Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I just wrote about everything that that has happened in the past month and thought I’d blah — I mean, blog — about this:

We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus all the money Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).

$68,000 in rent. Wow. It’s scary when you think about it. The obvious observation is, “shouldn’t you have brought a condo/house instead?” With 20/20 hindsight, sure, that would have been the right thing to do, but only because of a Fed-induced housing bubble.

When I first moved to Seattle, I didn’t have plans to stay that long. Specifically, I had to see if I liked my job and the area before committing. Common sense indicates that you should expect to own an house for 5 years before you recoup closing costs and turn the corner on paying mostly interest.

Of course, the housing bubble artificially caused a lot of temporary house value increases; if I’d bought something when I moved there and then sold it when I left, I could have made some decent money. On the other hand, the bubble could have popped earlier and I could have lost all my appreciation. And you also have to keep in mind that rent/buy ratios are way out of whack in the Puget Sound.

But, of course, the move back to the Boulder area was always in the cards and I did end up changing jobs much sooner than I would have guessed when I moved to Seattle, so who knows. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).

It has been about a month since my last post. And boy, has it been an eventful month:

• Movers came and turned out apartment into boxes. Lots of boxes. I think we had on the order of 140 boxes.
• Movers came and took the boxes and the furniture.
• Car guy came and took our cars.
• We checked out of the apartment. I’d lived there for just about 6 years. My rough estimate is that I gave Avalon Redmond Place around $68,000 in rent over that time (plus whatever Chris and Andrew gave them while we were roomies). In return they kindly gave me back my entire deposit of $250 (oh, and a place to live).
• We flew one-way to Denver on Wednesday.
• Rented a car and stayed with Mom and Dad.
• Looked for houses to rent.
• Had our cars delivered.
• Found a place to rent in Lafayette.
• Rented it.
• Had boxes and furniture delivered (all within 5 days of arriving).
• Unpacked lots of boxes.
• Bought lots of things for the house. (We bought a lot of stuff, Visa loves us right now. Our checking account does not.)
• Had Mom, Dad, and Sri over lots of times.
• Crissy’s family came and visited for a week.
• Went to my high school reunion.

Of course, each of these things has an interesting and fun story behind it. Maybe I’ll write about some of them in later posts. :-)

Update (7/30/08): I just realized I calculated the rent total wrong. It should be ~68K over 6 years (corrected above).

Crissy and I don’t drink beer, but we do buy some when we host a party. And then, since our friends know we don’t drink, they bring beer to the party assuming we don’t have any. But our guests never consume more than they bring. Either we have generous guests or boring guests. :-)

So, anyway, over time, our beer stash grows.

Last night, I was cleaning out our second bedroom (the office / guest room / storage room) I realized that we had over 50 bottles of beer. This morning I carried them all out to my car and brought them to work with the goal of giving them away.

As luck would have it, one of my colleagues is having a party in 2 weeks, so she is inheriting all the beer. Yay! 50 fewer things to take to Colorado!

So, ignoring the unnecessary reference to Boyz to Men… it’s really sad leaving Seattle. Crissy and I will be flying to Colorado next week and, by my count, I will have lived here for exactly 6 years and 6 days — I wonder how many hours… hmm… :-)

This week started with a little party when it suddenly hit me that while all this time I’ve been thinking, “we’re moving in late June”, it was suddenly late June. And that put me in a really sad mood.

And to make matters worse, this whole week has been a series of goodbye lunches and coffees. Also every time we go out, there’s the “this is the last time I’ll eat here”. It’s pretty weird.

This weekend, we’re going to try to go to the Fremont Solstice Parade, this was the first Seattle event I attended (thanks Sapan!) 6 years ago when I moved here, so it seems logical to attend go again as we leave. :-)

All these goodbyes remind me of college, where guys fell into 3 categories of goodbye-ers:

1. Scared to be emotional - these guys would say ‘um’ a lot and finally just shake hands or hug at the end
2. Avoiders - these guys would either just avoid everyone or say goodbye as if it weren’t a moving away event. Just a “see ya” and turn and leave.
3. Stoic manly man - firm handshake, good eye contact and a heartfelt “good luck”.

