Due to various personal reasons, this LiveJournal is going semi-friends only. I'll still be posting the occasional public post, but most of my more personal posts will be locked to those on my friends list.

If you'd like to read these and I in some way know you, please comment or send me an email with your LJ username and how we know one another and I will be happy to add you.

Thank you!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314802,00.html

(Not withstanding that this is coming from Fox News, of course.)

In an effort to get my newest venture off the ground, I need to build up a bit of a portfolio, as well as test out my code and all that fun stuff. So I'm offering for the first, oh, four people, a completely free website done on any one of those templates. All I ask in return is that you let me link to it from the site (which means more exposure for your site!) and provide me with any feedback you think might be useful.

I don't mind if it ends up at a subdomain or on a free host (provided that host will run PHP scripts, or the sites won't work), or even if it never gets any real use. Of course, I'd also love to get you set up with a real site to help your own business get off the ground or get you exposure on some other project.

Because this is free, I'm going to limit these projects to a maximum of five pages. If you need more than that, I'll have to charge my per-page fee (though you'll get waived the one time set up fee and get your first five pages for free, so it's still a good deal!).

I'd prefer to do these for my friends, but since most of you are pretty net-savvy yourselves, feel free to pass this along to friends of your own. But this offer is only good for the first three people!

To make sure you get this deal, fill out the order form and put in the promo code: ljfree

webboByDebbo.org

Five Alarm Blaze

This is about maybe 4-5 blocks from my house, whee. I can see the plume of smoke from my window. It's just the other side of the shopping plaza behind me.

Apparently the smoke is toxic, so I've shut all the windows. At least the wind is blowing the other way.

So the good thing is that we're allowed to listen to our iPods at work. The bad thing is that after listening to it for about 7 hours, 5 days a week, I'm already getting sick of my current library of almost 2500 songs.

So I turn to you, loyal reader, looking for some suggestions for new music discoveries. Work is the perfect time to listen to new music, since it takes enough focus to keep me from getting bored, but not so much that I mess up my work.

( What I Like )

But I'm not limiting you to those. Anything fun, different, musically or lyrically interesting, or just that caught your attention and you don't know why - drop me a line with the artist and song name and I'll see if I can find it. Even suggestions for stuff that was popular back in the day but has since faded into obscurity (eg. Walking on the Sun, Save the Best for Last, Black Velvet, etc.).

I should also mention that I might be using less than 100% legal means to procure some of these songs, so if you are particularly against me doing so with your recommendations, please make note of that.

You can comment on my LJ, my Facebook wall (or answer the Q on my Facebook page), or even do the old fashioned thing and send me an email (or, gasp, even talk to me directly).

Just a real quick update to say: We got the house!

We sign officially tomorrow, but everything is basically locked in as of now, we just have to finalize and send back the offer and give over the deposit.

I'll probably update more later with some house details in a friends-locked post.

Just a short one since I'm really wiped from another whirlwind day, but for the few of you still playing along at home, thought I'd mention that we've put in another offer on a place and it seems much more likely to be the real thing this time, since it's not another instance of a multiple offer situation.

As far as I understand it, since our offer is in first, they're legally obligated to deal with us until either 8 pm tomorrow or we mutually decide to stop negotiations. So even if they do get a second offer in early tomorrow, they have to come back to us and give us a shot at matching it. I could be wrong, but I think that's how it works, anyway.

Anyway, will probably give more details later on if I'm a little less tired tomorrow night after we get done in the city. And by then we should know either way if we got it.

Went out tonight with Joe, which was fun, despite the fact that it's really friggin' cold out there. I'm so ready for winter to be over. Anyroad, dinner at Kelsey's left a little to be desired - we both got the fish and chips, but the fish was more batter than actual fish. Next time we'll have to do Casey's instead, we decided.

We were going to go and see Catch & Release at the Ajax Cinemas, but since that's a small theatre, they only had showings around 7 and around 9, and by the time we got done dinner, it was closer to 7:30-8. We didn't really want to kick around waiting for the 9 show, so we went over to Whitby to the AMC 24 there. I hadn't been to Whitby in a very long time (the last distinct memory I have is of going to the miniature gardens there when I was maybe 5 or 6), but it's really so close by. And it was a very nice theatre, I must say.

