Jerm's Insanity

Take my advice on this folks. If you’re ever trying to buy a house, and there’s a known problem with the porch on the back of the house, and there’s also a lack of building permit for the porch on the back of the house, and the sellers say, “We don’t want to deal with it, here’s some money… you deal with it,” I urge you to invite them to have sex with themselves.

It all SEEMED like a good idea. They give us money to deal with the deck problem. If the problem gets noticed by the town, we go about ripping off the deck and installing stairs to make the place legally safe. All of this is off to the side of the normal contract, of course, because i need the $$ to put on a new deck after we close and if the bank sees the seller giving up money, it comes off the purchase price. Money off the purchase price is nice, but a few grand in hand to work with gets me a much bigger deck than a $10/mo smaller mortgage payment. Anyway, it sounded like a good plan to make everyone happy and get us our house.

That is until the town sees the deck 2 weeks before your interest rate lock-in runs out, the toen notices the problem, and then points out that you’ll need a demolition permit before you can rip off the deck. Oh yes, permits are taking 2-2.5 weeks to get.

Yes, we need a demolition permit, to take away the deck that they say shouldn’t be there. And now that the issue has been brought to their attention, we can’t just sneak the porch off and hope no once notices… something about it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

The saga continues

oh.. did i forget to mention i’m buying a house again? With Heidi? Heh. i guess we need to catch up. It’s been quite the saga, but finally there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

More to come.

For now the score is.

House purchase attempts: 2
Houes purchase failures: 1
House Purchase successes: 0 (pending)
Hairs I’ve pulled from hy head: 240
Hairs heidi has pulled from my head: 492
Mathematical errors made by the bank that i had to correct: 2
Important details, printed prominently on the contract, that i had to point out to the bank: 1
SNAFUs related to the porch situation: lost count
Terrorist background checks run on me in the process (really): 1

Last year (May ‘05) I took one of the girls from my office on a tandem jump (check out the picture.. it lends relevancy to the rest of the post). The aforementioned Laci took video and stills of the jump and the whole thing yielded some very nice pictures. Since then my picture has shown on up the ranch dvd sleeve, the ranch experienced homepage, and the ranch school photo page. It was also used on a ranch flyer which i unfortunately don’t have a copy of, though one was very tasefully ‘improved’ with a Salvatore Dali mustache and hung outside manifest. (i’ll try to get a picture of it).

Even given all of this, I can’t say it wasn’t a bit of a surprise when Heidi opened up a copy of the The Chronogram (a local arts & happenin’ happenings rag) and paged through to find this article. Look familiar?

So this is fame.

Tuesday afternoon I took my friend Heather on a tandem. No, not that Heather, though this one is also short and cute and sprouts red curls from her scalp. No, this particular Heather has not made her friends question her mental stability by moving to Texas, but rather preaches from a pulpit for fun an prophet.

So we jumped. It went well, and as usual i got Laci ( /LOT-see/ ) to do video and stills for out jump. Dig it…

(click for a bigger version)

Considering my life is vastly different from how things were left as of my last musing, i figure i can fend off some of the more common questions and make room for the less common ones.

When Last we left our hero, he was in the process of buying a dwelling to inhabit with his
trusty sidekick and their fearsome canine companion. Things went horribly awry somewhere in mid september and, to make a long and painful story very short, we went our separate ways. Mostly.

For a while i tried to divine a way to keep the whole house venture going. But in the end i realized that w/o the extra income, set of hands, etc… of having Heidi there, i would be constantly treading along the precipice of financial ruin if everything went well.. and hurling myself over it if not. Alas, soon after i gave up the girl, i gave up the house. woe

All of this turned out really well, however, for my friend Dave. His cousin had just moved out to move in with a girl in virginia, and Dave was stuck paying all the rent on a quainl little house just outside the also-quaint village of Rhinebeck. Rhinebeck is a very cute little town just north of the world famous Staatsburg, which i know needs no introduction.

So that’s where i am right now. Still working my day job, doing some side projects, and trying to get my housemate to do his own dishes.

I made my annual pilgrimage to Zhills and had the usual stupid amounts of fun

Heidi and I have managed to remain close and, though we’re dating other people, still be a part of each other’s lives.

I think that’s all the big stuff.

oh yeah.. anyone want a cat?

What are the secrets to my success? Simple; Eat right, exercise, and don’t take any wooden nickels. Tried and true methods for staying fit and avoiding wooden nickels.

For those who haven’t looked, a comment to my last post was:

How do you get your site address down to simply “http://www.Jerm.org/”
Do you have to pay?
Tell us your secrets.

I want to thank you for inviting such a pedestrian post from me, i like to think of my ramblings and a bit more whimsical and a tad less informative than this one is bound to be. I’ll play the djinn for the moment, though, and grant your wish. Besides, it’s only fair that the occasional unfortunate traveler who stumbles across this blog might divine some small morsel to keep their time here form being completely wasted. I’ll get right to it, then.

