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Thursday, December 30, 2004

Home improvement + some photos

Couple of days ago our heater stopped working, and the temperature in the house dropped below 60. It wasn't the cold that bothered me so much (although I do get cold easily and don't deal well with it sometimes), but the possibility that we'd have to spend thousands to replace the heater. We already have to pay thousands in property tax by the end of January, plus we're taking out a home improvement loan of another 10-12k for some exterior work done to the house, fence, and backyard etc. It's true that mortgage payments are not that much more than paying rent, and that we are building equity; but all these other expenses add up REALLY quickly, easily making it 3-4 times more than paying rent. When you are on rental property, you don't have to worry about paying to repair the heater, you don't have to worry about paying property taxes, you also don't have the stress of dealing with all these stuffs. Oh well, I guess these are the "joys" of home ownership....

Luckily for us, it turns out that only the thermostat broke, but the heating system is still fine (for now). So we had to pay a couple hundred dollars for a new thermostat + installation, instead of thousands. For that I'm thankful.

So anyway, while the heater was down, I had to keep myself warm. Thus I had my laptop on my lap all day. Usually I complain about the laptop getting too hot, but for the past two days it was definitely welcome. And with that, I finally sorted and uploaded some of the pictures I've taken recently: photos.cybette.com. These include my trip to Finland, my cousin Wayne's wedding in Taiwan, and Gloria & I having fun in the snow last week. (Gloria, I enabled the download/supersize option for those pics, so you can download the originals!)

Haven't done going through the photos from the Vegas trip Bruce and I just took over Christmas break, so have to upload them later. Also was going to write something about the Asia Tsunami situation, but maybe I'll do that on my .org site.

cybette wrote this at 01:19 AM
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