Holes In Thoughts

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Fighting Entropy

Rachel and I moved into our current place about a year and a half ago; Previously I hadn’t managed to keep a place for more than a year. So for the first time in a decade, I've been living in the same place long enough that I actually have to fix things I've installed – and dust!
I've never really had to worry about that before. Whatever arrangements Rachel and I had, it lasted at least the six months between when I did it and when I moved.

I put up some lattices by the basketball hoop to keep the basketball out of the street. I put up some Christmas lights on a light detector to light our side path at night (it’s completely dark otherwise, and we never use the front door). Of course, the majority of the work we’ve done has held up and works fine… but I can’t help but be surprised and amused that I’m a bit excited at the notion that I have to clean up after myseslf.

Labels: basketball, house, work

posted by Steve @ 6:08 PM 0 comments

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Potential Awesome

The Phoenix Suns' championship run begins in a few hours. Barack Obama has his shot at sewing up the Democratic nomination in the next few weeks. I'll be talking to my landlord about possibly setting up a rent-to-own for my first home. I'll be bringing my car back home and driving my own car for the first time since October, in preparation for the final stages of its restoration.

There is so much potential for joy in my life in May, it's ridiculous, and I have almost no control over any of it.

Labels: basketball, cars, house, Leelu, Obama, playoffs, Suns, Volkswagen

posted by Steve @ 9:54 AM 0 comments

Friday, January 18, 2008

A Clean House

Rachel and I didn't get a chance to go to the Phoenix Suns game today, but strangely I'm glad it didn't happen, because we got a chance to do nothing but clean the place the whole day. We didn't even finish, but we did a lot of the little things that had only been kind-of put away. She sorted out her ribbons with a neat way of hanging them on the wall, and I tied up the wires to the little bedside stereo to be a little less messy, allowing me to have a real place to put my wallet and phone charger at night.

Little things like that are why I always have said that it takes a solid year to really move into a new place. Unfortunately, I've paid rent in 11 places in the last 10 years for a variety of reasons:

1. 1998: Moved from home to Cochise dorm. Lived in the funny-smelling place with Eric, and proceeded to do terribly in school. I'm still convinced that my aversion to the lead-tasting water lead to dehydration through the entire year. Moved because I was kicked out of UA for bad grades.
2. 1999: Moved to my first apartment over the summer, and Joe moved in as roommate. It was so very tiny, but he just had a few bags and I didn't have a lot, either. We moved to have our own rooms.
3. 2000: Moved a 2-bedroom place with horrible furniture and a landlady that smoked approximately twenty billion cigarettes. Moved because the landlady was scary.
4. 2001: Moved into a nice 2-bedroom place with a backyard with Joe. Bought my own furniture for the first time, and had one of the better years I've ever had. Tension over my leaving to Japan and not being able to pay rent for summer forced Joe and I to get separate places.
5. 2002: Moved into a small, 1-bedroom place run by a completely neurotic Indian man. Met Rachel that year, who moved in just to avoid my Ex, who was her roommate. Tough times, but made better with Rachel. Moved because the landlord (seriously) wanted to evict us for trimming the bushes that prevented us from getting in the front door.
6. 2003: Joined Rachel in a big house with Sean and Gayle. We were all broke, all the time, but we threw some good parties and had an awesome place. Moved because Rachel and I were getting married.
7. 2004: Lived in a somewhat dilapidated guest house, which was nice except that the landlords were going through a loud, messy divorce, and their favorite place to argue was our front yard. Moved for that reason.
8. 2005: Found a nice duplex in an apartment complex that was nicer than the not-great neighborhood it was in. Had the luxury of sharing the duplex with AZ & Tasha, but were next door neighbors to crack dealers with small children. Moved out of fear.
9. 2006 (1): Lived with Mom while teaching in Phoenix, but that didn't work out and we had to move for two months into a tiny duplex just south of the UA. Only had it during the summer before the new tenants moved in for the school year, but it was a godsend because we were destitute.
10. 2006 (2): After that, we were miraculously making better money and moved into a nice second-floor apartment very close to Rachel's work. Had a very cranky downstairs neighbor, who didn't appreciate our construction projects. Resolved to get a place without stairs and with a carport.
11. 2007: Found a great little duplex that we currently have. It was dirty and had next to no heating, and an absentee landlord, but it feels very much like a home. And now, it's fairly organized, as well! I am fervently hoping that we don't have a reason to move out next summer.

