Our New Home

As we approach the move to our new house (end of January), I thought it might be nice to share some more views of the house–views before we have all of our stuff in the house!

Here’s a great picture my wife took of the house on the day we saw it for the first time.

Our new house

As I mentioned in a previous post, this house has many of the things we’re looking for.  If memory serves, the house is roughly twice the actual size of our current house; yet it still only has three bedrooms (the basement could be made into a family room, bedroom, 4th bathroom, and storage).  It’s definitely an upgrade from our current house, but it isn’t ginormous, either.  The house faces the sun, has a three (actually 4 stalls) car garage, oversized doors, a front porch, a mudroom, in ground sprinklers, and modern siding and brickwork.  Our current home?  None of the above.

Our new kitchen

This is our kitchen, a spacious area (compared to our current home), laid out it a way that it can be used for family events (making lefse, for example).  My wife is very excited about the pantry in the corner.  She can’t wait to change the handles on the cabinets.

Our new living room

This is our new living room, which is right across from the kitchen/dining area.  The cabinets are built into the room, and the room is wired for high-definition sound.  That happens to be a gas fireplace on the wall.  Our current home has two fireplaces, but we do not use either one; both need an insert to be used these days.  To the right of this picture is a small front room (called a “parlor” by some of our family).

Unfinished basement

I’m not going to post any pictures of the bedrooms, mainly because they don’t do well with photos.  This is the large unfinished basement which has as much (or more) floor space as the upstairs room.  There are currently 3 bathrooms in this house (two full, one 1/2), and there is plubming for a downstairs bathroom as well.  We’ll probably finish this room off in time.

We’re very excited and it’s hard to believe that we’ll be moving in less than a month.  We feel very grateful for the opportunity to own a home like this, and we continue to thank God for making all the pieces fit together.

Before we move, we’ll take some pictures of our current house and I’ll write a post about this house as well.

My First “Real” MacBook Issue

Okay, my first year of MacBook ownership has been awesome. My late 2008 Aluminum MacBook has been the best computer I’ve ever owned or used (including various Dell, Gateway, and HP computers). The MacBook has been an incredible performer, even when dropped mysteriously at school last year (one corner of the MacBook dented in), and there was a flawless upgrade of the system memory (to 4GB) and to a 500GB hard drive. Time Machine (backup) has been fantastic, as has using the Airport Extreme (wi-fi). All my peripherals have simply worked.

I upgraded the iPhone SDK this week, preparing again to write some programs for the iPhone. Shortly thereafter, Spotlight stopped working. Spotlight, for Windows users, is a very powerful search engine which maintains an index of your entire computer, and thus is much faster (and provides more information) than any Windows search engine I’ve ever used.

You access Spotlight by pressing the Command key and the Space Bar at the same time. Now, as I’m a former Windows user, I never thought I’d use that feature as much as I do. But I’ve found myself limited without it.

So, I did some web searching. I found some suggestions to reindex Spotlight, by making the hard drive private and then removing those settings (resulted in a index time of 120 hours); or to delete the data file (plist) where Spotlight resides. No luck. So I went to the Apple website, scheduled a call back, and was talking to live American (not outsourced) tech person in less than five minutes.

It turns out that my researched efforts were the first steps to take; this was followed by my booting into Safe Mode (hold down the Shift key as the computer boots), which also didn’t work. On a a side note, I didn’t even know that a Mac had a Safe Mode.

So, now I’m doing an “archive install” of the entire OSX, or more acccurately, I’m doing that at home while I am at my in-law’s house with my wife’s (now my) family. I’ll be interested to see if this works. If it does, I’ll be pretty happy. If not, I’ll just give Apple another call and figure it out with them (by the way, I did run the Disk Utility function, and everything turned out fine).

I’ll update later on the situation…stay tuned…

My MacBook in installation mode

Update (8:50pm): Came home and the “archive install” was complete, and the Spotlight index is all fixed and back running again.  No complaints!  And I’ve already used Spotlight twice tonight since I came home.

