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Name: Jeremy
Country: United States
State: Illinois
Metro: Chicago
Birthday: 8/7/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Getting by in life and having some fun while doing that.Pondering modern Christian issues.Pondering select modern world issues.RPG gaming.
Expertise: Pondering. No seriously. I just wish I could act on the results.Biology: research and restoration.Third world experience/other cultures.
Occupation: Ecological Restoration Technic
Industry: Environmental Restoration
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
9/21/2004
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| What to do when one is very depressed and stressed and various other feelings that I can't describe that rarely are applicable to me? Write a xanga, of course!
Work's still going pretty good. I am still the Kress Creek person, if we still have Kress Creek anyway (the factory company funding and overseeing the project went through some kind of bankruptcy and restructuring), but since we can't really plant in Chicagoland during the winter I, along with everyone else in the company (who wasn't laid off for the winter, or permanently, or quit) have been on a "winter project" since December 1st. Its been the same one the whole time, and could possibly be finished by the end of this week, which is exciting given that we're all really tired of this project. Anyways, the project in a nutshell is a clearing/removal of invasive woody species in 88 acres (supposedly, but we've found that the boundary markers seem to stretch the areas compared to the maps that were used to generate the size, ie my company is being cheated). Russ was the original foreman, with Kari and I being crew leaders, but Russ decided he'd rather be laid off than be this project's foreman, so as a thank-you for that refusal our oh-so-wise-and-so-fair manager, Brian, switched Russ to a prevailing wage site for the winter, so that he could get some $33 an hour for the whole winter. Yeah... The grapevine, through employing some sneaky methods, reported that Russ made as much as Kari and I combined last year, even though his responsibilities are about the same as ours, and his knowledge and capabilities and willingness to do dirty jobs is much less than Kari and I. **shrrugg** One of those depressing little points that life isn't fair.
So then Kari became the foreman of the project, which meant that she has to do all the official talking to our forest preserve contact and our manager (not Brian for this project, since this project has been deemed a "Long Grove" project and other than Kari and I, our crew is all Long Grove people who do things like spray lawns and trees during the normal year, and thus are very much not accustomed to doing physically difficult work like this project, or even accustomed to working as part of a crew). We've got some really crappy workers on our crew that we wish were laid off for the winter due the constant headache we have from trying to get them to work. Oh I got sidetracked from where I was going with the beginning of this paragraph... Kari and I share all the responsibilities other than all her official talking, pretty much, since we both are the types to reason out the best way to do things and reason is usually best when tested in conversation. But every now and then I make her do something neither of us want to do, since she's the official "foreman".  Enough of this project though, its been 4 months of aggravation and now that its about done I'm ready to forget it and move on. Not sure what I'll be doing next week...maybe prescription burns. Nothing's growing enough yet to herbicide, and I don't know if we can start planting or whatever at Kress (or anywhere, for that matter) yet.
Keshie and I's marriage is coming up quickly, only a couple months away! Yay!! 
[insert] I'm going to add a couple paragraph breaks into this next section. I often try to put an entire subject into one paragraph but the heartbreaking story of the condo is unsurprisingly turning out to be much too large to have it one paragraph. You'll need some marker points so that when you come back from crying in sympathy for us you'll be able to figure out where you left off.[/insert]
But meanwhile life's stressful. See, married people need a place to live. Now, we initially expected to rent an apartment, like most young newlyweds seem to do. But then we found that it hardly costs any more monthly to buy a condo than to rent an apartment, and then instead of money down the drain, its an investment. (Of course, more into the process we realize that most of the monthly payment goes to interest on the mortgage and all sorts of other things, and only a couple hundred goes towards the principle, thus only that couple hundred is actually being invested.) So we (mostly Keshie Darling actually, since she's the go-get-em type and has more free time in the day) started looking at condos, and eventually settled on a particular one in Glen Ellyn. That was in October. The seller (a company that is converting apartments into condos en masse) told us that we'd be moved in by the end of the year. Kewl. Well, that was their first failed promise. (actually there could have been another promise they made before that one that didn't come true. not many of their promises seem to come true.) Supposedly all the paperwork and mortgage arranging would happen in like a week, and then they'd start construction (because we opted to pay $12,000 additional to have the place remodeled and new appliances and everything nice and new and delightful) which takes 28 days. Yes, construction takes 28 days. Not 30, or anything nebulous, 28.
