synthaetic synapse

and so, we are guests in our own home, now. we put it on the market yesterday. we placed an offer on a house in town on Friday and it was accepted, contingent upon the sale of our house, on Saturday. nothing like working things backwards and living from behind the eight ball.

concurrent with all this, we got a new computer system in, and i have yet to get this old 21″ NEC MultiSync monitor calibrated on it. i’m about ready to give up: i can’t process photos on it right now because the color’s off and it’s way low-contrast even after several iterations of the half-hour long calibration routine. bah. it’s just one of those things, i guess, but i’ve been fighting it for two days and not getting any real work done, other than getting some print orders out, and those had to be done off the old machine with the new monitor. bah. computers suck. it’ll piss of #1 Son, but i think i’m going to swap monitors back and put the new one on here. there’s a point wherein the clients do have to come first.

obviously, the imminent move (presuming someone doesn’t out-bid us on that house with a non-contingent offer) weighs heavily on all of us. an interesting side-benefit is watching the kids actively seeking to gain parental favor by virtue of picking up after themselves. but of course, the weather has been crap, so no one’s seen these ultra-clean guest quarters we continue to call “home” other than ourselves and our realtor. winter’s a stupid time to be trying to sell a house out here, but we really had no control over the Spouse Unit getting laid off. and the timing with my not having any contracted client work from January through April was just one of those coinkydinks where you roll your eyes, sigh, say “Go fucking figure”, and sigh again.

other than that, we’re all doing fairly well. the Spouse Unit has accepted a job with a former employer out of California that is going to pay her decently without expecting us to move out there, so that part of our futures is looking bright. it’ll also suffice to see us through in case we have to leave this house on the market through the spring. sorry if that was redundant to a previous post. i’ve been so busy with trying to serve client orders, getting the house ready to show, and getting the new system configured, calibrated, and all the software installed, that i’ve become too damn lazy to go read any previous posts. forgive me. i’ve gotten very adept at not allowing some emotions to show to my fellow family members, for what it’s worth, so i suppose it’s only natural that i bitch and moan a bit on my blogs.

as i was taking photos of the house for the realtor on Monday, i couldn’t help but to think about all the photos that were taken from or of this property. so, i made a compilation of the ones that had been previously published on synthaetica.com.

we are back from the frozen wastelands of slightly-north-of-here. despite being this far north (relative to the residences of many of my readers), this was our first “truly white” Christmas in several years. yeah, yeah, yeah…there’s been snow on the ground the last few years…snow like somebody went and opened a fifty-pound bag of flour over every square mile. this year, there were actually a few inches of sun-and-wind-skinned snow setting, and some appreciable drifts courtesy of the wind.

it was an early Christmas this year, thanks once again to the sisters’ conflicting work schedules. one of my brothers-in-law got half the family sick because of something he brought along with him after having gotten it from one of his kids. so our short, early Christmas rapidly became a care center for the stricken: my other brother-in-law, my son, and both of my parents-in-law. i knock on wood several times a day.

i am trying to pump out the blog transfer for the otherwhirled and synthaetica, but i have experienced a wordpress import problem that may ultimately require me to do the import directly from the database. in fact, i should probably just do that and scrub the support ticket. it’s been a while since i did something completely databasey, anyway.

and, for what it’s worth, i know this will eventually come up in searches for wordpress+'import & problem'which is by no means the point of this post. but in case that happens, i hope you read down to this to discover me saying “the wordpress import problem is probably somewhere in my php.ini, the default installation of which is an excellent example of too much information in the way of code-comments provided in the file.” because if it wouldn’t be such a butt-pain to read without all the comments, but my limited understanding of regular expressions keeps me from making that available in any sort of responsible, feasible time. besides which, i’m not really confident of the intrinsic, ongoing, and long-term benefit of seeing that file as just a bunch of settings with no explanations. heh. i’ll just have to sit down and read the whole damn thing one of these days, but….*yawn*….

anyway, we are back, except for #1 Daughter, who is continuing her annual stay with her grandparents, who always enjoy her company. she’ll be coming back on New Year’s Eve, i believe. and we are back, but will quite likely be moving—out of this house at a very likely minimum, and possibly even out of the state. it’s all rather hypothetical right now, but the bottom lines are fairly simple. the Spouse Unit is getting laid off where she works, and some of her best job opportunities could potentially lead us to “follow the money” to places as far apart as Santa Clara, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in Florida. Colorado Springs would be our preferred area if our current location isn’t an option, although Minneapolis would put us closer to the Spouse Unit’s sisters.

but even that aside, the other bottom line is the fact that even after putting a lot of money down on this house when we moved here, the inherent limitations on how much i can make when working almost entirely alone coupled with the fact that companies out here do not come even close to compensating intelligent, well-educated females for what they’re actually worth is forcing us to consider selling this house and moving into town. None of us want to do that, but since we put so much down on the house (which was actually a very good idea on the time, just one that was based primarily on the expectation that it’d take the Spouse Unit about six months to get hired. instead, it took almost 18. and then her layoff comes at the bottom of the bell curve of my business cycle (not many people get married in the winter, and soccer’s not a good game when it’s less than 40 degrees. cold-weather injuries are a bitch).

so, it looks very strongly like we’re moving. we just have to figure out how not to make it an entirely bad thing for #1 Son and #1 Daughter. the photo is from our current front porch just this morning. several retouch methods, obviously. predictably, with the prospect of moving looming over us, i will be more inclined to document the views for what little time i have remaining.

congratulations to my father, by the way. it took the VA until just this past Monday to finally award him 50% disability with back-pay. it should have been at least 75%, but now that he has finally been awarded something, the paperwork, while considerable, is much easier to file. i’m glad you finally got something out of them, Dad. hang in there!