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2012 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 1 – Scott’s Christmas Mix Tape, volume 2

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

MUPPETS!!!

This was a fun list to put together, as some of my all-time favorite songs of the season come from Muppet movies! In fact, I ended up doing 11 this time because I got done and just couldn’t bring myself to cut a single one of them to make it an even 10.

Admittedly I was a little bummed that the only copy of Brothers in Our World that I was able to find on YouTube was from that weird play version instead of the original special, but it’s still a good song as the Otters come together to remember what’s really important after losing the talent show!

P.S. Feel free to also check out my mix tape from last year for even more fun holiday songs… 🙂

Scott’s 2012 Holiday Advent Blog…

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

I thought this ended up being a whole lot of fun last year, so I’m going to do it again this year!

Basically, the idea is that I blog just a little bit about Christmas every single day leading up to The Big Day itself – we’ll talk about everything from decorating and baking to giving and charity, and of course, plenty of nostalgic memories that I cherish from growing up in a household that was very much alive with the holiday spirit from the moment the pumpkin pie was cut and we fired up A Muppet Christmas Carol on Thanksgiving night.

You like Christmas, I love Christmas – it’s really a win-win for everybody.

Happy holidays!!! 😉

Stephen Colbert Does The Hobbit?!

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

Oh man oh man oh man – I need to make an effort to watch The Colbert Report next week!

Vice City Celebrates 10 Years!

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

So apparently it’s the 10th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City…

…and in celebration, Rock Star is re-releasing the game on iOS and Android devices! Though it’s kinda hard for me to imagine playing this on my iPhone – an iPad might be cool, though – $4.99 is still a small price to pay for a bit of nostalgia, South Beach-style. As my icon, circa 2002 might suggest, I used to love this game, second only to GTA3. The soundtrack was great with all of that ’80s music on the radio, and I actually even kinda loved how the load screens divided up the areas as you drove over the larger bridges … this was pre-moving to Florida, so it just seemed like the coolest thing to be driving through the city, then go over a big bridge with water on both sides, and then be driving through more city!

I’m not gonna lie that the first few times I drove across the Howard Frankland Bridge when I got to Tampa, I would always picture my own personal, little loading screen in my head. 😉

This game is gonna be fun to revisit … maybe I’ll just pull out my PS2 copy until I get a chance to buy a slightly bigger screen!

End of an Era EXPLAINED!!!

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

Remember that totally bad ass Final Fantasy video that I posted a couple of weeks ago with just amazing CGI of some crazy dragon getting unleashed and laying waste to the free world???

Remember where I said that I’d love to know the real story behind the whole thing because as cool as it was, I didn’t really know who anybody was or what was really going down???

Well check out this awesome blog post that I just found over at Square-Enix that answers EVERYTHING!!! 😀

I, for one, would’ve never thought that the dragon was actually Bahamut without seeing it in print because I guess I always thought that Bahamut was more of a good entity in the pantheon of the gods, or at very least neutral, but in the video clearly Bahamut is pissed! after being imprisoned for thousands of years and seems pretty hell bent on taking out his pent up aggressions on pretty much anything that dares to stand anywhere near his awoken vicinity!

It was also neat to see a little more about Louisoix – the amazing monk dude – because it just makes the climax that much more powerful when we watch even him cripple under this unleashed demise. The sense of defeat is both really overwhelming as he takes one last bout of energy to teleport the heroes through space and time into the netherworld before watching the end of the world firsthand.

Seriously, give yourself a 5:54 break and watch the video again – so good!!! 😉

Song of the Lonely Mountain

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA9XlO2TmjI

This makes me kinda excited to see the first part of the new movie for The Hobbit here in a couple of weeks – I haven’t listened to Neil Finn in a long time, but I think he does a great job of capturing that folksy, tall tale vibe that these stories carry. I’m still real curious to see how the party vibe goes with so many dwarves this time around, but I’m trying to keep an open mind because the LOTR trilogy was near perfect in my eyes.

Hmmmm – odd, that reminds me that this is the first year in a handful that I never got around to watching the trilogy over the Thanksgiving holiday. Maybe I’ll have to make it a Christmas/New Years Celebration this year! 🙂

I don’t know why this continues to get me so riled up…

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

…but I think Elliott and I pretty much share the same opinion as far as Chris Brown is concerned.