Labels: apartments, house, landlord, To-Do

posted by Steve @ 11:28 PM 0 comments

Friday, September 14, 2007

Parties & Progression into Perfection

Last weekend, Rachel and I hosted a party.

When we were in college, we had a house shared with a few other people and it really was the perfect party house: huge living room, a pool, decent kitchen, and a patio. We didn't have any money at all, so our preparations were always sparse, but people brought alcohol and we had cards and a stereo system.

As far as parties go, they were fun, but Rachel and I were never really big into drinking -- and she always cheats at cards.

Now we have an awesome little place of our own that's not unlike the place we used to have, expect of course that it's a one-bedroom instead of 3. Naturally, after an absurd amount of clean-up, we wanted to have a housewarming party.

We didn't quite finish cleaning, and I jumped the gun a bit probably since the party was scheduled a week before Rachel's vacation (she had to work the day after a party; that was my bad).

~-----~

We invited most of Bookman's and all our friends. We had few people come, though: Sami, her friend Camille, Nyssa (briefly), and Sean. Sean's friend Justin and his wife made a brief appearance in which we watched their wedding video - and Sean's best-man speech. It was very good and included this memorable line (paraphrased from memory):

"[Justin's parents] have nothing to worry about from this guy. He'll take good care of your daughter his whole life until he's dead. After that, I can't promise anything."

~-----~

I'm actually quite glad that the party was small. It was made more enjoyable, and fit our style. We had S'mores, even though the fire was a bit smoky. We played 2-on-2 basketball. Sami beat up Sean like a boxer. Sean was surprisingly nimble. Camille was a regular baller. I was much worse under pressure than I should've been, given all the practice I've had lately.

We played some video games - Rachel and Sami were playing a lot of Mortal Kombat, and we hardly touched the absurd amount of alcohol Sean and I split. I do however have a pretty awesome alcohol cabinet all of a sudden:

Blue Sapphire gin
1200 Silver Tequila
Bailey's Irish Cream
Kahlua coffee liquer
Captain Morgan dark rum
Bacardi light rum
Finlandia vodka
Triple Sec
Grenadine
Lime juice

~-----~

The party culminated in a pretty intense girls-versus-boys water gun fight. Thankfully Sean and I realized that the first place one should go when starting a water gun fight is the hose, and we fought off the girls' attacks in general. Eventually they (with 3-on-2 odds) managed to raid and wrestle control of the hose, and by the end it was a big, drippy mess.

It was awesome.

The survivors - Sean, Camille, Sami and I - went to Grill afterwards. It was certainly memorable, and I'm hoping to throw that kind of celebration more often.

Labels: friends, house, party

posted by Steve @ 10:26 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 07, 2007

250 lbs. of weeds

That's about right.
I had two hundred and fifty pounds of weed in a 20' x 20' area to the side of my place. Tomorrow, I get to pull up a similar amount on the side of the fence. Hooray.

Despite that, though, I would like to sing the praises of what's called the hula-hoe, which is not a derogatory term for a girl from Hawaii. No, it's a weeding tool that, on gravel, is amazing at digging up weeds. It just digs in under the gravel and pulls up weeds with the roots (usually). It was still a bloody ton of work, but doing that on my knees by hand would've taken an eternity.

My hula-hoe was a gift from my Aunt and I'm suddenly forever grateful.

I also got a chance to really use my camera's time-delay function to make a movie of the reaping of the weed forest. You can see the headlights of the truck dying, and eventually I had to quit just shy of being actually finished (will do that tomorrow), but it's still pretty cool, especially with the nighttime clouds going by. It was taken at a 10-second interval, which makes things go by pretty darn quickly when the frame rate is 24 per second. It means that every second in the movie is four minutes of work:

Weeding movie
0:17 (1MB QuickTime movie)

Labels: house, photography, work

posted by Steve @ 1:02 AM 0 comments

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Blog's finished.

I've finally transferred all of my old MySpace blogs to this blog, and am especially glad of it after finding out (through Nyssa) that MySpace apparently owns copyright on blogged entries.

Yikes.

Now I can start working on my homepage's gallery, and hang a zillion things around the house.

Random thought of the day:
Did Harry Carey die because of disease, or because he was a life-long Cubs fan?
Wouldn't that be enough to pretty much kill anybody?

