Tuesday we found out we got turned down for our house loan. Building, that is. Seems the bank wanted more "Comps" (Houses like the one we wanted to build in the area & what they’ve sold for, etc.) but, there just aren’t any comps in the area for a mostly cement house. Damn! Then they had a ’worry’ about our debt to income ratio. Let’s see: we owe on my truck and the overdraft for the visa card. OTT we pay rent and utilities. OUR bank said our debt to income ratio was great (but, unfortunately, they can’t help us with a loan because we want to build in MASON COUNTY). Other than that: Who knows? SWMBO and I have excellent credit ratings (around 700 each) so I just don’t know.

So, we decided to go with the "Box" House I found a couple of weeks ago and just try to buy the thing. It’s a HUGE house. 4300 sq feet with a two bedroom & living room & kitchen mother-in-law apartment built in on it’s own level. (I think I mentioned it in an earlier post.) Nice place. Hope the neighbors can get along with me.

So, I was out at the property Sunday, Monday & Tuesday anyway since it got over 70 degrees each day. Finally got some color to my cheeks! And my face got some too! Damn, it was nice out there! SWMBO even came out for several hours yesterday and I got some pretty good footage of her operating the digger and pushing dirt. Once she learned to just push the forward/backward levers she really got into it. Think I’ll post the video on YouTube!

Today we spent running around working on financing for the Box house. Just got back from spending several hours in (something like) Golf Banking filling out the paperwork. They love doing VA loans! And since SWMBO and I both have our VA eligibility everything ought to go okay. I say Ought To. We’ll see.

Then I took SWMBO to the Silverdale Mall and fed her one of her favorite sandwiches at the food court. Then we walked around and managed to spend ONLY $50 at the Barnes & Noble. Got out of there cheap; for us.

OTT, not much going on. Still ripping our dvd’s even though I have to do it on the tvserver and copy the files to my computer to convert to avi format. Sill trying to learn FL Studio and have added Finale & Sebilius to the line up. Want to start on 3ds Max too.

Bought a shopping cart "program" for my Brother-In-Law to test and see how well it would work on his site. With a little work it would work well. He still hasn’t done anything and I’m ready to call it quits and cancel the website and everything. Sometimes I want to call him up and tell him "Bud, get off your fat ass and make this work or quit your bitching about how life has fucked you." But if I did SWMBO would give me a hard time about it. Ah well…

Anywho, the two DNS file servers I bought are working great! I’ve filled both 1.5tb drives about 2/3’s. Still have about 900 GB available on the other server. Cool!

Oops, gotta reboot. Later!

In awhile. What can I say? Sometimes just the daily routine takes all your time. If you’re normal, that is.

Gads! What have I been doing? It’s all run together. Still getting to the property when I can to move dirt around. Still doing the regular daily stuff around the house.

Did get in those DNS-321’s I ordered. Set on up with a 500 GB drive. Damn thing reformats the drives. Won’t use NTFS format so I had to copy everything off the drive I wanted to keep (500 GB worth of movies) to my local drive (what a pain!) before putting it into the NAS. Took only a few minutes to reformat the drive.

Took a bit longer to set the NAS itself up. Wasn’t really hard or anything; just took awhile to match it to our internal network. Then you have to set up users and access and permissions. Pain in the butt! So I got it all set up and started copying the movies back to the drive. Fourteen (14) hours later it finished! Fourteen! For 489 Gig!

Then I installed the 2nd 500 GB drive and set it up as our music/data drive. Took only 2 hours to copy all the music to it. But it is working great! SWMBO can listen to her music and I can watch a movie at the same time. We can both watch different movies at the same time. I like it!

COSTCO has an ad for 1.5 TB drives for $110. Took Philip (our 70 yr old neighbor) to COSTCO with me to pick one up and let him get some shopping done. He spent so much time browsing the free food sample handouts that I spent about 30 minutes just waiting on him before getting into line. Then, when it was time for me to check out, the checkout guy told me the $30 off coupon wasn’t any good until Monday. Damn! But I will be making a trip back to COSTCO Monday!

So, when I get the new drive; one NAS will have 2 500 GB drives; one set up or music and the other for data. The other NAS will have 2 1.5 TB drives; one for television shows and one for movies. Too cool! I’ve already set up a computer to act as the "projector" to show whatever on the big tv. It’s working great too! That ATI Radeon 9000 video card works great for showing things on tv as long as I don’t install the ATI drivers. Go figure!

Then, last Friday after we got home from our date, I stuck a cd in my dvd drive, it spun up to about 1 MILLION rpm and the disc shattered! After that I couldn’t get the drive to respond at all. Damn! I even took everything apart and back together to no avail. So, yesterday, I went and bought a new dvd drive ($62!), came on home and installed it. No Go! Still! Damn! So I redid everything. Still didn’t work. Damn Damn!

So, while setting up the new tv server I put both drives in it. Both working great except sometimes the old drive doesn’t want to open when I press the button. Which I could live with because this means that something is going wrong with the drive controller in my computer. Damn Damn Damn! I can’t afford a new computer right now.

