perfidy

Part six of the Veil War went live today and is now terrorizing its neighborhood, Frankenstein-style. Take a gander over here. One nice thing about this whole novel writing project is that I now have a good excuse to both post on perfidy, and not post on perfidy. Best of both worlds, baby!

And a gentle nudge: for all my readers who have blogs - and I know that a few of you do: the time has come for all of you to link to the Veil War. (cough... Naked Villainy, Murdoc, Rocket Jones, AW1 Tim, Aretae... cough) Just saying. I will ruthlessly mention you on perfidy until you comply.

I've been surprised by the amount of traffic that veilwar.com has been getting from perfidy. It's been a steady flow of refers - not so great a flood as Blackfive's generous linkage generated a couple weeks ago - but significant. I haven't had any sort of stats functionality here on perfidy.org for a good long while now, because a) I don't care that much and b) if I knew, I might be depressed. But I'm thinking that the residual traffic left over from our glory days must be greater than I imagined/feared.

If you will forgive a little bit of me-time, I am very pleased with how things are going. Blackfive sent about 300 readers my way, right before the third installment went up. As of part five, the last installment for which we have full statistics, there were over a hundred reades. I think that's a pretty good stick rate, and not bad considering its only been a few weeks since the whole thing started. And I see from followers and commenters that I am just edging into second order readers - people who are being referred by the first wave. So that's cool. And once I get the ebook ready for sale on Amazon, there will be several new avenues for promotion.

Thanks to everyone who has read, and linked, liked, friended, followed and shared the Veil War. It really is appreciated.

I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:

Outline for Autobiography

1. Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
2. Working at apathy (1985-1988)
3. An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
4. A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
5. A moment of clarity (1996)
6. The moment passes (1996-1999)
7. A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)

CHAPTER ONE

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn't the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary's Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.

At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.

Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot's license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.

I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work - in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.

But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes' ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.

My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.

***

"Praise not the day until night has come."

That's as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.

Today, my grandfather would have turned 100. He didn't make it here. Pancreatic cancer got him two decades back. But I've been thinking about him all day, today, every time I see the 11-11. My grandfather had a thing about numbers. There were good numbers, and there were bad numbers. He'd have my dad get him license plates from the other side of the state because the license plate numbers issued in NW Ohio were better than the ones in NE Ohio. One time, my dad pranked him, though. Told him he'd gotten a license plate XQ-5381. "Oh, no." He liked numbers that had patterns, or were in some subtle way harmonious. I like to think that that all started because of his birthday, which like today was 11-11-11. He also liked writing on things. He annotated his physical world. When I was five, he took me down to his cabin in Tennessee. We went hiking over to Cumberland Gap, and he made me a walking stick, just my size. He whittled a handle for me, but he didn't stop there. He took a pen and wrote

Cumberland Gap, Tennessee 8-26-1974

I may have the date wrong. My mom sent me a picture today. There was a beautiful tree on the hill behind the farm house he retired to. Grandpa posted this warning: I miss Grandpa.  I wish he could have lived long enough to meet his great-grandchildren.

Yesterday was a happy day, for I am finally south of 230 pounds for the first time in well over a decade.  That 230 had seemed for some little while now to be like the speed of light - something that can be approached but not exceeded.  I've been as close as 230.5 a few times in the last couple months, but just couldn't get any further.

I have blamed the stagnation on my wife, circumstances, children, cosmic rays, the Jews and always the never to be sufficiently damned herring eating Norwegians.  But the was just one simple cause, really - lack of focus and consistency.  So it was my fault, I guess.  The last couple weeks I have been much more strict in my paleo diet, and I've started lifting again.

I have to say that even just a little into the new exercise regime, I am very pleased with it and the the results.  I've combined the super-slow methodology that I was introduced to by Aretae with a collection of body-weight exercises, and it pretty much kicks my ass.  Which is what you want in an exercise program.

The first day's program was arms and shoulders.  I was surprised at how much more difficult push-ups are done super-slow style can be.  My arms are strongish, thanks to the six months of weight-lifting on machines I did last fall and winter.  The push-ups gave me a nice burn there, but the next day I could feel everything around the big muscles hurting, and even more, I could feel the pain in my abs.  I think this new program will be a lot more effective.  The best thing about the You Are Your Own Gym book is that he gives you lots of ways to adjust the difficulty of the exercises, which makes it easy to adjust each exercise to hit the 90-second-to-exhaustion target for super slow.

