Live from Austin!

I’ve been laughing at some online galleries of photos by home inspectors. (Volume 1, Volume 2.)

The wrench foundation is basically what was under our house, but with wooden shims instead of a wrench, and concrete instead of metal for the pillar.

The one that made me laugh hardest was the air circulation masterpiece.

Anyhow…there’s a saying that hard work pays off tomorrow, but laziness pays off immediately. Well, sometimes laziness pays off tomorrow as well, especially when it comes to gardening.

Last summer I noticed that the grass out back wasn’t doing too well. I have to assume it was planted by whoever built the house, and that they just picked the cheapest grass seed. In winter and spring it would grow like crazy, and then in summer it mostly turned brown and died. It clearly wasn’t suited to a Texas climate.

Then this summer, I noticed that some kind of plant was gradually taking over. It was a bit like clover, but bigger. It started as a couple of patches, but by mid summer it had pretty much replaced all the grass on the right side of the path, and had somehow made the leap to a patch on the left side. I pondered whether this was the kind of thing that ought to be treated with weedkiller.

In the end, though, I wasn’t too concerned about doing anything, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was too damn hot to do anything; and secondly, we wanted to get rid of the unsuitable grass anyway and replace it with something more suited to local conditions. The plan was to get some buffalo grass sod put down, or perhaps a hybrid like Turffalo planted via plugs.

Then last week we paid an arborist to inspect our trees and offer advice on how to best take care of them. I asked him about the stuff that had eaten the lawn, and he told me it was Horse Herb. It’s a native ground covering of the Texas hill country. It thrives in the shady areas under live oak trees, forming a thick, lush, lawn-like surface that you can mow just like a regular lawn.

So by being lazy, we got a free native plant lawn replacement. It doesn’t need watering in summer, and you only have to mow it every 2-4 months. It produces tiny yellow flowers at the end of summer, and is apparently robust enough to crowd out weeds. Sure, you can’t play golf on it, but you can walk on it, sit on it, and watch squirrels dig in it.

So instead of expensive lawncare, our best bet is to roto-till the bald patches in the back yard with some organic fertilizer, get some Horse Herb seed from the Lady Bird Johnson wildflower center, and sow. Then simply leave it alone. Awesome.

The other secret to Texas lawn care I have discovered is mulching. Get a mower which mulches. Sure, it’s good for the lawn, but what’s even better is you don’t have to rake, bag up clippings, or drag sacks of yard waste around.

The idea behind credit cards is simple: they’re a way for the bank to make money. And they do, billions of dollars of it every year. The trick is to find new ways to get as many customers as possible into the optimum debt profile.

The basic rules of the game are relatively easy to understand: The more you spend, the more you owe. The more you owe, the more you have to pay at the end of the month. And the more you owe after that payment, the more interest gets added on to your bill next month.

It’s a feedback loop: owe more, more interest, owe even more, even more interest, and so on.

At some point, many people let the feedback system run away for a few months, and they arrive at the optimum debt profile: they owe so much money that if they send in the biggest payment they can, it just about covers the additional interest they’re about to be charged that month.

At that point, they’re fucked. They are basically indentured servants to the bank. They can keep working, keep making payments indefinitely, and they will never eliminate the debt or reduce their monthly bill.

There’s a catch, though. Lots of people don’t fall for it, they don’t let their balance accumulate too far; so the banks are always looking for a way to tempt you to spend more.

The time-tested method is to increase your credit limit. Eventually you’ll see something you really want, see that big number on your credit card statement, and think “Wow, I could really have that, if I just give in to temptation and use the card.” That’s why people like me who pay their bills in full each month end up with a credit limit that could pay for a small yacht, while people who actually need it have trouble getting any credit limit at all.

But now, Citibank have found a better way to get people to let their credit card bills accumulate for a while. I have to say, it’s a work of marketing genius. Evil genius, yes, but impressive nonetheless.

The new Citi “Simplicity” card has one extra clause in the credit agreement: no late fees, as long as you spend more money in the month when the fees would be assessed. Oh, the cold, calculated evil.

