Legwork and Life, week of 3/7/18

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
The moving continues!  We\’re about at the point where we need to arrange for actual movers, though.  There\’s piles of stuff everywhere in the house, with no homes just yet, and the amount of stuff in the apartment is well diminished… except for the heavy furniture.  There\’s no way we\’re getting the chest freezer by ourselves.  It\’s like 4-5 feet long, at least 4 feet deep, and 3 feet wide, minimum.  The rest of the furniture would mostly be doable, but if we\’re already hiring movers for the chest freezer, might as well make them move the rest of it, too. 

Yesterday Chris and I both opted to snag some of the more fragile things we own.  Various glass pieces, some of the wedding decorations, our framed pictures, and various bits of art.  I expect we\’ll probably be done moving everything but little bits and pieces by this time next week… which I\’m looking forward to, because I\’m really tired of the abuse that road heaps on my car.  Awesomely, though, yesterday was the first snowfall ever that I didn\’t have to worry about clearing off my car.  I had a car in college, but there was no parking structure.  And natch I\’ve had a car since, but it\’s all been parking lots.  Since we now have a garage, I simply parked my car inside the garage.  The snow fell, but not onto my car.  I have like three ice scrapers and two snowbrushes and I\’m enjoying the fact that I\’ll only need them occasionally now. 

Today marks the first week we\’ve lived in the new place.  I\’m finding the neighborhood much quieter, though a couple days ago my doorbell did ring, and an elderly lady presented me with chocolate chip cookies and a welcome to the area.  I was somewhat startled; I\’d kind of thought that sort of hospitality was dead.  But apparently not.  I\’m hoping to make a batch of chocolate chip breakfast bites (highly nutritious grain and nut balls) and go visit her at some point.  With so much else to worry about, though, it might have to wait \’til the weekend. 

The soundproofing in the new home seems nice as well.  I can\’t hear the garage door very well from the basement, nor from the bedroom.  We technically have a shared wall, but it isn\’t a very big shared wall, and if I didn\’t know better, I\’d assume our neighbor was dead.  A great improvement from being able to hear the whine of someone else\’s shower, plus the noise of the heater, plus the booming bass of some thoughtless git\’s stereo outside.  Plus whatever assorted people happen to be out there \”talking.\” 

The noisiest things in this neighborhood appear to be the geese.  And sometimes the ducks.  But even they\’re much further away, and as a result, much easier to ignore.  The most disruptive thing thus far to my sanity is the light in the bedroom.  In the apartment bedroom, we have almost all light blocked out with the use of blackout material.  It\’s crude at best: we more or less stapled a sheet of blackout fabric over each window.  We\’d prefer to be a little classier in this new place, so whenever I work up the nerve (probably right after this, since I\’m shaming myself about it publicly), I\’m going to message a more sewing-inclined friend of mine and see if we can pay her to make some proper curtains with blackout fabric. 

The house is basically still piles of stuff everywhere.  But we\’ve been making some improvements despite that.  There are now trash cans in most rooms, and soap, extra toilet paper, and cleaning supplies have made it to all three bathrooms.  We still haven\’t located a decent couch for downstairs, but by the look of it, that might take a good while.  In the meantime, we\’re still hoping to find shelves… but apparently shelves are about the one furniture type you can\’t find secondhand.  Everyone always needs shelves. 

We\’ll either have to buy new ones, or Chris has said he might be able to make some from boards and such.  It would be pretty cool to have handmade shelves, but my skill with woodworking was limited to like three projects in shop class.  It sounds like I should be grateful I was able to have shop class at all, between the past mentality (females weren\’t supposed to learn \”manly\” trades like woodworking!) and the current mentality (cut EVERYTHING out of school except academics/sports!). 

Reading the Research: Anxiety as a Memory Aid

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s article covers something I noticed when my anxiety levels started tapering off: that anxiety can be beneficial to remembering things.  The study covers a relatively small group (less than 100 people), but the results were marked.  People with higher anxiety tended to remember details better, possibly because they had additional emotional contexts assigned to it. 

