borgknight

Of roaches, repairs, and the threat of violence

2009-10-19T12:51:05Z

Very busy weekend.

Tara's childhood home was always kind of cluttered, but it was NEVER this bad when her mom was alive. It's a damned horror show with Kenny and his gluttonous selfish bride of the damned living there. Roaches everywhere in the kitchen. Turn on the light and they don't even scatter; they just wander around, climbing on the dishes, the appliances, the food.... UGH.

The whole place smells like piss. Upstairs in the room Kenny and Rachel share, I found a Taco Bell cup filled with piss. She's too lazy to get off her huge ass and go downstairs to the bathroom. There are lots of Taco Bell cups up there. She likes to go out at midnight to eat more of the stuff. I guess she needs to eat quite a bit to maintain that Huttese figure.

Tara's dad is slowly getting better, but it's a long struggle for him. The hip surgery and infection was quite a drain on his body's resources and the terrible care he gets from his son is not helping matters. They went away for the weekend and didn't think to tell anyone until Tuesday! Four days of notice that his bedridden father would be alone, with nobody to get him food or anything else. Real nice, Kenny-boy. I guess he's forgotten the last couple of times we locked up and I bounced his sorry ass off a wall or two.

So Tara and I spent four hours over there on Saturday, bringing him his dinner, making sure he took his medicine, and spraying the kitchen with roach spray. That's what I love doing, spraying poison over every kitchen surface and under the counters. Not that it helped a whole lot. When we picked him up to take him to the pumpkin farm on Sunday, the roaches were still there, still wandering over everything.

Saturday night I worked on a zombie decoration that seemed to have a bad motion sensor. It works now, but it needs more light to work than is really convenient for a Halloween decoration. Last night I spent fixing Tara's laptop, because the power socket on the system board had cracked the solder weld again. They really need to design these things so that a the plug isn't nearly so susceptible to pressure.

Closing is complete!

2009-08-19T20:19:30Z

A few years back, we were in bad financial shape. It was bad enough that we were about to lose the house and could not come to terms with our lender. I had spent the previous few years unemployed or in short-term jobs, causing us to fall behind on too many bills.

Desperate, we turned to a company called Advantage Financial which bought our house from us and rented it back to us until we could buy it when our finances improved.

Unfortunately, I was stupid and did not read the contract as thoroughly as I should have, taking the representative's word for what it contained. Instead of the rental payments going to pay down the mortgage as they'd assured us, the price for the house was fixed...and fixed very high.

I suspect some fraud with the contract, but since our copy was destroyed in a flood a couple years back, I have no way to verify it.

Things were going well for a while until we got a letter from Advantage telling us to start making the rental payments to some couple we'd never heard of. It turns out that Advantage sold the property to them and was paying them each month to carry the mortgage while Advantage collected the rent and paid the mortgage, taxes, etc.

It turns out Advantage had stopped had stopped paying the mortgage a couple months before telling the owners of record that they were going to stop paying the mortgage, destroying their credit and dumping five properties into their laps. Our house was already in foreclosure because of this.

Since then, I have learned that Advantage was owned by another company called Loomis Wealth Solutions. Google it. Enjoy the horrors. Apparently Loomis was running a $100,000.00 Ponzi scheme and my house was one of the tokens used to bilk people out of their money. It seems this scheme was running across 6 states and caused a great many people to lose huge amounts of money. Some of the Loomis employees were also arrested for using some of the empty houses to grow marijuana, so we can add drugs to this story of fraud, deception, and theft.

From what I have read, the scenario also includes fraudulent real estate listings to drive up the amount of money that could be borrowed against each property, with Loomis Wealth Solutions, through Advantage Financial, pocketing the difference. The listing for our own house http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/62-W-Fullerton-Avenue_Glendale-Heights_IL_60139_1108608395?mp=1 includes rooms that we do not, and have never had, as well as some weird claim to professional landscaping and recent renovations.

We've spent the last eight months working on either finding a better house or keeping ours. None of the other homes in the area were suitable for us, so we're staying put.

I'm glad this mess is finally over.

borgknight @ 2009-08-19T10:09:00

2009-08-19T15:10:01Z

Closing is set for 1pm. Will update once it's complete.

borgknight @ 2009-08-16T22:05:00

2009-08-17T03:05:52Z

Wednesday is the target day. All will be explained then.

borgknight @ 2009-07-23T23:48:00

2009-07-24T04:49:42Z

House nears final resolution. I do not want to say much about it until all the papers are signed.

