Big things: Puppy!

[One final, little post about another big news item.]

A week ago, J decided we are finally ready to get a puppy. (!!!!!!!!!!!)

I am so so so excited! I've wanted a puppy since second grade.*

Yesterday I drove up to Smithfield to choose our puppy. We knew we** wanted a Dane and we knew we*** wanted a solid color one instead of one with spots. And we knew we wanted a girl.

So, this is our puppy! The girl who is selling them tried**** to get her to hold still so I could take a picture.


She doesn't look the most photogenic, because she wanted to PLAY and not pose, but she's really sweet. I picked her because she is pretty mellow, and she's all black (instead of having white toes), and she wasn't one of the smaller puppies, so I thought she would be more likely to stay healthy. I did also like one of her sisters with white toes. It was a tough choice.*****

Here she is with her momma and a couple of her littermates. (Girl ones, because the boys stayed in their puppy corral thing since I was choosing between girls.) The momma ("Marley") was pretty much the nicest dog ever. She's such a good mom.
The pups are going to the vet for their shots next Tuesday, so I will meet the people sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning to pick her up. I started buying puppy stuff, but there is still a bunch to do to prepare for her to come home--I need to get her kennel ready, and puppy-proof our house (at least a little bit), and buy some things I haven't gotten yet (like food).

I showed J a trick book I bought, and we are both very excited to secretly manipulate our dog into doing what we want. J was especially excited about the ring-the-bell-to-go-outside trick. I was especially excited about the "Go get the mail!" trick.

We're not sure what to name her.




* Instead, my parents let me have fish in second grade. And books about dogs. We always had lots of pets, but I don't think they wanted to do all of the dog chores that I promise-promise-promised to do [and definitely would not have actually done].
** I.
*** Both of us.
**** Unsuccessfully.
***** When I first saw them, I told her (decidedly): "Okay. Yes. We'll take all of them. All eight. J won't mind. Can I just take them now? ALL of them?"

Big things: Fourplex!

Almost a week after my graduation, J and I received some exciting news: we had final bank approval for us to purchase our fourplex!

Months ago, J and I decided we wanted to buy a fourplex, but we wanted to get a good deal on it. We analyzed the different properties that were available (over several months). J made a spreadsheet that calculated anticipated mortgage amounts, evaluated the rent collected for each unit, and produced a decimal to indicate how well it would pay for itself. We realized that most of the really good deals seemed to be short sales.

We didn't know much about short sales.

We learned all about them.

Basically, in a short sale, the seller owes more on a property than it is worth. Usually, the seller is about to go into foreclosure because they are in default on their mortgage, and they can't sell the property (because nobody will buy it for the amount owed). So they try to sell it at the amount it's actually worth, instead. It's usually in the bank's best interest for a short sale to happen because if the property goes into foreclosure, it will still only be worth the current value, and having to sell it and deal with it will cost the bank even more money. It's kind of a win/win (or lose-less/lose-less?) situation, because the seller avoids foreclosure (which looks really bad on a credit report) and the bank avoids the extra expense of foreclosure.

In order for it all to work, though, everyone has to cooperate. A lot of times they don't. In order to do a short sale, the seller needs permission from the bank(s). Especially if there is a second mortgage, it's tricky, because sometimes the first bank would be totally paid off if the foreclosure happened (since the second mortgage is paid after the first one), so they don't have a lot of incentive to cooperate for the short sale.

Our real estate agent told us we should be prepared to wait a long time to hear back from the banks, even after our offer was "accepted" by the seller. It usually takes them months. And even after that, the price isn't always approved. We put in offers on a couple different properties. One of them was accepted, but we canceled that offer because once we got inside, there were cockroaches and mold all over the place. (No thanks!) We waited on the other offer, though.

It took about 3 months for us to hear back from the banks, and they said YES IT WAS APPROVED BUT WE HAD TO DO IT ALL IN 15 DAYS OR ELSE. If we didn't close (and fund!) in 15 days, it was going to cost us $2500 more.