The article here does put in an important cautionary, which is that if anxiety levels get too high, this  benefit goes away.  Very high anxiety levels just destroy your concentration and keep you distracted by worries and fears.  In my personal experience, too high of anxiety made my mind foggy, and thinking was like slogging through molasses.  Even now, with my magnesium and my exercise and the other anti-anxiety things in my life, I still sometimes have days, or hours, like that.  There are also days where it feels like a swarm of rats is eating me alive, one nibble at a time. 

In the past, it was worse.  I lived with a lot more anxiety, to the point where it was commonplace and although it tormented me, I hardly gave it much thought.  I was anxious all the time, and I was used to being anxious all the time.  In school, that showed up as aversive behavior, and it still does sometimes.  Instead of studying for tests long in advance, I\’d procrastinate by doing projects for the class.  To procrastinate on those projects, I\’d do the coursework/homework.  In the end, my test results probably weren\’t as good as they could have been, but I got every piece of homework completed, and every project finished. 

I was almost never late for doctor\’s appointments or scheduled meetings because I worried so much about missing them, I\’d keep checking my calendar and the clock.  I\’d leave 10-15 minutes earlier than I really needed to, just so I could be sure I\’d be there on time.  When I got there early, that was my cue that I could relax, because anything that went wrong after that was someone else\’s fault.  I still adhere to that thought pattern to this day, even if I don\’t leave quite as early these days. 

My anxiety made me more organized.  Because I hated not being able to find things, I paid more attention to where I\’d put them in the first place, and designated homes for important objects (like car keys, text books, notebooks, and homework).  I have never been, and never will be a paragon of perfect organization, but the important things, I kept track of. 

Since getting treatment for that anxiety, I\’ve noticed I forget things more often.  My memory for details is fuzzier.  I\’m late more often to appointments.  What used to be a near-photographic memory is now much more ordinary.  In some ways, this saddens me.  But in other ways, it\’s an improvement.  The sharp detail of memory helped me avoid misplacing things, but it was more commonly used to create Boomerang Memories, which torment me to this day, albeit less often than they used to. 

Worth Your Read: Parents: Let’s Talk About Grief and Disability

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
As I get more tied into the disability and autism community, I occasionally run into articles that I don\’t have a lot to say on, but I do think are very worth your time. 

This particular article is from an autistic parent to all parents of children with disabilities, on the subject of finding out your kid is disabled.  As I\’m not a parent, I don\’t have a whole lot to add to this discussion beyond what the author espouses here… but I\’d like to underline what he says about finding out you\’re \”broken.\” 

I learned, over time, that I was different than other children.  Unlike the author, my parents weren\’t given this song and dance of grief to do.  They simply… dealt with me.  Not ideally at times.  But they were forward-thinking enough to just let me be me. 

And still, I learned that I was broken, that something was wrong with me.  But it wasn\’t nearly to the magnitude that this author talks about.  Knowing your own parents wish you were someone else?  Knowing they wanted to fix you rather than love you?  The mere thought staggers and hurts me. 

So please, give this excellent article a read.  And let\’s try to do better by all of us. 

Worth Your Read: Parents: Let\’s Talk About Grief and Disability

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
As I get more tied into the disability and autism community, I occasionally run into articles that I don\’t have a lot to say on, but I do think are very worth your time. 

This particular article is from an autistic parent to all parents of children with disabilities, on the subject of finding out your kid is disabled.  As I\’m not a parent, I don\’t have a whole lot to add to this discussion beyond what the author espouses here… but I\’d like to underline what he says about finding out you\’re \”broken.\” 

I learned, over time, that I was different than other children.  Unlike the author, my parents weren\’t given this song and dance of grief to do.  They simply… dealt with me.  Not ideally at times.  But they were forward-thinking enough to just let me be me. 

