Janicek.com

I HATE cold weather. It’s 31 degrees outside right now. To some of you, that’s nothing. To me, that’s the desire to quit my job, crawl into bed and hibernate until late March. You can’t do anything when it’s cold except sit inside. You bundle up to go outside only to go inside somewhere else where the heaters are cranked up so you then have to disrobe and lug around your cap, jacket, scarf, gloves, etc. Your nose drips, eyes water, fingers become numb, skin dries out and lips chap. Most people, myself included, tend to put on weight during the cold months. It’s not fun.

My wife is from Des Moines. Her parents, grandma and brother still live there. I don’t see how they survive the winter months.

During lunch I watched a part of a live video stream of Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. We’re so getting an iBook. New Macs are shipping with iLife ’04. He also introduced GarageBand. He had John Mayer there playing guitar right into the computer and he recorded it. It was SOOO cool. iLife is pretty much what I’ve tried to attain with our computer. I use a hacked version of Picasa for our digital photo album, which is mediocre in my opinion, iTunes (which is made by Apple and is the only recreational 3rd party software that works decently on the computer), Pinnacle Studio 8 (capture card) that I still can’t get to work right. We don’t have a DVD ROM so I haven’t had to endure the pains of dealing with 3rd party software for that.

Jobs also introduced the iPod mini. Apple wants to get their hands on the upper-end flash mp3 player market by selling a smaller player that will hold 4GB of music at a comparable price. Except the iPod mini is a hard drive player (vs. compact flash). It comes in 5 different colors and is the size of a business card. No, I don’t want one – I just think they’re cool.

Scotch from a plastic jug, Jack Daniels, Skyy cosmos, champagne, shorts, t-shirts and a Celtic version of Auld Lang Syne piping from the JoshPod. That was New Years 2004. Happy New Year, by the way.

Elise and I went to John and Christine’s to ring in

Posted on 1/5/2004

Bather at Petsmart

Della called Elise this morning to tell us that the final addendum has been signed by the sellers. That means that it’s 99% official – we are bona fide first-time homeowners. Our closing date is on or before January 29th. I say 99% official because the loan is yet to be funded. We’ve been pre-approved so we just have to wait to have our broker fund the loan at closing.

Elise and I had a nice, relaxing, extended holiday week. We got to my parents’ house at almost midnight on Tuesday. Elise had to finish wrapping presents. I hit the nog.

I woke up late on Christmas eve. Elise got up early, had breakfast and talked to my parents for a couple hours. Shortly after I crept out of bed, we wormed my parents’ cows. A very Texas Christmas. After an enchilada dinner, we looked at the photo albums.

On Christmas morning, we all got up, ate breakfast and opened presents. Mom and Dad really liked the picture that Elise and I took in New Orleans… My parents spent their honeymoon in New Orleans as did we in 2001. We went to Pat O’Briens and a recreated a picture that was taken of my parents 30+ years ago.

After all the box tossing and paper shredding, we all went to work in the kitchen to prepare Christmas lunch/dinner. My uncle Bill and cousin Shantel came over just after noon. We ate, took pictures, ate, took more pictures and rode Bill’s 4-wheeler. Elise says she doesn’t want her own motorcycle… I guess having two extra wheels makes for a safer ride.

We woke up on Friday morning and drove into Houston to find our washer and dryer set. The drive in was fun. Even though Christmas had passed and Elise was suffering from her cold, we were able to maintain our holiday spirit. After waiting in traffic and passing the fatal accident on I-10, we made our way up I-45 north to what we thought was the Sears scratch and dent outlet. It turned out we had made our way to the parts and service store. We turned around and drove down I-45 south to the actual scratch and dent outlet. We looked around for an hour or so and decided to move on. We didn’t buy anything because 1) we didn’t have a truck 2) I wanted to make sure that we slept on it before spending $1,000+ and 3) Elise the Laundry Monger wanted to go back to my parents’ house a research the units we looked at.

