid in the house.  And, we also thought we might have a leak in the upstairs bathroom since the paint on the ceiling in the kitchen was peeling.  So, we called a plumber and he cut a whole in the ceiling and then proceeded to tell us that we didn’t have a leak.  I believed him because after he left, I put my hand up there and didn’t feel any moisture either.  What it turned out to be is that the people who did the drywall for the renovations on the house were frikking idiots.  They cut too many corners.  The drywall didn’t meet another piece of drywall at a joist, they connected in midair, so after a while the drywall tape just bubbled out and cause the paint on the ceiling to look like it was wet.  Ugh…  well, I ended up patching the drywall up myself, but it isn’t repainted yet.  Someday we will get to it, but the spackle is white and you can’t see it unless you really look for it since it’s on the ceiling so we’ve left it.  We then speant I don’t know how many weekends cleaning up the basement and then patching it with concrete, caulk and drylok paint.(Another sign of the contractor’s laziness and how old the house is, we found a ton of debris under the floor in the basement such as coffee cups and paper towel rolls)  But, after all of that we are now comfy in our house.  I feel like I live here now and that this is home.  I know where my dunkin donuts is, I know where the grocery store is and we saw a movie in the small (2 screens) theater in town yesterday.  (Tropic Thunder, it was pretty good…)

Other than the house and house related items we haven’t done too much.  We went to DC to Jen friends birthday party.  It was held at a wine festival.  The weather was great and the hotel we were in was super fancy.  It had a golf course and something like 5 pools.  It was the off season so we got a deal on the room.  Then, last week I was in LA for Siggraph.  It was great to see a couple of my friends again, but sadly it was a working trip.  So, I had to spend much of my time either working the booth or looking at resumes and such.  The worst part was the flight home, I was scheduled to land at JFK at 8:30 but I didn’t get in until 2am.  We had to circle over NJ for about 2 hours because of a thunderstorm.  Oh well, I can’t blame the airlines though, what can they do about the weather?  I would have liked to have seen Josh and Wil and Davy some more while out there but everyone’s schedule was all out of whack.  Oh, we did get to go to Toronto for a hockey tournament I played in.  We won our division of the HNA here in NY but got stomped in Canada.  We didn’t have all our players though as not everyone could make the games, so we were at a disadvantage.  It was nice to see Canada again and I think it might have been Jen’s first time.  If not, it had been a while for her too.  I think we have pictures of most of these things I’ve mentioned so I’ll try to post them soon if Jen hasn’t put them on her site yet.  Well, I’d love to write more but it’s about 2:30 am and I am tired.  So, I think I’ll watch some Olympics and then hit the sack.  Hope to update again soon!

 Well, my OT has finally seemed to have come to an unceremoneous end.  No trumpets, no champange, nothing.  Just me going home at 6.  It’s strange, we got home, ate some dinner, watched a movie and then some cable and it’s now only 10:15!  It’s going to be strange getting used to this again.  Good thing I have so many video games to play.

 Oh, one other thing that sorta incited this post was Trygve emailed me :)  I want to try and keep in touch with all my old friends because it’s sad that I’ve lost track of people that were so close not even that long ago.  I sent an email to 3 friends from school a couple days ago just to see what was up and how everyone was doing but I haven’t heard anything back at all.  Guess I’ll have to fly out to CA to get some face time or something…  Oh, tried to write my old frind Hunter (who’s now in Florida) but we are both pretty busy.  And, also, trying to keep up with my bro.  It was his birthday last week and he got himself an iPod touch.  I got him some best buy gift cards but holy crap!  The site said it would take 1 day to get there and I believed it.  I mean, they’re basically postcards, how long could it take?  2 frikkin weeks!  So, my poor bro couldn’t wait any longer for the cards and went ahead and got the ipod before they arrived.  Well, I guess he can use them to buy Apple giftcards and then get some tunes/videos to put on it!

