At long last, the house in Florida is officially off our hands. It now belongs to the relocation company. They will in turn sell it to the actual buyer soon.

It has been a long and painful process with all sorts of problems and mis-steps and issues that came up at every turn, and this last month has been especially painful. We accepted an offer with the understanding that our involvemewnt would be all wrapped up within a couple of days when the buyer would present one last piece of paper and the relocation company would acquire our house. In fact all sorts of things came up and the buyer did not actually provide that last piece of paper until today, more than a month after it was supposed to happen.

I thought about going into all the dirty details of what happened with regard to this, starting way back in January and going up to today… but I’m not going to. At this point I don’t care to rehash any of the stressful events of the last few months at all. All I care about is that it is over and we are done. And although it was nowhere near as much as we had initially hoped, we still walk away with a check and the selling price was more than we paid for the place (barely).

So… we are done. We are moved. We are now officially Bellevueites. And the stress of living on a significant month over month cash flow deficit should now also be over, and we’ll be able to start getting the debt paid off and start rebuilding the savings buffer which was almost completely depleted between the last employer never delivering on their promises and the transition of the last nine months.

Whew. Whew.

Of course, the hunt for a more perminant place to live than the tiny apartment we are in now also begins today…

I missed it when it happened. I think I was asleep, but I hadn’t done the calculation yet of exactly when it is anyway. And I always forget that it is usually a day earlier than expected because of the crazy leap year business, but at 08:24:53 UTC this morning (1:24 AM Pacific, 4:24 AM Eastern) I was exactly 35 years old. Woo. Go me.

Paying attention to the calendar date instead of how many 365.242… day years have happened since the exact time I was born, the anniversary date is actually tomorrow. But never the less, the actual moment has already passed by some 12 and a fraction hours ago. Yes, I am old.

I think I’ll celebrate by going to get a soda from the vending machine now.

Oh, one other note. Exactly one year ago was the day I got my first “modified” paycheck from my then employer cutting my salary by some 22%… in theory making it up with imaginary “commission” for sales I was to help generate. They had told me they wanted to do that, but had never told me a date when that would start or confirmed the exact terms or put anything at all in writing. I found out when I looked at my paystub. Thank you very much for the lovely birthday present. And of course this was after already not having delivered on much of what they had promised me monitarily (and otherwise).

Thank goodness I am at a much better place now.

Zuri pooped on the bottom left hand corner of my iMac’s keyboard while i was having a video chat with Cynthia. i wiped it off, but now the left shift key only partially works. “QWERtyuiop ASDFGHJKL ZXCVBNM” See, the right half of the top row doesn’t work with that shift key. i can still get them caps by using the other shift key or the caps lock key, but that does not come naturally to me. All i can say is this better work once it dries.

We signed up for the Family Locator service from our cell provider (see link above for more info).

The map shown is where Brandy and I are right now. (I’m the one in Seattle, she’s the one in Bellevue.)

Kinda cool. It only works with my phone and Brandy’s phone though, not Amy’s. So I guess that means Amy will be getting the upgraded cellphone she has wanted for awhile now, even though she has yet to prove she can keep hers charged and with her for more than a week straight. :-)

Of course, it is all restricted and you explicitly have to log in and push a button to find the location of one of the phones on the plan (or set it automatic times for it to check, but in a limited fashion.) Of course what I would LIKE is a system where it would automatically check my location once every minute or two, would save all those data points (or the last 24 hours worth or whatever) and then put the resulting plot on a map that I could automatically expose on my website either live or refreshed every X minutes or whatever.

But it doesn’t quite do that. Now, might it be possible to use this along with some external automation to try to do something like that? Maybe. But it is probably beyond my current skill set, and would take me quite a while to figure out. Quite a while that I don’t really have.

Oh well.

But this will prove quite useful as Amy is rapidly approaching teenagerdom… :-)