Interestingly enough, I seldom use the same feature on my iPhone (from the home screen, scroll one page to the left, or hit the home button again).  Mainly that’s because my apps are located where I can find them (as many are on my MacBook Dock), but when I have a file I need to find on my MacBook, Spotlight rocks, plain and simple.

My Top Apps (16) of 2009

My wife and I have owned iPhones since October 2008, and we owned a first generation iPod Touch for a few months before buying iPhones.  In that period of time, we’ve downloaded over 360 applications (and we’ve deleted a few).  Some of those apps stay on my phone, others visit a short while and then simply are stored in iTunes.  Perhaps you are a new owner of an iPhone or iPod Touch, or you have one and are simply looking for recommendations.  By all means, these aren’t the only apps on my iPhone, and there are others that I use.  But these are the applications I use most.  Here are my top applications on my iPhone at the end of 2009.

NetNewsWire

I read a number of blogs, most of them iPhone or Apple oriented.  This application is one of the best RSS readers, even having undergone a change where the application pulls your blogs from Google Reader (NetNewsWire used to provide its own blog subscription hosting).  If you are an RSS reader, or you read a number of blogs, this is a great program to have.

Stanza

Stanza, although owned by Amazon.com, has not disappeared into the Kindle brand, and in fact, was recently upgraded and revised.  I love Stanza because the desktop version can open nearly any kind of text file and convert it to a format that can be read on your iPhone (including PDFs and Word Documents).  Stanza is used every night as my free time for reading is usually right before I fall asleep for the evening.  My current read?  The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (including the Hobbit).

The Weather Channel

We live in Minnesota.  Enough said.

TweetDeck

I have six Twitter clients installed on my iPhone, and I use nearly all of them.  TweetDeck is my favorite for reading entries.  I like how it allows you to swipe between accounts (including Facebook).  Posting doesn’t always work so well, particularly if you try to post a picture to two different accounts.  For posting, I’ll usually fall back to Twittelator Pro, or my new 2nd favorite Twitter app, HootSuite (which allows you to schedule Tweets…very useful if you use Twitter [as I do] for announcements).

Mint.com

Mint.com is a very powerful service, which allows you to keep track of all your finances.  We’re in the process of buying a new house and changing banks, a bank which has a relationship with Mint.com.  In addition, you can track credit cards, investments, and automatically keep a budget.  This is a powerful app, although many users are afraid because it was recently purchased by Quicken.  Mint.com only accesses your account data, it cannot transfer balances or make payments.

Olive Tree NIV Bible Reader

I don’t apologize for my Christian faith, and I need access to a Bible on my iPhone for church and personal devotions.  I like Olive Tree’s iPhone application very much, and I also have downloaded additional translations to use.  This application underwent a major revision this year and looks great.

TextNow

Please see my previous post for an in-depth discussion of text messaging programs, TextFree Unlimited is also on our phones.

Cleartune

As a choir director, I seldom have use for a tuner, but the pitch generator on this app serves me VERY well as a pitch pipe.  Highly recommended.

Guitar Toolkit

The best guitar package, unbelievable for tuning guitars.  Although it is pricey in iPhone App terms, it is money well spent.

Fluent News

A great, free news reader, which provides top news compiled from several sources.  Much more reliable than many of the newspaper apps we’ve used in the past.

Sportacular

A way to see how games are doing, if you love sports.  A new feature this year was the addition of pushed updates (you set the frequency).  This has been great for the football season.

DoodleJump

DoodleJump has to be my favorite iPhone game, even though I can’t seem to get past 34,000 points.

iQuarium

Sort of a dumb concept, yet every day I enter the app and feed my fish.  Go figure.

Dragon Dictation

I haven’t used it much, but I should.  Speak and have what you say dictated, copy it to an e-mail or text message, and be done with it.

