Yay for Black Friday sales, but truth be told I do feel a bit guilty about it given the financial issues we’re dealing with. I have faith the lawyer will get us out of them though. 🙂
What did Santa bring? A copper trim finish Protector Elite saber:
Polishing cloth and thumb drive with extra sound fonts included
This has all the bells and whistles of my Custom Battle Wrap Havoc lightsaber, and a few extras as well. That little window at the front is a LED screen that will display which “sound font” (lightsaber sound and color settings) you’re using, the battery life, a digital “kyber crystal” and a few other goodies, and even play about 6 different games such as Pong (the world’s first video game BTW). Like the Havoc, there’s also a juke box that plays The Imperial March or the Cantina Theme.
Battery Power Remaining
Equalizer display of saber sfx
That’s the Havoc behind the Protector. If it’s not obvious, the Havoc is made of aircraft grade aluminum while the Protector is chrome steel, AND an inch or so longer. That gives the Protector a fair amount more weight than the Havoc. Both are comparatively light, but you feel it in the wrist more if you use the Protector for an extended period of time. Continued practice will get you in shape though, lol.
Slightly surprisingly, the grip on the hilt is quite comfortable. The squared off sides give it an effectively oval shaped grip which fits in the hand quite nicely. I really shouldn’t be surprised though. When we got to tour Vader’s Vault, the owner said he won’t make a saber unless it’s built well, comfortable, and FUN to use. 🙂
As with the Havoc, this saber came with the option to have multiple blade colors. You CAN buy a saber with a single blade color at Vader’s Vault, and that’s a cheaper option, but why do it when you can customize to your heart’s content?
No, you’re not seeing things in those last two pics. The blade CAN display and cycle through multiple colors at the same time. The Havoc can do it also, but didn’t come pre-loaded with some of the ‘sound fonts’ that this one did.
The fifth picture is supposed to be with a Yellow blade, but the blades are so bright that Yellow got white washed out by the camera.
Unlike the Protector v1 in the video above, this v2 model will let the “seismic charge” and power button light up in whatever color you have the blade set to display, even if it’s a multi-color like in the last two pictures.
As a trade-off, I did give my Mace Windu Hasbro Black Series saber to my cousin-in-law’s son as a Christmas present. I have to admit, I’ll miss it strictly for the potential collector’s value, but it was worth it to see his face light up. We played the whole thing off like in A Christmas Story also. Enough so that for a minute I’m sure he thought he was getting a Red Ryder BB gun, lol.
The better construction and grip on the Vader’s Vault sabers just make it hard to appreciate the Hasbro ones on the same level though. Some day, down the road, I MAY have Vader’s Vault whip me up a custom Mace Windu saber to replace the Hasbro one, but for now I still have Dooku’s saber.
And for those asking WHY Santa would be handing out weapons… Because some people (and Sith) make the naughty list:
It’s been a hectic last week plus here. Initially, it was last minute holiday preparations and cooking two different holiday dinners (the things we do for family). The previously mentioned spider bite slowed me down just a little as well. More on the meals in a separate food post. 🙂
During the prep for the bigger, second dinner, my Microplane box grater decided to take a chunk out of my thumb instead of leaving it at the smoked gouda cheese
If you’ve never used this goodie, or the more well known Microplane graters:
I highly recommend them. They work amazingly well on anything from lemon skin (for zest) to coconut to thumbs. 👍🤨 Dark humor aside, they’re FAR superior to the typical grater.
After the dinners, presents and festivities, it’s been a combination of clean up and (mostly) what I can only assume is a reaction to the antibiotics for the spider bite; I’ve been dead on my feet for days. Worst case of fatigue I can ever remember. Yesterday, I was only awake for 7 hours or so and I was dead on my feet the entire time.
I’d almost attribute it to the Onmicron variant (which is supposed to cause severe fatigue), but I’ve felt fine otherwise. Even the spider bite is healing nicely. So with no other suspects or symptoms, the now finished off antibiotics seem the most logical suspect.
