Tag: homeownership

Energy Star done lost their mind

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I briefly lived in an apartment, there was once a day in which it was abundantly clear that the air conditioning went out.  When it was obvious that no cool air was coming out of the vents, I called up the main office to see if I could get someone from maintenance over to come fix it.  However, it was a Sunday, and the office hours were drastically reduced, and I was unable to actually get with a human being on the phone, and I thought that I was going to be boned until Monday.

I tried to stick it out, but didn’t last more than 30 minutes before I began looking through drawers for the information packet that was given to us when moving in, to see if there were any alternative numbers to call, or if I could get to maintenance directly or something.  I found an emergency number and figured it wouldn’t hurt to call and get a human being on the line to see if they could point me in the right direction.

When I got a person to pick up, I explained my situation, and they asked me to tell them what the thermostat read.  “83,” I told them, and they responded with “I’ll be right over.  82F is what we consider to be an emergency.”

In less than an hour, a maintenance guy showed up, turned out a freon recharge was all that was needed, and then the entire apartment began cooling down pretty quickly afterward.

The point of this little story is that I just read this article about what Energy Star recommended people keep their thermostats at, in order to save energy:

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Office Space-ing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s only been a year and chance since I moved into my house, but I haven’t really done anything with my office.  Sure, I made and installed my wall of belts, and hung a few frames on the walls, in addition to positioning the futon and setting up a space for my computer.  But I still had a lot of boxes sitting in the closet along with general ideas for lots of little trinkets and nerdy figurines that I had imagined displaying in whatever room I’d designate as my office, that I simply never bothered really getting to.

Another thing I decided to do while mythical gf was out of the country was to finally do something with my office space, and get it to a point beyond where it was just a whole bunch of boxes stacked in a corner with just a computer and a wall of wrestling belts.  A few posts ago, I touched on the hanging wall shelves that I had put together, which are in place and I’m generally happy with, even though I underestimated a little bit just how many Rito figures that I had and how much space they’d take up.

So among the things not making the cut of the above picture are two shelves that I purchased and installed; neither are particularly impressive things, but more like essentials in order to get a degree of organization for all my various personal effects.  The obstacle I faced with my primary shelf was that I had some general dimensions that I did not want to exceed in any capacity so that I could retain as much open floor space as possible but still be able to have a place to hold some shit.

At first, I had resigned myself that storage cubes would be the most logical shelving solution for what I had in mind, but after a lot of digging on various sites, it was Amazon of all places where I found this shelf that fit into my dimensional parameters, and definitely looked like it had way more character than the cubes that just about everyone in my generation has from Ikea, Target or Walmart.  Not to mention I loved the faux-incomplete half edges on opposite ends that definitely gives it some personality as well flexibility in case something is a little wider than the surface area.

I only needed one row and the top to display stuff like nice figures and photo frames, and I didn’t have a lot of printed materials that exceeded the smaller shelf spaces, that didn’t quite fit into my library shelf elsewhere, so that left the entire bottom row available for general storage.  I got these storage bins to store shit like camera equipment, electronic peripherals and art supplies, but also looking a little bit nicer than the army of cardboard printer paper boxes they’d all been sitting in previously.

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A catch-up post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not lost on me that it’s been a minute since I last wrote anything.  And among the last things that I did write about, it was probably sports and or professional wrestling-related in the first place, and admittedly I don’t like to stick to the same topic too frequently because I like the idea of being a well-rounded person who has thoughts, opinions and words to write about a myriad of things and not just a small pool of interests.

Sure, a part of the dormancy is the fact that I haven’t really found much to write about, but also the fact that in my work and personal lives, I’ve actually been kind of busy.   Not a day goes by where there isn’t some local news that isn’t violent and could easily be twisted into a racial commentary, and there’s otherwise little else locally to talk about other than the impending Republican runoff for governor that I’ve already said numerous things about.

My taxes are going up in the upcoming fiscal year, which isn’t a surprise that the primary culprit of it all is the Atlanta Braves, which is something that most everyone with a brain saw coming, seeing as how the construction of ScumTrust Park and The Battery was a gigantic money suck to state and county coffers that is naturally the unfortunate responsibility of taxpayers.  Obviously, I’m a little salty over the fact that my monthly rates will go up, but at the same time, I’m okay with it if it means that things like parks and libraries aren’t shut down and rendered inaccessible services to the people.  Granted, I’d rather the Braves never moved in the first place and this wouldn’t have happened, but I don’t have the completed Infinity Gauntlet in my possession, so I can’t go back in time to rectify that.

By the way, I actually caught up and watched Avengers: Infinity War, which is in large part to making this reference.  It was slightly better than I had anticipated, because I felt there was a high possibility of them fucking things up by having to cram so much crossing over into a singular film, that it could convolute things real fast, but I didn’t think they did a bad job, and put out a pretty decent flick.

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One year later

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a selfie I took last year, but I never got around to sharing it with anyone.  It was maybe an hour after I had signed a boatload of paperwork, and officially signed the purchase to my second house.

I still remember the feelings of driving away from the realtor’s office with my new keys and garage door openers in hand, not knowing what I should be doing next.  Seeing as how my new home wasn’t that far from the realtor’s office, I decided to just go straight there, since I had some boxes in my car that were already ready to be unloaded into the new home.  I guess it was fortunate that the realtors were as close to the property as mine was, because I can’t imagine that this is the case for everyone who ever purchases a home.

I remember walking around my new house with a feeling of amazement and bewilderment; this house was mine now.  It was slightly different than my former home, since I didn’t purchase it alone, so the feelings of newness and ‘what did we get ourselves into were shared between two people.  I also remembered that it was pretty warm in the house, presumably because the HVAC was dormant due to the home being empty and unoccupied and none of being on for a while.