Well, getting the paperwork and mortgage approval took until the end of December (starting in mid-October) which you may notice, is much more than the 1 week they lead us to believe it'd take. Of course, the entire time they were telling us that we were nearly there, and any day they would start construction...actually at one point, they seemed to indicate that construction was nearly done, then a week later when we thought we would be putting our closing into place we found that construction hadn't started yet...so yeah construction started at the end of December. And construction takes 28 days. Well, other than the couple items that we saw on our walkthrough on Sunday that aren't done, construction was completed two weeks ago. So in the first week of March. 28 days...more than doubled...and the whole time expecting it'd be done anytime. Other than the countertop, of course. They didn't even order the countertop before the 28 days had passed, and then it took a couple weeks to come in, and then it was wrong so they had to reorder it, but would we like a simpler one so that it could come in a week earlier? NO WE WANT OUR FREAKING CORRECT COUNTERTOP AND WE WANT IT THREE MONTHS AGO AND YOU COULD HAVE ORDERED IT FOUR MONTHS AGO WHEN WE CHOSE WHICH ONE WE WANTED!!!!!! *ahem* The countertop is a sore point. Its installed now though, and its beautiful.
So with that, most of the problems and delays caused directly by the seller and their contractor are ended (most. we can't say that they all are, because we can't rely on them for anything much, but we've survived (in a living, breathing, if not sanity kind of way) through all the setbacks they've given us so we can make it through whatever else.) Enter the mortgage broker, GuaranteedRate. Let me say off the bat, if you ever need a mortgage, DO NOT USE GUARANTEEDRATE!!! Now, they have explanations for most of their delays, somewhat, but they're hard to get any information out of and they never call you to inform you of anything. About all they do is ask for more and more documents every once and a while. And now to the reason you should absolutely not be their client. They're incompetent. Their whole organization. Especially their IT department. And their other people, too. The easiest way (we thought) for us to get docs to them is to scan and email them, since we don't have fax and are too impatient to mail hard copies. And now, after wondering why they keep on asking for the same documents again (like a month later) we are informed that their IT department doesn't give them very much email storage capacity, so their inboxes tend to be full to the brim, and emails sent to them (especially large ones, like ones with scans attached) don't get to them. Those emails just vanish. Without any "message refused" or any indication to the sender or the receiver that a message failed to go through. So **** their IT department for not being competent enough to meet their business needs and **** the people working with us for not having the shred of brilliance necessary to figure out methods of keeping their inbox empty enough to receive new messages. Some people I know delete nearly all the emails they receive, even though they have the near-limitless accounts that most email providers give now. Its a pity that this company is dealing in private documents or all their people should just sign up for google or yahoo or whatever accounts since everybody other than GR's IT department gives at least a gig.
Okay, now that I've explained part of why GR has done what its done, let me tell you what they've done. Our attorney, with the seller's attorney, scheduled closing for last week Thursday, but I was going on an MDS trip for that week so we bumped it to Monday this week. So the closing was scheduled some two weeks in advance, and our lender (GR) notified so that they could have everything in order. Then Kristen spent the whole time trying to get GR to tell us how much cash we need to bring to closing (well, cashier's check, so don't get any ideas about robbing us when we go to our closing) and they spent the whole time pretty much ignoring her, other than a new chap that called me wanting some more info and documents, which we provided. So Monday morning dawns and we don't know how much we'll need, and our attorney doesn't know, and she finds from the title company that they haven't received anything yet from the lender. So I call GR to ask what the **** is going on, and they say that their underwriter still has the docs and is working on them but they can't get a hold of her to find out how close to completion she is. ... ... ... ... So with an hour to go we postpone the closing indefinitely. (do you know how depressing, confidence-breaking, heartbreaking, and multiple-other-things-breaking that is, considering how long we've already waited and struggled to get here?) And instead of spending the evening moving stuff into our new condo, I spend it emailing more documents to GR, most of which were ones that we'd already emailed them a month and a half previous and the previous week (bank account statements and 2008 W-2s). And then first thing in the morning, I get a call from GR asking where the docs are, why didn't I send them all the previous night? That's when we figured out their whole problem with receiving emails because of their inboxes being too full.
[insert]This is the point where I realized that I should go back and add some paragraph breaks. So you get an idea as to how large it was before I broke it up.  Woah. I just did a smily face.  [/insert]
At the moment we're a little unaware of when closing will be. The lender says their underwriter should be done by Thursday, Friday, or maybe even but hopefully not, Monday. Meanwhile, Kristen's parents had taken off work for the last couple days this week and scheduled to rent a U-Haul truck to bring the large furniture still in Buffalo (couch, loveseat, chaise, bed, piano maybe, bookcases, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting) since we were going to be closing on Monday. Rather than rearrange this (which we've done once or twice already because of postponed closing dates) I asked the seller if we could put the stuff into the condo even if we haven't closed yet, and they said sure, no problem, as long as you don't damage anything inside and claim it needs to be fixed at closing. Don't worry, we have a much higher sense of honor than whatever few scraps you might possess. So Friday's moving day, one way or another, key willing (the keys have to be ready to be at closing, which seems to mean that the seller's attorney has them, but also need to be at the condo on Friday to let us in. Hmmmm can they just make duplicates and let us pick up the duplicate after closing????
