Some recent geocaching...

I recently downloaded the geocaching.com app to my iPhone.  This gives me the ability to geocache about whenever I want, as long as my battery doesn't die.  Most important realization about caching?  Cliffs and scary terrain don't scare me at all.  Teenagers wandering around in the woods as a pack result in me vacating almost immediately.  Not because I feel like some forest-dwelling perv, although that occurred to me.  But because I don't trust why they're out there, so I don't see the need to be anywhere in their vicinity.

Mr. Geocaching Cowboy is from a trail near my house that I didn't even know existed.  There are a number of lakes in the neighborhood you can't see, and the trail wraps around them.  Some serious work on the bike.

I gave Colin a whole bag full of geocaching dinosaurs and animals tonight.  And at least one soldier.  But I think I still have the cowboy.


I think you can see the cache in this picture if you think about it.  But only because the hiding place broke and it's a little more obvious.  Still took me a few minutes to figure out what I was looking for.


This is a camo style in Call of Duty.  It was very hard to see in the tree.


There was a cache across the street, although I think it had been muggled.  There were so many cars and pedestrians going by that I just couldn't spend much time really looking around.  But this hardware store was pretty cool.  If I had a business (one with a building, that is...well, a building that's not rental property...I mean, not rental property for half a dozen people...who were in a family...you know what the hell I mean), I'd like it to be big enough that it has it's own sculpture park.


Near the high bridge.  Uppertown.  I didn't sit in the chair.  It was REALLY cold despite our recent weather.  It just happened to be between breakfast with Erik at the Day to Day and home.


Klund has the Pearly Gates.  Uppertown has this.  I'm not sure who wins.  Both have a cache nearby.


Cool sculpture in the Uppertown park.  Looks sort of dragonish.


The cache in the Uppertown park. My fingers were numb after getting it open.

Why I Use FourSquare...

I use FourSquare because...

a.) I am now mayor of Eagan, and I think Eagan is really just the house down the street.  Despite the previous mayor's best efforts, I have snatched away the title.  At first it was just for a day or two, but lately it seems as if I've managed to lock it down.  Part of my effort has included posting random pictures of weird things I see.  She may have just abandoned being mayor because I seem like some sort of psycho with my pictures from the front of the City Pages, the cover of Pahluniak novels, and it goes downhill from there.

b.) I am mayor of my house.  This is close to the house that purports to be Eagan.  My house is characterized by pictures of feet, usually wearing various shoes.  I must look like a fetishist.  There are even pictures of Kyle's feet and Luna's feet.
c.) Jen's bed is now a FourSquare location.  I'm waiting to see who shows up as the mayor.

d.) I am mayor of Kedar's cube.  Kedar used to be a report at work, although not since the last reorg.  But I still claim dominion over his cube.  I bet his new manager isn't mayor of anyone's cube.  And I'm hot on Jennifer's tail.  Go figure.

8-bit Town Hall Brewery

I was looking for an address to The Wienery, and Google Maps prompted me for using their 8 bit version.  A very funny pre-April Fool's bit of humor.  Here's Town Hall Brewery in 8 bit...

Cultural Dissonance

The last two nights have something of a weird dichotomy of cultural experience.  On Wednesday, I went to Plankton at the Trylon with Kyle.  It was part of their viewer-selected Trash Film Debauchery series, and the guy who requested the movie was in the audience.  If you're not familiar with it by the name Plankton, it also goes by the title, Creatures from the Abyss.

The plot?  Idiots get lost at sea in a raft.  They find a yacht.  It's a pleasure yacht belonging to scientists who are a.) researching deep sea life in an area polluted with radioactive waste and b.) having weird fish sex.  The rest of the movie involves said idiots managing to get bitten/contaminated.  This ends in turning into a Ray Harryhausen-esque tentacly stop-motion fish guy.  Giving birth to copious amounts of caviar.  Growing a fish out of your back during sex.  Being subjected to a phone-sex-esque shower that's breaking down, and a weird wall sculpture that offers up nonsensical advice.  Growing a fish out your back that's forced to pinch your brain until you behave because you're still listening to your friends.  And your pregnant fiance (of a year!) shooting herself in the head with a spear gun.  I'm sure I missed something, like the flying fish that looked like they were from the Cthulu universe in From Beyond.  My favorite quotes was, "YOU HAVE NO MORE SISTER!"  That's brilliant.

