It’s déjà vu all over again as I may soon find myself unemployed once more. Word came down at work that they are redefining my job from being a contracted position to an internal position. The job itself will be the same, but who I directly work for won’t be. As a result I need to apply for consideration to be hired for the job I am already doing. Like most companies these days, they’re very big on their employees having some form of degree, preferably a bachelors. Doesn’t matter what area the degree is in, so long as you have one, your chances of being hired are greatly improved.

Which, of course, I don’t have. I am working on one at the moment, but it’s still some distance in the future. I wasn’t expecting to have it done before my contract expired as it was and I definitely won’t have it within the next few weeks. The good news is that I’m at least being allowed to apply for the job which is a step up from when this happened to me at Ford Motor Company where they wouldn’t even entertain the idea of considering possibly hiring me without a degree. The bad news is my boss doesn’t get to put in a good word for me until after the recruiter determines whether or not I should even get an interview.

Needless to say I’m updating my resume and will be submitting it, but I’m not particularly optimistic that I’ll retain my job. Assuming I don’t my boss has said that he expects the transition to take at least a few months to unfold so I should be OK until at least January at the earliest and possibly as late as March. There’s no guarantee of that, but you take your silver linings where you can find them. In addition to applying for the job I currently have I’ll be hitting the job boards with a bit more vigor to see what other opportunities there might be. The fun never ends.

You walk in and the first thing he does is ask how you’re doing and you explain that you were up to “only” 2AM because you were playing the new Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW and without missing a beat he says with a smile: “Oh, surprised you didn’t just call in today.“

Now you might think at first that he’s suggesting that I’m a lazy bum who would be so lame as to call into work just to play a video game all day, but I should mention the fact that my boss, while he’s saying this, is sitting in the office with the lights off and Gears of War 2 loaded up on an Xbox 360. He understands. He knows what it is to be a gamer.

In my younger days I’d be more inclined to take a day off to play a new game I’ve been waiting forever for, but my mastery of my willpower has improved with age and it helps that I’ve been playing the beta since it started so had already worked through some of the cravings. There’s also the fact that I don’t get paid time off so that’s another motivation to get my ass to work.  Besides it’s Friday and I’ll have a good portion of the weekend to devote to playing so that gives me something to look forward to.

It’s not winter yet, that won’t officially happen until December 20th, but you could have fooled me over the past couple of days. After a surprisingly balmy Halloween and first week of November the jet stream has finally shifted and took us from a high of 64 this past Monday to a high of 44 the next day. The skies have gone grey and cloudy with occasional showers that have had a snowflake or two mixed in and today we’ve already hit our high of 40 degrees. Fortunately the furnace here in the townhouse works pretty well and the place seems decently insulated enough considering its age. For the rest of the week the best we’re hoping for is a warm up to 53 degrees by Friday, but there’s more chances of snow as we go along.

Shouldn’t be too much longer and we’ll get our first dusting of snow. Or perhaps it’ll be like last year and we’ll get dumped on in November and then have a relatively snow free Christmas. Either way it’s coming and it’ll be interesting to see how well Ann Arbor handles plowing the streets. Living in Canton was fantastic as the streets were cleared almost immediately whereas Hamburg, being the boonies, was lucky if the streets were cleared within a couple of days. I suspect this being Ann Arbor that it’ll get pretty quick attention.

In the meantime I need to decide how I’m going to use my Krismas lights. We’ve got a few windows with outlets nearby that I can stick some in and our “backyard”, such as it is, has a wooden fence around most of it that might be a good spot to put a string or two. I should probably do that before the snow starts flying in any serious quantity. I probably won’t, but I really should.

I’ve updated my picture in the sidebar to something a little more autumn-ish as well as current (some of the other pics of me were a couple of years old) and I’ll be leaving the color scheme as it currently is as some folks seem to like it.

That pic was taken just this morning right outside our townhouse with the sun behind me which explains why my eyes are so puffy. It was a comfortably cool morning for early November. Fresh with the promise of a new day after an election that made history. As you can see I took the shears to my head last night before bed though I didn’t bother to apply a razor as I was already tired. The hair is about as close to the skin as you can get it with standard shears. I had an alternate pic with more of a smile and a bit of the sun flaring around the side of my head, but I wasn’t sure it was as good of a pic as this one. Maybe I’ll post it later if anyone’s curious.