Anywho, it’s Easter Sunday and we’re waiting for my brother-in-law to show up with his new girlfriend. I’m cooking ham, taters & carrots and gotta get back on that. Hope y’all had a nice one!

Summers On The Way!

Yesterday and today actually. NICE! Meaning it got above 50 degrees and wasn’t raining. Nice and sunny.

Yesterday I went to the property to move some dirt and it was almost nice enough to take my t-shirt off. Today it was nice enough to get naked and lay out after moving dirt. You just can’t beat that! I love summer. Wish it would get here!

My MediaCenter went TU. Power went out yesterday morning around 0700 and took the motherboard with it. Thought it was the power supply and went and bought a new one down at Motherboards Etc in Gorst. Swapped it in but still no go. So I unplugged everything and started adding drives back in. Would run fine with only one drive (any drive) plugged in but with two or more wouldn’t run. Must have taken out the drive controller.

So, back to Motherboards Etc to see how much a new motherboard would cost. They don’t have any that will take an AMD processor so I’d have to start from scratch. Let’s see… $80 for a new MB. $130 for a new cpu (Intel). $30 for 1 gig of ram. Hmmm. $240 plus tax. Then I’d have to buy a new video card ($50 Plus depending) as the new board has PCIe instead of AGP. Nope. Too much.

So I came on home and talked to SWMBO about it. Got online looking for motherboard/cpu combo’s. Still expensive! And would still have to buy a new video card. So I found, and bought, two (2) D-Link DNS-321 NAS Enclosures (2 bay) for $260 with $30/ea rebate. Cool! Except for occasionally showing something on the big tv we almost always use the MediaServer as a server and watch stuff on our computers. Or SWMBO uses the music drive while she’s working. I’ll still have to figure a way to show whatever on the tv; but having our stuff available on a couple NAS’s will start us toward what I wanted to accomplish with our media anyway. With these we should be able to access our stuff via the web from anywhere. Cool! Now I just gotta figure where the heck I’m going to put them. And start saving for a couple more 1.5 TB drives!

Been waking up with headaches for the past couple of weeks. I think my head has finally gotten fed up with the smoke and dust and crap from the woodstove. Decided not to start a fire yesterday or last night and woke up headache free this morning. Now we’ll see what happens tomorrow morning. Was kind of cold in here when I did get up but nothing I couldn’t live with.

Really not much else going on. Still waiting on the bank and the contractor for the house stuff. And Mason County, of course. I’ve been getting up to the property when I felt like it. Other than that just not doing much. SWMBO did take me to breakfast Friday noon at the FHP.

Would Be A Nice Birthday Present!

And that’s it.

Haven’t posted lately cause I’ve been busy looking at houses. ??? You Ask? Me too!

Got a call from Cindy at Timberland Bank that we might possibly NOT get the loan to build our ICF House. Oh, they can loan us some money, but it would be about $25K short of what we need to completely finish out the project.

That really bummed us out. SWMBO e-mailed our Contractor, Jeff, and told him what is going on. He e-mailed her with an offer to carry the $25K. So they’ve all been calling and e-mailing and hashing all that out these past couple of days.

I’ve been looking for a (new) house. And I gotta tell ya it ain’t easy given SWMBO’s criteria for any house we move into or build. It’s gotta be on one floor as much as possible, and, it’s gotta have something that can be turned into a Mother-In-Law apartment. Other than that she doesn’t really care. My requirements is that it not be near a major road and I’d really like to NOT be able to see my neighbors. (Having a MIL Apartment is a Whole Other Argument and we really don’t want to go there.)

Found two, believe it or not. Houses. With built in MIL Apts. The first, down by the water (sort of) here in Olalla sits WAY back on a lot on the side of a hill and is really kind of nice but would have a butt-ton of external maintenance. The MILA is fairly small also. But the house is fairly huge and has a built in 2 car garage with room for a small wood shop. It has a house length master bedroom with a huge bath and walk through closets where the attic would be on a regular house. But all the carpets and flooring need to be replaced and there are many "dings" where the people that were living there made moving out.

It’s Frakkin’ Huge!

The other, out Tahuya way, is Frakkin’ HUGE! Two levels but each level has it’s own ground level entrance. Has a HUGE daylight basement that would have enough room for a woodshop and room for my father-in-law to set up a couple of his train boards with room left over for SWMBO’s quilting stuff. LARGE 2-bedroom MILA. Two car garage for the upper level with a room at the back for storage/whatever. And did I mention: This Thing Is Frakkin’ Huge! SWMBO and I wouldn’t have to see each other for a week in this thing!

SWMBO liked it when I took her out to see it today (the house that is). I can tell by that look in her eyes that IF it turns out that we can’t build our house, we’ll be putting in an offer for this one. Which would be okay as long as I get the Hell out of this house before another winter swings in on us.

So, we’ll see.