Starry Wisdom

Almost a year ago, Brian Fargo posted that inXile was going to do a kickstarter campaign to make a sequel to the best computer RPG of all time, Wasteland. I, of course, donated a decent amount to the campaign, which was well funded (over 300% of the original goal). The developers recently released a preview video of the gameplay. The video is kind of long, but it’s also more than kind of awesome:

This looks pretty much exactly like I hoped it would and I can’t wait for this game to be released!

Recently we learned that Mackenzie’s Aunt Connie Connie was going into Hospice care, due to ovarian cancer. The middle of last week we learned that there wasn’t much time left. Also last week, my 96 year old grandmother went into the hospital for GI issues. Last weekend Grandma was put on palliative care, and Connie’s condition quickly deteriorated.

Connie passed away Monday night at the age of 63. Mackenzie made plans to head to Green Bay (around where she lived) on Tuesday, leaving Thursday. I would have liked to have gone with to be with her and her family, but I was not able to commit since I didn’t know what was going to happen with Grandma. Thursday morning I was anxious, and saw that fares on Virgin America to Chicago were fairly decent, if I stayed through to the following Thursday (2/7), so I booked a plane ticket. However, around noon PST, Grandma Kitty passed away, peacefully, exactly 96 years and 3 months of age. I’m at my parent’s house now. Both Mackenzie and I are mourning the passing of a wonderful woman who we cherished, and neither of us can be with the other.

I’m a bit slacky in my once a week posting, I swear I’ll try to get better, but stuff has been busy lately. One of the things which has been keeping me busy the past month (or really since the end of August) was the condo conversion refinance, which would complete the process of turning from TIC to Condo – something I’ve posted about before, and I swear I will make a definitive post on in 2013 (please, my meagre readership, hold me to this!).

Anyway, I posted back in September that my condo conversion was done with the city, but that there was still the refinance bit to go. Well it took until the week before last for that to finally finish. We closed the refi on 1/15/2013, and that puts an end to the TIC and brings into full on Condominium territory. Hurray!

I spent much of this week in Portland, OR for work. There is lots I could mention – mostly about food, but to keep this short I’ll just say that I had an artisanal Twinkie and it was DELICIOUS. I forgot to take a picture, sadly

I don’t expect to be doing much traveling this year – at least in the first 8 months – but we started the year out with a weekend trip down South to San Diego, to celebrate one of Mackenzie’s friend’s birthdays. I’d never been to San Diego before, so I was looking forward to whatever we did being new to me.

We arrived along with a few other friends around 6:30PM, and a couple of our friends from other cities who were driving down that day picked us up from the airport and brought us to Ponce’s Mexican Restaurant where we met out local friend and her coworker. There was a bit of a wait for a party of 10, but the margaritas made the wait easier, and the food was worth waiting for, and also pretty cheap. Actually – they split us into a table of 6 and a table of 4 and my table, the table of 6 ended up just paying the entire bill since we didn’t read it carefully and it was low enough that dividing by 6 seemed OK. I guess we forgot we were in San Diego!

The next day we headed out to the famous San Diego zoo. It was the last weekend of their “Jungle Bells” holiday thing, where there lights up around the zoo and it stayed open fairly late.

This was pretty cool later in the day, after it got dark, but from the get go, I was very happy. We started out with their bus tour, which is a good way to get a feel for the zoo, especially for a first timer (of course some in our party had been there before, but not I!). There were some good views of animals from the bus, like this lion:

After the bus tour we ate and, agains the wishes of many of the party, I got to walk around the reptile house. They were mostly sleeping, of course, but there were still some sights to see like this dwarf crocodile.

Even though we spent almost 6 hours at the zoo, I don’t think we saw more than 20% of it. Of course we spent some time eating and drinking, and with a group of 9 you might have to take things slow, but none of us were too bored, I don’t think, and everyone liked what we saw. As we stayed until round 6PM, we were able to enjoy the holiday lights as we were getting ready to leave the zoo.

After spending the day at the zoo we were all sort of tired, so we ordered in Pizza, drank a bunch of wine,

and watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch on DVD, which was a good lead on to our brunch plans the next morning…

We went to Lips, which is a drag show dinner club, that has a Gospel Brunch on Sunday. The show was pretty good and while the all you can drink Bloody Marys and Mimosas were nothing to write home about, there really was all you can drink, so except for our drivers, we were pretty sauced by the end of the show.

Almost all the non locals headed home after lunch, either via Air or Car, but Mackenzie and I along with a couple of more friends were on a late evening flight, so we hung around for a while, watching some TV and getting dinner from Smash Burger, which makes a tasty burger and some tasty fries.

Overall, it was a fun and quick trip, which makes me want to go back to San Diego to check out more sites and have more food!

2012 was a banner year for book reading for me. By my count, I finished thirty-one books, although one of them, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming is a children’s book, so maybe it doesn’t count. Either way I at least hit my goal from the previous year of thirty books. There is also one book that is unfinished, which means it will always remain in book limbo, stuck between 2012 and 2013, poor thing.

