The Brad Hole

This past Saturday, we went down to Tucson for a memorial service for the mother of one of my good friends and ex-roommate from college. It was a wake combined with a Catholic mass. I'm not Catholic by any stretch, so I really didn't know what to expect. Before I go any further, I feel it's important to emphasize that I'm in no way trying to make light of the tragedy and circumstances surrounding this funeral. It was a weighty and emotional event for my friend, and the burden on him was pretty plain to see. I should also add that I'd only met his mom a few times, and I don't believe I ever spoke more than a few words to her in total during all those years.

With that out of the way, I'm pretty sure that if there's a Catholic god, I've secured myself a seat in hell. If there's one thing I'm fairly sure of in this world, it's that snickering during a memorial service is generally frowned upon. I knew this before the service, of course, and frankly didn't expect to encounter any circumstances that would cause mirth during the service. The first sign of possible trouble was close to the start of the service.

As the priests walked down the aisle towards the front of the church, the song "Guantanamera" was playing over the speakers. When I think of this song, I think of one thing: the skit on Saturday Night Live where Dana Carvey and Patrick Swayze do a commercial as 2 Latin singers with competing songs - the "Super Feud". It's one of the funniest SNL skits I've ever seen. Each time I hear the chorus to "Guantanamera", I hear in my mind : "He stuffs his trousers/I'm telling you that he stuffs his trousers/With a plastic peee-nis/It fell out in Liiii-ma!" So as the priests are walking up the aisle and this song comes over the speakers, I crack into an immediate grin and it's all I can do to keep from laughing out loud. I bite down as hard as I can on my inner cheek to try and focus my attention. The moment eventually passes and I regain my composure and dignity.

From here, the rest of the service is quite somber until we get closer to the end. The head priest starts the whole bread/wine thing (I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know it - sorry). During this, he must say "Jesus Christ" many times. Well, he's got a bit of an effeminate lisp, so each time he says "Jesus Christ", it sounds exactly like Mr. Slave from South Park. While I wasn't on the verge of laughter, I had a hard time suppressing a smile, and bit my inner lip for good measure.

Finally, there was an older priest who assisted in performing the service. I swear to you his voice sounds exactly like "Coach Z." from the Homestar Runner website. Others in our party thought he sounded more like the "Wuvvv...twue wuvvv" priest from Princess Bride, but I dunno.

All that aside, I believe this was perhaps the most sincere and well-handled memorial I've ever attended. The outpouring of emotion and affection by those who knew her was quite overwhelming. The priests also came clean and admitted that they didn't know her, and thus they didn't try to eulogize on her behalf which I found refreshing.

Posted by bradman at 03:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Everyone has told us recently that houses we will like will continue to come up in our search, and that seems to be true. Take yesterday, for example.

On Thursdays, I have a weekly conference call with Aspyr in the afternoon, so I wasn't planning on doing any house hunting on these days. Still, a new house entered our list Wednesday night that was in the same subdivision as the first one that got away, so we were a bit anxious to check it out. After some talking with our realtor, it was decided that I would drive up there after my call and investigate. Most of these places are a 40 minute drive (one-way) from our current home. I happened to hit rush hour traffic most of the way, so I got there around 4:15p yesterday.

As it happens, the house was the best of the 3 that we've been open to buying. Remembering yesterday's incident, I talked it over with our realtor and made an offer $5k above the asking price on the spot. Asking for more than the asking price is tricky business - you can't indefinitely raise the stakes because you run into problems with the appraisal value of the house. It's my limited understanding that if the house appraises for less than you offer, the loan company will only cover up to the appraised value. In that situation, the only way you can pay "more" is to stipulate in your offer that you'll essentially pay the difference above the appraisal value in cash. Why am I mentioning this? ;-)

Well, it seems that we were again too slow. Someone had made an offer on this house 30 minutes before we did, with the stipulation that they'd match any price up to a certain value. Upon discovering this, we increased our offer to $10k above the asking price. This is where the danger of the appraisal value came into play. Our realtor (and the selling realtor) both felt fairly sure that the appraisal value of the house was close to the original asking price, so any offer we'd make in excess could potentially run afoul of that problem.

After some back and forth, the selling realtor decided to go with the original offer which matched ours. It was at this point that our realtor gave us a free primer in creative swearing. The people who beat us, we discovered, were basically in the same boat as Beth and I. They'd been getting beat out on houses that had come on the market the same day or the day before and decided to take their game to the next level. It makes sense, of course, and that's where Beth and I are now headed, it seems.

Speaking of, where was Beth during all this? She got off work at 5, so we told her to haul ass up here if she wanted to see it. It's a 45-50 minute drive for her in the thick of rush hour, and by the time she made it, the house had been gone for 10-15 minutes. That's 2 in a row now she's never seen. She still had class at 7pm, but there was no way she could have made it back in a reasonable time, so she missed it as well.

So, what's next? Our even-more-aggressive strategy now is pretty simple. If an interesting new home pops up the night before, I'll hit it bright and early the next morning, prepared to make an offer with a "matching" clause on the spot. Beth won't stand a chance of having seen the house until after our offer has been accepted at this point, but it seems that's the way it's going to have to be.

As for this latest one that got away, well, it was clearly the best I'd seen so far. Apparently everyone else thought so as well, simply because in the hour I was there, half a dozen groups of people must have come by to look at it. They all seemed like families rather than investor types, but it was madness.

Posted by bradman at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday was a real heartbreaker in our ongoing home search. As I mentioned in my last entry, our realtor has been sending us home listings up to 3 times a day, depending on if new ones enter the market in the area we're interested in. On Tuesday evening, a strong contender popped up, and on Wednesday morning, I decided what the heck - I'll go take a look at this thing so that it doesn't sit until the weekend and everyone else gets a peek.

So I call up our realtor, arrange for a hasty viewing yesterday at 1pm and check it out. I loved the place, so again - wanting to avoid the unpleasantness of last weekend, decided I'd better get Beth to take a look ASAP. The soonest she could see it was yesterday around 6pm, since she got off work at 5 and had class at 7. The drive from her work to the house was roughly 45 minutes, so she'd be late for her class, but if she liked it, we could potentially just end the whole hunt right then and put all this aggressive home-market crap behind us.

We arranged with the seller to meet there between 6 and 6:30 pm. Then, fate steps in: our realtor called us around 4:30 and mentioned that, shockingly, a bid had just been placed on the house for above the asking price but that we had time to place a bid if we wanted, since the seller has 24 hours to accept. I felt pretty strongly about this one, so we talked it over with our realtor and decided that $5k over the asking price should seal it without grossly overvaluing the house and potentially running into appraisal issues. Beth gets off work and we haul ass over there. We are no more than half a mile away when our realtor calls us to tell us that the seller just accepted the offer he got earlier in the day. This was at 6:15 pm, and let me tell you - it felt pretty devastating. On the plus side, Beth never got to see the inside of the house, so she'll never know what she missed.

So now we have an all-new, even more aggressive plan. If I see a house that I think we'll both end up loving, from now on I'm going to make an offer on the spot, sight-unseen to Beth. How could this possibly go wrong? ;-)

Posted by bradman at 05:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Beth and I have recently begun searching for a home in earnest. We've spent the past few years getting our finances in order, and now we're looking to buy our first home. I thought we were somewhat prepared for the experience, but we've had some real shocks along the way.

The largest shock can be broadly expressed like so: the housing market in the Phoenix metro area is red hot right now. Some articles at azcentral.com provide a bit of backstory, but let me sum up a bit. First, housing prices have risen on the order of 10-30% across the valley in the past year or two. This has caused a lot of real estate investors to flock to the valley and snatch up homes, flip them for a profit and dump them back on the market.

That has started a chain reaction that has caused home prices to continue to rise along with a few twists: houses tend to not stay on the market for more than a week or two, and new housing developments sell out lots so quickly that they have resorted to "lottery drawings" to give out space. It's not unusual to walk into a new home center and see signs proclaiming "no invenstors/2nd home buyers" to try and avoid that. Further, Beth and I had looked at new homes in the Laveen area last summer to get a feel for pricing vs. size, and saw a 3200 square foot monster going for $215k. That same home now sells new for over $320k. The increase in prices over the past year is staggering.

Our loan agent was telling us yesterday that now loan companies are balking on financing homes if they find out the home was flipped within the past few months. That means that if Beth and I find a home and make an offer, it's possible that the lender our mortgage broker chooses could potentially back out if the home we pick was recently flipped. Buyer beware, indeed.

We had some first-hand experience with the wacky market last weekend, our second weekend looking for new homes. We saw a house last Saturday that had been on the market for 4 days (give or take). It stood above the rest we had seen since then, but being our second outing looking at houses, and feeling a bit gunshy, we didn't make an offer on the spot, naturally. However, we were aware that houses were selling somewhat quickly, so we decided to talk it over last Saturday evening and see how we felt the next day. We decided on Sunday to arrange for a second viewing to see if it was worth it and asked our agent to hook us up. Shortly thereafter he called to inform us that we were too slow - someone had made an offer on the house the night before. This was a bit sobering.