So far, I’m category #3. I imagine I’ll be #1 by the end.

I’ve been thinking it through in my mind over and over, and even though it’s hard, moving to Boulder is the right thing for us, our families, and eventually the family we’ll start — Colorado will hopefully have lots of little Vijay’s and little Crissy’s one day. :-)

In case you didn’t know already, Crissy and I are moving to Colorado in less than two months. Along with all the sadness of leaving friends, I realized that I’ll be leaving my hockey team, the Monarchs, behind.

This is especially tough; my first ever ice hockey game was with the Monarchs Hockey Franchise (which incidentally was my 3rd time skating on ice). We started as a single team and, so far, have grown to a franchise of 5 teams. So with the move, I’m retiring from the Monarchs as a franchise player after eleven seasons and four tournaments, the majority of which I served as team captain.

The franchise has been kind enough to retire my number and it now hangs from our virtual rafter.

Why #40? I never really had a number that I considered my own. In high school, I ran track and played tennis, so we obviously didn’t have numbers. In college, I just did intramural and club sports. So when I needed a number for the Monarchs, I decided that I could use some of the luck from the Bangaru athletic genes (which apparently mostly went to my sisters), so I picked Sri’s soccer jersey number.

Being me, I never remembered to tell Sri that I picked her number, so she was pretty surprised and happy when she found out 2 years later. :-)

I’m having a heck of a time trying to get over jet-lag here. I’m in Zurich for a week long meeting with my European engineering teams. Originally I was calling it a “Summit”, but that makes it sound much more formal that it is; especially since people started asking if I’d tape the sessions to publish online. :-)

So we decided to call it a “Offsite”, except that we’re still in the home location for half the team. We could call it “meeting”, but that’s boring.

Anyway, I was talking about jet-lag. I’ve been trying to take advantage of being unable to sleep by doing as many of my “chores that require about a quarter of a brain to do” as possible. This way I don’t feel guilty wasting time, but don’t try to do something important.

So, I’ve updated my blog to Wordpress 2.5. You, the reader, won’t notice any difference, but I get to the use the new management UI; which so far is really nice. But, the backlog of 1900+ comments that needs to be moderated? Not that nice (stupid spammers).

I also went back into my Facebook account and fixed all the privacy settings. I’m so glad that Facebook finally fixed their privacy settings interface. It still not great, but it’s a lot better. So now, people on Facebook can probably actually see things in my profile.

The past few nights, I spent some time learning about and thinking about Option ARMs and how to invest based on the big waves of the Option ARM resets coming up. It’s especially interesting considering that the Bank of England, this morning, decided to also trade junk MBS’s for Treasuries. And the Bank of Scotland’s recent announcement. And countless other things that happened recently. Expect a big post on that soon. :-P

And, of course, I’m seeing all sorts of cool things here and have met some really cool people. I’ll start writing about all that soon. :-)

As you may know, I just got back from a business trip to Boulder. And instead of staying at a hotel, I stayed with my parents. It was really nice being home and, since Sri is in Oregon visiting friends, I had my parents all to myself. No sisters or wife to hog the parents. :-)

Yesterday, we realized that this was the first time that it’s just been me and my parents for more than a day. Like the first time ever. In the past 27 years, if I was with my parents, I had to share with one of my sisters.

When you think about it, that’s really crazy. But a nice side-effect was that the house was really quiet and peaceful. :-)

Except we weren’t alone. Sri got a gerbil that lives in a cage in the study room. The gerbil just runs on the hamster wheel all day long. Since Sri is out of town, Amma is feeding the gerbil and taking care of it. Amma really likes the gerbil and you can often find her talking to gerbil in Telugu, [roughly translated] “Hi little dear. I’m sorry I didn’t come visit you yet today. Did you like your dinner?”

It’s really, really funny. Especially so, since the gerbil doesn’t speak Telugu! Amma astutely pointed out that the gerbil doesn’t speak English either, but still.

