So we hit a major milestone this weekend.  The old house is completely empty, clean and ready for new people to move in.

The deal was that if I emptied everything and brought it to the new house, Lauren would clean the old house.  Probably 95% of the move was done by May, but there were some things lingering in the old house that took us a while to get to, like our office, which we didn’t really pack in its entirety before the movers got there.  There was also a lot of stuff in the basement and in the attic.

So a lot of the weekend was spent moving boxes, which made it not very distinguishable from other weekends in recent memory.  Just getting everything to the right place, much less getting it unpacked, is a nightmare.

Then there was the dirt thing.  See, it’s been raining pretty much non-stop in New York for the past several weeks.  That’s led to water intrusion in the basement.  I’ve been doing a lot of stuff to get the gutters to channel water off the roof and away from the foundation, like cleaning all the goop and trash out of the gutters and buying pieces of elephant trunk to extend the downspouts.  But there’s another thing we need to do – pitch the grade away from the foundation so that water siting on the lawn won’t pool up against the house.

So I ordered some topsoil on Saturday.  Ten yards for $120 delivered – not a bad price.  It was just the “delivery” that was the problem.  You see, the topsoil was somewhat moist, so when the delivery guy showed up with his truck, he raised his dump bed about as high as it would go without tipping the truck over, but the dirt just stuck and refused to slide down onto the driveway.  The delivery guy actually had to take the dirt back and bring a different, wider truck that wouldn’t tip over in order to make the delivery.

Then Jimmy and I started taking it out back to where it was needed.  We’d fill up a wheelbarrow and the John Deere’s dump cart and take it back into the yard, dump it and rake it out.  Jimmy and I would switch after two loads, so that I’d be using the wheelbarrow while he used the tractor and cart.  It was a pretty good system and we moved at least five yards that way.  There’s still five yards sitting in the driveway on a tarp, though.  We’ll do a few loads when I get home from work.

I think I’m going to end up ordering more dirt, though.  There are plenty of uneven areas around the lawn and I still haven’t put any fill or soil under the porch where there’s a whole other bit that needs to be filled in.  Water is pooling under there, too, because no one ever took the time to do a final grade before the builders put the porch on the house.  So the grade under the porch is slanting back toward the house.

Soon, Jimmy and I will start pouring the slab for the air conditioning units and the hot tub.

I can’t believe that something that was invented in order to streamline online payments has made it MORE difficult to make online payments almost every single time I’ve used it.  If it weren’t for eBay and all these little independent merchants who don’t have their own credit card processing, I’d never use it to begin with.

Here are some suggestions for PayPal to help make things easier for the end user and make some more money in the medium- to long-term.

1. Stop defaulting to the payment option that’s most profitable for PayPal. I have my checking account linked to my PayPal account.  But it’s often better for me to use one of the credit cards linked to my account.  PayPal always defaults to take money directly from my checking account and makes it a huge pain in the butt to pick another payment type.  The end user, though, doesn’t care what’s most profitable for PayPal.  They just see that PayPal is picking the option most profitable for it, and not the one that’s most convenient for the end user.  I find myself changing my payment option out of spite – to the debit card that draws money from the same checking account PayPal wants so desperately to directly debit.
2. Make it easier to change information after you change addresses.  Having just moved, I now know that this process is a pain in the ass.  You can’t just change your home address in the system.  You have to log in, delete any credit cards associated with your old address, then delete the old address.  Then you have to add your new address, add the credit cards back and then designate that address as your new home address.  All credit cards have to be reconfirmed.  How about an “I’m Moving Wizard?”
3. Change the whole process for confirming credit cards. The existing process is screwed.  PayPal wouldn’t let me use my Discover Card because it was “associated with another account.”  I just found out it was associated with the right account, all right – just the wrong address.  So I went through the steps described in #2 above and found out that I needed to reconfirm the Discover Card.  How PayPal does this is to charge the card $1.95 and have the owner of the card confirm it by entering a code that appears on their statement.  Once confirmed, the $1.95 is refunded.  The transaction takes a few days to show up in electronic billing, assuming you don’t want to wait for the statement to come in the mail.  Meanwhile, PayPal gave itself a $1.95 interest-free loan on your credit card.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what if you’re confirming a few million credit cards at any given time?  That’s a lot of float, to say nothing of the breakage.  I should point out that when I’ve opened checking accounts with ING Direct and Emigrant, they send you a micropayment of something like 8 cents or 12 cents and ask you to confirm the amount.  They don’t take money out.  Interesting…
4. Quit trying to upsell when you should be streamlining payment processes.  People resent it when PayPal wastes the chance to make a payment process shorter and simpler and tries to upsell a Mastercard or whatever.  Do Not Want.  Keep doing it and its a big Do Not Want for the whole service, which exists (ostensibly) for simplifying payment.

