Educating the Wheelers

There was a post recently on Blog Maverick about the current state of movie marketing, and how much it costs and what folks do to get a rear end in a seat on opening weekend of a movie. He then tosses the ball out and wants to know who’s got a better idea.

I am just an average Joe, and I always look at these types of questions as to what sorts of marketing sways me. I posted that they should take the “28 Days Later” approach further — that movie had posted the first X minutes online for anyone to see. But, in that case, you would have had to come to it, either by word of mouth or stumbling across it or seeing an ad telling you to go see it or whatnot. Instead, why not take the AOL approach and mail the first X minutes [to a suitable cliffhanger or whathave you] and send it out on dvd to everyone’s mailbox?

That way you could reach people like, say, my aunt, who goes to movies, but would never, ever go to Apple’s Trailers page.

It can’t be that expensive, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many AOL discs in my life.

Of course, to actually get me back into a movie, you’d have to have a cry room. Or a Tuesday matinee “baby day” like our local Alamo Drafthouse theaters. And a take-no-prisoners no cell phone policy. Hey, like our local Alamo Drafthouse theater!

It’s time for us to bump up my husband’s life insurance. I’ve never had to deal with anything more than just signing up for the employer offered coverage, but we want more than they have to offer.

I vaguely recall another pf blogger going through this process recently and blogging about it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember who, and using the search boxes on various sites that I usually read hasn’t yet found anything.

Does anyone remember who was writing about that, or have any experiences to share?

We are essentially packing and moving in two stages this time. First we’re getting all of the clutter and anything we can spare out of the house before it goes on the market [and anything you can’t see, like stuff in drawers]. Then after it sells, we’ll pull out the furniture and the bare bones we left in to live on. Because of the two stage process, we decided to try the PODS approach.

So, right now there’s a POD in the driveway and we’re filling it up with junk. They are going to come take it away the day before we go on the market where it’ll sit in storage. Then once we sell, we’ll get another POD [and possibly bring back the first, if it’s not full. But I think it will be.] Then we will have them transfer those two PODS to MN, where they will sit for about another month while we stay with my parents and buy a house up there.

It seemed like a more straightforward way to go than dealing with loading trucks, bringing to a storage facility, moving stuff from a facility back to a truck, then heading to MN, then putting in a facility, then reloading a truck and bringing it to our new home.

We don’t have the final numbers yet — it’s going to depend on how many PODS/of what size we end up filling — but it didn’t seem to be outrageously more than going the moving truck route, particularly for our situation. Both are plenty expensive for my taste.

When we moved from CA to TX, we had a good experience with Movex, but they use independent contractors to do the actual move, so we may have just gotten the luck of the draw. [Our drivers were a young married couple who were totally cool, and very helpful.]

So far, our PODS experience has been good. But there’s still plenty of time for it to go all to heck.

I admit, one of my very favorite things about having a blog is finding out what search terms people used to get here. Many of them I couldn’t in good conscience repeat here, because this is a Family Blog. But I just now checked for the first time in awhile, and there was an undiscovered gem waiting for me. Even better not one, but TWO clicks came through on this one:

Nick Rhodes potato salad recipe

I can only guess what they were really looking for, but they came here. Welcome!

We could never have a garden at this house. We’re on the deer superhighway between two “wild” areas where they spend most of their time. Oh, I suppose we could build 12 foot fences, like the retired guy down the street … or we could not have a garden.

Well, it had to happen eventually. The weather has been unrelentingly hot and miserable here, and Saturday night, I went to let the dogs in and they smelled completely horrible. So terrible and I couldn’t quite place what it was. I walked onto the deck and looked around, and there I saw a dead deer in our yard. Too bad the dogs had found it first. [And too bad it had been sitting in the hot sun all day.]

We called the animal control guys, but the Austin ones wouldn’t come get this guy because we’re just outside the city limits, and the Travis County guys apparently don’t do pickups on weekends. So we kennelled the dogs downstairs and decided to take care of business in the morning.

I showered and soaped and scrubbed the heck out of the dogs to get the stink of death off them, and Andrew went to Lowe’s to get heavy duty gloves and thick trash bags. While he was gone, I was upstairs nursing Owen and saw very large, ominous shadows through the window.

I went downstairs and discovered about two dozen vultures fighting over the meal. It was like Animal Planet back there. If we didn’t have a fence, I’d bet I’d have seen coyotes as well. The pictures don’t do it justice, but I had to take the photos from inside, I didn’t want to scare them off. Or not scare them off. Heh.

A few hours later, even after the B team and C team and D team vultures had their turns, they were all gone and all I could find was a small strip of fur and a few bones.

Clutter is bad enough when you have to look at it, but it’s a killer when you have to pack it all up so you can get your house ready to list.

I think I’ve packed 80 boxes so far. Probably more.

I’ve been arranging sitters to come over and play with/hold the kids while I pack. Owen has decided that these few days would be an excellent time to have a growth spurt and need multiple hour+ long nursing sessions. And then another one. And then another one. But in between those, I’ve been a packing FIEND!