We drove over to the Galleria area. We first stopped at FAO Shwarz. That was kind of depressing because they were having a going out of business sale. I then took Elise into the Galleria. It was a mad house. I really just took her there so she could see the ice skating rink and 3-story Christmas tree. After seeing both, we decided to pretend we were swanky and dipped into a few stores. Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Cartier were about as much as my $18 sweater and I could take. Elise and I found a $180 long sleeve t-shirt and a pair of $480 blue jeans. Nothing fancy about either. Those were the two items that we decided were worth a price tag flip. Most items didn’t have price tags. “If you have to ask…” We laughed heartily and left. We drove back to Mom and Dad’s, had dinner, watched TV and went to bed.

On Saturday we drove back into Houston in Dad’s truck and decided on a washer we wanted to purchase at the Sears outlet. We saved $250 on a new Maytag washing machine because of a couple barely noticeable scratches. Our options for dryers were a limited because our house has a gas line for the dryer. We drove over to the Sears store in Memorial City Mall. I told the sales guy that I had a truck and I wanted to take a dryer home with me that night. Elise found the dryer we needed but they didn’t have the gas model, nor the “bisque” color that matched our washer. The sales guy upgraded the dryer for free and is having it shipped to Austin just in time for us to move into the house. We saved $400 on new appliances. We realized that we are married, soon-to-be homeowners because we were shopping for household appliances on a Saturday night. Memorial City Mall received quite the facelift, by the way.

We got up Sunday, ate, read the newspaper, packed and started watching the Texans Vs. Colts game. Elise and I headed back to Austin around 1 p.m. and fought the rain and traffic all the way in. Our normal 1.5 hour drive took us over 3 hours. We unpacked the Jeep and rushed over to Burlington Coat Factory to exchange both of our new jackets. I think we’re both much happier with the jackets that we picked out for ourselves.

Life is started to get back to normal, which stinks. While riding my bicycle to work yesterday morning, I tried to listen to Christmas music on the JoshPod so I could maintain some form of holiday spirit. Battery was dead. Bah humbug! Apparently 98.4% of Austin isn’t working this week because it sure seemed like I was the ONLY warm-blooded animal traversing the land yesterday morning.

We met with Della and Clyde at Springhill last night to initial another addendum on our house contract and to consume fried food. I had a chicken fried steak sandwich that could have fed a team of starving Sumo wrestlers. We’re hoping that the paperwork we initialed last night will be the last until closing at the end of January. This addendum stated that the buyers are paying a certain amount in closing costs in lieu of repairs because we had to go with an FHA loan. With an FHA loan, the buyers have to pay part of closing. We wish we had known that earlier. Things could have been worse though. All-in-all, buying a house has been relatively pain free thus far.

Elise and I drove into Houston yesterday afternoon to shop for washer and dryers at the Sears scratch and dent warehouse. On I-10, just before Sheppard we saw the aftermath of a horrific car crash.

If I had to guess, I’d say we missed the wreck by an hour or so. Elise saw that the car was cut in half. Even though I was driving, I could also see the remains of the car and what looked like a body covered by a sheet.

Seeing things like that really put things into perspective.

In other news – Elise and I have been at my parents’ house since Tuesday night. We been having a nice, relaxed visit. Christmas was a lot of fun. Elise and I both surprised each other by giving each other new leather jackets. We’re both going to have to return them. Luckily we both bought them from the same store so we can go returning/shopping together.

My parents are helping us buy a washer and dryer as our Christmas/housewarming gift. We’re about to go to Houston (again) and hopefully knock this purchase out of the way. I know nothing about washer and dryers. I think the ones with all of the buttons and lights are cool, though I have no idea what they all do.

It’s pushing 8:30 p.m. and we’re about to load the sleigh and head to Mom and Dad’s house in Cat Spring to celebrate Christmas.

Elise has come down with her annual cedar fever/allergies. So now yours truly has to look forward to a 3 hour Jeep ride with a snot funneling, teary-eyed wife, contemporary pop Christmas tunes on the soft rock radio station, no rear view visablity due to a vehicle full of presents and dirty laundry and an imminent headache from my own cussing at last minute shoppers and other travellers on the highway.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope Santa brings you all everything that was on your list.