Grocery IQ

You can now scan items into the list.  Fantastic.  This changes the very nature of the application, if you need a shopping list.

Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker

A new app for me, but one that seems very useful to actually write notes.  If the program could offer OCR, then it would be the best of all possible worlds.

T-Minus 31 Days

Thirty days from now, we officially leave this home and move into our new home.

The last weeks have been very tumultuous.  Shortly after my last blog on choirguy.com, the sellers of our new house decided they didn’t want to sell us the house at the price we were previously offered.  It was a stressful period of time, but things worked out (although the price of the house did go up from the price we were offered).  God has provided a buyer for our house at a time when the market is stagnant, and we’re receiving some help from my parents to allow us to make the move.  Hopefully we’ll be in the position to help our children when they are in similar situations in the future.  So, God has been good, and we’re very excited about our immediate future and our imminent move.

That said, we need to make sure that we’re giving God the praise for making everything work out for us.  It’s been incredibly busy, which is why blog posts are so few and far between for my wife and I.  We both want to get back into shape in 2010; physically (something I’ve let go, if you’re wondering), spiritually (finding personal time of all kinds is hard at the moment), and emotionally.

No, a new house isn’t going to do that for us, and it’s possible that it could make it even more of a challenge (although I’m looking forward to the extra time in the car as a chance to pray).  But with a new beginning comes with the chance of a new beginning…and I want that so desperately, yet I haven’t had the self control lately to do any of that.  And as things are occasionally rocky with my “new” job, I can’t let my job define me any longer.  True, the world defines men by what they do; but God defines us by who we are, specifically who we are in him.  So, although my job is important, it is not more important than my relationship with God or my family.  But it is so tempting, as a man, to let it be so.  Time for that to stop as well.

So, in 31 days, one month (January 27th), we’re looking forward to new beginnings.  It’s our new year (chances are, my new regime with diet, exercise, and devotions will begin tomorrow) and a renewal of our lives. Go!

We’re moving…exciting times

For the past twelve years, I’ve lived in the community where I teach.  Not many people know this, but I student taught in the district where I teach, which is why I was hired.  In fact, I was asked to come and teach in this district a year earlier than when I started.  Before I left for my year in the Dominican Republic, I received a call asking me to come and teach here.  I was committed to honoring my contract, so I declined at that time, and ended up coming back when that same position opened again a year later.

Throughout my first year of teaching at my former school, my parents asked me to find a house to buy.  They promised to help me with a down payment, but their main concern was that I was building equity in a property instead of “throwing it away” with rent.  I ended up finding and buying a yellow rambler a few blocks away from the school where I taught.  A number of my students came over to help me paint the yellow house (now battleship gray), and this has been my home for the past twelve years.

My home for the past twelve years.

As I think about it, this home has been my home for the longest period of any home I’ve had on this earth.  My parents lived in Milwaukee, WI until I was 4; we lived in Fredonia, WI for eight years, and I lived with them in Oconomowoc, WI for six years until I went to college.  After college, I’ve been in the St. Paul area most of the time, with the exception of a year spent in the Dominican Republic.

There are a lot of memories in this house, such as group student visits (in those early years), using the equity I had built up in this house for various reasons (new furnace/AC, remodeling the kitchen, helping finance our wedding), and even my first kiss with my to-be bride.  Liz’s grandfather helped us build a custom deck, as well as to remodel our kitchen and bathroom.  It’s been a good solid house, and we weren’t actively looking for a new home.  So much so that we invested $5,000 this past May to put in new windows and a patio door in our house (by the way, they’re working wonderfully, and we’d recommend Window World of St. Paul to everyone).  Still, this is a starter home, and I would always call it “my/our crappy little house.”  Eventually, it’s going to need a new roof.  And siding.  And gas fireplace inserts.  And a remodeled basement.  In addition, we only have a two car garage with a lot of suburban “stuff” (trailer, motorcycle, lawn mowers, etc.), and our driveway faces away from the sun, which means that no matter what, there is always snow and ice on the driveway all winter long, even though the neighbors across the street have perfectly clear driveways just because of the sun.  Liz has had her own issues with the house (She’s grateful to have a house to live in, but she has her list, too).  When you start to add up what the house is going to need over the years, and you don’t implicitly love the house, it’s okay to move on.  But again, we weren’t looking.