For the next few months, I'm going to be doing about seven minutes of lifting a day, four times a week.  I think this, along with a strict paleo diet, will get me down to an optimal body weight sometime in the Fall.  I'm not sure exactly what that will be, exactly, because I'm not sure how much more muscle I'll get; but I definitely want my body fat percentage down to at least 10.

I do have one more resolution, but it's really a part of the diet/health resolution.  At the end of the year, I let my membership at the gym at work lapse because, well, it was a shitty gym.  I am feeling the lack of exercise, and I don't like it.  I don't have any decent weights, gym equipment or even reasonable facsimiles at the homestead here, so I needed to either find a new gym or think of something else.

Seeing as part of the budget is to not spend money, I decided to think of something else.  Which meant google.  I found a book, You Are Your Own Gym, written by ex-SpecOps trainer Mark Lauren.  It's all about using your own body weight as resistance.  I've skimmed it, and it looks like a decent program - I just need to adapt his method to a more super-slow style, and I'll be set, I think.  I've been doing some pushups and sit-ups just to be doing something, so I think I'll be able to segue into this as soon as I have time to adapt his exercise schedules and play around with it a bit.

An update on progress in resolution world.

• Dieting.  Tragic fail.  Gained ten pounds.  There are lame excuses reasons for this one.  First was the baby. I'm starting off blaming young Anneliese for things beyond her control a little early, perhaps, but best get started now while she has no defenses.  The arrival of the baby was certainly the cause of chaos, and that made eating correctly more difficult.  Second was the diet plan itself.  Ferriss' idea is that one day a week is a cheat day, eat whatever the hell you want and basically be paleo the rest of the time.  This does not work for me.  Sure, I can cheat like all get out on Saturday, but switching back to paleo is all the harder.  There's usually leftover cheat food that I am sorely tempted to eat - after all, I picked it on the basis that it would be food I would really enjoy, but can't normally enjoy on a paleo system.  Also, throwing carbs and wheat into my body just as its getting used to not having them makes me feel sick and fatigued and a bit depressed.  So, I'm ditching the 4-hr body plan and going back to the more straightforward paleo that lost me much wait last year.
• Blogging once a day.  Tragic fail.  Still want to go with this one - and now that the new baby is calming down, this may be more feasible.
• Time consuming hobby.  Started accumulating stuff, but haven't had time to dive in.  I still want to carve out an evening for this, but this one's on hold.  Incomplete, abandoned.
• Read thinky books.  Started all of the books I mentioned, but haven't finished them.  Also started reading the Great Mortality, about the Black Death.  Fascinating.  Will have reviews soon.  Incomplete.
• Almost done with Volume I of the great books.  I hope to pick up the pace there.  Incomplete.
• Made progress on book catalog - all the history and military history books are catalogued.  I've found digital copies for some, but some of the books are rather obscure and I'm not finding digital copies easy to, uh, find.  If anyone's interested, I'll post the list.  Incomplete.
• Passports: tragic fail, no progress made.
• Made a budget, win!  Following budget, win!  I will be debt free, God willin' and the creek don't rise, on or about Friday, Jul 8.  Still need to rein in random spending a bit, but things are proceeding nicely on this front.
• I think I am definitely a better person than I was six weeks ago.  No closer to taking over the world.

New resolutions?  Well, I still have quite a list.  If I can wrap up the resolutions from last month by the end of this month - doable, certainly, then I will consider new ones for March.

I succeeded on the most important of my goals - the budget.  I consider the tragic fail on the diet to be a partial success, in that it was an experiment and I gained useful knowledge, which I can use going forward.  Three incompletes, but given time constraints and a newborn baby, not so bad - I did make some progress.

Twelve years ago today, I made a good decision. I wasn't sure that it was a good decision at the time. But that was only because most of the decisions I'd made as a nominal adult had been, on the whole, tragically unwise. This one, though, was wise, and by far the best choice I've made.

A dozen years of marriage was incomprehensible to the younger me. It has been more than I hoped, but harder too. I have more joy in one day of my life now than I did in weeks or years before. Not necessarily more fun. But more joy.

Life is good. My wife is the biggest reason why.

[wik]: Our anniversary is on Valentine's day by accident, not some sort of sappy design. And while I admit that not being able to forget my anniversary is a plus, it's annoying to hear people go, "aaww" when they find out.

