About a week or so after we get back to San Rafael, we finally hear back from the Builder on how much extra they will charge us for the network wiring. Get this: it’s three times what the contractor says they will charge us later to put the network wiring in after the interior walls go up.

Once of the few benefits of traveling to Arkansas is that on the way back we can occasionally actually get a price break on the total cost of the air travel if we stop in Vegas. It’s amazing, but there you are. The company travel expense department actually likes us to stop in Vegas for the weekend.

As you know from last time, at the “last minute” of our last trip we actually changed which physical lot we were going to purchase. Consequently, we lost the chance to choose the facade and color scheme of the house, but we also moved up two building phases (i.e. slightly cheaper and closing is much sooner. End of March!) One other thing – because this was originally a house marked for some other prospective buyers, there were some options that we wouldn’t have chosen, namely surround sound pre-wiring.

We spent the weekend rushing around Vegas, driving up to the building site. We filled out the paperwork for real this time (or was it?) – the contract still with a contingency on the Builders coming back to us with an acceptable quote for the additional option of putting network wiring in the walls before the drywall goes up.

We also got a chance to talk with the contractor who does the wiring for the builder, because we needed to specify where the surround sound speakers were to go (should we wish to have them back to turn the pre-wire into reality once we moved in). While we had the contractor sales guy at our mercy, we also talked about network wiring and how much it would cost to install this in a completed house, fishing for the wires through the walls.

We did get a chance to do the official “dusty shoe” walkthrough of the house, enough to check that yes, it is the same model, the heating units are in the ceiling, the room that could be a den is in fact a bedroom (which is what we specified).

We took lots of measurements and photos…

We also checked out some cat hotels to give us an idea of where Karma and Kami are going to stay when we move in.

Phew – an exhausting couple of days. Special thanks to Stan and Jeanne for the loan of the car and for all the chauffeuring!

On around the 8th of January we flew to Little Rock, AR, for the first team meeting since our new business unit was formed.  The few days we had there were, as usual, filled with a mixture of interesting and productive meetings, and stupid team-building tedious stuff. It’s embarrassing to admit that perhaps the major achievement was coming up with a name for the business unit: Strategic Alliance Integration Architects. Don’t worry, it really is as meaningless as it sounds.

We arranged to follow Alexa and Ken to the airport for our quick trip to Vegas. Unfortunately we had made our plans too late to book Karma into Cat’s cradle, so we were going to have to leave him at home. We put out 5 bowls of different kinds of food, and got a special watering dish with a reservoir so that we wouldn’t go thirsty, and left lots of little screwed up balls of paper all over the house so he wouldn’t get bored. Despite our preparations, we felt bad leaving him in the house by himself.

After being collected at Vegas airport by Stan, and getting settled, we made some plans to go out the next day and check out some alternative housing developments.

First stop in the morning is a development from builders called DR Horton. They are a development in the far north west, basically out in the desert, same as Greystone’s Spring Mountain Ranch, only in a different empty section of desert.

This development – called Paradise Falls, I think, for no apparent reason I could tell – had a nice layout of streets maybe 200 houses, half of them built already, with a block of about four lots that would be ready to move into around May. We checked out the model houses – pretty nice, actually, although the kitchen, although open and light, felt a little like an apartment. We spent some time with the site manager, discussing the options and getting a feel for how things would work. Then we went out and looked at the four appropriate lots. There was one that backs on to the block wall northern border of the development. There’s a main road behind it. This has good and bad points. Good because there would be no ongoing construction behind us, bad because, well, it’d be a main road over the back. And the traffic, while now non-existent, will only get busier with time. On the way out the door, the manager handed us a disclosure statement, that indicated the position of the development with respect to the Las Vegas beltway project. (This is a ring of freeways around the city designed to handle the tremendous increase in traffic that the region is projected to experience. Did I say projected? Traffic on the main freeway through the city is already pretty bad.) Only part of the freeway system is currently built and operating.

The disclosure leaflet shows the section of beltway projected to be completed in 2003 as being about half a mile north of the main road on the back of the development, superimposed on a road called Centennial Parkway.

Geographically speaking we were quite close to the very first Greystone development we looked at back in August – Bradley Ranch. We decided to drop in and check them out. They are further North than the DR Horton development.

