This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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December 2004
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The House is Ours!

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It is official. Our new address is:

1457 Meadowbrook Rd NE
Palm Bay FL 32905

Please make a note of it. We’ll have the mailbox up there and start switching mail over this weekend.

Now the hard part starts. Brandy is anxious to go buy paint and start changing colors around, so I won’t write much. But the final walkthough and closing all went without incident. We went by once to use the keys for the first time. We’re now busy calling utilities and such to put everything that needs to be in our name in our name. And I’ve called the screening people to try to get that moving too. We have the deposit for them out of escrow.

Now as soon as I get out of this suit into something more appropriate, we’ll be heading to stores to get the appliances ordered, the mattress ordered, and paint and cleaning supplies… and the move has begun!

Brandy promises more pictures, including interior pictures, once we finish cleaning.

T minus practically Nothing

Last night I was going through my paper “in box” to make sure all the financial transactions I had receipts for were entered into Quicken and all outstanding bills were paid and such, just to make sure that everything was in order, and we knew exactly what the money situation is for closing, and more specifically for after closing, when we start having to spend money on immediate needs to get the place ready to move in. (For instance we need a washer and dryer and a mattress and such.) I was doing all that until around 08:00 UTC.

Then I decided that this might be a really good time to get the “Sam’s Net Worth” graph going again. I’d been slowly pulling the data from Quicken to do this over the last month or so, each time I did bills I had been printing a report with one quarter’s worth of net worth data at weekly intervals and putting that data into Excel where I was graphing it in my own peculiar way. (Not satisfied with the graphs Quicken produces out of the box.) At the rate I was going, I was adding a quarter’s worth of data every couple weeks. It would be a few months before the graph was up to the present and ready to post. So I decided to accellerate that and enter more data.

Well… Next thing I knew it was 12:00 UTC. I’d extended the graph so it now covers July 1994 to December 1998 though. I thought about continuing straight through until it was up to the present, but it would take a few more hours, and I was exausted, and frankly it was already the time I should be waking up. So the Sam’s New Worth Graph’s return will have to wait a bit longer. (It will be soon though, I’m going to be carefully monitoring things as we adapt to this move and the new conditions… as usual of course the web version will have the vertical axis labels removed, so folks can see trends, but not actual numbers.)

Anyway, finally headed to sleep. Then Amy woke up and started popping her head in every ten minutes. She wanted all kinds of things! She was up and ready to go. She’d set her alarm for some ungodly early time for some unknown reason, and had actually woken up. (She often sleeps through it.)

Anyway, I finally got to sleep. It is now 3 hours later. I am up again. Just woke Brandy up to go get Amy up (who of course fell back asleep). I am about to go hit the shower and get dressed and ready.

90 minutes from now we meet our agent for a final walk through of the property. There are a couple things they were still supposed to be working on which should be fixed by now, even at this late date. (The money for the screen is still going into escrow, some of which will be released to the contractor immediately after closing for them to schedule the work, the balance paid when the work is done… probably not for a couple months yet given the continued backlog for that kind of work.)

3 hours from now we go to the actual closing.

When that is done, we will have a house.

Then we have to start getting everything in order. We have planned out how we will do a lot of things. Others we decided to wait until we could actually be in there to even plan. There are a bunch of things we will need to buy right up front. We have worked out a preliminary budget we will have to live within for those sorts of things. (As well as a tentative budget for the amount we will need to live on PERIOD once we are in the new environs.)

Stress Stress Stress!

But this should be good.

If all goes well, which I presume it will, we’ll take some pictures of the new place and post here late tonight. And I suppose we’ll announce the new address then too.

Oh well. Gulp. I need to get ready. Already not really enough time to get breakfast or lunch or anything before we meet the agent. Maybe coffee.

Oh, have I mentioned I am sick as a dog right now too? Yucky cold, nasty cough, and lung reading thing under 400. Bleh! I probably should have tried to get more than 3 hours of sleep.

Oh well!

Perhaps Amy Will Need One

I’m usually not much for the bottom of the line models, I tend to always try to get the maxed out version of whatever product line I am getting in the theory that I will be happier with it longer, but this is probably a good move for Apple. A lot of budget-minded people who would never consider Macs before because they only had higher end models might consider this:

Apple to drop sub-$500 Mac bomb at Expo

With iPod-savvy Windows users clearly in its sights, Apple is expected to announce a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret.

The new Mac, code-named Q88, will be part of the iMac family and is expected to sport a PowerPC G4 processor at a speed around 1.25GHz. The new Mac is said to be incredibly small and will be housed in a flat enclosure with a height similar to the 1.73 inches of Apple’s Xserve. Its size benefits will include the ability to stand the Mac on its side or put it below a display or monitor.

(via TivoCommunity)

In our case, we have a couple old Window’s boxes of Brandy’s which could probably be cobbled together with the best pieces of both boxces to make a adequite working computer for Amy, but putting a Windows machine on our network, with all the problems Windows has, stikes fear into me! Cynthia just called me yesterday cause her machine is absolutely infested with spyware, trojans, and viruses and she is having trouble getting it clean again. Sure, you can be careful and keep a Windows machine clean. But it is just more work. YOu actually have to think about those things. Although the situation may change, at the moment you just have a lot less of that to worry about on a Mac.

Not to mention they are just cooler and better in every other way imaginable as well. :-)

Anyway, a budget level Mac might fit the bill perfectly.