Sure you would. And its only one, anyhow; me, Kasey and baby Anneliese:

At 2:07 this morning, #3 daughter came into the world, delivered by me.  Granted my wife did most of the work, but I didn't drop the baby, so we'll call that a win.

The midwife arrived about a half hour after the baby, and pronounced everything good.  Funny, through the years I've had a fair bit of emergency training, but baby delivery was really the last thing I expected to have to deal with.

Mrs. Buckethead is stubbornly refusing to give birth.  This is frustrating, because I arranged for a week off from work to commence when the baby arrives.  I bought a copy of Civ V so I'd be ready.  We're already three days past the due date, now, and I'm getting impatient.

I'm thinking I'm going to something slightly different. I'm going to do resolutions this year on a month by month basis, and report on my progress before issuing the next set of resolutions. Obviously, some of these will be repeating month to month, but I want to be a little more granular - and keep more records of my progress.

So, here are January resolutions:

• Follow the 4-hour body diet plan for the month.  This diet is in large part identical to the paleo diet that I followed from July through Thanksgiving.  I lost just shy of 40 pounds.  I want to lose another 20 pounds.  The main difference with the new plan is that it actually encourages cheating, one day a week.  I'll throw a post up later with some more information on the diet, and other stuff from the book.
• Post on Perfidy at least once a day.  And I don't mean average at least one post a day, I mean post at least once every day.  Hopefully more, and get this habit locked in.
• Start a new, time-consuming hobby.  I've always teased my wife that I need a hobby that sucks time as much as her band, just to even things out.  I've decided to start studying physics.  I was a physics major, once, and I'd like to sharpen my math and science skills.  The early part will be just catch up - elementary physics refresher courses from a variety of sources, and math as well.  There'll be a post forthcoming on this, too.
• Read one thinky book a week.  SF doesn't count.  For January, I will read the 10,000 Year Explosion, The Mystery of Capital, The Long Summer (How Climate Changed Civilization) by Brian Fagan, and Keegan's First World War.  (Having unpacked my books for the first time in four years, I've found lots of books that I want to read that I never got around to.)
• Read Volume I of the Harvard Great Books.  This one will be easy, I'm already half done.  There's fifty volumes, so that's over four years at that pace.  But, I hope to increase the pace.
• Catalog my books, and start getting digital copies of them.
• Get passports for the family.
• Get a budget in place, and automate as much as my bill paying and finances as I can manage, to reduce craziness.  The last few years have been difficult, what with layoffs, uncertainty, etc.  But now that I've relocated, cut my housing expenses in half, and have a small measure of job security, it's time to get off the paycheck to paycheck life I was kinda forced into by the necessity of juggling payments and such.
• Become a better person and take over the world.

And I think that's enough for one month.

My father has impeccable timing. After moving every single thing that I own at least four times - from where it was to a box, the box to storage, storage to new house, box to its new home - Dad informs me that he needs help moving. I am so tired of picking things up and moving them that lifting my coffee mug to my mouth is aggravating. But, devoted son that I am, I will chip in for the big win, and move my Dad's crap, too this weekend.

The new place is slowly attaining a semblance of order. I have to say that shit-canning half your stuff makes the moving and unpacking process much easier. Having an office again is a real bonus too, and this week I get to put all my books in real, actual bookshelves!

I'm sure you will all be deeply interested to know that my neolithic herder diet is going pretty well. Last July, my pants were a verging on fatbody 44" waist. This last Black Friday, I stopped by the Eddie Bauer warehouse outlet store thingy in Columbus and (rather optimistically, I thought) picked a pair of 38" pants to try on. They were too big. I went back for a 36", and they were just right. Pardon my French, but holy mother of fuck, I just dropped eight full inches of waistline. I haven't been in a 36" since no one knew that Clinton liked getting BJs from pudgy chicks. And I still have another twenty pounds I want to lose. The Thanksgiving holiday was a minor setback, as far as the diet goes - what with all the stuffing, rolls, sugar cookies, pumpkin pie, und so weiter. But a few days of hardcore paleo should remove most of what I gained at the feast.

Aretae is suggesting a 100 push up challenge. I think this would dovetail nicely with the superslow that I've been doing. Aretae has a charming habit of answering questions that I haven't realized I needed to ask. The gym at my office sucks ass, really, and I don't want to keep spending money on something that sucks. I also don't want to spend money on a home gym, which would likely also suck, and be something I have to move in a couple years. What I need is a weight and equipment-less superslow workout scheme. The 100-pushup thing could be part of that.

