A Day Late

I took some pictures of the house last week. They’re posted here. I realized, as I was looking through them, that I forgot to take pictures of the living room and basement. Other than that, they’re all here.

Well, I’m almost a home buyer. I started working with a realtor about a month ago. We spent a little bit of time driving around the Provo/Orem area looking at different places. Initially I was hoping to find a house with a decent yard and such but I quickly learned that there’s not many of those in the price range I was shooting for and the ones that are can be pretty hammered. I thought about looking at some of the surrounding communities since you can get a lot more for your money but decided it was a bad idea since what’s left of my social life would probably go down the tubes if I moved too far from Provo/Orem.

Anyway, last weekend I decided to stop by a new development of townhouses I looked at last year. They offered two types of units. The end units which were a little larger and had a two car garage and middle units with a one car garage. Naturally I preferred the larger one. I found out they only had two end units left. One that was completed in May and the other that was still under construction. I looked through the finished unit and really liked it so I called my realtor up and we both walked through it. She liked it so we decided to write up an offer last Saturday night.

After I put in the offer the stress started to build. Initially I was excited. Then I started thinking about loans, breaking my lease, etc and began to think “how am I gonna pay for all this? What the *(&* have I done?!” Once I calmed down over the finances, the waiting for their response started to eat at me. Since I put the offer in on Saturday I had to wait till Monday night to get a response. Our deadline was 6pm so I started to get really apprehensive when the hour approached and I hadn’t heard anything. I called my realtor and she said they were submitting a counter offer for $500 more. What a relief. Well…the counter offer didn’t come in until this morning but there was a problem with it. In my initial offer I requested the seller to pay $1500 toward closing costs. The counter offer they sent was for the same price with $1000 toward closing but they added a stipulation that I must use their preferred lender. I got a good faith estimate from their lender and also one from my sister, who is a loan officer. My sisters closing costs were about $2300.00 cheaper then their lender. The incentive to use their lender is they agree to purchase a refrigerator, washer dryer and microwave (models are already picked out). I priced out the models of appliances and figured their cost was around $1500 or so. So I decided I was better off to go with my sister, save $2300 and buy my own appliances. We talked to the builder and they said it’s their policy not to pay closing costs to any mortgage company other than their preferred lender (strange). So I figured we’d just write up a counter offer for $1000 off the home price and I’d pay the closing costs. My realtor suggested we leave the price of the house as it is, agree to pay all the closing costs if they agree to throw in the refrigerator, washer/dryer and microwave (thanks Jenny). To my surprise they agreed. So…if you calculate everything out it’s basically the same amount as my original offer. I don’t know if they realized that by not using their preferred lender they were giving me a better deal but I wasn’t about to bring it up. Anyway, we submitted our counter offer at about 2pm. By 5:30 I hadn’t heard anything and was starting to get nervous again. I called my realtor and said the fax had just come in accepting our offer. So that’s that. Looks like the loan is next.

For those that are interested the place is a townhome with a 2 car garage and fenced patio in the back (about 15′ x 30′). The main level (about 650 sq ft) has a living room, kitchen with dining area and a half bath. The second floor (about 1000 sq ft) has a master bedroom with master bath with seperate tub and shower (very nice) and a huge walkin closet. It also has a laundry room and another full bath and two more bedrooms (one with a walkin closet, the other has a regular closet). The basment is unfinished and is around 650 sq ft. So basically I’m looking at 1650 finished sq ft plus the 650 unfinished in the basement. Not bad. I might stop over sometime this week to walk through it and take a few pictures. If I do, I’ll be sure to post some.

I’m still having trouble with our MySQL server. It stops responding at least once a day. I’ve tried just about everything I can think of. I even dumped all the databases, dropped them and imported all the data again. No luck. I think I’ll probably have to install the debug edition and try and figure out what’s locking it up.

We’ve been having some trouble with our MySQL server running on the HPUX machine. It’s been crashing multiple times for the last few days. When it crashes it becomes completely unresponsive. No clients can connect and any clients that were connected don’t respond. I tried keeping a few windows open to monitor the processlist and extended-status but they didn’t help a whole lot when the server crashed (all values seemed normal when the crashes occurred). I was even unable to shutdown the server. I tried running the script to stop the server but the server wouldn’t respond to any kill commands. Basically the only thing I could do was kill the process with a “kill -9″ (NEVER A GOOD THING).

I’ve been watching the logs and I haven’t found anything out of the ordinary. Nothing significant in the error log. Nothing in the binary log and nothing in the query log file. I assumed it was one particular query that was killing the server but the last queries in the log files never matched. I checked the system log files and couldn’t find anything suspicious except for one thing. The server was restarted a few days ago for unknown reasons. I put in a ticket to engineering inquiring why the server had been restarted (assuming they’d made some changes). I got a response back indicating the server had crashed. I suspected the database might have some corruption problems due to the kill -9’s but it wasn’t until I learned the server had crashed that I thought corruptions could be the cause of the problem.

I decided to take the server down and run a myisamchk. It found quite a few errors. I ran it again with the –recover option. Just to be safe I then ran a CHECK TABLE [table name] EXTENDED on all the tables (MyISAM and Innodb) to verify they all had an “OK” status. They did. Hopefully this solved the problem. We’ll have to see how things go tomorrow.