On a totally unrelated note, but something I’ve been meaning to mention for awhile now, what the hell is going on with gasoline prices? Last Friday I filled up the tank at a station selling gas for only $2.09 a gallon! Checking MSN Autos’ Gas Price Finder there’s at least one station in my area selling gas today for $1.99 and the average price has dropped to $2.05! I can only figure the switch from the summer formula to the winter mix must be part of it, but that’s an amazing drop in price. Thanks to living so close to work and school I’m only filling up once every other week these days, but I’ll take the lower gas prices just the same.

My one concern is that some folks will take this as a sign that they can go back to buying big gas guzzlers as the “crisis” is over. It appears, though, that the shitty economy is keeping people from buying cars at all. GM’s sales in October plunged 45%, Chrysler down by 35%, and Ford was down 30%. Even Toyota saw sales fall by 23%. None of which is good news for Michigan. Hopefully when things improve enough for sales to pick up folks will make wiser car buying decisions and not rush back to the huge vehicles because gas is cheap.

We decided to sleep in until 6:30AM and then got up, tossed some clothes on, brushed our hair, and headed to the polls. Got there a couple of minutes before they were due to open at 7AM. There was already a line stretching down two hallways that looked like it would take hours to get through, but it actually moved pretty quickly. We were done and home within an hour and a half at which point I took a quick shower and was only 10 minutes late getting to work. So I’ve done my civic duty and can sit back and watch the results roll in. Well, once I get through the work day and class tonight. We’re having a test so my mind may be on things other than politics today.

If you’ve not gotten out to vote yet (assuming you’re an American who can vote) then be sure to do so. You’ve got until 8PM and if you’re in line at 8PM you’ll be guaranteed a chance to vote. No excuses. Get out there and get it done.

So Friday was Halloween and it’s a good thing that my in-laws dropped that bag of candy off as we actually had a few trick or treaters this year. Not a whole lot, the one bag still had a fair amount left over when it was done, but enough to make us feel like we actually got to participate for a change. Another cool part of the evening was getting to meet at least one of our neighbors who were also giving out candy. It was their first Halloween in the townhomes as well and were just as curious as to whether or not we’d see any trick or treaters. Ended up chatting with them (I’m not mentioning their names because I’m not sure if they’d be comfortable being blogged about) for a good part of the evening well after the ghosts and goblins retired for the night and we had a lot in common. I’m looking forward to hanging out with them from time to time.

Saturday was spent running about for the first half as Courtney worked early in the day and then Anne worked in the latter half. About the time Anne went to work Courtney was ready to come home so after dropping the wife off I hurried over to pick up the kid. She was upset because her paycheck was a lot less than she expected it to be so she called work when we got home and discovered that she’s paid weekly and not biweekly like she had thought. So we got back in the car and went up to her job so she could pick up the second paycheck she didn’t know about. Then down to Fantastic Sams so she could get her hair cut. We were back home for about ten minutes when my phone rang and it was Anne asking if I could run a book up to her place of employment. She’s working in an assisted living facility for folks with traumatic brain injuries and had been assigned to sit and monitor a client who had been having trouble. That meant a lot of time sitting in the room doing nothing. So I grabbed the book she’s been reading and piled into the car and ran it up to her job. Fortunately all of us work within five minutes of where we’re living these days so this wasn’t as much running around as it seems. I had a massive headache by the time I made it back home, though, and spent the rest of the day zoning in front of the TV and playing WoW with Courtney.

Everyone had Sunday off and we spent it being mostly lazy. Anne worked on the laundry and we all sat around and watched the Marky Mark movie Shooter during dinner. Other than laundry not a lot was accomplished yesterday.

That’s what we’ve been up to, how about you guys?

It’s Monday already? Damn, was hoping I still had more time in my weekend. Which is saying a lot considering I took Friday off to go to my sister-in-law’s wedding.

