(no subject)
House inspection done.
Most of the house is fine. There were some comments about the foundation being in good shape but that it was made with high lime content mortar, so moisture remediation &etc will be important to prevent issues going forward (but no signs of moisture damage, no cracking, etc). A vague "you should probably get a specialty contractor to look at this for you and talk with you about remediation steps if you're worried, but I'm not an expert and...". Talking to friends and such who actually know about this basically revealed that it's one of those, "can be a pain in the ass to fix because people need to know to use compatible materials, but as long as you know it should be fine" things. A note about how the kitchen cabinet directly under the sink has signs of old mold damage/remediation having been done at some point in the past, and that one of the plugs in the kitchen is not grounded. (Just one! I was quite frankly amazed.) Otherwise, not much going on. A recommendation that the plumbing in the upstairs bath (which we're already planning to have remodeled...) be replaced, because it's got PVC for the cold water (copper for the hot), and that's "not recommended" for residential, but it's the only place in the house where that was done, so...
All told we're looking at about $10k worth of work, the majority of which we were already aware of, and most of which does not need to be dealt with immediately (though we'll likely try to find a contractor we like and get it done ASAP). Nothing too shocking or weird. We talked to our agent about whether we could try to press one or two issues and get some money back re: closing costs, and she said that there was a chance that we'd be able to for the plumbing (because it's the one thing that's really not up to code), but otherwise, you know, most of the stuff is issues you'd expect from a 116-year-old house.
And...like. We already know that if we are willing to do a little bit of work on the house, we'll be able to raise the value from the $455k we're paying to easily $500 or even $550k. So yeah, we are okay with the inspection results and we're moving forward. Yay?
Last week at work was...hard. It was a high anxiety week (for obvious reasons...), and then nothing in the lab worked, and just...eugh. Add to it that we had to sign a bunch of paperwork for the startup (about stock allotments, who gets what, and what happens in the event that one of us dies or is grievously injured to the point of no longer being able to work), and it was just...not great. I'm hopeful that next week will be better, but we'll see.
Meantime, Max's car is still in the shop. The repair he needs done is under warranty from the guy who did it last time, but he's being difficult to work with and is demanding that we use his tow guy to have it hauled back to Florence, to the tune of roughly $1k. I was like, "um..." when Max told me about it, and immediately hopped on the phone to my dad, who was like, "don't do that", and then started looking up auto shippers and such, but...yeah.
It's looking at this point like we're going to pay a friend of ours a couple hundred bucks to use his truck to haul it down to Florence, and then they will either repair it (best outcome) or they will refund us the money for the transmission and we'll sell it as-is.
Sigh.
Max had a hard time last Sunday (his birthday, ofc), with the whole car thing weighing on him, and it weighed on me, too. Like. He's been driving my car, and it's fine, but it's also just - this is a lot to deal with on top of the whole "buying a house" thingum. Ugh.
Anyway. The long and short of it is that he'll probably be buying a new car in the next month or so. He's not happy about it, but as I pointed out to him, it's not really something we have a choice about, esp. if we're going to be moving two towns over, so, you know.
...yeah.
I'm doing Idol again and wrote a thing about Linden for the first topic. The number of comments going, if this is nonfiction..., sort of cautiously, make me laugh. It is non-fiction, though it has been eight years now, and I've probably gotten some of the details wrong, and I have deliberately fuzzed some others to make it harder to go, oh, this is when it happened, and where, and why...
Fictionish, maybe, but I'd say it's nonfiction. He'd disagree, likely, but the beauty of it is that I doubt he will ever read it (as it seems a bit sad to still be reading the online rambling of someone you dated almost a decade ago and haven't talked to since 2014 or 2015).
Writing about it wasn't therapeutic, per se, but it did help illustrate for me how much better things have gotten, in the last few years. 2017 was...rough. But I survived, and I'm here, still - I survived the house fire, I left the bad boyfriend, I have grieved and largely moved on from my grandmother's death, I finished my PhD...
It's just.