I think she would prefer a laptop though. :-)

And then Brandy will need one too.

And I need one too.

OK, budget was just broken. Oh well!

And, I should also submit, this is from a rumor site with a spotty track record. Sometimes they get stuff right, sometimes they don’t.

50:40

Fifty hours and forty minutes to closing as I write this.

At the moment, it looks like all issues have been resolved and all systems are go.

I’m heading to the bank this afternoon to get the cashier’s check.

Darkflash: Half Way

Time for another Darkflash. Things that I sent out as emails when I didn’t have a blog for a few months that I would have normally posted. They are almost done. Really. Anyway, this one was originally sent to friends and family 8 Sep 2004 06:27:39 UTC.

So, we spent some time in New Orleans. Tried to go on one of those walking tour things, but the one we had the pamphlet for turned out to be canceled. So we just walked around by ourselves for a bit. Bourbon Street was a bit overwhelming for an already tired 8 year old though, so we didn’t stay long in that area and caught a kids movie instead. There was also a lot of swimming in the hotel pool.

Word from a few people we have talked to back in Melbourne is that the house is basically OK. Apparently a palm tree out front fell over, but otherwise things look OK. And at least some of the neighbors have power, so there is a good chance we will have power too. So it is looking good. We won’t know for sure until we get home though. And we picked up a small generator at a Home Depot in New Orleans just in case we were still out… and for the next time the power goes off. :-)

We are on the way back now. In Tallahassee for the night. That’s almost exactly half way home from New Orleans. We’ll go the rest of the way home tomorrow.

Work reports that the office is undamaged, but still without power. They were trying to set up today with generators. I’ll be back at work Thursday. The trip I was on that had to be called short will probably be rescheduled for next week.

So looks like things should be normalizing. Probably one more update once we get home.

Later all!

Boxes All Opened

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I put a stripe on the tree. Do you like the stripe? I like the stripe!

Well, all the boxes and packages have been opened and the presents dispersed. I think we all got a lot of good loot that will keep us busy for a long time. Thanks to everybody who sent us stuff. We much appreciate it. (I’ll of course try to thank people individually too, but I didn’t keep an actual list this year, so it may take me awhile to figure out.)

We had a good Christmas. Everybody was up late the night before. I woke up at 9:30 AM and flipped on the TV. Remarkably though, Amy, who we expected to rise at the crack of dawn, did not get up until almost noon. So the whole presents thing took us all the afternoon. Outside it was pouring rain almost all day.

Once everything was open we watched a DVD Amy got. And now Brandy is making dinner. Then I think we’ll probably watch another DVD. Between Brandy, Amy and I we probably got about 30 hours of new DVDs to watch. :-)

And Brandy got me some new things to aid in my graphing! And there was a remote control car, and a bathrobe, and some clothes, and a few decorations for the house… and… and… well, like I said, I didn’t make a list. But lots of cool stuff!

Tomorrow the cleanup begins. :-)

Lung Power!

Time for another new graph. My lung power over time!

Sam’s Peak Flow History

Since I was a child I have had asthma.  It used to cause me quite a bit of trouble.  With modern medicines it bothers me much less than when I was a teenager and younger.  But it is still there and likely always will be.  So I monitor it on a regular basis.  What follows are charts I have kept of my “peak flow”.  This basically measures how strongly I can blow out, which in turn is one indicator of my lung strength and how well I am breathing at that moment.

As with the weight graph, there is some data which I have but is not yet reflected on the chart. This will slowly be restored as I go through a few places where I have the data and get it entered.

Trees and Boxes

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Happy Trees and Boxes Day from the Minter/Donaghy/Roney’s!

Closing is Scheduled

The time will be 30 Dec 2004 19:00 UTC.

It looks like all the issues have been worked out and this house buying thing will be moving forward. There are a couple outstanding contractual issues to be worked out. Since the house appraised for enough without the screen to get the mortgage company off our backs, any arrangement about fixing the screen is outside of that. So the agents are hammering out the details of how the escrow will be handled and everything. Hopefully nothing will come up last minute that will stop that. That is the last remaining detail.

So this time next week we should have a house.

We won’t be moving instantaneously though. We’ll do it slowly over a month or so.

I won’t send out the new address and such until everything is official. Cause that one remaining detail might still rear its ugly head and cause a problem. But if not…

The Weight Graph Is Back!!!

After many years, the weight graph is back!

Sam’s Weight History

…you can see my steady rise over the last 12 years, starting in 1994 and 1995 when I was trying to gain as much as I could because I was too skinny.  And you can also see quite clearly the “weight contests” of 2001 and 2002, especially the big one, where to win the contest (which was a very stiff competition) I ended up eating only something like 10 times in the entire last month of the contest, and not at all in the last 10 days (other than one SlimFast shake on the 8th day) in order to ensure my win (barely!).  Um, that was stupid.  Very stupid. But I recovered quickly.  :-)

I’m a bit above where I really should be right now, but I’m not too concerned. And the trends are right at the moment.

This is the first of several new graphs I’ll be adding to the Graph Section. Some of them will be the return of graphs from the distant past with new and exciting updated data. Others will be brand new.

For those that remember abulsme.com from that far back though (1996 I think), do not expect an immediate return of the “Temperature in Sam’s Mouth” graph. Maybe someday, but not right now. Sorry.