Month: May 2017

The window well outside my basement office claimed another victim this morning: a baby rabbit. He must’ve fallen in sometime last night, and obviously had no way to climb out. We have a history of animals trapped in the window well: a mouse, another mouse, and even a vole.

After Laralee and Kyra spent a few minutes remarking how cute he was, I went on a rescue mission and climbed into the window well to retrieve him.

He was very docile… maybe from the cold, or maybe from hunger. In any case, Kyra gently put him in a grove of bushes and he hopped away. We’ll probably see him again in a few weeks, munching on the grass in our backyard…

On Mother’s Day we had a chance to talk with Alex as he continues his mission in Peru. We connected Google Hangouts to our bigscreen TV and were treated to gems like this:

He’s changed a lot in the last year and a half, but it’s good to know he still has that same goofy streak.

So this happened yesterday.

Yeah, it’s mid-May. Colorado is amazing.

I haven’t written anything political on this blog for a long time, but the recent train wrecks in the Trump administration (or should I say the increased frequency of train wrecks) make me feel like our country is in some kind of surreal situation, with a leader who is basically an arrogant, ignorant, petulant child.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, I read that Trump suffers from something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is “the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence.” He demonstrates this over and over, most recently by revealing classified intelligence he essentially didn’t understand.

The Times article ends with this gem, which sums up much of what I feel about our President:

Sigh.

My seminary kids tell me that sometimes I get off on tangents while we’re studying the scriptures, and I think they may be right. For example, today we were studying the book of Revelation, which includes this verse:

It made me think of a famous song whose words few men know. I did a little bit of research and was fascinated to learn:

* The song was recorded in a single take, and it went terribly. The guitarist missed his cue, the drummer dropped his drumstick halfway through the song, and the lead singer’s voice wasn’t picked up well by the microphone.

* It received a little airplay but didn’t really take off. The band decided to break up.

* A DJ discovered it and played it as “Worst Record of the Week”. Suddenly it became immensely popular, because listeners couldn’t understand the lyrics and thought maybe they were obscene.

* The rumor of obscene lyrics spread, eventually leading to an FBI investigation of the song. After months of work, the FBI concluded the words were “unintelligible at any speed”.

* Not convinced by the FBI, the state of Indiana banned the song.

* Over time, the song has become one of the most covered tunes in music history, with some 1,600 different bands recording versions of it.

* The song has its own web site.

* There’s also an international organization called LLAMAS, made up of people who are fanatic about the song.

* The state of Washington attempted to make it their official state song (but sadly the vote failed).

* It’s played during the seventh-inning stretch at every Seattle Mariners home game.

The song? 1963’s “Louie Louie”, performed by the Kingsmen.

Yeah, pretty amazing stuff. And definitely related to the book of Revelation, right?

Oh, if you were wondering, LLAMAS is the Louie Louie Advocacy and Music Appreciation Society. No, I’m not kidding.

Whenever we use our credit card and rack up “reward points” or whatever they’re called, we cash them in for Amazon gift cards. Every few months I check our balance and realize we can grab a few more cards, so I order them and, a few days later, I have a little guilt-free shopping spree. It’s guilt-free because hey, gift cards don’t count as spending actual money, right?

Last week I realized it had been a long time since I checked our reward-point balance, and I was happy to see that I could order a dozen $25 cards. Woo hoo! Today they arrived in the mail, and I added them to our stash. Now I have around twenty of them.

That’s $500 of whatever random junk I want to buy… expansions for board games! Goofy Halloween costumes! Buckets of Red Vines! Ooh, the mind boggles.

So this came in yesterday’s mail.

Of course it’s for Kyra.

I saw this picture on the internet this morning:

It evoked all kinds of 1990’s nostalgia:

* A thirteen-inch screen in a compact, fifty-pound CRT monitor
* A mid-tower case with a 24X CD-ROM drive (eventually technology reached screaming speeds like 52X)
* CD-ROMs, or maybe music CD’s… either way, you don’t see many of those any more
* Doom!
* 3.5″ floppy disks in their little cardboard boxes

But best of all…

* The “turbo” button that changed the computer’s clock speed when you really wanted to run stuff quickly (note this particular computer is set to “HI”)

Ahh, good times.

A couple of years ago, Kyra worked for our friend Emily, who owns a goat-herding business. She rents the goats to organizations– typically municipalities– who want them to handle weed control. Kyra’s job is to put up fencing around the area that needs to be “trimmed”, and then herd the goats into the fenced area. They remain there throughout the day, munching happily on weeds but generally leaving grass alone. At the end of the day, she herds them back into the truck and takes down the fencing.

It’s actually pretty tough work on a hot day, but Kyra enjoys it and has fun with her friend. Moreover, it provides a great conversation-starter whenever people are talking about summer jobs or “what I did yesterday”. For example, yesterday Kyra was working with a llama who got a little excited and spit on her. Why a llama? Because they’re very good goat-herders who protect the little guys from predators (or aggressive people, I suppose). When you’re a sandwich artist at Subway, you don’t get to tell funny stories about being spat upon by a llama.

All in a day’s work…

I received my 2017 property valuation notice from Boulder County, and they listed the value of my house way above what it’s worth. According to them, it increased in value by over $80,000 last year! It’ll mean another $700 in property taxes. Not cool.

So I went to the Boulder County assessor’s site to figure out how to protest this valuation, and they provide some search tools so you can find comparable properties. They use “time-adjusted” sale prices, all calculated for June 2016 (the time of the valuation), so it’s a relatively simple matter of finding homes like mine, seeing their sale prices, and finding an average.

Of course, with tens of thousands of homes in Longmont alone, that “relatively simple” matter gets complicated quickly. Looking at a map isn’t a good way to identify homes of roughly the same square footage, or with a similar basement or yard or year of construction or whatever. Luckily the county provides a downloadable Excel spreadsheet that lists properties which sold in the past two years (which is the time period for the valuation). I downloaded it, and was a little dismayed to find that it contained 5,900 property records. Hmm.

Sorting by square footage was a first step, but not useful because I’d find houses the same size as mine, but 50 years older… or without a garage… or in a ranch style. After a few futile attempts to sort the spreadsheet in a way that would show me comparable homes, it occurred to me what to do. I’m a database programmer, right? So I wrote a little PHP script to load the spreadsheet data into a database that I’d quickly created, and pulled all of those values into the appropriate fields.

Then it was a relatively simple (I keep using that phrase…) matter of writing some SQL queries to find homes that matched my criteria, and calculate the average of their sale prices. I could look for homes with floor space within 100 square feet of mine, or built within a few years of mine, and so forth. After a few queries I narrowed it down enough to identify some houses that were more similar to mine than the ones the county had selected. I went back to their web site, filled out the protest form, and submitted my calculations. In three months they’ll respond whether they accept my proposed valuation, and hopefully my tax bill will be $700 lower.

I’m not sure what other people do in a situation like this, but if you’re a database guy…