Lose the bill on your desk, forget to make a payment by the due date, and suddenly you’re faced with a late fee of up to $39. Unless…you spend more money. And then maybe the next month you can’t quite find the monthly payment, plus a month’s interest on the full balance—so why not skip a payment spend more money instead?

And as soon as you do that, they start increasing your APR. After all, you defaulted on a monthly payment, so as per the agreement they’re entitled to increase your APR up to 30.74%, rather than the usual 0-9%.

Basically, this one simple gimmick means that you can keep spending pretty much without consequence until you hit your credit limit. And boy, are you screwed then! No more ways to avoid late fees, a sky-high interest rate, a balance you’ll probably never be able to pay off, and a terrible credit rating (because technically, you defaulted on those payments), so nobody else will take over the debt at a lower interest rate.

Citibank says it’s all about giving you “the treatment you deserve”. They also stress their “[t]ools for helping you keep a good credit history”—an option to change your billing date, e-mail alerts, and a handy automatic system to suck that minimum payment out of your bank account every month for the rest of your life. Now, isn’t that convenient?

Hell may not have frozen over, but Texas has, and that’s almost as rare. Last night we were driving home from Houston when the temperature dropped below freezing, and the car showed a black ice warning light. Soon it began to sleet.

Texans really don’t know how to deal with snow and ice. I drove slowly and carefully, but people who had bought into the SUV myth were overtaking. Unfortunately, no amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control will help if you hit a patch of wet ice. Before long we rounded a gentle curve, and passed a major accident scene. A big patch of smashed glass was by the central barrier, and an SUV was a little further on, pointing the wrong way with its front left corner crumpled. Seconds later we passed another car, similarly wrecked, then another SUV in a ditch.

Fortunately, we had set out from Houston as soon as it began raining, so we were only around 20 miles from home by the time the roads got really treacherous. I found a truck to follow. My reasoning was as follows:

1. Chances are, the truck driver has years of experience driving in all kinds of weather conditions. So, let him set an appropriate speed.
2. He’s got good visibility to see what’s going on up ahead and slow down in plenty of time.
3. Behind the truck, the ice will be broken up somewhat.
4. Anything an 18 wheeler can safely negotiate, I can probably safely negotiate.
5. One of the biggest dangers when driving in icy conditions is inability to brake. In which case, it’s better to be behind the truck than in front of it.

I also did my best to stick to the middle lane where possible. Again, the reasoning was pretty simple: if the car started sliding, I’d have the maximum time possible to let it stop sliding before I ran out of road.

It’s always worth remembering that a 40mph collision with a solid concrete barrier is quite sufficient to kill you. Combine that with a road that may at any moment decide not to let you put on the brakes, and it’s not hard to deduce that doing 50 mph is a bad move. Some of the trucks put their hazard lights on and drove slowly in formation to block the way and stop various idiots from killing themselves, which I thought was very charitable of them.

By around 15 miles from home, everything had slowed to around 6-8 mph. Fortunately, after 15-20 minutes things eased up a little, and we made it the rest of the way at around 20-30 mph.

The final problem was getting from I-35 to our house, the biggest hazard being the big dip in Oltoft Street just west of the freeway. I eased the car to the top of the hill, and tried to start the descent as slowly as possible. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to brake significantly before I got to the bottom; I took my foot off the accelerator completely, and let the electric motors provide a little drag on all 4 wheels.

As we hit the bottom of the hill and came up the other side, we realized that the power was out–along with all the traffic lights. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to slow before the first junction, and people were pretty much behaving sensibly in the absence of signals. We made it home safely, and I started trying to un-knot every muscle in my body.

Normally at this time of year, the average temperature hits a high of just over 60°F, 15°C. Today the high was 2°C. Apparently it hasn’t been this cold since 1927. But as Texas’s own Bill Hicks might have put it: Remember, increasing incidence of climactic extremes has nothing to do with so-called global warming, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise. This is just a perfectly normal bit of freak weather you’d expect every hundred years or so…and so was Hurricane Katrina, and so is this year’s Amazon drought, and so is the sudden lack of ice in the arctic, and so is the freakishly warm Carribean ocean weather that has bleached the coral reefs, and the drought emergency in the western USA, and the heaviest rainfall since records began in Australia, the freak snowfalls in Kazakhstan, the record heat in Prague, the blizzards in the UK, the floods in Cumbria, and the 195km/h storms in Sweden.