Labels: blog, house, MySpace, Nyssa

posted by Steve @ 2:51 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 10, 2007

No, really, next week. I swear.

This week's been pretty productive on the settling-in front, so maybe, just maybe, next week I can settle into the 'routine' Rachel and I agreed on - not to bore with the details, but it allows time for me to work on regular work, freelance work, working out, and working on my album. A lot of work, but it's all gotta get done.

So far, it has been foiled by school, summer school, the truck, and moving - formidable forces, really.

Of course, now we have the party (parties) we're planning, and the place isn't really finished - it's just inhabitable. But it's now or never, really...

I've also just about finished consolidating all of my old MySpace blogs onto here. Once they've been reformatted and updated, I'll link to my old Okinawa journals on my homepage as well. Most of my 'let's update the homepage' boredom/energy has been directed towards back-filling this blog, so hopefully I'll make my photo gallery on the homepage next

Labels: basketball, house, Ignition, life, party, photography

posted by Steve @ 1:30 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Music & Life... with Rests

Rachel's birthday is on Wednesday, and so of course everybody - and I mean everybody - wants to see Rachel and I. It's nice that we're popular, but I'm pretty sure she's going to want to sleep for the most part.

Finding a balance is proving harder than we thought, especially since we have different weekends. Hopefully, when we go to the libraries around here to apply for a job for her, we'll have some luck and eventually have the same two days off every week.

We also weeded and pruned a ton this week. I'm pretty sure we've cut, pulled and otherwise removed about 300-400 pounds of foliage, branches and weeds. Sad thing is that we're not even really close to finishing. We're still excited about our new place, but boy it's a lot of work getting it up to where we want it to be.

Labels: birthday, family, friends, house, Rachel, vacation

posted by Steve @ 12:52 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Moved.

We're finished moving! Finally! The basketball hoop's up, and the place is a mess. I'm sore, Rachel's sore, and I'm worried about the walk-through inspection to happen today. But once I'm done with that, we can concentrate on making this place as awesome as possible!

The housewarming party should be in about two weeks.

To-Do List:

Front yard:

~~Hang Sun sculpture~~
~~Pull weeds~~
~~Sweep up trash~~
~~Get a trash can lid~~
~~Get a porch lamp cover~~

Front room:

~~Paint entertainment center~~

~~Set up computer~~
~~Set up desk~~
~~Hang my paintings~~
~~Decide on other decor~~
~~Set up entertainment center~~
~~Mop~~
~~Hang red curtain~~
~~Replace fan light bulbs~~
~~Dust fan~~
Make/hang bookshelves
~~Vacuum rug~~
~~Strip couch~~
~~Paint couch~~
Upholster couch
~~Buy 9V battery~~
Fill hole(s) in grout

Kitchen

Mop
~~Put away food~~
~~Decide on and hang decorations~~
~~Organize and put away cleaning supplies~~
~~Get slip-covers for chairs~~

Bedroom

~~Finish putting away clothes~~
~~Fix window that won't close~~
~~Decide on and hang decorations~~
~~Set up speakers~~
~~Sort and get rid of old/non-fitting clothes~~

Back yard

~~Trim both trees~~
~~Set up a trellis along the gate~~
Set up a barrier for the washer and dryer
~~Put tape down to define basketball 'key'~~
~~Fix Christmas lights~~
~~Pull weeds~~
~~Trim bushes~~
Hang lamp
Throw away desk
Trim hanging vines

Side yard/parking areas

~~Trim bushes~~
Weed out dead branches, bushes
~~Pull out weeds~~
Clear out trash
~~Organize storage~~
~~Put locks on storage~~
Figure out trellis replacement

Other

~~Train cats to use litterbox outside~~
Patch holes in walls

Labels: house, moving, To-Do

posted by Steve @ 11:02 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 21, 2007

LePlan, part 2

It feels like it was forever ago, but at one point in my life, I was so strapped for cash that I had to make an elaborate plan to get out of the country.

No joke.

I had a hard time keeping all of the people involved in my head, and had to write it all down on a timetable in Excel. I called the file, 'leplan.xls.'