So right right after I graduated we got approval, and we hurry-hurry-hurried to get everything together. We had the home inspector come out on a Monday, got the home inspection report on Tuesday, had the appraisal on Wednesday, finally got the appraisal back on Friday. On the following Monday I set up insurance. We met with the seller a few times to pick up maintenance stuff for the fourplex, and we were going to close that Wednesday, but it got pushed to Thursday, and then it finally happened. The whole thing was all such a whirlwind!

Since then, I have stayed busy with fourplex things.

- I started my own business (an LLC!) to handle J and I's property management stuff. I set up a business bank account and a PO Box.

- I read up on A LOT of different landlord/tenant laws, and became VERY familiar with our tenants' leases (we have to honor the previous owner's leases). I developed and had our people fill out Property Condition reports, and Tenant Update forms.

- I installed smoke detectors in all of the units. I bought seismic bands for the water heaters (and was going to install them, but it turned out I didn't have the right tool at the time.)

- I bought tools!

- J and I met with the previous owner to learn how to summer-ize the evaporative coolers. It was nice of him to show us. We realized that when we summer-ized our evaporative cooler*, we actually didn't. [More to follow about that...]

- The previous owner also showed us how to use the sprinkler system, so we turned the water on for the summer and found out a sprinkler was broken. (So I learned how to fix sprinklers! I replaced some broken pipe. J helped with part of it.)

- This week, I repaired a broken drawer and performed maintenance on a dishwasher. Then J and I replaced a dishwasher a couple days ago, and yesterday I replaced the elbow thing on the new dishwasher, and I used teflon tape for the first time.

- My next projects will [probably] be: making and installing a bunch of screens (a few of the units are missing screens) and re-painting the parking lines in our little parking lot.

I am becoming so handy!** Also, I am making friends at Home Depot and Lowe's.

It seems to take a lot of time to learn how to do each new thing, but after each repair (or repair attempt!) I understand so much more about how things work. In the future, repairs will be quick and easy, and soooo much cheaper than if we were to hire repair people every time anything breaks.

In the past, J and I have sometimes talked about having me do property management. Recently, we like the idea even better. Instead of looking for a job now, I am studying to get my real estate license.*** To be licensed, Utah requires people to complete a 120-hour real estate course and then pass the state and national license exams. So. I signed up for one of the courses that is available both live and online (to mix it up a little bit), and I've been getting started with that. I'm going to try to finish it over the next couple months.


* You know, by just changing the pads. (LOL)
** Also, I am making friends at Home Depot and Lowe's. Since their employees have to walk me through all of the steps of my projects when online instructions are insufficient. Actually, the HD master plumber knows me now. In the past couple weeks, he and I have talked several times, for probably a couple hours in all. What a guy! He really knows his stuff.
*** In Utah, in order to manage other people's properties you need to have a real estate license.

Free Gum

If any of you sometimes read the New York Times but not always, and you like gum, read the Times today.  In the A section (A13ish?) there's a big advert for gum.

It says:

Let's stick together.

in the spirit of unity,

Wrigley is giving everyone,

regardless of political or 

flavor preference,

any new Slim Pack tm,

FREE.

And then there's a coupon for a free pack of gum.  Neat.

Something funny from work

Want to see something fun?

I just filled a request for a patron with an interesting name. And people have to use their real names when they request things, so we never get Jane Does or John Smiths or fake names at all.

Plus, this guy's email address is an official school one.


Awesome. I want to email him and ask if we can be friends, just because he has such an amazing name, but that wouldn't be very professional, so I won't.

In other random news, did you hear about the two German kids (6 and 7 years old) who eloped to Africa? One of my friends told me about it. The story is here.

Correlation v. Causation

Remember how a few days ago I posted about interesting articles in the NYT?

One of the articles that I noticed was "Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says,"which was a new study which had results showing that like, friends of friends could cause you to be happy. I mentioned a bit about it, and said that it was interesting.

On the Freakonomics blog (which, incidentally, is a NYT blog...), today there's an article saying the study is bunk. The Freakonomics article is more interesting than the first article that I mentioned, actually.

