First and foremost, I fucking hate HostGator and am currently looking for a new place to house my servers. Upgrading to WordPress 3.7.1 almost completely had the servers shut down because of how often WP was being called on for updates. Now, this was easily controlled with a wp-config update that marked all auto-updates to false. I’m pissed because this is something that should have been built into WP directly with an “Enable/Disable” function but whatevs. To tell me that two sites are using 80% of the server-load is bull shit considering there’s 30 CPU’s available to it. So yea, they fucking suck.
In the “Home” front, we’ve been searching, searching, searching. We’ve seen more than I can remember, and while some were doable, others were just “Uhm… wtf did we just walk into?” We’ve narrowed down the area we want to live in, as well as the basic requirements that need to be in the house before we even consider looking at it.
Right now it’s the matter of waiting on the broker to get all of the numbers crunched. We have the pre-approval for $250,000. He’s finalizing the paperwork so that it’s a pre-qualification. This gives us the ability to look within the price range, and if we happen to find a house he’ll be fast-tracking the paperwork as much as he possibly can. Since everything we’re looking at is either a stick built or a class-c there’s absolutely no reason for there to be any kind of issue popping up that’s completely illegal. We got screwed on the last house because the lender (not the broker) blacklisted the community, this is 100% not legal and I’ve already reported to the proper authorities but really don’t care enough to pursue more than that. It’s cheaper, in the long run, for Sean and I to just buy a house on it’s own property and go from there.
We’ve found a house that we love, the listing price is $249,900. Built in 1977, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, floored attic, unfinished basement, decent sized yard, huge front porch and a nice cozy back deck, and since we’re in a beach town of course it comes with an outdoor shower. Is that a waste to me, yes, but it’s easy enough to remove if we so choose.
It’s a relatively lightly used house, even though it’s over 30 years old it was very well cared for and you can clearly tell just by looking at it. I’ve never been in a cleaner basement in my life. Sean and I already know how we’re going to frame it out and set it up. If we do it right, considering the massive size of the basement, I can easily turn the 3 bed 2 bath into a 5 bed 3 bath with an office. That’s the ultimate goal over time. The other goal would be to do some upgrades in the kitchen but that’s something that can come later on down the road. For right now, since it’s just the two of us the kitchen shouldn’t be an issue – but in the long run when families start visiting… and one gets started… the increase is going to need to happen.
Maybe it’s an Italian thing, I don’t know, I just know that teaching someone to cook, or having a mini-assistant is important to me and that’s just the way it’s gonna go.
So we’re taking a second tour on Monday with Sean’s father so he can do a once-over of the house as he has more of a ‘contractors’ eye with things, hopefully putting in an offer the same day and then crossing our fingers and playing the waiting game. Everything seems to be falling into place thus-far… hoping it runs the same way.
Last week a little Grey cat showed up out of absolutely no where, and me being a push-over when it comes to something with four-legs I instantly said “Go get some food for him”, he ate, came on on the porch and rubbed up against my leg and from there he stayed. Knowing full well that I didn’t want to deal with another flea problem, we kept him outside, I treated him with Frontline (which doesn’t work BTW) and then was utilizing the 
Sean was super sweet this year and bought me a 17″ MacBook Pro. As much as I absolutely love it, being as it’s everything I’ve ever wanted – I’m also upset. See, work has blown up and I’m back to working on five different sites at once – trying to pace myself through them instead of rushing through them this way I don’t royally mess something up. With that, I’ve yet to be able to really be able to enjoy this new lil super gadget. I’m also having one of hell of a time patching some programs, no serial numbers I come across are actually working the way they’re supposed to and it’s driving me nuts to go have to repeat the steps numerous times every time I boot a program. I even pulled the numbers off of the iMac (which work fine) but can’t have the same result here. I just wish there was a physical ‘patch’ file the way there is on Windows but I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to get around it in the future. For now I’ll just deal with it, and usually it only happens when I need to open the programs so just getting past them once and leaving the program open should pretty much do the trick for the time being.