And still, I learned that I was broken, that something was wrong with me.  But it wasn\’t nearly to the magnitude that this author talks about.  Knowing your own parents wish you were someone else?  Knowing they wanted to fix you rather than love you?  The mere thought staggers and hurts me. 

So please, give this excellent article a read.  And let\’s try to do better by all of us. 

House-Hunting While Autistic, Part 3: Complications After the Offer

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
This is the third in a series about my experience of finding a house.  (Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, Part 4 is here)  As I\’m autistic, the process proved to be a bit more challenging than it would be for most people.  In part 1, I covered why we decided to buy a house and what things we opted to look for, given my disabilities and challenges.  Last week in part 2, I described the actual search process, which proved to be both draining and frustrating.  This week, I\’ll explain what happened after we put an offer down on a home.

————————————

So there was a bunch of annoying paperwork that went with putting the offer in, but thankfully that can all be done online these days, somehow, and all I really had to do was read a bunch of legalese in .pdf format, then sign at the appropriate places.  Reading it was optional, even, but it\’s never a good idea to sign something without reading it…

After we put in the offer, there was the painful waiting period while the other offers went in, were checked over, and a decision was made on which offer to take.  Fortunately, our offer was accepted.  Had it not been, we would have been back to square one, basically.

Thus far, the process had been exhausting, but relatively straightforward.  Now began the back and forth between waiting and flailing frantically.  Communication came in bursts, with much waiting between each burst, and much activity directly afterwards.

Complications With the Seller

There was the inspection first.  We hired an inspector to do a general inspection, which came back with a few oddities, but no major problems.  The sump pump was broken.  The garage door will happily crush small children or pets to death.  And there were some strange chewmarks on the deck.  But that was it.  No water damage, all the appliances in working order, etc.

The broken sump pump was of sufficient worry to me to request it be replaced before we moved in, so there was a disagreement with the seller about that…   After much back and forth (like, a week\’s worth of back and forth), and after he found out the sump pump was the owner\’s responsibility, he finally paid for a new one.  (All of $150, and him receiving literal thousands of dollars on the sale of this home.  Ugh.)

Unfortunately, that wasn\’t all.  I\’m sensitive to mold, so I had to hire a second inspector to do a proper mold test.  No sense moving into a place and then finding out I couldn\’t live in half of it.  To my horror, the mold test did come back with toxic black mold spores, which was almost enough for us to call it quits on the entire place.  But there hadn\’t been water damage, so we suspected perhaps the sump pump was the problem.  But then we had to bargain with the seller for who was paying for any mold remediation costs… which was a mess.  I think it took another week or so before we were able to get the seller to agree on splitting the cost.  In the meantime, he threatened to back out of the sale, which was extremely frustrating and nerve-wracking to me, given how much time we\’d spent on this place.

The mold cleanup ended up being little more than replacing the sump pump and cleaning the carpets, and the second test came back without any toxic black mold spores, so thankfully I think we dodged most of that bullet.  I\’m breathing the basement air at present and don\’t feel hideous or particularly out of sorts, but I guess we\’ll see how the weeks progress. 

Prior to those messes, the seller had originally offered us all the furniture save a few pieces in the home.  Since it was nice stuff, well matched and coordinated, we were excited and wanted to take him up on it.  We offered a reasonable price, specifying particular pieces we really liked.  Then there was nothing for half a week.  We then heard back that he was going to keep most of what we\’d liked, but did we want anything that wasn\’t already spoken for in the downstairs?  We did, and offered an appropriate price for those pieces… only to hear back a couple days later that, \”just kidding, I\’m taking everything but these pieces you didn\’t want, which you can have for a ridiculous price.\”  I was pretty annoyed with the seller after that.

