Starry Wisdom

Months ago I posted some about my condo conversions, and the inspections. Well, suffice it to say that after that last post the final but of the inspections went through without a hitch. After that we had to wait for the city to approve our application, which went fairly smoothly (there was some confusion over the title report, but that got cleared up pretty quickly.

At this point there are only a few tasks left to do:

1. Pay all of this year’s property taxes – there can’t be any liens on the property when the seperation into two seperate deeds take place. Since the tax lien is from January 1, even though we don’t get bills until September, we need to pay this before we can proceed. I recently contacted the tax assessor and got our estimated property taxes for this year – up somewhat more than I expected from last year, but still not too bad. We plan to pay this off in the next couple of weeks.
2. Record the condo map – this is actually expensive, but already paid for when we sent in our application. The surveyor will send in a mylar copy of our condo map to the city, and when it is recorded we are officially two separate properties, at least as far as the city is concerned.
3. And then, the final step to true separation is to refinance into two seperate loans and record the CC&Rs. Hopefully this won’t be too bad to do – property values look like they are still pretty good around here, so I doubt the house has devalued, which would be the biggest snag to a refi. But we’ll have to see – at least we have pretty much forever to do this step (although rates are sure good now).

In other news, we bought a grill for our shared back area, so BBQ season can commence!

Way back in the 1970s, when I was just a toddler, Steve Jackson came out with a little game called OGRE. The premise of this tiny little game (the original was pocket sized) was that one side played a giant robotic death tank, and the other side played an army composed of ‘conventional’ units (if you call levitating tanks conventional). The former tried to wipe the latter’s command post off the map, while the latter’s singular goal was to destroy the former. It’s very asymmetric, but fairly balanced in the end.

I probably first became aware of OGRE in high school, after Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service, due to a cyperpunk roleplaying game they were developing at the time. Or maybe it was from the cruddy computer game that Origin released in the late 1980s…

Now, Steve Jackson has turned to Kickstarter to release a new, huge version of this seminal strategic board game. I for one am hugely excited about the 14lb sixth edition! And unlike Wasteland 2, I should get my copy this year!

And, lest you think that the only things I support are games, I also recently supported Flint and Tinder’s premium made in America underwear.