Rancid-Tea

House Deconstruction, Pt 1

We went to closing last Thursday. For some reason the money didn’t all change hands until around 11 am on Friday, so we couldn’t enter the house or make changes until then (the woman at the title company is currently on my list of least favorite people, she would do well to never wander into my path). This meant that while we could do stuff to the house Friday evening, the plumbers had to reschedule their day and couldn’t come out to mark areas we needed to demolish, and Ethan had half a day of frantic calling to the stupid title company.

We bought a new bath tub and sink, as well as new fixtures for those on Friday night and brought them to the house. On Saturday morning Ethan removed a pile of tires some lovely person had left in our driveway. After that we went to the hardware store and picked up a few more things (dust masks, safety goggles, and new exterior doorknobs). We then descended upon the house with a fury of pickax, crowbar, hammer and Sawzall and succeeded in ripping apart the walls and ceiling for the plumbers to deal with the pipes.

Unfortunately Ethan discovered my fear was a reality and that the basement floor is unbelievably sturdy and thick and a pickax simply wouldn’t do the job, unless we had months, not days to break it up. I discovered that the area of the front door and door frame where the hardware goes was about as sturdy as swiss cheese… which is bad when you’re in not the best neighborhood and you want to keep people from just shoving the door open.

On Sunday morning we went to the hardware store again and bought a new steel front door (on a side note, they apparently prime steel doors with a horrible shade of yellow; I can’t wait for my chance to paint that thing). My dad was able to come to the house and install it with some help from me. That didn’t go very smoothly because the original door was not exactly a standard size and so we had to manage to get an 80″ door to fit and work in the hole of a 78″ door. Long story short the door is in and the new knobs (which are really cool looking if you ask me) are in too.

Yesterday Ethan got to try his hand at a jackhammer against the basement floor and found that a) it took about a minute to do the same amount of damage as it took an hour to do with a pickax and b) the jackhammer was sufficiently loud that he didn’t want to use it after 7 pm (I think that’s a pretty early cutoff, but maybe that’s just me). He’s going to hopefully complete the floor destruction this morning and maybe the plumbers will be adding new pipes today instead of just tearing them out.

Quick Update

I started packing this weekend. We still haven’t closed on the house (I’m starting to think we never will) and now technically the seller is in breach of the purchase agreement. I wonder what they’ll do about that. Everything is hinging on the closing date. If we can close on Wednesday of this week, we might be able to get in and do some demolition, replace the locks on the doors, get electricity and gas hooked up and maybe even start moving some of our stuff. I’m a little hesitant about moving stuff in before we’re actually living there, but there is a security system, so maybe that will be enough of a deterrent to any local thieves.

My Dad lent us a pickax, sledge hammer, saws-all, crowbar and dolly this weekend, so we should be good to go for demolition and preliminary moving. They also have a fridge we should be able to use, so we won’t have to go for very long without that necessity. We still have to pick out bathroom fixtures and talk with the Stucco guy, the remodellers and the roof guy to get all the squared away (and to have the roof at least patched where it’s leaking before too much more snow falls). Egad. I’ll be glad when this is all over.

Thanksgiving

I’m in a small minority of Americans that don’t really enjoy holiday food, including Thanksgiving. There are a few exceptions: mashed potatoes and gravy (so long as it’s vegetarian), wild rice soup, salads and hors d’oeuvres are all good, but many of the other traditional foods make me want to fake an eating disorder. Cranberry sauce (unless made from scratch), green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and jello molds are the first

Is it worth it to buy a house?

Today on GRS there was a short article about a Rent vs. Buy Calculator from The New York Times.

For someone like me, who is in the process of buying a house, this was particularly interesting. How long, approximately, will it take for me and Ethan buying a house to be worth it? According to the calculator, even the most negative/conservative estimate is less than two years. Good news for us!

New Job

For those of you who don’t know, my job since February was coming to a close in the next few weeks, due to a downturn in the real estate market. I really, really enjoyed working there, and was very sad to learn that I wouldn’t be able to stay for very long. On top of that, I had to have a job in order to buy a house which we have been in the process of for a couple of months now. So… my former employer was extremely accommodating and said that A) if I had to stay with the same job until closing, he would make it happen. B) If I could take another job in the mean time, he would be very flexible with my hours so that I could job search/interview/leave on a moment’s notice.

