It’s been quite warm out lately. We haven’t had much rain until the other night this really big storm came through. The thunder was enough to wake me up, I wonder how Scout did, she was probably hiding under the couch with a really puffy tail. My unicycling skills are improving, although I did break it (sort-of). I was out riding and doing really good all the neighbors come out to watch me… I should start charging admission. All of sudden the uni skidded out from under me and I noticed the next time I got on, something wasn’t right. The left pedal felt weird, sure enough it was crooked in the crank arm. After trying really hard to get that pedal off (to try and straighten it), I ended up partially stripping the threads… doh! I ended up taking it to a bike shop where they struggled really hard to get that crank off, even breaking the handle of a tool off in the process. They put a new one on for me and a couple of new pedals and I was good to go (literally…) I haven’t been on it much since, the crank doesn’t quite match the other one, I think I’ll probably just order a set and put the cranks that are made for the uni on it. It’ll work until they come though. This weekend wasn’t too exciting, but we did go for ice cream the other night. Susan’s co-worker is leaving and we had a fun time at Great Lakes Ice Cream Co., even if they didn’t have cotton candy… it’s the best one! I also learned an important lesson this week, move the grill before backing out of the garage (oops!) The way our driveway is sloped, you can’t see it when backing out, the only damage taken was to my poor little fingers trying to move the hot grill out from under my car, oh well, I didn’t get burned that bad… it’s actually mostly healed now (happened on Monday) Oh, and just to remind you, you’ve only got three days left to go shopping for my birthday… 😉

As you’ve probably seen from the latest picture of the day, I am now the proud owner of a unicycle. Why do you ask… because real men only need one wheel. Acutally it’s something I’ve always wanted to learn and last night I found out how fun that could be.

Day 1: I got my unicycle fairly quickly, it came Monday evening. After I got most of it together (yes… some assembly was required), I found out I needed a couple of metric allen wrenches. After paying twice as much for the set of metrics then for the set of standards, I had my unicycle together. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject and thought the seat height was good for my height of 6 foot. Before going out I tested it, and found out it sure wasn’t, I could barely reach. the peddle when it was at the bottom. Time to get the ol’ saw out. I’ve got a small saw with an 8″ blade on it, after I realized I was using the wood blade, I soon made short work of the first cut… still too long. I made another cut and thought it would be alright and headed over to the high-school for a wall to help me learn. After half an hour I managed to figure out how to get on the thing, and how to fall (which to some people is important, heh!) Later that night I made three more cuts to the seat post, with the metal blade =P, and I think I finally got it at the right height.

Day 2: This day went a lot better than the first outing, I think mainly do to the fact I had the seat at the right height. I was getting better at getting on it (still using the wall to help steady myself), and managed to hit a record of 10 feet without using the wall to help maintain balance. I tried free mounting (getting on without a wall), but that didn’t go so hot… I was out for about an hour today…

Day 3: My break through day! I started using the wall at the school for about an hour… I noticed my seat was a tad crooked and asked Susan if she could bring me my allen wrenches on her way to the gym. Luckily she hadn’t left yet and managed to get them to me. After correcting my seat I practiced for another half hour or so and everything was going really well. I had managed to get good enough to go the length of the wall, only problem was there was a wall perpendicular to this one… I quickly decided I’d make a go in the parking lot. Using a lamp post to get on my uni, my first trip sent me out about 40 feet or so (wOOt!) A couple more lengthy trips (still using the lamp post to start from) and a voice over the PA system told me, “School’s closed, pack it up and go home!” So I did just that… I tried free mounting and was acutally able to get in a couple revolutions, but mostly I practiced by using our mailbox to help steady me. I was doing pretty darn good, as I was getting 20+ feet every few tries, sometimes 40 feet, and I made a record trip of about 65 feet! At this point it was getting dark, and I saw Susan coming home from the gym. Wanting to impress her, I waited for her to pull into the garage and was on my uni when she came down the diveway. I managed to get 50 feet, and all she could say was, “Wow you’re kind of wobbly…” and “why don’t you just ride back?” as I wa walking back… Some encouragement… but I didn’t let it get me down, I was super excited I could go that far at all. Unicycling is a ton of fun, I can’t wait to get back out and try some free mounting and maybe learning to turn (could be useful…) Today I was out for about 2.5 – 3 hours.

