February 2009 Archives

I am definitely getting more and more girly in my old age. In the past few years I've found myself admiring various purses. Purses! It wasn't that long ago that I didn't even carry a purse, and now I love them. I just got a new one, and it's a funny/cool story so I thought I'd share, even though talk of purses has probably already driven away any male readers.

A while ago, I came across Sarah's blog. I can't even remember how I found it -- maybe from Dallas, who I found through Becca? Anyway, I had randomly clicked on Sarah's site, and as I scrolled through her crafty posts, I suddenly realized that I knew her! She lives here in Houston, works for a NASA contractor, and we used to play soccer together. Small world, right? So I added her blog to my RSS reader and have been thoroughly admiring all of her projects. She really makes me want to learn how to sew something fierce.

So when I saw her post that she was selling this cute bag that she made, I jumped on it. It's a great bag, and doubly cool because I know who made it. Hooray for handmade!

I consider myself a fairly social person and I like to spend time with my friends as much as the next person. But I also value my down time, especially my weekends. Yesterday I spent 12 straight hours being social and although it was tons of fun, I feel exhausted today! Jose found out on Friday that one of his good friends, Semi, from MIT would be passing through Houston on his cross-country move from LA to DC. They hadn't seen each other in four years, so we made last-minute plans for lunch with him. We also got Jose's friend Meryl, who lives here in Houston and also went to MIT, to join us. We ate lunch at Chuy's in River Oaks and then, because Semi and Jose wanted more time to catch up, we went to a bar near downtown and hung out at one of their picnic tables for a few hours. Then we went over to Meryl's apartment for dinner (her husband James made the most delicious meatballs I've ever had). THEN we came back to Clear Lake and ended up at Gavin and Jen's to watch the Oscars. I didn't get home until midnight, and of course I had to be at work at 8:00 this morning. It was all very tiring, but it was really a great Sunday.

As for Saturday, I'd planned a while ago to get up early Saturday morning to go to the Houston Zoo's photo day. But it was at 8:00 a.m. and I already mentioned in my last entry how wiped out I was after Friday's sim. The last thing I wanted to do was have to wake up to my alarm, so I stayed home and slept till 11:00. Glorious! After a yummy lunch at South Shore Grille, Jose and I headed out for the 50-minute drive to Sienna Plantation in Missouri City. We went all that way just to see a house -- and not because we plan to buy a house that far away, but because it was the closest development that had one in the floor plan we like best. Magnolia Creek only has one in the framing stage. It was a long way to drive, but worth it because it's really important to be able to see the house as it will actually look. A floor plan can only tell you so much!

It is really quite a nice floor plan. The family room/dining room/kitchen is one big open area with an A-line ceiling. Another feature that is not pictured is a large round "rotunda" that serves as the foyer. It is unlike any other floor plan we've seen, and is both crazy and cool. At this point, this is what we are leaning towards building if the other pieces fall into place.

Looking from the family room towards the kitchen:

Looking from the kitchen towards the family room and back of the house. Off to the left is a sunroom/study.

Looking from the sunroom/study back towards the great room.

Update: Since Karen asked, here's the floor plan. It's 2715 square feet. Yep, houses in Texas are big and cheap.

There's something about spring that sends me into overdrive. It is always a crazy busy time of year, no matter how calm I tell myself it's going to be. Throw in wedding planning plus potential house buying and instead of just crazy busy, it's CRAY. ZEE. BUSY.

Take Wednesday night, for example. After a full day at work, I met Jose at the mortgage broker's office for an hour. Then we had time for a quick dinner at Thai Cottage (yum). Then it was home where I worked on my class project for 3 hours, then checked a few small wedding items off the list, then started working on vectorizing artwork for BAM jerseys. Then it was midnight and definitely time for bed!

Last night? More of the same. Left work at 5:00 and went home to finalize my part of the class project. At 7, I met my group at Kinko's where we spent an hour gathering all the pieces and putting them together to get printed. We'll meet again on Monday to assemble everything. (The project was to make a board game -- board, cards, rules, box, and all.) I was home by 8, at which point I did get to relax with Jose for an hour. Then it was more work on the BAM artwork followed by an early bedtime for once.

Today? I capped off the week with a rendezvous sim that left me exhausted, as they tend to do. I love simming, but in a way, being the rendezvous officer is like standing at attention for 8 hours straight. Once I get home at the end of the day, I am seriously wiped out.

One thing I haven't done in far too long? Run. Whenever I'm busy, exercise is always the first thing to go, which is unfortunate since it's such a good stress reliever. It's also unfortunate because I am not going to be in good shape for the Texas Independence Relay. I hate to let my team down, but it is what it is. I might as well be honest about it.