I recently interviewed at a new place in Minneapolis (I think this was two weeks ago, but my memory is getting pretty fuzzy) and was asked to complete a small ‘code challenge.’ Upon completion, I was asked to return for a second interview, which happened on Thursday, and then on Friday, they offered me the job!

It was really bitter sweet, because I wanted to stay where I was for as long as possible, and it was really sad to tell everyone I was leaving. I’m certainly going to miss everyone at the office, and I was told that I would be missed as well. I feel really bad for Tim, who was finally getting to take some vacation time and free up some of his time to be with his new family, but now I’m sure he’ll be as busy as ever soon. I also feel bad for the receptionists, since I think they felt just a little bit more comfortable asking me about things, probably because I’m a woman. I will see them all again, though, because I was invited to the office Christmas party that is in about a month, so I can at least see how everyone is doing, and they can all get an update, too.

Today was my first day at my new job, and I think it will go really well. At first I was very nervous because they threw some new code at me that I had never seen before, and I was worried that they would be upset if I didn’t catch on right away and tell me that I just wasn’t what they were looking for. There was no real basis for this concern, but it is a pretty fast-paced environment, and the clients are billed based on actual hours spent on their project… Also it was my first day and I was really nervous. Anyway, by the end of the day I was already starting to actually contribute some code, so I’m hoping tomorrow I can get in a bunch of work (they want at least 80% of your logged hours to be billable, once you’re working at full capacity), and very soon I’ll just be another programmer.

The place I’m working now is growing really fast, I met at least half a dozen people who said they had started really recently, out of 40-50 total employees. I’m sure I won’t be ‘the new guy’ for very long, though I may be ‘the new girl‘ for quite awhile. The interesting thing about programmers is they’re mostly men, and we few women who make it into the profession find ourselves to be very rare. I think there were five or six other women, one is the office manager and two are in sales… Craziness.

Fun Stuff

Yesterday at work, I was struggling with some changes to a page, not because it was technically difficult, but because there was no good way to get all of the information on the page without the layout being overly complicated and confusing. Furthermore, even though dozens (or hundreds) of records would be returned on the page, additional information would only be needed for a few, so pulling in all of it didn’t make any sense. After much thought and consideration, I decided to go crazy with javascript, and ended up with a very cool page.

Now when you choose to edit a record, that row is highlighted, and a pop-up div comes up with a form in it. The form is populated with the record data, via AJAX and you can save the new data via AJAX. Certain changes will cause the data displayed in the table to be updated. This way our receptionists can update as many rows as they need to without waiting to refresh the page for every little change. Sweet. This makes me wish I could find a place on this site to make gadgets like that. If I ever have time to complete the photos section, I just might!

A Busy Weekend

On Friday Metasteph was going to visit, helping us make and eat dinner. She did visit, but ended up only having enough time to drop off part of dinner and chat for a short while. We ended up making a sort of variant of the original recipe, but it turned out pretty well.

On Saturday, Ethan’s parents arrived, and we showed them the new house, then drove up to my parents’ house for dinner and a movie. We all spent the night there, which was not the best for me, since they have rock-hard mattresses and I couldn’t sleep. We did have fun though, and I think our parents got to know each other better.

Last night, I was so exhausted from sleeping poorly the night before, I ended up falling asleep right away, and now, here I am at 20 to 7 in the morning… Weird. I guess life is like that sometimes.

Tortilla Soup (vegetarian)

This is the recipe that Ethan and I came up with (by highly modifying another recipe) for tortilla soup. It is really tasty and simple.

Ingredients

• 15 1/2 oz Can Diced Tomatoes
• 1 Small Onion, coarsely chopped
• 2 Cloves Garlic, chopped
• 2 Tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
• 1 tsp Sugar
• 1 – 2 Dried Peppers
• 4 Cups Broth*
• 1/2 Cup TVP*
• 2/3 Cup Corn
• 2/3 Cup Black Beans
• Shredded Monterey Jack or Cheddar Cheese
• Sour Cream
• Fried Tortilla Strips or Tortilla Chips
• Sliced Avocado

Preparation

Cut or break open the dried peppers and remove the stem and as many seeds as you can shake out. Place peppers into a small pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer until softened, 5 – 10 minutes. Remove peppers from water. Chop coarsely.