Despite it all, I’ve managed to keep the new positive outlook. Can’t say I’ve been perfect. Last minute grocery shopping certainly worked my last good nerve, lol. I’m sure hoping that I’m done with the fatigue now as well. I’m managing to keep an overall positive attitude about everything though. 🙂
Presents and meals you ask? Next Time. 😉 Here’s a hint though:
Time for another brief personal update. The post’s tile is partially a pun. I’ve been sidetracked and away from the blog not only due to holiday stuff, but because I also literally got bit by.. something.
My suspicion after doing some internet research is that it’s a spider bite, likely a black widow or brown recluse. I never felt the bite nor saw any spider though. The first day I noticed it, I wasn’t sure what it was and it didn’t look TOO bad all things considered. I decided to wait a day and see how it progressed.
This is a pic from the internet. For new followers, I’m paranoid about personal photos online, hence this pic as a stand-in. My apparent bite is on my calf and looked similar but the center is darker and hard like a scab.
Getting back to the story, by the end of the day, my calf was showing some swelling, and I wasn’t feeling so good. Long story short, we spent almost 3 hours waiting in the local ER, got literally one minute of face time with an actual doctor (who barely looked at the alleged bite), and sent with some antiseptic wash and a prescription for major antibiotics.
Aside from the lousy ER experience though (and they were not that busy BTW), the whole event has been pretty mild for what was likely a bite by a dangerous spider. I felt lousy for a few days, and slept ALOT, but the wound is slowly healing as opposed to the horrific click bait pics out there of widow or recluse bites just rotting away huge areas of flesh.
At this point, the worst of it all is that the Doxycycline antibiotics make me sick to my stomach, even if taken with food. That’s minor in the grand scheme of things however. 🙂
The big trick is going to be catching up on all the Christmas stuff I still have to do. We’re hosting not one, but TWO dinners this year. Christmas day will be five people, and then Sunday will have 11 of us after the out of state in-laws finally make it to town.
I could have just left everything at Sunday only but Christmas is supposed to be celebrated on Christmas, dangit. 😀 😀
That’s what today’s personal update is about; struggling between faith and fear. That’s kind of where I’ve been the last week or so. Enough so that I’ve really struggled to put words to “paper” about it and thus been absent here as I struggle to find my footing.
I should start where I last left off I suppose. 🙂 Even before my last post, I’d been picking up little messages here and there urging me to shake off the slump I was in. A Buddha quote in a blog post, the underlying theme in Cobra Kai (which we’ve been watching), etc… I could make a whole series of posts about how neither Johnny nor Daniel are balanced emotionally until the end of season 3, but that’s another story…
More to the point, all these messages got me to see two important truths:
No matter how bad my life has gotten, in the end every situation resolved itself in an essentially positive manner
There’s truth in the adage that there’s no point in worrying about problems because either they can be corrected and thus solved, or they’re completely out of your control anyway.
Perhaps stress and suffering (partially) come from not knowing the distinction between the two and thus categorize one’s problem.
At any rate, I’ve found a great deal of peace in the combination of those two realizations. I’ve accepted that whatever comes, we will get through it and eventually get back on our feet. It’s always happened, no matter how dark the moments in my life. Funny how much things have changed in the last week also. I’m thinking more clearly and FINALLY noticed that a bog contributor to my back pain issues has been my stubborn refusal to wear shoes. Circumstances required shoes for 3 or 4 days though and I noticed how much better my feet and back felt vs wearing sandals.
On a level that could be written off as coincidence, but I’m choosing to attach some spiritual meaning to, we also had a minor breakthrough on our legal case; our lawyer found out that the home inspection company we were referred by our realtor wasn’t licensed to do inspections in Georgia. If true, that’s going to leave them open to a legal broadside.