Then again, I might not get to do the relay at all due to the continuing fluctuations in the STS-119 launch date. I'm working both the launch and the Orbit 1 shift, so I might have to be at work instead of running across east Texas. Though it would likely make my team faster, it would still be sad.

It's good to know that in these tough economic times, when thousands if not millions of people can no longer afford their home, the banks are still willing to lend insane gobs of money to the people they deem worthy...

Ugh.

Last night Jose and I met with a mortgage broker, not to actually put together any paperwork for a pre-approval or a loan, but just to get a lot of questions answered and put together a few scenarios detailing our options for a first-time home purchase. In response to the mortgage crisis, banks have raised the minimum credit score they require for certain types of loans. No surprise, right?

Fortunately, I have a pretty good credit score. In fact, I have a high enough credit score that I could get a loan for the price range in which we intend to buy -- on my income alone.

Of course, I would never buy a house in this price range on my income alone because the monthly mortgage+tax+insurance (i.e. housing money) is 50% of my monthly net income. That's far higher than the 30-35% that most financial budget-planning experts advise, and higher still than what I'm paying right now. And while I could afford to spend that much if I truly wanted to, the rest of my life would take a pretty big hit in terms of eating out, activities, and travel.

Basically, banks are willing to lend me a very large sum of money that, while technically affordable, is not really in my best interest. And this is to say nothing of my future plans. What if I lose my job? (Fortunately mine is quite stable.) What if I get seriously ill? What if I change careers? The potential of me changing careers and taking a significant pay cut is very real, but mortgage companies seem to just look at a single data point -- what is my income and credit history at this very point in time -- to make a decision on whether they should loan me money that will be paid back over 30 years. That's a long time. A lot can happen financially, both good and bad, in 30 years.

I am smart and reasonable, and so I can take all this into account when I run the numbers to figure out what Jose and I can afford. (And we are fortunate to be in a position where it's really not whether we can afford a nice house as much as it's what we want to spend.)

Nevertheless, it's very easy, even now, to see how a lot of people could quickly get in over their heads with huge mortgage payments that they can't support.

All that said, our meeting with the mortgage broker was excellent. He answered all of our questions and put together a few different financing options. We left feeling much more educated about the home-buying process, which was exactly our goal in the first place.

And that is a good thing.

Some idiot took the police on a high speed car chase up I-45 yesterday, ramming the back of a cop car and flipping it over before trying the same trick with much less success on a cop SUV. He ended up wrecked, dragged out of the car, and thrown roughly on the concrete. Apparently the chase started in the apartment complex right across from the JSC credit union -- a complex where many of my friends have lived in the past.

I swear, we really have some wack jobs down here in Clear Lake.

Hopefully the craziness is not due to something in the water, or a consequence of suburban life, because the house search continues for Jose and me, and everything we're looking at is even more suburban than my current apartment. We're coming to a conclusion on which neighborhood and which builder we feel most comfortable with, and it's actually a little scary how quickly we were able to narrow it down once we started really looking.

Our favorite neighborhood is Magnolia Creek, a golf course community on the west side of I-45 in League City. It's the neighborhood farthest away from work and the commute would be about a half hour, which is about as much as I'm willing to do. It's been there for 5-6 years, so part of the area is established, but they're still building in one section. There will be more sections opened up in the future, so overall the development is probably 50-60% complete.

Coventry and David Weekley are the two builders in that area. Both are more expensive than other builders in this area, but I think part of that is simply the location. Both are similar in price, but we like the Coventry floor plans much better than the Weekley options. We've been back to Coventry three times now, and haven't been anywhere else more than once, so it seems that the decision has been made. By the end of the month we might be building a house. Crazy.

In fact, it's sort of insane to think about how many major decisions we've made in the past few months -- marriage, wedding, to-leave-Houston-or-not-to-leave, and buying a house.

Related to another one of those major decisions is this -- Jose is starting his new job today! He is moving to the engineering directorate, where he will be working on more technical projects and helping design the next NASA vehicle. He's pretty excited, and I know he's going to be much happier over there, but the transition is going to be weird. Many of you already know this, but in case you don't: back in 2006, after only 6 months of dating, Jose and I applied for and got spots in the rendezvous flight control office. So we have not only worked in the same group for the past 2+ years, but we've also been in the same office. Our desks were only about 6 feet from each other. (There are four other people in the same big room as well.)

So after two years of spending literally every moment of the day together, he's now in another building. Although working in such close proximity was never really a problem, I know that the move is definitely for the best...I mean, it can't be healthy to spend that much time together, and it's better to have a married couple working in separate locations. But it's weird to look at his desk now and know that he's not ever going to be there again.

If anyone has experience with Coventry homes as a builder, I'm all ears.

Jose has rediscovered his love for the NBA, so we've been going to a lot of games recently. And I've got to admit that I enjoy the games as well.