Susan did say she was impressed later that night. In other news, we have been hitting the movies up quite a bit lately… We did a double feature of Transformers and Harry Potter. Harry Potter was okay, but I really liked Transformers… Susan said she even liked it so it can be all bad… We’ve also seen Ratatouille (twice), Hairspray, and Knocked Up (not for the faint of heart)… I gotta give it to John Travolta for pulling off some of those dance moves, in a plus size woman suit (Hairspray). They were all pretty good. I’m still trying to get Susan to go to Live Free or Die Hard…
As many of you know, the last Harry Potter book hit the stores last weekend. Susan was pretty bummed for not getting a pre-order, but Friday night we thought we’d swing by Wal-Mart around midnight to see if we could get our hands on this critically acclaimed book. Sure enough we found the line and didn’t even have to wait that long (though we were about 30 or 40 people from the front). After we got our copy, we headed to the front of the store to check out. Logical Wal-mart only had one lane open and there was one heck of a slow moving line… An announcement came over the PA, telling all employees to move to the front of the store to open some more registers. Hearing this, it was my idea to stand by one we thought would open and sure enough it worked, we were about the third ones in line. Our associate however had the daunting task of figuring out how a gift card works (we spent a long time waiting for the first person to be checked out in our line). After that we had our book in hand… and Susan stayed up most of the night reading it whilst I was immersing myself in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (execellent game). That was pretty much our weekend, Metroid and Harry Potter…
As for my job status, I’m still looking for something new and exciting… my job has gotten quite boring in the past few weeks. A couple new oppurtunities have presented themselves, but all I can do is apply… wait… and hope… Tuesday was actually pretty fun, I did my second speech for Toastmasters. It was about racquetball and I think everyone really enjoyed. I got great feedback and am now aware of a few things I can work on for my next one (which I’m really excited about doing!) As for playing racquetball, Mittag has gotten to be quite the opponent, the harder he is to beat, the more fun it is to play (for me anyway…)

I hope everyone had a fun (and safe) fourth of July. Me and Susan took the whole week off and went up north, to da UP, eh! Susan was asked to play in a wedding on the 30th. So we decided to go up on Sunday. I was also put in charge of our second home improvement project (our first successful one!) To prevent weeds and keep grass clippings away from the AC unit, we thought we would put a rock bed in. After we picked out the type of rock and border brick, I was quickly underway. I ended up making three trips to Home Depot, one for the bricks and two (low-riding trips) for the stones. We ended up buying about half a ton of rocks, which is why I made two trips… The project turned out really nice, we probably made the area too big, but oh well, it looks good (pictures to come soon…)

So we made our way up north on Sunday and that was the longest drive ever! We wanted to get breakfast at Big Apple Bagel in Bay City only to find out it was closed. After a quick run through McDonald’s, we managed to get on I-75 in some pretty heavy traffic. After awhile we realized we didn’t have our PWC certificates… We turned around to get those, sitting through that horrid class, we better get some fun out of those certificates =P. The drive seemed to take forever about eleven hours if you count the time we originally left the house… It was a nice relaxing week, there was jet-skiing, fireworks, a parade, and all sorts of fun in Michigamme. We found out the Seadoo can hit speeds of 55 mph and that it has quick responses at such speeds (well at any speed really…). The first time Susan got on to drive I went with her and we almost ended up going for a swim. She was cruising along around 45 mph and I told her watch out for the buoy/rocks ahead well she turned slightly and I told her better turn a little more to make sure we avoid any unseen rocks… She cranked the handlebars and my weight shifted, but I had a steady grip around Susan… if I was going she was going… After that she told me I wasn’t allowed to hold on to her anymore… yeah right! The joke after that was we should have given her the beginner’s lanyard as that caps your top speed around 27 mph. After the week ended we slowly packed our stuff up, some how we got more of Susan’s junk (how much more could she possibly have?) and got ready for the work week ahead of us after a much needed break.