Sure, I believe in second chances, but I also believe that when you do something as unbelievably reprehensible as beating a woman, well, examples A, B, and now C aren’t exactly a great way to prove to the world that you really are a pretty nice guy after all.

Did Jenny Johnson provoke him in this latest Twitter battle?

Yep – absolutely.

Is it reasonable that maybe the guy should just get used to being called nasty names after we all saw the photos and read the account of how he beat his girlfriend a couple of years ago?

It sure beats actually going to jail over it, I would imagine.

Chris Brown’s PR team must get paid just to sit there and shut up because anyone with half a mind for actually recovering his image would tell him that his only response when someone refers to that incident at this point should be, “Yeah, that was a really ugly time in my life – I fucked up, but now I’m trying to make better for it.”

You know, as opposed to…

“HATE ALL U WANT BECUZ I GOT A GRAMMY Now! That’s the ultimate FUCK OFF!”

“take them teeth out when u Sucking my dick HOE.”

😯

That’s one hell of a role model you’ve got there, Team Breezy…

a Thanksgiving 2012 Retrospective

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

So what did I do over my Thanksgiving vacation, you ask??? 😀

THE Meal
…was very good, and I don’t just say that because thankfully we’re already pretty much out of leftovers! We ended up spending Thanksgiving with some friends, on account of not having any family within about 1,000 miles or so, and boy, is it a whole lot easier just showin’ up as opposed to actually buying and preparing all of that stuff yourself! The last couple of years have always been a little crazy anyways because though we’d buy everything to have a full meal, the wife was always in a position that required her to work that day, so it wasn’t uncommon for us to end up consuming the entire meal in a matter of about 30 minutes.

All in all it was a quaint and quiet afternoon, I only got forced to watch a minimal amount of football, and then afterwards I got to go home and play video games all night instead…

Super Mario Galaxy!
So truth be told, this is pretty much what I did the bulk of the last four days … and it was GREAT!!!

Well maybe not so much productivity-wise unless you count Getting Stars to be productive, which I actually hope that you do because by the end of the weekend I think overall I had nabbed about 20 new ones! I honestly hadn’t even plugged in our Wii after moving this summer, so it’d been quite a while since I’d even held a controller, but once I popped in that disc and got settled into the couch, I really didn’t have much motivation to do anything but pursue stars around the galaxy to try and help a familiar plumber save his lady friend and whatnot.

And some of the levels I’m at now are really hard! I ended up resorting to YouTube walkthroughs for at least a couple of them – basically I only had a couple things before I could beat the game on Wednesday, so Thursday-Sunday were thereafter spent trying to collect all of the purple coins and do some of the other secret levels that you don’t find until way later in the game. Every so often I’d finally just get too frustrated and have to go hunt down one of the few normal levels that I hadn’t completed yet as sort of a sanity check.

At the time of writing this, I think I have about 89 stars collected, which still means that I’ve got 31 left to go for 100% completion?!

That’s gonna be tough because I really, really hate those Cosmic Mario races, and rumor has it there are also Cosmic Luigi races to unlock that are even worse… 🙁

Exercise … or a Lack Thereof…
It bugs me that I haven’t been able to do more of this because I got really motivated Tuesday & Wednesday, and then after that … nothing.

I don’t really like walking during the day, so I wait until nighttime but the last couple of days it’s just gotten ridiculously cold. So cold that I pretty much just want to curl up on the couch with Cleo and play video games…

Snuggle Puppy
No, not that one – Mom, please stop singing…

I think Cleo enjoyed me not being locked away at my computer desk the whole time because hey, the couch is more comfier and besides, she never asks for a turn at my game, either! 😉

Creative-Type Stuff
I didn’t really do as much as I wanted to on account of an unruly number of stars to collect, but I did put together a nice, little feature for Just Laugh that should be going up in the next couple of days. The first new feature of the new site, in fact – so there!

Other than that, well, I guess you could say that I probably won’t be playing Mario again for a while – back to work. 😕

Scott & Sara Buy a House – the final summary post!

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Scott / 1 Comment

And there you have it, the complete and unabridged tale of me and my wife’s new house purchase!

