I was born in the Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvaina. My parents moved to my house in Gibsonia when I was about six months old. That was home for the next 18 years.
When I was growing up Gibsonia was a one-light town on a state route road. The town grew up with me to become a sprawling mess.
When I was little, though, there was plenty of space to run around, with plenty of trails in the woods. Around the age of 13, things started to change. Commercialism started to come out from the city core and take over the town.
They tore down a trailer park (yaay) to put up a shopping center. That’s progress to most people, but a large number of the trails I mentioned were in the woods they also leveled.
They took my woods away, but since I was young I loved watching the massive grading machines take the hill of shale and level it. I still have love the grand scale of construction projects, whether the result is good or bad in the long run.
I suffered through high-school with a mixture of frustration and boredom, and I finally started going to art class, and that changed something in me. It really interested me, and beside that, I met a nice girl who I dated throughout the rest of my time in the joint. (The High School was designed by the same folks that brought us the Allegheny County Jail.)
I graduated high school and enrolled in the Art Institute, in downtown Pittsburgh. I only lasted about 6 months there, because the commute was horribly long and I got offered a job with my current employer, doing data conversions starting in summer of ‘96. I’ve been there for more than 10 years now.
I moved to several places after joining Medic/Misys. First, I moved to Pittsburgh, into my aunt and uncle’s house after they moved to Florida. I also lived in Cranberry Twp. (Crider’s Corners, PA) for several years before buying my first house.
A few things to keep in mind when buying a house:
- Character doesn’t make up for cracks and leaks and a lack of air conditioning
- Never buy on the ground, if you can avoid it
- Never buy a house in a bankrupt city.
I liked the neighborhood, and the neighbors, but my house was a royal pain in the ass. The night I moved in, it was raining, and water started coming into my dining room. This led me to pull up the carpet. Good news: hardwood floor. Bad news: heavy moisture damage. I set to trying to restore it. I never succeeded.
I put about $8,000 in repairs and improvements into that home: a nice window for the bedroom, paint all around, and icynene insulation in the walls. I never did get to see if the insulation worked well. About a year after buying the house, I moved to Raleigh, NC to join the home office of Misys.
So I moved to Raleigh, and after staying in a temporary home for a month or so, I signed on my current residence, a Condominium starting on the second floor, in good repair, in a prosperous city.
I was getting rental income from the old house for about a year while I waited for it to sell. That put me in limbo for a while. My mortgages totaled $1,400/mo, and I had a car payment and HOA dues to pay. The house did eventually sell, at about $15k loss. Lessons learned, and things have been better since selling my home.
I am the president of our condo association board, and this is the last year of my tenure. I will not be putting in anymore time after the past two-and-a-half years.
In the previous two years, we’ve made improvements to the retaining walls of units, re-built a lot of the community pool, and replaced all of the polybutylene plumbing with PEX. Condos which stood months on the market before selling now sell in a week’s time thanks to reasonable prices, nice landscaping and no worries that the pipes will break. I think I’ve done a lot for the community and I will be happy to leave the board in a better position than when I started.
I like to take photos, and host them on my flickr page. I’ll let them speak their thousand words’ worth.