For all of those faithful readers out there, here’s the scoop on our first anniversary celebration! Weeks and weeks of planning and it was finally time to unveil my latest DVD creation. Okay so I didn’t quite get it onto a DVD, but it was a good effort (grrr you Movie Maker!) Awhile back I ha asked my folks and Susan’s parents to scan in bunches of pictures of us when we were kids. I wanted to create a digital photo album on a DVD with music and all sorts of neato special effects. Susan’s mom almost took the surprise out of it, but I managed to dodge that bullet and Susan was still unsuspecting. After editing all the photos and creating a project in Movie Maker I thought I was all set. Apparently there’s a bug in the code which makes it very difficult to create movie projects greater than 20 minutes. This was all very annoying. I found this out after importing all those pictures (a lot!) I should have known something was up when it took like 45 minutes before my final project file would actually open up in Movie Maker… my movie was just over an hour long. And this was without any background music. Not wanting to redo all my hardwork, I fought with that program to the bitter end. I managed to encode a WMV file from Movie Maker and thought I was set. This file was about 250 megs and easily fit on my flash drive (I was doing this at work while I had free time… which was a lot of the time). Getting home I tried and tried to get that dumb file to encode to a DVD compatible format. For some reason the audio wasn’t working. I figured it had something to do with the WMV file. So using my work computer, I encoded an AVI file thinking the sound would work. One problem with that is the AVI file was only about 14.7 gigs. Not easily transferable… Anyway, back to two nights before our anniversary… I stopped by Meijer on the way home and bought some really expensive orange juice and some not-so expensive champagne. After our fancy dinner at the Doubletree Hotel I told Susan I had a surprise for her. I set up our round chairs in front of my computer, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and made some mimosa’s. I fired up the WMV file I had (even though the compression made it a little fuzzy) and played through our “DVD”. Susan seemed to like it and I recently managed to get it onto a DVD (there was a bug in the script I was using to create the DVD structure, a fairly easy fix, but annoying as heck!

The next day I had another big surprise for Susan. We headed to the west side of Michigan to a place known as Silver Lake. If you haven’t been there, you should check it out! We stayed at a Jellystone Campground and didn’t even have too many arguments putting the tent up (it was close though…) I was pretty disappointed as we didn’t even get to see Yogi (probably because we didn’t have a picnic basket…) The campground was really nice and they had a lot of things going on… My plan was to check out the Sand Dunes. If you think that’s boring, guess again… they have four-wheelers and dune buggies to rent that you can take all over the dunes. Feeling a little hungry before we hit the sand, we went over to Whippy Dip. Although it’s famous for their hotdogs we ended up getting subs there. Be warned they come on garlic bread (just ask Susan how good mustard goes with that =P). After fueling ourselves up, it was dune buggy time! We headed over to the rental place and watched a really cheesy video about riding in the Sand Dunes. We then got escorted out to the dunes and were ready to get going. The guy told me to keep a good speed going up the entrance ramp and don’t slow down or I’ll get stuck. So, after making it up the mile-long entrance ramp, we met up with the guy again and he gave us some tips about driving around. “Just gun it!” stuck in my mind as I attempted to climb my first hill. Well we made it about 3/4 the way up and sure enough got stuck. A little wiggling and we managed to get free. The guy asked me how that went, and I said not so hot. Some more advice and we were off again (and stuck again not too long after). After getting stuck a couple more times and helping some other people get unstuck (at least I wasn’t the only one, heh!) we had one heck of a time! The time seemed to fly by and we needed to get the buggy back in. Only one problem… we didn’t know where the exit ramp was. After riding around, we did manage to find it and get the buggy back in time, whew! Man that was awesome.