Another of Anne’s sisters has taken the matrimony plunge and did it with style having a Fantasy themed wedding with dragons and castles aplenty. So rather than dressing up in formal clothes we ended up busting out the Renaissance Fair garb and going as a merchant and wench.  Courtney was in the wedding party as a bridesmaid and as such had a custom costume made for her ahead of time. The groomsmen rented knight costumes from a local costume shop and we even had at least one relative of the groom show up in full knight regalia (he was a SCA member). It made for an odd site with most of the guests in traditional formal clothes and the rest of us looking like extras from a bad dragon movie. I have to admit to being very impressed with the reverend who did the ceremony, though, as in addition to the traditional Christian style marriage he also performed a fairly decent - and very pagan - handfasting! Either he’s very progressive or fairly ignorant of the significance of a handfasting, either way it was a pretty cool addition to the ceremony.

Spent a good chunk of the rest of the weekend hopping in and out of World of Warcraft as the zombie invasion world event they’re running to herald in the upcoming release of the expansion has grown progressively more complex. By the time I went to bed on Sunday the amount of time between being infected to becoming a zombie had diminished from 10 minutes to one minute and many of the Argent Dawn healers that were curing folks had left the cities as the Lich King’s necropolis started appearing near the capitol cities once again (this happened once before with the opening of the Naxramas raid dungeon). New argent dawn NPCs have shown up in the cities handing out quests, some of which hint at a cure, and flying scourge fortresses are showing up in several high level areas such as Winterspring, Eastern Plaguelands, Tanaris, etc. that require players to go battle the invading scourge. The zombie problem has gotten so bad that small towns are completely overrun and even the capitol cities are in danger of being wiped out of NPCs. Needless to say this is making questing for the lower-level players a lot more difficult as even if they manage to make it into a town without being killed by the wandering zombies they may find they can’t turn in a quest because the quest giver is dead and hasn’t respawned yet. Needless to say some people are complaining it’s gotten out of hand, but it’ll improve over the coming days as the story progresses so their pain shouldn’t be too lengthy. [Minor Update: It appears the zombie plague will be ending around 12 noon PST today. It’s not the end of the world event, but the cure appears to have been found.]

All of that is going on at the same time as the Hallow’s End holiday event. So in addition to zombies all over the place players are contending with frequent visits from the Headless Horseman setting various buildings on fire in Goldshire and other newbie zones as well as trick or treating and making the trek to the Scarlet Monestary to put down the Horseman where he sleeps. Toss in all the changes to the game from the new 3.0.2 client and things like the new achievement system and it makes for a lot of chaos in the game at the moment and I’m having a blast with it myself.

As if all of that wasn’t enough we had good friends Bob and JethricOne out on Saturday night to watch a couple of fantasy themed DVDs: The Gamers and The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. Both are very low-budget comedies about a group of pen and paper role playing gamers playing through a campaign. We see not only the players playing, but also their characters as they act out what’s happening in the story. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons or any other RPG with a bunch of hardcore gamers then you’ll find a lot to laugh at in these movies. It’s geek humor at its low-brow best.

So it probably goes without saying that I’m way behind on what’s going on in the world this morning. On booting up Google Reader I noticed that my “Friend’s Shared Items” was up to almost 70 entries let alone the rest of my RSS feeds. There’s probably lots I’ve missed so if I post anything that’s a few days old, well, now you know why.

Not so much for the stuff I could buy with all the money, though that is a benefit, so much as for all the time it would free up to do shit I wanna do instead of shit I have to do. There are so many places I’d like to visit and so many projects I’d like more time to work on that all this time spent earning a living is seriously getting in the way. Not to mention not having any money to go anywhere or do the things I’d like to do. If I had the means I’d quit my job and spend my time doing all the cool stuff I’ve wanted to do such as traveling.

The funny part is I wouldn’t make a very good rich person. Allow me to explain: I’ve been reading The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) by Peter Sagal and one of the chapters is all about Consumption, as in “conspicuous consumption.“ It talks about how quite a bit of what rich people spend their money on is less about the item itself as it is about being able to afford the item in question. There’s no real practical need, for example, for a $15,000 15K solid gold bathroom sink, but it’s something a lot of rich people buy because they can.