Anyway, C&R wasn't playing any time too handy there either, so we opted instead for The Pursuit of Happyness, which he'd already seen but really liked and which I'd wanted to see but hadn't gotten the choice. It was a very cute movie, very much the feel-good that it promises to be, though the middle gets a little frustrating when you feel so much for the main character but he just cannot seem to catch a single break.

So we've agreed to make this a more regular thing seeing as we're both tooling around over in this area. Might see if we can't drag Hil into things next week if she has any time.

Tomorrow, I'm supposed to meet up with the realtor in the afternoon to go look at places, though she hasn't gotten back to me yet with a time. I'll probably just aim to get up around noon or one, I guess, maybe take the phone to bed with me in case she calls.

So we lost out on those two places that we really liked, which kinda sucks. The system, I think, is really pretty messed up for multiple offers. And because both Rosevear and Stephenson were on the same day, we couldn't put bids on both. We went for the Rosevear, but someone else got it. We're both pretty disappointed, but the show must go on.

So Friday afternoon I go out with the realtor on my own since mom has to work and a lot of the places won't do showings in the evening. I'm a little nervous about that, since with the way the market is, we'll probably be making an offer dependent entirely upon what I think of a place, if I like it. It's a lot of pressure, but we've clearly got to get moving more quickly if we want to get anything good.

Assuming we don't get anything Friday, we'll also probably be hitting up open houses on Saturday and then going out again with the realtor on Sunday. I've also got plans to go out for dinner with Joe tomorrow night, so going to be a pretty busy weekend, which is good after being trapped in the house and feeling like I've been wasting way too much time online.

Next week, I'm hoping I can get in touch with Hil and maybe I'll look up a couple of folks who mentioned wanting to get coffee when I was still too sick with mono to venture out. Speaking of the mono, feeling mostly better. Still get tired fairly quickly, but it's more manageable in that I can go out and do stuff, I just feel a little worn out afterwards.

So yes, if anyone around the GTA (or willing to travel here) wants to do stuff, lemme know! In the words of Muppet Treasure Island, "We've got cabin fever - we've lost what sense we had!"

(And it's a pun because, y'know, cabin = house? Geddit? Geddit? Oh, forget it...)

So tomorrow we enter into possibly two different bidding wars, on the Rosevear and Stephenson properties. Apparently the way it works is a little less ... efficient than the way I had thought. I figured it was more like an auction, where someone starts the bidding and if someone else bids high, person one gets the option of raising their own bid again and so on. But instead, you don't get to know what the other offers are for. You have to be told if there are other offers, but otherwise you know nothing.

If you put in a bid and someone else comes along and bids higher, you don't get any chance to raise your original bid; you just get the one shot at it. And even if you're the second bidder, you don't know how much the first bid was for, so you may end up coming in lower. The seller then looks at both bids and gets to choose between them.

So it makes it a little tricky trying to figure out a price that's high enough to 'win' the property, but not too much higher than you need to go.

Anyway, so, we enter into this fun and exciting realm tomorrow. The Rosevear one is probably our fave, but we'd be happy with either, really. Bidding on Rosevear starts earlier, though, so we'll probably try for that one and hopefully we'll know before we need to move on the Stephenson one (since the last thing we want to do is end up buying TWO houses).

So wish us luck! Granted, even if both fall through, there look to be options out there (including that first place on Gerrard that we liked which sold but is now back on the market, so the sale must have fallen through).

So just got back in from our second serious bout of looking at places (not counting the times we went out during the summer before we found out we couldn't get financing without first selling this place). It was supposed to be an official round of it with our agent lining up appointments, but she was sick today so she had to bail out on us, offering to do Wednesday evening instead.

We debated just not bothering since it's really cold out there, but there was an open house at one place we wanted to see. Similar to the place we like on Rosevear, this one isn't taking offers until Tuesday, but we figured if we liked it we'd need to see it pretty much this weekend, since by Wednesday it would be too late.

The original plan was to take the GO, since Main station is right there within walking distance, and then we'd troll around the neighbourhood a bit, maybe check out from the outside a few of the places on our list to get an idea of them, but again, it was really cold, so we finally decided we'd drive in. I'm glad of it, since the Weather Network site is all bold and orange claiming:

WIND CHILL VALUES OF MINUS 30 EXPECTED ACROSS ALL OF SOUTHERN ONTARIO TONIGHT AND VALUES NEAR MINUS 40 OVER PORTIONS OF EASTERN ONTARIO TONIGHT. THIS IS A WARNING THAT EXTREME WIND CHILL CONDITIONS ARE IMMINENT OR OCCURRING IN THESE REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.