What else is going on? There's been some interesting stuff on the internets. I can't remember what it was, but if you poke around I'm sure you'll find it.

Well, I'm moved. Mostly. Still have some random crap to get out of the old place, but all the important stuff is in the new place, and all the furniture is where it is supposed to be. Lots and lots of unpacking left to do, of course, but the family is settling in in its new digs.

Cool thing about renting #1: it can be much cheaper. I just gave myself a $15000/year raise. Actually, more like a $21 k, because I'll actually keep all this money.

Cool thing about renting #2: other people fix things. This is a real time and aggravation saver.

And, I have about twice as much living space as in my previous mountain fortress, though the neighbors are much closer. Sigh. It about evens out.

The little girls do love the fact that they can now literally run in circles. I don't think they liked being forced to run from one end of the house to other and back.

After the unpacking is finished, I think I might actually start blogging again.

In the meantime, read Aretae, Foseti, Devin, Isegoria, Charleton, and Vox Day. Good stuff, there. I was particularly taken by Charleton's riff on Moldbug, here, and Foseti's review of "The Dark Side of the Left." Congrats, also, to Foseti on producing an heir.  Reactionaries need heirs.

I would apologize abjectly for my dearth of posting, except for the fact that I don't think it has had an adverse impact on, well, anyone. So there.

But, for those who do care, here's what I've been up to. Most of my free time over the last month has been occupied with purging, Soviet-style, my belongings. Eight entire Nissan X-Terra loads of my possessions have been lined up against the wall, shot, and taken to the dump. Their families were billed for the cost of the bullets. An additional five loads have been taken to the Militant wing of the Salvation Army, and one full load of books - 26 liquor boxes worth - were sold or donated as well. There is another two loads of detritus staged next to the garage waiting for their dirt-nap, and I'm going to have to borrow my neighbor's trailer to take a load of busted or worthless furniture and appliances to the landfill.

By comparison, only four loads have been taken to the storage facility. The house is now down to currently-being-used clothes, kitchen stuff, furniture and only ten books. I've also ripped nearly every DVD I own, I've thrown out the cases and someone is going to get an unexpected gift of nearly 400 movies.

It is liberating, nay, exhilarating to get rid of so much crap. My soul feels lighter and cleaner.

So that's to the good.

As far as the reason for all this - it doesn't look like we'll even be making the attempt to purchase another home. From what I've been reading, the housing market collapse is far from over. Even though we could by the same house for half what we paid four years ago, it looks like if we did, we could find ourselves underwater again within a year. Which would suck. Note to self: buy low, sell high.

So I think we'll be renting. I'll lose some tax write-offs, but paying between a third and a half of what I've been paying will more than even that up. Much more, really. And besides, I'll have another child deduction next year.

So I'll be moving within the month, which will continue to cut into blogging time.  But less so, since I've already gotten through the obsessive difficult part.

In the aftermath of the mortgage company deciding to sell my house with out, you know, letting me in on the secret; I decided that this was in fact a perfect moment to pause and take stock of my situation.

So I did.

In many areas of my life, things are groovy.  I'm down 20lbs.  I'm exermacizing.  I've got a decent job.  I've got great kids, and a great wife.  Even my dog and cat are well above average.  I've no credit card debt, I'm current on all my bills.  There's just one gaping, gangrenous sore on the face of my happiness, and that is the house situation.  And it occurred to me, after consulting runes, oracles and qualified professionals, that my current housing situation was not only not all that great it is unlikely in the extreme to improve anytime in the near future.  Given my recent unpleasantness in the job market, and the general unpleasantness still extent in the housing market, the likelihood of getting a decent refinance on my home is vanishingly small.  So until the housing market rebounds (which might happen before the world ends in 2012, but I'm not betting on it) I am stuck paying a large mortgage on a house that is worth less than that mortgage, and said mortgage is a much larger fraction of my monthly income than it was when I bought the place.

Since I want to enjoy my last couple years before the world ends, and since I want to get some petty vengeance on my mortgage company for stabbing me in the back, I'm moving.  It seems that now I can get a house twice as big and almost as nice as the current one for 2/3 the price I paid four years ago.  Such is modern life.  So, the next few months will be consumed with the vast logistical enterprise that is relocating a household consisting of a pregnant wife, three kids seven and under, a dog, a cat, and all the crap we've accumulated with the efficiency of a black hole sucking in light.  Packing, looking at houses, trips to the dump, dealing with realtors and finance, and a thousand other tasks large and small will consume most of the time I don't spend working or sleeping.

