I came into February expecting to be wildly unproductive with my brother’s passing at the end of January. That seems to have sparked a feeling of “I don’t have a lot of time left on the planet, let’s get shit done.” So I got shit done. My goals for the month were:
- find a house, get an offer accepted
- finish my D&D campaign info
- submit an idea to Lego Ideas
Find a House
Man, started strong here. On the first, we put in an offer in on a house that we loved, only to be neck-and-neck with another bidder on the second, and waking up on the third to discover that they had taken the other offer. Goddammit. We talked about it, and in retrospect it was for the best — that house had a couple of shortcomings that we decided to live with (too little garage space, not enough storage space, tiny yard), so we decided to go ahead and figure out a new strategy. We each made a list of the top 10 features we wanted in a house. Then we combined our two lists — with the overlap, there were 15 items. We each went ahead and ranked them personally, and then created an average for each feature. That helped us refine what we were looking for. We also decided to take care of paying down some debt so that we were in better shape when it came time to do a hard credit pull. That was done.
Things got really interesting the day after Valentine’s Day when our landlord reached out to us to see what our plan was for moving out by June 1. (Our lease says May 1, so there was some confusion.) They were going to put the house up for sale and start showings in April. Anyway, we decided to redouble our house hunting efforts, and to get the fuck out of here ASAP.
Anyway, that same night, we found a gem in Rosemount — it’s a little further south and east from where we wanted to be, but the schools are exceptional, the house ticked all of our boxes except for the fence and a three-car garage. Fiiiiine. We saw it the next day and we loved it, so we put in an offer, and that evening we had a signed purchase agreement in-hand! We close and start moving on April 11th! DONE.
D&D Campaign
Oof. Didn’t get as far with this as I’d like, but I made a ton of progress. Got my world map completed, figured out an insertion point for the group of players, developed some new NPCs, two new classes of rangers (the mirage shapers and the wind riders), and a whole new species in the Underdark, the core concepts of which I totally ripped off from John Scalzi — the Consu. Because of the impending move and the chaos that that entails, I am holding off on the running of the campaign until June or so of this year. But, while I am pleased with my progress, this also isn’t finished. Not done.
Lego Ideas
Holy poop. I had to do a bunch of thinking on this one — I knew I wanted to do something cool here, and I was feeling partially inspired by the recent reboots of the Galaxy Explorer and the Blacktron Renegade, but was of the mindset that I wanted to do some sort of cool mech design, so I did get started on a large-ish M:Tron set, which is going to take longer than this month to get done. Not done.
Minor/Other Accomplishments
- Got some stuff done on my WordPress/Todoist integration plugin.
- Had to slam-dunk some learning on Typescript and C#/.NET as part of my tech testing with a job I was interviewing for. I love filling my brain up. I’m going to need to spend some time with .NET, for sure, and I’m really liking the power of Typescript.
- Had a nifty idea that would help improve gun safety and unauthorized access to firearms that came to me while thinking about Richard Thaler’s book, Nudge, and so I took it far enough to email my representatives in the government, and I’m kind of thinking about pushing this. (In short, motivate the purchase/use of gun safes by providing a one-time tax break for purchasing one, and removing sales tax from gun safes and trigger locks.)
- Finished cataloging all my unopened Magic the Gathering cards. That was a slog, but here’s the immediate metrics on the set:
Reading
Blockers
- Dealing with probate — my brother didn’t have a will, his BFF Jen is handling most of this, but I have to authorize stuff. Etc., etc. It’s a clusterfuck.
- House hunting consumed a bunch of time, plus we had to start packing, fixing stuff around the current house, and getting ready to move.
- Mauled my thumb on the 23rd — we had stopped to help a dog that was clearly lost (had a collar and tags), and I didn’t want to spook him, so I tried to catch the car door before it slammed, and got my thumb crushed. Going to definitely lose the thumbnail. Proof that no good deed goes unpunished. But we were able to corral the dog and his owner showed up just a minute or two later.
Lessons Learned
- Never die without a will.
- No good deed goes unpunished.