Been a long time since I have posted

2009-06-23T13:30:49Z

House situation is still unresolved.

Life continues on.

Not a very informative post, but hey, I'm really not much into caring right now.

Life is a shit sandwich...

2009-01-31T15:16:41Z

...and we're all out of bread.

We have been renting our house with an option to buy for the last three years. We've been all paid up and everything seemed to be going fine until we get home last Friday night to get a message that the owners have decided to sell it out from under us.

This money we've been paying in rent was supposed to go to pay down the mortgage. We have no idea where it's really been going for the last year or so because the house is in foreclosure and we need to either buy it or move out.

Nice message to get on a Friday evening, when everything's going to be closed for the weekend, hmm? The owners gave us the number for their lawyer and realtor, but we had to wait until Monday to get any information from either of them. The realtor has lied to us about several things so far, and the attorney won't return our calls.

What a great week it's been!

Hope?

2009-01-02T04:05:40Z

"It's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last"

-Counting Crows

We'll see.

Many changes this year.

Tara got a full-time teaching job.
Alyssa became a teenager.
I decided that the management track at work is a sucker's game and went back to being more technical.
The basement flooded three times.
We finally went to Disney World as a family.
I redid my office.
The stupidity of Reaganomics finally came home to roost and crashed our economy.
Our "beloved" Governor tried to sell a Senate seat and got caught at it.
The first non-white man was elected President of the United States.
Dick Cheney confessed to advocating torture.

Let's hope some good starts happening this year.

8 gallons

2008-12-29T02:41:53Z

8 Gallons of water were sucked out of my office carpet by the shop-vac.

8 gallons.

Carpet has now been upgraded from swampy to damp.

Yee. Ha.

and thus melted the snow...

2008-12-27T21:28:40Z

...right into our basement.

Damn it.

Why didn't anyone tell me about this?

2008-12-19T05:00:39Z

Tonight I used baking parchment for the first time. It was bloody perfect!

Air-Bake cookie sheets + Baking parchment = Victory!

The cookies came out perfectly. None overdone, none underdone. Much time was saved by moving the parchment to the cooling racks instead of using the spatula to move each cookie one by one.

Too bad I don't get to eat any of them.

Of cookies and messes

2008-12-15T04:17:08Z

I learned something today:

Powdered sugar and flour are not easy to tell apart when not in well-labeled containers.

My cookies made quite a gloppy mess, which Alyssa is taking to school to use as an ice cream topping. The stuff tastes fine, but round puddles of glop do not cookies make.

When the cookies failed, I asked Tara if those two containers had different types of flour. She informed me that there was only one container of flour; that the other one was powdered sugar.

When the hell did we get powdered sugar?

The next batch came out fine. I am pleased.

Decorations and an unwanted day off

2008-12-08T12:40:09Z

We finally got the tree up this year. I suppose I should call it a Christmas tree because that's the holiday Tara celebrates with it. Excuse my heresy, but I still find the whole thing hard to swallow.

Ryan has a fever and a tummy ache today, so I am forced to stay home with him. I certainly hope he's better tomorrow, since this will be an unpaid day off. I am out of PTO days at work.

Today will be spent on laundry and possibly (weather permitting) putting up some of the outside decorations. We picked up a pole with a special tool on the end that should let me get the outside lights up without climbing on the roof. We'll see how well it works.

I other news, Black Friday was good to us. I cannot divulge most of the stuff we got in case certain eyes read this page, but we did get an incredible deal on a Kitchen-Aid mixer. Several batches of cookies have already come forth from its incredible mixing power. I foresee much goodness coming from this machine as the years go by.

Ryan's Lego League competition is this Saturday. He has been going to the bi-weekly meetings for several months now and will be presenting a speech about how Tampa Bay deals with flooding. Given how the flooding this past September had affected us, it's a topic that hits home.

With all the stuff going on here, I had to miss the Bridgeview charity toy show. I hate missing this event, since it's the only one I've done every year since joining the 501st, but we needed to be in several places at once and there was no way to accomplish it with me there instead of here helping.

The desk I picked up a couple of months ago has one flaw that I hate. The keyboard drawer is too short for my mouse and keyboard. I had to get a compact keyboard, which lacks the numeric keypad and has some of the keys in slightly different places. I can deal with the keypad's absence, but they put the backslash key next to the apostrophe, which is where the other keyboard had the oversize Enter key. This, of course, means I tend to hit backslash at the end of a paragraph. I will get used to it eventually, but it's driving me crazy at this point.

