January 2007←

February 2007

→March 2007



February 20, 2007

The Non-Design Side of My Job

11:43 PM

When I’m not writing CSS for the Newgrounds.com redesign, or goofing off with little things like mailing out stickers and T-shirts or “brainstorming ideas for stuff”, I’m supposed to be just plain writing. When I was hired almost a year ago, Tom mentioned that in addition to writing code one of my job functions would eventually be to manage the print version of the Newgrounds magazine. And while it quickly became apparent that the title of NG.Mag Editor was in the distant future, I knew in the back of my mind that I’d eventually have to dust off my formal writing skills.

Well, this week I took advantage of a recent lull in website coding duties to officially kick off my NG writing career, and wrote my first press release. It took a lot longer than I had hoped but I’m delighted with the result — and more importantly, Tom appears to approve as well. My first draft took two days off and on, but it may have been some of the most organized, straightforward writing I’ve ever done. We brainstormed the outline last week, and I just worked from that to plod through paragraph after paragraph; by the time I reached the last line it only required a few edits to make it presentable. Five or six Tom-edits later and it was pretty much a done deal unless we think of something else we’d like to announce.


February 18, 2007

Signs of Life

10:18 PM

We looked at a really great house today in Gulph Mills. Over on Balligomingo, Ballingomingo, Oingoboingo, or whatever you want to call it Road, it’s a sloping property where cars drive up a switchback road behind the house to park. The place has more than its fair share of quirks, but nevertheless we fell in love with it. With three bedrooms and three baths on three floors — connected by a spiral staircase — plus a front porch, side deck, private yard, basement and attic, there’s a lot to like about the place. Unfortunately, it doesn’t match our current lifestyle with it’s incredibly small living room and kitchen, a powder room that’s just a little bit in the way, and a garage that Dia’s father would have to help us build. It’s someone’s perfect house, we’re just afraid that it might not be ours.

At $300k, we’re going to have to pass on it for now, but we’re keeping it at the back of our minds while we explore the list of properties we found online. By driving around for two hours this afternoon we were able to whittle it down to 14, and the plan is to resume the home tours on Wednesday.

The house on Balligomingo Road showed us that there are beautiful, private, eclectic houses out there in our price range, and that gives us hope. It’s a good feeling for a change.


February 17, 2007

Back in the Dumps

08:25 AM

We went, we saw, but they kicked our asses — none of the houses we saw yesterday were anything we were remotely interested in. They were all sized about right, but their floor plans weren’t anything that suited us, most of them were in neighborhoods that were too squished together or on a main road, and one of them was a straight-up log cabin that needed to be demolished (in all fairness we were expecting that but simply had to see it).

To be clear, yesterday wasn’t a total wash. It was only our first time out so now we have a better idea of what we’re looking for, and we now know that our future searches need to include the term “master suite” and have at least a quarter acre to space us far enough apart from the neighbors to suit Dia’s taste.

I’m still excited for tomorrow’s home tours even though they’re a product of the first search results. They have more space, are newer constructions, and the taxes are low enough to make it worthwhile living in King of Prussia. We’re even bringing my grandmother along, which should make it more fun regardless of how the search turns out.

For now — time to help Al and Mary move into their dream house. (What a view from the back!)


February 15, 2007

A Not-Entirely-Unpleasant Unease

10:37 PM

We’ve going on the first round of home tours tomorrow with our real estate agent, Dia and I. We’ve been looking online fore a few weeks and finally tweaked enough of our expectations (mainly location and maximum price) to come up with several promising listings in the Hatboro/Ambler area. Two fixer-uppers on the cheap, and two that are probably out of our range unless they blow us away.

If nothing strikes our fancy, we still have three others to look at in the King of Prussia area Sunday. The majority there need a little work as well, but one has three fireplaces. It just so happens that three fireplaces is just what I require to live west of Conshohocken instead of closer to work.

After weeks of dreading this next concrete step in the home-buying process, I find myself borderline giddy as I get ready for bed. I had no idea that house hunting could be so amazingly tolerable.


February 05, 2007

Back, and Colder Than Ever

12:09 PM

I almost lost my toes today, it was that cold outside. Twelve degrees to be exact. Until this morning I’ve never been so cold that I almost involuntarily broke down into tears.

I tried to bundle up, I really did, and for the most part I would have been fine: wick undershirt, fleece sweatshirt, and windbreaker up top; a long pair of warmup pants; my usual gloves and balaclava. I didn’t get a chance to hit REI this weekend however, so I put my two layers of socks on and then put them in plastic bags to hopefully stop wind. It still did nothing so I’m going to need to buy some booties before my next ride.

Other than the fact that I’ve had my feet perched on Stamper’s space heater for the past hour and my feet are still numb and swollen, it was a nice, brisk ride. Good thing I didn’t need water because that froze in about three minutes; probably would have happened sooner had I used the water backpack since there are hoses involved.

I would have wimped out this morning if it weren’t for the fact that I told Don I was going to go no matter what. Damn me and my big mouth.


February 03, 2007

My Day With Grandmom

02:09 PM

I set out yesterday morning around 7 a.m. with the intention of driving my grandmother to her consultation with an eye surgeon yesterday, and instead we ended up spending the entire day together. Though we arrived at the doctor’s office around 9 a.m. we didn’t leave until three hours later — I can’t stand the multiple waiting room system that I see implemented more and more every day — at which time we were late for meeting up with Tom, Tim, and Lisa at Ikea. Since we were both hungry and my grandmother has never been to Ikea before she decided she’d like to come along and it saved me a little driving as well. So we ended up sticking together through the Ikea lunch, a Costco browsing sesion, and lovely stretches of traffic on both the Schuylkill and I-95 at three in the afternoon.

I finally made it to work at 4 p.m. to get a little bit of coding done but mainly to help assemble the shelf and chairs that were picked out earlier in the day. After working until 11 p.m. (and playing, too — some flash games, a fine Wawa dinner with Dia, and a game of Blockus with Jeff, Mike, and Josh were also part of my evening at work) I finally made it home where I fell right to sleep.


February 01, 2007

Doing My Penance

01:01 AM

I’ve been trying to make up for all the mean things I said to those poor users on the site. I scour the NG Portal for submissions that don’t totally suck and write encouraging reviews to those artists. All others I vote a big, fat “0”. I’ve surprised myself by finding that a lot of these kids have great senses of humor even if their drawing skills need a lot of work, and it feels good to write nice things for a change. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m racking up Blam and Protect points by the dozens.