I’ll take this moment to say that I have two best friends, and both are named David.  One I went to college with, and the other I taught with for twelve years.  David the teacher became a principal, and was hired in a community that is close to where we currently live.  Nonetheless, David and his wife wanted to move out of this community into a bigger (and better house) and David wanted to live in the community where he is the principal.  All that happened last summer, and they found a beautiful house for their family.  We stopped by to visit them this past fall, and we toured their new home.  They bought the home for an incredibly low price–if they had bought a home in the Twin Cities, it would have been double the cost.  So, partially in jest, we asked them if there were any other houses for sale near them.  They pointed out a “For Sale” sign across the street.  Then my wife and I started looking at the house and started to dream.

Our new house (if all goes to plan) that we'll buy in January.

We looked through the windows and doors, and liked what we saw, and I knew that a number of my “the next time I buy a house” statements were already answered in this house (driveway facing the sun, three car extended garage with extra height).  When we came home that night, I called the realtor, expecting to leave a message, but instead went to view the house.  It was listed at that time at $259,000.

We toured the house a few days later, and we saw a basically new, hardly lived-in house that seemed to match all of our desires for a new house, and we began the process of selling our current house and buying that house.

I won’t go into all the details, but it’s been an emotional time for us over the past months for a number of reasons.  Keeping a house clean for showings…and then cleaning the house for showings…is difficult in itself when there are three males in a residence and one female (Not that my wife had to do all the cleaning by herself, but when there were weekday showings and I was at school, she did have to do all the cleaning by herself).

This past week, we had a showing (our 15th), and our last.  There’s a couple of funny stories that go with it (which I won’t tell at this point), but we settled on selling our house for a price that causes us to bring $5,000 with us to closing, which we’ll recover when we receive a $6500 tax credit for buying a new house at tax time.  And the last hope is that we’ll qualify for a Rural FHA loan, which means that we’ll need no down payment to buy our new home in January.

There are still a couple of minor hurdles to jump, but we are in our new home for a very good price (we didn’t even need to make a second offer…the buyer offered us the price we wanted), our current house has to pass inspection, and the sellers of our new house also have a few things they need to take care of.

Throughout this process, we’ve been praying, a lot.  Our prayer has been that God would aggressively and clearly shut doors for us if we weren’t supposed to move.  But he kept opening doors (the possibility of a Rural FHA loan, low interest rates, lowering the price of the new house, keeping that house on the market, extending the tax credit plan, etc.) while not completely closing them (not finding a buyer for a long time, having to lower the price on our house, having to bring money to closing to get out of this house).  Just this past week, we received an “ultimatum” from the seller of the other house, as they needed to sell or rent (they are carrying $289,000 on that house, and not living there).  We had talked about offering our house as a rental or Contract-for-Deed property.  And then a buyer came and we worked out a deal.  So we’re very grateful to God for his timing, and we trust that all the other details will work out.  It’s an exciting time for us, as we prepare to move and to enjoy our new house for years and years to come.

Brett Favre and the Falcons, Packers, Jets, and Vikings

Falcons, Packers, Jets, and Vikings

I grew up in Wisconsin, and actually, if my wife and I can manage to sell our house, we’ll be moving back to Wisconsin.  As a result, Wisconsin teams, particularly the Brewers and the Packers, will always be special to me.  They were my “home” teams.  (There was a point when the Packers actually played regular games at Milwaukee County Stadium, something that doesn’t happen any more).