A few reviews:

• http://www.bloodygoodhorror.com/bgh/reviews/05/05/2011/plankton-creatures-from-the-abyss
• http://www.badmovieplanet.com/inferno/archives/cfta.html
• http://www.badmovies.org/movies/cabyss/

This should prove to Altsie that I've go no problem with bot-capable movies that lack bots. Thanks for the comment!  I'd love a few tickets - I'll talk a few developers from work into going.

Then, on Thursday, I went to Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy at the Children's Theatre Company with Eryn and her friend Eli (pronounce it "ellie" - Eli is a her - whose dad works with me, if you consider working in the same building of 7000 people to be "works with me").  Content wise, this was probably the best play we've seen at CTC so far.  Despite being a play for kids, they didn't pull any punches.  Kids got hit by their fathers.  Children and mothers were committed to the mental hospital to die.  Grandpa died of a broken heart.  Families were uprooted.  Greed ruled.  Mom was dead and Dad couldn't talk about it. And the racial/racist part of the story line was front and center.

Mrs. Cobb was well played.  Absolutely wonderful.  So was Lizzy.  The Buckminster boy was a little too reminiscent of the whining from A Wrinkle in Time, but more palatable given the strong performances surrounding him and the engaging story line.

Eli had seen part of the show already on line, and knew that there was going to be a very loud and scary scene at one point, when Lizzie and Turner (Buckminster) are lost at sea in a rowboat in a storm (see...just like Plankton!) and encounter a whale.  She wanted to leave the theater until the scary part was over, but I convinced her that wrapping my jacket around her head would be sufficient so I could watch, and I'd let her know when it was over.  A good call, as it was impressive to see a whale head and tail appear on the CTC stage.

Reboot II

We decided to mix it up over at snrky.com again.  It took us a year to realize that with no text other than the alt and title image tags and title to the post, most search engines were doing a very poor job of finding the site.  At least now we show up when someone searches for snrky.  Even that didn't get a hit before.  So we're moving things around.  Dropping the title for the comic onto the bottom of the image (that's no good for search, but if people want to share it, at least they don't have to cut and paste a few things - we could lay the title into the image as well, but at the bottom is more interesting.  We may get rid of the * and move it truly to the bottom left).  Adding the title and alt as real text to the post - visible, not just as attributes of the image.  And....drum roll...adding content.  I have to say that's the most difficult part.  I can think up short funny blurbs, but trying to add some related content, regardless of how much I type in other capacities, is sort of painful.  The intent is to add it at the same time as the post so there's always a comic at the top of the page.

Additionally - we're going to be messing around with the white on black and perhaps going black on white and trying to pretty it up a bit while we're at it.  It's an interesting learning experience as a background thread to other things I do.

Altsie

I read this post about Altsie on the MHTA newsletter today...a very cool idea:

In a nut, Altsie allows bars, restaurants and other local venues to become one-night-only independent movie theaters. 

On the programming side, that involves working with independent film distributors to select one great new release each month, and to secure the public performance rights. On the venue side, the company provides marketing and ticketing support (via Altsie.com) and also manages the shipping of each month’s Blu-Ray disc to each venue. Venues have to provide their own player, projector and screen — and Altsie requires that they also provide a dedicated space for the screening to avoid non-paying customers from simply wandering in.

However, Apocalypse, CA, seems like bot-faire...really like bot faire.  I expected Joel and the bots (or Mike, but I'm a Joel guy) to show up in the trailer...

I take the I out of Team...