So blogging will be light for the near future, as it has been for the last couple weeks. I do intend to finish up a couple nearly finished drafts on formalist type issues.  I'll throw up some links now and again.  (Isegoria seemed to disagree with my last bunch being labeled, "Of mild interest.")  And I'll probably steal some time away from work or sleep to get things off my chest. 

o assuage your pain, here is teh funny:

I have achieved a milestone in personal fitness.  I now weigh less than 1/8 ton.  I have not seen the sunny side of 250 since somewhere in 2002, about which time I was settling into the sedentary lifestyle of the knowledge worker and eating at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet across the street from my office nearly every day for lunch.

Since I started my diet on July 5th, with the encouragement and assistance of the Monkeybrains google group founded by Aretae, I have lost 18 pounds, net.  That's an average of three pounds a week over six weeks.  But the average is lying to you, as it often does.  I went to Ohio for two and a half weeks and over that time progressively fell off the diet, and ended up nearly ten pounds heavier when I returned than when I left.  So the total weight loss is closer to 26 lbs, over a period of four weeks.

How did I achieve this?  I've mentioned the Paleo diet here before, and that is it.  The best summary I've seen of the methodology of paleo dieting is right here, and here's the twelve commandments:

1. Eliminate sugar (including fruit juices and sports drinks) and all foods that contain flour.
2. Start eating proper fats - Use healthy animal fats or coconut fat to substitute fat calories for carbohydrate calories that formerly came from sugar and flour. Drink whole cream or coconut milk.
3. Eliminate gluten grains. Limit grains like corn and rice, which are nutritionally poor.
4. Eliminate grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Cook with Ghee, butter, animal fats, or coconut oil.
5. Favor ruminants like beef, lamb and bison for your meat. Eat eggs and some fish.
6. Make sure you are Vitamin D replete. Get daily midday sun or consider supplementation.
7. 2 meals a day is best. Don't graze like a herbivore.
8. Adjust your 6s and 3s. Pastured (grass fed) dairy and grass fed beef or bison has a more optimal 6:3 ratio, more vitamins and CLA. A teaspoon or two of Carlson's fish oil (1-2 g DHA/EPA) daily is good compensatory supplementation if you eat grain-fed beef or no fish.
9. Proper exercise - emphasizing resistance and interval training over long aerobic sessions.
10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries and avoid watermelon which is pure fructose. Eat in moderation.
11. Eliminate legumes
12. Eliminate all remaining dairy including cheese- (now you are "Orthodox paleolithic")

The good doctor also points out:

If you can do step 1, that is about 50% of the benefit and alone a huge improvement on the standard american diet (SAD) By about step 6 you are at about 75% , by step 9 about 80% and at 10 you are at 99% for most people. These are just estimates, of course.

So right now, I'm obeying the first ten of the twelve commandments and thus am 99 44/100 pure paleo.  I don't think I'll ever cut the beans and cheese completely - they round out the meat and vegetables.  And by obeying those commandments, I'm losing a pound a day eating as much as I want.  Sunday, I was particularly hungry, I had 4 eggs and 4 slices of bacon for lunch, two glasses of whole milk, most of a bag of beef jerky, a handful of peanuts, a single strawberry, and a two large helpings of a tasty Indian lamb dish my wife made.  That had to be a few thousand calories.  But next morning, another pound and a half gone.

My goal is to lose another 20 pounds in each of the next two months.  That will put me at about 210 - a weight I haven't seen since my mid twenties.

Looking back at the last six weeks, I find that I'm really rather surprised at how easy it has been.  Aside from the trip, where I was at times not really free to pick the food that I wanted, and some alcohol consumption along with it; I've been able to keep to the diet remarkably well.  Being able to consume mass quantities is a huge help - every caloric restriction diet I went on in the past drove me nuts, and led to binge eating.

If you want to lose weight, I recommend this diet unreservedly - and read Good Calories, Bad Calories to understand why it works.

Normally, I have a typically lame excuse for not blogging.  Apathy, work, illness, family, the like.  This last hiatus, though brief by the standards of previous lapses, was more scary.  (For me - if it was scary for you, I am concerned about your mental health.)

Last week, I almost lost my house.