Later that night we went over to Craig’s Cruiser’s. It’s a pretty neat place that has an arcade, go-karts, and mini-golf. Lucky us after paying for a round of mini-golf we got stuck behind a group that went really slow. The line just kept getting longer and longer behind us. It was funny though, we ran into some Yoopers, as they recognized the Miners shirt Susan was wearing. Oh yeah, we also started playing the last hole before the group ahead of us was done (whoops!). We hit up the arcade for a little video game action, as well as a workout. They had this jump-roping game I tried really hard to win the jack-pot, but couldn’t manage to keep up with the machine. We managed to feed some fish that day, but it was pretty dark and you couldn’t seem them very well. There was a ton of bluegill in the area, too bad there was no fishing from the dock, we could have had fish for dinner…

Later that night I had yet another surprise for Susan. By chance I had found out Dave Matthews Band was coming to Michigan in August (to the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston). Being sneaky I had picked up a couple of tickets and a shirt for Susan. I gave her the shirt that said, “Dave Matthews Band 2007 Spring Tour” on it. She looked at it and had the exact reaction I was hoping for… why the heck did he give me this shirt… we didn’t go to the concert. I then pulled out the tickets and told her, “maybe you’d want to wear it to the concert?” She seemed pretty happy about that! Before tearing down camp I had one more surprise in store for Susan… a canoe trip! I asked the person at the desk where we could rent a canoe for a short trip. He gave me a couple brochure’s and we were off. The river we found wasn’t too far away and the guy we rented from was really nice. And no… we didn’t even tip over, thought it was close. During the process of getting the canoe in the water, we found out the particular canoe we had chose was quite tippy, and we almost ended up in the drink! The guy said the river was pretty lame but I beg to differ as there was lots of foliage down in the river and it was quite the challenge to get through some of it All and all it was a pretty excellent anniversary, Susan’s planning the next one, though I set the bar pretty high ;). We did manage to get a couple shirts as a souvenir and had a fairly uneventful trip on the way home.

Let the graduation parties begin! No… not for me but for my little brother. It’s been quite an adventure, but let’s start at the beginning. Me and Susan went up north a few weeks back to see my brother graduate. The drive went well and we made it to the ceremony way early. Not having any idea where my folks were at I figured I give them a call. Well, after trying my mom, then my dad, my sister, my brother, and then my mom a couple more times I gave up hope of trying to meet up with them before the ceremony started. My brother did call me back and found where we were sitting and got to talk a little, parents still no where to be found. Graduation was pretty boring, though it went pretty fast. There were a couple of really good speeches and way too many chorus songs. After Ben was had his deploma in hand, we headed back to my sister’s to make a game plan. We managed to beat everyone else there and I had rang the doorbell to see it anyone was home. No answer so me and Susan waited outside. A little while later, Matthew pops outside (guess the doorbell was broken…) He was in a hurry to get to work and didn’t have much time to chat. A little while later everyone else showed up and we headed off to Mama-Mia’s. The food was good although they burnt my dad’s steak, fed him raw noodles, and I’m pretty sure gave him the wrong dressing on his salad (three strikes and your out…) After dinner we went over to the motel, someone forgot their swimsuit so we didn’t get to do any swimming. After seeing some pictures of the mine and Ben’s memory book, my dad wanted to play some pool. We headed over to the bowling alley near the motel, where the all nite party was at. We walked in and looked for Ben, who was no where to be found. After playing a free game of pool, we tried to get a hold of that knucklehead, but he wasn’t answering his phone. Apparently he did show up around nine the next morning…