There are a lot more tips I could give.  PayPal ought to give serious consideration to fixing some of this stuff.  The big picture is that they’re screwing up their brand.  They look like a company that scrapes for every nickel and dime it can get out of customers in exchange for adding minimal value.  That may cut it in a world where PayPal is pretty much the only game in town for folks who don’t want to spend money on payment processing, but how much longer can that last?  It can’t be too long before PayPal will see serious competition (most likely indirectly).

My guess is that PayPal will leverage its user base, the eBay ownership and other assets to enforce the status quo.  Should be good for a 4-7 year slide into oblivion while users slowly find and exploit other options.

Lots of things going on, as usual.  And because the tasks are piling up, so is my general list of maladies and complaints:

1. Dear Best Buy, CostCo and all other brick-and-mortar retailers – I bring the product to the register and pay for it.  You give me my receipt.  Transaction over.  No, you can’t peer through my bags to see whether or not I’m stealing something.  (Oh, and nobody’s buying that “We’re making sure you got the right item” bullcrap, either.  If I didn’t have the right item, I wouldn’t have brought it to the counter.)  You can’t stand in my way and block my exit until I give you a receipt, either.  Think I stole something?  Call a cop.  You don’t get to BE the cop.
2. Dear New Next-Door Neighbor – Keeping pets requires responsibility beyond leaving giant mounds of cat food on your porch outside for the cats that live in the woods behind your property.  You’re supposed to make sure they’re spayed/neutered, get them their shots and keep them off other people’s property (namely, mine).  You can’t have it both ways such that you feed them, cuddle them, etc. but bear no responsibility for what they do.
3. Dear Mother Nature – Make up your mind regarding whether or not you want to wash out the weekend.  This “two hours of sun followed by two hours of rain and then back to sun” thing is getting old.  My vegetable garden looks like the mud pit at a monster truck rally.  And, please don’t wait until I’ve brought a bunch of boxes out of the garage into the driveway before you decide to make it rain again.  Can I have a sunny weekend, please?  It, is, after all the second half of June, not the beginning of April.
4. Dear Guy at the Brookhaven Town Dump – It sucks that I got there five minutes after closing.  You don’t have to shoot me a self-satisfied smile at me as you’re closing the gate in my face.
5. Dear Brookhaven Sanitation Workers – If you’re not going to pick up two tall kitchen trash bags filled with ordinary household trash, I need to know why.  You can’t just skip my house for garbage pickup and leave me wondering whether I did anything wrong.  (Was I supposed to put pink bows on the bags?)

Thanks.

Weird stream of consciousness at about 7:30 this morning.  I was thinking about how much cooler toys used to seem back when I was in the target market.  Big Wheels, Star Wars action figures, slot cars, Stretch Armstrong, etc. – All these things would get me really excited when I was a kid.

So then I started thinking about whether kids today would get excited about toys I had during the 1970s.  And I was thinking I’d do a little experiment: Get Kate a vintage 1970s toy and see if she spends as much time with it as she spends with her other stuff.

So then I was thinking Weebles, because they’d be too big for Kate to swallow and they don’t have any moving parts.  I remember digging Weebles when I was, like, three.

So I logged on to eBay.  And there are a few vintage Weeble auctions going on.  I can’t seem to win one to save my life.  I bid up a set of five or six of the little bastards to over $20, only to find out someone else wanted them more.  No way I’m paying more than $20 for a set of plastic eggs left over from 1973.

But I still want some vintage Weebles.  So I’m opportunistically bidding.

Tell me, what was the first toy you remember having?