I had a five hour offsite management meeting today.  Having only had my new teams for a few weeks, I think I'd have been better served going out for a beer with my business unit.  Or a bike ride, knowing one of them and our current amazing weather.  But that's not the point.  We were asked to list some pros and cons of the current organization.  At least as much as we could speak to after a few weeks if we were new to our areas.  I noted that one of my primary problems is that I have a team where 4 of the developers are contractors from different companies, my lead has left and I haven't filled the role yet.  My tech coach has certain restrictions placed on him around his work day.  I have one rotational developer who moves on in 7 months.  And that leaves two company developers who are both looking for a promotion to lead a team.  And a developer leaving because she couldn't get half the raise she was getting at her new company plus EB2 sponsorship (think a few years to green card instead of 20).  I pointed out that it's incredibly difficult to create a culture with only two people, trying to really bring home that our current lack of competitive compensation (we move in the right direction, but as a big company it takes time) is a barrier, and that with three people they might argue and come to a consensus, but with two they just tenaciously hold on to their viewpoints.  My point...we need to pay competitively (and offer compensation such as eb2) enough that we can gets more developers who actually work for us instead of contracting so we can have a team culture and stop worrying about bouncing up and down with capacity and forcing a discussion about resourcing and capacity with our business, as they should be somewhat oblivious to our resourcing issues and focusing on building something beautiful.  I used the example that I had people on the opposite side of the fence when it came to TDD (test driven development).

The result?  At least my interpretation of it.

I was told that perhaps I shouldn't be thinking about culture so much as forcing a decision on TDD and leading.  I should be breaking the tie. That was hammered home by using me as the end of meeting example of someone who should put some thought to really leading his team.

I already have a cross-team meeting on Monday (scheduled over a week ago) to drive at TDD and create a laundry list of development topics to drive at including Javascript widget creation, Jquery, javascript in general, HTML5, and beyond.  I don't have any problems leading.  I have problems anchoring (e.g being the manager who makes your team follow a particular path when they might be able to organically generate a better path by discussing issues at a grassroots level - agilely) when teams are fully capable of determining a direction on their own.  But they can't determine a direction when there are only two of them and they have dichotomous positions and the other two are momentarily distracted, fulfilling multiple roles, or too new.

I could take the developers from my one team, move them to the other team, and have a fully staffed in house team.  Functional.  Cohesive.  Self-directive.  And I could simply move 3 contractors over to the other team and have a team composed of nothing but contractors - if I pulled them from the same company, cohesive, functional.  I might make that argument.  I have a company who's offered a team.

But the point seemed to be that I don't know how to lead.  In the end, I realized I was a talking point and that's sometimes that is just the way it goes.  The truth is, I'm appreciating my new boss - he throws seriously technical issues my way and just says "go".  This is good.  And it makes me happy.  I want to really dig into code with good developers and architects, or developers that could be very good if given a chance.  If my boss' boss uses me to illustrate a point, I can live with that.  My goal is to make life easier, more interesting, and more productive for developers. That was always why I became a manager.  And in the end, that creates the culture and velocity that my business unit benefits from.  But I have the inkling that perhaps that's not the right talking point when it comes to our current direction/vision.

It usually works out in the light of morning.  Get good developers (including testers).  Build good code.  Collaborate with good business people and good customers.  The noise always goes away in the end.

Kinnickinnic Caching III

This is Boss' leg after geocaching in Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin.  It was unmarred before he started.  And if you think this is bad, you should see what one of those nasty brambles did to his face.  Geocaching is not for the faint of heart.  It's a violent, brutal, sport.

 

I can't believe how unscary this picture looks.  I was very paranoid about stepping out on this tree.  It's about 3x longer than it looks.  It's about 5x higher off the ground.  And it's about 20x less stable.  I'm not making that up.  I'm not generally nervous about stepping out on edges and structurally unsound things, but I was nervous about this tree.


Left.  Box.  Right.  Box.  Boxes everywhere.  You want some box?  Go anywhere but straight ahead and you'll get yourself some box.  Me?  I like box.  This sign made me very happy.  There's a map in case you get lost on the way to the box.


SMAH!!!!  Or SAHM!!!!  Something like that.  This is a letterbox.  The idiot's geocache.  Who has time to carry a stamp with them?  Oh...that's right.  BOBCAM does.  We saw his stamped signature all over the place.  I have no doubts that if you want to pull down caching numbers in the tens of thousands, you have to find ways to streamline.  This is one of the nicer letterboxes I've seen as it really did double duty as a cache. Only three stamps in the log book, however.  Sort of sad given the love and attention lavished on the box.


I WILL HUMP THE S*** OUT OF YOU GEOCACHE!!!  We've all seen those humping tortoise videos.  Don't pretend you haven't.  This is one very confused tortoise.  It's probably the camo.