Draining away our bank account

2008-11-29T21:45:20Z

Ok, had the guy from Roto-Rooter out today. the router they use is much better than the one I rented from home depot.

However, it cost a whole hell of a lot more.

I think it was worth it, however.

The guy was friendly and very good at what he did. When he felt the bit hit an obstruction, he'd back the thing up and run it through that area a few times. He did this several times and the water flows quite well now.

There's also a 6-month guaranty, so if it backs up again tomorrow, I'm to call him immediately.

Yet another bit of flooding

2008-11-29T04:05:51Z

This is really beginning to piss me off.

Everything was fine yesterday and most of today. Tara takes another bath to stop the itching from the strange bumpy rash she's got all over her body and guess what? More damned water in my basement.

We've called Roto-Rooter to see what they can do. We can't afford it, but even less can we afford to be unable to do laundry or get cleaned up.

Bugger.

More damned flooding, redux

2008-11-27T06:10:32Z

Ok, no rain. No snow. Now precipitation of any kind.

What we did have, however, is a bath.

Well, ok, Tara had a bath.

A good deal of that bath is now filling towels on the basement floor, as it backed up from the main drain line yet again.

That's three times since we got the house now. We've been putting Root-Kill down the drains as instructed, but it doesn't seem to do much. Or does it help a lot more than I think, and the results of not using it would be catastrophic?

Does that sentence work? Don't care.

The first time it happened, the village came out and routed it out for free.

The second time, they charged us $200.

This time I went to Home Depot and rented a 100' router for $50. This thing is damned heavy! I got it down the basement stairs and realized we'd never be able to get it to the main drain cover without dismantling our bed.

That was not going to happen.

So I opened up the drain in the downstairs hallway by the bathroom and started cramming the snake down the drain. After about 15' it got stuck. I pulled a bit more length from the router and started the router up. A few seconds later, I hear a gurgling and rushing of water. Not satisfied with that degree of success, I proceeded to rout out at least 75'~80' into the pipe. I then switched out to the cutting bit and did it again.

Let me tell you, this is a two-person job. Unfortunately, it was just me doing it. I am now exhausted and my arms hurt like hell.

But the water is draining properly again!

Why the hell am I awake?

2008-11-24T13:42:19Z

Friday after work was spent setting up the 501st booth at the Chicago International Toy and Game Fair. Saturday and Sunday were spent trooping the event, with Sunday evening to take the booth apart.

I get home and help deal with the kids and unload most of the stuff from the van. Then it's laundry. I end up awake until almost 1:00 this morning because I have to get that last load into the dryer for something Tara needs to wear this morning.

Now I am at my desk wishing for nothing in the world more than to be back under warm blankets fast asleep.

If I had any PTO days left, this would have been one of them! Thank the gods it's a 3-day week.

Yeah ChITAG was good, might post about it later.

Ryan's costume

2008-10-31T12:32:02Z

My son Ryan loves the Force Unleashed game, so he had to be the main character. Of course he didn't like the normal look of the Starkiller, but he loved the Sith Robes:

So here he is in his own version:

Made of two squares of fun foam, a couple yards of metallic red fabric, some silver ribbon, old shin guards, kid Vader gloves, an old Anakin belt, and capes and robes left over from previous Halloweens.

Going to catch some Zs and then prep for the party. I was up way too late sewing last night.

Polling in the state of Azeroth

2008-10-30T13:05:25Z

Ok, I'll join in....

2008-10-30T12:52:20Z

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Evil is an exact science, being carefully, correctly, wrong

2008-10-27T16:36:57Z

Saturday featured a surprise party for my brother-in-law Wally's wife (sister-in-law-in-law?) Denise. Being so close to Halloween, it was, of course, a costume party. Tara, after much searching for costumes, went as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. I wanted to do something complementary, but not predictable, so I decided on Bender (the robot from Futurama).... Sadly, the cost was prohibitive. This left me wandering around with no idea what to do for my costume. I lack the appropriate old clothes to do a good scarecrow and all the costume shops I went to were sold out of them.

Ok, so it was time to take stock of what I had. Given my past attendance at Ren Faires, I was sure I had enough stuff to work something out.

Wait, what about those metal plate-covered SCA fighting gloves I bought at a Twelfth Night all those years ago?

Metal gauntlets, long black robe, blank face hood, cape, sword, some "Freaky Fabric" stuff, and we had a Nazgul. Time for some fun!

We arrived slightly early for the party so I decided to wait outside for the other guests to arrive. Standing motionless. Next to the other decorations.