Anyway, Houston…

We’d gone there because I have some time off, and it was a fairly cheap alternative to sitting on my ass watching TV all day, nice though the new television is. We both got a religious experience into the bargain; I got mine at the Johnson Space Center, and rothko got hers at The Rothko Chapel, of course.

Snakes On A Plane. You can just imagine the pitch meeting.

Turner: I have got this killer idea for an action horror movie.

Ellis: Sure, hit me.

Turner: OK, here’s the setup…there are a bunch of people on a plane. And the plane is carrying a load of, like, poisonous snakes. And the snakes are accidentally let out.

Ellis: Are you drunk?

Turner: No, listen, there’s more. Samuel L. Jackson is on the plane. He, like, kicks the snakes’ asses.

Ellis: I’m not sure snakes have asses.

Turner: Tails, then. But you get the idea…Samuel L. Jackson. In a plane. And the plane is full of snakes.

Ellis: So what’s it called?

Turner: Snakes On A Plane.

Ellis: I knew it, you’re baked.

Turner: No, it’s marketing genius. Nobody reads what it says on posters, we don’t need reviews, we don’t even need trailers—it’s, like, all there in the title. Snakes…On A Plane, man!

Ellis: Wow. It’s almost Zen-like in its minimalism. So outline the plot for me.

Turner: You’re still not getting it. I just did! It’s snakes…on a plane. Obviously I’ll get a few of my friends to help pad it out to an hour and a half, but it’ll practically write itself.

Ellis: OK, sounds good, get me a draft. Anything else?

Turner: Sure, and you’re going to love this. One word: sequels.

Ellis: Oh, yeah, I’m liking that.

Turner: There’s no telling where this baby could go. Snakes On A Boat. Snakes On A Train. Snakes On A Bus. Snakes In A Restaurant. Snakes In A Goddamn Movie Theater, and we drop rubber snakes on the audience half way through! It’s fuckin’ genius, man!

Ellis: Oh, yeah. I think I just creamed my pants. I’m taking this to New Line, Emmerich will green light this faster than Terry Gilliam can blow a budget. Let’s do lunch next week.

Let’s predict a few key bits of plot:

.

• Snake emerges from aircraft lavatory.
• Oxygen masks drop down, only some of them are snakes.
• Constrictor gets into lifejacket, is worn around neck.

The temperature dipped below 26 celcius and the sky clouded over, which meant it was time to deal with the back garden. The builders had half-heartedly seeded the back of the house with non-native grass, which had gone crazy as soon as spring arrived. We had allowed it to become seriously overgrown, and now I was going to pay the price.

I started off by giving it a once-over with the string trimmer, getting rid of the worst of the large bushy weeds and thinning out the grass a bit. Clouds of insects were disturbed by this, so I set up the bug zapper to lure them away. Then I put the lawnmower together.

Things I found in the grass:

• Bits of live oak branches.
• Broken glass.
• A 4cm spider, tan colored with yellow-brown stripes, so probably a fully-grown wolf spider.
• A dead pigeon, dessicated by the heat, only recognizable because of a handful of intact feathers.
• Some kind of beetle, about penny sized.

Things I was relieved not to find (this time):

• Scorpions—apparently scorpion season is later in the year.
• 6″ centipedes.
• Cockroaches.

We now have… well, I wouldn’t call it a lawn, but it’s a patch of grass you can’t lose medium-size objects in. I think we want to put down a proper lawn of buffalo grass anyway, I just wanted to get it to a state where it wasn’t completely shame-inducing.

I’ve also put up a squirrel feeder. The squirrels have found it, but I haven’t seen them lift up the lid and take food out yet. I could tell they were excited by it by the way their tails were twitching, though.