Should I ever be fortunate enough to become rich there is quite simply no amount of money I could possibly have that would result in me saying, “Hey, let’s buy a $15,000 solid gold bathroom sink just for the hell of it.“ I could be richer than Bill Gates and it would still never cross my mind to ever consider such a purchase. I probably wouldn’t even buy particularly expensive cars, though I’d love to be able to walk into a dealership and just buy one outright. I could see possibly buying a big house for the tax breaks, but even then there’d be limits. I would spend a good chunk of change traveling because I’d probably find the comforts of first class worth the extra money, but I wouldn’t buy my own jet or anything silly like that.

My charitable contributions would go way up as well. There’s more occasions that I’m happy with where I’d like to donate to a cause and just couldn’t afford to do so. Plenty of family members and friends who have run into rough patches where a spare $100 would help out and we didn’t have the cash. We do what we can when we can, but I’d like to do more and being rich would certainly make that possible.

I definitely wouldn’t be one of those rich people who becomes obscenely rich and then keeps on working to become even more obscenely rich. Had I written the first Harry Potter book instead of J.K. Rowling it’s likely there’d never have been any sequels because she made a bazillion dollars off the first book alone. Well, maybe one or two sequels just to cement the fact that I’d never need to work again, but that’s probably it.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to find a way to become rich. Not obscenely rich, but rich enough that I can afford to do what I’d like to do instead of working. I was working on a book myself for awhile, but it hasn’t been a smooth process and I’ve not worked on it in awhile. I doubt I’ll get rich through writing something. What I need is a good idea that starts off small and then explodes in such a way that I can sell it to some big company and retire. The modern day examples are web services like Google or Yahoo!, but I doubt I can think of anything that revolutionary. The classic example is the guy who came up with Pet Rocks. Here is where I start to suffer from a lack of imagination and my own skepticism. There’s stuff out there that’s made people wildly rich that I never in a thousand years would have considered as being something anyone would buy.

So it looks like I’ll be stuck doing what I’m doing for awhile longer until I can find some source of inspiration. Still, it never hurts to keep those ideas percolating in the back of my head. Perhaps I’ll stumble across something absurd enough that everyone will want it and I’ll realize my dream. Until then I’ll buy a lotto ticket every so often to see if I can get lucky.

I suppose I can’t complain too much as it is almost eight years old with almost 150,000 miles on it, but damn if it isn’t one thing it’s another and then a couple more on top of that.

First, there’s something rubbing near the front driver’s side wheel when I drive. It doesn’t seem to be affecting the handling at all and I’ve looked and can’t see what the hell it is, but it’s loud enough that it attracts stares from people as I pass by. When I had my tires worked on not too long ago I asked the guys to let me know if they noticed anything and they couldn’t figure it out either. So I don’t know if it’s a serious problem or not.

Then my Service Engine Soon light has come back on. You may recall back around this time last year it came on and I took the car to Auto Zone and they told me it was a Camshaft Sensor Out of Range error in the car’s computer. I bought the part to fix it, but before I ever got around to figuring out how to put it in the light went off and stayed off until about a week ago. I still have the part and I’ll probably head up to Auto Zone to see if it’s the same error and perhaps it’ll go away before I get around to fixing it again.

Lastly, and this one really annoys the hell out of me, Anne went shopping at Meijers on Monday and when she came out the passenger side review mirror was broken. The weird part is that whoever broke it took the time to clean up most of the glass before they left. Considering that this is a powered mirror I’m guessing that getting it replaced will cost a small fortune, but I use all my mirrors quite a bit and not having one on that side is really pissing me off.

So, yeah, the car is in rough shape these days and I’d really like to trade it in on a new on, but money’s tight and we really need two cars anyway and so it’s not happening anytime soon. Unless I suddenly become rich or something.

My cat has certain needs and he is quite capable of letting me know what they are:

Click to embiggen!