From there the story continues here with my first public declaration of said purchase, followed shortly thereafter here where we have to fight with the stupid seller’s agent to get her to come unlock the house that we just dropped a whole lot of pocket change for! Looking back, I’m still incredibly thankful that we got so lucky with how the thing went down as a whole – compared to hearing the stories of others just going through nightmare after nightmare as houses came and went, it’s crazy to think that we literally finished the entire process in right around 45 days.

I think a big part of that was who we had working for us, and mind you – picking them was pretty much all luck of the draw! – but we had two individuals who really helped make the process a lot easier to traverse…

Our Real Estate Agent: Chris Henry of Signature Realty

Our Mortgage Broker: Bob Saltzman of Academy Mortgage

In truth, one actually lead us to the other, but both of these guys really bent over backwards to guide us through the entire process, taking the time to answer whatever questions we had even if it meant talking on the phone at 10pm! It certainly became clear as we had to deal with other folks in the industry – the aforementioned seller’s agent, one of our local credit unions before we opted to work with Bob on the mortgage instead – that not everyone out there really had our best interests at hand and with many we just felt like another pile of paperwork that they had to deal with before they could go home, but these two guys really earned every penny that they got paid from helping to facilitate our purchase and I know that Sara agrees with me that we couldn’t thank them enough.

So what happens next in this brand new chunk of suburban heaven that we can now officially call our very own??? Hmmmm – let’s see, I had to deal with the toilet a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven’t gotten around to fixing that leaky valve with the sprinkler system yet … grass is starting to look a little pale, too … and if I look hard enough, I know that we’ve even got ourselves a list of home improvements specifically not related to flushing toilets around here somewhere that we wanted to work on as well!

They say that the work of a homeowner is never really done, but at least for the time being, I guess it’s just kind of cool to finally be able to call myself one to begin with… 😉

(House-Buying Backlog) Contracts Signed…FINALLY!!!

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Scott / 0 Comment

(This post was originally written on Monday, July 30, 2012 at 11:08pm – see the intro post for more details…)

You know that old saying, “Anything that can go wrong, will…”?

That was my day today.

As you may recall from my post earlier today, this morning my wife and I were supposed to sign the final documents to purchase our new house. I say supposed to because, well, instead of signing everything at 11:00am, we actually just finished signing them at about 9:30pm!

Only 11 hours late, right?!

I was literally getting in my car to go to the signing when my phone rang with those ominous words, “We have a problem…” As I listened to someone from the mortgage company explain the nitty gritty, pretty much my worst fears unfolded before me – in fact, they had screwed up some numbers on the closing statement … to the tune of nearly $3,000 … which we didn’t have, mind you … and so now my guess of how we were going to resolve the whole mess was pretty much as good as yours…

Well, luckily it seems that we managed to make a pretty good choice in selecting our mortgage company because they really came together to help us solve the problem. I mean, by now they’ve seen every intimate detail about our finances that exists, so more than anybody they knew that we didn’t have any more money, either, and so they were kinda forced with coming up with some other way of covering the difference or letting the deal fall through.

Thankfully, they did the former by basically splitting the difference of the excess with us – they gave us an invoice credit for part and we paid a little more out of pocket, which unfortunately pretty much sapped us completely dry, but at least we got a house out of it!

For those curious, the details were two-fold – 1) there were a couple of document stamps that are normally paid by the seller, however in the case of a foreclosure like ours, the bank refused to pay so we were stuck with them … our mortgage company overlooked this; 2) they also slipped when estimating taxes and quoted us figures for something like 3 months instead of 11 months … pretty big difference!

Anyways, again, I’m just grateful that they were still willing to step up and do what was right to finish this thing off, and as Sara pointed out on account of the ridiculous interest one pays over the life of a home loan, it probably wasn’t too big of an impact to their bottom line for them to eat the $1,500 credit, either! So that whole thing took the better part of the day to sort out, then we had to coordinate with the closing agent to meet with a notary to sign all of the documents, and it was finally just after 8:00pm at a nearby Wendy’s when we sat down at the table with a nice, older man who came bearing several hundred pages of paperwork for us to sign, and without even stopping to enjoy a cool chocolate Frosty, sign all of that paperwork we certainly did.

Now we’re told we should just have to wait a couple more days for the paperwork to all be verified, along with our closing funds and so forth, before we get our keys and it’s officially official, but in the meantime we’ve still got this pretty big stack of legal documents that more or less says…

…WE JUST BOUGHT OUR FIRST HOUSE!!!!!