This morning, I managed to take one good-sized step toward getting my life in order. I signed the paperwork for refinancing my house and reducing my mortgage payment by a full third (2% less and went from a 15 to a 30 year mortgage). That gives me a lot more breathing room for finding a new apartment/house to rent in the coming months. It also means that, if everything goes to hell--such as Fluffy not finding a job in the next year--I have a good chance of surviving it. In a week, I do step two which will take a few weeks and it will give me more of a foundation to buckle down for this nasty period in our economy.

I started looking at new places to live. My lease is up in April and I want to be able to have Inigo visit me instead of my father-in-law. Call me jealous, but I'm not. It would just be easier of Fluffy could bring the dog here instead of struggling to find someone to watch the little bastard. And, being her husband, I can't really tell her no.

(And I might miss him.)

In other news, I still haven't found a home for my serial story but my other forum is willing to look at it a bit and maybe give me a bit of feedback. I don't expect a lot (there is only 10 active people lately), but they are the right audience for the story so here's hoping.

I also messed with a little script I have. Some years ago, I write a program called odt2xhtml which take an OpenOffice.org writer document and generates nice, plain XHTML. I wrote it to make it easier to style the entire thing for a website. I usually bounce between hand-written HTML and CMS systems like a Wiki or something. Never sure what is best for me, mainly because I don't know what I really want. Well, I modified the code in the last week (finished today) for a new program odt2txt. This takes the normalized XHTML code from the first program and lets me generate a text version, appropriate for posting here in a blog post or on a forum or even in a wiki site. I also have a little program that takes that output and gives me a style analysis on it (mainly to find my over use of passive voice).

I feel pretty good having a neat little program like this. It makes my life easier and it went from a hack program to something actually pretty elegant (and in Perl).