On the way there, we passed Centennial Parkway – a grand name for a dusty strip of rutted track – and determined that, in actual fact, it was more like quarter of a mile away from the north side of the DR Horton development. Handy access to the freeway is good, but that’s a little too close! Nothing like finally enjoying peace and quiet when the rest of the development is completed, only to find a massive public works project starting up over the back fence. Even closer was a tight knot of powerlines meeting at a substation. Hmmm. Paradise Falls was not looking so attractive.

Bradley Ranch was an empty space with a mobile office trailer when we saw it last time. Even though they had the plan we wanted, we never went back there as we couldn’t see what the houses would actually look like, and anyway, at that time Spring Mountain Ranch was in a more advanced state… Now the models at Bradley Ranch were completed, with one street well under construction, in fact a couple of families had even moved in that week!

One nice thing about it is that it is laid out as a series of cul-de-sacs. Nice from a reduced traffic point of view.

Of course, the first question is, what lots are coming available in the May time-frame? Well, one left actually, at the end of a cul-de-sac called – wait for it – Rottweiller Court! Argh. They are all dog names. We joked about this months ago, saying how glad we were that Spring Mountain at least had respectable names like Bandit’s Bluff… ok, well, relatively respectable.

The second question is, what about structured wiring? Well, we actually got to speak with the Site Manager this time. He said, “Yeah, I’ve done some network wiring, in fact I’ve just done some in a house on another development, kind of like an experiment, to see how it’s done…”. Fabulous, Not. Still, better than the non-response we’d got to date from the other crew at Spring Mountain.

We walk around the single remaining lot in the building phase that had the timing that suited us, and talked things over. Were we being stupid to think about changing our plans? Should we stick it out with our existing Spring Mountain arrangement? Living at the end of a cul-de-sac was good. Keeping our preferred house plan was good. Having a wider property was good. Having less back yard was not so good, but we could live with that. We could make the contract conditional on getting an acceptable quote for putting in the network wiring…

To cut a long story sh, er, less long, we decided that we wanted to keep the house plan we had selected, but switch from Spring Mountain to the Bradley Ranch development. By the end of the day, we had almost become used to the idea of living on Rottweiller Ct. It wasn’t that bad, really.

We made sure that the whole deal was contingent on the following: We had reduced our original detailed custom request from 13 or so items down to just one: that of being able to have CAT5 network wiring installed in the walls prior to the drywall going up so that we could have some kind of structured wiring system for our LAN and telephone system. The builder had to determine a cost estimate for that custom feature, and we had to agree to it, or the contract was void.

Over the next couple of days we got our lot deposit transferred; signed a whole bunch of documents; selected house colour scheme and options; drove out to DuPont to get our flooring upgrades transferred to the new address… On the whole, we were feeling pretty good about the progress we were making.

We were preparing our last dinner with Stan and Jeanne before flying back to San Francisco the next morning, when we rang the site office to ask a simple question about what department was responsible for sewage, when the site manager – a dingbat if ever there was one – said, “Oh, so glad you called – listen, we made a mistake: we can’t build the plan you want on the site you selected.”

Arrgh! We couldn’t believe it. At this point we were basically offered an alternative: They would apply for a variance on the allowable building envelope so that they could build our selected plan anyway, or we could move our contract to a different lot that already had our selected plan – with most of the options we specified – already under construction.

Side effect 1: Our move in date would be pushed up by two months, to end-of-March rather than end-of-May;

Side effect 2: The colour and facade of the house had already been selected and set in stone, so our selections would not be able to be transferred;

Side effect 3: We would not be living on Rottweiller Ct. We would be living on St Bernard Ct.

We thought about this, and then left them with orders to wait until the variance was either approved or denied, and to switch to the other site if it was denied.

We knew which subcontractor would be doing the electrical wiring in the house, so we called them up independently and got a quote for installing CAT5 drops into selected rooms in a (theoretical) existing house. This was to get some kind of reality check on the builder quote when it came through. If it cost $X to install the wiring in the house with existing completed walls up and finished, then surely the cost for the builder to get the same contractor to do this at the framing stage would be less, right? That’s how we figured it.

