Kevin's Weblog

On Friday I climbed Mount St. Helens with a Mazamas crew. It was a little rough; between vacation and moving, my training regimen sort of fell apart and I hadn’t done a serious hike in over a month and a half. But, at a certain level, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually you end up at the top. (Well, that’s not true for all mountains, but it’s pretty much the case for St. Helens. Just don’t keep walking into the crater.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, we got a lot of snow this year. Most of the roads in the Mount St. Helens National Monument have been closed until the last week. As a result, all the earlier Mazamas climbs of the mountain have been canceled. We lucked out on timing, as they cleared the road to Marble Mtn Sno-Park just a couple days before our climb. We drove up and camped there Thursday night, rising at about 4AM to hit the trail at 5. We cleared the treeline around 6:30, and by 8 we were well above all the neighboring terrain. But, still only about halfway up.

Three hours later, we made the summit, and plopped down for lunch.

The trip down was a bit faster. We were able to glissade all the way to treeline. That’s a technical term that means “sliding down the mountain on your butt”.

(Photo by Travis Schweitzer)

More photos on Flickr

I closed on the house a week ago, and I just got my first re-fi offer in the mail.

42) Buy a House

I closed on the house yesterday. Wow! I’m excited and nervous and overwhelmed. I’ve got 2 weeks to move everything in before I go off on vacation, but that shouldn’t be too bad. I started moving some boxes already; the big day of furniture moving will probably be put off until next weekend. And some point soon I’ll actually post some pictures.

Right. I keep meaning to update and failing. I’m closing on the house on Thursday. I’m in a sort of very low level, continuous freak-out at this point. I’m sure it’ll go fine; but the reality of moving and setting up a home, again, is sinking in. Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m leaving on a two week vacation two weeks after closing day? Some recollections of the past month:

The inspection itself was quite educational. I followed the inspector around and got quite a few pointers about maintenance and such. The big issue that came up is that the roof is close to finished. We had a tense day of negotiations, but did get the seller to agree to cover the cost of a new roof.

Settling on the mortgage was a little stressful, but only because I didn’t just trust my instincts. My feeling going in was that I wanted to use my credit union, who I have a life-long relationship with. Over the years, plenty of people have looked at me funny for continuing to do all my banking with a bank on the other side of the country, but they have never made me unhappy as a customer, which is a pretty amazing thing to say about a bank. So, I got my preapproval through them, but then I let my agent talk me into getting some mortgage quotes from a broker that she often uses. That ended up taking most of a week, due to some phone tag, and in the end the broker couldn’t beat my credit union’s rates (or their fees, or their guarantee not to resell my loan). Unfortunately, at that point when I called my credit union to finalize the application, the first person I talked to wasn’t sure they could do it, because they usually want 30 days to do an out-of-state mortgage (which would have been no problem had I not wasted a week getting quotes from other people). Then I talked to another person and said “Look, I really want to do this with you, but if you can’t hit May 1st I have to go elsewhere”, and he said he could make that happen.

Getting insurance was straightforward, although part of me really wants to know why they ask some of the questions they do and how it affects your risk (and premium). I don’t want to game them or anything, I’m genuinely curious why drywall vs. sheetrock matters to them.

Tomorrow I need to call the utility companies and take care of all that.

Okay, better post this now, or it’ll never happen before the purchase actually happens.

42) Buy a House

On Sunday I had an offer accepted on a house! It’s a cute Victorian bungalow, just a block down the street from where I am now. Although there’s lots of small houses in this neighborhood, most of the houses on the market have been bigger than I need, and pushing what I can afford, leading to questions of whether I’d be happy renting out a room to someone, or buying a duplex and living in half of it. This house is just about perfectly sized for me, and comfortably priced.

We’re in the inspection period currently, but the house seems to have been well cared-for, so I’m hopeful that we won’t discover anything problematic. Beyond that, things still move pretty slowly at this point in the process. Stay tuned for updates (and pictures) later.

(Aside: please don’t feel that you need to comment on this post with your speculations about the future of the housing market or mortgage market. Suffice it to say that I’ve been paying attention too, particularly to the local market here, and given my needs and plans (and my ability to still qualify for a mortgage on excellent terms) I am comfortable with this purchase.)

Last Sunday was the annual Worst Day of the Year Ride. Like last year (when I didn’t ride) it was actually a pretty nice day.

I took the short option — 18 miles. If you don’t bike much, that might sound like a lot, but especially with rest stops every 4 or 5 miles, it went by pretty easily. Unfortunately, the friend I was planning to ride with forgot to register, but it wasn’t too bad riding on my own for a couple hours.

Part of the fun of the event is the people who ride in costume:

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I was definitely inspired by this ride to get out on the bike more. I think I’ve ridden nearly every day this week, going to user groups, meeting friends, and running errands. I really want to try living without a car for a while, so this is definitely a good trend.

On Sunday, I took advantage of most of the population being glued to the TV to enjoy some really good skiing up at Timberline. I also took the little one with me, for her first day of skiing. I didn’t see much of it, since she was in the kids program all day, but she seems to have had a good time and asked this morning if this weekend was another ski day. The only complaint I heard was that they wouldn’t let her do snow angels with her skis on. Heh.

