bengt-erik norum

to sod or not to sod...

the backyard on the new house is in pretty bad shape. i've been contemplating the options. the guy at dale hardware suggested starting with weed and feed, just to see what it'll do. he said that there's typically lots of grass lying dormant under all the thistles and weeds. we'll see what it can do. i'll try that later this week.

i am somewhat obsessed with the thought of new sod, though. some random guy's re-sodding adventure turned out looking quite nice. lots of work, though.

i'll flip a coin, i guess.

i'm not sure, but it looks like our spanky new stainless steel range hood may be stuck on the rangehoods.com loading dock. the ups tracking info is less than helpful. sent email tonight and will be calling them tommorow to validate shipment.

got an almost immediate (7AM, this morning) reply from rangehoods.com claiming that ups lost my hood. i'm trying to decipher 'origin scan' on the ups tracking page. i don't know if this means that they just printed the label or if it was actually billed and printed at a ups location. i would have expected a pickup scan; there isn't one there.

i may have to write a www::screenscraper::ups perl module, if one doesn't exist. (maybe they've published an api?)

we sold the house about 6 months ago. i've been in this one bedroom apartment, in mountain view, since. i love my apartment.

as a con, it's small. while it's not the smallest place i've lived, it's a close second. it's three rooms and a bathroom, plus a space that some might call "dining area", but blue calls home.

it's got dated fixtures. the bathroom fixtures are a painful pink color. the PANTONE colorist tells me that it's probably "698 C", which looks like this: ███. the kitchen sink is really pretty charming, though.

on the plus side, it's all hardwood floors. they really make the apartment, i think.

it's very very bright. windows on three sides of the apartment, including south-southwest and south-southeast. i love the sun, so does blue.

i don't share any walls, ceilings or floors with anyone. i listen to the music i want, when i want, mostly at the volume that i want. i picked up some klipsch promedia thx 2.1s for the living room. they're loud enough for this space. no, they're not crazy reference monitors, but whatever. they work. they sound good, esp for what i paid.

i'm surrounded by really good restaurants. (jatbar, courtesy of some former hotmail people, btw!) i eat sushi, mediterranean, hawaiian, bbq, thai, malaysian, burritos, italian, etc. etc. etc. etc. it's hard to not love a downtown like this.

i've been treating this apartment like very temporary storage, more than a dwelling. i've still got stuff in boxes, in the livingroom. i've got old webvan tubs holding stuff that really should just be thrown out and plastic bins of rc stuff stacked around.

i decided to change that. started with a really cool clock (right) and new floor lamp (looks better in person). the clock flips hours and minutes over using far more complicated mechanics than i remember from the alarm clocks of my youth.

aeron is at the fedex depot, just waiting to be picked up. new desk and a restaurant rack for the livingroom and i'll feel a little more like i'm "home", i think.

i'm sitting in the san jose airport waiting for a delayed flight to seattle. my work mail is syncing slowly, so i decided to clean up my personal inbox. doing so, i noticed a trend.

i've received a relatively large number of messages from people that read similar to: "hey, how've you been? haven't talked to you in awhile. life's good here (insert details). i ran across your blog. how's your health?"

i'm horrible about replying to personal email. i get distracted with things that aren't nearly as important and lose the mail behind a few hundred pieces of spam. i think i need to adopt some work habits for my personal mail. in the short term, i'll post here and reply to these people that think i'm ignoring them.

having tapered off to a slow trickle of posts, there's alot of "big" or "important" life events that have passed unmentioned:

• i'm engaged to a beautiful woman, katherine brown, i met through work. wedding isn't until sept. of 2009, mostly because we've been busy with the rest of this list
• we moved to duvall, washington, a town of ~7000 people
• we bought a 3 bed, 2 bath house on 15 acres.
• kat is working in redmond, i haven't changed jobs and am still working in microsoft's silicon alley campus. i fly alot.
• my kids still live in idaho falls, id. celeste turned 8 a couple weekends ago and eva turns 4 in march. did i mention that i fly alot?

on the health front, in short, i still have barrett's and am looking for a gastroenterologist up here. the aciphex has done a pretty good job of controlling symptoms (and further damage), as long as i'm careful about what and when i eat. i'll post more on this, later this weekend.

some time ago, i promised a coworker that i'd blog about my "adventures in farming."  the lifestyle change we made when we moved from california to washington is atypical enough to be a novelty to people who know me.

