The New House

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.

Kindle Madness

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...

eBay Needs To Get Into The Shipping Business

It occurred to me that eBay would get a larger share of my spending if they were able to address one thing - shipping.  It's better to illustrate what I mean by way of example. I want a cheap landscaping/utility trailer.  There are thousands of them on eBay, and probably hundreds that fit the criteria I want.  I want something newer, so I can narrow down my choices from there.

Here's my problem.  If I go outside my immediate geography - say, 100 miles or so, - using eBay looks less and less attractive.  If a trailer I want to buy is more than 100 miles away, I'll spend at least $50 and several hours picking it up and bringing it back.  Alternately, I can ship it for more than what the trailer is worth.

Same goes for a lot of higher-ticket items that can't be shipped by conventional means.  I bought my camper on eBay last spring, but it took me six months of searching to find a trailer locally that met my criteria.  There were many more on the other side of the country that would have worked out just fine - I just didn't want to drive across the country to go pick something up.  I can't tell you how many cheap cars I passed up because I didn't want to ship them from California or fly out there to get them and drive them cross-country.

But what if eBay helped with the shipping on unconventional items?

What if sellers could bring their sold items to their local eBay retail store (yes, I know these aren't owned outright by eBay - bear with me a second), give the store an auction identifier and a shipping address, and get discounted rates on shipping long distance?  eBay could outsource to a freight or trucking business and make money.

Now, what if you could do this for any item and, as a seller, offer it as an option in your auction?  That would be huge.  I think it would be just the thing to grease the wheels a bit and get people to look outside their immediate geography for items they need.  There's a lot of pressure due to the economy for people to buy things used or barter for them (see Freecycle, etc.) and I think eBay could capture more revenue if they did this.  BTW, yes I do understand that we should try to avoid creating a larger carbon footprint by getting items locally when we need them, but sometimes given the choice between buying local and not buying at all, we choose not to buy.

What do you think?

Minor Presentation Annoyances

I spend a lot of time not just giving presentations, but listening to them.  There are a lot of presenters who are better at it than I am, and certainly I've been guilty of a presentation gaffe or two.  (Or five, or thirty-six.)  I'm starting to encounter a lot of the same presentation annoyances lately, though.  Here are some of them:

1. Starting off answers to questions with phrases like "To tell you the truth...," "Honestly..." or "Truthfully..."

   If you're presenting, and you're answering a question by first telling me that you're about to tell me the truth, it subconsciously makes me wonder about whether or not you've been telling me the truth up to this point.  It also makes me wonder if honesty is a habitual problem for you.  I know that presenters tend to use these phrases as filler while they organize their thoughts, but really - choose something else.  I'd even prefer umms and ahhs to hearing "honestly..."

2. Using "amount" and "number" incorrectly

   My rule of thumb here is that you use "number" to refer to things you can easily count and "amount" to refer to everything else.  Thus, you can talk about an "amount of ad inventory" or a "number of ad impressions," but not an "amount of impressions."  I know this is minor, but I cringe when people screw this up.

3. Screwing up plural/singular of certain industry terms

   Many times in the media business, we show syndicated research runs featuring composition indices in order to help back up assertions about the right media vehicles for a particular audience.  (I know - We use indices for other reasons, too.  Bear with me.)  When we refer to these in the singular, we use the word "index."  The plural of that word is "indices."  There is no such thing as a singular "indice" or a plural "indexes."

   People mess this up when it comes to the word "medium," too.  A medium is a channel of communication.  When you talk about multiple channels of communication, use the word "media."  All the usual subject/verb agreement rules apply.  So if you're referring to television, radio and print collectively, don't say "mediums" or "medias."  It's also appropriate to say "Media are..." as opposed to "Media is..." when you're talking about more than one medium.  Yes, there are permissible exceptions, like in colloquial speech when you're really talking about the media business and you just happen to be leaving out that implied word.  But please don't say "mediums."  It hurts my ears.

4. Starting off answers to questions with meaningless phrases like "Actually...," "At the end of the day...," "Many times...," etc.

   Sometimes, presenters do this to give themselves a couple seconds to organize their thoughts.  Sometimes, they're using hedging language designed to mentally give themselves a fallback if their assertions are challenged.  It makes a more powerful statement if someone says "More moms visit iVillage than visit Oxygen.com" rather than "Many times, more moms visit..."  Don't hedge.  Hedging makes your audience think that you can't back up what you say.

5. Overly florid language

   Presenters in our business often have a tendency to use a lot of unnecessary language.  Cut to the chase.  "Our users tend to be affluent" works a lot better than "On a household income basis, our unique user base has an index of 125 against household income $150K+."

I don't want to give the impression that I sit in the back of the room grading people on their presentations, or that I'm nitpicking.  None of this stuff really keeps me up at night, and I doubt I'd ever call somebody out publicly for any of the minor annoyances I've listed above.  It just grates on my nerves when people who give presentations don't notice that they've lost half the room because they keep using language that makes them appear less professional.