Archive for the 'Life' Category

Update: We’re not starting for another couple of weeks. More info to come.

Krissy is becoming a vegetarian. Here’s how it happened:

One of Krissy’s coworkers wants to quit smoking. This same coworker is a vegetarian. Krissy wants to help support her friend in quitting smoking, but since Krissy doesn’t smoke, her coworker and she came up with an idea. Krissy promised that she would not eat meat for an entire month if her coworker would abstain from smoking for the same time period. When she came home and told me, she thought I would be excited. I wasn’t.

I don’t want to be a vegetarian, and I don’t like changes. It took me a while to accept the idea, even though she told me that I wouldn’t have to participate with her. I don’t want to buy food for and have to prepare two separate meals every night, so I plan on participating with her in this experiment. But that doesn’t mean that we are easing ourselves into the transition.

For Krissy’s birthday we went to Applebee’s because they always make their steak just how she likes it. Tonight krissy wanted a Wendy’s frosty, and I was going to get a hamburger for dinner. At the drive-thru menu there was a huge advertisement for the newest burger creation: the Baconator! A quarter-pound of beef and six slices of bacon all smothered in cheese were my last hurrah before consigning myself to a month of vegetarian bliss.

Something in me feels like it would be unethical to recommend the Baconator to anyone, because it is so unhealthy. That said, it is one of the best hamburgers I have ever had from a Wendy’s restaurant.

On my way home from work today I was sitting at a stop light when something in a parking lot distracted me for a few seconds. While I was looking over my left shoulder a thunderous crunch tore through the car. It was horribly jarring and it took me a few seconds to piece together what was happening. The light had turned green and the car in front of me was just starting to pull away. Looking through my rear-view mirror revealed a silver car about the size of my own Honda Civic, but it was literally touching my bumper! I had been rear-ended.

I stared intently at the front bumper of the car through the mirror until I remembered that Arizona doesn’t require (or, possibly, even allow) cars to have license plates on the front of their cars. I signaled that I was going to pull over, and they did the same. As we both approached the side of the road, I came to a stop, and the other driver sped off at full speed. I didn’t have time to get any of the info from their rear license plate, and I was positioned in such a way that it was difficult for me to quickly get into traffic and make chase.

I pulled into the nearest parking lot and got out of the car. There was almost no visible damage to the car. A minor scratch was visible, but it looked better than what I’d have expected had a shopping cart tapped into the back of me. I was very upset that the other driver was so amoral that they wouldn’t stop. I likely wouldn’t have even done anything with their insurance information, it’s just the principle of the thing that got me.

When I got back into the car and pulled back onto the road I noticed the absence of the familiar rhythmic clicking sound associated with turn indicator usage. All the way home I had to manually blink the turn indicators on and off because, although the light would come on, it wouldn’t blink. The hazard lights didn’t work right either.

After playing with the hazard lights and the turn indicators for about an hour they are working again. It really doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t really do anything to make them work, so I am guessing that they will stop working as suddenly as they started. As Davis’s Dictum states: Problems that go away by themselves, come back by themselves.

Krissy found a smokin’ clearance deal on some garage counters and cabinets, and couldn’t pass them up. We bought them without considering how me might get them home. After 15 minutes of deliberation, we finally decided we had better just rent a truck and take them home. After all, the trucks were only $20 for 75 minutes and we only live about two miles away from the home improvement store. I went inside to rent the truck, but they needed proof of insurance, which was back at the car. I was a little miffed when I heard Krissy calling my name. She was running up to tell me that someone in a white truck pulled up next to us in the parking lot and offered to truck our stuff home for us.

When we got to our place, we wanted to do something for him, but he wouldn’t let us. He just told us to pass it forward. I don’t even know what his name was. I am really grateful that there are still people out there willing to do things like that for people. Now I really need to be on the lookout for opportunities to help others.

Krissy dropped her well-used Palm Tungsten E PDA on concrete a couple of weeks ago, and the thing hasn’t turned on since. When I told some friends about it one of them said he was looking to sell a Palm Tungsten C which is faster and has a built in keyboard, something I knew Krissy would probably like. I asked him what he was selling it for, but he told me he would think about it and get back to me. I looked it up on eBay and concluded that it was probably worth between $100 and $120. When he brought it to me I asked him how much he had decided on. He wouldn’t take my money, though. He said that the only amounts he was comfortable asking for weren’t worth taking anyway, so I could just have it! I tried to write him a check of $100, but he wasn’t having it. He caught me before I was done writing it and said, “I hope that’s not for me, because if it is, you can just stop right now.”

I took it home to show Krissy. I restored her data from a backup on the computer, and everything looks great! She is excited to have her life back in the palm of her hand.

The wonders of “linksys” (which happens to be America’s most popular Internet service provider) allows me to post this from within the walls of my home before I have had the time to find my cable modem and WiFi router.

Yesterday we finally got the keys to our new home! We went over and picked up our Uhaul truck first. The place we got it from was the only place in the area that had the right truck available for the right time period. The place is a dingy tire shop that just started renting out Uhaul trucks. They didn’t have their system hooked up to fast enough Internet access to run the Uhaul computer system, they did everything on paper. It was kind of uncomfortable in there because he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, and it was a filthy, greasy, tire-filled mess.

After we got the truck we emptied out all the stuff we could pick up by ourselves from the storage unit and loaded it into the truck. That night we were able to move half of it into our new house. We slept on the floor since our mattress was still all the way at the back of the storage unit. We got up early and started moving stuff again. By the time the first people started showing up to help us move we had already moved almost everything from the truck and were ready to go get the furniture out of the storage unit.

40 minutes later and everything had been moved into our new place. Now there are mountains of boxes that need to be sifted through and furniture that needs to be placed. Krissy is excited to get started on projects around the house. She is the hardest working person I know.

Police Chief Wiggum explained to Lisa that nothing gets chocolate out, then he motioned to the large brown stain on the front of his police pants to prove his point. Now I have a pair of pants of my very own that can be used to illustrate that same principle. I won’t blame anyone for the mishap. Wendy’s frosties are mighty tasty, but you need to be careful when you put an empty frosty cup on the top of a fast food bag that’s completely full of trash. You need to be especially careful when that bag has a small tear at the top and the empty frosty cup has a spoon in it causing the empty frosty cup to lean against the torn part of the bag. The most unfortunate things can happen when driving over speed bumps, so watch out for those as well. When all of these circumstances come together it’s curtains for your pants… See?

Tragedy struck in the life of a school librarian close to where Krissy and I are staying. To help her out with her sudden serious financial difficulties a fund raiser was organized at the nearest McDonald’s fast food restaurant. All of the money that was paid for food was to be donated to her, and there were large tip jars on the counters where additional money could be given. We don’t know her, but our hosts who are putting us up until escrow closes on our house do, so we thought we would go along and help out for a good cause.

There were more people in this one McDonald’s than I have ever seen at a fast food place at one time in my life! The line to order stretched out the door and down one side of the building. It looked like a number of school faculty and staff were there helping take orders and get them distributed as the food was done. I ordered more McDonald’s food tonight than I have in the last year! I didn’t end up eating it all, but I figured that since I was really just there to donate money, I may as well get something interesting out of it.

I don’t know if the woman we were there to help out was present or not, but I hope she knows just how many friends she has in this community. Apparently part of the tragedy she has had to endure involved her husband having committed suicide primarily due to huge online gambling debt. It appears that she was left holding the bag, completely unaware of his out of control habit. Let’s hope that the money raised tonight lets her at least not have to worry about debts quite so much, and that she can find some semblance of peace.

I was going to wait until we were settled in our new home before writing another blog post, but it looks like that’s still going to be aways off in the distance. We found out today that circumstances are such that the closing date of our new home has been moved out about two weeks later than we were originally planning on. We were expecting to close on Thursday of this week, but now instead of a 4-day wait, we now have a 20-day wait ahead of us.

At first this seemed like a tragedy of the highest order, and my first thought was that we were not going to be able to get the house for one reason or another. Even though it upset a lot of plans, it turned out that within just a few hours of receiving the bad news everything had settled in to place and we were left with only a few minor inconveniences. We will have to pay another month’s rent on our storage unit, but that is the greatest of the frustrations. It could have been much worse.

Our friends, who have been incredibly kind and have let us stay free of charge in their guest bedroom for over six weeks now, would not accept our offer to pay them rent for the time from now until we leave. They have been a great blessing to us. Moving drained our resources and we are just now again in a position to take care of ourselves. If it weren’t for them, we would not be in the fortunate position that we are in. Without their generosity and effort on our behalf, we would still be struggling to pay rent in California awaiting the day that I finished school and got a job there.

I will try to keep things up to date if anything interesting happens between now and our new closing date.

I finally broke down and bought the Wii. I thought I would be able to buy one in the stores by now, but it looks like demand is still outstripping Nintendo’s supply, and stores are immediately selling the few Wiis that are trickling in on their delivery trucks. I ended up bidding on eBay until I accidentally won one of the auctions. After all was said and done I had paid about $400 on it. I was a little upset at first, but as soon as I got it set up and started playing with friends and family I immediately knew that I had made the right decision. My only regret so far is having waited so long to buy it.

When I got home from work today I was feeling really sick. I had a pretty bad head cold and a cough, and I am pretty sure that I had a fever, too. I arrived home just 15 minutes before the post office closed and there was a slip of paper indicating that a package that required a signature upon delivery was waiting for me at the post office about two miles away. I grabbed the paper from the mailbox and went right back to the car without even going inside the house. I wanted to get the Wii ASAP!

After I got out of the post office with the package, I opened it up in the car. The way it was packed made it impossible to remove without getting packing peanuts everywhere, but I wanted to open up the package completely in the car before I got it home. If this had turned out to be an eBay scam, then I wanted to be alone when I found out. I was fearing a Wii box filled with rocks or some other heavy substance instead of the game system I was expecting. Everything checked out, and the system seemed as brand new as it comes!

Krissy was really excited for the new Wii. She wasn’t quite as excited as I was, but that’s understandable, I guess. My coworkers were amazed to hear that my wife actually approved of the purchase and looked forward to playing video games with me on a regular basis. I love my wife!

I can hardly wait to get more friends and family involved when I can get more than just two controllers. You see, the Wii becomes more fun the more people you can get playing it together at the same time. Wii remotes are sold out almost everywhere, just like the Wii. It’s a good thing I bought that Wii remote at Toys R Us back on November 20th of last year!

When I got home from work today there was a surprise waiting for me that had come in the mail. I almost felt like Elder Dowler again! It was a box from my wife. She had sent me a whole bunch of my most very favorite chocolate chip cookies that she makes from scratch! They were still soft and chewy (which is one of my favorite things about them).

Thanks Krissy!