I was on computer repair duty for a good portion of the morning. I was also recruited into helping with the Palmer graduation party. The party was fun, thought, I had to borrow Susan’s dad’s truck to carry around my sister’s grill, and we didn’t even use it. Other than that, we got to see a lot of our old Yooper friends and got to enjoy cake and ice cream, before it ended up on the ground (whoops!) The trip back home wasn’t too exciting until we got to the bridge. I took the I-75 exit from St. Ignace and noticed the car coming up on my right looked like a cop car (it didn’t have any lights on top, or markings on the side, but it did have the spotlight commonly found near the side mirrors). I let it pass me and lost sight of it for awhile. About 20 minutes later I saw this black car again and was about to pass it when I saw the sheriff logo in the middle of the license plate. Not that I was speeding a whole lot, I thought it wise not to pass an unmarked cop car. I pulled into the right lane and this guy coming up behind me (at about 90 mph) thought he could easily pass all these cars. As soon as he got up to the black car, he promptly stepped on his brakes and pulled in behind him. This went on (with other cars) for quite some time. It was all very entertaining… Once we got back home it was time to prepare for Ben’s next graduation party… and an open house for my side of the family. The pary was scheduled for two weeks later and that one was a lot of fun too! I got to see lots of my family who all really liked our house (who wouldn’t?) My uncle roasted one heck of a pig and brought some sweet corn as well. In between these two graduation parties, was our first year anniversary, but you’ll have to tune in tomorrow for that story. 8)

Yesterday was a pretty entertaining day… Why I’m posting today and not yesterday I’m not sure, anyway… The check engine light had come on in my car recently, so I decided to get it looked at. AutoZone helps you figure out why it’s on for free, so they seemed like a logical choice. After the guy hooked up his computer to my car, he said the code he got was from the gas cap not being on tight (or not sealing properly). This seemed familiar as I had read that in my owner’s manual… So I opened up my fuel door and sure enough, the cap fell out (guess that was the problem). Feeling a little embarrassed I thanked the guy and left (guess it’s better than taking it to a shop paying a small fee to find out it was just the gas cap…) Moral of the story, make sure your gas caps on tight…

As I was about to pull into the driveway, I noticed a kid on a bike coming down… The first thing I thought of was he was trying to sell something for raising money. As I got closer I noticed he wasn’t pedaling and I had to sit and wait for him to come out of the driveway. He stared at me the whole time, not peddeling, and then I noticed why. When putting in our mailbox, I had bought an eight foot post, two feet too long. We were using the extra two foot piece to hold down the tarp over our straw. Once the straw was used up I had just left the hunk of wood right outside our garage. Well, it wasn’t there anymore as this kid had it firmly in his hands… I pulled into the driveway, got out of the car, and the kid continued to stare at me with my piece of wood in hand. I went to get the mail (still staring…) and went into the house. I then asked Susan why a kid was taking our wood (I had thought maybe he asked her for it… apparently not). Not that I really cared about that piece of wood, but had I stole (not that I would) something and the owner saw me, I probably would have been trying to make off like a bat out of hell (I dunno, guess that’s just me…) What a bizarre little boy… If it happens again and I catch him in the act I’ll probably ask him why he’s doing it and possibly have a talk with his parents (again it’s the principle of the thing, not the fact he took our piece of wood…)

Later that night me and Mittag hit up the racquetball courts, man was that a workout. The last game was pretty intense, Matt was leading for awhile I caught up, then it kept going back and forth for awhile, until I finally managed to score the winning point. It was a lot of fun aside from taking a shot in the rear and one to the head (right in the ear), hopefully my wifey won’t be so tired today and we can go duke it out. Although, she wasn’t too tired to go get ice cream at the local ice cream shop ;)… yes we found one (and yes we go there quite often!) While enjoying our ice cream, we flipped on America’s Got Talent. This show has people doing some outrageous things, and you should defintely check it out. It’s got “The Hoff” (David Hasselhoff) as one of the judges, and I just wish I could go on there and sing one of his songs (do a search for “David Hasselhoff hooked on a feeling music video” and you’ll see what I mean)… Ooga chucka, ooga chucka!