It says that the study was performed sloppily. The study proves correlation but not causation. This article says that there are actually three reasons that you may be happy when strangers near you are happy-- the first is that happiness actually is contagious. The second is that "people with similar dispositions are more likely to be friends," and the third (and Justin Wolfers says this is most likely) is that people who are friends are more likely to be under similar influences. The example he gives is, if our mutual friend dies, we'll both be sad about it.

Wolfers also mentions another article in the same issue of BMJ which proved that people can too easily draw conclusions about contagion.

"They use Fowler and Christakis’s approach on another dataset, and show that it leads to the unlikely conclusion that height, headaches, and acne are also contagious. The more likely explanation, of course, is that all are subject to similar environmental influences. For instance, the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine."

I remember when we talked about correlations in my psychology class. Our teacher said, "Ice cream sales are strongly correlated with crime rates. Therefore, ice cream causes crime." And then we talked about it, and of course that isn't actually true; when it's hot, people buy ice cream. And there is also more crime when it is hot, probably because people are more irritable.

Interesting NYT today...

I had some time in between class and work today, and I decided I would read the New York Times, which I sometimes do.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper, because I think it covers a great range of news; there are always stories about what's going on, but there are also often stories about just random, interesting things. One time I read this story about these immigrants who would call this phone number and listen to a preacher in their like, obscure language, and it made it so that they could hang in there for the rest of the week. It kept them going. It was a pretty amazing story. Or another time, there was that story about the berries that made everything taste sweet. NYT, baby.

Anyway, today's paper was a real winner, I thought. Not that there was anything amazing amazing, but there was a lot of great stuff. I read a bunch of it, and skimmed some of it, and I clipped 3 little stories to share on here.

1. From the front page of the NYT, "H.M., Whose Loss of Memory Made Him Unforgettable, Dies". Anyone who has ever taken a psychology class has heard of this guy. He was always called H.M. for privacy, but his name was Henry Gustav Molaison. Basically, he was hit by a bicycle and had been having awful seizures. So he had this experimental surgery which would hopefully fix that, and like, it did. Exceeeppppt, he totally ended up losing the ability to make new memories. So for the next 55 years, everything he did it was like he was doing for the first time. The NYT says, "And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science." The article says he was patient and always willing to try stuff they had him do, "And yet every time [Dr. Milner] walked in the room, it was like [they had] never met." It was a neat article. They arranged to do final MRI scans hours after he died, and they're having his brain preserved, like Einstein's. Neat article.

2. The next article that I really liked was, "Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says," by Pam Belluck. This article was about a study that will be published in BMJ, which is a British journal. (Aha! I found it.) The article included a quote from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis from Harvard Medical School, who was one of the authors of the study. He said, "Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don't even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you." The study shows that people who live close to you have a huge influence on your happiness, even without you being aware of it. Like through body language and stuff. "A next-door neighbor's joy increased one's chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better."

The article also mentioned another study, "In a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling." Interesting.

3. The last article isn't really an article. It's just one of those little blips where they briefly mention what is happening in places around the world. The title was "Zimbabwe: Cholera Emergency" and I thought it was interesting too, mostly because I had no idea about it. The only thing I know about Cholera is that there is a book called Love in the Time of Cholera. Which I haven't even read. I sort of didn't realize it was still a big deal. It is to Zimbabwe, though. They've had 560 people die since August. They desperately need food, drugs, and equipment, and Dr. David Parirenyatwa (whoever that is) said, "Our central hospitals are literally not functioning." Sad! The International Red Cross sent 13 tons of medical supplies, like rehydration fluids, antibiotics, and clothes to protect the medical workers.

I looked up Cholera to see what it actually even is, and basically it's where you consume food or water that is infected with cholera vibrios bacteria, and it messes up your small intestine and you start having exhaustive diarrhea. It's one of the most "rapidly fatal illnesses known" according to Wikipedia. Without medical treatment people can die within 3 hours but typically they make it 18 hours to several days. The only way to survive is to have oral rehydration therapy.

New Job

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I had a job interview today.

