After some serious thought about whether it should be a Christmas event or not...

I bought Kat an engagement ring.

Nothing outlandish since we just bought a six-figure house but nice enough to make her cry on Christmas morning.

I even wrapped it and put it under the tree so she had to stare it for four days wondering what it was.

Then when she opened it I was on one knee and proprosed to her right in front of the kids.

Hah. That'll larn her.

Tentative date for March 12th.

So Kat and I decided to buy a house.

Christ. What were we thinking?

We call the guy on Wednesday around 5 o'clock. That night we looked at 4 houses and decided on one that we liked. So we put a bid in on it.

Needless to say we got it.

Now... this is a HUD home. A foreclosure.

Now I am certainly no expert on real estate so I couldn't tell you what's a good HUD home and what's a bad one. But the broker we went through said if we didn't buy it then he 'By God' was going to.

I believed him. And I still do. There are very few things wrong with this house. All the carpet is in extremely good shape as are the floors and the walls. The only weird thing about is... they took all the faucets and the toilet paper spindles with them. The faucets I can almost see if they were nice ones... but the TP spindles? I don't think I wanna know.

This house though... wow. It's a 4 bedroom 2400 square foot behemoth. Two stories. Two car garage. Two and a half bath (with the master bedroom having a garden tub big enough for two. woohoo!) and more closet space than we have living space at the moment. Maybe I exaggerate on that but when I looked through the master bath into the master closet I thought it was an adjoining bedroom. Imagine my shock when I yelled "Holy shit this is a fucking closet!"

The problem here though is that I have my VA Loan benefits. And I'm gonna use them. But I obviously didn't think this through. Right now we're dealing with not one but two government agencies. Talk about your Recipe for Disaster(tm). I won't try to guess which one will piss me off first. I'm giving even odds on either one.

So right now we're in a holding pattern. I'm almost positive we'll get the house and I'm trying to convince Ms. "I just know something will go wrong and we won't get the house that I absolutely love Mr. and it'll somehow be your fault." of the same but... well you know how that goes.

Swaret rocks. I went from Slack 8.1 to -current without any trouble whatsoever.

Having been a Slack fan and user since the 3.x days and hearing all that time that Slack "does not upgrade well" I had my doubts.

Not anymore though. New kernel and everything without having to compile a new one. All dependencies handled insofar as I've been able to tell.

The only trouble I had was after reboot (yeah yeah I know I didn't have to) apache wasn't running. I started it manually and it ran fine. Apparently Patrick turned that off by default.

So I've joined Nerdfarm apparently. Played last night with Xeri and gmhowell (at least I think it was him) and really enjoyed it.

Admittedly though this whole thing is starting to become surreal. I played TFC for years and after hearing "Join our clan!" from every pub server I went to I finally ended up in [SHR] which was the epitome of a not-clan. That was the whole point of being in [SHR]. It was never a real clan.

So this will be interesting.

In related news I see they've gone with MS's Game Voice. I think I'll see if I can't talk them into going with Roger Wilco.