Oven top.  We took the roundabout route to this one.  Sort of walked in a spiral that narrowed in on it only to realize it was only about 100' off the main path on a tributary path.  Strange object to find in the woods.


Boss, being all serious about his geocaching.  Or offering me something from his bag of crack.  Hard to say. But the context implies geocaching.


Tigger!  Fortunately, there was no Pooh in the cache.


This was a fun one.  The cache is in the handle of the shovel - it had a name like "I dig this park".


Moe the Sleaze was here!  I showed this picture to Eryn and then had to explain what a sleaze was.  Chaymus (from work) asked me how I explained "sleaze".  I tried to tell her it was sort of the boy who paid you too much attention, but if you were older than 8.  And who told jokes you shouldn't be listening to.  I admit, it was a rather loose definition that wasn't "some guy who caches".


There's a cache in that tree.  Part of our day took us completely around this prairie grass area.  Quite the hike.


That is a plunger.  Did you know that a plunger fits perfectly over a peanut butter jar?  It's like how your hand, at the middle finger, is exactly the size of your mini me.  Or your reach is your height.  Or your foot length corresponds to your IQ.  Or the cc's in your mouth are exactly the cc's of your balls.  It's true...  Don't believe me?  Try it.


F-in bird caches.  They always scare me.  You're looking and looking and then there's a bird next to your head and you're worried you've caught some bird-borne virus.


Guess!!!  It's a cache .........  cache ......  cow!  Looks like an ornament.  Boss and I discussed that we should put out a temporary cache at Christmas that has about a thousand ornaments, each with "look at the blank ornament"  inside a container.  If you're really lucky, you manage to start a few reads from the end.  If you're unlucky, you start about 200 reads from the end.  Brutal.  A multi-cache on a single tree.


I don't know why.  It's a screw for a boat.  It's in the woods.  There's no water.  There are no boats.  But there weren't any cows or toilets either.  Wait...scratch that.  There were toilets.


See.  I s*** a cache.  Don't I look blissfully happy turtling something larger than my head into a bed pan?  Since the surgery, I have the balloon knot of a superhero. I could pass a dozen caches and still be relaxed and ready to hike the next tenth of a mile.

Excellent day of caching.  It's good to set a personal record.

Kinnickinnic Caching II

As I mentioned earlier, Friday was a big geocaching day.  Boss and I found 36 caches.  At least I found 36.  He found 37 with the one I pointed him to in Prescott.  We did our caching at Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin, which may be the very first time I've ever paid to cache.  And out of state visitor fees at that.  It cost us approximately $0.33/cache, or half that if you count each cache twice because there were two of us.   We noticed Bobcam hadn't been there until recently, which seemed strange, but it was my hypothesis that he's a nonresident as well.  If you do like 30,000 caches at .33 each, that's $10,000!  That's a semi-expensive hobby.

 

Despite it being mid-March, the park was beautiful.  Very nice for hiking.  I only found one wood tick.  Yep.  Wood tick. You heard me right.  Little Scony bloodsucker.  Isn't it disturbing that such an idyllic setting has a dark side?


Our first cache was a multicache with a phone.  This was next.  Bear with a butt plug.  I kept the highlander keychain.  That's the coolest swag I've found in quite a while.  I left behind oodles of beads.  Not the usual plastic zombies I leave behind, but I have this giant box of caching stuff to unload for which I've swapped zombies in the past, so it's time to put it all back out in the woods.  If you see topless women running around Kinnickinnic, you can thank me.


We did two mystery caches.  Usually those are evil and difficult and may even require access to the internet if you have to figure out the years of the movies of all the Bond girls.  But I researched these before we went, and they involved reading a plaque.  Boss was quick to point out that Clyde L. Butch Wolf was only 54 when he died, which meant we had a mere decade left.  I think he was killed by a tick.


The other mystery cache plaque.  It seemed brand new, and yet someone had already tried to carve a heart in it.


F the law!  I do what I want!  You don't own me!  And we got away with it too.


Yum!


Near the park plaque.  The view for which the park is famous.  In Wisconsin circles at least.  Almost looks like something you'd see in Oregon.


Monkey paw!  Make a wish!  I wish I find the next cache and that it's not down a steep, muddy, hill, into a scary ravine, and then up an enormous, muddy hill infested with nasty brambles, only to find a trail right next to it when I get there.  Stupid monkey paw.  Didn't work for s***.