Though usually, like at this very moment, he’s sitting directly in front of my LCD monitor when he’s trying to exert his mental mind control on me. That often works because there’s little point in using a computer when you can’t see the screen. If I continue to ignore him, as I’m doing now, I risk him moving around the keyboard and leaning in to get his forehead as close to mine as possible so as to increase the telepathic waves he’s emitting. If that doesn’t work then he’ll gently bite my arm or hand to get my attention, meow in a particularly pathetic way (as he just did), and get right up into my face and purr as though there were no tomorrow. The truly sad part is that he’s almost never without any food and he just wants me to pet him while he’s eating.

Excuse me, I need to go give my cat the attention he

I had intended to get some blogging in this weekend, especially after seeing headlines that the Big Three might become the Big Two which would be huge news for us Michigan people, but I couldn’t think of what to say that would be all that interesting. In fact I’ve been in a bit of a blogging malaise lately. Maybe I’m just burned out from all the political drama what with the upcoming election and all, I’m still astounded that the Presidential race is going to be close, or maybe it’s the changing of the seasons. Not sure, but I know several of you have sent me some very good links lately hoping I’d write something on them and so far I’ve had little to nothing that seemed worth saying. It probably doesn’t help that I’m currently participating in both the Wrath of the Lich King and LittleBigPlanet beta tests and both ate up a good chunk of my weekend. So I’ll write a little bit about those for now:

With regards to Blizzard’s expansion to World of Warcraft all I can say is: Wow! As far as I know they haven’t updated the graphical abilities of the client in any way, but you’d almost swear that they did with just how gorgeous the WotLK expansion looks. The designers have really learned how to squeeze every last drop of goodness out of the client. If I had to guess I’d say that most of the improvement comes from improved texture use, but it’s also clear that they’ve learned a few tricks to making the low-polygon models look like they’re more detailed than they really are. Of particular note are some of the special effects. Fire, for example, has always looked a bit cheesy in WoW so when I first stepped foot into the Ember Clutch and saw all the trees caught in the midst of a fairly realistic looking forest fire I was, to say the least, impressed. There’s another effect when fighting the ghosts of a Norse looking race new to the game on the beaches of Riplash Ruins that caught my eye immediately. When the ghosts die they explode into a pile of seaweed. The expansion just looks fantastic all the way around and the variety in landscape is higher than I thought it would be given the frozen theme of the expansion.

It’s also obvious that Blizzard has learned a lot over the years in how to tell a story in a MMO and make people feel a part of the world. The main villain of this expansion, Arthus aka The Lich King, shows up early and often rather than just sitting in his dungeon waiting for players to get high enough to take him down. Not only do Death Knights interact with him quite a bit during their first two levels of experience—you have to go through a quest line to free yourself from being his slave—but he also shows up in at least one of the two starting zones for people arriving in Northrend. Reportedly he shows up through various quest lines all the way through the different zones of the expansion. Did I mention the expansion is huge? I’ve been playing the beta since shortly after it opened up and I’ve only gotten to level 72 on two of my characters, my hunter and my mage, and I’ve only made it to three of the different zones so far, not counting Dalaran which I got portaled to at one point. I’m sure someone will power level their character to level 80 in just a day or two, but for those of us who actually play the game for the content it should take a couple of months at the least to get to 80. It’s amazing to see how much stuff they’ve crammed into the game and I’m looking forward to seeing client 3.0.2 drop tomorrow bringing a good chunk of the user interface and game changes along with it. It’ll basically contain everything except for the new Northrend content to the current game.

The LittleBigPlanet beta has been a blast. The first few platform levels you’ll go through teach you everything you need to know about how to play the game and control your sackboy as well as getting you started on your collection of items you can use to customize the game. It feels a little simplistic at first, but it quickly becomes apparent that it has a lot of hidden depth. Already there are a ton of user created levels available all of which it was recently announced will be carried over to the live game. The game is as gorgeous and cute as the screenshots have shown and it can be surprisingly difficult to snag all the collectibles in a level. I’ve not created much of anything myself yet, but I’ve had a blast seeing what others have come up with. One person managed to put together a fully functional electronic calculator in the game using the available parts. It’s a surprising creation that leaves one to wonder what else might be possible. I think this one is going to sell a lot of PS3s.

So that’s what I did with my weekend. How about you guys?

