My Ridiculously Circuitous Plan is Three-Fifths Complete

From the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania. The new owners got an amazing deal, as they should in the current market. I'm happy with my end of it as I'm no longer holding onto a debt denominated in a currency I want nothing to do with for a while yet secured by an asset in a city I have no particular desire to ever return to. So it's what we call a win-win, then.

An interesting footnote here is that the whole experience was bracketed by meetings of the IETF. I spent a fair amount of time during the 62nd meeting in Minneapolis working out the details of the purchase, and of course it was at the 72nd in Dublin last week that I signed the bulk of my half of the paperwork for the sale. Although, to be fair, this is probably simply indicative of the fact that I do so much travel for work that such trips make a convenient set of reasonably evenly spaced signposts by which to remember what happened when.

In other news I'm settling in a bit more. I have Internet access at the flat now, which should not be worth mentioning, but is, because I am a geek. I'm a long way from my sysadmin days, three lifetimes ago in Atlanta. Me-as-a-sysadmin would not have taken thirty minutes of screwing around with the cable modems to realize that the reason Cablecom had shipped me two was that one was for the phone and one was for the Internet, and that no amount of coaxing would get the phone one (alas, the first one I unpacked) to give me an IP address. Although me-as-a-standards-geek would point out that they probably also SHOULD have clearly labeled each, or at least a little note in the box explaining the situation. Ah well. We'll call it another universal: the standard of cable company customer service is invariant with respect to culture.