Spring is here, and the garden is bursting with new life. Oozing, wriggling and crawling with new life. We can broadly divide the contents of the garden into the following categories:

• Neoptera terreorus, or things which I am scared of. This category includes anything with more than 4 legs that is over 1cm in its largest dimension.

• Eukaryota mortis nausicam, or things which I am revolted by. This category includes piles of dead leaves, dead and rotting things, dessicated insects, and so on.

• Plantae gravatatem mortifera, or things which I am violently allergic to. This category apparently includes most other green things.

Nevertheless, the back garden was starting to look a hell of a mess, and something had to be done. What’s more, the front and back porches were covered in disgusting yellow tree jizz. Then, when I went out back to assess the situation, I found a paper wasp was building a nest so she could settle down and raise a few hundred children in the corner of our back porch.

Dead plant stems, caterpillars and wood are all plentiful around our back porch, so I could see why she was attracted to the neighborhood, but beneficial or not she was going to have to go.

First, though, I had to sweep the pollen off the decks and sweep the path. Clouds of dust were raised, and I think my sinuses were so outraged by my foolhardiness that they went into some sort of shock, as I felt OK. Next, I got the hose out and rinsed off the back deck. The wasp was easily rinsed away, but the nest required some brisk work with the yard brush.

By that point I was sweating, and I felt as though there were insects crawling all over my body. I came back indoors and took a shower. By then, my nose had worked out what was up it, and not even Zyrtec could alleviate the misery.

There’s no doubt about it, I am to gardening what Stephen Hawking is to synchronized swimming. I just need to accept that, and pay someone to sort the rest out.

One of the things we need for the new house is a mailbox. I’m quite excited about it. The Postal Service want us to get a street-side mailbox–in other words, the classic American mailbox on a stick, with a flag on it. The kind I always saw in books, but never saw for real until I moved here.

On a totally unrelated note, when dialling someone’s phone number manually, it’s a good idea to not start the conversation with “Hey, what the fuck are you doing, bitch?” You never know, you might have dialled the wrong number. Like, say, mine.

When we arrived in Austin at the end of October, we didn’t expect major problems finding a house. During our visit in April we had spent an afternoon with a real estate agent, and had seen a number of suitable houses.

Sure enough, the first day we went house hunting, sara walked into a place and immediately thought “This is it.” We went back when I had finished work, and I agreed.

It was in Bouldin Creek, part of South Austin, more specifically Travis Heights. It was a newly-built house, extremely energy efficient, with zoned HVAC, high-e windows, the works.

As far as style, the house wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England—constructed with fiber-cement siding to look like wood, with decks front and back.

We put in an offer in November, and it was accepted. We thought we’d be moved in by Christmas…

Being cautious, we arranged for a full independent inspection of the house. Many people don’t bother to get new houses inspected; many people are idiots. Mold is a big problem in Texas, as it is in England, because of the damp and mild climate. Our realtor recommended a local inspector who does a particularly thorough job. Sure enough, there were a number of interesting things about the house.

First off, the foundation was pier and beam. Not unusual, given that the house is in the South Austin hills, but usually the wooden joists of the house rest on metal plates, which spread the load to the concrete blocks of the piers. Plates are added and removed as appropriate to level out the house.

The contractors putting together this house had invented a shortcut. Instead of metal plates, they had hammered in some small wooden shims. As a result, the load was concentrated into a tiny area instead of being spread, and the concrete posts were starting to crack.

They had also not quite put in enough ventilation for the space under the house. In fact, it looked as if they had almost forgotten the whole house part in their excitement at building the foundation walls, as in one place they had forgotten to leave a gap for a beam and had just knocked out a hole with a sledgehammer after the fact, and then filled around the beam afterwards.

The decks were a problem too. They had been built with no gaps between the wooden slats. Seems superficially like a good idea, as you can’t drop stuff between the gaps and lose it. Unfortunately, it also means that water can’t drain from the deck, and gradually pools up. Then the wood starts to absorb the water, and the space under the deck becomes moist, a breeding ground for mold. Finally, the wood rots away, and you have to do major repair work.