Despite closing, mythical gf and I didn’t really quite move in for a little bit, as we had to settle up our apartment as well as the fact that we decided to a lot of painting and whatever superficial things needed to happen before the introduction of all of our belongings.

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When in doubt, make it yourself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While mythical gf is vacationing out of the country without me because I’m not a teacher and I don’t get entire months off at a time, I decided that I would spend a chunk of my solitude working on my office. 

I mean, after a year of living here, it would only make sense that I would have the room where I do the bulk of my artwork and gaming to a point where I’d be able to sit back in my chair and look around and be somewhat satisfied with my immediate surroundings.  Nah, as is often times the case in my life, when it comes to the intricate things for myself, I have a tendency to slack on them, putting just about everything else first, like responsibilities.

One of the things I had in mind was that I wanted to have some floating shelves for the vast array of figurines that I’ve amassed throughout the years.  Primarily the League of Legends figures that I’d been collecting since they started producing them.  They’re pretty good quality, and I can appreciate the consistency and cohesiveness of them as a collection, and I wanted to display them.

The thing is, I was having a great deal of difficulty in finding floating shelves that I was satisfied with.  Primarily, I did not want floating shelves with a massive depth, that would fuck with my peripheral vision when I would be sitting at my machine, at the height that I had envisioned setting them up at.  Furthermore, floating shelves seem to be a really in thing when it comes to home decorating these days, so the cost of them are most certainly not as cheap as when the first time I came across them years ago at like either a Target or a Container Store.

To make matters worse, the shelves that I once had on the walls of the old house were nowhere to be found anymore; a simple floating shelf with a minimal depth, that would’ve been perfect for Rito figures.  In their place were an array of shelves with pretentious bevels and faux-trim accents, with shoddy hardware that were most certainly not very cost effective, nor were they remotely long enough to accommodate all the figures that I have.

Over the last year or so, my brother has gotten really into woodworking.  He’s gotten really good at it in that span of time, and he’s made an array of shelves, tables and other practical furniture with his own hands and tools.  Needless to say, as all good big brothers do, it inspired me to want to make some practical shit on my own.  I figure I’m a pretty meticulous person who has zero fear of working with my hands, I know I have the capabilities to do similar stuff to him, except that I don’t have near the hardware he does at his disposal to do the depth of work that he can.

But making floating shelves?  Simple, shallow-depth and of course, simple floating shelves?  Oh yeah, I know I could do this at least.

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Have Lexus drivers passed BMW for biggest assholes?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the better part of the last two decades, if anyone were to ask me what drivers were the worst drivers in the world, my automatic reaction would typically have been “Maryland drivers.”  But upon clarification of asking which automotive manufacturer has the biggest assholes that drive their cars, my answer becomes “oh, BMW drivers.”

BMWs have always been at a price point to where even the drivers of the low-end 3 series still felt validated to turn their noses up to everyone not willing to drop $35k (then) on a glorified Jetta.  Some of them were legitimately high-performing, and all of them came with a degree of luxuries that when combining all of the above, had a tendency to foster a sense of entitlement and arrogance from those that drove them. 

And it was no more indicative than watching the average BMW driver drive amidst the pleebs of the world; they’d cut people off without using signals, aggressively tailgate cars deemed inferior to their marvels of German engineering, and demonstrate all sorts of driving behavior that exuded me-first selfish and dickish attitudes.  It really didn’t matter who was driving the car, be it a white man, black woman, Asian teenager or an elderly Hispanic; once behind the wheel of a BMW, it’s like there’s a needle in the seat that goes straight up the driver’s asshole and plugs into a very specific node inside the body that triggers all sorts of degenerate behavior, thus fulfilling the destiny of BMW drivers all have to be assholes.

However, ever since I moved back into the ‘burbs, I’ve often been moderately fascinated at the sheer differences of my surroundings compared to my previous foray in homeownership.  Which is a nice way of saying that I now live in a slightly upper-middle class exuding white privilege which is overwhelmingly predominantly white, versus my old community which unfortunately sank into really lower-middle class that was overwhelmingly predominantly black, which in itself is a nice way to say that everyone in the neighborhood was black, and then there was Jen and myself.

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Imagine if…

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night, amid the news that horrendous storms were going to pass through Georgia overnight, I went to bed with some concern over the trees in my back yard, and concerns that a large branch that really could be better off being pruned off would be the greatest risk to my home, if it were to snap and fall on my house.  I made sure my freshly repaired computer was properly powered down, and I was hoping that my dog wouldn’t be scared by all the arriving flashing lights of lightning pulsing through the night skies.  Regardless, I went to bed fairly easy because I am old.

However, I woke up at 5 am to other dog whining, wanting to be let out.  This has become something of a normal occurrence now, and I’m finding that I’m not even making it to my personal alarm more frequently than not, much to my occasional annoyance.  Regardless, with the night (mostly) passed, my mind began churning with curiosity of how bad the weather still was, at 5 in the morning.

Taking the dogs out, it was just wet outside, like it was just any other rain that had passed by.  After coming back in, I went to the rear windows to try and get a scope of the backyard, and despite it being dark, I didn’t see any large branches sitting ominously in my yard, mocking me with an “almost got you” proximity to my home.  So, with the supposed nightmare storms in the past, I tried to get a little bit more sleep, failed anyway, and began my day earlier than usual, since I can justify going in at ass o’clock because of the busy season at work.

Durning my morning surfing rounds, I come to discover that despite the fact that my region of the metro Atlanta area seemed to make it through the night relatively unscathed, there were other areas that weren’t as lucky.  Namely, one specific neighborhood in South Fulton County which got a literal brunt of the night’s storms, as an actual tornado touched down right in the subdivision and basically obliterated an entire neighborhood.

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