I went. It was about what I expected. (Did you guys know I'm good at interviewing for jobs? Because I am.)

And they offered me the job!

I never really know how much to say about work on my blog. SO, basically, I'm working at my school library. In one of the departments. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And it's going to work so so much better with my school schedule than Ancestry did. (Which is to say, I can SLEEP now!) And I don't have to take public transportation to get there.

I start on Monday. Today I exchanged my student ID for an employee magic door-opener card.

Just a couple other random thoughts--

I thoroughly enjoy people dressing up for work on Halloween. The guy who made my new student ID was a vampire! At first I only noticed his fangs and suit, but then partway through our exchange, I realized he had red eyes. Neat. Also, there was a gypsy serving food at one of the restaurants on campus.

On that same note, there are some quality Halloween episodes of things that are worth watching. The Office and Making Fiends come to mind.

And one last thing, and this is sad: as I was reading the NYT during lunch today, I read a story about MiShawna Moore and Sanders-Clyde Elementary. Basically, the lady was like Mother Teresa at the school. When families didn't have anymore food stamps, they came to her, she helped people with their electricity bills, and bought a bunch of turkeys for Thanksgiving and food baskets, etc. I guess the school really became like, a community center. And the school was like all these poor black kids. And after they got all this attention, they started thriving. All these kids that couldn't read became proficient readers, and stuff. And the school became an inspiration. MiShawna Moore won a bunch of awards. And people were saying anyone, if they're given the right attention, can succeed. EXCEPT, oh wait, turns out they can't. They started monitoring the testing at the school and then the principal takes off, really randomly. And scores drop from 84.6 percent to 44.4 percent on the third grade science test. And kids who are transferring to other schools, like, just because, are not thriving anymore. And when they go back to look at old tests, each kid has like 7 erasure marks to correct answers, when usually the average for that sort of thing is one per kid. And the saddest thing of all is, everyone had hope, but it turned out to be in nothing. Because the kids still can't read.

I don't really know what to think about that.

I did think it was an interesting story, though.

My Favorite Political Cartoonist

I've had a favorite political cartoonist for years. His name is Michael Ramirez, and he drew for the Los Angeles Times. I used to enjoy the cartoons in the actual newspapers, and then they became available online. But they were really tricky to get to on the LA Times website and you had to register.

WELL, turns out they fired him while I was on my mission! LAME!

BUT, now he draws for Investor's Business Daily. And, you don't have to register for anything to see them.

Check out Michael Ramirez' political cartoons here:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/cartoons.aspx

"no news is no news"

I don't watch the news very often. Or even follow it, for that matter.

Periodically, I go through phases where I feel very interested in newspapers, and knowing what's going on...but usually, I don't. (Although I do become informed before I vote on things.)

I think that the news is generally depressing and speculative. It makes me worry about things that I can't do anything about. It takes time to follow. And of course, I know that this is a terribly pessimistic and isolating perspective.

But anyway. When my mom texted me last night about the New York plane crash, I hadn't even heard about it. Apparently it had been on the news all afternoon. She wrote in the text that it was one of our friend's flying students. They weren't sure if our friend had been in the plane or not.

And then, we found out that he was. They didn't announce his name in the news yesterday since his wife didn't know about it, but it's all over the news today. His family flew out to New York last night.

And the whole thing seems so weird to me. When big things happen on the news, it's usually about other people. It's about far-away people.

All day today, my stomach has been in knots. And I keep randomly having to wipe my tears away.

Tyler was a really good guy. His family has always been like an extension of my family; if my mom couldn't drive me somewhere, his mom did. As kids, Lavish and I spent nights at their house regularly. We were friends with his sisters. He and Lavish had the same birthday.

I feel so sorry for his family, and his wife and kids.

The whole thing seems surreal.

There are a bunch of articles about it now, but I like this one.

[Incidentally, my supervisor at work was also in an accident yesterday; he backed his car into a Ferrari. (Of all cars!) The paint on the bumper will just need to be touched up, but the owner of the car is a real jerk. It's going to be an expensive paint job. Poor guy.]

Stay safe, everyone.