My favorite cock-up was the bathroom venting. The way it’s supposed to work is the bathroom vent connects to a duct, which goes up into the attic and emerges via a vent near the top of the roof. That had been too much work for the contractors; they had run a duct across instead, to the soffit vents. Hence the moist air would immediately be sucked back up into the attic.

The good news was that the problems were fixable. We got an estimate from a builder our agent recommended, and put in a revised offer—we’d buy the house if the seller would pay our choice of builder to fix the problems. We wanted the work done by our choice of builder to ensure that The O’Reilly Men wouldn’t be hired to fix the problems they caused in the first place.

[Our builder has found a neat way to fix the decks, too. Rather than rip them off and rebuild them, the plan is to use an industrial covering material to put a single-piece waterproof surface on them. No holes for things to fall into, rain will just drain off, and the result should be more durable than a properly-constructed conventional deck. The downside is that it’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than major structural work, and the final result can be colored to match what the wooden deck looked like.]

So once again everything was agreed. We thought we’d be moving in in January.

Then came the next problem. It turned out that the house and its neighbor to the west had originally been part of one large lot. They shared a separate two-car garage, subdivided into two single garages. Unfortunately, when the builders divided up the original lot, they ran the property line across the corner of the garage.

Our neighbors-to-be had discovered this and weren’t happy about it. The city of Austin wasn’t happy about it either, and had refused to issue a certificate of occupancy for the houses. The neighbors-to-be got someone to draw up a revised plan which changed the property lines to skirt around the outside of the garage. The garage would be entirely on next door’s lot, and an easement agreement would be drawn up to give us perpetual usage of half of the garage for a nominal $10 fee to make the contract legally binding.

Unfortunately, the revised property lines needed to be approved by the city’s property zoning people at their next monthly meeting. In the mean time, our mortgage deal fell through, so we started that process again. Fortunately we’d elected to work via a mortgage agent, so he handled all the re-submitting of application forms and documents. We expected to be moving in by the end of February.

Unfortunately, there was a snag. When the city reviewed the redrawn lots, they rejected the changes because the diagram was missing some essential information. The whole thing had to be sent back to be re-drawn and then re-submitted for the next month’s review meeting.

That was done, and things looked like they were falling into place. We had sorted out the financing, we’d checked the easement agreement was OK, the price and terms were agreed, and the money was ready to go.

It was about then that we discovered the IRS had recategorized my UK flat as a speculative business investment, rather than our only real estate property. There was a rather spectacular tax bill due. Massachusetts wanted a big chunk of cash too. The good news was that we had the money to cover it by April’s deadline. The bad news was that it was the money we were planning to use for furniture and appliances…Oh well, c’est la vie.

The city approved the change to the property lines, and we still expected to move in some time in March. Then our new neighbor asked a lawyer to check over the easement agreement, and the lawyer went nuts. He put in clauses saying that nobody could ever park in front of the garage, even temporarily; that we couldn’t keep housepaint in the garage; and that I couldn’t repair my bike in there either. There was also stuff about not being allowed to play musical instruments in the garage, not that I cared about that; but for good measure, he added a clause saying that no such restrictions applied to next door.

My objection was pretty simple: the agreement said we would split the maintenance costs for the garage 50/50. If we were going to split the costs equally, we should have equal use of our respective halves of the garage. I shot off an e-mail last week. The good news was that everyone agreed the lawyer had been a touch overzealous, it was perfectly reasonable to store a couple of cans of paint in the garage, I could clean and repair my bike if I wanted to, and if people wanted to visit us and park in the driveway that was fine so long as the car was on wheels, rather than on bricks. This was written into a revised contract (yes, even the bit about cars on bricks not being allowed), and everything looked like it would happen some time next week.

On Friday I was out getting some photocopying and faxing done, arranging for the bank to wire the money to the escrow agent, when I got a call from our realtor.

