Countdown

Started: 2004-12-09 19:32:50

Submitted: 2004-12-09 19:50:05

Visibility: World-readable

Yesterday I got a fax from my realtor with the closing statement from my mortgage broker with a long itemized list of everything I get to pay at closing, including courier fees, a title search, and everything else related in some way, shape, or form to my upcoming house acquisition. I'm rather impressed how many entities have their finger in the pot in my home-buying experience. I got a cashier's check (made out to myself) for the designated amount to sign over at the exact moment during closing tomorrow afternoon. The walk-through is at 1230 tomorrow; closing is immediately thereafter somewhere in Longmont. So in eighteen hours Kiesa and I will be homeowners.

(I'm now at BLUG; tonight is a demo night, but no one came up with very much to demo. While I was sitting typing this changelog, Zan Lynx mentioned the existence of FileLight and would have demoed it if he had his notebook handy. I volunteered to demo it and carried Elssbett to the front, only to discover that I had to reboot her to get the VGA output to work. One reboot later, I successfully demoed FileLight with the Linux kernel source 2.6.8.1. Fun and exciting.)

Today I trained customers (and another engineer) on the latest and greatest XY table we've built, which was a little odd; I've never done training of this sort before. (Eric usually does our training on complicated things like the XY table and drop watcher, but I have done some sort of low-key training on the accursed web transports before.) I'm still trying to figure out whether I covered everything or not; our customers think they have a vague idea what's going on, but they haven't spent very much time actually using it. That's what tomorrow is for; if they have any questions after I leave at noon to close on my house, they can ask Eric, who knows as much about the system as I do. After seven hours of training today, when our customers departed, I was entirely exhausted and couldn't do anything else useful. I concluded that I was done for the day and went home.

Kiesa and I are enjoying packing our apartment into little boxes. We've picked all the low-hanging fruit (books on shelves and the sort); now we've run out of space to put boxes in out-of-the-way places, and there's still plenty to be packed that isn't easily accessible. Should be great fun. I'm amusing myself doing the super-geek thing; we're indexing everything in our private Wiki and I'm printing box labels so we know where everything should go and what's in each box. I printed barcodes on one set of boxes (thanks to GNU Barcode); if I had anything that actually read barcodes, I'd print barcodes on every box I packed. (I Googled once; it seems that there is no consumer-grade barcode-reading hardware; everything is expensive, which keeps it out of my potential price range. I suppose I could dig out my cue cat, but I'm not quite that bored.)

Once we close tomorrow, our next project will be to paint one room (the master bedroom) and two roomlets (the master bedroom and the dining room). (Possibly after calling my mother and telling her I'm officially a home owner.) We're fairly comfortable with my paint choices for the master bedroom and master bathroom, but the dining room is still under consideration. When I picked colors and bought quarts of paint, I painted three-by-four-foot sheets of foam core board so we can hold them up in the target room and see if we like the color or not. We'll paint all day on Sunday and any other time we end up with extra time between packing and everything else we need to do before moving.