Hurricane season is upon us

It’s almost halfway through June — we’re into hurricane season! Some of the thunder and lightning has been epic and I’m looking forward to more storms. These last 2 weeks have gone by quickly.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned starting the hunt for a more permanent residence. Our rental ends mid-August and we had to give notice in the next couple of days. The house buying process in the US is interesting. In the UK when I sold both my flat and house, the exchange date (closing date in the US) was an estimate — both dragged on for months and months. In the US this date is decided from the outset as part of the offer. What a novel approach.

Our criteria was to keep the children in the same school, which is a pretty strong filter as the school boundaries are quite tight. From my research everything is overpriced. Another factor was not ending up owning the most expensive home in the neighbourhood. Our choices were limited, which made things a little more straightforward. We found a couple of places, got pre-qualified, and put in an offer. We were unlucky on our first choice — although we were told we were very close. Can you believe everything you’re told by realtors?

We made an offer on our second pick and with a bit of back and forth we were accepted. All that in one weekend! In total we saw 4 different places. Since then this week has been about gathering all the relevant paperwork for the mortgage — payslips, bank accounts, pensions, tax returns, and a bunch of different forms of identification. All this whilst banging my head against a K2 and Adobe Sign integration…

Digital signing has become a lot more prevalent during pandemic times. My issue has been with K2 sending a document to Adobe Sign to begin the digital signing process — the contents of the file just aren’t being picked up. I tested the upload of a document from K2 to Box and boom, with a little finessing I managed to get some dummy docs across. However, when transplanting this working code to Adobe Sign, no bueno. I’ve raised a request with the guys at Nintex (they own K2 now) and we should have a chat over the coming days to iron it out.

And finally some rowing machine progress — I think this will be the last time I’ll write about it as I now have a better idea of what I’m supposed to be measuring. The idea with rowing is to keep your SPM (strokes per minute) around the 30 mark and the split times steady. I played around with Excel to present the data better, using a banding chart. I’m ok with the results, it could be a bit cleaner but it’ll do until I come back to fiddle with it.

Oh, yesterday the whole family went to Keke’s Breakfast Café for pancakes, waffles, and French toast. Delicious as per usual. Also Loki started on Disney+ this week — pretty good, I love me a bit of time-jumping shenanigans.