We left Las Vegas preparing for New Year’s celebration that evening, and flew home to San Rafael to see how the cat had managed to survive 5 days alone in the house by himself.

It turned out that he had managed quite well. His dirt boxes definitely needed emptying though!

We were getting a bit impatient for the builders to get back to us regarding our non-standard request.

(Some background here: The deal is that we give Greystone a list of changes we would like over and above the standard list of options, plus a cheque for $200, and they are supposed to get back to us with a yes/no on each item, plus an additional cost estimate for the changes.) These changes were mostly very minor: an extra power outlet here, a deleted medicine cabinet there, delete the built-in microwave (we have one already), etc. The main non-standard item we requested was for some network wiring to be installed during construction. (Everyone says, put wire in the walls during construction, not afterwards! Obviously.)

We figured that the more information we could prepare for them on this point, the more comfortable the builders (and associated subcontractors) would feel about the request.

We had heard nothing from them, and after some pestering we heard conflicting reports. First, they wouldn’t do any of the changes. Then they would do some of them, but not the wiring. Then we didn’t hear anything for another few weeks… they still hadn’t cashed our cheque. It was getting more than a little irritating, so in order to feel better about our decision, we went back online and started looking at housing developments from other builders, including ones that were much clearer and up-front about their support for “wired” or “future-proofed” houses. Fairly quickly we saw some other plans that might work for us, and after some enquiries, several of the builders were familiar with the concept of putting network wiring in. One of the builders even offered it as a standard feature!

The trouble was, none of the geographical locations of these other developments were as good as the ones we had looked at already, and we had limited details of possible timing or availability.  We figured that we should investigate them anyway, if only to reassure ourselves that we should stick with our current plans with Greystone.

We had some outstanding leave accumulated during the year owing to us at work, which we had to take before the end of month, so after checking on available flights, we arranged fly to Vegas for a few days between Christmas and New Years day, to see if we could shake out our house plans a little.

We were still feeling queasy about leaving the house – even though we’d changed the locks – when a sudden request from Acme required us to make an overnight trip to Houston, TX, to consult with a customer’s development group. We had no choice but to let the neighbors know – this time we asked the people from across the street to collect our mail – and leave Karma in the house with plenty of food and water, and go!

We got back from our Great Northern adventure to get into the house to discover that our house had been broken into while we were away. The first thing we noticed was that the screen had been popped off one of the windows at the front of the house.

We had hired the eldest son of the next door neighbors to collect our mail for us while we were out, and this had clearly not been adequately done. There were a week’s worth of newspapers strewn on the driveway, and some mail stuffed in the mailbox and left on the front porch. I went around to collect the mail that he had supposedly collected, and indeed, there was some to collect, but I didn’t get to see the lad in person – his father actually handed me the bag of mail, and was very preoccupied with some other visitors at the time so I couldn’t question him about anything.

Another thing was that the burglars had been careful to arrange things so that it was not immediately obvious that a burglary had taken place. We walked in an thought, “Surely we didn’t leave the place quite so untidy?” but instead of calling the police we just started putting things in order. The TV was in the lounge, the VCRs had recorded what they were supposed to; my guitars were untouched, the dust cloth was still in place over the studio mixer and synths; our laptops were where we had left them… if we’d been burgled, we figured that these items would have been missing for sure.

Our bathroom had a big muddy footprint on the tiles, the window was open, and weirdest of all, the shower nozzle unit from the other bathroom was lying coiled on the floor.

Our first thought was that Derek had popped in while we were away, but he wouldn’t have randomly rearranged stuff like this. Then we noticed some DVD’s missing from our shelves, and I went outside and looked around the house and found all the screens popped off, and one of our suitcases lying outside!

We called the police.

We spent the rest of the evening talking to three officers and explaining what we did for a living, and discovering more things missing. The cops were mystified. No high-ticket items were taken, and the bathroom was apparently rigged to make it look like a forced entry. It began to look as though someone had had a key to the house! Ergh.

The suitcase left outside contained a car registration from someone in the neighborhood; our Charlie Parker Collection CD (the only CD missing!); a checkbook from someone in a nearby street; and packing material from some unopened inkjet printer cartridges taken from our office. The cops were very interested in the items found in the suitcase – it turned out that the car that the registration applied to had been reported missing earlier that day, and the owner of the checkbook had not realized that it was missing.