In a blender, combine the tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, sugar and peppers. Blend until almost smooth. Put blended mixture into a large pot with broth, TVP, corn and beans. Cover and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve hot over tortilla chips, with cheese, sour cream and avocado slices.

Notes

* As vegetarians, Ethan and I use vegetable or mushroom broth, but traditionally this meal is made with chicken broth. Also, we use Textured Vegetable Protein in place of traditional shredded, cooked chicken. TVP can be purchased in almost any super market, and is easy to hydrate (I usually use the water from the peppers).

Once A Month Cooking

Recently I read an article about ‘Once A Month Cooking,’ a cool concept where you only really cook meals every 4 weeks, and are otherwise taking your frozen, pre-prepared food out and throwing together a meal with very little effort. This has the potential to save a lot of time and money (especially if you prepare your dishes around good deals at the supermarket).

The basic idea is that you make some staple items that can be used in a variety of dishes, such as a good tomato sauce or (if you’re into that sort of thing) roasted chicken. Then you base 2 – 3 meals off of each staple, so you could make up the ingredients needed for lasagne, spaghetti and ravioli to use your tomato sauce. Everything that freezes well is cooked up and put in the freezer, with a label and a date, and a list of the meals is put somewhere accessible. The intent is that you spend one or two days slaving in the kitchen, and then for the next 26, you just pull out some freezer bags from the fridge, and spend very little time preparing food each night.

While I’m not ready to make the leap from cooking every night to cooking onces a month, Ethan and I have taken the general principle and decided on a few recipes that bulk and freeze well. The first is (of course) spaghetti sauce. We made over a gallon (!) one evening and froze it in 1 quart freezer bags, getting 4 1/2 bags and enough for dinner that night and lunch the following morning. Each full bag is enough for about 8 servings of spaghetti. It did take quite awhile to make that much sauce, but it didn’t take 5 times as long as making one batch. The end result is that we haven’t had to make spaghetti sauce in almost two months, and when we don’t feel like spending time in the kitchen, we don’t have to resort to frozen pizza or eating out. To prepare the rest, just cook some noodles and thaw/heat the sauce.

The other dish we’ve done this with is tortilla soup. The beauty of tortilla soup is that you add a quart of stock to one recipe’s worth. Stock comes in 1 quart boxes or can be made with bullion in about 30 seconds. Leave the stock out, and you have an easy to freeze food that turns into soup in less than 30 minutes. The recipe we use takes about 1/3 can of beans and 1/3 can of corn. We tripled the recipe, using a full can of each, and prepared one third that night. The other two thirds went into two freezer bags. To prepare, just empty the frozen contents into a soup pot, add 1 qt stock and bring to a boil, simmer for 25 minutes.

I’ll try and post the recipes tonight.

Interesting…

On Get Rich Slowly they posted an article about saving money on prescription medication. I had some recent experience with this after my most recent doctor’s visit.

My prescription plan covers any generic drugs 100% (neato) so I can walk in and fill my prescription and walk out without ever pulling out my wallet. However, for brand name drugs, if it is on the formulary list I pay a $35 copay and for non-formulary brand name drugs I pay a $70 copay. That said, I have no desire to have a brand name prescription.

I was given the standard options for birth control from the doctor: the pill, the shot, and nuva-ring. Each has its benefits and drawbacks.

The pill is a hassle. You have to take it every day, you have to go to the pharmacy every four weeks, and you get your period once a month. There are about 100 options of medications though, and most are free to me.

The shot is only administered once a month, and then you don’t have periods, but you have to make a visit to the clinic to get the injection, which costs money, and can only be done during regular business hours.

Nuva-ring is only available as a name-brand prescription. Boo. Don’t want to pay $70 for it.

The best option seemed to be the shot, so I called my health insurance and asked about the cost of actual shot administration. They said that “depending on how it is billed, it may or may not be covered.” Great. So I called the clinic and I was able to find out that no, it is not covered, but the charge is only $35/injection, so for three months, it’s pretty cheap.

Unfortunately, it took me two weeks to get a hold of someone at the clinic who could actually give me that information. I did not want to schedule an appointment until I knew how much I would be billed, and they could only give me an appointment a week from when I called, so between calling my insurance and calling the clinic, my treatment was delayed for almost a month. I can see why it would be easier to just take whatever seems best and wait for the bill.