For sale: one big house

You doughty followers of The Big House will doubtless have noticed that I haven't posted this year.  The spring has been hectic - lots of travel and our daughter graduated high school - and now we've left The House for better prospects.  This is the view from my desk right now, in Budapest's 16th District.

I still have so many projects photodocumented that I want to write about, and hopefully now that we live in a place where my wife is unassailed by Level 5 culture shock and my children have public transit for all their back-and-forthing needs, I'll actually have some time to write about them. I probably have so much backlog that I will have bought a fixer-upper here in Hungary before I run out.  I'm going to insert them into the post stream around the dates they were actually written, but I'll also put current-dated references to them for the home audience.

In the meantime, I've put The House on the market for $40,000.  As I tell people, either I'll get to keep it, or I'll have enough money that I won't care.  I think it won't sell this year, but we'll see.  With an office view like this, suddenly The House is less attractive to me, and I remember, you know, how much I always loved Europe to start with.  But if it doesn't sell, then in the fall or maybe next spring, I'll head over for a few intensive weeks of work - sort of a work camp of one.

My next post will be a full to-do list of everything remaining to be done in The House (at least those that have been dignified with to-do points), just for historical reasons and in preparation for any such work camp binge.  But in the meantime, my bank account is running on fumes and I really have to pay attention to invoicing and additional work.  (Without significant distractions!  It's like heaven!)

Hibernation

So the sun keeps poking out, and the crocuses are thinking quite seriously about popping up, and slowly my metabolism revs back up to something approaching human. I have done work on The House recently, really I have - but I'm incapable of normal levels of prolixity when it gets so dark. I pine for the Caribee, I guess.

When we lived down there, I'd stick my head in the ice machine to feel less homesick. Now, I buy full-spectrum light bulbs and search the real estate ads for foreclosures. Puerto Ricans are optimists when it comes to real estate, though. Prices are never going to fall to the precipitous depths of the Rust Belt.

I haven't even posted my glazing article! Rest assured, Gentle Reader, you're not forgotten. The glazing, and the Purple Room, and soon it will be warm enough for me to resume outdoor maintenance - glazing and caulking and mortar.

Oh, my.

Stuff

Ah, Gentle Reader, I'm not neglecting you or The House, it's just that I've been embroiled in longer-term projects (well, the way I do them they're longer-term) and so you'll be getting longer posts about the replacement of the back carriage house door with a window and some glazing I did in the big house.

I got two more first-floor windows primed during this Indian Summer heat wave, so that was good!

I'll leave you with a picture of one of my favoritest things I've ever owned.

I'm back!

Well, I kind of expected to blog a little about the architecture in Budapest, of which I have copious photographic evidence, as you can well imagine. But (1) I ended up being pretty busy with work this summer and thus never got around to writing much on architecture, and (2) I've been writing more about software instead.

But, exhausted, we rolled in today after a marathon drive back from JFK (itself following 8 hours in the plane from Geneva after a three-hour drive from Zurich, where the train delivered us in only 12 overheated, poorly air-conditioned hours between 7 in the evening Monday and 7 in the morning Tuesday). Rewind the chronology on that, and you'll see it was planes, trains, and automobiles for three days, one of which was a 30-hour day.

Anyway, we got in, stripped two months' worth of spiderwebs off the front door (seriously), managed to remember the alarm code (whew), and walked into the carriage house. Except for mold in the fridge, there was no damage from two months' disuse, and the air smelled clean. This is literally a first for us; we've had horrible things happen during these summer absences; once the entire house sprouted mold - different colors of mold, including in the carpet of the car in the garage. We sold that house at a ridiculous profit in 2004, and laughed all the way to the bank. I miss the tree house there, though.

All summer long we've been thinking seriously of selling the place and getting something in a little less grungy part of town. It would kill me, but the family would like it. But you know? A house that doesn't get moldy when you leave it alone for a couple of months is kind of a keeper.

