You can really add “stravaganza” to any word, can’t you?  Truckstravaganza!  Chex Mixstravaganza!  Mumpstravaganza!  Danzastravaganza!

Anyway, so our humble apartment had a problem lately.  Landen really enjoys getting into the wires we have around the house, and as any mediocre electrician can tell you, baby + current = bad.  This was one such area that was a definitive problem.

Because we continually pull him away from under the computer desk, he of course wants to go there even more to play with all the cool and not-at-all dangerous electricity.  So one morning, I wake up to see my genius wife had taken a very intelligent step that I clearly didn’t have the mental capacity to figure out for myself.

See, he knows enough to pull a pillow away when it’s blocking his path, but when it’s against a wall, he doesn’t know that there is good stuff behind it.  So this worked great for a couple of days.  I’d be typing away at the computer, and he’d crawl under there, and I’d let him go because there’s nothing bad he could do there.  That was until yesterday.  I’m typing and all the sudden I see a hand peeking out from the underside of the desk.  I pull back my chair to see this:

Earlier that morning, I saw that he had pulled himself to standing in his crib, but that was a familiar environment.  SURELY he can’t do it anywhere he wants to.  Well, yes, he can.  And he does.  Alot now.  He is officially in the “uh oh” place where we need to keep an eye on him at all times.  Or else:

He gets into our checkbooks.

While his eating and sleeping habits are all wonky, I attribute that to him always wanting to try out his new skills.  He pulls himself up, yes, but he can also get off of couches and other high surfaces by letting his legs swing out first and dropping until he lands on his feet.  I don’t know at what age you’re supposed to be able to do that, but he can do it now.  He’s also recently learned that banging on the dishwasher with his hand makes a very different sound than other things he can bang on, and banging on the dishwasher with the cabinet door makes a REALLY loud (and possibly not-at-all-good-for-the-dishwasher) sound.

He has taken to feeding himself, but only when I’m trying to feed him.  This morning, he must have put more than a dozen pieces of toast in his mouth, but only when I was trying to get him to eat his mushed aprimangorangebeets or whatever it was.  If I try to get him to eat toast, he will stick his entire hand in the bowl of rice cereal.  He definitely has a very unique personality, and he’s incredibly fun to be around.  See him jamming on his sippy-guitar.

Baby Slash would be jealous

He still loves playing with doors, but now his big thing is to close them and then get very upset that he can’t open them back up.  The day that he’s tall enough to open door handles, watch out.  Make sure your checkbooks are kept in safes, that’s all I got to say.

Because of being semi-packed for almost two months now, he hasn’t had much room to play indoors.  So we have taken him across the parking lot to the playground while the weather was still warm enough.  It was his first time on the big boy playground.

At the top of the slide

Perhaps confused by how gravity works

Startled that someone is apparently eating his shoulder

He does not share my fear of heights

The two most beautiful people I know.  One of whom appears to be surfing.

I went into Landen’s room this morning to get him up as we could hear he was stirring and probably ready for breakfast.  What do we see?  He pulled himself to standing and was waiting for me to pick him up.

We’re in trouble indeed.  And you’re in for some pictures very very soon.

Yes, this is more painful.  Our lender backed out because the seller is making too much money.  Not because they think the house value is wrong – simply because they are upset the seller is making so much money.  (Hey bought it as a foreclosure for what was owned)

The house isn’t done for good, but we can guarantee we won’t be moving into it within the next week, at least.

Here’s what this procedure has been like.  It’s like someone came up to us and said: “Hey, I’ll give you $1000 if I can punch you in the face 10 times.”  We say okay.  And he whacks us ten times.  He then says “Oh, you can’t have the money NOW.  It’ll come in a month.”  So in a month, we ask for our money, and he says he miscounted and the $1000 will be ours if he can punch us a total of 20 times in the face.  So we let him punch us another ten times, at which point we go away for another week.  Finally, we come back and he says that because it’s taken so long, he’ll actually give us $1050 if we get punched in the face ten more times.  Once that’s done, he says just ten more and the money is ours.

That’s what it’s like.

Don’t buy a house.  Ever.  Just don’t do it.  Not if you’re named Derek and Ashley.  Actually, if you’re named Derek and Ashley, you probably have bigger problems.  Just sayin’.

I’m not going to get into everything – it’ll just make me angry.  The nutshell: the mortgage company is now stringing everyone along – asking for just about every possible document and receipt for the repairs imaginable.  In the words of the banker we’re working with, “I’ve never seen that before.”  Oddly, this is not the first time we’ve heard this exact phrase during this nightmare.

So we’ve signed THREE different offers that said:

- the closing date will be on or before October 1

- the closing date will be on or before October 15

- the closing date will be on or before October 16

We are now told that it will likely not even be completed by Monday (October 19.)  That’s right – we are now going to be about three weeks after our original closing date, and we are not sure we are even getting it.  The seller, having (in his mind) busted his ass to get everything we’ve asked for (and, though he sucked at doing it, he more or less did accomplish what he promised), he is now getting yanked around because the mortgage company thinks he is making too big a profit on his turn-around.