I have a habit of searching for deeper meaning in things, and part of me wonders if all the bad experiences weren’t used by (not orchestrated by) God to try to teach me I’ve got the strength to overcome all of it if I had faith in myself, AND to teach me to have faith in Him since I always landed on my feet.
Am I in a perfect place now? Far from it. Fear of everything that could and might go wrong is still warring hard against my new sense of calm. I’ve had so many things go wrong in the past after multiple times taking a step in this direction that I’ve been outright afraid to even make this post. Maybe it’s time to stop looking for the other shoe dropping though and try to get on with life.
This was actually about a week ago. Things have just been a mess here, and I didn’t get around to this sooner.
It’s hard to believe I’ve actually been here this long, and how little I feel I’ve accomplished beyond dealing with a never ending, ever escalating series of disasters that keep me from doing any real writing.
I’m battling to get back to a normal routine the past few days. Part of that is I did make a concerted effort to create a nice dinner for us last night. That offering was Fettuccine Alfredo (with my homemade Alfredo sauce) topped with steak. Note the sauce recipe is towards the bottom on the linked to post.
As always start with fresh pasta:
Wow, focus was off there. 😦 Oh and that’s a loaf of Rosemary Parm Bread next to the pasta, courtesy of Costco. Not as good as homemade, but decent.
While the water was heating up, I stared the strips of steak sauteing in butter and garlic:
two in a row, so much for the high end camera on the new samsung
I’m throwing in the above picture primarily to show off that colander. This was right before I dumped the water. It was a Christmas present from my mom a couple years back. Super handy as it holds tight to the pot, is heat resistant silicone, and is much easier to clean up than a full colander.
Beyond that, since the camera was acting up, I’ll cut this a little short. Aside from the bread and pasta dishes, I also cooked up some butternut squash and added a touch of cinnamon to it. Viola; one almost gourmet meal:
Otherwise known as a Czerka Corp Crate-O-Matic in Star Wars, The Old Republic.
I scored one yesterday!
What is it, you ask?!? A curiosity primarily, BUT it’s also the absolute most rare item in the game. It allows you to disguise yourself as a shipping crate, which supposedly will let you not be detected by enemy non-player characters. I have yet to verify that claim. At any rate, it’s potentially handy for stealth based characters at the very least. 🙂
So yes, FINALLY a bit of good luck. If the thing was sellable, I could write my own check for an obscene amount of in-game currency via the game’s trade network. One does not simply SELL a crate-o-matic however. It’s a rare goodie.
The Actual Update:
Beyond that, there’s not much to report. We’re in a holding pattern until we talk to a termite inspector and a lawyer so we can better plot a path forward. Right now, there are so many variables flying our way from out of left field, it’s hard to formulate any sort of a plan.
We did find out today that the roof on the new place is indeed older than disclosed and in worse shape than the initial home inspection said.
We’ll see how much, if any, of that is from termites.
I mentioned in my “Month from Hell” post that on top of everything else, we had a really sick cat on our hands.
If you look closely, you can see she was bloated around her mid section, but insanely thin around her hips and “waist”
After Banfield passed us off immediately to a pet emergency center (after telling us for ages she was just overweight), and we got jerked around by that pet hospital for a week and $1500, we took her to another pet ER. They did surgery and cleaned out what turned out to be some sort of a massive infection in her mid section. The Internal Medicine vet and the Surgeon had never seen anything quite like it.
After a day recovering in the pet hospital, she came home with us. She seemed to be slowly getting better despite not eating or drinking much at first. We took her with us to the new house today so we could get some work done while still keeping an eye on her.
New space, so (particularly being an indoor only cat) she was a bit nervous, but seemed to be adjusting, and enjoying the attention. We packed her up in her carrier to take her back to the current (rental) house, and when we opened the carrier, she was dead. 😥😭😟
We had her ten years… adopted her probably a little earlier than she should have been put up for adoption, given how small she was. She was almost all of what got me through many of the bad days I’ve had over the years. $7000 total spent (which REALLY hurt our house repair budget) and all we got with her was two days.