On the topic of work, we are still unsure about where we will be moving to, or not moving to.  Supposedly, we are down to 2 options, a building north of Greenwhich CT or staying where we are.  CT offers alot of tax incentives to the company and the building seems pretty nice.  The only problem is that it is very difficult to get to for people without a car.  Most of you might be thinking, “Well, who doesn’t have a car?”.  Well, strangely, I think a lot of our employees don’t.  Being that at least a third of the company lives in NYC, most of them take mass transit and have no need for a car.  In fact, it doesn’t really make sense to have one in the city.  It costs a ton to insure one, maintain it and park it that it’s not really worth it.  So, management would have to figure out some way to get the city people to the new building.  We currently do have a shuttle but I hear it’s on time record isn’t so hot…  So, us normal employees sit and wait to hear the decision so we can get on with our lives and perhaps choose a place to live.. which leads me to my next topic.

Jen and I really want to buy a house.  We’ve been in our current apartment for almost 5 years now and we yearn for something bigger/better or at least something that is ours.  The place isn’t too bad given NY apartment standards, but we can finally afford something a bit nicer.  Perhaps something with a washer/dryer in the house and new appliances.  We’ve also been holding back on buying new furniture until we get a house as well.  So, once we do find a house, the amount of money we are going to spend is pretty scarey.  Thus, the wife has bought some personal finance books so we can plan appropriately and figure out how much we can spend per month on a mortgage given our incomes, debts, and tax incentives for owning a house.  Hopefully, if we do move to CT for work, we can get a house in CT as the property taxes there seem lower than they are here in NY (depending on the county)  We are hoping that the housing slump will play in our favor and we can get a house at least at a reasonable price.  Since the next time I post will probably be 4 months from now again, I’ll let you know of any progress there

As for our personal lives we havent really changed much.  I’m playing hockey in an adult league still.  I got some new skates for xmas so I can’t wait for tomorrow to try them out.  Oh crap!  I need to get them sharpened…ugh, I’ll have to do that at lunch since everything is closed on Sunday (today).  The wife is still in school and this is her last year so once we are done with that we’ll get a nice little chunk of money back each month that won’t have to go towards tuition costs :)  We did do our usualy trip back home for xmas but this time spent it in New Bern seeing my brother’s family.  It was short but nice visit.  The weather was great, in the 70’s, and i got to eat some chic-fil-a.  Woot!  The driving was really long but again, we had nice weather so it didn’t drag on and on because of rain or snow.  I also got a fancy new laptop for xmas, which i’m writing this post with right now.  It’s my first laptop so I try to use it whenever I can.  Unfortunately, I think the battery is dying and I’m too lazy to go grab the plug so I think I’ll end this post now.  Once I get up, I’ll plug it in and write some more.  Which shouldn’t be long as we are supposed to go to Matt/Parke’s house today when their little guy wakes up.  See you soon! 

The other part of our trip was just having a small vacation.  We basically had three days in NC.  The first day we spent with Jen’s family.  Took a tour of the Battleship NC and got some dinner.  Jen went to the aquarium with them in the morning but I was too pooped out from the drive the previous day.  (Our 9 hour drive turned in 14 hours after tons of traffic in DC and a freak storm once we hit I-40)  The second day was spent at my brother’s visiting Drew and the third was spent on the beach.  I wish we had at least one more day even though I got sunburned on my feet pretty bad.

As I mentioned in my last blog, my bro was about to adopt a baby and they finally got him.  His name is Drew and I hear he likes to eat.  I haven’t met him yet but I do get pictures from time to time from Matt and Melissa and he looks like he’s gonna be a big boy.  Jen and I will be taking a trip down next month for a little aniversary trip and a chance to visit him down in NC.  I’m looking forward to it as we haven’t had a real vacation in almost a year.  Our time away from NY is usually spent going down south and visiting the folks, which is nice, but sitting on the beach with no responsibilities sounds nice too.  I just dread the driving.  It usually takes us about 12-13 hours to drive to Charlotte or Greenville so I’m hoping it is faster to the Outer Banks.