The final headache with the seller came after the bank had appraised the home, and they decided the place was worth about $4k less than we\’d offered for it.  For some reason, they wouldn\’t redo the appraisal, and so we were stuck figuring out what to do about that last $4k.  The options were: pay the $4k up front, negotiate with the seller to lower the purchase price by $4k, or negotiate some kind of compromise. We really didn\’t want to just pony up $4k unless we absolutely had to, as our bank account tends to be below $10k at all times… so we attempted to negotiate.  Thankfully, this was near the end of the process, and the seller was willing to split the cost.  He dropped the purchase price $2k, and we ponied up the remaining $2k. 

The Trainwreck Mortgage Loan Officer

And that was just the issues with the seller.  The mortgage loan officer was an entirely different mess, of the type I\’d more call a trainwreck than an anxiety-provoking annoyance.

The wreck actually started after we put in our application for \”preapproval.\”  We heard from him briefly, saying he was going to try to finish our application before the end of the week… and then utter silence for basically the whole of the next week, until we emailed… at which point we found out he was on vacation and hadn\’t bothered to tell anyone.  Including the realtor who had recommended him to us.

When he got back from his unannounced vacation, we tried to contact him again, and succeeded… only to find out that he\’d somehow lost vital parts of our application… such as how much our income was.  Then he couldn\’t seem to keep straight the documents we needed for the various parts of the process.  So things like taxes, driver\’s licenses, etc.  He kept asking for a document that didn\’t exist, and he should have known didn\’t exist if he\’d read the documents we\’d already sent him.

To top all of that, he completely messed up our insurance paperwork by informing us that we didn\’t need any additional homeowners insurance on top of the insurance that comes with the condominium.  So we thought we were fine, since he made it sound like he\’d looked into this carefully… only to find out that no, that didn\’t count, and we therefore might lose the bid on the house if the bank didn\’t let us submit proof of insurance late.

And to finish off this shortened version of the angry email I sent to the bank, he was all but impossible to get a hold of.  We had his email address, his office phone number, a secure email line via the bank\’s website, and even his cell phone… and the jerk wouldn\’t respond to any of those, unless you chain-called him every five minutes until he picked up.

So, for any people looking to buy a house, and who would like to avoid this trainwreck, please make sure you avoid one Stephen Kik, of Lake Michigan Credit Union.  I can\’t speak for the rest of LMCU\’s staff, beyond that this was by far the absolute worst service I\’ve had from any employee there.  But yeah, avoid like the plague.

Normally, if you have so many problems with a mortgage loan officer, you can switch to another one with limited issues.  Unfortunately, when we tried to do that, the person who would authorize and oversee that transition was on vacation.  Because apparently everyone takes vacations in January.  So we had to stick with the uncommunicative, avoidant, absent-minded dunce for the entire thing, and it annoys me to this day that he probably made money from the whole debacle.

But In The End…

After dealing with those two sanity-shredding facets of the process, we did manage to get bank approval for our offer, a closing date set, and all our funds straightened out.  My grandmother kindly gifted us with some of the money needed for the 20% down payment, and my parents loaned us the rest.  These days, you don\’t strictly have to do a 20% down payment, but if you don\’t, they make you have an escrow account and you lose access to your money.  It\’s basically an extra tax on the poor.  We were thankfully able to opt out of that mess.

We scheduled a walkthrough to make sure the place was still as we expected it to be, and to check on the new sump pump.  Everything was in order, and in fact, the seller was there and even gave us a set of keys.  He wasn\’t even entirely moved out yet, so that was nice of him.  He also showed us how to use the gas fireplace and gave us the day for trash pickup and such.  

The closing itself was both annoying and anti-climactic.  We had to drive about an hour to the western shore of the state to sign something like 150 pages of paperwork.  The only bright point to it was that our realtor also came with, and she got us a nice blue teapot, some mugs, and some tea.  Since I don\’t actually have a decorative teapot, this was kind of nice.  We took her out to lunch afterwards.

All that remained was waiting for the seller to get done with moving out.  Then we could start moving in.  Next week\’s entry will cover furniture hunting and the actual process of moving in.