Not to keep my faithful readers in the dark, I’ve got another (lengthy) blog entry, so hold on! Things are going pretty good. A couple weeks back now, Susan’s folks came down… and brought more of Susan’s stuff with them (I thought we had gotten all of it, but apparently there’s even more). This weekend they had planned to come down and see Abby in her dance recital and would stay with us for the night. Before heading down to Jackson, we stopped in Quizno’s and boy was that exciting. After placing our order, we found a table and each of us had gotten a cup for a drink. Susan decided to get some lemonade well that was a bad idea. The valve wouldn’t close all the way after filling her cup up, and the lemonade continued to spew out everywhere (yup she broke it 😉 ). The Quizno folks seemed to know what to do and got the situation under control. The rest of our meal went unhitched, until we got outside. Susan’s dad noticed a bird that was hanging upside down from the inside edge of the roof. We all thought that was kind of weird, why would a bird hang upside down? Upon further investigation we noticed the bird wasn’t looking so good, in fact he was pretty dead (we did hear some chirping and thought it was him). Never thought Quizno’s could be so much fun, huh? We made it to Jackson, had dinner, and were soon off to the recital. Abby did a really good job and the rest of the recital was okay. Afterwards we went to The Parlor. This is an ice cream shop where you get massive amounts of ice cream. Last year I had ordered a banana split (I’ve got a picture of that somewhere…) and managed to eat the whole thing, it was stacked pretty high. Everyone was disappointed I didn’t get the Dare to Be Great. It’s a 21 scoop ice cream sundae with toppings… if you finish it in an hour, it’s free and you get your name on the wall… someday mine will be there…

Memorial Day weekend was nice and sunny, and we got to enjoy it (well I don’t know about enjoying it, but we did get a lot of sun in). With a three day weekend we decided it would be a good opportunity to get our lawn started and the forecast looked good. I wanted to get a roto-tiller from the start, but getting some advice we were told raking should do the trick. Raking probably would have worked, except the top layer of dirt was so hard it was quite the chore breaking through. After spending a few hours getting a not very big section of the front lawn done, we decided we needed… More Power! Using my internet skills I soon found a few places that rented roto-tillers. The first one on the list, Home Depot was only about ten miles away. I called the guy to see if they had any roto-tillers to rent out, he said they had four to pick from. Not having a truck yet I asked which ones (if any) could fit in a car. Two of them could and he asked what I planned to do… which was till a decent sized yard. He said his mid-tine tiller would do the trick and I asked again if we could get this in the trunk of my car (he said it would…) We knew the road Home Depot was on and figured the bright orange store would be easy to find, and off we went. We turned the wrong way on the street and had to turn around. After traveling awhile I figured we better call the number (still in my phone) and get directions in case we were really off. When I finally got a hold of someone, the store was in sight… and I still asked for directions… We found the tool rental area and there was a different guy there then the one I had talked with on the phone. I told this guy I needed to rent a mid-tine tiller… he went and got it and I’m looking at it thinking no way that’s gonna fit in my car… it didn’t, we went out and looked and the guy said it wasn’t going to work. Not wanting to do more back-breaking manual labor, I asked him what we could do. He said they had a truck we could rent (for a relatively small fee… and didn’t have to pay for gas…), but it was out and wouldn’t be in for another hour or so. We told him we’ll be back in an hour to pick it up. After coming back we decided to go all out and get the rear-tine tiller (this thing’s a beast, see the Picture of the Day). The guy started it up and loaded onto the truck for us. He then claimed it was in gear (three speeds) so it wouldn’t move around. After pulling out onto the road and coming off a stop light, I saw the tiller go from near the cab flip up and roll to the tailgate (I thought we were gonna lose it for sure!) That was scary, but not as scary as unloading it. As I mentioned, this thing’s a beast. We pulled into our driveway which has a slight slant to it, put the ramps on the back of the truck (decent size about 8 foot), and I could just see this was unsafe. In fact I told Susan it didn’t look to safe to unload it like this and she said, “Yeah, you should put shoes on…” I wasn’t really worried about my feet, but being completely runned over by this thing. Needless to say I managed to get it off the truck and ended up almost in the middle of the road (without getting runned over, wOOt!). I wouldn’t say using that thing was fun (okay at first it was!), but it was definitely better than doing it by hand. I managed to do the whole front yard and back three times over in about ten hours (and got one heck of a sunburn…) At times that thing would actually drag you along when it caught the dirt just right, luckily I didn’t run into our house or accidentally till our neighbors yards! Our yard was so tuff it actually sheered one of the tines on the thing. Bringing it back wasn’t too exciting, I made sure it was in gear and made the guy at the rental place unload it (who did the same thing I did, but slammed it into the ground a lot harder… guess that’s how you’re suppose to do it).

