Wednesday, August 31, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  My Cousin, the Army Major

Back in August, 2003, I blogged about how I wouldn’t forgive President Bush if my cousin in the Army was injured or killed in Iraq.  I had heard he was about to deploy to Iraq for the first time since Desert Storm, and I was very worried about him.  I’m happy to say that, thus far, he’s been fine.  Here’s an update.

My cousin has been deployed to Iraq in short stints at least three times and, last I heard, he was about to be deployed again (and considering this was several months ago I heard this, may be deployed currently).  As a Major (last I heard), he’s one of the “lucky” ones who gets to ride in an armored humvee.  Apparently this was a very good thing during his first deployment, since his convoy got hit by a roadside bomb.  The bomb hit the humvee behind my cousin’s and destroyed it, killing at least on soldier and wounding several more.  There hasn’t been any additional “excitement” that I’ve heard about since then, but that’s probably just because I haven’t heard about it, not because it hasn’t happened.

I’ve read too many people saying that Iraq doesn’t affect them.  They have no vested interest in the war because they don’t know someone in it.  I can understand that point of view.  As someone with a cousin in Iraq occasionally, even I’m not tremendously vested in the war.  But at least I know someone.  Too many people who don’t personally know a soldier, airman, seaman, or marine involved in some way in Iraq are calling for the war to continue, or to end now.  And their opinions don’t carry a lot of weight with me.  Have someone you know and care about nearly blown up and then let’s talk.

My cousin and I aren’t close.  Hell, I’ve barely seen the man over the course of my entire life.  But the last time I saw him and his family, I felt that I had a strange closeness to him that I still can’t explain.  He is very conservative, a Christian in the “praise the Lord!” sense of the word, and he probably approves of the war in Iraq.  I’m a center liberal pragmatist, an eclectic pagan who thought that the war was a bad idea from the beginning.  We don’t have much in common, except that we’re family.  And I worry about him.  From what I’ve seen, he’s a good man and a good father.  And while I can’t explain why I feel that I have some connection to a cousin that I barely know, I can’t help but believe that the connection exists.

And like I said in that August, 2003 blog, Bush and his cronies had still better pray that my cousin continues to come home safe.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Datasheets

Trust experimentally-derived data over manufacturer-provided datasheet data.

Sunday, August 28, 2005

House Update

First, let me apologize for the derth of posts over the last week or so.  Stress tends to make me less amenable to posting much, even if I keep seeing stuff that desperately needs posting on.  I’m sure that things will settle down and I’ll get back to my regular posting schedule again.

Now that’s out of the way....

As my wife says, you’d think that when someone puts their house on the market, they actually want to sell it.  We certainly thought they wanted to.  Apparently not, because they’ve pulled it from the market a second time (they pulled it three months ago and then put it back on about 3-4 weeks ago).  We figure that they were having problems making the financing work out.

I’ve heard a good joke from my inlaws (at least, I think that’s where I heard it):  How is California like a granola bar?  Take out the fruits and the nuts and all you have left are the flakes.  Well, in this case the flakes were taken out first (no, I don’t know if they were Californians, but man, the are SERIOUSLY flakey).

We appear to have been in the right place at the right time, though, because another house in the neighborhood, of the same floorplan that we like, is now on the market.  We were driving around to look for new homes for sale and we found this one.  We also found that the realtor was doing another open house nearby, and we went over to ask if there was an open house any time soon, as well as how much the house was, etc.  Not only was the open house planned for today, but the house was quite a bit cheaper than flakey people’s house.  Not the same view, and nowhere near the extra goodies either (no hardwood or ceramic tile, for example), but the house is still in reasonably good shape, even if it does need some serious paint help.

So we’ve called our realtor and asked him to draw up a new contract for the house we wandered through today.  And with any luck, tomorrow will NOT be like last Tuesday was.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Receipt”

receipt

a written acknowledgment of an exchange of goods or services that, when personal details such as a signature or credit card number are present, should always be shredded

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Life’s a Mountain

I’ve often heard that life’s a bitch.  I’ve never really liked that statement, and not because of the the epithet.  Instead, I’ve always prefered theidea that life is a mountain.  Some parts of life are like walking up a valley, others are like walking up an exposed ridgeline.  And other parts are like hanging by your fingertips on the underside of an overhang in a sudden blizzard with white-out conditions wearing summer shorts when your last three anchors have fallen out and you’re off belay.