At the same time, I’ve been in Minnesota most of the time since 1990 (with the exception of nine months in the Dominican Republic, time home from college in Wisconsin, and so on), meaning that as of next September, I will have spent nearly twenty years in Minnesota, and only seventeen in Wisconsin.

Originally, I tolerated watching Minnesota teams (although I always had a love for the Minnesota Twins, as one of my t-ball teams was the “Twins” and a special childhood memory was my dad bringing me a Twins hat from a business trip to Minnesota…a hat I still have, even though it’s in poor condition).  I even had season tickets to the Vikings in 1998 and 1999 (some awfully good years for football here in Minnesota), but mainly to see the Packers play.  That toleration has grown to adoption.  I still root for the Packers.  It’s hard to support the Brewers because they aren’t the American League team I grew up with (I now understand how my Dad felt about the Brewers after growing up as a Braves fan in Milwaukee).  But I now root for the Vikings, Twins, and Gophers.

My wife’s grandfather gives me a bit of grief about being a Vikings fan, but I can’t help it.  They’ve gotten rid of many of the bozos that gave the team a bad name in recent years (and have put a leash on others), and they have some genuinely fantastic players.  But the real turning point for me is the addition of Brett Favre to the Vikings.

Don’t get me wrong…Brett Favre isn’t a superhero to me, but I enjoy how he plays the game, even at age 40 (ancient for football players, and he’s three years older than I am).  Brett has a lot of flaws…he’s made bad decisions on the football field (lots of interceptions over the years–not so much this year) and off the field (vicodin).  But he plays with heart, he always gives his best, and he sure seems to love his wife and his daughter.  I wasn’t a big fan of the annual retirement scenario (I’m praying that will be avoided at the end of this year).  And I wasn’t a fan of how the (new) Packers management treated Favre last year.  Both sides were in error, but I think the Packers were more so.  If you don’t want the player, release him and let him go elsewhere.  The Vikings might have had their 10-1 season last year had that happened.

Meanwhile, Green Bay has become one of the wild-card contenders for the playoffs, and the Vikings are virtually guaranteed a spot in the playoffs, and must continue to win to guarantee home field advantage (I don’t think anyone wants to face the ravenous fans in the Superdome in New Orleans).  Hard core Packer fans consider Brett a traitor.  Brett Favre fans are just happy to see him playing, and playing so well.  And Vikings fans have come around to realize that maybe they were just a quarterback away from a Superbowl, even if he’s 40 years old (Many Vikings fans originally swore they’d never support Favre…meanwhile the Favre jerseys and t-shirts continue to sell like crazy).

I’m one of those people who likes the Packers, likes the Vikings, and even likes the Bears.  Normally, of the three, I’d hope the Packers would win…but not this year.  I’d like to see Favre and the Vikings take it all.  It could happen.  And I remember that Favre was a third string quarterback for Atlanta before being obtained by the Packers.  And I realize that if Favre was still a Packer, he’d be on a stretcher with that porous offensive line of the Packers (and it also shows that Aaron Rodgers is a great quarterback and likely hall-of-famer as well…the Pack was right to move on, but should have just let Brett go).  And I also know that Favre’s poor performance with the Jets was due to damage in his arm (now repaired), and it shows what an iron man Favre is, continuing to play when basically unable to throw.  Wow.

I loved watching the Packers win the Superbowl while I was in the Dominican Republic in 1997.  I’d love to see the Vikings win the Superbowl in 2010.  They have a chance.  They really do.

Meanwhile, Favre continues to play a highly accurate game, benefiting from the attention paid to the Vikings’ running back, Adrian Peterson.  Teams are trying to beat the Vikings by stopping the running game, leaving themselves open for Favre to do what he does best.  You’ve got to like those odds.  If the Vikings don’t get you on the ground, they’ll be after you through the air.

Either way, the Favre experiment has worked well, and it should be a fun playoff experience.  I was looking forward to the year with Favre…now I get to look forward to the playoffs as well.

