Tag Archives: House

Wow…

  By Josh Bazin | December 3, 2008 - 9:23 am | Building Blocks
1 Comment

Today, Emily and I take posession of our house.  We’re very, very excited about that.

While we still have a few hours before everything gets finalized, but barring any really strange things happening, we’ll be getting our keys this afternoon sometime!

Anyway, we wouldn’t have made it to today without the help of these individuals:

Matt Gaglione – Realtor – His Website : Matt showed us a bunch of houses and didn’t try to sell us anything that didn’t really work for us.  He came through huge for us with the house we ended up buying!  He also recommended the other people we worked with during this process, which was very helpful.

Lee Politano- Mortgage Manager, TD Canada Trust – His Website : Lee worked hard to get us our mortgage and all things considered, I’m pretty confident that we got a pretty good rate.

John Lemieux – Lawyer – His Website : John did all the legal stuff.  That’s a technical term (mine, not his).  He made the paperwork easy.

<edit>I can’t believe I forgot the home inspector!  I’ll have to look up his name, but he was from Housemaster.  He was very knowledgeable and did a lot of teaching while he did the inspection to help Emily and I out with maintenance.  I highly recommend using this service.</edit>

I’d recommend working with any or all of these individuals when looking to purchase a property.  Thanks for making it (relatively) easy.

I’m a winner (and in debt)!

  By Josh Bazin | October 30, 2008 - 9:20 am | Video Games
Leave a comment

It has been a really busy month for me and my wife.  As some of you know, we’ve been looking to move out of our apartment and into a house for a little while now.  For over a little over a month, we’ve been out looking at houses with a Realtor – and about two weeks ago, we found a place we quite liked.  We moved through all the details of putting an offer in and negotiating and all that jazz and as of last week, the house has been officially sold.  We’re very excited about it.  But of course, this is also coupled with the mortgage debt that inevitably shows up with a home purchase.

It always amuses me that people get so excited about being in debt for 20+ years.

I also received some very exciting news recently – I have been selected as a winner of a MacBook Air from CMA Alberta.  The contest was for going to one of their events.  I’m very excited about it, especially since I’ve always wanted to have a laptop to assist with my GMing.  I can use it to track damage, quick reference my preparation documents, powers and all that other stuff – and, I can potentially make the game a bit more cool by the addition of music/sound effects.  I’m excited about the potential that a laptop brings to the gaming experience.

Just before Halloween, I was able to participate in a Trail of Cthulhu game, run by a friend of mine.  It was my first real horror game (while Dark Heresy has some horror elements, I wouldn’t really call it a horror game) and I really enjoyed it, even though my character was devoured first.  It was a great time and I would really like to be able to participate in another game like that in the future.

Trail of Cthulhu is an interesting system and from the single game, I found it fairly ideal for the type of story being told.  I haven’t read the rules cover to cover, so I can’t really give a holistic view on things, but the experience with the ruleset was extremely positive.

Finally, Fallout 3 was released this week.  My copy is on the way from Amazon.  I’m really excited about the game.  It looks amazing, the reviews have been very positive, and the game appears to have no shortage of ‘holy crap that’s fraking awesome’ moments.  I’m very exited.