It reminds me of when I was in the 5th grade, and the Hornets became Charlotte's first professional sports team. The entire city went basketball-crazy -- not exactly a surprising thing in the already basketball-crazy state of North Carolina -- and we watched the Hornets games religiously. One night I even ripped one of my braces brackets off my front tooth while I was wildly cheering with a blanket in my hands. The blanket caught on my braces, since my mouth was wide open cheering, and bam -- we had an 11:30 p.m. emergency meeting at the orthodonist's office.

ANYWAY, I digress.

We went to a half dozen games last year, so a week ago we decided to just buy a 6-game package for the rest of this season. As a bonus, we will now have access to playoff tickets should the Rockets make it there (they're likely to make the first round at least). The games are really fun, and now that we've been to enough games I know all the guys on the team.

My favorite guy on the team is Shane Battier. He's my age, so I remember him from when he was at Duke, who of course played Georgia Tech on a regular basis as part of ACC conference play. With three family members having graduated with degrees from UNC, I know I'm supposed to call his alma mater "Dook" and all that, but hey, my dad went to Duke for a few years too. As a middle schooler, I wanted nothing more than to go to Duke. So I like Duke. And I like UNC. Deal with it.

ANYWAY, I digress again.

I like Shane Battier. He completely shut down Kobe Bryant when the Rockets played the Lakers last spring, which was awesome to watch. Everything I have seen of him in Houston, both on the basketball court and off, indicates that he is both a great basketball player and a great person. But he's more of a defensive player than an offensive guy, which means he doesn't get a whole lot of attention. In fact, the Rockets TV announcers often comment on how his job is to go out every single night and defend the best player on the other team -- not an easy task. That's why it was so cool to see this lengthy article in the New York Times today about Battier, "The No-Stats All-Star."

It might be time for a #31 t-shirt.

Today is Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday...and my dad's birthday! (Hint: he's not 200.) So happy birthday Dad. A belated happy birthday to my mom as well. Hers was Monday, but I didn't have a chance to say that until now because the past three days have been crazy busy.

Today, however, I have no sims. And though I love sims, I am looking forward to a day without one. Feel free to remind me of this in a couple weeks when I start complaining again about how I have no sims.

But onward.

To continue the wild swing of my life from "we're moving to DC" to "we're staying in Houston," you can now add "we're looking for a house." Yep, a house. To be honest, I could have probably bought a house years ago, thanks to the incredibly cheap real estate available in suburban Houston, but there was always a nagging "but I might leave" thought in the back of my mind. Yet the decision to stay here is feeling pretty permanent, at least for the next 5-10 years, and my upstairs neighbors are getting more and more annoying with their stomping and their music and their loud breakups with girlfriends.

Ok, so that might not be the best reason to buy a house. The point is that we are looking. Last weekend Jose and I drove all over the Clear Lake area to ooh and aah at various model homes. The housing market in Houston never really got out of control like it did in other parts of the country, and there is still a lot of new construction going on. While I hadn't really considered building a house until now, it is starting to seem like a very appealing option.

First, the idea of getting to pick my floor plan, pick all the options inside and out, and watch my house actually being constructed from the ground up is very appealing. Second, the timeline if we build is awesome. We can start the process now for very little money down, and we don't have to spend weeks or months looking (which we might, as I'm pretty picky). On top of that, we have more time to add to the downpayment we've already saved, and we don't have to deal with trying to move prior to the wedding. So I'm seeing very little downside to the idea of building.

That said, I welcome comments and advice from anyone who has done this before. There are dozens of different builders, and I have no idea how to determine which ones are better than the rest. Also, while I'll be great at choosing cabinets and tile, I don't know many specifics about what to look for in the actual construction of the house -- foundation, structure, plumbing, windows, and all that.

It's overwhelming. But so exciting!

This blog entry is going to sound like gobble-de-gook to most of you, so I apologize in advance.

Today's rendezvous sim was cra-a-zy. When all was said and done, I got to check off two major objectives: a one-orbit rendezvous delay, and a "null" dump of leaking propellant (that's not really "null"). And I learned a lot. So that is great.

I don't regret any of the decisions I made real-time during the sim, so that is also good.

But I am frustrated by my performance because I felt that I was lacking some of the information I needed to really feel confident in the decisions I was making. I felt like I was making decisions in the blind.

Case in point: we delayed rendezvous by one orbit because our trajectory had been perturbed by the afore-mentioned "null-but-not-really-null" dump. I thought at the time, and still think now, that we made the right decision in delaying.

But I had one flight controller telling me one thing in my left ear, and my back room telling me the opposite thing in my right ear -- and as I was trying to think, they were loudly arguing with each other. I went with my gut and agreed with the controller recommending that we delay.

In the end, I took blame for things that weren't my fault, and probably escaped blame for things I could have done better.