It's funny, right, to think about how stressful things are now, how there's still that old anxiety there about how things are difficult and maybe they'll be bad, only to realize that well, no matter what, they're never going to be that bad again. I have money now. I have a steady job (even if I don't always feel like I'm good at it). I'm in a healthy marriage (to Max, of all people - something that I think he would have been amused by, had he stuck around to see how that played out, because Max was always sort of - well, the non-threatening, obviously not interesting to Jenn one), and there is no doubt to people on the outside that it is healthy. You just need to watch how we interact with each other to be able to see it. There's no lying and no embroidery about how good things are - I feel that it speaks for itself in a lot of aspects.
As I was explaining to someone else a few days ago, it's interesting to me how people have commented about how boring my life has become over the last couple of years. Like, yeah, I have gotten boring! But let's not confuse that with being unhappy. I don't feel as though I'm lurching from crisis to crisis every week and that's so...good? I'm with someone who has a similar values alignment to me and who respects my opinions and input on things, who wants to support me in all of my dumb endeavors and who expects that I will support him in his as long as they are healthy.
We're not joined at the hip - we actually spend a lot of the day roughly ten feet away from each other but completely absorbed in different tasks (see: him sitting behind me on the sofa right now, playing Pokemon Shield...), and pretty happy about it. Sometimes he comes over to touch me, or will exclaim something happily and pull off his headphones to tell me, but a lot of our time is "being alone together", and it's pretty good. I realize that I don't spend a lot of time talking about what it's like to be married to Max, but I can't think of a good way to describe most of it - like. There are so many little inside jokes and other bits that I can't think of how to articulate clearly, things that I enjoy that would require years of context to make sense to an outsider, and I just...don't feel that they need to be broadcast to the outside world. (Sorry? Except not, if that makes sense.)
I caught up with a friend a few months ago and he described me now as "vibrant and happy", and I feel like that's probably accurate.
Today was quiet. Ran Space Heist, ran a single errand, came home, took a long nap, made soup, hung out with Max. Watched TV, played West of Loathing, didn't do anything more productive than a load of dishes and laundry. I'm imagining tomorrow will be more of the same, or at least I hope tomorrow's quiet too. Running session 0 for the last Neverwinter campaign in the morning, and that should be it, ideally.
Suppose we'll see.
Most of the house is fine. There were some comments about the foundation being in good shape but that it was made with high lime content mortar, so moisture remediation &etc will be important to prevent issues going forward (but no signs of moisture damage, no cracking, etc). A vague "you should probably get a specialty contractor to look at this for you and talk with you about remediation steps if you're worried, but I'm not an expert and...". Talking to friends and such who actually know about this basically revealed that it's one of those, "can be a pain in the ass to fix because people need to know to use compatible materials, but as long as you know it should be fine" things. A note about how the kitchen cabinet directly under the sink has signs of old mold damage/remediation having been done at some point in the past, and that one of the plugs in the kitchen is not grounded. (Just one! I was quite frankly amazed.) Otherwise, not much going on. A recommendation that the plumbing in the upstairs bath (which we're already planning to have remodeled...) be replaced, because it's got PVC for the cold water (copper for the hot), and that's "not recommended" for residential, but it's the only place in the house where that was done, so...
All told we're looking at about $10k worth of work, the majority of which we were already aware of, and most of which does not need to be dealt with immediately (though we'll likely try to find a contractor we like and get it done ASAP). Nothing too shocking or weird. We talked to our agent about whether we could try to press one or two issues and get some money back re: closing costs, and she said that there was a chance that we'd be able to for the plumbing (because it's the one thing that's really not up to code), but otherwise, you know, most of the stuff is issues you'd expect from a 116-year-old house.
And...like. We already know that if we are willing to do a little bit of work on the house, we'll be able to raise the value from the $455k we're paying to easily $500 or even $550k. So yeah, we are okay with the inspection results and we're moving forward. Yay?
Last week at work was...hard. It was a high anxiety week (for obvious reasons...), and then nothing in the lab worked, and just...eugh. Add to it that we had to sign a bunch of paperwork for the startup (about stock allotments, who gets what, and what happens in the event that one of us dies or is grievously injured to the point of no longer being able to work), and it was just...not great. I'm hopeful that next week will be better, but we'll see.