Near the overlook.  We got off trail after this one as well.  General rule of thumb, if you're climbing extremely large hills, you're probably doing something wrong.


Except this hill.  This is the "easy" hill after taking the difficult way to find the cache at the bottom. I'm not sure if you can appreciate it from the photo, but we had to take two microbreaks on the way up.  I blame the elevation and thin air.


Down at the bottom is the St. Croix river.  It has an inlet for swimming which doesn't get much water flow, so it was still frozen.  Enough for these geese, but not for us.  Looks a bit like a glacier.  I'm not sure what the geese were up to - mostly just staying away from us.


To be continued...me on a toilet, any way to the box, and Moe the Sleeze.

Ice Cream

On Sunday, when Eryn was bored, she asked if she could bike to the church parking lot by herself and bike in a bunch of circles.  I thought about it for a long time and then said, "Sure."  A little while later she came back, bored. And I said, "If you can bike to the church lot, you can bike to ice cream."

After I said it, I was nervous.  That was a long way to go by herself.  But I loaded her up with a phone and a bit of cash and she was gone.  She called me from the shop only to have my phone go dead in the middle of "Hi, Dad!"  But it didn't even seem to phase her.  She got her cake batter ice cream and simply worried that the problem was on my end.  When Pooteewheet got home, I sent her to check on Eryn, but Eryn was already on her way back by then.

Sigh...definitely turning into a big kid.  Might have been her last tooth this weekend as well.

Ming - COD

Ming...599 grenades, and only 36 of them actually killed someone?  319 concussion grenades, and only 2 resulting in kills.  How embarrassing.

Caching - Kinnickinnic

I had Friday off to make up the holiday I never took, so The Boss and I went caching at Kinnickinnic State Park near Prescott Wisconsin.  I believe we found either 35 or 36 caches - I haven't tallied them all up yet.  Basically everything you can see in this picture, including the multicache and the two mystery caches, and the letterboxing cache.  Just not that one that's across the St. Croix River out on the peninsula.  See it - right out there - that one on the dingle.  That one is probably for boaters, not your casual walking around in the woods cachers.  The multicache was interesting.  We spent quite a while poking around with the phone in the first stage trying to figure out what to do, only to realize after about five minutes that we weren't supposed to be looking IN the phone, but at the number pad.  Duh.  It was a good multicache, as we didn't have to travel far away to find the second stage.  It's also about the only cache I didn't take a picture of with my phone.  I'll post some more pictures tomorrow, but below is a nice panorama of a few of the interesting bits.

You'll either have to squint, zoom in, or wait for the individual explanations.

Poke Poke

What's that?  Ming seems to be wearing out while poking me in Facebook?  He just doesn't have the same gumption he once had?  Is it like I'm the terminator?  Merciless in my ability to poke back?  It's like I'm just sitting there waiting for him to poke me?  I wonder if that turing test/stopwatch joke makes sense now.

Sudden Lovelys

I'm not sure why I don't have these pictures of Eryn and The Sudden Lovelys from The Ritz on my blog.  Perhaps I was waiting for my wife to fix the glowing eyes.  But as Eryn's dad, all I really see is that enormous smile or her face.  That is an incredibly happy little girl.  Tonight is their last local gig, over at the 331, before they go on a six week tour of CA and the west.  If you're not doing anything at around 9 or 10 p.m. I recommend it.

Paige and Danny on stage at the Ritz.

We're Understating the Risk of Human Extinction

I enjoyed this interview with Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford, in The Atlantic: "We're Understating the Risk of Human Extinction."

I particularly liked the idea that we might have "virus printers".  And the quote, "You don't observe yourself after you've gone extinct, and so that complicates the analysis for certain kinds of risks."

As an avid scifi reader, I was still unfamiliar with the Kardashev Scale.

Strange Horizons and What Not to Write About

I love the Strange Horizons list of sci fi topics you probably shouldn't write about.  The list reads like a breakdown of the DSM-IV, full of addictions, parental issues, and opposite sex issues.  One of my first stories appears on the horror story list of things not to write about.  Very disappointing.  But understandable.  I also like the advice not to consider the list a challenge.