Didn’t get on the computer much this weekend, and what little I did was spent playing the Wrath of the Lich King beta, so I’m once again two days behind on what’s going on in the world. Most of Sunday was spent at my parent’s place while the wife and kid and my sister went to a bridal shower for one of my sister-in-laws. I spent most of that time napping on the couch. I also played way too much Burnout Paradise on my PS3 this weekend after starting the game over again so I could earn the trophies that were just added with the most recent patch.

In regards to World of Warcraft one thing I’m really looking forward to with the release of the WotLK expansion is a new title you can earn via an achievement. It’s an homage to the infamous Leroy Jenkins party wipe video and it’s called, appropriately enough, Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy! You gain it by killing 50 rookery whelps within 15 seconds and as a reward you gain the title “Jenkins” which shows up after your character’s name. In the case of my Dwarven Hunter it would make it appear as though his name is “Balfour Jenkins.“ Given that my last name really is Jenkins then it should go without saying why this is the single most important achievement I can aspire to in the game.

Let’s see, is there anything else from the weekend worth talking about? Hmmmm. I may have helped SEB regular JethricOne convince his wife that they NEED to have a PS3 and a shiny new HDTV on Saturday. Just doing my part to stimulate the economy by getting other people to spend their money. Anything else? Nope. Guess that is it for now.

Interesting article at the L.A. Times titled Remember ‘go outside and play?‘:

Reader, if you’re much over 30, you probably remember what it used to be like for the typical American kid. Remember how there used to be this thing called “going out to play”?

For younger readers, I’ll explain this archaic concept. It worked like this: The child or children in the house—as long as they were over age 4 or so—went to the door, opened it, and ... went outside. They braved the neighborhood pedophile just waiting to pounce, the rusty nails just waiting to be stepped on, the trees just waiting to be fallen out of, and they “played.“

Thirty years ago I was 11 years-old and I played outside quite a bit. Despite growing up in Pontiac our neighborhood had a touch of suburbia to it and the house I grew up in was right next to a vacant corner lot owned by the family that lived on the lot behind it. We called it The Field and it had three rows of trees down it with a big dirt ring encircling them from where countless kids had ridden bicycles, go-karts, and minibikes around and around. Stepping out the back (actually side) door of our house and walking across the driveway was all it took to escape to a world of imagination. For being a big lot with a bunch of trees in it we found plenty to do there. Neighborhood baseball games, games of tag, riding bikes, playing in the rain, losing our “action figures” in the grass, playing with the family dog, and so on. I once asked the man who owned it why he never developed it and he told me he left it empty so us kids and his own kids, he had a son and daughter himself, would have a place to play. Go to the neighborhood today and you’ll find that the lot has been sold and two newer homes crammed into it. A discovery that both surprised and saddened me. There’s a whole bunch of us who had years of play time invested in that empty lot and it’s sad to think that it won’t be available to future generations. There aren’t any parks close at hand to that neighborhood, but I suppose it doesn’t matter as most kids don’t play outside anymore.

Above and beyond The Field, I can remember having a pretty free run of the neighborhood even at a young age. I had friends who lived down the street or one street over and I used to go over to their houses to play regularly. I can recall walking to Alcott Elementary school every day as well starting in first grade, a distance of at least a couple of miles (uphill, both ways). I can recall being very envious of the kids who got to ride on a school bus once the January winds started in full force. As I grew older the distance I was allowed to traverse grew considerably. By the time I was in high school I was regularly biking to friend’s houses that were several miles away. One of my girlfriends lived a good 20 minute bike ride away and I used to ride the bike over to the Pontiac Mall (Summit Place Mall today) which took over an hour even with shortcuts. Once some of us got our licenses we’d get together all the time to hang out.