Okay so enough on the condo. There's a million more problems its causing directly and indirectly, through its effects on finances and through the stress its causing. But enough.
Oh and there's stuff going on at church too. They're delving into an issue that has often split congregations and denominations, and not everyone is where we expected them to be. So this is making our church a less comfortable place to be. Obviously that's a major problem, but the less obvious complication is that this is where we have planned to be married, and have the pastor marry us, and now its all damaged and could be even worse by the time we get married. Our safe place of trustworthy friends seems no longer safe. **sigh**
And then there's even more issues tearing up our little world, that's potentially of more lasting consequence than the condo or the church. ***sigh***
What a bleak place our world can be. Lord, where are you?
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| I find myself in desperate need of records of what I've done in the past weeks. And sadly, none exist to help me out. It isn't like in the old days. Back then, I could get a pretty good idea as to what I'd been up to just by reading my xanga entries, as they usually managed to mention just about everything during their long winding course down my site page. But now, with it being months since my last update, my xanga is useless for determining what was planted and repaired in the days following The Flood. So I'd better either start keeping better work records, or writing my long rambling posts once again. Or maybe, I should do both. Tonight's a perfect night to start both. After all, I just caught up on all the production sheets for Arcadis from Sept 22nd till now. What of them I can figure out, anyway. I don't have a clue what we did on the 22nd, let alone how many were in my crew and how long they worked. I think we did flood repairs, because I know on the 23rd I was desperately trying to figure out how many stakes and wire rolls we'd used the previous day on repairs. But did we plant anything? I think not. So what reaches did we repair that day? Maybe I should backtrack. I realize that outside of a very select few of my possible readers (family, fiancee, fiancee's family, and Jersled) most of you won't have a clue what I'm talking about. Well let me fill you in (quickly, since it is 11:23 and I need to get up by 5:45 at the latest) on the last half year. Or something around half a year. I can't remember when exactly I started working for McGinty. See, I should have xanga'd about it as soon as I got the position, and then after my first day of work, at the very least. March 21st sounds familiar. Anyways I got a job as an Ecological Restoration Technician in the restoration branch of McGinty Bros, a landscaping and restoration contractor. I work out of our little office in Lisle, which boasts 4 employees at the moment. Wauconda (Restoration and hydroseeding branch) has something around 40 employees, and I have no clue about Long Grove (Company headquarters and headquarters of the landscaping branch, which I calously and snobbishly ignore the existence of. Who cares about pretty lawns? Give me prairies, wetlands, and forests!). Lisle is a new office to relocate some resources and personnel closer to many jobsites. Usually, we seem to have half the drive time that Wauconda people have. So anyways, for most of the summer I was a sprayer, dousing all manner of bad plants (and occasional good plants and inconsequential plants that got in the way) with herbicides, much to their detriment. At least, we usually wanted it to be to their detriment. Sometimes things didn't happen right, which reminds me that I actually have posted about working with McGinty at least twice, so perhaps you aren't totally clueless. You know about the fun that diesel and rain can cause. But yeah, mostly spraying, which kept us moving from site to site, seeing lots of places, and never knowing where we were going to be the next day. But just recently things got shaken up a bit for me. This one chap, Will, is essentially second-in-command after Brian, the manager of the restoration branch. But Will never gets to oversee many projects since he's always at one giant project of ours, the Kress Creek and West Branch of the Dupage River Mitigation Project. Some factory dumped radioactive thorium into the Kress Creek and contaminated a nice large section, so they (government-organized agencies and hired contractors like us) had to dig up and clean all the contaminated soil, restore the river's shape, and replant the destroyed areas. My company is doing all the replanting. So that is thousands of trees and shrubs, and sections of grass and prairie to seed, and wetlands and riverbanks to plug (plugs are small wetland plants). Will has been overseeing our company's share of this project for 3 years. But now they've decided to get him out of there since they are short on supervisors for more confusing projects (and because Brian doesn't want Will to go job hunting because he's getting rather tired of being at the same place everyday for 3 years). So they needed a field supervisor for the Kress Creek project, which has turned out to be...me! So now I'm there every day, overseeing 6-15 person crews from Wauconda. And trying to keep track of everything we're doing, and everything we need to do. Which is why I have to now keep copious records. Of course they didn't inform me of all the records and production sheets that I was going to be responsible for filling out for the first several weeks, which is why I was now in the position of wishing for records of my last couple weeks. Ah well, it, along with my fiancee's comments about how sad it is that Xanga is so dead these days, brought along this fine post. A very fine one, I must say, considering how informative it is, and how little it meanders through topics. Maybe I can give you a meandering one in the near future. Maybe. Probably not likely of course, considering how my posting habits are of late. Hm.... | | |