in my last post, i explained that i'd moved to washington state and that my fiance and i live on 15 acres.  i left out the type of details that apparently make my story "interesting."

i'm going to try to catch up on some blogging i haven't done.

with an eye toward self-sufficiency and environmental sustainability, kat and i wanted to find a place to live with some acreage.  we were hoping to give ourselves the flexibility to do some things we found difficult in california.  kat had a pretty productive patio garden in mountain view, but it frustrated her.  we wanted a garden.  we had been making goat cheese, mostly direct set chevre, from store-bought milk.  we wanted to raise goats.  we had indoor animals and wanted a dog.  in looking at what we wanted, it was clear we wanted land.

as the possibility of relocating became more tangible, we turned our focus to finding a house... and land.  i briefly flirted with the idea of a downtown seattle condo.  a new construction two bed, one bath penthouse with all the ridiculous trimmings (granite counter tops, pool, gym, home owners association and annoying pretentious neighbors) somehow seemed like a good idea to me.  i came to my senses.  i did a naive statistical regression using three variables, price, acreage, distance, and direction from microsoft's main campus.  not surprisingly, there were pretty significant correlations to be found.  the size of the parcels increased as you moved farther from redmond, to the east, and decreased to the west.  price/acre similarly decreased following the same pattern w/cardinal direction.  there were two outliers that we investigated.  the area along the snoqualmie river valley (duvall, carnation, and down toward fall city) and monroe highlighted statistically significant differences in price/acre and price/mile (from main campus).

we took this info to a realtor that'd been recommended by a friend (thanks j+l) and committed ourselves to a few solid weekends of house-hunting.  we'd visited duvall, while poking around in july and fell in love with the town.  it probably didn't hurt that we were there on the day of the farmers' market.  monroe and carnation looked doable, from a commute perspective.  with this information in hand, we compiled a list of several properties and kat set about evaluating them on a multipoint weighted scale that included "kitchen", "acreage", "distance from campus", and "bathrooms".  we narrowed it down to 14 properties for the first weekend and after setting expectations with the realtor, booked a trip for that weekend.  the list included a couple of places we "weren't sure about" and probably should have skipped.  one was a 2 acre place with a 1500 sq foot house and a 3 bay 7 car garage and 20+ foot ceilings.  the other turned out to be correctly listed as an almost 3000 square foot with 5 acre condo.  the second was built as a "duplex" style house with an adjoining garage wall.  the 5 acres turned out to be half of a 10 acre horse track.  even though the realtor said the listing agent had insisted that the "neighbor" was a very nice man named "wally", we decided not to even look.

the top three properties were:

• a large house in monroe with all the most amazing features you'd want, including granite countertops, slate floors, all new viking appliances, a wrap around porch, etc.  it came with some downsides, though.  it was located a the back of a 2 acre lawn and very little privacy.  the very friendly neighbor mentioned that it had some cc&r-style restrictions, including "no horses."  the commute was also likely to be a little hellish.  this was our #2 choice.
• right at the upper edge of our price range was a big new england style house in skyhomish on 2 acres in a somewhat suburban neighborhood.  it appeared to currently be inhabited by the owners, but looked as if it'd been rented out to a horde of college boys.  the hardwood floors were trashed, the oven was missing most of the oven door (!?) and the exterior showed complete neglect and left us wondering what else was lurking behind an inspection report.  we called this the "sad house" because we sooo wanted to make it shine again, but ultimately decided that it was just too much extra investment, given it's current price.
• the house we purchased is a 2000 square foot, one story, 3 bed 2 bath on 15 acres.  it was newly listed and the third house we looked at.  we both absolutely fell in love with it.  we walked back to the creek that forms the southern border of the parcel (cherry creek) and kept asking the realtor, "this is still the same place!?"  before we saw it in person, we'd been pretty sure that the mls listing was a mistake and was supposed to be 1.499 and not 14.99 acres.

after a full day of house hunting we returned to "make sure" we wanted this one.  after gawking at the more open floorplan and huge (though dated) kitchen, we wrote an offer on the dining room table.  we received a counter offer that was not materially different from our offer and entered escrow two days later.  we'd gone to look and returned having an offer accepted on a place we couldn't believe we'd found!

the details of the move aren't any more interesting than the typical "moving is hell" story, so i'll skip those.