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I started writing this many times over the last month and somehow never could finish this. Sometimes I couldn’t even begin writing it. It is weird when you want to do something, but your own brain gets in the way of doing it. Here we are now, many starts and almost starts and I can finally say that I have a new theme.

Kris did an amazing job with it and it has a lot of things I wanted and things I requested. I am going to be able to write reviews and articles and everything else I want to do. She did an absolutely incredible job on it.

There is some things I need to figure out and things from the old site that I want to bring back. I eventually want to bring back forums and maybe profiles, but that might be best for a separate community site and not the main one. I also want to bring back tutorials. It was popular and if I can update what was there and move them into WordPress then it might be worth it. I also ant to get back into reading blogs again. I know there’s nothing like Despair anymore, but I always did love reading and commenting on people’s blogs in the past.

There was no posts besides this one in 2018. I’ve been on Twitter and Instagram so if you have been following me there, you know 2018 has been just a shit year, not just in the general sort of way, but also personally as well. I won’t go into why because I just want to forget this year has existed at all. Fuck 2018 and hopefully 2019 is better, if not, then fuck 2019 as well.

I ordered from Zenni Optical a few years ago after the glasses with scratch proof coating that I bought from BJs got a scratch on them. I am thinking about ordering a new pair of glasses because just normal wear and tear, three years of the same glasses and they’ve accumulated some minor scratches on them. My only apprehension is that I don’t have a new prescription so getting glasses based off a three year old prescription is not something I necessarily want to do, but with how cheap their glasses are and the fact that I don’t have vision with my insurance, it’s worth it. With the weather getting warmer, I might even get some prescription sunglasses. Prescription safety glasses might also be good to get too, since using safety glasses over regular glasses can be an inconvenience.

With summer coming and with the possibility of us getting a shed soon, I am hoping to do more wood working and other kinds of projects. I just finished up a monitor riser that can fit my speakers under it and I started working on the window cutout in the kitchen again, so hopefully that can be completed relatively soon as well. I’ve got some other projects that I am thinking about coming up soon too. One thing I am attempting to do is to coat these zombie ear soap on a rope that I got from Loot Crate with Resin so that I could actually use it as a decoration or a necklace if I wanted to and not have to worry about it sudsing or destroying anything else. I talked to someone about it already and they said resin is the best way to go with it, but to test it on a different piece of soap first. I’d also like to get back into working with metals as well.

Eventually I’ll get to all these projects, but for now I will keep doing little by little what I have the time and money for.

Alan Rickman died earlier this week, but unlike a lot of people he wasn’t Snape to me, or Hans Gruber, he was Metatron. I’ve seen him in Robin Hood Men in Tights, Die Hard, heard him on King of the Hill, but the first time I remember him distinctly is from Dogma. I always hoped that we’d see him in the View Askewniverse again in some way, like how we saw Alanis Morissette as God at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but that is obviously never going to happen now.

I know a lot of people love him in Harry Potter and would probably question how I don’t associate him with that role more than anything, but the truth is, I never saw any Harry Potter movieand I have never read any of the books. I’ve wanted to, don’t get me wrong. Kris and I were even thinking about signing up for Kindle Unlimited since the books are part of that and we could read them for free. As for the movies, Like I said, I’ve never seen them, I’ve wanted to, but I never saw them on streaming, so I am going to have to buy them and watch them, maybe sometime this week.

As weird as this sounds, since he died, I’ve been dying to see Harry Potter more and more since everyone keeps posting memes and saying how much they loved him in it. When Robin Williams died I couldn’t watch any movie with him in it, I still can’t. Up until that point I was watching Good Will Hunting at least once a year, but now the thought of watching any Robin Williams movie makes me want to tear up and I haven’t been able to bring myself to hit play.

It really says something about the person when their death affects you. Even though you never met them, their life means something to the point where their death changes you in some way.

Since we bought this house we have had an issue with water. When we moved the wall a pipe broke, our washing machine was leaking water a few times before we replaced it, the discharge pipe for the air conditioner was filled with crap and overflowed, the sewer pump in the basement was clogged with a rag and overflowed, and most recently our master bathroom flooded.

