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Condo-fication: Part 3

They want $181 900 for this place as a condo.

$181 900???!!! Holy crap, who’d have thought this place would cost so much!!
The official letter from the new owners of our soon-to-be condo came yesterday, and now we have a tough decision to make. I’m torn over whether we should buy or not. On the one hand, we really love the location and our apartment (despite being leaked on) and would love to stay. Plus we hate moving. On the other hand, the asking price was waaay more than I was expecting. Coming up with a down payment by August will be tough, especially since I’d want to put down at least 20%. Borrowing against my 401k would be an option, but I’m a little hesitant about taking on that much more debt at this point, especially considering the credit card debt I’ve been trying to dig out from under for the past year. Doing some rough calculations putting down at least 11% on a 20 year mortgage would make the mortgage payment about the same as what our rent is now. That would mean I’d also have to factor in that darned PMI as an additional cost.

Well, we have a little bit of time to make a decision. The first thing to do will be to head over to talk to one of the sales reps sometime next week. I’d like to find out what they have planned for the condo-conversion process (new flooring, appliances, other upgrades?) and see if there’s any wiggle room in their price.

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Navigating Grantland Part 1

A few weeks ago I received word that a small research project proposal that I submitted had gotten funding approval from the sponsoring company. Terrific! My first research grant! This is a big event for me. Most of the grant funds will be used to purchase another phantom, but first there’s paperwork to be filled out. And I’ll have to navigate the hospital’s research and grant administration process. Fine, no problem. There are plenty of people around here with lots of experience in this kind of thing.
First snag I encounter is that I learn is that the hospital takes 25% off the top for overhead. Ok, nobody told me about that when I was coming up with a budget for my proposal so I might have to go back and say I’ll need more money. But the people helping me with this tell me that I can probably get an exemption from this overhead charge. Good.
Then, I discover that because I don’t have a faculty appointment I can’t be the principle investigator (PI) for the grant. I guess the hospital doesn’t want to take research money brought in by the unwashed and unlearned masses. But there’s yet another exemption that can be applied for that will take a couple of weeks for approval. Fortunately the physician I’m going to be working with is faculty, so he can be the PI instead. I’ll just be the one doing all the work. Maybe I’ll be able to call myself a co-PI. In any case, I don’t think it’ll be a big deal. Sounds like it’s just one of those administrative things. My project, my paper/poster/abstract. First author is what it’s all about.
So now all I need to do is finish up responding to the questions from the sponsoring company, wait for the paperwork to be filled out and hopefully I’ll be able to start this project soon.

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FDA: Rock. Hard place.

It certainly didn’t take long for lawyers to jump on Vioxx. Just a couple of days after Merck announced they were pulling it, I saw TV commercials from local legal firms urging people who’d been taking it to contact them. With Vioxx as a warm-up, I’m sure it will take even less time for them to jump on Pfizer and Celebrex.

It kind of strikes me as ironic that just a few years ago there was much hubbub about the FDA‘s lengthy drug approval process and how it was keeping potentially life-saving/altering drugs out of the hands of people who could benefit from them. These drugs can help peeople. These drugs can save peoples’ lives. Why isn’t the FDA approving them for clinical use? What’s taking them so long? The FDA bureaucracy must be overhauled so that these wonderdrugs can be approved faster. Speed up the process!

So the FDA did streamline their drug approval process so that drugs would be approved for clinical use faster.

Now all the commotion is about how the FDA didn’t spend enough time studying the effects of things like the COX-2 inhibitor class drugs. They’re releasing drugs too soon. They shouldn’t have approved these drugs before knowing the long term effects. Why didn’t they study them longer?

Either way, the FDA is stuck between a rock and a hard place and someone at the FDA’s CDER gets screwed. Drug companies and potential drug beneficiaries (the patients) clamour for the newest drugs to be released expediently. To do that you shorten the time the drugs are studied and evaluated. That means fewer long-term studies. But then if a long-term adverse effect is discovered, the FDA gets blasted for not studying the drug long enough and rushing drugs to market before knowing the long-term effects.

People seem to forget (or conveniently ignore) the fact that for every drug that does get approved, there are several more that are blocked because adverse effects were found or failed to show as much of an effect as expected.
So how do people want it, over easy or fried hard?

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It’s Christmas…isn’t it?

The wife and I were doing a little bit of shopping Sunday gathering a few more supplies for Christmas baking. One thing that struck me odd as we were walking around was just how un-Christmasy things were in the stores. Stores were relatively empty (although it was a little late on Sunday evening). All the racks and shelves of Christmasy things had been relegated to the back corners. There wasn’t even any Christmas music playing in the Target (I’m sure it was a welcome break for the employees). Couldn’t find any Christmas cards to save our lives either. If I didn’t know any better I’d have thought it was just another day rather than the holiday season.
Maybe I’m just going to the wrong places.

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It’s raining in the apartment

I’m stuck here at work while the wife deals with a bit of a crisis with leaking water. Just as I was about to call her to pick me up from work, she calls and says there’s water leaking into our place from the apartment above us. So she’s trying to contain the dripping in buckets while the maintenance guys come over to see about damage control.

And we’re supposed to be buying this place sometime in the future. Maybe we will be moving after all…

Update: Well, the apartment’s a bit of a mess mostly from having to pick everything up off the floor and everything from the kitchen closet being out on the balcony or on the couches and tables. The apartment itself is reasonably ok. A few more water stains on the walls, and rugs were a little bit damp. A couple of the light fixtures need to be emptied out.

On the plus side, parts of the carpet did get a good steam cleaning and deodorizing.

On the down side, the kitchen is a bit of a mess, so our Christmas cookie baking is probably over for the year. And we probably won’t be getting any Christmas cards out this year. We’ll be busy trying to get things cleaned up before heading out of town.