Anyway, we've decided to get a bit more aggressive about this. For starters, we probably can't wait until each weekend to look, so I'm going to attempt to "preflight" some homes during the week and then bring Beth to look at the most interesting possibilities of those as soon as reasonably possible, given her work and school schedule. It's far from ideal, particularly for a home purchase -- to say nothing of our first home -- but it may be the only way we can pull this off without getting stuck with the dregs or looking for months at a time.

Our real estate agent so far has been very helpful and understanding, and he's been aggressively sending us new listings several times each day so we can get a feel for when things appear and how long they stay active before selling. As I type this, he just sent us a new listing for this morning. Since last night, a new home has appeared (grossly overpriced IMHO) with an all-too-familiar blurb in the description: "BRING YOUR INVESTMENT BUYERS!"

Game on!

Posted by bradman at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

While I was gone this past week, Aspyr released the final patches for Jedi Academy (1.01c) and Knights of the Old Republic (1.03c). As such, I've removed the older beta ones from my site.

There are very few changes from the prior betas. Jedi Academy only has one fix, IIRC - it should give you a descriptive dialog if you are suddenly removed from a server now. KOTOR has a fix for some stray polygons that were obscuring geometry on the water world of Manaan in the prior beta of 1.03c.

Posted by bradman at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The past month or so has been hectic in a relaxing kind of way. We spent Christmas up in Seattle with Beth's parents, then just last week went to Walt Disney World for the WDW Marathon. This was my second trip to WDW, the first being on our honeymoon. This trip certainly wasn't any honeymoon. ;-)

Beth ranted a bit about it in her blog, but I'm so filled with hate that I'm compelled to regurgitate some of the more interesting points. First off, let me just say that if you're offering a limo service that picks guests up from the airport and deposits them at their hotel, I believe it is perhaps important to actually know where the fuck their hotel is, rather than drive around the greater WDW area looking for it. If you are reluctant to pull over so that your guest can pull out a map from his luggage with directions to the hotel, you may not be doing such a good job. For future reference. "A.J." at HappyLimo.com didn't have a clue.

Second, if you provide a service that sells park tickets and you offer to deliver it to the guest's hotel the day before they arrive, it helps to deliver it to the hotel that the guest is staying in. This can usually be done by reading the order that the guest places, but if that fails, it's often helpful to listen to the guest repeat the name and address of the hotel instead of continually repeating the wrong hotel back. Here, Central Florida Tickets and Travel let us down by managing to deliver it to our hotel roughly two hours (and several phone calls where we provided directions to the hotel) after we checked in.

Finally, if your hotel offers a "free shuttle" to WDW, do not be surprised if your guests are a bit put-off by a schedule that includes 2 early morning departures and nothing else.

All told, though, we learned a valuable lesson. Although it's cheaper to stay off-property in a non-Disney resort, you're really just gambling that that all the third-party companies that inevitably come into play are going to provide the level of service that you'd get from a Disney hotel. Our experience this trip, in stark contrast to our honeymoon stay on Disney property, has convinced us that the extra premium you'd pay by staying at a Disney property is worth the aggravation and hassle it saves.

That ranting aside, the trip didn't really go all that well. We arrived on Thursday afternoon, pissed away a few hours waiting for our park passes, then managed to squeeze in a dinner at Epcot just before closing. We spent all day Friday in the Magic Kingdom with Beth's parents, but Saturday was a complete wash. We started out by wisely switching our hotels from the Comfort Suites Maingate East to Disney's Port Orleans Riverside, so that ate up our morning. I should interject here that I was mighty impressed with the Port Orleans Riverside resort. It was far nicer than I was expecting for a very reasonable price.

Complicating things, Beth's mom was fairly sick, so we didn't do much that afternoon either. We caught Downtown Disney Saturday night, but Sunday morning was the start of the marathon. Beth's mom was feeling better, but now her dad was sick. So with those illnesses and Beth's exhaustion from the marathon, Sunday was also not overly productive. Monday was our last full day in Orlando, and we squeezed in 2 rides at Epcot in the morning and 1 at MGM Studios in the afternoon.

We left Tuesday afternoon, and as such didn't have time to do much of anything that morning except catch lunch at Disney's Beach Club resort. On the plus side, we still have 2 days left on our park passes, and I don't believe they expire so we'll be able to leverage that for our next trip. Given all the things we've learned to do (and not do), I'm pretty sure our next trip will be a rousing success.

Posted by bradman at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)