breakfast first

Coming to you live from an empty house

The fellow from Comcast was just here to switch on the cable, and I just set the cable modem and wireless router up. I have the router in the basement, and I was thrilled to discover that I can pick up signal all over the house, even the upstairs (although signal strength is low there). Haven't tried the backyard yet.

On a somewhat related note, is there anything worse than having someone ask you to fill out a customer satisfaction survey about their work while they loom over you in your own house? My favorite question from the survey: "Did the technician make you feel valued?" Heh.

This is it

This afternoon we received a surprise phone call from our real estate agent informing us that the former occupants of our new home had vacated the premises a couple of days early and the house was ours. Early? Exciting! So after work, we headed over to West Seattle to see how the old place looked.

It was an odd experience. First, there was the shock of seeing the house empty. It looked different and, surprisingly, smaller. Second, there was the heightened awareness of all flaws. Did I not notice the stain on the floor before? Why is this door only painted on one side? Is this little thing the only closet in this room? Finally, there was the disbelief. We really own this? Yes, we really do.

We walked all around the house and started poking in all of the corners that we missed during our previous short visits. We were surprised and delighted to realize that the sellers were very cool and had the house cleaned thoroughly, top to bottom. We had been worried about what shape the house was going to be in, since we have two curious cats who will get into everything. Knowing that there's no bits of debris lying around in the basement is quite a relief.

At first, armed with my flashlight and a hypercritical eye, I was alarmed by all of the problems I was discovering (or noticing again), but gradually that alarm started to give way to the excitement of the possibilities of the house. There are dozens of small things we can do to improve it very quickly. Other changes (roof, furnace, electrical) are more substantial, costly, and time-consuming, but they'll no doubt be worth it. I can't wait to start attacking some projects this weekend.

Another shocking aspect of the house is just how darn quiet the place is! Having lived in apartment buildings in very urban areas for quite a while now, this is going to take a bit of adjustment for me. I think I'm going to be pacing around the house late at night for months, like last summer when we rented a little house on a beautiful beach in Kauai and I would lie awake all night convinced that someone was going to come in and murder us simply because there was no one around to hear us scream. I guess I just like being packed in tight with neighbors.

Still, this is one of the best things about this house -- it's in a quiet area, but it's still within walking distance of shops, restaurants, a movie theater, and, of course, a Starbucks (where Greg Nickels, mayor of Seattle and West Seattle resident, gets his coffee in the morning on the way to work, I'm told). And it's just a 10 minute bus ride (or water taxi ride!) to downtown. I think that's a great environment to raise a kid. Now I just need to get that nursery ready...

"Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest"

One of the comic adventures awaiting anyone who moves to Seattle is learning the street naming conventions here. Once you know something about it, it can be very helpful; but if you're unfamiliar with it, you're in for some laughs.

The city is split up into a number of different geographic regions: NorthWest, North, NorthEast, West, East, SouthWest, and South. These compass directionals are used in conjuction with the street name to help identify where in the city the address is located. But, naturally, there are some twists. For streets, the directional is a prefix (for example, "W Raye Street"); for avenues, it's a suffix (for example, "Phinney Ave N"). Amusingly, I've seen at least one street that had both a prefix and a suffix (different, of course), which pretty much fried my circuits at the time. (The wikipedia has a decent piece on the history and Byzantine rules of Seattle street naming.)

After you catch on, these directionals are useful for figuring out what part of the city things are located. If someone says "85th Ave NW", you go, "Ah, that's in Ballard!" which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I've found that the directionals can trip up mapping services. Shortly after I moved here (and before I understood the directional system), I found a hardware store online. I looked it up on Yahoo maps, and saw it was located downtown. Before I left, I decided to call the store and discovered that they were in Magnolia -- the opposite direction from downtown! The problem was the directional -- the trailing "W" wasn't taken into account.

So the moral is: learn your directionals, be careful when using mapping services, and if you're sending me anything, be sure to include the "SW". (Oh, and about the weird title: it's a mnemonic to help remember the street pairs of the central business district: Jefferson/James, Cherry/Columbia, Marion/Madison, Spring/Seneca, University/Union, Pike/Pine.)

Statistics I can live with

The Seattle Times recently ran two articles on the local housing situation. The first article reports that the price of older homes is increasing faster than new construction in Seattle -- unsurprising, but still music to my ears (our home was built in 1929, which certainly qualifies as "older"). Of course, like all home stats, these are just comparing sale prices and aren't adjusting for capital improvements, so they're overstating the returns. Still, good news.

