Passion

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 01:25:44 GMT

We own a house!

This has been exhausting.

Good, but exhausting.

So far, homeownership can be characterized as "you must drive 30 minutes several times a week to meet contractors at the house at the crack of dawn, and then drive 30 minutes back to get to work on time" and "make four thousand phone calls to contractors" and "please arrive with a check".

We've had asbestos removed. We've treated for termites. We are removing a wall between the living and dining rooms, and installing recessed lighting in those rooms, and then having the hardwood floors refinished, and repainting all the walls, and replacing the baseboards, and installing crown molding. I am told this is a "small" job.

I've been spending spare moments daydreaming about how to landscape. I want ALL THE NATIVE POLLINATORS. I want native bees, and butterflies, and moths, and even pollinating flies, though I reserve the right to tell them they are ugly when they arrive. In the pursuit of this goal, I have compiled a massive spreadsheet of California native plants, and tried to focus on which ones might be native to my new county, to determine what to plant.

We also want chickens, and a vegetable garden, so I have tabs in the spreadsheet for plants for those purposes (cucumbers and nasturtiums are natural de-wormers for chickens, did you know?).

I deleted my LJ today. I am sad. But all the content is here, so there is nothing lost. Still sad though.

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Sun, 26 Feb 2017 05:30:23 GMT

We bought a house!

On Feb 13th, our agent said, "Do you want to see a house before it goes on the market? The sellers want out fast. I can show it to you tomorrow at 11:30am." Chris and I both said, "Yeah, we can take a long lunch for that."

On Feb 14th we met at the house and spent, between the three of us, still less than 60 minutes inside the house. We drafted an offer that evening. It waived all inspections and contingencies. We told the sellers they could cancel the proposed floor repair work they had planned for Feb 16th.

On Feb 15th our offer was submitted at 8am. At 5pm the sellers accepted.

The first thing Chris looked up was whether we can have chickens in our new city.

We can.

We close on March 8th.

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Russia, Livejournal, and Dreamwidth

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 03:42:52 GMT

Bleh. Okay.

snoopdawg posted on her journal a couple days ago with basically the following information: the Livejournal servers have apparently been moved to Russia, which makes LJ no longer subject to US laws about privacy. This is the source she linked.

One of the entries linked in that source is this one, which, along with snoopdawg's recommendation, led me down the rabbit hole of signing up for Dreamwidth, which uses the same code platform as LJ, but with a totally different business philosophy. I looked them up on Wikipedia too. It's really easy to import your journal to Dreamwidth. It took me about 30-40 minutes to do the research, make the decision to move, and start the import. Dreamwidth did the rest, and it looks like the full import of 13 years of entries and comments took about five hours to migrate over. I am pleased with this.

I don't know yet if I'm going to delete my Livejournal, but I've certainly been looking the other way for a good seven or eight years when they've done sketchy stuff, because I haven't had a good alternative. Now I have a good alternative.

If I had a large friends community I might hesitate more, but I think I only have three active readers these days. :-P

I'm making this entry from Dreamwidth. It should crosspost itself to LJ for me. Let's see how this goes!

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