In comparison after Courtney came to live with me she stayed a lot closer to home. Part of that may be the fact that, unlike myself, she’s always had access to the Internet and thusly could keep in contact with her friends without having to pick up a phone and go physically hang out with them. She didn’t have anywhere near as regimented life as some kids do today, but she also didn’t go outside as much as I did as a kid. Not that we didn’t try to encourage her to go out more and hang out with friends. Now at 18 she’s just starting to hang out with her friends and go places with a frequency that’s somewhat similar to what I used to do at 16.  We didn’t plan it that way, that’s just how it sort of went. Of course I had the advantage of living in the same house for most of the first two decades of my life whereas Courtney with both parents has had more homes already than I’ve had in my entire life. The six years we lived in Canton was the longest stretch she’s had in one place. I sometimes feel bad that she didn’t get to have the sort of childhood I did.

Hat tip to Fallacio.us for the link.

I forgot that I’m dealing with Crazy Young College people and by the time I got to the school the line was already longer than the number of computers - PC and Mac combined - they were selling. So I said to hell with it and went to work. Though I almost got one because when I first showed up I didn’t see the crazy line and walked right up to the counter where the helpful lady started to take my request until someone else pointed out that I had just walked up and had not been in the actual line. It was completely unintentional though I admit I thought it was odd the crowd was so small when I walked up. I just figured I was lucky.

Anyway on the way out the door I spoke with a building maintenance guy who was walking by and said I wasn’t motivated enough to get up earlier to join the line. He said that the line had started forming around 3AM because when he got there at 4AM to open the building there were already a bunch of people waiting. That’s when I realized I had forgotten I was dealing with crazy young college people. I would’ve liked to have had a Mac to play around with, but not enough to go get in line at three in the morning. So those of you hoping this would result in my conversion to the Cult of Mac, well, maybe next time.

Thanks to the remnants of hurricane Ike we got our first real heavy rains here in Ann Arbor since we moved into the townhouse. Our landlady had warned us not to stack too much stuff along the walls in the basement until after the first heavy rain because some of them do leak, but we hadn’t seen any signs of water on the walls or floor when we moved in so we put our computers down here and stored some boxes only to find out that, yes, we do have a leak. With that discovery came some good news and some bad news. The good news is we didn’t really have anything near where the leak is occurring, our computers are on the other side of the room and the boxes are far enough away that it wasn’t a problem and the leak itself was more a trickle than a torrent. The bad news is that it’s coming through the wall via the circuit breaker box which is just scary as hell and its fair enough away from the drain in the floor that it leaves quite the meandering puddle of water before it gets to the drain.

So we called to have the building maintenance guys make an emergency stop by the apartment to check it out and see if we were in any danger of shorting out the circuit breakers and starting a fire. We also noted that it appears part of the problem has to do with the gutters on that corner of the building (we’re in the last unit on the end) as they appear to be overflowing and making for a small lake at that corner which is undoubtedly contributing to the flow of water through the wall. Chuck, one of our friendly maintenance men, showed up in no time and took a look after taking the cover off the breaker box. Fortunately the rate of seepage is slow enough and the point of origin low enough that we’re not in any danger of having it short out the circuit breakers so we put a bucket underneath the box to catch the water and a towel down to catch anything the bucket misses. Once the rain stopped yesterday the water stopped coming through the wall almost immediately, but we’re expecting another round of heavy rain tonight (some 2 to 4 inches we’re told) so we’ll have to keep an eye on it. Once things dry up in a couple of days they’ll see what they can do to fix things up including repairing the gutters, improving flow away from the building, and possibly jack hammering the wall out where it’s leaking and patching it up properly. Something they’ve done more than once it seems, which is understandable as these buildings are over 30 years old.

I have to give the staff here at Mill Creek Townhouses a lot of credit. We’ve called them at least a dozen times with various small issues we’ve discovered since moving in and they’ve been quick to respond without complaint. One of the other issues they’re working on for us involves the dishwasher in the kitchen. Putting some dishes in the other night we accidentally broke off one of the tines that sticks up holding the dishes in place. It was rusted through at the base as are several of the other tines so we called to see if they could replace the bottom basket. Turns out they have to buy both the bottom and top baskets as a set and the cost is almost as much as a new dishwasher and the one we have is quite old already so they decided to just put a new dishwasher in. Can’t really complain about that. So if you’re moving to Ann Arbor some time soon for some reason I can’t fathom (not because Ann Arbor is a bad place, but because the economy in Michigan is so bad right now) then you may want to check these folks out.