I’m having a hard time deciding how to lay out the living room. I did some rough layouts, but thought I’d ask people for advice. I have two ways I want to use this room. To flop down and zone out in front of the television, and to sit around and talk with people in comfortable seats.
A few misc notes…. I do hope to put a full length sofa eventually, but not for a while. I would love to cut a door into the ‘north’ wall that would give direct access to the garage if it wouldn’t screw things up, and I’ll probably never light a fire in the fireplace but pulling out the whole thing with all the brick seems expensive and difficult.
This is the current layout. I kind of like it, except for the TV being too far away and hard to see. I really don’t want to buy a bigger one, though some people I’ve talked too have thought that would be a great idea.
This layout brings the TV closer, but makes it awkward to see. It also leaves part of the seating a long way away.
This last layout blocks off a channel as you walk in, which I kinda don’t like, but it’s not too bad. It would also use a sofa where the recliner is now to make that walk way in more defined.
Three photos of the actual room.
I’m in the process of buying a new house. I expected this to be a pain, and expected getting a mortgage to be an extra pain given the recent meltdown of the financial system. However, I underestimated the overreaction of a bank’s bureaucracy by quite a bit.
A number of times through this process, my mortgage broker has asked me to write a letter explaining some detail or other about the purchase, my recent financial history, or whatever was causing concern. This has been slightly painful, but today’s letter was over the top. I needed to explain why money transfers between two banks (the recipient being the one writing the loan) required a day’s delay to transfer instead of being instant.
Since I’m still asking them for a lot of money, I tried to hide my lost temper….
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m told that a letter is required explaining delays in the money transfers between my ETrade and Wells Fargo accounts on 6/29/2011 and 6/30/2011. I will start by explaining that two transfers were used because of a daily limit of $**,*** was insufficient to allow the funds to be transferred over a single day. Both transfers were scheduled with Etrade at the same time, and scheduled to take place on the 29th and 30th. However, Wells Fargo did not post the transfers until 6/30/2011 and 7/1/2011.
I have no understanding of why these transfers weren’t instant, but the one day delay is consistent with my previous experiences.
I can speculate about the causes if that might be helpful.
1) One of the banks involved may have found it to either be profitable or useful to hold money in limbo for as long as possible, and have found that a one day delay is acceptable to most account holders. They are then delaying the transfers for their own benefit.
2) This delay may be a side effect of various holdovers from accounting methods used when accounting was done manually. At that time it was the habit of banks to hold all transactions until the end of the day and then process them in large batches. It may be that E-Trade holds all transfers until the end of the day, then hands them over to outgoing banks. If this handover were to happen after the receiving banks (Wells Fargo in this case) have already started their batch receipt jobs, then the transfers would not be posted to the receiving account until after batch processing on the following day. This problem can obviously be exacerbated if the banks in question are in different time zones.
Thanks for your attention.
Don Garrett
Today was the last day of the trip. To save you this suspense… I really did make it home safely. However, the day started at Wil and Janet’s in LA. They were planning to spend the day watching football with the kids, and I got a couple of photos of people before I left (even if people weren’t ready for the photos).
Wil, Janet, Garrett, and Riley.
The visiting team, Me, Ken, and Derek.
Instead of taking the I5 route that we’ve always used when going to Blizzcon or crawfish boils in the past, I decided to take the slightly more scenic route up 101. This added about half an hour to the trip, but made it much more pleasant. Also, I can now say that I’ve ridden up from the south end of 101 to Morgan Hill.
The ride went pretty quickly and easily with no worries other than some rain that was a bit heavy in places. As I started getting close to hope, I started going through places I visited with my sister when she was in town, which made me think of her visit. It felt a bit surreal as I got closer and closer and things got more and more familiar. I really would rather keep going instead of stopping, but the real world must return.
I got home before this, but didn’t think to take a picture until after the sun had set. Everything around the house was fine, and my neighbor gave me the bucket of mail he’d saved for me while I was out of town almost right away. Easy to return to the normal pattern, but I hope I don’t go back to quite the same thing.
It looks like this trip was 9,701 miles total and 47 days. I plan to do one more post showing the cost of the trip as well, but I probably won’t get around to that for a while. I also hope to email everyone I got to visit along the way again, but since it’s late today, I probably won’t get to that for a bit.
Now to bed, and back to work tomorrow!
