Got up this morning at 2:50 am, left around 3:10, on I-70 around 4am (stopped for gas and to check the luggage rack).

It's now 10am and we're travelling through North Carolina. I'm connected via cell, travelling about 75mph on I-95, sharing my connection with Robin via a wi-fi ad-hoc network. I left it open, so if anyone is on I-95 around mile marker 127... hop on and keep up!

More time has passed and more things are afoot. I have officially moved into the house, and I even have a sign set up out front (a temporary one). I spoke with my existing landlord about the old property and if we can get someone ready to move in, then I can get out of my lease early.

I have been kept pretty busy trying to balance everything out. Like most of my friends, I actually like keeping busy and having a hectic schedule. There's a sense of accomplishment when you can do work in multiple locations in one day. Another side of having a hectic schedule is that when you get a bit of time to yourself, you can enjoy it better.

Back to the house, I finally got the shower fixed and the new surface put back up. There's still some trim work to finish up, and I need to put the window sill back on (yes, there's a window in the shower) but it's useable now. I definately need to go through the house with a camera and create a virtual tour of the place. I also got these two wooden boxes, painted one green, the other orange, and created two push-together coffee tables for in the living room.

This week I have a house guest. Randy's son Conrad is staying with me while the family goes on vacation. This isn't a babysitting deal.. he's 16, but he is taking classes at the local college and has no vehicle. My place is within walking distance of the college.

Things are still going good between Robin and myself. She reminded me the other day that we're coming up on our 6 month anniversary, but it seems like we've known each other a lot longer than that. But.. to squash any rumors, we're not getting married/engaged anytime soon... a lot of people feel like asking that "so when's the date?". Then I've got the people telling me that I'm not getting any younger, and then I've got some married/previously married people warning me "don't get married!". In any event, I have no plans brewing in my mind along those lines. I have this idea of being married before I turn 30, so I've got 6 years to contemplate that. In any event, I'd appreciate it if people would stop trying to suggestively move things along. Robin feels the same way (I'm not sure if she has "an age to get married by" though).

Speaking of marriages, Kara (living in North Carolina) got married recently. I mainly disagree with her as to her motives for getting married, but I hope it works out for her. Another friend of mine is also getting married in April of next year and I'm invited. I'm not sure if she's made it official yet, so I'll hold off on giving all the details out. I think her marriage has a really good chance of working out.

In just a few weeks, I leave for Myrtle Beach. We will be heading out the 15th of July, staying for a week and coming back the... 21st I think. Robin's family invited me along and it seems like fun.

After I come back from vacation, I will most likely be looking for more work to keep me occupied as the M&T job is ending, things are slowing down a bit with Raystown Wireless, and Berkely Springs might not be needing me that much yet. So if you know of work needing done between the end of July and the end of August, let me know. Also.. I my air conditioner needs replaced.

Hmm... that's about all the news I can think of right now.. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch, but I'm starting to ramble, so I will pause and contemplate. Before I go, let me leave you with this quote for today: "Never attribute to malice what can be better attributed to incompetence."

The best way to find out if things are going on in my life is to see how much I post on here. The more I post, the less is going on.

I've been eyeing up this house across town that has come up for sale. It's got a full living area upstairs -- 1 bedroom, 1 living room (that is large enough to split into another bedroom), full kitchen and bathroom. The first floor was a doctor's office at one point and is setup perfectly for business. It also has a basement and an attic. There is off-street parking available, but to get to it, you need permission from the neighbor to use his driveway. This has scared off a lot of potential buyers and drove the price down.

Anyways, I am pretty much unable to get any sort of reasonable loan due to self-employment and problems arising from being overseas, and while I paid off all my credits cards in '04, I don't have any active accounts. So I made an offer where I would pay all of the closing, taxes, and up-front costs if the owner would do owner financing. I was originally told that the owner just wanted to get rid of the house and pay off some debt/project he had going on. So, I was a bit discouraged, but I kept praying about it and asked others to pray as well. About a month later, I got pre-approved for a loan and went down to talk to the agent about it. While talking with him, he called over to the owner, and we ended up going over to talk to him about it. At this point, he took me up on my offer where he did the owner financing. He even lowered the price. Isn't God awesome?

So we worked out a verbal agreement, I came back two days later and wrote up a contract with the real estate agent, I put a deposit down, and the owner gave me the keys. I'm now almost completely moved in. I moved myself in, I have internet, electricity, telephone, and water setup. I still need to run a network cord down to the first floor and move over my "tech bench" area, my two "server" computers and the printer. Once that is complete, the business will be moved as well. Finally, on June 2nd, we go down to the attorney's office and close.