I thought most of the work on the house would have to get done on weekends and Summer Fridays.  But thanks to summer daylight hours, I can usually get a few minor things done when I get home from work.  I can’t save a major project like spackling and sanding for a weeknight, but I can do a few small projects.  Last night was a good example.  Lauren picked up the baby and I rototilled the new garden area.  We ordered dinner in and then put some chairs together that we ordered from Target.com.  Then I went out back again and started fencing in the garden.  (By the weekend, it should be ready for planting.)  I am going to have to replace a sprinkler head I hit with the rototiller, but truth be told, it needed to go up on a riser anyway and I was probably going to have to switch to a shrub head, so I’m not mad I hit it.

I didn’t have to go to Home Depot, but that’s only because I had already bought the sprinkler parts and garden soil I needed, and already had the fencing and stakes from the old house.  So it’s only advance plannig that kept me away from my big orange friend last night.

I’m going to be posting some pictures of the new place soon, but I wanted to make sure we charged Lauren’s digital SLR camera and got some decent shots.  Give me a couple days.

Since I moved in to my new place last Wednesday, there hasn’t been a day in which I haven’t made at least one trip to a home improvement store.  Sometimes, like last night, it’s for $5 worth of bolts and screws.  Other times, it’s for much more.  (Sometimes, I swear I can hear a tiny voice screaming “nooooooo!” just as I’m about to swipe my Discover Card through the PIN pad…)

I live dangerously close to the Home Depot now.  Make a right out of my development and follow Buckley Road to the end, make a right and a quick left and you’re pulling into the parking lot of the Gateway Plaza Home Depot.  It literally takes a minute and a half to get there.  You end up with a lot of situations like last night, when I was fixing some furniture and wondered aloud if Home Depot sold nuts and bolts in an antique finish so the repair I was making would match the wood.  (The answer?  They do.)

Truth be told, I actually prefer Lowe’s.  The Home Depot was great in its heyday, but they seem to have given up when it comes to hiring knowledgable people.  Sure, there are some great people in my neighborhood store who know what they’re talking about, but there are quite a few people with little training.  They don’t know the specs on the riding mowers and they get stumped by questions like “You have a nut that matches the finish on this antique brass bolt I found over on the next aisle?”

Lowe’s seems to get more knowledgable people on the floor.  They don’t get tripped up if you ask them to cut a piece of plexiglass for you, or if you want to know if they make a mulching kit for a particular riding mower.  At Home Depot, I asked someone to cut some blackout shades for me, so they’d fit Kate’s windows.  You could see the smoke coming out of her ears when I asked.  And then she did it wrong.

It reminds me of that summer I spent working for Pergament.  Back then, Home Depot was killing us.  They had the better-trained people and the better-organized store.  I remember struggling to organize all the PVC fittings in the plumbing department in those little snippets of time when I wasn’t helping customers.  There just wasn’t enough time.  (Then, one day, the cops walked my department manager out of the store in handcuffs and I became the interim plumbing department manager, but that’s a story for another time…)  Just like Home Depot put Pergament out of business with better people and better organization, Lowe’s seems to be kicking Home Depot’s butt.  Maybe Home Depot will figure this out and invest some more in HR, training and logistics.

I love Lowe’s, but going there entails getting on the expressway.  So I tend to go there for major purchases only (like the John Deere) or when I have a shopping list as long as my arm.  So Home Depot manages to still get a fair share of my home improvement dollar, albeit earned over a comparatively higher number of visits a nickel or a dime at a time.  I’ll stick to Home Depot when I know that the product offering will be the same as Lowe’s and when the prices will be approximately the same, like Sunday night when I needed a dozen bags of dirt for the garden, or when I needed a 24-foot extension ladder to get up into my attic over the garage.  Lowe’s gets my business when I go on a trip that combines several projects – like when I was simultaneously prepping the bedroom for paint, fixing up the horseshoe pits outside and buying organizers for the garage and shed.