I miss my baby kitty. I’ve cried off and on all night. I want to scream but nothing will come out. The worst part is I can’t stop wondering if she’d still be alive if we mistrusted Banfield sooner or at least hadn’t taken her on the trip today. 😫 I don’t know if what happened was that bounce back phenomenon where a dying person or pet seems to recover temporarily, long enough to sort of say good bye, or we did something that killed her.
I’ve been miserable to the point of not being able to post (and I’ve had numerous topics lined up ready to go) or reply much for almost two months. Now this…
Life has been nothing but one giant shit sandwich since we began the move out here.
R.I.P. Chloe. There are NO words for how much you’ll be missed…
As I’ve hinted at a few times, things have been going… rough with the new house. I’m finally ready to begin to tell the story here.
So, where to start? We looked at several other houses even after putting in the offer on the cinder block place. Suffice it to say that nothing under $350k here is problem free. We ended up following through on the block house after all. In case you’re wondering, the law here gives you a limited window to back out of a Real Estate purchase on top of the normal contingency windows (inspection, loan approval, etc…) before closing.
I’m still not sure if that was a mistake. It’s been a running battle with the seller and his agent ever since. First it was getting concessions on repairs needed, which needless to say is normal. Then we couldn’t get them out after closing paperwork was signed. It took a $500 a day occupancy fee to get them to clear out. And clear out they did at that point, like greased lightning. After that was where the real fun began.
Of the three repairs we asked for 1 was technically done, 1 was done half-assed and will need to be redone, and the third was not done at all, BUT it did have a work order falsified by a local contractor to say it was done.
Technically done was the side door to the house. The framing at its base was unfinished, and it was allowing water in under the door and along the slab. Did I mention it rains so much here that it makes the tropics look like New Mexico? He put in a sill plate to seal off the door entrance, but didn’t concrete over the area he’d carved out of the slab to install the door. End result; there’s a ditch under the carpet in front of the door.
Half-Assed done was the roof. It’s 8 years old and not in bad shape, but the major swings in seasonal temperatures here have created “nail pops“, where the nails back out of the roof a bit. That in turn can push up shingles partially and cause them to curl. All we asked for was that they drive back down the nails and throw some sealant under the loose singles. Easy job, even if a little time consuming. Well, they did maybe 2/3 of it and used low grade silicone sealant to (sort of) tack down the shingles. End result; it needs to be done all over again to keep the roof intact.
NOT Done was the house electrical system. It was built in 1959, right at the start of “modern” (ie the last version of) two wire systems that are now retired in favor of 3 wire, fully grounded systems. So, no knob and tube or aluminum wiring at least, BUT nothing is grounded, which is horrible for modern electronics of any sort. The seller had already upgraded the circuit breaker box to current standards and had installed 3 prong outlets in the entire house. No ground though; he just hooked the two wire wiring to the three wire outlets and tried to pass them off as properly updated per NEC code. Our home inspector caught that they weren’t, so we said that we wanted those outlets properly grounded as a condition of sale. He agreed, then apparently had a contractor friend forge a work order saying that the work had been done. “Trust but Verify” as Reagan said. After we FINALLY got them out of the house, I went through with an outlet tester and found the only areas properly grounded were the kitchen and bathroom where he’d ran new wiring to for previous remodeling work.
Same general idea with the other two jobs, once checked up on. Partially my fault for allowing closing to go through before they were out of there. I’m going to plead detrimental reliance however, since our own realtor assured us this guy was a well established contractor with a sterling reputation, and a virtual pillar of the community (huge town of 3600 there, lol).
Side Note: Trying to translate from Legalese to English, detrimental reliance in this case means the victim followed the bad advice of an expert professional on a given matter. Such as an electrician telling you it’s OK to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, with wet hands no less. A few other circumstances apply but it’s essentially malpractice for professionals other than doctors and lawyers.