&lt GEEK &gt

Now, the question was a little vague, ‘How do you get your site address down to simply “http://www.Jerm.org/”,’as getting one’s url to be short really only requires finding a combination of a few letters that no one else is using as a url yet (yes i’m being pedantic, piss off. did you not see the GEEK tag above?). I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you meant, using blogger, how do i keep from having all the ancillary crap AFTER the jerm.org/ in order to get to my blog. Elementary, my dear Watson, this is. (You dig it? Sherlock Holmes after a month on Dagobah (what do you want? it was an all-caps GEEK tag))

Anyway, blogger may have some service in which they’ll do the bloggy hosting thing at the base of your url, and i imagine they’d want you to pay for it. This is a guess, however. I could check, but that would require effort. Consider it homework on your part, i want a 3 page report on it by Monday. I imagine the changes are about 50-50, because as i’m sure they could make some money off of it, it’s much easier to just not do it, much like my unwillingness to check into the existence of this feature.

No, what i do is simply have blogger FTP the bloggy goodness to my webserver which, among other things, houses jerm.org. This option is, well, it’s an option in the “publishing” section. I incorporated a line in the blogger template to include my template file, so every time i make an entry, blogger sends be a new home page with my site template built right into it. It took a bit of fooling with DIVs and editing the blogger styles to get everything laid out correctly, but i think the result is rather spiffy, and since i’m the only one who read this blog anyway, that’s all that matters.

&lt /GEEK &gt

There you have it, dear reader, my good deed for the season.

Jerm’s Tomato Theory: As you eat through the ripe tomatos in a bag, the most ripe of the less ripe tomatoes, through relativity, become the most ripe tomatoes, though in all practical terms they’re no riper than when you began. The net effect of this is that it takes 2 or 3, “Ugh, that was a bad one!”s before you realize that you’re eating a tomato whos grade of ripeness you’d have thought unconsumable when the truly ripe tomatoes were still in the bag.

Jerm’s Corrollary: The knowlege of and acceptace of Jerm’s Theory don’t seem to help one stop reaching for the bag, “Oh, must have missed THIS ripe little beauty….. BLECH!!”

*removes the bag of tomatoes from his desk*

That’s right boys and girls, the guy who not a year and a half ago was trying to figure out where he could hook up his bus to live is buying a dwelling that has neither wheels nor flashing retractable stopsign. And as if that weren’t grown up enough, there’s a rentable space so I get to have a tennant. So, between spending gobs of money and becoming a landlord I’ve got flashes of The Money Pit and Pacific Heights dancing in my head.

To be fair, though, I’m not alone in this daft affair. One Heidi Eklund, obviously at a loss for rational decision making, is accompanying me on this journey. Perhaps it’s something in the New Paltz water, but we’re obviously not in our right minds.

We do, however, seem to have decent taste in houses, at least i think so. Check it out. I doubt we’ll have it anywhere near as “Better homes and Gardens” as it is now, but it’s quite the swell little place that seems to have had (knocking on wood) all the relevant work done on it before we came along (this is where Tom Hanks and Shelley Long really work up a good guffaw).

This is probably the most grown-up thing I’ve ever endeavoured to undertake, but at least it’s a huge risk and scary as hell. Truly, though, it’s all very exciting. The whole thing seems fabulous, at a fair price. I even got them to throw in a shed and a riding lawnmower. And i’ve never had my own shed before. I imagine I’ll need to buy a wheelbarrow.

Ok. Up until now I’ve refrained from a whole lot of gadgety geek blogging, but something this sexy really deserves a note. Not only has Apple finally gotten right the whole idea of a black ipod (re: the colossal ICK that was the U2 Ipod), but it’s so frikkin tiny one would be silly to not drool. I’ve had to wipe my keyboard off several times already.

No, just drool.

I won’t, mind you, but that so totally and perfectly sums up the post-convention experience that it gave me chills.

For the last 2 weeks people have been asking me how my vacation was, how the convention was, and I invariably reply, “Fantasic, but hot,” or some similar permutation of the two. Detail beyond that is sparse and vague. I imagine the reasoning for that is twofold. Firstly between the heat and the alchohol, i think even my own recollections are sparse and vague. Second, however, is much less environmental and yet all about the environment;

“What happens at the convention stays at the convention,” is a common mantra, though not necessarily true, especially with all of the cameras and photoblogs. I think more of it goes to the fact that, at least for me, lots of the stories, fabulous as they are in my mind, fall a bit flat out of context. Some things totally translate, but i find that trying to get across the vibe of the convention is a bit like trying to describe to a whuffo what skydiving feels like.

I know i had a brilliant time out there, if y’all wanna know more about it, meet me there next august