The last week I’ve been dealing with a flooding bathroom. The most frustrating thing about this particular leak is that we couldn’t find where it was coming from. It appeared like it was coming from under the toilet, a toilet that we put in less than a year ago, so I put food coloring in the tank and bowl to make sure that was the case. That was not the case, the water was clear. Since it was clear I started feeling everything, the bolts on the toilet were dry, the incoming line on the toilet was dry, plus the other side that was stopped up was dry. The way everything was pooling next to the wall and under the toilet, I thought it might be coming from the shower in the other bathroom, finally I found that the shut off was loose and tightened that.

It was fine for a day or two and then it started flooding again. This time I found it to be coming from a bolt under the tank, the same one that was dry last time. It’s been a few days and so far it’s been dry so I am pretty sure anything that has been leaking on the toilet is fixed.

For now I am just waiting for the next water issue to come up again.

Colin left today after coming down for a few days. We played a lot of Wii U when he was here, since we picked it up the day before he came down. I have to admit, while I didn’t want one when it came out, Mario Maker and Mario Kart are amazing and definitely make me regret not getting one sooner. I might soon also pick up Super Mario Bros U since it looks fun with multiple people. Just need to check if you can play online with it.

We also went to Buffalo Wild Wings, which is not something Kris and I do often since she doesn’t like their food. The Blazing Wings is what Colin usually gets, but these were reformulated and much hotter than he anticipated. His reaction was too funny not to start recording:

He says within a year he will be able to handle it, so I am thinking about recording his reaction next time he comes down and see if the wings are still too hot for him.

Kris and I have an old Windows machine that wasn’t being used for anything, so I bought a 5TB hard drive for it, installed Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL and we will be using it as an in house server. The 5TB is most likely overkill since it will be used only as an in house testing server, but you never know when we’ll need to use it as a cloud storage solution, or even a media server, not everything can be on Netflix afterall.

At this point I need to make sure Apache, MySQL, and PHP all run at startup and figure out some sort of admin panel. Plesk and cPanel are out of the question since they are paid, so I’ll need to figure out a free solution and then how to install it. With any luck I will have it installed by Friday and have a few test sites setup to test things out.

This marks the first Christmas that we’ve owned our house. We were planning on being in the house for Christmas, but due to some unforeseen circumstances we decided to come up to New York  for Christmas and then go back home for New Years with Colin on Sunday. Even though Christmas is now over, we’re doing Christmas on Friday with Kristen’s mom and on Saturday with her aunt. We’ll be leaving on Sunday once Colin gets out of work. Eventually I think we will be doing a separate Christmas celebration down in Delaware with my parents, but I don’t know that for certain.

Kristen and I exchanged gifts before we came to New York, I only took a picture of this ax she got me this year in front of the guitar she got me last year. I just put it up on the same hook as the guitar temporarily, I have to hang it on it’s own hook, as well as the weapons Colin got me for Christmas.

Guitar behind the ax on the wall

I hope everyone had a good holiday and I hope it won’t be another six months before I write again. Merry Christmas everyone.

I should have made this post months ago, but work has been really busy and I haven’t had much time to do anything. We did close on the house March 14th. We’ve sorted out some issues that was on the inspection report, but have had new ones come up as well. The house was left with a lot of garbage that we’re still getting rid of, such as old paint cans, they left us a garbage can full of bowling balls, a dog house, etc. We did manage to get a lot thrown out, but there’s a lot that you can’t really just put in the trash and expect the garbage men to take it.

Yesterday we got the hot tub running , it needs some repair, but just some minor gorilla gluing and then we can enjoy a nice relaxing dip outside. It’s a big project, but I think all houses are. My office is painted and getting setup slowly, Kris’ office is setup, we just need to build her a desk. Kris painted the guest room tonight for when her dad and our friend Colin comes down in a few weeks.

Eventually I will have pictures and videos, but the first few months have been exhausting, hopefully soon I can share more and blog more.

We’re supposed to be closing tomorrow, but we’ve had some setbacks. We had to add my dad as a cosigner, so now we have 2 cosigners and me on there, but we had to wait until my dad got his taxes done, which he did last week and the bank got all the paperwork this week, but now it looks like we’ll get the loan, but we will need to postpone closing for a few days or possibly weeks. This whole process is stressful and I hope we never have to go through this again. They want to know everything, they question every little thing, they even question your paychecks. Some of the stuff is common sense, but they want to be able to have a paper trail to see where all your money comes from. I guess the housing market fallout a few years ago caused the banks to be so thorough, but it just seems a bit overboard and unnecessary. In theory we should have a solid answer from the bank regarding a new closing date later today. Once I have that I can get insurance and be in the final stage of this thing.