There is a prologue to this story, of course.  I have been gainfully employed for the last year.  The two and a half years previous to last summer were rather more chaotic.  Between January 2007 and August 2009, I was laid off three times.  Once, just five weeks into a year long contract.  This had a profound and deleterious effect on my finances - every time I'd get a new gig, I'd struggle to get caught up, get there, and then immediately be on forced retirement.  With help from family, and by adopting a spartan lifestyle, I managed to make it through.  Except for what I owe my parents, I am no more in debt now than when I started the whole nightmare.  I have no credit card debt, and my only loans are car loans, and my mortgage.  But I did not get through without constant run-ins with the most wonderful and understanding people on Earth, the bill collectors.

My largest debt is my mortgage, and my mortgage loan company is a smallish one.  I'd fall behind, get a job, get on a plan, get laid off, get behind...  Last fall, hopeful again that this job would last a little longer than the last few, I got on a plan.  I scraped up a few thousand in earnest money, and started making payments.

Life is good!  The house is saved, a major worry is de-worrified, and I focus on catching up on other bills.

Now, part of the process is filling out endless paperwork.  I did, back in October of last year.  A call to the mortgage company revealed that they were missing a signed page two of my tax return.  No problem - I'll fax it.  As I made my last scheduled payment on the plan at the end of March, this came up again.  Didn't get the first one?  I'll fax it in again.  I continued making payments, as agreed.  I asked when I'd find out what the new terms would be, they said that the underwriters would look at everything and get back to me.

Okay.

Understand that from January of this year through my departure for Ohio three weeks ago, I received exactly one piece of mail from the mortgage people - a form letter saying that my interest rate might (or might not) change in August.  Got that in May.

'Round about June, I became concerned that I hadn't heard anything.  I gave them a call.  "Oh, hi, Mr. Buckethead!  We don't have your signed page two of your tax return."  Well, shit, okay, I'll get it to you.  I asked where we were - no problem, they say, just get that to us, and we're cool.  So alright.  I faxed it in, for the fourth time.  Busyness ensued - getting ready for the trip, other issues.  I leave for Ohio.

Last Tuesday, two weeks into my trip to Ohio, I called again, to check on their progress.  And discovered that my house was scheduled for a sheriff's sale yesterday - the 10th of August, a week away.  Holy mother of fuck.  I say, well that's mildly outrageous, seeing as I never got anything in the mail, or a phone call, or by smoke signal indicating that my house was going to be sold out from under me despite the fact that I had made every single agreed payment.

In fact, I discovered that the decision had been made four days before I talked to the guy in June - rejected because they had only an unsigned version of page 2 of my tax return, and not a signed one.  They had somehow failed to mention that in the phone call, or the sale.  And it appears that my signature on the initial agreement gave them the right to do that.

I seriously considered just giving them the keys.

My house is worth no more than what I paid for it in 2006, maybe slightly less.  Thanks to missed payments that will be tacked onto the end, I'm at least somewhat underwater.  If I sold the house, I'd lose money.  Having the bank sell the house would mean they lose the money.  I could find a rental for significantly less than my current mortgage payment, even as low as half; and I wouldn't have the burden of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.  The upside would be a thousand more dollars in my pocket every month - not an insignificant sum.

Downside, of course, is that my credit rating would be savaged for years, useless.  That's a hell of a trade-off, freedom and more money with expulsion from the ranks of the credit-worthy; or continued paycheck to paycheck wage-slavery to maintain my status and nice home.

I find that the monkeybrains was arguing for status.  Losing the house would be a real hit to my pride.  But in the end, I decided to go with monkeybrains and keep the house for a couple reasons.  One, employers check credit reports when they're hiring. Two, I will need a viable credit rating to purchase a new, larger vehicle to accomodate my soon to be larger family sometime before next January.  Three, I have plans for the future that require home ownership.  It's involved, but take my word for it.  I'm trying to think long-term, and the short term happiness of more money is not outweighing seven years bad luck for defaulting on a mortgage.

So last week, I spent several hours on the phone, arguing, bargaining, negotiating, and managed to avert disaster.  So far as I know, they did not sell my house yesterday.  It came down to me agreeing to pay two payments instead of one, all for their screw up.  A reach-around would have been appreciated, but was not offered.  A timely short term loan from Mom covered the shortfall (thanks mom!) and finally we were able to move on.