That’s what yesterday was like and, to something of a lesser extent, my life since last Friday.

Jennifer and I have been trying to sell our house since April with precious little luck.  About two weeks ago, we dropped our asking price dramatically in hopes that it would generate enough interest for interested parties to start coming through the house on showings.  We did this because the house we’ve been drooling over for 3 months finally came back on the market, and we knew that homes in the target neighborhood tended to move fast.

Thankfully, we did generate several showings on the house, and one of them turned into an offer.  Not an ideal offer, but certainly workable.  This happened Friday.  By the end of the weekend, we had a signed contract on our home, and we’re due to close and be moved out on September 28.

Over the weekend, Jennifer and I determined what we were planning on offering, and I wrote everything down to get it into a rough draft contract on Monday morning, as well as into the loan officer for the new house.

Monday I received a copy of a preliminary contract on the house we want to buy to look over.  I looked it over and had several questions that I hoped to ask our realtor before Tuesday, when we would hopefully put an offer on the target house.  Unfortunately, our realtor never called (he did say he was going to be busy all day Monday, so while I am complaining, I really probably shouldn’t).  I worked with the loan officer to generate the terms for a new home and discovered that the interest rates had fluctuated somewhat since we started the process in April.  Hardly a surprise.  But Jennifer and I thought we were pretty much set.

Then Tuesday came.  Jennifer is a middle school teacher.  Middle school teachers tend to be starting up classes in late August, and Tuesday was Jennifer’s first day of school with 7th graders.  It was also the day we’d decided to see the target house and put an offer out on it if we were still drooling over it.  So Tuesday was going to be ugly stressful for Jennifer no matter what happened otherwise.

But then I heard back from our realtor.  Apparently, the target house had already had an offer put down on it from someone else, and so we weren’t the only ones interested in it.  Not a surprise, but we’d been planning on low-balling the sellers.  That was no longer an option.  In addition, we’d asked for several thousand dollars of our closing costs to be paid by the seller since we’d been asked to do the same by our buyers, and we figured that passing the buck was only fair.  If we were now in a bidding situation, this wasn’t really an option either, especially at the low-ball offer we’d planned.  Finally, we hadn’t been thrilled by the high amount of earnest money we were being expected to put up front and had been considering trying to negotiate the sellers down some.  This was also not an option any more.  And this was just the problem with an offer.

The contract was also incomplete and filled with “NA"s where real dates or prices or interest rates should have been.  This was because I hadn’t provided the realtor’s assistant with this information.  So I needed to hunt down all this information.  Unfortunately, the information I had was out of date, especially if Jennifer and I were going to dramatically adjust our initial offer to what the realtor had suggested, specifically “our best offer.” So I had to disturb my wife on her first day of school that was going to be hell anyway and tell her that we needed to come up with more money to improve our offer if we were going to stand a chance of succeeding with our offer.

Then I called the loan officer and talked to him about it.  We’ve been qualified for more than the amount of the offer for quite a while now, so that wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that it takes time to generate all the paperwork, regenerate updated interest rates, etc.  And all this information needed to be to the realtor two hours before our meeting at the target house.  Oh, and we discovered that we needed to come up with an additional amount of down payment than we had planned for.  This discovery necessitate yet another call to my wife at school during her planning period/meeting with her team time and even more stress piled onto Jennifer.

I finally saw a copy of the contract at about 3:30 PM, well after the realtor was supposed to have his own copy in hand.  I had earlier reviewed the entire document carefully, so all I had to do was verify the changes, and that’s when I discovered that the loan section numbers did not have the same numbers that my loan officer had told me over the phone.  I called the realtor’s assistant to verify that they were right, and she said that she’d been dictated those numbers by my loan officer.  So I called my loan officer to verify them and got - voice mail.