We had picked up some seed and fertilizer for our lawn and realized we needed some hay (at least that’s what we thought we needed). What we really wanted was straw, but there’s a good story at Lowe’s with Captain Helpful (this was before getting the tiller). We went into Lowe’s (which by the way I use to be a fan of until now… Home Depot all the way) to pick up some flowers for Susan’s big planter. Passing by a very small bag of grass seed we thought, maybe we should get a couple bags of it to seed our lawn. Doing some calculations in our head we realized it would take more than a couple bags that size to plant a lawn at our house. Putting it back, we managed to spot a 50 lb bag of seed. This seemed to be more promising and we picked up some fertilizer to go with it (we already had a spreader which was nice and we managed to get a sprinkler from our neighbors across the street). Recalling what someone down the street had done, we knew we needed something to put over the seed once it was planted (some sort of mulch). We went looking for hay and when we couldn’t find any we asked someone to help us, aka Captain Helpful. We asked him if they had any hay, he said no… I then asked him if he knew where we could get some, again he said no and that he’d ask someone if they knew (I think he might have actually asked customers), and about 10 minutes later he came back telling us no one knows, maybe a farm, but you can’t get it yet… I then asked him what we should put on top of the grass, he said the fertilizer was all we needed (gee thanks…) After filling up with gas I asked the cashier if she knew where we could get hay, she pointed me towards Pat’s. Pat’s didn’t have any hay, but they did have straw. Which if you didn’t know is different then hay, hay is food and straw isn’t… there’s a more technical difference but that’s good enough for me (yes… I actually looked it up…) Having a full trunk of seed, fertilizer, a vacuum cleaner, and other stuff I told the guy lets put it in the back seat (hah!) As you can expect that made a pretty nice mess in my car, luckily a few minutes before church with the shop vac got it looking fresh and clean again. Planting the seed was interesting, our spreader doesn’t have a way of stopping the seed from coming out the bottom, so as I was filling it up, it was making a nice mound on the ground. Seeding is actually pretty fun (and easy) once you get started (and have something to cover the hole before filling up the spreader). We just got the front lawn seeded, mostly because it was going to be a hot week and we didn’t feel like watering both the front and back yards.

This past weekend we managed to get the backyard seeded (finally), fertilized, and strawed. The rain came this weekend, which was what I was waiting for… and our front yard actually started sprouting up this morning (sweet!) Saturday, we went to see Mr. Brooks in Midland, which was one of the better movies we’ve seen recently. This year is definitely the year of the sequels and we went to see Shrek the Third and Pirates. Shrek was alright, and Pirates was pretty good (a little slow-gowing at the beginning), but Mr. Brooks was better than both. It’s about a schizophrenic serial killer (it’s not all that gory and a pretty darn good movie).

