Life in the house is going well. We’re mostly unpacked now and have most of the rooms mostly in order. We turned on of the bedrooms into a craft room to hold Meg’s yarn and my computer stuff, at least until I can get the basement set up the way I want with a server closet and workbench. Then I’ll be moving most of my computer stuff down there, and probably just have a workstation up here. I think our next steps will be getting some more furniture so the place doesn’t feel so empty. It’s time to finally get some real bedroom furniture, as we currently just have a mattress on the floor and the room looks really bare.

Work is good, I’ve been doing some IPv6 deployment, and it’s nice to finally see that getting some traction in the real world. Also been playing around with netdot, mostly for it’s IPAM features. A little hairy to get installed on FreeBSD, but once you get it on there, it seems to work out pretty well.

Meg and I are going to be heading out to San Diego tonight for Comic-Con this weekend. It’s out big vacation for the year and we’re really excited about it. Bunch of big names will be there, including Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. Hoping to get some autographs and generally have a good time. Also, Geek Chic will be there, so we’re going to be checking out their Emissary table. We’re thinking about getting one for the dining room, but I want to see one in person before dropping that kind of money on furniture.

Time to go move laundry around. I’m sure we’ll be posting plenty of pictures from this weekend, and I’ll try to remember to post about it when we get back.

We bought a new construction two story colonial in a small development. It’s just over 2,000 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, 2 car garage on about a 1/4 acre. Hardwood floors on most of the downstairs, carpet upstairs for the bedroom. Small deck off the back.

Moved in last month and have been slowly settling in. We still have a lot of boxes in the garage to go through, but we’re making progress on that, as well as buying all the little things we’re finding we need, like shades and curtains and a fridge and a lawnmower. There’s an unused space in the garage under the stairs that I’m hoping to rig up for my router and home storage server and such. Big Dave has offered to help me pull Ethernet wiring to the bedrooms and living room, so that’ll be cool.

I’ll have to get some good pictures to post, the only ones I have at the moment are from the construction. I’m hoping to get a bit better about writing on here as well. My personal goal is to do at least one thing worth writing about each weekend, even if it’s just some small improvement to the house.

So, hopefully more posts to come in the near future, along with a house warming party sometime in the next few months.

On the plus side, I might be able to get that 10%-up-to-$8k tax credit if I can get things all set before December 1st. On the down side, I’ll have less cash available for a down payment, and I’ll have to pay the lease break fee to get out of my current place.

Hmm…

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occasional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintenance roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rather liked in Merrimack. Unfortunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

In other news, the apartment building we’re living in is up for sale. Looks like the asking price is about $350k, and I’m trying to think of a way to get together with our friends on the first floor to buy the building. One person suggested working out a system by which the building is split into individual condo units and purchased separately, but I have no idea whatsoever on how to go about doing such a thing.

Other than that, not a whole lot going on in life. We had a party for Delia’s birthday last night (I’m actually still awake from that, haven’t felt the inclination to sleep yet.) Much fun was had, lots of Karaoke Revolution, a surprising amount of alcohol and more than enough pizza. I’m sure Delia will post more about it at some point.

Not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my weekend. I’ve been tossing around the idea of going geocaching, since I haven’t done that in quite a while. I should do some work on the SimPro stuff as well. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to work on one of my own projects for a change.

On the plus side, we found a pretty nice apartment on the west side of Manchester, two floors above where kyotemusings and redenife are living now. It’s a pretty big 3 bedroom place for about what I’m paying for my 1 bedroom currently. We’d be able to take on a roommate, too, which would help with trying to put some money away.

On the financial front, it seems that the mortgage person I was dealing with has disappeared off the face of the earth, so I need to find someone else. I plan on contacting my bank and Delia’s bank. Any other suggestions?

We started off in Merrimack looking at this place. I’ve noticed it in listings for a while, and the size and location seem really nice, but the listing does say “needs cosmetics tlc”, which is a bit of an understatement. This first thing we noticed when coming in the door was that a chunk of wall had been removed. This was pretty typical, as there were numerous small holes in the walls all over the building. Not really sure what was going on there. It is huge though, good sized basement with the beginnings of a bar, first floor has living room, dining room, kitchen. Two good sized bedrooms on the second floor, then a huge loft-type area on the 3rd floor, which I think would make a great computer/gaming room. It’s also in a pretty good location in Merrimack, about halfway between my work and Delia’s office.

Next we went to a garden style condo in Manchester, off of South Willow street (near the mall). It was very nice, very good condition, great floors, but I think it’s a little small for what we want. It’s not really much bigger than the apartment I’m in now, but it does have it’s own laundry room. I think it’s staying on the “maybe” pile. From there we went to another townhouse nearby. This one has some water damage to the upstairs bathroom that caused a part of the ceiling in the dining room to sag. It’s probably not a big deal to fix, but it didn’t help the overall place much. It would need some paint, as a few of the walls were a little too pink for my liking, but it had a “half-finished” basement, which could make a good computer area.

The last place we looked at was the brand new townhouse in Manchester, a couple blocks away from the Verizon Wireless Arena. It’s got an unfinished basement, a first floor with a small dining room, small kitchen, and a decent sized living room, and a second floor with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom with washer/dryer hookups. I really liked it, and I think it would be great if we finished off the basement to make a comp/game room. Until that happens though, we’d probably use the second bedroom as an office, which means we couldn’t get a roommate for a bit. I think we’re going to request some more info on this one.

So, that how things are going so far in the new year. I need to get on the phone with the money people again to get that ball rolling as well. Hopefully we’ll be in good shape to move into a place of our (my) own in the near future. Then we can start having people over again, yay!