YOAD 2.0 Week 10

It’s been a “blah” week…lots of stress at school, and lots of time at school. One trip to the gym. (I’m not going to make 12 trips to the gym this month for the health care discount.)

I haven’t eaten totally well, but I haven’t gone off the deep end, either.

Resulting weight: 248. That’s down 1.5 pounds, and I’ll take it. Next week better improve–in quality of life!

YOAD 2.0 Week 9

Just a bad week. Didn’t pay much attention to what I ate, eating at ofd times, eatin out (pretty much neber good for me), and ate lots of bad things. It’s been really busy and quite stressful, I’ve been to the gym once, and there have been two games on TV that I just plopped down and watched after long days. So a gain of two pounds to 249.5.

No worries, back on track today–a good reminder to fix the problem and go back to my normal patterns.

YOAD v.2.0 Week 8

Good news. Down to 247.5 this week, even though it has been a week of few trips to the gym and three nights with ice cream–and I think 3 beers in that time, too (I don’t drink much alcohol at all).

We have been working on the house…especially last weekend when I leveled our old lilac bed and then laid sod…that was seven straight hours of perspiration.

And otherwise my eating has been okay, and I’ve been able to stop snacking after 10. My body is finally adjusting to 11.5 hour days at school (due to the musical) and I’ve even (it’s a miracle) started to get caught up with many of the things I have to do at school (all the filed music so far is in Finale and also in my new Freehand tablet). So life is good this week.

Our house hits the market on Friday. I have some things to work on by then!

YOAD v. 2.0 Week 7

It was an interesting week.  The previous weekend, we had stopped by a family’s house on the way back from Crystal Cave in Spring Valley, Wisconsin.  They had moved this past summer, so we checked out their (beautiful) house and jokingly said, “Any other houses available around here?”  They pointed (literally) across the street.  When we looked at the house, just from the outside, we realized that it seemed to be every bit of a house that we’ve talked about.  Type of house, things the house offers, location, direction (driveway facing the sun) and so on.  So we called on Sunday night and visited the house last Tuesday night.  We were right…the house was perfect for us.  We have one concern, which is that it overlooks a steep ravine, and we have a nine-year-old and a sixteen-month-old.  But there are other families that live on the ravine, and their kids are surving.  Plus the backyard was built up a little to make more of a yard.

So we fell in love with the house, and then made plans to start the process, meaning putting our house on the market.  So we worked our tails off, getting the house ready enough to show our realtor.  We basically spent the entire week and weekend cleaning…my wife upstairs, me in the basement.  And that included a lot of work in the (formerly nasty) downstairs basement, which is looking presentable now.  There is still a bit of work to do, but our house goes on the market this coming Tuesday.  It’s exciting.

Meanwihile, last week was audition week for the musical (long days), and the musical is fully underway.

And with all this other stuff, I haven’t slept very much, nor have I gone to the gym a lot.  And over the past two days (prior to this evening…so Monday and Tuesday) I’ve eaten poorly at night (Grilled KFC on Monday and Culver’s fried Cod yesterday), plus I’ve had the munchies later at night while I’m up doing other things (probably a sign I should go to bed, but there has been too much to do).

So I report a one pound gain for last week.  I had cereal right before bed (a healthy dose), so realistically if I weighed myself tomorrow, I’d be back at 251 or perhaps 250.  But I’m counting the pound gained and trying to be okay with it after a week of little sustained cardio (although a lot of energy used cleaning) and some poor choices in eating.  Statistically, a gain of one pound is nothing, as we can vary in weight 3-5 pounds throughout the day.  I can’t let weight gain continue, however.  I have to be on track…ultimately, that’s more important than anything other than my relationship with God and my family.  My health has to come number 3 on that list…I’m learning that as I get older…so I can get older (if that makes sense).  Even my job has to come in at number four.

So here’s the image of this week’s situation.  252.  77 pounds to go.

YOAD v. 2.0 Week 7