Fast forward a few years, and I'm in a much more comfortable place, and now have drawn this Georgia-time (i.e., casually-paced) plan:

Re-wire the truck's entire electrical system with my awesome in-laws up in Prescott. Escape the heat, work online there, help them build their house, and get the truck to never-imagined levels of awesome.
Look up a new house to live in that has a yard, laundry machine, a place to work on the fiberglass dash I need to put into Rachel's truck, isn' insanely expensive, and is close enough to Bookman's that Rachel can walk. The discount we get for not driving to work (either of us) is nice.
Rent the place two weeks into August, and take those two weeks to move. Catalogue every last item. We'll be listing every item we own, and decide if we need it. If not, it's donated or sold. Keep the list for our house insurance, and update it as life goes on.
Rachel takes her last class for her Bachelor's Degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature (fall semester). She drives her amazingly well-running truck.
In January, I either get promoted to full-time at ITP, or keep working part time and begin finishing my teaching certificate. Either way, Rachel starts her graduate program classes in Library Science.
After that, things get a bit fuzzy, but for now:
If we can afford it, sometime in Fall '08 or Spring '09, buy an RV, give the truck back to the in-laws for a while, tow the Bug and live on the road for about 3 months. Make a time-lapse video of the entire thing. Explore the entire United States, and decide on a place to settle down for the next few years. In all likelihood it will be in Arizona, but why not find out for sure? Living without regrets is a part of freedom.
Reproduce on the road! Our kids will not know exactly where they were conceived, and I think that's vaguely awesome.
Have kids. Name the girls Méria Jael and Artemis Ella; name the boys Aaron Isaac and Michael David.
Buy a house.
Live well.

Rachel and I also bought an awesome floor carpet today. We're moving out in a few months, and so Rachel will be taking stuff off of the walls and packing her books to ease the move. Still, for a few glorious weeks, we'll have the place basically 'right,' and that's awesome.

Labels: ambition, college, gas, house, kids, money, Rachel, rant, RV, To-Do, work

posted by Steve @ 5:20 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Back.

Rachel and I have finally moved into our new, temporary digs. It's just until August when, hopefully, I'll be working full time as a teacher. Meantime, send me a message on IM, an email or whatever.

Also, I'm going back to my other MySpace account to do journalling. This wasn't really supposed to be a personal thing ... it's supposed to be for my music, so now that the Basis fiasco is coming to a conclusion through the lawyers, I'm going back there. But I'm not leaving you. Just returning to normal life. If you wanna contact me, there's email, MySpace, IM, etc.

Cheers
Steve

Currently listening :
Eyes Open
By Snow Patrol

Labels: BASIS, house, moving

posted by Steve @ 10:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Exciting Event no. 13: Unofficial confirmation/Houses

I talked to my boss yesterday about, well, how I screwed up some things and did well in another.

I've been a bit stressed about something lately, and I brought it up: what's the other Art teacher position that they've been thinking about (i.e., who's that skank who said, "oh, I might be working as the Art teacher next year" - no, that's not what I said but what I thought)? And this person said that with myself and another teacher in the lunch room and the other teacher said that I looked like someone just walked over my grave.

You can't blame me for gettin' my hair up about it: this is my first stable job with any benefits, I like my job, and I make three times my previous high rate of income.

Turns out that they'll just have two teachers - and since she has 17 years' experience in this field and at this grade level, she'll be top of the program, which is fine with me as long as I'm employed full-time doing what I like to do: teach.

Also seems that there may be a Digital Art class next year that I would be teaching, if they can get the hardware (read: computers) for it.

Finally, I'm designing a house - actually it's not that simple, let me back up.

I assigned every one of my students (~200) the same thing: construct a cool house on an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, so that it will hang sideways along with everyone elses' houses, and the more creative the better. I've had a pretty dizzying variety - shacks, caves, UFO's, mushrooms, etc., etc..

But my 8th graders have been so wonderful lately that they need little to no instruction - leaving me a bit bored, or cleaning, or grading. So I'm using that time to make a house of my own, in my own assignment. Of course, I built a sort of 'dream home' for Rachel and myself (we have conversations about this kinda thing from time to time).

Of course there's a risk in this: I need to prove to my kids that I'm really good - that I'm worth listening to as a teacher. So hopefully this doesn't blow up in my face. I doubt it, though. I'm enjoying myself genuinely and my artwork has universally been great when I do and put time into it.

EDIT: It's kinda sad looking back on this.

Currently reading :
The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives
By Neil Gaiman

Labels: apartments, BASIS, house, school, teaching, work

posted by Steve @ 10:35 PM 0 comments

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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
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