I do love scaring people! Particularly Kenny's fiancee, whom nobody likes (except Kenny). She damn near wet herself when I lunged at her and hissed my demand for the halfling!

Good times.

Office reorganization

2008-10-05T04:28:07Z

I am typing this entry from my new computer desk in my rearranged office.

I am very pleased with it so far. Under my feet now is a 6x9 carpet from HOBO's clearance store. Nice and cheap, so if we flood again, I'll not be too upset about losing it. Several plastic shelves now contain the stuff that used to be in the china cabinet, which is going away. Big, ugly, and inefficient....not welcome here anymore.

The Great(?) Debate

2008-10-03T13:07:06Z

Ok, so the expectations for Sarah Palin were set so low that not drooling on herself or running shrieking from the podium would be counted as wins for her. I can deal with that.

By that standard, I suppose it was a victory for her.

By any other standard? Meh.

She answered questions. I'm not entirely sure what questions she answered, because for the most part, they were not the questions she was asked. Most of her answers made sense, if you ignored the terrible grammatical structure and run-on sentences. However, she once flat-out refused to answer the question asked, and instead dove into energy policy, where she was back to her argument that drilling solves everything. She would dodge questions on almost any topic to get back to drilling, drilling, and more drilling.

I think the best review I heard was "She sounded like she was giving a third-grade book report."

Many reviewers have settled on the word "Folksy" to describe her demeanor. My own take on it is "Annoying." The over-the-top Alaskan accent and the repeated use of the word nuclear as "nu-cu-lar" I found to be contrived and just a bit too forced to be believable. She pronounced "nuclear" correctly on one occasion, in the middle of a sentence, so I am forced to think she just may be speaking this way as a deliberate attempt to appeal to the same crowd that found Shrub so appealing. If this is how she really acts and thinks....I am terrified.

She made frequent use of the word "Maverick." If we'd used that as a trigger for a drinking game, we would have died from alcohol poisoning fairly early into the debate. Biden, however, called her on it near the end and pointed out exactly how McCain was no maverick regarding any meaningful policy.

Palin also tried to make herself seem like a regular person, saying she understood, in her own words, "Joe Six Pack and Hockey Moms" around the country. Biden, on the other hand presented himself quite well as a regular guy who also knew what he was talking about.

Biden started off kind of slow, showing a familiarity with facts and figures that Palin obviously lacked. Though he seemed a bit uninteresting at first, I saw it as him playing it safe until he had the measure of his opponent. When he saw how she was conducting herself, he chose exactly the right amount of energy and conflict to slap her statements around without coming off as a bully.

Biden was not at all afraid to call her on some of her ridiculous numbers and had rebuttals to all of the lies and distortions she was presenting. When Palin claimed that "Obama voted to raise taxes 94 times," he called it a bogus standard and pointed out that by the same measure, McCain had voted to raise taxes more than 400 times. When she lashed out at Obama for some votes, Biden pointed out that McCain had voted exactly the same way on those same votes.

In my final analysis, I find Palin won for exceeding expectations, but Biden won the debate for knowing what he was talking about.

borgknight @ 2008-09-25T10:28:00

2008-09-25T15:29:49Z

A meme. I know I don't post these too often, but let's see what we get from this one:

If you're on my friends list, I want to know 36 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine... you're on my list, so I want to know you better!

Comment here and repost a blank one on your own journal.

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
02) What was your dream growing up?
03) What talent do you wish you had?
04) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
05) Favorite vegetable?
06) What was the last book you read?
07) What zodiac sign are you?
08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
09) Worst Habit?
10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
11) What is your favorite sport?
12) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude?
13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
16) Do you have any pets?
17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
18) What was your first impression of me?
19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22) What color eyes do you have?
23) Ever been arrested?
24) Bottle or can soda?
25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
27) What's your favorite place to hang out at?
28) Do you believe in ghosts?
29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
30) Do you swear a lot?
31) Biggest pet peeve?
32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
34) Favourite and least favourite food?
35) Do you believe in God?
36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?

dry

2008-09-18T02:59:06Z

All dry now.

I forgot how ugly those basement stairs are without the rug. We're going to have to get something to put on them because that tile pattern was ugly when it was first popular back in the early 60s.

And by ugly, I mean HIDEOUS!

I'm thinking about a complete change of my office layout. My desk is a large L-shaped beastie and I think I can make better use of it in a different location. Maybe turn it to face the door instead of the wall and put some shelving up along the wall where the desk resides now.