Cleanliness is next to godliness

Posted In: Work life, Everyday life — February 17, 2005 @ 7:57 pm — Peter

Our house is very clean because the appraisal person came today. We thought having the place spotless would result in a higher appraisal. He was a friendly man that thought Iris was adorable although she spend the entire time barking her head off at him. He was supposed to arrive around 4:45pm but ended up being late. This worked out great since we have some last minute cleaning to do. Based on his remarks, our frantic cleaning was obvious. He said things like “Are you sure you live here?” and “It looks like Better Homes & Gardens here!”. The second comment was obviously flattery since he caught on to the fact that we are very proud of our home. I gave him the grand tour and pointed out all the home improvements we have done over the past year. He assured us that our appraisal amount will be in the top tier of similar recently sold homes in the area. We didn’t really go through all the trouble of cleaning to score a few extra thousand on the appraisal, we simple didn’t want someone coming into our house and thinking we are scums. Now that this is done, we will be closing on our refinance next Tuesday. Amazing that Countrywide was able to move this process along so quickly. Had I stuck with Washington Mutual, I would probably be on another wild goose chase trying to find some obscure piece of personal financial trivia to satisfy their underwriters…

Work has been so so over the past few days. I hit a less productive slump over the past few days as I am getting burnt out on documentation. I am working on three documentation projects and all are nearing completion. As a change of pace, I started coding up a few enhancements to a web application I maintain to break the monotony. I am now caught up on a interface design issue, trying to find a way to maximize screen real estate. I grabbed a few javascript menus from SoftComplex and started experimenting to elicit some feedback. So far, I have decided to replace this long form select box with a more attractive tree menu. This gives a facelift to a rather boring looking webapp and saves quite a bit of space when the nodes are collapsed. I might experiment with a few other components from SoftComplex and consider purchasing the Professional versions if any of the extra features would be useful. If you have not tried their products, I strongly suggest trying them out. They are very simple to use and it is quite easy to populate the menus with data from a database.

Tomorrow is hockey day! It is not going to be as nice as it has been the last few Fridays, but you never know… I recall a forecast of high 40’s last weekend and it ended up being very sunny and we played in t-shirts. Hopefully all the snow has melted from earlier in the week and the rink is dry. I don’t mind it being cold, but wet patches on the rink make it quite tricky to play. In addition to hockey, another game has been popular at work. Some people have signed @ Red Hot Pawn and I jumped on the bandwagon late last week. I lost my first game by making a stupid move, but I’ll make up for it. I have not played chess in a while and am quite rusty. Actually, I just got a great idea! Perhaps I could challenge my Dad to a match! We loved playing chess together when I was younger and it would be so fun to play with him again. After I wrap up this post I’ll give him a call and walk him through the process.