I’ll end up going tonight.  I have no idea what for, but I’ll need something tonight.  There are a few rooms in the house that can be considered “done” for now.  The acid test is whether or not I could show the room to company without saying something like “we still have to unpack those boxes” or “we’re putting a different color on the walls in here…”  Among the “done” rooms are the dining room, the room off the kitchen that I’m calling the family room, Kate’s room and the master bedroom.  There are a couple rooms that we won’t have to touch for a while, because the former owner’s hideous decor hadn’t left its mark and the kids hadn’t destroyed the walls and floors.  Among those are the main floor bath and the spare room.  There are a couple rooms that are “almost done,” including the kitchen (which needs a coat of paint, or an entirely different paint color, depending on what Lauren wants) and the room off the dining room that I’m calling the living room.

I won’t know until I get home tonight what I’ll be going to Home Depot for, mostly because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tonight when I get home.  If I have enough daylight to rototill the garden, I might end up needing some stakes or fencing to keep the rabbits out.  If I end up ripping up the carpet in the basement bedroom and getting rid of it, I might need to go get some heavy contractor bags.  I don’t know what the project will be, but I’m definitely going to Home Depot.

My name is Tom, and I’m an addict.

Linkety-link.

Listen to the canned show here.

I promised I’d tell this story in yesterday’s post.  So here goes…

We needed a riding lawn mower.  Our new property is an acre.  Our old property is a third of an acre.  I mowed the old property with a non-self-propelled push mower, which was just fine for a small lawn, and it only took 45 minutes or so to cut the front and back lawns.

But there was no freaking way I’m cutting an acre with a push mower every week.  And the situation is such that we closed on the new house before selling our old house.  So I’m mowing two lawns until at least the end of next month.

I love John Deere tractors.  My mom, sister and brother-in-law all live together and they have one.  It’s bulletproof.  And it cuts the lawn pretty quickly.  I’m not the kind of person who scrimps on things that have motors.  You do that and you end up frustrating yourself to no end by having to replace your motorized tools almost constantly.  I tend to spend a little extra to get things that will last in that regard.  So when you look in my shed, there’s a mower, a generator, a pressure washer, a rototiller and a bunch of other motorized tools that are all name brands (usually with Honda motors) and everything starts on the first or second pull.

So we needed a tractor and I started doing the research a couple weeks ago.  It turns out that both Lowe’s and Home Depot sell John Deere and they get the same prices the local dealer offers.  They also stock the tractors, so provided they’re not out of stock on a particular model, you can walk in, plunk your credit card down and walk out with a new tractor.  Lowe’s seemed to have the most in stock, so I figured I would buy from them.  I talked to the manager of the seasonal department at Lowe’s and he gave me a brochure, explaining some things about the different models and how I might use one of the John Deeres for plowing.

About plowing…  Our new place is at the end of a short private road.  It’s not a big deal, but the town doesn’t plow it after snowstorms.  So I wanted a tractor I could put a plow on, just in case I need to plow the road this coming winter.  As it turns out, any of the 100-series John Deeres accept the plow attachment, but really only the LA145 and the LA175 have the horsepower to push significant snow.  So my choice was down to those two models.

When I got to Lowe’s this past Sunday, the seasonal department was a zoo.  Say what you want about this economy, but the Lowe’s I went to had dozens of people milling around the seasonal department, buying grills, stuff for their gardens, lawn mowers, pressure washers – you name it.  It was 15 minutes before the right person in seasonal could even talk to me.  And then it took him another 15 minutes to help out another customer before he could get to me.  When I told him which models I was interested in, he had me wait again while he checked stock.

While he was checking, I mentally sold myself on the LA175.  I had looked online prior to coming to the store and I really wanted the extra horsepower and the wider deck (54″).  I had also looked at the dimensions and it fit on a 5X8′ trailer.  So when the guy came back from the computer and told me that the only one in stock was the one on the floor, I was a little dismayed.

So I negotiated.  I told him I’d take the one on the floor, but they had to give me a discount.  Ten minutes later, after a discussion with his manager, they offered no discount.  At that point, I was ready to walk, but then I asked about any promotions that were running.  The seasonal guy told me I could get a free dump cart or spreader with purchase.  I told him I wanted the dump cart, and once again, I was told the only one they could offer me was the one on the floor.

I didn’t mind taking the floor models, but again, I wanted a discount, so we negotiated again.  Their final offer was thus:

• $100 off the tractor
• Free dump cart
• $89 canopy that was on the machine for $25 (because they didn’t feel like taking it off)

I thought this was a reasonable deal, so I had them write up the invoice for me to take to the front.  At this point, I had been in the store for over two hours and I could just picture my wife impatiently tapping her toe in my head while she waited for me to come back home and resume packing for the move.

