Home Improvement

Things have been busy around the house lately! Had I not met my neighbors I probably would have been accused of drug trafficking due to the volume of people traffic and double-parked trucks on my court. Contractors have been coming and going all week--my spa was recently delivered and a friend (electrical contractor) is working on hooking up the electrical. It started with the spa hookup and slowly grew to a much larger project including a low voltage circuit (and chase under the walkway) for my future LED landscape lighting and now I have asked for additional power outlets in the garage as well as new energy efficient fluorescent lighting to be installed on the ceiling. My garage has a 7.5-foot by 28-inch indent in the sheetrock that was perfect for the workbench I have always wanted and now have, thanks to yet another contractor friend. The workbench perfectly fills the indent without intruding into the space of the garage and follows a wall to form an L-shaped work surface. Not only that but they were built around my stacking Craftsman tool chests, which made the final product look like I had actually planned it that way. Three-quarters of the bench has a nice wooden birch top while the remainder is 12-gauge steel to support a vice and bench grinder while offering the strength for a beating station for unruly projects. Not only is it functional but also looks great. I also had shelving built to support all of the junk I shouldn’t have and a great rack to hold my sea kayak off the ground.

Beyond resolving my garage and storage issues the contractor also upgraded my ceiling fans to nice modern ones, installed some nicer outside porch lights, removed an ugly steel security door and most importantly, eliminated the gold trim ring around my doorbell (I hate gold!). A neighbor gave me some weed mat and five boxes of pavers, which ordinarily would save me money, but ended up costing money after a trip to the nursery for some great plants and native grasses to put in the backyard. Enough green waste has been cut out of the backyard that my green waste cans will perpetually be full for the next two months and I am even paying extra for a second can. Nice. Speaking of money, or lack thereof, I just realized I also bought a new media center cabinet this month too…I think this home ownership stuff is going to be pricey!

And speaking of pricey, you knew I couldn’t go without complaining about the cost of healthcare again…and I will leave you today with the latest invoice!

Rising Health Care Costs

You knew it was coming. At some point you will get bored hearing about my trips to physical therapy or stories like the one about the male nurse at Sutter that came into my room while I was knocked out and put six blankets on me on a 100-degree day and made me…oh wait, I haven’t told that one yet. Anyways, the topic of rising health care costs hits the news nearly every waking day. Are costs rising because surgeons are overpaid? I don’t think so; it took quite an education to get where they are and they save lives every day—what is that worth? For comparison’s sake, a friend makes $224,000 a year selling tires. Nurses? They should get a bonus every time they have to see 80-year old man butt. (Even I managed to accidentally witness this and it is somehow burned into my memory no matter how hard I try to erase that entire sector of my brain.) Or are health care costs rising because the drug companies are spending two and a half times the amount on marketing than research and development? Well, maybe, but I think I found the real reason:



Paper. Lots and lots paper. This is an example of the amount of paper Kaiser sends me every week. And do you think it comes neatly packaged in one packet mailer? Of course not! It all shows up on the same day in individual envelopes with business class postage. And each week I have to open this enormous stack of mail and spread it out on the floor so I can determine what is and what is not being paid between my health provider Kaiser and Sutter Trauma where my surgeries took place. I have been shredding this paper each week and managed to fill a city recycle can nearly 3/4 full. Now I am disappointed I didn’t keep it all…it would have made a nice decoration and one heck of a picture.

On a completely different note I loaded up the 4Runner today with a voluminous amount of cardboard leftover from my move. Nothing wrong with that, right? I figured every other aspect of my recovery was coming along well enough, so why not give driving a shot? It's been two and a half months since I have driven a car. You wouldn't think I would forget what side of the road we drive on here. A fellow motorist was kind enough to remind me. Just kidding. But my driving skills were what you might call suboptimal. I only had three blocks to drive and I had safety on my mind the entire time--I figure 80% of the cars on the road are smaller than mine so if I was going to hit someone I was looking for that 80%. I made it fine though, you would be amazed how well you can drive a manual transmission using your left foot for all three pedals and your left arm for steering, shifting, signaling, using your wipers (which I didn't need too much today) and for talking on the phone and eating too, all at the same time of course. Good thing for Roseville, I won't be driving that car again for a while, I have an automatic-equipped (read: for those that can't walk and chew gum at the same time) car on the way.