Other than the house, I’ve been doing some stuff here and there on the site. You can now submit jokes, riddles, and recipes and I am working on a few other things. With these bumps in the road with the house I haven’t really been motivated to do much besides work and play video games. My Xbox 360 died so I decided to get a newer one, I had the day 1 edition, so a 20 gigabyte hard drive with no HDMI port. My new one has a 250 gigabyte hard drive and HDMI. It’s also black. I can’t really record from it the way I used to, but maybe once this house stuff is settled I’ll pick up an HD recorder to record from Xbox One and the 360. I already have to pick up a new HDMI cable for my PS3, I haven’t really used that much.

There’s a lot of things we need to buy, couches, wood, tools, cleaning supplies, lawn mower, cookware, etc, but we can’t begin buying it until we know without a doubt we have the house. We were under contract for another house back in October that we were all set to get, but the complex and the bank had a falling out and we bought some things for it, like a coffee table and some other things, then the deal fell through. We still have that stuff which will go into the new house, but we won’t be buying anything else until we know for sure. In theory everything looks good, we just need the underwriters to say we’re good to go for some date and then the price we will need at closing and then we will be set and we may go out and start purchasing this stuff, but not before then.

We have the mortgage papers, they just need to be signed. We got them on Friday and then had some confusion with the cost, but we went over things with the broker and our real estate agent, so we will be signing them on Sunday. Hopefully we can get to UPS to send them back on Monday. After that, it is just a waiting game.

Looking over everything, we never got this far in the process. We were under contract with three houses before this, one we couldn’t be approved for, one was a terrible house and should be condemned, and then this one. I guess they really mean it when they say third time’s the charm. I can’t wait to have my office/mancave/studio.

I plan on doing videos in between work and gaming, maybe even some more gaming videos if and when Microsoft can get Twitch Streaming up for the Xbox One. Lack of space and privacy has been the main issue I haven’t done more videos in the past. I may eventually purchase a green screen to make things more interesting, but we all have plans and dreams to do things.

Lately I have been getting a lot done on my site. Jokes, Riddles, and Recipes are all working much better with a new rating system. Eventually members will be able to post their own content and have it show up on their profile. I’d like to also get a new design up, with a different theme for each section. Also get more content up that is better organized. It’s a lot, but I have been doing pretty well lately with balancing everything out. I plan on being on my laptop more in the new house so working from the living room or any other change of scenery, should provide even an ounce of inspiration to work on things. I have a lot of ideas that I want to implement, but the first one is a new newsletter format.

I do feel more inspired just buying the house, which is why I have been blogging more, commenting on blogs, working on SEO, working on new content, etc. I felt stuck for a while, but things are finally falling into place and moving forward. It will finally be nice to have our own place that we can do what we want with it. I don’t think that we will move in and have all this money to play with, we might have some, but really I know it will be tight at first, but you make it work, do the work yourself, save up, then you can get it all sorted out. Just having this house opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I’m excited.

We kind of took a step backwards with the house. We are back in the negotiation stage, but it is the last one. We had to renegotiate the price due to the appraisal and inspection. That should be taken care of on Monday though. Once all that is settled, we send it to the bank and get the loan closing date. The loan is fine though and can be done as a regular FHA mortgage with no repairs required for the loan.  Not having any repairs being required is great which means we can fix things on our terms and when we want to.

Of course we will take care of the major issues as soon as we can, but instead of replacing the whole roof within 6 months, we may just patch it, then put a new roof sometime in the Fall. The first thing we’ll be doing is sealing an unsealed sewer pipe to prevent sewer gases from getting into the basement and replacing a rotted out door. Eventually we’ll be fencing in the yard and putting up a pool too. There’s a lot we’ll be doing, but with a 6 bedroom house that we will be in for 30+ years, we have time to figure it all out.

In reality, we could close weeks before February 28th, but the sellers need time to get out. They said if they get out before then we could close sooner. Once we have the official approval from the bank, I think that is when we will start packing up. We have a pre-approval and pre-qualification right now, so I guess at this point they just need to make sure all of our ducks are in a row and get the final paperwork signed so that we can close. It should be an interesting few weeks, but in realty it should be pretty boring. I used to do some work for a mortgage broker in New York and once the signatures are there, I don’t remember him ever having to interact with the people again until closing. So once we have the price finalized and can get the bank the paperwork, we shouldn’t hear much except that we’re approved.