So, I haven't posted here in a while (excepting the tiny CSS post this morning, and for fixing jsSnow earlier today). I promise: I have good reason. It's been a mighty busy few months!

Moved!

I suppose the first thing to mention is that we've moved! Such a giant distance, from our old house in Bateman, Berkeley, CA to Rockridge, Oakland, CA¹. We moved from a 2BR/1.5BA to a 3BR/3BA, and the extra space is great. Unfortunately, its another more-than-100-year-old house, and has all of the problems that we'd already dealt with at our old house; to wit, we've had to do the following:

• Rewire the whole house, which was previously a mix of knob-and-tube and romex, mostly put together in totally unprofessional ways by a previous owner who fancied himself an electrician but apparently had never heard of a junction box and just liked to tape things together in the air/wall/ceiling. It also had a Zinsco/Sylvania panel² with 100A service and the whole house shoved onto like 6 circuits. Now it's a shiny new Eaton Panel³ with 200A service and plenty of circuits, and a proper subpanel
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  As with all of our electrical work, we had this done by the excellent guys at Micah Elecric Co..
• Repipe the whole house; it was previously mostly galvanized steel pipes from the 60's. We had them all ripped out and replaced with new copper pipes. Yes, including the vertical runs.
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• Replace the roof, which was 30 years old and uninsurable. We got Certainteed Landmark Solaris shingles from Apollo Roofing Company. They did a fine job, but I'm not convinced there's any actual difference between Certainteed, GAF, and Owens-Corning.
• Replace the furnace with a heat pump; the furnace was 39 years old and only put out slightly warm air. It could probably be repaired, but I wanted to get cooling, and feel a little weird about gas appliances older than I am. We got a Bosch IDS system installed by Galaxy HVAC. The system works great, but I wouldn't be eager to endorse Galaxy; it took them 9 days to do the install, during which time we had no heat⁴.
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• Put in a new sewer lateral — EBMUD requires that you replace the sewer connection to the city (the "private sewer lateral") roughly every 20 years and ours was around 30 years old. We did a trenchless pipe bursting thing from a company called Underground Rooter, Sewers and Drains. My favorite part was that two of the other companies we called to get competitive bids from actually sub-contract out all their trenchless work to Underground Rooter.
• Redid the wrought-iron railings. The house had wrought iron railings both on the front porch and surrounding an indoor landing. They were... rough. The indoor one had a roughly 8 inch gap at the end (perfect for a child to squeeze through) and the outdoor ones were unpleasantly low to the ground. We had totally new ones fabricated for inside and out by Neza Iron Works and I love them; they're super stable and exactly what I wanted. I guess if you get excited about wrought-iron railings, you might be officially middle-aged.
• Renovated the en-suite bathroom. The primary bathroom had a vintage clawfoot tub in it, approximately 50" long and with no shower. It was not actually useful for getting clean⁵. We had it removed and put in a Fleurco standing shower. It's not at all authentic to the house, but you can actually use it to get clean, which seems probably more important.

We still have some more projects to work on (e.g., solar), but we've fixed up most of the subsystems and now can focus on just living here.

New Car!

You might recall that we bought a new car about 4 ½ years ago. Well, we were hoping to keep that one for a few more years, but with the incoming administration⁶ promising to put huge tariffs on... everything... and also promising to eliminate federal subsidies and tax credits for EVs, it seems like now is the right moment. We got my mother-in-law to watch our son for a while and test drove a few cars. Unfortunately, in terms of car-shaped EVs, there's very little on the market⁷, so we were looking at "compact SUVs". After test-driving, we narrowed it down to the Volvo C40 and the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and we decided to move forward with the Hyundai.

Some of our deciding factors, in roughly descending order of importance:

1. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is significantly cheaper
2. Hyundai has physical buttons for climate/media controls; Volvo just has one big touch-screen
3. The Ioniq 5 has slightly better range and can DC-fast-charge much faster (350KW vs 150KW max)
4. The Volvo feels less roomy despite a similar footprint
5. The Hyundai has a bunch of fun features⁸ like a heads-up display and a way better 360/top-down view camera⁹
6. Hyundai gives you 2 years of free Electrify America fast charging, which I've already used once¹⁰

That being said, I really liked driving the C40, and Volvo seems like a somewhat more reputable car company. Maybe in another 5 years or so...

We're going to have to put in a home charger at some point, since the nearest Electrify America is a few miles away. Let me know if you have any recommendations! I'm currently leaning toward the Flo X6 or the or maybe the Wallbox Pulsar Plus, or maybe a Grizzl-E but reviews seem inconsistent.

N+1

The big reason to do all of this now rather than later is that we're having another child. This wasn't exactly the original plan, but you gotta roll with what life hands you. The new one is due in early February¹¹, and we found out in June, so it's been a bit of a hustle. Our son Isaac is very excited to be a big brother.

Anyhow, that's about it for now. Maybe I'll post more interesting technical things when I'm on parental leave in a few months. Maybe the apocalypse will come. For now, happy Advent of Code!