As you might have seen, I’m running Linux now… Fedora Core 6 to be exact. It’s been time consuming trying to get everything working good, but I’m hoping I can really do away with Windoze. My job’s been really slow… I’ve got a good job lead that might work out, I’m really hoping… until then I’ll sit and be bored as can be at Dow, trying to find any excuse to get out of the office. Such as the 47 Building brick giveaway. This building was the original Dow headquarters and was really three buildings in one. I managed to take home a piece of history with a pretty fancy plate (on a not so fancy brick). I also saw the Blue Planet Run kickoff which is pretty neat. You should check out their website to learn more about it. Basically it’s a 15,000 mile, 95 day, around the world run for safe drinking water… the runners are from various Dow locations and will be running 24/7 (in shifts). It was pretty exciting to watch the first runner take off through the streets of New York. The runners will be passing through Midland on August 25th and there’s all kinds of stuff planned. I also managed to pickup some Loons tickets (minor league baseball feeder team for the L.A. Dodgers) for when my folks come to visit. Getting them was no easy task. I emailed the lady who was selling them and after a few emails back and forth we planned to meet at her building at 2:30 PM. Silly outlook decided not to send me a reminder so I forgot about it. She sent me an email and I emailed her back asking if 3:30 PM would be alright. No response, I thought maybe she was waiting for me still and took off. She had given me directions and it seemed pretty easy to get there. Well it wasn’t and I ended up in the wrong part of the corporate center. I stopped into security for directions and he said, “Whoa you’re way off!” He sent me on my way and I managed to find the door we were meeting at. She wasn’t there, but another lady was on the look out for me. She called me over, called the ticket lady for me and I finally (after about 10 minutes of waiting) had the tickets in my hand. Never thought something so simple could be so complicated.

A lot’s happened since the last time I posted on here, so this entry might be kind of long (better hit the bathroom and grab a cold drink before you get started 😉 ). April seemed to go by pretty quickly. Easter had finally come and man did I have a major chocolate craving (it wasn’t as easy to give up as I thought it was going to be…) We took a trip up to the Soo to see Susan’s family and had an excellent Easter dinner. Susan’s grandma is moving into an apartment and this gathering was one last hoorah at her place. We also got to go “shopping” for various things we “needed” for our new house (more on this later). We managed to find the raquetball courts and played a couple of games (could have been for free… the guy asked us if we were students of Lake Superior State Univ., even though we had Michigan Tech sweatshirts on, oh well three bucks a person isn’t gonna break the bank). The courts were nice except for you couldn’t run (or stop) on them, they were pretty slick (I think they put a few too many coats of varnish on).

The next couple weeks weren’t too exciting, we already had our taxes in (though it took forever to get our return) and we hadn’t really started packing yet (though we thought we should, and it’s the thought that counts, right?) I managed to sign us up for a Marine Safety Class which was a lot of fun (not really…) In case you’re wondering, if you were born after 1978 you need this spiffy blue certificate to ride a PWC (personal watercraft, aka Jet-ski). Well wouldn’t you know me and Susan were the oldest ones enrolled. Yes that’s right, we took an eight hour class with a bunch of kids, even the instructor was born after us… For all you drivers out there, beware… the kids we took the class with will be driving soon, and boy am I scared… The class could have been cut to about four or five hours, but we ended up taking a lot of breaks (why can’t kids just sit still?) Basically we worked through a small magazine-type book with a few chapters in it. At the end of each chapter we got to watch a really cheesy video. This was to prepare us for the test at the end of the day. In case your wondering, I passed the test with flying colors (first one to be done, and I got a hundred percent, booyah!) Sounds easy, well your probably right, considering the instructor actually reads off the test and the answers right before he hands it out. To pass you need at least 38 out of 50, and if you get between 35 and 37 you get a second chance to reanswer a couple you got wrong. How could anyone fail, well sure be it there have been students in the past that actually fail this thing… like I said… beware!

It was April 27, our closing date was upon us. We had taken a walk through prior to this to make sure everything got fixed that needed to be fixed (everything looked great). I had worked some pretty long hours this week so I needed only to work three hours today (3 days of 10.5 hours isn’t exactly fun, but Friday was nice!) I had also taken a couple hours off on the 23rd to take a test for a full time job with Dow. The test went pretty good, I was able to finish the two sections pretty quick (even had time to double-check my answers). I didn’t find out how well I did until later, but at the time I looked around and noticed I had finished long before anyone else (thought, wow either I did really well or really bad…) Back to the closing, we were scheduled to meet at 9:00 AM, we had our down payment (personal) check ready to go and were getting pretty excited. