It's ours. Got the keys and everything. Now the work begins ( Read more... )

We bought a house. It's official. We close on Tuesday. This week has been a blur of paperwork, planning the renovation, and so forth. In addition, the guy who is replacing my old boss as director starting. I applied for the job and was told they wanted someone very senior, and my experience wasn't enough to even be considered. When the last ( Read more... )

After jumping through some hoops that the bank just seemed to randomly throw at us, we've got our acceptance letter. We'll close escrow on 3/25, and officially be home-owners! It's a 1938 Spanish Revival house in Windsor Hills. It has quite a bill of repairs associated with it, which is why we could afford it, and qualifies me for what yagathai calls the " ( Read more... )

Eowyn is incredibly cheerful in the mornings. She wakes up giggling, rearing back and throwing her hands up in the air, and then slapping P and I to get us to interact with her. Yesterday morning I'd had a long hard night at work - just part of the deal when you work IT and actually do stuff, you get called at odd hours. So I got up bleary, a ( Read more... )

I need to keep more regular track of what's going on. I will want to remember this stuff later, and if recent mental deterioration is any indicator, I'll need some help ( Read more... )

I don't have many friends here in LA. Part of this is a natural by-product of getting married and having a kid - everyone knows that severely limited your social time. It's predictable, no big deal, and nothing to worry about. But above and beyond that, I just have trouble or get in trouble out here in a way I didn't back in Philly ( Read more... )

Look at real estate in LA as a game. You have a limited supply of properties to buy. Their value is determined in part by a national average, in part by the cost of financing, in part by recent trends - in part by their objective features, like size and location, and unfortunately, largely by the competition ( Read more... )

such a look of pure betrayal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnWyDzLVus0

Click to view

I started training for the LA marathon in August or September. I needed to go from not having run at all for years, to marathon-fitness, so I gave myself lots of time, 8 months. I started out slow. I joined the LA Road Runners, who met every Saturday morning at 5:30 AM in Venice to run in pace groups. I ran a few miles a day, then more. Then we ( Read more... )

My New Year's Resolutions for 2013 were to not complain about anything all year, and never pronounce the word "quinoa" in the conventional way. The second resolution I kept, much to the dismay of some punctilious people ( Read more... )