Sri gave the gerbil some name I can’t remember, but I think a better name is “Sribil” (Sri + gerbil).

And we have one more guest in the house. A woodpecker has burrowed into the house and is building a nest inside the walls by Akka’s room. My parents didn’t notice since no one was using this room. I noticed, though, because bright and early each morning, Mr. Woodpecker start drilling (or pecking) very loudly.

And during the night, he gets bored and starts running around in the wall right by my head. You know, during the day, it would be cute (in an Animal Planet sort of way). But at night, when I’m trying to sleep, it’s rather annoying.

If Mom and Dad don’t do something soon, they are going to have a wall full of baby birds come spring. :-)

… well, except that it was Crissy and me, not trains. And we didn’t pass each other, we stopped and talked for a bit. And it was mid-morning, not night. But you know, the phrase “Like two people talking to each other mid-morning” just isn’t as poetic.

As you know, Crissy was visiting her family last week. And for most of this week, I’m on a business trip to Boulder. I booked our flights so that if everything was on time, we would get to meet at the airport and hang out for 30 minutes or so.

And instead of wasting money on cabs, I drove Crissy’s car to the airport and parked it in short-term parking. And then, Crissy could go to the parking lot and drive her car home. We both had car keys and if we missed each other, I would use her voice mail to tell her where the car was parked.

Despite the simplicity of the plan, there were a lot of things that could go wrong. I could forget to leave Crissy a message with the location of her car. She’d then need to walk around the airport looking for it or wait until my flight landed in Denver. Or Crissy could have lost her keys. Or countless other things.

But it actually worked out nicely. I parked Crissy’s car, went through security and walked to Crissy’s arrival gate as her plane taxied in. I walked with her to the “Exit to Baggage Claim” area and then went to catch my plane.

Given all our recent travel ordeals, I can’t believe it actually worked. :-)

This post is a long time coming. I started it shortly after we got home from Christmas travel and have been slowing adding to it. It’s really long, but there are some valuable travel tips to learn if you’re (very) patient…

For Christmas, Crissy and I had our usual “visit both families” trip. Our flights were all booked on United airlines. First we’d go to Crissy’s house; the plan was to fly from Seattle to Kansas City (with a plane change in Denver). Then fly Kansas City to Denver to see my parents. And then finally fly back to Seattle after the New Year.

It was a fairly straightforward plan. But the travel gods had other plans. Only some luck, knowledge gained by lots of travel experience, and persistence made it work out somewhat smoothly.

Our trip started ominously, as my usually punctual town car service to the airport was 25 minutes late (the service claimed the dispatcher mistakenly canceled our reservation). We rushed to the airport and learned that our flight out was now delayed at least an hour and a half.

As a result it was impossible to make our connection in Denver. The United ticketing system caught this and when we tried to check our luggage, the service agent started the process to book us on a later Frontier flight. Unfortunately, the service agent was having problems getting the re-booking on Frontier.

(Continued)

“Experts” say that when you open your car trunk to load groceries, you should leave your car doors locked. That way, while you’re distracted putting things in the trunk, no one can sneak into your car.

It sounds good in practice, but I find myself doing the exact opposite. Now that I replaced my old Accord, I actually have a key remote that unlocks my doors and opens my trunk. So as I walk up to my car, I unlock the doors and pop the trunk. This way if I accidentally lock my keys in the trunk, I can open the car door and use the trunk release to get the keys.

Not that this ever happened; I’ve never locked the keys in the car or the trunk (knock on wood). But it seems prudent. The chances of my locking my keys in my truck are much, much higher than some guy sneaking into my car as I load groceries (especially now that I have a job, I don’t have to shop at the sketchy grocery store like I did while I was in college).

Even if it’s 100 times more likely that I lock my keys in the trunk than a guy sneaking into my car, I think it’s worth it. Imagine locking your keys in 100 times; now imagine a random guy getting into your car — whom you will likely see or hear anyway, since it’s hard to hide in a sedan.

Seems like a prudent trade-off. What do you think?