Work has been going ok, it has been really slow up until about 3 weeks ago.  Someone at Fox had the brilliant idea of making a trailer for our movie.  I mean, who would have thought that a trailer would be a good idea for a movie?  Apparently, the ones who schedule these things didn’t schedule any time to create a trailer even though they’ve known we are making this movie for at least 2 years now.  So, a bunch of us at work had to bust our butts to make not one, or two, but three trailers.  I guess they couldn’t make up their minds on what kind of trailer they wanted.  Nothing like sitting on your ass for a year and then jumping in the fire for 3 weeks, working OT, holidays and weekends.  Anyways, the trailer should be in front of The Simpsons in a couple weeks.  Try not to judge it too harshly, I honestly only had two days to work on most of my shots.  Another hot topic at work right now is the idea that we will be moving to a new building someday.  Some articles were found on the web that suggests we could be moving to Connecticut but management has neither confirmed nor denied that rumor.  (Even though the guy in the article sounded pretty positive that we will be moving there)  Personally, I wouldn’t mind moving to CT since real-estate is cheaper there and we could possibly afford a house there, but there are alot of people who don’t share my sentiment.  We have some people who live west of the TZ bridge and adding another 30-40 minutes on their commute is probably unacceptable.  It’s probably a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Well, I probably have a few more things I can talk about but I need to get ready to go to a reception for a friends wedding, so I’ll leave that for next time.  Hopefully not 5 months from now!

On another good note.  My brother and his wife just got back from Siberia (yah, the Russian one) visiting a baby who they hope to adopt.  He’s a cute little guy with chubby cheeks and brown eyes and dark hair.  I think they plan on naming him Andrew and calling him Drew.  I like this name as it happens to be my middle name :)  Unfotunately, they have to wait a couple more months for the paperwork and all that stuff before they can fly back and bring him home.  So let’s wish them well and hope I can be Uncle Jake soon!

And the final bit of info, I finally got my Valentines Gift from Jen.  A pink Nintendo DS Lite.  Woot!  (they didn’t have black/white and i’m comfortable enough to own a pink one, so why not?)  I bought Brain Age, FF III and Mario kart to go with it.  The first time I played Brain Age, my brain was supposedly 85 years old.  Totally not fair as I didn’t even read the instructions, but the next time I tried it, it said I was 40.  I believe that is because it doesn’t understand how I write “9″.  It always thinks it is a “0″.  What is kick-ass about it is the voice recognition portion of it.  That capability was totally unexpected and blew me away when it asked me to read out the colors of certain words.  Ah.. Jen just reminded me that I also got the Military and Science channels for Valentines day as well.  I now have 3 channels I can usually find something on with, Comedy Channel, Military or Science.  Yay! 

The weather here in NY has been crazy lately.  It is mid January and 60 degrees outside.  I hear birds singing in the morning when last year, it was nothing but snow and cold and the birds had moved someplace warmer.  When I first moved here 4 years ago, it got way below zero at times with the wind-chill, especially outside of our work building. It seemed to be cold every year except this one.  I know global warming is happening but 1 year seems a little fast for this.  I guess it’s because the midwest has been taking such a pounding our weather has been a little fairer.  Well, I must say that I do miss the cold and the snow.  It reminds me of living in Michigan when I was a kid.  Maybe February will be colder, until then, I’ll enjoy a smaller ConEd bill.

On another front, my hockey team is doing pretty well.  We started off a little shaky but have gotten better as the year has gone by.  We need to win all our remaining games, and the leader has to lose 1 I think, and then we will be #1 in our division and get to go to Toronto.  Even if we don’t get to go, I’m having fun again playing and it is really good exercise.

There is an especially demonic portion of the video - let us say thirty-one seconds from the hated beginning, which was the end of all pleasure on Earth. Their Godforsaken stooge begins to wave around a PSP faceplate he has printed out, but they have sped up the footage so that by thirty-six seconds in there can be no doubt: the man has been lobotomized. There is no man left. In the video, the meat continues to twitch, electrical accidents birthing grotesque jerks in the unknowing beef. It speaks! But it is not language. It is like the wind blowing through a pile of skulls.

This post in particular is talking about a website sony created called AllIWantForXmasIsAPSP .  It was a pretty blatant attempt on their part to drum up some viral publicity for their ever failing product lines.  I have to admit that I do own a PSP and have actually enjoyed playing a few games on it.  The screen is nice and the graphics power on it is decent, but the whole UMD thing just killed me.  I can’t believe sony tried to have people buy movies on yet another format, one that was only playable on the PSP.  Plus, they cost the same as a normal DVD.  And unfortunately, they seem to be going the same route with the PS3 and blu-ray.  I have the HDDVD drive for my xbox and it works great.  My only beef is that the XBOX sounds like a jet engine idling in my living room.

Anyways, life has been pretty status quo as of late and I don’t really have much to say.  The holidays are just around the corner, so I hope you’ve done your shopping.  For me at least.