The frustrating thing about this is (aside from nearly dying of shock, and then having to fork over an extra mortgage payment for someone else's fuck-up) that I had not refinanced the loan back in March. I didn't because the people I talked to said that I wouldn't be able to get good terms while I was still technically in default, because the plan wasn't complete.  I figured a couple more months wouldn't be a bad thing, especially if I can get a better deal at the end of it.  Now, thanks to this most recent ass-rape, it will be until January of '11 before this new plan is finished.  (Needless to say, I am going to pursue refinancing rather more relentlessly, I want to get away from these people.)

If anyone knows of any good house refinancing resources, I'd welcome a tip.

From what mom was telling me, this sort of thing isn't exactly uncommon.  Others have had houses sold out from under their feet despite having made regular, agreed-upon payments.  And usually, without notification.  Which strikes me as curious - it's one thing to foreclose on someone who isn't making payments, but given the near certainty of massive losses on the sale, you'd think they'd want to keep raking in the interest money.  Unless, of course, it's cheaper for them to write off the loss and get bailout money from the government.

I'm in Ohio for a couple weeks. If any of our vast readership is interested in getting together for beers and conversation, use the contact page to drop me a line.

I started my super-slow workout program just now, and despite only doing five exercises for a little over a minute and a half each, I am convinced that this is serious exercise.  It's been about fifteen minutes since I stopped, and my muscles are still all a-trembly.  I lifted weights semi-regularly for a while back in my twenties.  I seem to remember that the weights were a bit bigger then.  But that's to be expected, that was almost twenty years ago, and now I am a decrepit old man.

I signed up for the gym in my office building, and I am now having buyer's remorse.  The machine I thought was a leg press when I looked at it from across the room is actually a leg extension machine.  And there's no seated row-type machine either.  I substituted a lat pull for the seated row today - next time, I'll use the free weights to do a proper one.  However, the weights are all dumbbells - there's no bars or stands.  Which sucks, because I can't replace the leg press with a squat if there's no bars or racks.  And what's really annoying is that I signed up through December because the pro-rated yearly membership was the best deal, by far - only $40 more than a month membership.

So, I used the leg extension machine.  I don't know if it would make more sense to keep using that - it does hit the quads, after all, or use the one bar I have at home without a rack.  Not safe, really, with no one to spot me.

Thoughts on super-slow based on my now vast-experience with the system: it kicked my ass.  The slow, controlled pace really gets you.  I remember doing multiple sets of ten that didn't burn like this did.  I was pretty good at guestimating the weight that would get me to failure in about a minute and a half - only slight adjustments will be necessary for next time.  All the upper body exercises (seated row lat pull, chest press, pull down, overhead press) hurt, and my muscles were like jelly after.  Which is, as I understand it, how it should be.  But the leg press extension hurt much more.  It hurt a lot.  It took a fair chunk of will power to get to ninety seconds, and I actually cheesed out a bit and didn't really go to failure.  I don't know why that exercise hurt that much more than the others.  Strange.  The explanation for that one is probably wherever my back fat went to.

Despite my disappointment with the lackluster facilities, I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing.  Right now, my arms, back and chest feel pleasantly tingly and sore.  My thighs are recovering, though they still feel week.

I wonder if it might make more sense to price out a power rack and some decent free weights, and spend the money on that rather than on a renewal at this place.  I've got room in the garage, and seeing as I work at home, it shouldn't be hard to find the time.  And after six months or so, I think I'd be in the habit enough to trust myself to keep at it.

The interior of this structure is awesome.

[Architects] Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen says, "The Brain is a 14,280 cubic-foot cinematic laboratory where the client, a filmmaker, can work out ideas. Physically, that neighborhood birthplace of invention, the garage, provides the conceptual model. The form is essentially a cast-in-place concrete box, intended to be a strong yet neutral background that provides complete flexibility to adapt the space at will. Inserted into the box along the north wall is a steel mezzanine. All interior structures are made using raw, hot-rolled steel sheets."

The exterior, not so much. But if the exterior looked more like this:

(Image from here.)

It'd be a lot nicer. You can kind of imagine what the structure would look like if you combine in your head this image with the second one from above:

(Image from here.)

If this were a little bigger, and a little cleaner - just replace that big door with giant windows.  Now that would be an office to get up for in the morning.

[wik] Hat tip, The SteamPunk Home.  Images of the Brain taken from Apartment Therapy.

[alsø wik] The apartment therapy links are long dead, as is the site where I got the barn image. But the Brain is still available here. There's more internal images there, worth a look.