And tomorrow I get to do it all over again. Such is life in the rendezvous world!

I just got an email about the planning for this year's Yuri's Night 5K Fun Run, the race that I started in 2004. At first, I was surprised, because the email simply said that they'd chosen a race director for this year and just wanted to know if I'm available to answer any questions. What? They don't want me to help?

Then I remembered that 1) planning a race is really stressful and 2) if I'd wanted to do it, I certainly would have volunteered by now. So I'm excited. This year I'll actually be able to run the race for the first time. And it's also really, really cool to see that the race has survived so far without me planning it -- which was my biggest worry when I first realized I wouldn't be able to do it last year.

The Yuri's Night race has become a self-perpetuating fun run, and I'm the founder! That's pretty cool, since that was my goal all along.

I hope you'll all consider running it -- I plan to. I don't know the date yet, but it'll be in early-mid April. Keep your eye on the website.

After reading about poor Jose getting his wisdom teeth out yesterday, Liz and Debbie both sent me the link to this video of a 7-year-old coming off anesthesia. It's hilarious. Jose should be thankful he was not this funny, otherwise I definitely would have been forced to put him on YouTube.

As for Jose, all is well. The pain meds are kicking butt, as he says he feels virtually no pain. He's a little sore, the corners of his mouth are bruised, and he's starting to look like Richard Nixon/Marlon Brando -- but only on one side of his face so far.

He gave me permission to post these photos, which he remembers telling me to take, but doesn't remember me actually taking. (Weird.) He says he only remembers a few flashes from 9:00 yesterday morning when he went in to 5:30 yesterday when he woke up as if he'd just been asleep all day. Here he is just after I got him home:

Here he is typing on his computer, telling me what kind of ice cream and pudding he wanted me to get, because I totally couldn't understand what he was saying with all that gauze in his mouth.

And here he is just a few minutes ago. As you can see, he is looking much better today. :)

Jose got all four of his (very impacted) wisdom teeth removed this morning. I took him to the office, waited for the 45 minutes it took to remove the teeth and the 30 minutes it took for the IV sedation to begin to wear off, and drove him home. I definitely understand why they require that you bring someone to take care of you -- the whole way home he looked woozy and a little out of it. Every time we stopped at a light, he nodded off. I wonder if he'll even remember the drive home.

Now I'm sitting here and I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh, of course, because the process of getting ice packs on both sides of your jaw just makes you look like a cartoon character -- it's hard not to smile. But on the other hand, he just looks so tired, sad and injured. I've had very little experience with sick and injured people (certainly a good thing; my family and friends are a healthy bunch) and all I want to do is make it better, but I don't know how! Hopefully that's what the Vicodin is for.

He was in good spirits when we left the oral surgeon's office, and even drew this little self-portrait upon seeing himself in the mirror. But it took the pharmacy a half hour to fill the prescription, so the pain was starting before we were able to get home and get some painkiller in his system. He finally fell asleep so I'm hopeful that when he wakes up, the pain will have subsided. The oral surgeon said he'd probably have slightly above average pain, and "should swell up real good." Apparently maximum swelling doesn't happen until three days later, so the ice packs will have to stay on for a while.

My poor boy!

So, long story short:

At this time last week, Jose and I thought we were moving to Washington DC. He had a great job offer there, and I had...well, I had some good ideas of what I'd do. There were life-related reasons to stay in Houston, of course, but we'd decided that moving was the right decision for us right now. It was a decision we'd agonized over since November.

Then the situation changed in a way we never expected. In 24 hours, we went from absolutely knowing that we were moving to DC to absolutely knowing that we are staying in Houston.

Making the decision to move to DC involved picturing where we might live, imagining what I might do, and planning for living in a more expensive city on a much lower combined salary. I started to see us there, riding on the bike paths, going to visit the museums, camping amidst the rolling hills and the green, green trees. I liked the idea of being in the same city as my brother, in the same city as many of my old high school friends, two hours away from my dad's side of the family and within driving distance of Charlotte again. I grew up on the east coast, and I miss it.

So while I know that staying in Houston is also the right decision for us, the rapid shift in life plan has left me reeling. I can't totally explain the feeling to myself, much less to Jose, which sucks because it makes him think that I'm upset that we are staying here -- and that's really NOT it. There are some really great things about staying in Houston. We have many good friends here, Jose's family is only 4 hours away, and we're both very happy with our hobbies and activities here. We can buy a house this spring or summer, and really settle in.

But some part of me is in mourning for DC. And not for DC specifically, but for the big change it would have been, for the big life shake up that -- while completely over-the-top stressful in the short term -- might have been really cool.

Moving was scary, and staying is not. It's easy. Maybe too easy. A week ago my whole life was about to change, and now I feel like nothing is going to change.

But I need some change.

So now I have to figure out how to get it here.