If he doesn’t get it done by Monday, we will probably go to a new bank, where the interest rate is more than a half a point HIGHER.

Yeah.  I’m ready to punch some necks.

I’m not going to get into an ‘update’ on the house, because we’re still having drama with it.  Yes, two days before the closing, and there is drama.  Either way, we’ll be in that house within a week, hopefully in two days like we’ve been planning for a month now.

Anyway, here are VERY BAD pictures that we didn’t take – they were taken by the appraiser who came in.  They were then put into his report and printed and scanned (I couldn’t steal the pics themselves for some reason.)  So here is the house before we wreck it.

Front of House

Our backyard, practically the whole thing, too

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood

Master Bedroom

Living Room from hallway

Kitchen with new appliances

So in my ongoing quest to play all the Final Fantasys (and do as much as possible in all of them), I’ve finished an old favorite of mine, the tenth installment.  How did it hold up?

First off, this is the first game I did EVERYTHING on  – every sidequest, obtained every Celestial Weapon (dodging lightning was unexpectedly simple – I found a spot on one of the boards where there is a repeating pattern of lightning – to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never heard of anyone finding such a secret out.  w00t)  I beat every creature in the monster arena, including Nemesis.  I wish I had the international version so I could have taken on the dark aeons and Penance, but I’ll settle.  It shows that I did all this, too – I spent a mind-numbing 112 hours to do all of this.

Did the game hold up to my memory (I used to rank it in my top two)?  Well, yes and no.  There’s very little bad about it, in my mind.  The problem is the bad parts are VERY bad.  Read on.

The Good

- It’s just a fun game.  There aren’t many spots that you have to labor to get through.  Many (though certainly not all) of the sidequests are pretty fun, and there aren’t too many of them to just be a distraction.  It’s not the most challenging of games, but I did die a few times early on, and had legitimate troubles with one of the bosses.

- Auron: simple the most bad-ass character in any FF game.  Screw that one list that picked a top 5 from only FFVII.  Auron could kick the crap out of Cloud with just his milk jug.

- The new technology involved in the PS2 just made it a great game.  No screen loading when you left one screen and onto another (they circumvented this by having a moving screen for almost all locations.)  It’s a bit hard when up turns into left, but you get the hang of it.

- The movies.  They are pretty awesome.  That initial movie in the blitzball arena still stands as one of the best in the series.

The bad

- The chambers of the fayth.  I know the series likes to have “thinky” parts where you have to use logic to solve little puzzles.  But these are simply annoying and cumbersome.  There’s only six or seven, but it seems like a thousand.  And I was using a walkthrough detailing every step to make.  Among the worst thing in any of the games.

- Talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk.  With the new voice-acting, they decided to give people their money’s worth.  There were huge stretches of the game that seemed like there was no fighting whatsoever, just huge scenes.  It was like a movie that doubled as a video game, only you couldn’t really change the outcome.

- The Hymn of the Fayth.  That song is as dour as FFVI’s music.

- The lead guy, who I named Tantrum (quite fitting if you know the game.)  He’s not as bad as Emo Jr. from VIII, but he’s not at all good.

The I’m Not Sure if it”s Good or Bad

(This will be a surprisingly long list)

- Blitzball.  I still probably consider this to be the most fun mini-game in any of the series.  It’s a great time, and I recall in the past playing half the time in the game playing blitzball.  However, the walkthrough said I should wait until I can assemble the perfect team before playing any games, which can’t be done until you get the airship.  So I played something like 40 or 50 games in a row at that point.  It’s not that much fun in bulk.  Speaking of which…

- WTF is up with the airship not being accessible until the LAST PLACE IN THE GAME!?  So when you’re already strong enough to win, THEN and only then do you get to do the sidequests to make you stronger.  Doesn’t make sense.

- T&A.  While I don’t mind boobs and butts, this game took it’s fancy graphics and spent 80% of them perfecting how to craft cleavage and crack.  Okay, enough alliteration.  I don’t t hink Lulu had a single shot that didn’t include her barely-concealed breasts.  Not bad, mind you, but certainly egregious.

- The voice acting.  I’m not as down on it as most people are (I happen to think Seymour is perfect in a creepy way.)  But the director must have told them “Make sure to take lots of lengthy pauses that people can’t skip through for no apparent reason.”  Maybe something got lost in translation.  And if I didn’t know otherwise, I’d have sworn they got Brian Doyle Murray to do Jecht.