( Details of the day... )

Went and looked at some places today, which has left me rather worn out, but figured I'd compile my thoughts here as lucidly as I can before I forget them.

Rosevear

We really liked this one. We're seriously thinking of putting in an offer, though they're not accepting any until the 6th. They're really underpriced for the work they've done on the place. The realtor guesses they want to get a bunch of offers in on the 6th and hope they get more than the asking price, but even if it goes a little over, it'd still be worth it, we think. Don't want to get my heart set on it though, since a bidding war could go either way and we can't afford to go too high though.
Beautiful house, though. Original hardwood floors throughout, interior renos done well, fair sized yard, and three houses away from a huge park on a dead end street. A bit of a hike to the subway but certainly walkable.
Listing here. Obviously it's not currently a duplex, so we would have to do some work, but we should be able to swing it, I think. Other issue is parking, but it looks like street parking is available with a permit.

Woodbine

This one was a bit of an adventure to get to, facing onto a very busy road with absolutely no parking either side and with the houses raised up a flight of steps so you can't even get turned around. Apparently there is a parking spot off the lane out back, but hell if we could find it. The interior was similar in layout to the Rosevear one, but the house was in much worse condition. The floors were bowed and buckled, though covered over with nice enough parquet.
Neighbourhood was definitely nowhere near as nice and the house looks out over a very busy street right by railway tracks. Not a horrible place, but - not for us.

Gerrard

Wow. This house was scary. Very cool neighbourhood, right in the middle of east Chinatown (the more authentic of the two in TO), next door to a Chinese coffee shop and bakery. Then we went inside. It was being sold under power of sale, but man, they wanted WAY too much money for that sty. Someone had basically thrown up walls wherever they could, thrown down cheap linoleum and rented the rooms out as a flop house. Holes in the walls, the counters in the kitchen all over the place, dirty floors, wires and cables running everywhere. I felt like I should have a tentanus shot afterwards. Suffice to say not buying that one.

So we're going back out on Sunday afternoon to check out a few others. My job in the meantime is to peruse the MLS and find said other houses. Picked out a few promising ones so far, including a nice one right off the water.

The sale has gone through. It's official. We've now got until May 1st to find a place and, well, get ourselves there.

Wednesday we're looking at places, which should be much more exciting now that we can actually buy one.

Went out for dinner with my mom and Barry, which is the first time I've been out of the house for any extended period of time since I got sick, pretty much (unless you count the time spent sitting around at the doctor's). Wore me out a bit, but was nice to get out, since I'm starting to go a wee bit stir crazy here.

In other news, the home inspector is coming tomorrow at 10 am. He says it may take him 2-3 hours, ugh. So that's kinda going to suck, but at least it's just done once and over with, unlike showings over and over and over. Assuming that goes okay, and the buyer gets financing, the offer becomes official and we can get financing from the bank. So everyone keep a good thought, hm?

We're going to look at places on Wednesday evening, since the realtor was busy today. The one on Barrington that we liked has been sold already, alas. But we've got a few others we'd like to see, so we'll hope maybe one of those pans out.

Rusty's feeling quite a bit better now, though she's still a little laggy on things. But she's stopped trembling constantly and can get up and down the stairs on her own now, so it seems all is well.

House

So the conditional offer is pending a home inspection and buyer financing. They came in a little under our new reduced asking price, but it's still more than we were initially hoping to get, so all-in-all, it's not too bad. The price was originally going to include all the appliances (fridge, stove, washer, dryer, dishwasher), but we counter-offered and then they counter-counter offered the same price but we keep the applicances, so that's what's currently pending right now.

We're hoping to get out and look at places on Sunday. Our current faves are these two:

• Barrington
• Gerrard
  

I'll let you know how that goes if we manage to get out.

Rusty

She's back home post-op, having gotten the mass removed from her intestines. She found the whole thing very traumatic and is still overcoming the experience, but is slowly on the mend. No complications so far.

That's about all for now.

4 months and 31 showings later, we finally got an offer!!!