We had a party yesterday to show off the new house. Lots of people, lots of kids, lots of fun. The kids and some of the adults really enjoy the new Wii I got this week. Our house has lots of space for it so I had a friend bring over an extra pair of controllers and we actually got a couple games of 4 player double tennis going. That was pretty funny to see 4 people moving around trying to hit the ball. The games I have are Wii Sports, Wii Play, and I got Madden NFL ‘08 for myself. Madden’s a bit tricky so it’s not quite the party game that Sports and Play are. I had previously played all of the sports games except for Boxing. Boxing is pretty fun it’s the only of the Sports game that requires the Nunchuk, Golf like the real game is frustrating, Tennis and Baseball are good fun.

When I picked up my car, the Acura dealer didn’t even charge me for the extended warranty, so I got a new transmission all for free. The bad news is that it looks like there’s a huge number of these transmission problems on my car. I saw a ton of posts here about how many people have had their transmissions replaced. I see quite a number of posts from people who are on their 3rd or 4th transmission meaning that a replacement doesn’t fix it. There’s even a class action lawsuit at www.hondatransmissionsettlement.com. My car wasn’t covered in the settlement, but thankfully Acura still replaced it for free. These kinda problems make me want to get rid of my car, because it still makes me nervous. I may do that next year.

The automatic transmission on my 2002 Acura TL has been feeling funny. It felt like whenever I hit the gas, the transmission would have a hard time catching the gear and it would slip out under some acceleration. So I took the car in and they confirmed that my transmission was slipping. They said a transmission replacement would normally cost a whopping $5500. But they said because I was a good customer(bought it at the same dealer and had most of the services done there), they’d do me a favor and put my car on the extended warranty for $500 and then cover the repairs under that warranty. This is obviously an excellent deal for me(assuming they aren’t lying to me), and they’ve made a loyal customer out of me for this. If I had to replace the transmission at the retail price, I’d probably just buy a new car and never buy another Acura again.

What is it about Tiger Woods that makes everyone love him? Usually I root for an underdog, but whenever Tiger is playing he is my man. I want to have his babies. I think the most impressive stat about him is that he never chokes. He’s never lost a tournament when he led by 2 or more after 54 holes. 40-3 when he leads after 54 holes. 8-0 when leading in a major after 54 holes. 13-0 in majors when he leads after 36 holes.

We sold our house. Obviously, it was quick. We got several offers and took the best highest one as you’d expect. There are some situations where we might not take the highest offer(for instance an all cash offer is worth several thousand dollars more than an offer with a loan contingency, and a short close is worth more than a long close). Our agent recommended we take it because the housing market is rapidly worsening and it’s better to get rid of the house than to wait for something better. The tough credit market is really going to hurt peoples ability to get loans. And the fact that several lenders aren’t going to accept new Jumbo loans is going to make it very tough here in California.

I received my new PC today which I’d ordered on Friday. It’s yet another in a long line of Dells that I’ve bought. Some of my computer savvy friends deride me for not building my own. To which I say, my time is too valuable to build my own PC. At the high end of the PC market, the price you pay for a name brand computer is pretty steep. You can save $500-1000 by building your own. But at the mid and low end where I buy(I usually spend about $800 on a pc with monitor) the price difference isn’t that big and you’re getting support and a warranty to go with it. Also if you wait for a good deal and shop around a bit Dell comes through. The deal was for a Intel Q6600 quad core with 2G RAM, an 80GB drive and a 128MB Nvidia video card for $619 free shipping, no monitor.

I have no idea what I’ll use 4 cores for, but I’m planning on buying at least a couple of new games like Starcraft2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. And those games will use some horsepower. That and I’ll be doing some super fast word processing.

Our old house is on the market here.
When I walked through the house today a couple things struck me. It looked nothing like it did when we lived in it. Tracy spent a ton of time in the past week getting it ready to show. There was new carpet, professional cleaning, and odds and ends like a couple of light sockets and heater issues that had to be fixed.

The other thing that was funny is how big it looked. We had it professionally staged(where someone comes in and puts furniture in). There are some funny things about houses that gets staged. They really do try to use some optical illusions to make the house seem bigger. They use small furniture to make the places bigger. The bed they put in the master bedroom is definitely not a queen sized bed. The desk they put in was not more than 4 feet wide. The kitchen table was about a 3 foot round table with four chairs. If I were to eat at that table, I’d feel like there wasn’t room for anyone else to eat with me.

I think in our case, the staging is well worth it(I think the price is only $1500), it adds quite a bit of appeal to the house.

Our agent said that there was a lot of interest in the house which is good.