I rode my bicycle home from work and checked the mail this evening. Today we received a large package from the title company regarding the house we’re buying. To illustrate how large a package this is, I set it on the table next to the largest book I could find on our bookshelf, a work entitled “The Bible”. At first glance I noticed that the package from the title company contains a lot of legalese. We’re supposed to read and sign these papers. I decided to read the liner notes of “The Bible” instead for the sake of procrastination. From what I’ve gathered, this book is a fictional piece written by Oprah Winfrey about a boy who wears a very popular ring, wants to become a wizard, befriends a Clownfish and together they set out on a hair-raising adventure to produce a calendar containing nude photographs of post-menopausal women.

Yesterday I threw away approximately 72 house fliers. These fliers are usually 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper enclosed in a weatherproof container that is attached to a For Sale sign in front of a house. I kept these fliers somewhat neatly organized in my old, empty Olive Garden employee training notebook.

That means that Elise and I drove by and picked up fliers for 72 houses. If I had to guess, I’d say that we picked up 30 more and immediately threw them away because the house was out of our price range or didn’t meet some other criteria. I’d say we looked at another 25 houses that didn’t have fliers. Elise has gone to look at houses on her own many times. She has probably looked at 40 houses by herself. Della, our agent has sent me 74 house listing e-mails. She probably sent me more but were deleted because of criteria. On average, these house listing e-mails contain 3 or more houses for sale. Combined Elise and I have looked at another couple hundred houses in Travis County online.

That comes out to 1.4 billion houses for sale that Elise and I have seen since early summer.

I have a love/hate relationship with Pinnacle. I used to own a DC30 Pro video capture card. I upgraded my OS to XP. Pinnacle said they were not going to update drivers for the DC30 to work under XP. Bad Pinnacle.

I sold that capture card and recently purchased Pinnacle’s Studio 8 bundled with a DC10 analog capture card.

When I tried to install the program software I was asked for a 10 digit serial number. The number is to be found on the back of the Guide to Movie Making manual. On the back of said manual are a bunch of phone numbers and an eight digit number on the bottom right corner of the back cover.

I called Pinnacle’s 1-800 number where I was told to hang up and call a long distance number for consumer product technical support. I called the long distance number to get an hours of operation recording.

So long story short. If you need the serial number for Pinnacle Studio 8, here you go: 4511089346.

Buy Pinnacle’s Studio HD V14 here.

Elise and I walked the Trail of Lights last night. It was okay. We agreed that it would have been more fun making the trek by means of inner tubes and bathing suits. I snapped a few photos – a cold artist’s perspective.

Prior to that we had spent most of Saturday doing our last minute Christmas shopping. We had to be in the post office by 2 p.m. in order for our packages to make it out in time. We got to the post office around 1:30 and didn’t get out until nearly 3.

I went to bed relatively early on Friday night while Elise did some late night shopping.

Sorry for the lack of posts. Elise and I have been busy. By busy I mean we’re buying a house. By busy buying a house I mean signing multiple copies of amendments to addendums and initialling documents that contain words like “notwithstanding” and “kiss all recreational money goodbye”. The process is not 100% complete as of yet, but on paper there is a contract pending. That basically means that our offer has been accepted and the sellers are dealing with us exclusively. We’re having the hardwood floors looked at and are getting an estimate on repairs tomorrow. There are a few panels that aren’t tacked down to the foundation.

We had the house inspected yesterday. The inspector was really impressed with the condition of the house. Aside from some minor fixes, we’re getting a good deal on a home that will require minimal maintenance.

Here’s the general info:

approximately 2,100 sq. ft.
1 story
4 bedrooms (one being an office)
formal dining
living room
2 full bathrooms
living, dining and hallways are hardwood floors
kitchen/fireplace slate tile

We both feel as if we got a good deal on the house and are locked into a pretty good interest rate. We really want to paint the interior of the house. The current owners have an interesting taste in colors – definitely not our taste though. Elise and are thinking about a coffee color-based swatch. Another issue is a deck. We’re going to need a deck. There is a back patio, but not large enough to entertain or even to have the both of us out there hanging out. I have a feeling Home Depot is going to get sick of us.

Our closing date is on or before January 29.