Up to the counter I went.  They rung me up.  The cashier made a mistake, which I spotted right as I was about to sign the credit card authorization.  I did the numbers in my head and something wasn’t right, so I had the cashier re-do the numbers.  She had to call a manager over, which clogged up the line for another 10 minutes.  Again, my wife was tapping her toe in my head.

Everything was rung up again and I signed off.  As the cashier handed me my receipt, I noticed that she screwed up again.  She actually charged me for the dump cart I was supposed to get for free.  Cue the manager again, who came back and then had to get a store manager to credit my card the $219 (plus tax) extra they had charged me.  That took another 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, the store manager told me that I wasn’t supposed to get the dump cart for free because the promotion covered only the LA145 and the next model down, not the LA175.  True to their word, though, they honored the deal.

It took another 15 for the seasonal folks to push the mower out front to my waiting truck.  That’s when the real trouble started.

Yes, that’s right.  The tractor wouldn’t fit on the trailer.  Rather, the tractor would but the wide deck wouldn’t.  The deck didn’t raise up high enough to clear the short sides of the trailer.  So now I’m stuck in a parking lot with a $3,000 lawn tractor and dump cart that I have no way of getting home.  (There was also the notion that I really had a 4′X8′ trailer, not a 5′X8′.  In the back of my brain, I knew it was a 4′X8′, but when I was calculating the width in inches, for some reason I had thought it was 5′ wide, not 4′.)

The Lowe’s guys were really helpful, even though we had just spent a lot of time getting the deal done and everyone was clearly frustrated.  The solution?  I took the trailer home and dropped it off at the house.  The mower fits in the back of my full-size pickup, but I have to leave the tailgate down and strap it in.  So the Lowe’s guys got some metal ramps from inside the store and put the mower in my truck.  I strapped it in and took it back to the house.  By then, I had killed nearly 5 hours.  I thought Lauren was going to kill me for taking 5 hours away from the house while we had so much packing to do.

But that’s not the end of the saga…

I got my ramps out of the garage and my father-in-law helped me get the tractor off the back of the truck.  I put some gas in it, turned the key and… nothing.

No problem, I figured.  The tractor was a floor model.  Somebody probably left the key on and drained the battery.  So I hooked up a battery charger and went to go do some work for a while.  A couple hours later I came back and tried the key.  Nothing.  Completely dead.  It didn’t even crank.  I looked at the charger – 12.7 volts in the battery.  Hmm…

At this point, I popped the hood to try to see if I could find an obvious problem.  I traced the ignition wires back to a funny-looking little plastic box that looked like it might be some sort of safety switch.  Hmm…

Everything else looked intact, but there was something about that little switch that didn’t look right.  I got the owner’s manual out.  I was right – that little plastic box wasn’t a safety switch – it was a fuse holder.  There was supposed to be a 20-amp blade fuse there, but it was missing.  The guys at the store probably popped it out to keep little kids from accidentally starting it up in the store aisle.  I ran out to Sears to get a new fuse, came back to the house, popped it in and the tractor started right up.

Whew!  All that work finally paid off.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I commenced cutting the lawn and the whole operation took about 4 minutes.

I’m really excited about moving on Wednesday, but I’m also shuddering at the sheer volume of work that needs to be done.  I feel like I just got one house into habitable condition where I feel comfortable that nothing needs immediate attention, maintenance-wise.  And now I’m stepping into a new place that has been seriously neglected for a decade and really needs some TLC- NOW.

We had a basement flood right before final walk-through.  The sellers wouldn’t give us anything to fix it.  We did have several days straight where it was raining almost constantly, so I didn’t think too much of it.  The sellers assured us that once we cleaned out the gutters, water wouldn’t pool around the foundation and seep into the basement.  They were BSing us.

We had a light rain on Saturday.  There was more water in the basement.  After taking a walk around the property with Craig, I’ve figured out a few of the reasons why.