It turned out that the bank who had offered us our mortgage deal was getting pissy. In the last few days, oil prices had hit the US economy, and interest rates had jumped up 0.75%. The bank said if we didn’t complete the transaction that day, our interest rate would be raised 0.5%. In fact, to get that concession our mortgage broker had had to scramble around and contact senior management at the bank and explain the reason for all the delays.

So I finished my faxing and collected sara, and we drove over to the land and title company immediately. We spent a couple of hours reading and signing a couple of dozen pieces of paper. Technically, we completed the transaction “pending funding”—instructions may have been sent to my bank in Boston, by fax and now by FedEx as well, but they won’t act on them until Monday. However, since the money is sitting in my account, cleared and ready to go, I have confidence that I can get my bank to deliver the funds Monday, so we went ahead and signed accordingly.

As for the repair work, that’s starting this weekend, hopefully. The builder says we can go ahead and start moving in. The seller is going to cut a couple of checks and give them to us, one will be given to the builder up front, we’ll hand him the second one when we’re satisfied with the work done. The reason for that arrangement? Well, we’re not the only ones hurting from the delays—the builder found himself sitting on two houses, unable to sell them for almost a year, and for cashflow reasons needed to rely on the proceeds from the sale to fund the repairs. Something of a leap of faith by us, but it’s not going to keep me awake at nights.

I’m the kind of person who reads documents before signing them. There was one exception: the “meat” of the agreement is a 25 page nightmare mandated by Texas state law. Since we didn’t really have any say in what that one said, I just signed it. I have mixed feelings about that—on the one hand, I wonder if a non-state-mandated document might have been readable. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been state mandated and had been (say) 20 pages, I would have had to read it.

The seller’s agent thanked us for our patience. Both realtors agreed that it had been the most protracted delay in closing they had seen in about 35 years of combined experience. Our neighbor-to-be arrived and signed the easement agreement. Everyone seemed relieved that it was finally over.

So it all comes down to this:

After four months of delays, we bought the house we wanted. It’s actually purchased, in a legal sense.

The original contractors, who cocked everything up? They were all fired.

Hopefully we’ll pick up keys to the house on Monday when the deal is funded; then we need to sort out getting our stuff out of storage, and work out who we can bribe to help us unload our worldly possessions.

Moved to my work-related web site.

Here’s a brief run-down of the lowlights from the “REAL ID Act” passed by the House yesterday.

• Overstaying a visa becomes grounds to deny a driver’s license. There are many, many people who are now legal immigrants who have at some stage overstayed a visa period. Overstayed a student visa by a few days back when you were a student? No license for you!

  Plus, do you want all those illegal immigrants driving around with no license, no insurance, and without having passed a driving test? The government thinks you do and that it will improve your personal security…

• The act reduces the allowed list of reasons to be granted asylum, so the petitioner now has to prove that their claim arises from persecution due to race, nationality, religion, or political group membership. Merely having your life at risk will no longer be sufficient. There will also need to be corroborating evidence; even if the state knows full well that the petitioner was tortured, they’ll be able to demand proof.

• The act amends the law to allow the US to deport victims of terrorism. For example, Colombian refugees who were forced to make “protection money” payments to FARC death squads would now be liable for deportation for financial ties to a terrorist organization, without the government actually needing to present any evidence that the payments supported terrorism. The mere fact of monetary ties to FARC, whatever the circumstances, would be enough—and it’s believed that the majority of Colombian refugees have had money extorted from them by FARC.

  Also, the government can refuse entry if they think you might be likely to engage in terrorist activity in the future. They don’t need actual evidence that you’ve ever committed any crime.

• If a person is barred under the act, their spouse and children are also barred, even if they had nothing to do with the alleged activities.

• Homeland Security can override any law short of the Constitution if it’s to enable them to build barriers or roads. If it’s cost-efficient to build a new road across your back yard, using toxic waste carried there by 12 year old kids working 18 hour days, the government can now contract Halliburton to build it that way. Oh, and there’s no judicial oversight allowed; “no court shall have jurisdiction”.

• Oh, and everyone who’s an official of the PLO is now banned from the USA, including the UN building in New York. That’ll help the peace process.