By this time my brain was not just mush, not just oozing out of my ears and nose, not just pooling on the floor under my chair at work, but had turned into primal ooze and was about re-evolve bacteria.  And saying that my stress level was off-scale high would have been a dramatic understatement

I got to the target house, looked it over (and had my dad, who has a good knowledge of houses and what to look for with regard to problems, look it over too), and received a call from my loan officer saying that yes, there was a typo and no, it wasn’t a big deal since the loan section wasn’t binding on the loan itself.  In addition, the realtor, who hadn’t had a chance to review the contract yet, sat down and found several mistakes that had to be modified by hand.  Finally, we sat down and signed away our lives for an offer on a home we still love.

The only silver lining?  There seems to be no major problems with the house from my dad’s inspection (although we’ll still get true inspections done) and the interest rate will be a tad lower than I had been estimating.

It turns out that we made the right move on the offer - we’re still in contention tonight (at least, we think we are) with the other offer.  The difference?  We offered a lot more cash, but the other offer isn’t contingent on the sale of another house like we are.

That was Tuesday.

And today?  Well, today we find out that we have a definite “maybe” on our offer.  The problem is that the target house sellers need to pull the date as far UP as they can so they can get into their own new home.  And we don’t have enough equity in our home to qualify for a bridge loan for the few days that would enable us to eliminate the contingency on our own home’s sale.

We still think getting out of our house is the right move.  The neighborhood is fine, except that we’re competing against literally dozens of foreclosures and HUD homes.  Even if we ultimately get turned down on our offer, we’re still moving, albeit into a rental home for a short period (less than a year, hopefully) until we find something permanent.

Yesterday was one of the most stressful days of my life.  It’s definitely in the top ten, probably in the top five, and may be #1.  It was, hands down, Jennifer’s most stressful day ever.  But we’re hanging on.  I’m still hanging on by my fingertips, but at least the wind’s dying down, I can see the foothold in the rock, and I’m back on belay.

Monday, August 22, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Valentine’s Day Gifts

Be careful buying “us” Valentine’s Day gifts lest they inadvertently turn into gifts for yourself.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Q”

Q

the name of a Star Trek - The Next Generation villain, his plane of existence, and all other beings that inhabit said plane.

Friday, August 19, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  Mounir el Motassadeq

Mounir El Motassadeq, the man accused of aiding and abetting the 9/11 hijackers, was convicted only of being a member of a terrorist organization.  Today he was sentenced to 7 years in prison.  But something I read about this case made me very uncomfortable, and should make most people uncomfortable.

According to judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt, the reason that Motassadeq wasn’t convicted of being part of the 9/11 attacks was that there was concern over the evidence the U.S. provided the court.  Specifically, “there was no way for the court to check their veracity or to judge whether the information had been extracted under torture.”

Germany is an ally.  If our allies’ legal authorities are no longer willing to accept the word of the U.S. government and are willing to suspect that we would extract testimony using torture, what are our enemies thinking?

Oh, how the U.S. has fallen since the days of the Cuban Missile crisis when even France accepted the word of the United States.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Patent”

patent

1. an exclusive right to an inventor to sell his/her product without competition

2. something that should not apply to mathematical equations and processes like software

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  “Soft” Power

Today on NPR, I heard a piece on the strength of U.S. brands overseas.  The gist of the piece is that surveys are showing that, with only a few exceptions, U.S. brands are no longer viewed as prestigious and have fallen back into the pack with all the other brand names.  There are two reasons that our brands are no longer “the” brands to own.  The first reason is that U.S. companies and brands are facing more competition internationally.  The second reason is that the foreign policies of the United States government are widely viewed negatively, and that negativity is rubbing off on our brands.

This is a major problem.  Cultural an economic power, what I’ve heard referred to as “soft” power, can be even more effective at influencing a foreign culture than military, or “hard,” power.  Soldiers give the citizens of other countries a face to hate and a body to attack.  It’s much more difficult to assault a movie, satellite radio programming, international banks granting micro-loans, or the ubiquitousness of Google.  The changes wrought by soft power are slow, subtle, even insidious in some sense, and they’re much less expensive than soldiers or the threat of military action.

Global competition is inevitable, and it’s time for U.S. companies to get off their butts and get serious about competing in the global marketplace.  But if our government’s actions over the last who-knows-how-many years or administrations have weakened our ability to project soft power, then this is a serious reason to rethink our national policies.  Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that you cannot win a “war on terror” without soft power, and if our soft power has been degraded, then our hard victories may ultimately turn out to be Pyrrhic.