Progress

I was eating lunch with some friends the other day and the topic of biology, engineering and water resources managed to come up and it made me realize “oh yeah, I have a job I have to go back to one of these days!” Work is very important to me but I have spent so much time at physical therapy and the doctor’s offices that recovering from this ridiculous incident has occupied much more of my thoughts than anything remotely related to pushing water around the State. Two weeks ago I kept myself up at night trying to figure out how I was to manage the simplest of logistics, like physically getting myself to the office, how I was going to fit a shoe on my swollen and hypersensitive right foot and manage to keep wearing it for a 10+ hour day and the thought of staying awake for that long without taking at least one nap…these seem like simple things but I started to freak myself out that I simply was not going to be able to pull this off. (I have lost a full twenty pounds, so wearing slacks or jeans are going to require use of holes in my belt that I haven’t used since high school!) Anyways, things have changed enough in the past two weeks that I am now beginning to feel like I will be able to handle returning to work when the time comes. That time is now officially September 30. Returning to work is going to be a big challenge; luckily I work with some really amazing people, certainly not the type of people you think of when the words “state worker” come up. I am also fortunate that my job is both challenging and interesting. With any luck this combination will help ease the transition back into the working world.

It has been just over two months since I was injured and when I start to feel a little bummed that I missed out on a lot of fun activities this summer, I have to remind myself that exactly two months ago I was laying in the Trauma-Neuro unit at Sutter...after two blood transfusions I was connected to an IV and oxygen, I had two arms in casts, one leg in an ACL, a broken pelvis and a face that was swollen, scraped and heavily bruised. I was in so much pain that the doctors rigged a system so that morphine was injected automatically every 30 minutes and they put a button in my hand that I could push every 10 minutes to inject a little extra—I literally kept myself awake watching a timer they set for me so I could hit that button right on time to ease the pain just a little more. I was pretty out of it, but luckily I had a steady stream of family and friends visiting and the medical staff was pretty amazing. There was one nurse in particular that treated me as if I had been her friend for years—I was always happy to see her come on duty and I was disappointed when Sutter was forced to release me to Kaiser’s Intensive Care Unit. As I understand it now, Trauma is the highest level of care available—Kaiser and many other hospitals are not equipped to deal with this level of care, so they contract out to hospitals like Sutter for trauma care. When you become medically stable enough they downgrade you to ICU. As I was transferred from Trauma to ICU to Orthopedics the level of care and attention was reduced fairly drastically. It’s like driving around in a Bentley, then they downgrade you to the Mercedes and finally to the Dodge Neon. Not surprising, once I got to the Dodge Neon level I wanted out.

I did miss some pretty incredible things this summer—-a boat trip to Canada with family, which has quickly become my favorite thing in the world to do and I also missed a trip to Italy, Greece and Croatia, but those places aren’t going anywhere to my knowledge. A whole lot of positive things have happened since I was released from the hospital—I have lost both casts and that nasty external fixator that held my wrist together, the nerve pain I have been having is subsiding, I weened myself off the two very addictive drugs morphine and dilaudid with no apparent side effects (other than the fact that I see dead people), I am starting to walk again, I have become a homeowner and I have been reminded time and time again how close I came to dying and how lucky I am to be here. I have also been repeatedly reminded that I have some absolutely amazing friends and family. A lot has happened in the past two months and I am happy I made it through all that--if my recovery progresses at the same rate I should be in pretty good shape in the months ahead!

Up and running again (not me, my internet)

I went without internet for a full week and lived to tell about it. Seriously, I am addicted to it. I like getting email, but I forgot how often I use it to do a quick check on the weather, news or checking to see how much something should cost before I buy it. I do all of my banking and billpay on the internet, so I’m always wondering how much money I don’t have when I am internetless. Is that a word? I went shopping for the cheapest, most bare-boned loser internet connection I could find and somehow ended up with the full-pimp Comcast TriplePlay with free anywhere in the U.S. phone, fast internet and HDTV with DVR. I’m not sure how it happened but let me tell you that DVR is where it’s at. I can record the Travel Channel AND TopGear WHILE watching Animal Plant that aired in the middle of the night while I was asleep AND I can fast-forward the commercials…this truly is Comcastic, and that’s coming from a guy that doesn’t like TV. And speaking of pimp, if your caller ID says “Jesse Starr,” pick up the phone, it’s me. I’ve always wanted an alternate name and now that Comcast has given me a new phone number while failing to change the caller ID properties, I get a pimp name at no extra charge.