First and foremost, whoever did the grading there should be dragged out behind the woodshed and shot.  The grade is pitched toward the house under the porch, the result of someone failing to do a rough grade before the builders started work on the porch.  We’re going to have to bring several yards of fill in and have someone manually shovel it under the porch and rake it out.  The rest of the grading around the house is terrible – there are settled areas near the driveway where water is coming out of the gutters and pooling on the driveway next to the foundation.  There are other areas where water follows a series of little depressions from the lawn back toward the house.  Most of the gutters simply drop roof water right next to the foundation.  Until I fix this, I’m going to have moisture in the basement every time it rains.

The solution Craig recommended is to drop two drywells in on opposite sides of the house, and get some elephant trunk to direct the flow of water off the roof into the drywells.  He’s also going to regrade things somewhat.  The fill we need for under the porch can come from the excavation for the drywells.

That’s just one big problem that needs immediate attention.  There’s a whole list of them:

1. There are holly bushes growing on top of my central A/C units.  They need to come out.
2. Speaking of the A/C, it’s not working upstairs.  There’s $3K in escrow to take care of that problem.
3. There is a massive mosquito-breeding operation in the back yard, which used to be an above-ground pool.  I drained it.  There’s a foot of decomposing leaves at the bottom.  I have to choose whether to try to salvage it until I can afford an inground pool, or have Craig demolish it and cart it off.
4. The master bedroom and the bedroom in the basement REEK of smoke.
5. About two dozen trees need to be transplanted or chopped up for firewood.
6. The back yard fence is coming down.
7. Nobody has raked leaves in a long time.  For a heavily-wooded lot, that’s bad.  That leaf blower Lauren got me will get a huge workout this year.
8. We need to finish getting rid of all the stuff the prior owners left behind.
9. That includes the carpets they left in the basement, which are wet and mildewy.
10. I need to clear out a spot for my vegetable garden.  Pronto.  Otherwise I’m going to have the world’s largest container garden in a couple weeks.

Even though there’s a lot of work, I’m still very excited.  We’ve managed to get a lot of work done on the rooms, including spackling and sanding the whole first floor.  We also totally finished (spackled, sanded, primed and painted) several rooms – the kitchen, the den, the dining room and Kate’s room.

Oh, and we got a new lawn tractor.  Basically, there was no way I was going to mow an acre with a push mower and then go back to my old house and mow the lawn there.  I’d be doing nothing but cutting grass all weekend.  So we bought a Deere.  It’s the LA175 model.  The story of how I got it is a long saga I’ll tell another time, but once I got it home and started it up, Lauren came outside to tell me that she wanted to go to the new house to do some painting.  She asked me to put the tractor away and get ready, then she went inside to go use the restroom.  Instead of putting it away, I fired up that 54″ cutting deck.  By the time she got back from the bathroom, the lawn was cut.  No kidding.  I cut the grass in about four minutes.

We’re moving all our stuff Wednesday.  Should be an ordeal.

I got my Kindle 2.0 at the end of February.  It’s now the beginning of May.  I’ve been reading like a madman.  What’s cool is that I’m noticing that my consumption habits with the Kindle are similar to those that took effect when I first got my iPod Touch.  That is, reading on the Kindle isn’t reserved solely for when I have large blocks of time.  Much like when I would whip out my iPod and play with an app for a few minutes while waiting on line at the bank, etc. I’m finding that I’m not just reading on the train or before bed, but also whenever I can find a few spare minutes.

Some might find the notion of filling every spare moment with electronic media consumption sad.  I like it, though.  There are all these little slices of time during the day where we’re waiting in line for something, or otherwise detained, and without a little portable entertainment I’d be going nuts.

In the brief time I’ve had my Kindle, here’s what I’ve read:

1. The Yankee Years, Torre/Verducci
2. Ulysses, James Joyce
3. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
4. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
5. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
6. UR, Stephen King
7. Fool, Christopher Moore
8. Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
9. Practical Demonkeeping, Moore
10. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Verne
11. The Stupidest Angel, Moore
12. Afraid, Jack Kilborn
13. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann
14. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Moore
15. The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Moore
16. You Suck, Moore
17. No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels, Johnson-Shelton/Dobyns
18. Playing for Keeps, Mur Lafferty

This reminds me of when I was a kid and a voracious reader…