After the cops left we cleaned up the remaining mess. Over the next few days, several more missing items made their absence known.

As far as we can tell, the total haul the maverick plumbers got away with included: 6 DVDs (assorted Sci-Fi); my good studio headphones; an unopened container of oxywipes from Derek’s bathroom; the contents of our office supply cabinet, including batteries & pens; our two unopened packets of CDR blanks; and my Palm Pilot VII which I’d stupidly left behind on my desk. (The last item actually belongs to Acme and I have no plans to replace it because I very rarely used it).

The police favour the idea that teenaged thugs took whatever they personally wanted, with no desire to fence the stolen items. (The oxywipes would back that theory up!)

As I write this, we have essentially replaced the other items that were stolen – and changed the locks on the house – for a total of around $600, and frankly, we feel relieved to have been let off so lightly!

Some time afterwards we had a chance to talk to the neighbours across the street, whom we traditionally haven’t had much interaction with, and they told us that they had heard voices, and seen lights in the garage. We wished we’d let them know about our absence before we left! It seems that there is a possibility that the intruders had spent several nights in the house. Ergh again. Lesson Learned: Get to know your neighbours!

As far as we know, the varmints responsible have not yet been apprehended, but we suspect relatives of the landlords.

We got up early and packed our stuff away, making sure we had plenty of tissues with us for the plane ride.

Sherri very kindly took us to the Seattle airport, from where Mitchell was to catch his flight back to Heathrow, and we were to catch a shuttle back to San Francisco.

There was some confusion about when exactly our flights were leaving – for a while there was a delay in effect and we thought we’d be able to spend time with Mitchell in the terminal, then our shuttle flight departure time was corrected and we could leave as scheduled, but we were able to grab a snack and eat with Mitchell for half an hour or so.

We landed on the ground and waited for 30 minutes for a shuttle from the appropriate long-term parking company, but eventually got to our car without major problems. The drive home was uneventful, and due to the various delays we were right on time to collect Karma from the Cat’s Cradle – they have limited hours on Sunday so this worked out kind of well.

Our feelings of relief at walking in the door at home were tempered a little by the growing  realization that our house had been broken into while we were away – but the rest of that story will have to wait.

We got up, showered, ate breakfast, packed our luggage up and put it in the car, and went for a final walk around the beach. The tide was out, and looking at the first couple of pictures I took that day, I’m really wishing I’d taken a few more from the balcony. The light was really good, and the alternating pools of water and sand where the tide had retreated looked great.

The little cairns of rocks waited for us in the early morning sun.

We climbed back in the car and drove off. Due to a navigational glitch, we bypassed the “Nanaimo by-pass” and ended up driving through the city. (For the record, Highway 19 is the bypass, not Highway 19a.)

We arrived in Victoria with several hours in hand, so we parked the car in the Royal British Columbia Museum car park (we tried to use up our Canada money in the parking meter, but failed) and wandered into the museum, seeing Cirque du Soliel’s “Journey of Man” IMAX film before looking around the exhibit halls. There were three exhibits I remember in particular: a marine/coastal life re-creation; a First People’s gallery, with detailed descriptions of tools, clothes, houses, and particularly the impact of the coming of the missionaries and “modern” society; and a “modern history” gallery, complete with a rebuilt portion of “the old Nanaimo Hotel”, a cobbled street, a saw mill, and a boat dock inside the museum! It was all very interesting.

We left the museum at around 4:00pm and got the car returned to the Avis depot, and they kindly gave us a lift to the Helijet terminal.

We had hoped that this time we would be flying while it was still light, but alas, it was not to be. We waited until 5:20 in the waiting room, and by the time we boarded the helicopter – again, it was just the three of us on the flight – it was again totally dark.

I was on the right hand side of the aircraft again, and this time I saw the glow of the fading sunset, with Venus reflecting in the bay instead of Jupiter.

Sherri met us at the airport on the other side, after we’d come through customs again. It was great to see her! She drove us back to their house, and once we’d been shown our room, we took our shoes off and relaxed.