Happy Birthday to Jeremy Bragg!
The big news for us today is that the lawyers from the homebuilder were not willing to meet any of the changes that we had asked for for the house in Lebanon so we are backing out of the project. The biggest deal is that they won’t meet our need for a contingency upon selling the house in Geneseo. That is understandable as it is a big risk for them but it is so unlikely that we will be able to sell the house in the awful market that is going on up there that we just can’t take the chance. They were also unwilling to commit to finishing the house this year. They have all kinds of penalties if we can’t close by November 15th, far less than 90 days away but they were allowed to extend into the middle of next year giving themselves a cushion of way over 200%!! That is a ridiculous amount of buffer. It is one thing for a project to take half again as long as someone says but three times as long is way too much. And we aren’t at the beginning either. The houses are nearly completed. Their contract would let them just sit for eight months if they felt like it. We aren’t going to get caught playing that game.
So the current plan is to find a nice apartment somewhere quickly. Our current lease runs out in the middle of October so we don’t have very much time to find some place to live. But we aren’t worried. There are a lot of apartments around. We are back looking at Jersey City. Dominica has found an apartment there that she is interested in. It is roughly affordable, takes dogs and appears to have views of Manhattan which we would really like. We are both really looking forward to getting out of North Brunswick. (I killed yet another centipede tonight.)
Work was more relaxing today than it has been in a while. I managed to read two whole issues of Baseline Magazine and this month’s Java Developer’s Journal which got me caught up in my magazine reading which is nice for a change. I was able to leave work on the early side so that Dominica and I would have plenty of time to go out for her birthday dinner which we skipped last night.
It was just after six when I got home. Jeremy Bragg called just as I was pulling in the parking lot to talk to Min since their birthdays are just a day a part. While they were talking I walked out to the ice cream truck as it came by and got ice cream for Dominica and myself. The ice cream truck girl thinks that I am hilarious. Everyone else getting ice cream is kids or, on rare occassion, adults with kids. But I always go out there and get myself ice cream. I don’t care. I didn’t have an ice cream truck as a kid so I am getting the use of it now.
For dinner we went out to Bertucci’s. Dominica is back on the South Beach Diet and they have a meal there that she really likes. So we got dinner and then returned home.
It was quite early when we got home but we were both really tired so we decided to take a nap. Oreo was thrilled that we were going to bed at seven in the evening so he climbed right into bed and snuggled in for the night. I napped a little but spent most of the two hours in bed just reading in Joel Spolsky’s “The Best Software Writing I”. Dominica fell fast asleep and ended up being out for the night.
I spent the evening doing some work for the office. Nothing too heavy. I was pretty tired for some reason. I worked until ten thirty and was planning to go to bed around then but Andy called and we worked and/or chatted until close to midnight. So at that point I was very happy that I had taken a nap earlier. Then it was time for bed.