While that can get a little annoying, it also worked to our benefit this year. All family members were well taken care of for Christmas, Sean and I did spend quite a bit of money on ourselves but it was on things that we both wanted (for a while) and desperately needed. We know the difference between Wants and Needs – unlike anyone under the age of 16 these days. We both were in desperate need of new desks. I had my Mac sitting on a Rubbermaid folding table and being as the 27-inch iMac (2011) weighs about 40 pounds, it was starting to sink down in the middle. To avoid it completely caving in, we went out and got me a new desk. It’s a super nice one, with plenty of storage and it’s even a little bigger than the previous folding table so I actually got the chance to organize things where I can still completely function without any issues at all. Obviously after Sean spent 7 hours putting this thing together (one warped piece was throwing EVERYTHING off) he gladly took a little nap. I decorated the drawers with dollar store shelf liner so that they can list a super long time without getting destroyed. There’s more than enough room for the work phone so my boss can stay on my butt too heh. I had it across the room next to the TV because we didn’t have a long enough Ethernet chord, but that was taken care of with the addition of a ZyXEL wireless switch that now sits behind my monitor. It supposedly boosts the Wifi in the house, but turns the Wifi into an actual plugged in connection as well, so I’ve got the phone plugged into it and if I needed to I could plug a printer in to it. It was actually strong enough of a feed to handle Sean’s XBOX 360 for a few weeks as well, so obviously it works how it’s supposed to.
Sean, after my desk was put together, began increasingly becoming annoyed with his desk. After drilling into him that he spends way too much time at his desk and needs a new one…. we headed back to Staples a little over a week later (this past weekend actually) to pick up a new desk for him. The one he’s been using for years was a typical students desk with the metal legs, the pull-out keyboard and the thin table top. One you’d see in college students dorm, basically. So it was creaking like all holy hell and we wound up replacing that one as well. He found a nice wide desk that he was in love with, but it unfortunately was not going to fit in the room so he went with one that was closer to size (in comparison to mine). He’s in love with it as well. It’s very nice dark wood with a nice sturdy base, some drawers – finito.
Either way, we both were playing with the Tablet for a little while and found out when browsing through the Settings to get all of the stats that it was now possible (with Android – Ice Cream) to have multiple users. This sparked our interest almost instantly, and we both looked at eachother and I was like “I want”, he said “Go get it” (cause he’s fricken awesome) and while I was pulling the car around (cause he was picking up his desk the same day) he paid for both. Turned into an expensive shopping trip on our parts, but we walked out of there with a want, and a need. 
While he was in the Bedroom for a few hours setting up his new desk, I was prepping the house for Christmas. I did more baking in the past few days than I ever thought possible. Everything from cookies, to breads, to brownies – you name it, I probably baked it. I went all out for Christmas this year, because I actually had more room to do it. I know that sounds a little weird but it’s true. A huge living room and a big footprint in reference to the front end of the house, things just kind of happened. The baking was really just phase two, we’d spent quite some time decorating prior to my even pulling the flour out of the cabinet. So the tree was decorated, the bulk of the outdoors was draped in white lights and the rest of the house had random little touches here and there. Thankfully, minus today, there was really no wet weather going on outside so my garland didn’t get all mucky and was nice and clean for Christmas. I was also really happy with the tree in the living room. With the combination of Karen’s ornaments and mine everything kind of came together that worked out really nicely.
I also got him some new Happy Feet, this is a brand that we were in love with long before Snooki put it on MTV. I’ve always had a pair, and so has he and his were worn to the point that his toes were going to start popping through the bottom. Knowing how comfy they are I changed it up a little bit and got him the “All Around” ones, they look like real sneakers and there’s about an inch-thick rubber sole on the bottom of them. They’re better than my usual outdoor slippers so of course I’ll have to pick up a pair for myself in the future but for now this was all about him and that’s what he got. So that was one pair, and instead of getting him the standard color variations I decided to take a look under the “Animals” section and got him the most ridiculous ones I could find – and his favorite animal – the Penguins. Watching him walk around in these is more amusing than the slippers themselves, but they bring a smile to just about everyone’s face so it was more than worth it.
The thing I was surprised about, however, was the ViewSonic 24-inch Monitor that was under the tree. I’ve been using a 17-inch monitor as my “Email Screen” for the past couple of months and it was working out pretty well for me. I kept my email completely on that window and when I was actually in Photoshop or Dreamweaver I would just load project free TV and watch television right on the desk, no complaints at all. So you can imagine my surprise when Sean upgraded me to a much larger screen. This was one of those items that wasn’t on my wants, or my needs – which then turns into a complete and total surprise. And that wraps up Christmas Eve.