Lots of good things have happened in the last week. I am feeling pretty settled into my new house and I just love it. It’s not a huge house (1,540 sq ft), but it feels palatial compared to my sub-1,000 sq ft East Sac house. That house has what you call “charm and character,” which I interpret to mean “needs lots of work.” I love living in a modern house—it has that stuff called insulation that keeps the house cool during the day, the kitchen alone has no less than 10 electrical outlets, a telephone and cable outlet (let’s just say I used lots of sketchy adapters and power strips in the East Sac house), and I am finding that I actually like laminate wood floors better than the real thing since they are so much more scratch and dent resistant. Oh, and I have a 2-car garage that I can actually park in and I can extricate my body from the car with ease. My last garage was a 1-car…my truck missed the ceiling by 1”, I would pull forward until I hit the wall and the door would close against the trailer hitch. Getting out of the car was fun—it was like parking next to a Cadillac Brougham in a smartcar parking lot and trying to get out.

I had lots of great help getting my East Sac rental house cleaned and it was nice to shut the door and walk away from it. I realized at the last moment that I had failed to load up my old derelict gas BBQ, so I sort-of purposely/accidentally parked it behind the garage in hopes the landlord would not notice. Short chance of that though, she is absolutely the most particular person I have ever met. She spent three hours with me at the lease-signing telling me all of the things I could and could not do at the house. The cleaning list is no less than 15 pages, advising everything that needs to be done including cleaning dust off the blinds, ceiling fans, case moldings, doing the windows inside and out, pulling weeds, replacing the air filter in the HVAC unit and she even checks lightbulb globes for dust. We cleaned the heck out of that place but I’m probably still screwed. That 15-page checkout sheet is hilarious, everything is urgent and she tries to draw attention to things by changing the font color, font size, repeated use of underline and bold…studies have shown that 100% of humans simply get irritated and throw stuff like that away. (I’m sure there is a study that says that—honest!) Burn that document and she will charge you $25 if you don’t have possession of it at time of checkout. That document says nothing about derelict BBQs, but I bet it will next month. I have $3,137.50 in deposits on file with her, I am anxious to see if I get a check or a bill.

If you made it this far, I may be walking in the next 2-3 weeks. After reviewing a host of new radiographs my orthopedist indicated that I am healing well enough to slowly start working up to 100% weight-bearing on my right leg. I can’t tell you how excited I am to walk away from the walker and wheelchair and start driving again. I tried driving yesterday and found my right hand still isn’t strong enough to shift, so it will be an automatic-only car situation for me for a while. You might remember that a friend has offered to loan me a 1974 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus, an automobile that dwarfs my SUV in weight, width and length and has styling typical of an American automobile in the mid-70s…this car is ugly and I can’t wait to drive it. Anyways, my physical therapist recommended I start cycling on a stationary bike so I was able to borrow a bike trainer from a friend. That starts today. I am also working hard on stretching my right hand some I can get some dexterity back and strengthening routines so I can at least shift a car or open a jar of pickle relish. And now for the moral question—I have fallen in love with my handicap placard and so have my family and friends. Hell, I have new friends now because of it. People offer to take me everywhere now with free 5-star parking right up front everywhere we go. I will see who my true friends are when the handicap placard goes away early next year. But here’s the deal, and I hope my friends are reading this, if I’m walking in a few week’s time, from an ethical standpoint, I can’t see taking that handicap space away from your 90-year old Grandma. I will be back to lowly civilian parking located ¼ mile from the mall with no buffer on each side, I will once again have to pay attention to colored curbs and time limits and sadly will have to put money in the meters again. Sorry friends, the parking glory days are over.

So a friend was talking to a co-worker about my accident and not only did that person remember the incident, she had a copy of the newspaper article that I now have. Front page in the Nevada Union!! The article, complete with two large pictures, took up 60% of the front page. A stupid act is the only way that I make front page! The best part is Lance Armstrong was in town that day and his picture and article were miniscule compared to mine…Ha!…take that Lance! I found out Saturday that I was on KVMR. A friend of a friend was listening and heard them talking about the incident on the radio only to find out two days later it was me. And that was after Friday night when four of us were sitting down to dinner at Macaroni Grill and the waitress noticed and admired my platform walker, complete with tennis balls. She asked what happened and five seconds into the story she shouts “that was YOU?!?” Apparently she was at a friend’s wedding that day overlooking the beautiful Yuba River Canyon when ‘guess who’ interrupted the walk with my flight out! When I have a bad day, everyone has a bad day.

Moved!

Moved...my house is completely moved! With no thanks to me and all the thanks to my wonderful friends and family all of my junk has finally been moved to the new house. My mom and sister spent their weekend cleaning the entire house and getting it ready, from ceiling fans and blinds to cabinets and floors and it looks terrific. They also completely unpacked my kitchen, and that's a good thing because the male species is never going to place kitchenware where it should go. They also got a solid start on cleaning my old Sacramento house.