So, when I posted about attempting a $100 Christmas, I had forgotten that my brother’s apartment was robbed about a month ago. Naturally, that limit went out the window in order to help him replace things he lost. Other than that, gifts were fairly modest. I haven’t tallied things up, but it looks pretty close to $100. Next year, I’d like to follow the suggestion of others, and move more towards gifts I made or that have some sort of personal touch to them. And, we’ll see whether I can get the rest of the family on-board as well.

A couple weeks ago, Sandro posted about Buy Nothing Christmas. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that, but it reminded me of something I read about last year and wanted to try: the Hundred Dollar Christmas. So far, I’ve only spent $10, but that’s just one present, and assumes you don’t count the cost of plane tickets to see my family. I imagine about half of the total will go to something for the little one.

I haven’t even thought about presents for my mom and brother. The last couple times we’ve talked on the phone, we’ve done the old, familiar bit where no one really knows what they want and we defer discussing the whole business until I’m in town. Honestly, the thing is, we’re all comfortably well-off and if there’s something we really need, we’ll just go out and buy it. And, speaking for myself, I really don’t want more stuff. Consequently a bunch of what’s on my wish list at this point is things like gift certificates for various services. We’ll see if I can convince people that that’s really the sort of thing I’d like, and not more books to add to my already long queue.

I’ve been traveling a bit more often the last couple months. Here’s who’s in my doghouse.

Avis — Why on earth do you feel like I need to have two keys for my rental car, permanently tethered to each other by an un-openable ring? My pockets are cluttered enough while traveling without a completely useless duplicate key. For that matter, why haven’t American car companies figured out how to combine the remote entry fob with the key, like everyone else in the world?

Car Rental Companies - How do you get away with an advertised $40 rate that actually costs nearly $60? This list of fees and taxes is a little absurd: “11.11% Fee”, “VLF Fee”, “Tax 8.250%”, “2.5% TAF”, “$5/Rental”. I understand that this is all various governmental or quasi-governmental agencies trying to get their piece, but when the add-ons are 50% of the base cost, there really ought to be some sort of truth in advertising that applies.

“Luxury” hotels — I understand a huge pile of fluffy pillows is supposed to be a mark of luxury, but it’s gotten out of hand. I’m a side-sleeper, and your ridiculous pillows are still too big. I can’t imagine how sore the necks of back-sleepers must be. Moreover, when I request, and you deliver, a smaller pillow on one night, housekeeping shouldn’t steal the pillow back the next day, nor should you claim the smaller pillows don’t exist when I call down the next evening.

Yahoo — why is it that every time I come into an office I have to spend the first half a day with Help Desk figuring out why I can’t get on the network this time? Yesterday I never managed to get on the internal network and had to borrow someone else’s laptop to give the presentation I flew down to present.

San Jose — Coming down 101/87, I can practically reach out the window and touch the rental car area, but I have to drive another 2 miles down the road, then back through the whole length of the airport. Can we just get a freeway exit right there?

Southwest Passengers — Southwest is experimenting with a new boarding procedure where everyone has an assigned boarding number, like A-29. This seems like a good idea, since you no longer have people camping out on the ground. However, the concept seems to be a little too difficult for many people. Despite the assistance of signs marking off each set of 5 numbers, people still seem to have trouble with the concept of ordering themselves according to the numbers on their boarding pass. This might just be a problem of people not listening to the instructions, and lack of familiarity, as the folks in San Jose seemed to get it much better than those in Portland. (Alternatively, people flying out of San Jose are probably more intelligent on average that those in Portland, or pretty much anywhere else.)

Southwest (#1) — Let me explain a couple things about bulkhead seats. First, they don’t have underseat storage, so it would be oh-so-much more convenient for everyone if the overhead storage wasn’t already full of supplies. Second, there’s no back-of-the-seat tray available, so you’re suppose to either use the seats with a swing-up tray, or attach trays to the bulkhead. I understand you’re probably saving something like $2 by using the same seats in the bulkhead row as the rest of the plane, but knock it off. Seriously.

Southwest (#2) — Alaska / Horizon gives me complimentary Mirror Pond when I fly with them. The least you could do for my dollars / coupons is produce something better than Bud Light or Heineken.

TSA — It’s been 6 years. Could we maybe think about a return to sensibility sometime soon? Have you seen how many plastic bins people need these days? Personally I usually need 3: for my laptop, my jacket, and my shoes and bag of liquid toiletries; sometimes four if I’ve grabbed food before security. I’d really like to be able to have a water bottle again. I’d really like it if you’d stop stealing my toiletries because they’re 0.2oz too big. It would be nice if I could carry a modest pocketknife again, particularly as I tend to run into more frequent use for one when traveling. If would be nice if I could keep my shoes on. Are we really going to have to do this forever?

Finally, I promised one rave. So here’s a shout-out to one of the few businesses who manage to reliably make my travel a little more pleasant: the Larkspur Landing. For only slightly more than most of the low-end hotels and less than the high-end ones, they manage to give me a mini-suite, complementary bottled water, free internet, sensible pillows, a DVD player in the room, cookies in the evening, and a decent breakfast in the morning. Thanks guys!