The second article covers Seattle housing appreciation from 2003-2004, and lists South Central West Seattle in the #2 position, at +22.7%. (The top spot belongs to the very plush, lakeside Madison Park.) Even though our house is in North Central West Seattle (according to this map) where returns were a modest +8.3% last year (but steady; the 5-year average is +8.2%), I take this as an excellent sign -- more people moving to West Seattle looking for good deals, raising values for everyone in the process. From the article:

"It's my view that Seattle is an underpriced West Coast city," said [Lawrence Yun, senior economist with the National Association of Realtors], pointing out that "people have been saying San Francisco is overpriced for the last 20 years, and it still keeps going up."

Having very sadly missed the boat completely in San Francisco, I hope this guy is correct. Signs certainly seem to indicate he is. Now that I'm in the game, all I can say is: Keep it coming. Keep. It. Coming.

This just in

Miss J had another ultrasound appointment today, where we received the third independent opinion that we're having a girl, so the odds are pretty good. Additionally, we found out the baby already has hair! (Believe it or not, it shows up on the ultrasound.) This isn't surprising -- my mother just sent us photos of my rather hirsute baby self. If our daughter has as much hair as I did, we might be looking at a baby Crystal Gayle.

Miss J is just over thirty weeks, so we're 75% of the way there. Things are really speeding along. Still no name yet, I'd like to point out, although we had a lot of fun trashing various names with Miss V last night. Deciding against names is remarkably easy. There are so many bad ones!

In other news, we closed on the house yesterday, and everything went smoothly. The real action happened last Friday afternoon at the "signing", where you spend two hours signing every page of a huge stack and initialing many paragraphs on the pages you're already signing. (And -- get this -- they make you sign in blue ink. That is so '80s.) We move in later this month.

It was bound to happen

To prevent the blog from being overrun with ridiculous photos of the cats, I started a cat photo album. I'm sure I'll be adding to it regularly.

New camera

With a baby and a house on the way, I know that I'll be taking a lot of pictures soon. And sadly, my old Canon Elph just isn't cutting it. It's nice enough as a little pocket camera, but it's just slow as hell when it comes to shooting (and powering on, for that matter, since it has to extend the lens). Slow isn't good when it comes to getting shots of babies.

So last weekend, I followed my camera-savvy friends (well, I'm about a year behind) and ordered a Nikon D70. The camera is amazingly fast, really versatile, and can take great shots in the hands of people who know what they're doing (like Tony, Ficus, and this guy). And with the recent introduction of the D70s, the price of the D70 has fallen a little bit. Time to pounce!

Excitingly, the camera arrived this afternoon. There's a ton of stuff to learn about this camera, and I didn't have time for that today. However, I did happen to sneak a shot of Owen waiting for a printout. See, I've got a lot to learn.

The Rise of the Right (Hemisphere, that is)

Tonight I went to hear Daniel Pink talk about his new book, A Whole New Mind. The premise of the book is that the age of "left-brained" thinking is waning, as analytical tasks are being commoditized by automation and outsourcing. He argues that we're shifting away from the Information Age into what he calls the "Conceptual Age". What's forcing this is three things: abundance, Asia, and automation.

With abundance, he notes that our (I'm referring to Americans here) disposable income has risen steadily over the past fifty years, and yet our happiness has remained level. (I haven't read the book yet, but looking at the index I see that he references Martin Seligman in several places; I assume Pink is drawing on some of Seligman's research.)  "This gap is what interests me," he said, and it represents a massive business opportunity.

With Asia, he's referring of course to the availability of highly educated, cheap, and (in the case of India) English-speaking "knowledge workers". And automation is pretty clear.

The people and professions that will survive this shift are the ones who draw on right-brain skills: seeing the big picture, creativity, empathy, etc.  He identifies six "essential abilities" needed for this new age: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. (Design features very prominently; indeed, his tagline is "MFA is the new MBA".)

He was a very engaging speaker (not too surprising, given that he was a speechwriter for Al Gore) and put forth some compelling evidence. Of course, I was strongly in his camp (at least on the reasons driving the change) before I heard him speak. (Case in point: if you read the comments on my post about Television and Kids, you'll see that I talk about teaching our daughter Mandarin (or Cantonese), as soon as possible.) Hopefully the book will offer even more depth to the things he talked about tonight.

Talk about mundane!

Our new house doesn't come with a washer and dryer (the previous tenants are taking them), so we need to pick some up. Any recommendations -- or warnings? I'm basically opinionless on this topic; without you, I'm at the mercy of ratings of Epinions.