| So last night, I was expecting that today would be a rain day. A forecast of 70-80% thunderstorms through the whole day, so surely it'd be a rain day. But I wouldn't know for sure until 6:30am this morning. When I woke up at 6:00 I immediately realized that it was much too bright. Yep, looking pretty not good (as in no sign of thunderstorms) outside. Checked the weather and woohoo its down to 30-40% chance throughout the day until the evening. So I rather expected that the call at 6:30 would be telling me that we're working today. Well when the call came at 6:42, yep I had to hurry off to work. Which I did, and then got to the worksite at 8:40, and found that we didn't have an ATV today because the trailer was getting new tires put on and the ATV we used yesterday had gotten two...sticks...stuck through the tires and they were flat so it needs new ones too. Why we were using turf-grass "off-road" tires that didn't have steel mesh in them I don't know. Cheaper, I guess. Until you have to replace them. So we drove our van and pickup into the work area and loaded up a couple backpack sprayers and headed out to gloriously slaughter the canada thistle with transline. Halfway through the second pack it started sprinkling...then eventually turned into a nice rain. Oh great. Probably most of what we just sprayed rendered ineffective. Since it was looking like the rain was going to stick around, Brian sent us to help out an installation project nearby, laying blanket over exposed ground that had been hydroseeded. So then about half of McGinty's Waucaunda branch and all three of us from the Lisle branch were all there working on the project in the nearly pouring rain, getting absolutely soaked and covered in mud. We skipped lunch to get it done quickly and headed out. Well, my glasses hadn't been much use in that rain. I'd decided I'd see better with them in my pocket than fogged and rainsplattered in front of my face. Getting back in the van, I got them out of my pocket and opened them to put on...and they broke. The left sidepiece has been breaking right at the hinge, and I figured I had a couple days left. One of today's planned projects for my expected rainday had been to order a new pair. Well, no rain day, and they broke today. Great. So I balanced them on my face to drive the van back to Lisle, and then my car back home, and then walked to the optometrist, getting there at 3:45. Guess what? They close at 3:00 on Tuesdays. And they aren't open at all on Wednesdays! So now what do I do, go to some other optometrists that doesn't have my prescription figured out and pay an extra $100 for a needless eye exam? Oh and my wallet and all its contents were soaked as well, so they're all spread out under Motrax's heatlight drying off. Looks like the drink stamps on my Panera card all vanished with the wetness. Meh, Tiffany'll put them back on for me next time I go to my usual Panera for my usual drink from my usual barista. But in the meantime Motrax is wandering around my room and knocking stuff over (like several Lego spaceships that are now in pieces at the foot of my bookshelf). Ugh what a day. | | |
| So right now I'm hopping mad, raging furious, and incredibly angry at PayPal. Last Thursday my laptop's power adaptor died, so on its batteries last gasps I bought a new one on Ebay (exact same adaptor as sold at Fry's, but for half the price) and paid for it via PayPal. Also nice was the guarantee that the item would be shipped within 24 hours, and I upgraded the shipping to USPS Priority, so 1-3 days shipping. So I figured it would be mailed on Friday, and if very lucky, I'd get it on Saturday. Well nothing on Saturday. On Sunday I checked on the item, and it appeared to not have been shipped at all, yet! So I irately emailed the vendor (its one of the ebay store things, with over 45,000 feedback) today, and they replied that they're waiting for the payment to clear PayPal. So I go to PayPal, and sure enough, they haven't processed it yet, and say it takes them 3-5 business days to process a payment from a bank account. What the heck! I thought the mighty, famous PayPal was supposed to be useful and instantaneous! GRRRRR!!! So PayPal says it'll be cleared by the 14th (Wednesday) and it'll probably be shipped Thursday then, and get here Friday, Saturday, or Monday...a full week later than I expected it! AAAGGGHHH I'm so mad. What with my work schedule and generally waiting in Wheaton area after work to see Kristen when she gets out, I don't get home till late, and by then I'm exhausted and go straight to bed. Usually with my laptop I can just go to Panera or the library to get some comp time, but without it...grrrr. And meanwhile I'm going through MapleStory withdrawal. All my buddies probably think I died or something. I highly doubt this desktop could run it: even Kristen's laptop has difficulties. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Ugh I should have just bought the adaptor at Fry's for $80. Its not like I wasn't getting $33.13 per hour the whole of last week. | | |
| hey hey, I think I might update this afternoon, when I get out of work. If I'm not too dirty to go to Panera afterwards, that is. | | |
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