Weblog

On December 21st, my mom closed on her brand-new home in Thornton. This was a momentous occasion for her, as it was a huge stepping stone after she and my dad separated nearly two years ago. My brother and I moved much of her things the weekend after closing. She still has a storage unit to empty out and a lot of unpacking to do, and we are not without challenges ahead, but I believe things are definitely looking up.

After the move, Felix and the rest of us enjoyed a quiet Christmas at home. Felix is now three years old, so this was the first Christmas that he was really able to understand things. Needless to say, he loved every minute of it, from seeing Santa and leaving him milk and cookies, to opening his (and others’) presents. He’s already anticipating Christmas 2018.

I have not written anything for quite some time now. First we were busy settling into the new house. Then early last year, I got promoted to a team lead position at Healthgrades.

At first, I was very optimistic. They had restructured the entire company into a new model, geared toward enabling teams to work more autonomously. And I had been given a really great team, and a great product team to work with. We built up the team, and we functioned very well together. However, it wasn't long until the well-entrenched Healthgrades culture intervened. More and more was asked of the team leads and senior engineers, to the point of many getting burned out. By summer, I had enough, and I started looking for a new job.

In September, I left Healthgrades and started a new job at LGS Innovations. Their web operation is not nearly as large as Healthgrades, but so far I am really enjoying it. Web development is a very recent focus for the company, so it's a skillset they are trying to build. I feel like I have a lot to offer the team, and I've been able to make some great contributions already.

If that wasn't enough, last February my dad dropped the bombshell that he was leaving my mom. My brother and I have been dealing with that ever since, and it has consumed all of my available free time, and then some. They quickly got to a point where they wouldn't speak to each other except through lawyers or my brother or me. I helped broker a settlement, which they agreed to at the 11th hour in October, just before their scheduled trial.

Since then, until just last weekend, my brother and I helped my mom get ready to move. The house is going to be sold, and she agreed to be out of the house by January 15th. So we helped her clean out all of her stuff. And there was a LOT. Things turned a bit frantic toward the end, but we did get her out of the house. Last weekend, she moved in with me temporarily, until my dad can get the house ready to sell. So, I now have both my mother and mother-in-law living with me. The next few months should prove interesting!

Well, we've not only closed on our new home, but we've sold our old one as well. We moved into our new place on June 17th, and we sold our old house one week ago. Thankfully, both transactions went relatively smoothly. The mortgage for our new house did end up delaying closing by a couple of days, thanks to Chase, who was the underwriter for the loan. Our mortgage broker smoothed things out as much as possible, but Chase was pretty terrible. They denied our initial request to rush the process, saying that they would have things done in time. Wrong! Instead, they came back asking for additional documentation, and we couldn't meet our original loan deadline. Thankfully the sellers were willing to delay things a couple of days.

Just before we closed on the new place, Felix started crawling. Within a couple of days, he was off to the races! He loved his newfound mobility.

After we had keys to the new house, we dove straight into moving. The two places weren't very far apart, so we moved everything ourselves. My brother helped us with the big stuff, and even stayed with us for a few days so we could get things done quicker. The only two pieces of furniture that turned out to be painful to move were my big heavy computer desk, and a couch that apparently wasn't made to go through doors. We had to take the old house's front door off its hinges in order to get it out, and we had to stand it on end to get it in the new house. The only thing we hired out was Nhu's piano; the movers made it look incredibly easy.

We ended up listing our old house for sale right after the 4th of July. We accepted an offer roughly a week later. Houses certainly are moving fast! We ended up only needing to do a few minor repairs on the house to sell it, and the sale process went so quickly that we didn't even need to make double mortgage payments. We couldn't have asked for much more than that.

Since then, I've been working on getting settled in at the new house. My first task was to wire the house for ethernet and get my home server set up. This turned out to be easier than expected, as they already had the lines run mostly everywhere, just capped with phone ports instead of ethernet ports. I just needed to swap out the ends. I did end up needing to run one line to the media center downstairs, but that was fairly easy with the crawl space below. With the house wired, I then set up a new Intel NUC as the home server, along with a NAS for storage. I also did the same setup for my dad for Father's Day, as he liked my media center setup and wanted one of his own.

My current task is running cable to support some IP video surveillance cameras, which is now nearly complete. Once I'm done, my next task is going to be decorating the house. Then we should be settled in!

Meanwhile, Felix is now pulling himself up on anything and everything. He's been walking everywhere while holding on to someone, and he's very close to being able to walk on his own. I can hardly wait!