I notice Strange Horizons isn't telling me I can’t write a story where someone calls technical support and is never allowed off the call.  So hijinx, no.  Stultifyingly boring…maybe.  I’ll call it 1-651-FOREVER or 1-612-SUPPORT.  That's so clever it'll override their rules.  Right?  Right?!

1.   Someone calls technical support; wacky hijinx ensue.

a.    Someone calls technical support for a magical item.

b.    Someone calls technical support for a piece of advanced technology.

c.    The title of the story is 1-800-SOMETHING-CUTE.

And this one is for Ming.  Proof that you can break the rules, create Avatar, and make tons of money, despite the disapproval of Strange Horizons and Ming.

1.   White protagonist is given wise and mystical advice by Holy Simple Native Folk.

While you're out there, you should check out their backlog of stories.  Much of what they've published is available online.  A nice way to get in a lot of reading for free.

One Down, Ninety-Nine to Go?

My scifi story was turned down.  On a positive note, that means I can (slightly) rename it, which I'd been meaning to do.  I have magazine number two picked out and now I have my first electronic rejection letter.  Probably my own fault for going high end, but I thought it was worthwhile to try a few professional publications before I settle back into something else.  I'm not particularly concerned about getting paid.  After all, I have a day job.  But I wanted to see if I was even a candidate.  Fortunately I have a big list.  Unfortunately it's one at a time (e.g. no simultaneous submissions for most magazines) with up to a three month wait, so I'd better pull together a few other stories so I can rotate as necessary. That's much harder to do with a day job.

Home Improvement

I'm on page eighty of writing a book.  A large part of the reason I'm not blogging so much.  And then I get a scifi book that was released yesterday on my Kindle that I'd preordered, which surprised me because I thought someone was misusing my account.  I entirely forgot I'd ordered it.  But I was excited.  So I'm almost done reading it two days later, despite some killer work hours.  And what do I find in this scifi book - one of my own scenes.  Not like sort of close...really close...DAMN close.  So close I find it hard to believe.  Now, to be fair, my scene differs in the King Kong movie referenced - I use the '76 Jeff Bridges version, not the Empire State Building version - but where they intersect after that, crazy.  I'm glad I have a dated copy, just so when a friend reads both, I can prove I wrote my blurb prior to the March 5th release date of the other book.  Maybe I should just be pleased my brain works so much like an author I really like.

On to the title story.  We had an appraiser come by to assess our home value.  I'm taking our loan from 30 years to 15 year at 3.25%.  It should shave over $100,000 off the total payout.  I don't think there's much else I can do that saves me almost $7K a year, even if I have to pay a bit more each month.  Ming asked if I was nervous my wife wouldn't be able to afford it on her salary if I lost my job.  I pointed out she couldn't afford it on the 30 year mortgage, so that was just bad logic for making a decision.  The appraiser showed up, took his outside pictures, and then looked around the house and took pictures.  This was our discussion:

(In the dining room)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the kitchen)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(On the semi-four season porch)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the living room)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the downstairs bathroom)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the computer room)

Appraiser: You updated this room since you bought the house.

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the red room/bed room)

Appraiser: Ah, this room has been updated since you bought the house.

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

Appraiser: It looks like it's been updated.

Me: No, we're just very easy on our house.  But as you can see (I point at the stairs we just came down), we are redoing this hallway.

Appraiser: oh...sure.

(In the upstairs bathroom)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In our bedroom)

Appraiser (less certain): Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.  (Point to the very last room he hasn't visited).  But that bathroom, we updated that - the tile on the walls and the paint is new.  But the floor of the shower is the same.  We reused it.

Appraiser: Excellent!

I almost felt bad he was so desperate to find a room that I'd redone just to redo it.  Do people really just redo rooms all the time for no reason whatsoever?  I can see having to redo the parquet floors in the kitchen at some point - there are scratches and the finish is going.  But I'm not going to do it as long as the dog is running around on it and I still have nephews and nieces that like to drag things all over it and ride cars across it and a daughter who likes to roller skate from side to side.  The appraisal came in at about 20% over what I owe, so I'm doing better than the general market which is good news - we've only lost about 10% of what we paid - and that means my loan should go through.  Now I just have to stick around until Eryn is out of college to pay it off.