Then when we got a chance to thoroughly look the place over, the exterior windows (all but two of them were unsealed on the outside. One of them even had ivy growing into the gap. Personally, I can’t believe I missed all of that either. I saw new windows, and new looking bricks with clean, well formed mortar though. I didn’t think I had to worry about if he’d finished the job and fully sealed the exterior of the windows:
He also left two holes in the exterior walls where the old, in-kitchen hook up for the washer and dryer used to be:
Fortunately, I have many talents:
It’s actually amazing what one can do with a YouTube video or two and simply RTFM 😉
Yes, that’s patched with actual concrete for a proper, similar materials patch. Same with the smaller nearby hole that I patched. There are other, smaller holes that I still need to patch though. These two holes were hidden behind furniture and boxes to deliberately conceal them.
OH, I forgot to mention that the sellers failed to inform us of a roach infestation as well. When they finally got out, and we went to look at the place, the house reeked of cheap carpet shampoo and roach spray. There were dead roaches all over the carpet also. Unfortunately, this area only requires disclosure of wood destroying pests. Ergo there’s not much we can do on that specific one. Despite apparently cleaning the carpets, they also managed to leave the house filthy. Even the aforementioned carpets don’t feel anywhere near clean.
What really set me off regarding the entire situation is that when the violations of the closing contract came to light, EVERYONE involved with the transaction (including our own agent) just threw up their hands and said “oh well”. They got their money, so they don’t care. Take advantage of my good nature and risk my possible wrath. Rub it in my face that you did so, and guaranteed it’s going to get ugly. So, I’ve spent the last two weeks going through real estate laws and building codes online at night after working on the house all day. What have I found, you ask?
Well, first the renovated bathroom, all the exterior windows, the new side door, the new electrical panel (circuit breaker box), and hell maybe even the new-ish A/C system were all done without the required building permits. The holes in the wall, the unfinished windows, the improperly wired / switched out electrical outlets (along with several other things) are all building code violations. Digging into some of the outlets to check the wiring turned up things like this:
That’s the hired electrician sitting there, staring in disbelief
Yes, that’s gravel pouring out of the outlet. I wasn’t sure what to make of that at first, but a little research turned up that cinder block walls sometimes use “aggregate” (pebble) material as insulation in the hollow center portion of the block. This jabroni doesn’t even know how to keep the crap out of the ‘gang box’ for the electrical outlets though. I found jury-rigged, mismatched and spliced together wire in other outlet boxes and wood chips from the wood paneling in others. The electrician that looked over the house recommended a whole house rewire. The previous owner also left uncapped gas lines where he had his grill tied into the house gas system, where there was a gas powered space heater that he removed and where the dryer was.
Sooooo… long story short, we went from something that could have been settled easily with a “My bad, we ran out of time. Take care of it and send me the bill”, to escalating this up to the point where I’m out for blood. We’re going to sue the previous owner for breach of contract, fraud and misrepresentation. I’m also going to do everything I can to get his contracting license, and that of his electrician friend, pulled for the building code violations and fraudulent work order as well. Oh yes, and go after his realtor for the same reasons as well as acting in bad faith. Somebody’s losing their real estate license or is at least going to end up with one hell of a fine to the state department of real estate and Realtor’s Association.
SICK Cat Too…
And if all that wasn’t enough… One of our two cats got really sick and turns out to have a massive internal cyst in her abdomen area which will require surgery. The HIGHLY reputable vet hospital (extreme sarcasm noted, I hope)only took $1500 dollars to make the diagnosis of a cyst. We haven’t even gotten to treatment yet.
So yeah… It’s been a hell of a month. And there’s no resolution in sight for ANY of it yet…
A friend recently posted in her blog about “letting it go”. Normally good advice but…
Silk Chatters 