- Gaping plotholes.

a)  So Yuna mentions early on that Khimari has been her guardian for 10 years on her quest to save Spira.  But when the game starts, she is just learning her first Aeon summoning.  What the hell did she do for 10 years?

b)  Auron was a guardian for Braska.  So he did the entire trek, ostensibly gaining weapons and earning experience.  When you meet him 10 years later at the start of the game, he’s worthless.  Where did all that experience go?

c)  So Tantrum is from Zanarkand, which is imaginary.  He’s a dream.  Okay, I’ll buy it, that makes sense somehow.  And there IS a Zanarkand in Spira, the overall world.  It IS the same Zanarkand – one was destroyed 1000 years in the past.  Then why has Tantrum never heard of Spira?  Earth was still called Earth back when the Ottoman Empire reigned.

d)  The ending.  I was disappointed with how short the ending sequence was, and how it didn’t really tie much together.  But I also like that it didn’t end truly happily.  Tantrum and Auron were a dream and dead, respectively.  So instead of ‘everyone lives happily ever after’, we get “oh by the way, we kinda painted ourselves into a corner, so they’re just gonna disappear and give everyone hope.”

e)  The Magus Sisters make their triumphant return, having been gone since FFIV.  So who the hell put them in insect costumes?

I am taking a long break before playing any more FFX.  I kinda got obsessed with this one in the last few weeks.  (At around 31 hours, I was ready for the final place.  It took me the remaining 81 to do all the sidequests.)  I also [begrudgingly] bought FFX-2.  That will be the next one, and it makes sense that I’m not rushing out to play it.

Total time spent on this… … … … … … … … I’d rather not say… … … … …okay, fine, it’s ~568 hours.

First off, it is October 5th and we have snow in our “backyard” (Mount Peavine directly to our south.)  Reno is a strange place meteorologically.

Speaking of the 5th, that means it’s Landen’s birthday – he is 9 months old today.  And he’s every bit of that – he’s quite the little man now.  He still doesn’t crawl properly, but does the army crawl like it’s nobody’s business.  He crawls over legs, chairs… he is not afraid of anything.  And while stacking pillows up keeps most kids away from certain areas, Landen’s smart enough to simply move the pillows aside and crawl through.  He’ll even sometimes just crawl straight over them.  He’s extremely intelligent and picks things up quickly.

For instance, he has started picking cheerios up off the table and putting them in his mouth.  That sounds pretty simple, but it’s a monumental step for a baby.  Of course, now if we could just have him keep clothing and food straight (he tends to want to put his clothes/shoes in his mouth, and more food ends up on his body than down his digestive tract.)

Happy baby with a happy mom

He is a very peculiar boy in a number of ways.  At Granny’s place, he will sit with his basket of toys and can play for a half hour with them contentedly.  At our place, we give him toys and within a minute he is zooming off to another part of the house.  Even new toys or toys he hasn’t seen in a while.  And what he does play with most?  Doors.  He’ll crawl up to a door, particularly the guest bathroom door, and push the door closed.  Then he’ll crawl to the closed part and open it back up full (after wriggling himself out of the way, which is usually his major issue – being in the way of the door he’s trying to play with.)  He can do this a half dozen times before crawling off to do something else.  He also really likes drawers, cabinets – anything he can open and close really – as well as his ongoing love of instruction manuals, tags, and labels.

More playtime

Despite looking happy 90% of the time, he’s been a bit crabby and fussy lately.  He hasn’t eaten as much and he’s been generally fidgety and irritable.  In feeling his gums, we think two more teeth might be popping up any day now on his lower jaw.  This happened the first time he popped two teeth out (we’ve still yet to get a good pic of the teeth, but that will hopefully come soon – especially now that we have batteries for our cameras.)  Either that or he might just be hitting another growth spurt.

He apparently isn’t as scared of grass as I was at his age

Most people have asked about the house.  We are officially 10 days from the absolute deadline for our closing date, and we still don’t know if this transaction is going to happen.  It’s actually looking less and less likely with each passing day.  In short, the seller has been completely uncooperative and uncommunicative.  He was supposed to have had new appliances ordered about a week after we put in a bid (two months ago.)  To this date, there are no appliances in the house.  According to the seller’s agent, he ordered them maybe a week or two ago and they’ve been shipped each time and had some defect in them.  I personally think it’s BS (the fact that he changed the closing date from Oct 1 to Oct 15 was an indication that he hadn’t even done half the things he promised to do.)

While it would blow to a) lose out on the $8000 tax credit and b) have been living out of boxes for the last month, we aren’t bound to this.  And if I am not allowed to see the house this week, we’re going to maybe make a significantly lowered offer or, barring that, simply walk away.  We’re not happy, as the place was excellent, but the gloves need to come off at some point.

The realtor is supposed to swing by today and I have left a message to go with her.  We’ll see if she takes me up on that.  Obviously, her commission rests on this, so she’s going to do everything in her power to get this to happen.

Hopefully the next update will be a bit happier.