In keeping with posting about scams that have affected me: I noticed a $10 charge on my bank account this month, and the carge actually reads: "WLISHOPPERDISCOUNT 800-889-8776". At first, I just did a search on "WLISHOPPERDISCOUNT" and came up with shopperdiscountsandrewards.com
as the first link. I don't know what I went through that signed me up for the service, but when I called up, they didn't give me any hassle in cancelling the service and refunding the charge. However, I was still ticked as to the charge in the first place, so I expanded my search to do the full charge description, including the phone number and
this page came up first. My best guess is that it is part of one of those shopping carts, but other than paypal and newegg, the last purchase I did online was with eforcity.com.. I'm not saying that they are responsible, but in the last 2-3 months, they are the only online store on my bank account.

so I got up this morning around 8:30 and thought of all those poor people I
know that have been up for over 4 hours already and have been hard at work since
the sun came up. I could be one of those people, but curiously enough, I am
not. I think that's because in the beginning of this month, I parted ways with
the Marine Corp. A slow sense of relief begins to roll over me.

To atone for not doing Marine things this weekend, I decided to go down to
the hospital and get a drug screening. Of course, unlike doing this for the
Marine Corp, I can hope to get more money by doing this one. I'm essentially
on the 4th step of becoming a Dell Warranty Service Provider. I already have
passed two tests to become a Dell Certified Systems Expert, passed their
background check, and now I'm simply waiting for them to test my pee. I should
be clean, I haven't taken so much as an asprin since mid-January, and that time
was against my better judgement. Before that, it's been two years.

A buddy of mine has been working with a
group of people to setup wireless
internet for Raystown Lake.
The system runs on 900Mhz and the home
units can hit a tower up to 25 miles away. The towers sit on the mountains
ringing the lake and broadcast into areas that don't have cable or dsl available
(and aren't likely for quite a while, unless
wiMax comes into play). This is
a much better setup than some others
that broadcast at 2.4ghz and cover less than a mile per tower. This company
(despite their claims) only covers areas that already have cheaper/more reliable
cable and dsl internet. Anyways, I only mention this because I get to do the
installs at the customer's houses, get paid, and pass out business cards to
people that are just now getting connected to the broadband world.

In other news, things have gone wonderfully well between Robin and me, and
she has met just about all of my friends (though some of them seem to be
unavailable quite a bit) and most of my family. After all that and she still
wants to hang around? I don't know what to think.

I wanted to bring this comment to the light of day. I got it off of a Techdirt article, and I completely agree with it. I'm not saying that people were healthier "in the old days", but in my mind, unless you have some known medical condition that says otherwise, getting sick, getting germs, getting the occasional virus, and even some parasites is overall good for you. You should get all this as a child, your immune system then trains itself to fight off and recover from these diseases so they don't affect you as bad later on in life.

No Subject Given
by Anonymous Coward on Friday, February 10th, 2006 @ 11:19PM
It's curious how people that lives in a planet called Earth are so concerned about germs. I mean, it's unavoidable. People still don't realize that the slighest of the breezes can trasport millions of bacteria directly to your nose, eyes and mouth without any need of touching anything. The size of bacterias range from 0.2 to 5 microns and viruses from 0.005 to 0.1 microns, so I sincerelly have no idea what can we do to avoid them. Well, you can always wrap yourselves in duct tape. 🙂 Germs lately are huge business heh?

Oh, and I found this today. It's a music video to the song Alive by P.O.D. This has been one of my favorite music videos for a long time -- I love special effects that freeze liquid motion, and they did this one amazingly. Requires Windows Media Player or MPlayer (with appropriate codes). And here is the link.

Happy belated Birthday Kristin. Yes, I knew it was coming up, I had the date at several points, and I did plan on sending a card, but as you know.. I'm not perfect. Anyways, I just wanted to thank you for being my friend and for knowing me all too well.

Slippery slopes, we all fall in.. what ever happened to my sure footing? Why do I fall down, why do others follow me down? If I miss the signs, will anyone ever give me warning? Who tells me when to stop, when I go too far? Oh well, my fault, my mess to clean. If you know me well enough to know what I'm talking about, keep me in your prayers, maybe drop me a line. I'm going to go beat myself up or something.

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