Meantime, Max's car is still in the shop. The repair he needs done is under warranty from the guy who did it last time, but he's being difficult to work with and is demanding that we use his tow guy to have it hauled back to Florence, to the tune of roughly $1k. I was like, "um..." when Max told me about it, and immediately hopped on the phone to my dad, who was like, "don't do that", and then started looking up auto shippers and such, but...yeah.
It's looking at this point like we're going to pay a friend of ours a couple hundred bucks to use his truck to haul it down to Florence, and then they will either repair it (best outcome) or they will refund us the money for the transmission and we'll sell it as-is.
Sigh.
Max had a hard time last Sunday (his birthday, ofc), with the whole car thing weighing on him, and it weighed on me, too. Like. He's been driving my car, and it's fine, but it's also just - this is a lot to deal with on top of the whole "buying a house" thingum. Ugh.
Anyway. The long and short of it is that he'll probably be buying a new car in the next month or so. He's not happy about it, but as I pointed out to him, it's not really something we have a choice about, esp. if we're going to be moving two towns over, so, you know.
...yeah.
I'm doing Idol again and wrote a thing about Linden for the first topic. The number of comments going, if this is nonfiction..., sort of cautiously, make me laugh. It is non-fiction, though it has been eight years now, and I've probably gotten some of the details wrong, and I have deliberately fuzzed some others to make it harder to go, oh, this is when it happened, and where, and why...
Fictionish, maybe, but I'd say it's nonfiction. He'd disagree, likely, but the beauty of it is that I doubt he will ever read it (as it seems a bit sad to still be reading the online rambling of someone you dated almost a decade ago and haven't talked to since 2014 or 2015).
Writing about it wasn't therapeutic, per se, but it did help illustrate for me how much better things have gotten, in the last few years. 2017 was...rough. But I survived, and I'm here, still - I survived the house fire, I left the bad boyfriend, I have grieved and largely moved on from my grandmother's death, I finished my PhD...
It's just.
It's funny, right, to think about how stressful things are now, how there's still that old anxiety there about how things are difficult and maybe they'll be bad, only to realize that well, no matter what, they're never going to be that bad again. I have money now. I have a steady job (even if I don't always feel like I'm good at it). I'm in a healthy marriage (to Max, of all people - something that I think he would have been amused by, had he stuck around to see how that played out, because Max was always sort of - well, the non-threatening, obviously not interesting to Jenn one), and there is no doubt to people on the outside that it is healthy. You just need to watch how we interact with each other to be able to see it. There's no lying and no embroidery about how good things are - I feel that it speaks for itself in a lot of aspects.
As I was explaining to someone else a few days ago, it's interesting to me how people have commented about how boring my life has become over the last couple of years. Like, yeah, I have gotten boring! But let's not confuse that with being unhappy. I don't feel as though I'm lurching from crisis to crisis every week and that's so...good? I'm with someone who has a similar values alignment to me and who respects my opinions and input on things, who wants to support me in all of my dumb endeavors and who expects that I will support him in his as long as they are healthy.
We're not joined at the hip - we actually spend a lot of the day roughly ten feet away from each other but completely absorbed in different tasks (see: him sitting behind me on the sofa right now, playing Pokemon Shield...), and pretty happy about it. Sometimes he comes over to touch me, or will exclaim something happily and pull off his headphones to tell me, but a lot of our time is "being alone together", and it's pretty good. I realize that I don't spend a lot of time talking about what it's like to be married to Max, but I can't think of a good way to describe most of it - like. There are so many little inside jokes and other bits that I can't think of how to articulate clearly, things that I enjoy that would require years of context to make sense to an outsider, and I just...don't feel that they need to be broadcast to the outside world. (Sorry? Except not, if that makes sense.)
I caught up with a friend a few months ago and he described me now as "vibrant and happy", and I feel like that's probably accurate.
Today was quiet. Ran Space Heist, ran a single errand, came home, took a long nap, made soup, hung out with Max. Watched TV, played West of Loathing, didn't do anything more productive than a load of dishes and laundry. I'm imagining tomorrow will be more of the same, or at least I hope tomorrow's quiet too. Running session 0 for the last Neverwinter campaign in the morning, and that should be it, ideally.
Suppose we'll see.