I offhandedly mentioned in an email on a different subject to the HOA mailing list that we were putting the house up for sale on Friday and within an hour I received several emails from people who wanted to know more for their friends and family. [There is a large contingent of folks who grew up in this neighborhood who try to move back in.] I sent back a quick barebones email to the list, even mentioning that we didn’t have the price quite hammered out yet because there have been lots of comps just this week, even, but hey, call my realtor! My realtor reported that she has received several calls already. And this is five days before we list.

We got lucky when we bought this house — this is a high-demand, unique neighborhood. If you want to live in this part of town, you aren’t going to find much else with one acre lots and large amounts of mature trees, plus turnover has always been very, very low. My realtor has looked to see what else is currently available and suspects we’ll get offers quickly.

That sure would be nice. Anybody who peeks around the financial nooks and crannies of the internet has probably noticed that now is generally not the best time to be a seller, house-wise. It seems, at the moment, that Austin is currently dodging that bullet. But I guess we’ll see for sure when we list.

On the upside, where we will be buying — Mpls/St. Paul — looks like it’s in the thick of foreclosure central, and inventory is about twice what it was this time last year. Hopefully this all will work out in our favor.

If you’re a praying type, please keep us in mind.

Free Money Finance likes to post about the true financial costs of owning a pet. I guess I’ve got more fuel for his fire today.

We have two dogs and a cat. The cat is the easy part. I’ve had her for about 6 years, and she’s lived in three different states with me and doesn’t mind the cross-country moves.

But she’s also less than a quarter the weight of the dogs. And they’re, well, dogs. The issue we’re currently running into is that the kids and I are heading up North this week, before the house goes on the market, so once we have it all cleaned up and ready, we don’t have to worry about cleaning up after Hurricane Audrey every time someone wants to tour.

Since we can’t just leave the dogs in the house or the backyard if people want to tour, and I won’t be there to take them out for a ride in the car, we either need to kennel them in the house, out of the house, or send them up north. Well, I don’t want two big dogs barking at strangers from kennels inside the house, that wouldn’t be the greatest sales tool. And kenneling two large dogs is expensive, between 40-60 dollars a day. That leaves flying them up north with us, there are a few companies that do that, but some of them won’t ship when the temperature is over 85 degrees. Okay, this is Texas late summer. That isn’t going to work.

So that leaves us an option like Pet Air Carrier, who ship them in the air conditioned part of the plane.

Hmm. Should I just tell you how much this is going to cost? Or would anyone like to guess in the comments, and I’ll post it later …

This time, I’m not even talking about money!

I just spent a fair amount of time on a post about cost of moving pets while nursing my wee one … and now he just kicked the keyboard and the text is all gone. I don’t know exactly what keys he got, but apparently it was the right ones. How did he manage to do that??

Thinking about selling the house puts my stomach in knots. It’s not a great selling climate out there, but at least Austin’s housing market is doing better than most other cities. Lots of CA investors apparently turned their eyes towards Austin recently and it’s near impossible to get a handyman/contractor. Running the most recent numbers in the market analysis for our little pocket of town shows that we could probably get about 10-15% more than we could have if we’d put it on the market a couple of months ago. We’ll see how that shakes out when we list next Friday.

I’m starting to emotionally transition away from this house, which is a little weird since Andrew and I love so, so love our home and had no reason to think we wouldn’t be here forever.

I’m going to miss the veritable cornucopia of weird Texas wildlife that my history in the Northeast, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Pacific Coast never prepared me for. Armadillos! Road Runners! Tarantulas on your front porch!

… but then there are the scorpions. We’ve been in this house for over three years, and though I’ve seen many [many] scorpions, and had quite a few close calls [not the least of which was nearly stepping on one in the shower when I was 8 months pregnant with Audrey], I managed to always dodge the bullet.

Until a few days ago. It was basically my nightmare scenerio come to life. I was sleeping and felt something crawling on my neck. My hand goes to knock it off, and he gets my hand. Then he gets the front of my leg about a half dozen times, then gets my foot, too, for good measure. The silver lining is that Andrew was able to find it and kill the heck out of it before it got to Audrey or Owen, who were lying right next to me.

My tongue swelled up and went numb, and my lips were tingling — not to mention the fact that my leg felt like it was on fire. There was so much venom in my system that I paged my doctor’s office to check to see if it would get into my breastmilk or if I needed to pump and dump and feed older milk through bottles until it passed through my system. Funny enough, we couldn’t find anything via google addressing this issue. Heh.

For the record, my doc said not to worry about it, and both of my kids seemed fine. Well, as fine as a 2 and a half month old who’s teething and a 2 and a half year old who’s stressed about her toys getting packed into boxes can be.

Speaking of crazy Texas wildlife, now we’ve got a dead deer in our backyard. I only wish we hadn’t found it several hours after our dogs did, and after it had been sitting in 105 degree temp all day.

One of the hazards of real-name blogging is that there are something things that you just can’t blog about.

For us, it was Andrew’s job search that has consumed our time and psychic energy for a few months. But now it’s over and the die has been cast and we’re moving forward and we can finally talk about it. [Everything financial that I’ve thought about in the last few months has related to the move, so it sort of cramped my blogging style.]

The job is in Minnesota, near where my parents live. I get on a plane next Wednesday with the two kids, and the house goes on the market two days later. Andrew will likely follow about a month later.

Yes, I am in full on panic mode.

But isn’t Owen ridiculously cute?