Bill spent two days vacuuming, shampooing and revaccuming the carpets in the bedrooms with his high-dollar Kirby vacuum. (Bill has a great story about how he was seduced by the Kirby vacuum cleaner man and somehow ended up making payments on a vacuum he never intended to purchase.)

My friends Mike, Adam, Bill and Ricardo worked extremely hard on getting my stuff packed and moved. My furniture made it completely unscathed, well, with the exception of a jar of garlic and the ugliest glass serving bowl you have ever seen in your life. My father and Kathy worked extraordinarily hard packing, moving, cleaning, organizing, unpacking and making sure I was setup and comfortable in my new home. Marin and Maria also cleaned and provided valuable information on where things should go in the house. They have my yard landscaped, paint colors picked and future furniture purchases already selected. That's great because I am comparatively clueless. Mike and Marin's 5 month-old daughter Maggie did not do much but she sure looked cute doing it.

We put a little effort into not looking like the Beverely Hill Billies, but I am not so sure we succeeded:


But we did do better than these guys:




I am exhausted (even though my role was...well, I don't know), so I'm off to bed. I have the greatest group of friends and family that I know are going to sleep well tonight. Thanks again so much for everything!

Cycling

I took my first bike ride today since I was injured and it felt GREAT! It was a pleasant 74 degrees when I rode, there was no traffic and I didn’t swallow one bug. I was a little worried about crashing but that rarely happens on a stationary bike. :)

All joking aside, my therapist is recommending that I purchase a bike trainer and supplement my existing routine with cycling…I think I can do that, and do it happily! (Does anyone have any mountain biking video I can simultaneously watch to make it more interesting, haha.)

Since I have nothing but time on my hands and the desire to get back into shape, I have been spending a lot of time exercising at home. My right wrist was basically immovable from being in an external fixator for so long, so I started working on range of motion in the wrist, bending the fingers back and forth, etc, and it paid-off well. I saw the hand therapist today at Kaiser for the first time and he was impressed how much range of motion I had--he had seen only my radiographs. The range of motion is far from good but the exercises he set me up with will help get it back. He indicated I had “months” of physical therapy ahead of me but indicated that I should get most of what I had back, wrist-wise. Keep in mind that the other wrist seems to be 100% healed and doing great.

At this point I am only 50% weight-bearing on my right leg but I think that number will increase at the end of the month when I have my next appointment with the orthopedist. I hope that if I continue to work on building up the strength and range of motion in my right wrist, that I can throw this walker aside and “upgrade” to crutches. Two weeks ago I had casts on nearly all of my limbs, so the walker and wheelchair did not look out of place. Now that those casts are gone and were replaced with just one splint, I fear I look more special ed than injured. (No offense to anyone, of course.)

Look what I bought today!!!

On the right is my new house, only mine is 1-story. I have flowers in the front yard too, only mine are not that big. That’s me in the purple. I’m not sure who the cutie in the red dress is, but I’m going to find her one of these days. See how happy they are? They just bought a new house!

On August 14 I will finally become a homeowner--I am so excited I can hardly stand it! For those that don’t know, this was not the first house I tried for, not by a long-shot! Let’s see…the first was a cute brick tudor built in 1928 and located at 2148 36th Street, then the 821 sq ft craftsman constructed in 1925 at 2609 16th St, followed by 3241 L St, a 1,092 sq ft home built in 1928, which coincidentally would have landed me right next door to my co-worker Fiona. Whew, she got lucky on that one! I began to realize that these homes were priced at the top of my price range (East Sacramento is expensive!) and due to their age they were going to cost me a fortune upfront and hit me again with major repairs and updates. These 2 bedroom and 1 bath homes with less than 1,000 sq ft do not offer room for expansion, not to mention that the tiny 1-car garages or 0-car garage in many cases were far less than ideal. A guy just has to have his garage.

I began looking at more modern and slightly larger homes that offered 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. Next on the list was a 1970’s ranch style home at 2280 Glencoe Way, which was the first home over 1100 sq ft and the first 3 bedroom, 2 bath that I tried to buy. When that didn’t go to plan I put an offer down on 8529 Tay Way…oh boy, this one was a doozie. It was the first sub-10 year old home I looked at and by far the largest at 1,942 sq ft. I will have to simply summarize this one because it was really complicated and drawn-out:

• July 11, 2008, offer went in.
• Exhausting effort by my friend and realtor Molly to get some kind of response from sellers.
• August 28, tired of waiting, put an offer in on 3800 Caribbean Way, a 1970’s ranch home. I overbid but still got beat.
• September 9, they finally asked me to resubmit my offer. Market conditions had changed so much in those two months that I submitted my offer for $20,000 less.
• October 13, they told me they could do better by going to public auction, so they did. They got $90,000 less than my offer…LOL
• Real estate investor purchased the property, dumped some bark in the yard and put it back on the market a week later with the intent of flipping it. He set the price the same as the previous owners, which obviously had not worked the preceding few months.
• October 30, back on market, more time elapsed and property fell another $8,000, so I put in another offer accordingly.
• The seller counter-offered with the most ridiculous contingencies we had ever seen. Wanted to keep my deposit regardless of whether or not I got the house and wanted the lender to not appraise the house (because he knew it wouldn’t appraise for what he was asking). No lender would ever do that, so we walked.
• March 26, 2009, (5 months later and nearly a year since this started) the house finally sold for $11,000 less than my offer. Ha, I bet that flipper is sorry he decided to screw around! He lost that plus property taxes and utilities for that time period.
  

The market was crazy at that time and we had a serious problem with unscrupulous realtors…I didn’t get two of the above homes because the realtor was representing both the buyer and the seller, so they either did not show my offer to their client (which is illegal) or they somehow convinced the seller that the other offer was better (even though we know it was not) so they could score a double commission. This kind of activity is completely unprofessional, but apparently not illegal. I could write a book on the other unscrupulous or completely unprofessional realtor activity I encountered, but I will spare you that detail and just let you know that my friend and realtor Molly got so fed up with this activity that she left the business and went into law that December 2008.

If you actually made it through all that, you get to hear about my new house. It’s in Roseville near Riverside and Cirby. If I was going to live in Roseville the home needed to be as close as possible to Sacramento where I work. This home is 14 minutes from the H Street onramp onto Business 80 to my doorstep. During rush hour it is longer but I will be riding the commuter bus in the carpool lane. My exit will get me off the freeway before the traffic backs up at Douglas. It seems that every time I recreate, I always head out 80. Now I am much closer to the things I like to do, like my favorite hiking, biking, kayaking, skiing…you name it. Folsom Lake and Granite Bay are right there too, and best of all 90% of my friends live in Roseville. Yay friends! Now you just have to wait for me to get healed so we can go do all of the stuff I just mentioned. The house is “just a tract home,” but it’s newer, it’s nice and does not need any work, unlike the old homes in Sacramento that I was looking at. This house was exactly $149,000 less than the most expensive house I almost purchased. Even with the furlough and reduced pay my mortgage will be comfortable. Oh, it has a real 2-car garage, tile roof, new wood/laminate floors that were installed last year, travertine in the bathroom and hallway and the nice large wooden blinds. It’s 1,547 sq ft (according to the appraisal), 3 bedroom, 2 bath, corner lot and the lot size is halfway decent. I’m happy. :)

Getting this home was no walk in the park either. My offer went in May 4th. This home was also a short sale, so because the owners had both a first and a second loan on the home, the sale of the house had to be approved by both banks. My offer was accepted by the first bank on May 12th. Go Citibank! I’ve been waiting for months to get my acceptance from the second bank (Bank of America). My realtor and the listing agent did wonderful jobs of pestering BofA every couple of days to get the piece of paper to us to sign to close the deal. That piece of paper finally came today, exactly 4 months since this process started. BofA put my realtor and I through an unreasonable amount of stress, but it is finally a done-deal.

My family is helping me clean the new place in preparation to move on Friday August 14, beginning whenever we get the keys. I will use the help of a friend or two on Saturday the 15th to do a “pre-move” to help clear the way for the real move the following weekend. I’m hoping to get the backyard stuff and some of the contents of my garage moved that day. Sunday the 16th is set aside for a little more cleaning and moving. Saturday August 23rd will be the big move day. Since I am unable to do this myself, my incredible friends and family have graciously offered to help. I am so lucky to have these people in my life! August 24th I will deal with getting my old place clean to complete the move.

With a good downpayment, 13-years at a good job and an 800+ credit score, who would have thought it would be this tough? I am so glad none of those previous houses went through. I will be much happier in this house, my payments will be considerably less, I’ll be living near my friends and I won’t be $100,000 upside down like I would have been with some of those purchases 1-2 years ago. Thanks to all my friends that rode the emotional house-buying roller coaster with me, through all of the ups and downs of getting excited about a home only to lose it…it all worked out in the end, as evidenced from my big fat smile shown in the photo above. (P.S. the purple shirt and pants combo was borrowed from a friend and if you see the girl in the red dress, send her my way.)