Moving on, almost all of the books I read where ebooks – although the final three completed books, the limbo book and one or two others were physical books. Six books, plus the limbo book were nonfiction, and of them two were memoirs – 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust which is a funny little book about obsessing over bread baking, and Blood, Bones & Butter which was definitely the more awkward of the two. One of the non-fiction book was actually an opinion piece, and therefore maybe shouldn’t count? Two books were re-reads – The Hobbit and Treasure Island.

It’s hard to choose favorites, but I think I will be boring and say that the best non-fiction book I read in 2012 was probably the aforementioned 52 Loaves, and the the best fiction book was The Art of Fielding, which might be the overall best book I read in 2012.

Also, I think I resolved to post at least once a week in 2013, so maybe I won’t forget to post for another fourish months?

Ok, it took an email from Dreamhost reminding me that a new version of wordpress was released for me to remember that I have a blog. Well, I remembered, but I’ve not been tending to it too well. The summer business I alluded to in my last post, about 6 weeks ago is still going on but slowed a little. The condo conversion is still going, but almost done (done with the city, in the midst of refinancing it into individual condos). Anyway the only point is, I’ll post more soon. Maybe. But also that I have a bridge to sell you.

Oh man, I am lax, but I’ve been busy. The past month or so has been full of traveling, which I will write about when I get back from LA after this weekend – my last trip for several weeks. I’m excited because I’ll actually be at home next weekend, and be able to finish some projects around the house. Speaking of which, the condo conversion is still ongoing, but it’s at the *almost* done stage – the map for the lot split has been submitted to the county recorder, so once that’s recorded, it’s pretty much complete (will still need to do a condo conversion refi, but as far as the city will be concerned, we are two separate lots as soon as it is recorded). I’ll leave you with a photo of a good beer I discovered, which is impossible to get here :(.

For whatever reason summer seems to be the season when we do the majority of our traveling. This year traveling is mostly centered around events of friends and family – birthdays and weddings. The first trip was to my friend Scott’s wedding in New Jersey, June 1, 2012 through June 4, 2012. I’d been to New Jersey before, for work in 2002 or 2003 – Jersey City, which is pretty cool because it is right near Manhattan, and Piscataway/New Brunswick, which is probably closer to the rest of the state. Oh, we also went to Princeton for part of a day, which was nice, and the campus looks like Hogwarts.

Anyway, this time we were headed to Rockaway in North/Central New Jersey. And my number one impression of this place is – diners abound. We ate at a different diner each of the four days that we were there. They were convenient (open late or 24 hours, most of them), had decent foods and large menus so that they could satisfy the hungers of multiple people. The only one that was really of note was the Jefferson Diner in Lake Hopatcong:

This place was obviously recently remodeled, and as such the are a food network and such mainstay (based on their menu). They self-advertise a lot, both on billboards on the highway it’s on, and in the diner itself. There are video screens which show a mixture of local advertisements (for dog walkers or tutors or what not – the sort of thing that is often on placemats at other diners there) and clips from their appearance on Diners, Drive Ins and Dives. Personally, I would eat more comfortably without seeing Guy Fieri’s crazy mug, but that wasn’t to be. The food portions here were bigger than the other diners, which tended to serve more food than one should eat in a sitting, but were also more expensive.

The second impression is that New Jersey sure likes open faced sandwiches! I guess this helps get a bit more food on a plate, since you can have about twice the filling per sandwich, but it’s more of a pain to eat. Third impression – I really understand the state’s nickname now – this area of the state is incredibly verdant.

It was an OK place to visit, but I sure was happy to get back to California after 3 days there.

Months ago I posted some about my condo conversions, and the inspections. Well, suffice it to say that after that last post the final but of the inspections went through without a hitch. After that we had to wait for the city to approve our application, which went fairly smoothly (there was some confusion over the title report, but that got cleared up pretty quickly.

At this point there are only a few tasks left to do:

1. Pay all of this year’s property taxes – there can’t be any liens on the property when the seperation into two seperate deeds take place. Since the tax lien is from January 1, even though we don’t get bills until September, we need to pay this before we can proceed. I recently contacted the tax assessor and got our estimated property taxes for this year – up somewhat more than I expected from last year, but still not too bad. We plan to pay this off in the next couple of weeks.
2. Record the condo map – this is actually expensive, but already paid for when we sent in our application. The surveyor will send in a mylar copy of our condo map to the city, and when it is recorded we are officially two separate properties, at least as far as the city is concerned.
3. And then, the final step to true separation is to refinance into two seperate loans and record the CC&Rs. Hopefully this won’t be too bad to do – property values look like they are still pretty good around here, so I doubt the house has devalued, which would be the biggest snag to a refi. But we’ll have to see – at least we have pretty much forever to do this step (although rates are sure good now).

In other news, we bought a grill for our shared back area, so BBQ season can commence!