The big house smells a lot better now, too, now that the gutters are fully functional. The basement is still damp; the dehumidifier will only run for a few weeks before its bucket fills, no matter how tightly I tighten the hose. Not to mention a lot of the basement floor still has its plastic vapor barrier on it, which I really should remove soon.

Anyway - we're back. I was surprised how glad I was to see this place.

Merry Christmas to all!

And to all a good night.

Not dead yet

I've been quiet again - we went to Chicago to the museums for Thanksgiving, and I've been hard at work on that raised floor in the carriage house downstairs, so I haven't had much time for blogging (I kind of want to finish a given task before posting about it). I'm close to done with that, so soon, Gentle Reader, all your patience will have paid off.

Trust me.

Virus attack!

In case you're wondering why I've gone silent again, this time it was Win32.Virut.56. I honestly thought it was under control - in the twenty-five years I've worked with computers, I have never been bested by a virus or hacker before; over the five or so times I've encountered them, I've been able to figure out the means of entry and seal everything off, root it out, and enjoy another year or two of bother-free existence.

The full blow-by-blow is probably less than exciting, but suffice it to say that I shot myself in the foot with a thumb drive I took myself from an infected machine and only realized about 0.05 seconds too late how colossally stupid I'd been - I saw the drive infect my laptop. I was up until 4am that night researching and whacking, mostly with Dr. Web, a marvelous tool that almost did the trick in combination with Comodo Internet Security and Malwarebytes scanner. The next day I tried Dr. Web Live CD (it boots into Linux and removes Virut while Virut can't infect more files) and honestly thought I'd beat it.

Today, though, after three days of lost work, I broke down and bought two new computers. One is a new Windows desktop, and the other is now a Linux box currently working on pulling the files off my infected drives in a safe, non-Windows environment. I'm actually going to have to wipe my dear old laptop; it finally just ... stopped booting. Yesterday. Nothing more I could do for it. I can start it up on a Linux rescue disk and copy the files onto an external drive, but Windows has left the building.

About two hours before the end, I realized that although things looked superficially calm, my machine was actually and literally on one of the Russian botnets. It was phoning home to St. Petersburg and the Ukraine as I watched it, downloading and spawning new viruses as fast as my new blocking software could stop them. Finally, after one scan-and-reboot to remove the quarantined files, the machine started hitting the blue screen of death during every boot cycle. Windows had self-destructed. I am almost 100% certain the Russians did this on purpose to make it impossible to deconstruct the botnet code. Not personally, of course - but I think it's one of their preprogrammed failure modes if an owned node starts getting too "smart".

Bastards.

But I did get a sweet new machine out of it. Two, really. My wife said if I wanted a new office setup for my birthday, I could have just asked. Ha! Also, it was fun in a horrible, high-stress, panic-laden way. So I can't say it was altogether a negative experience.

That said, I'm looking forward to getting back to nice, safe plaster, although the whole dining-room-by-Thanksgiving thing is looking way less probable now. Thank Pyotr and Dmitri if you see them.

In the dining room by Thanksgiving, afterthought

So who's coming? Potluck makes sense, don't you think?

Meta moment for the day

If I may step back momentarily from the discussion of The House to address the medium in which the presentation is taking place: today, idly Googling (I don't Bing yet) for information on Marlin razor blades, I came across a post in medicinecabinets.blogmas.com, entitled, "The House: Medicine Cabinet." Let me quote you a paragraph:

...but upon inspection of the mansion of the tons, it appears that celebrity in reality liked Marlin blades. most of all They started making razor blades in 1936 and phased them finished Un bel di in the 50’s or 60’s (I’m not guaranteed from my ephemeral research). There is a child Gillette Blue Blade, with corner indents dating it to no earlier than 1933 (oh, Mr. Google, is there nothing you can’t demand that me?) most of all It has arrows printed on it indicating the captaincy it was to be inserted...

Sound familiar? Looking for information about something I posted about two days ago, I found a spaminated version of my own post, posted yesterday. I love this kind of stuff.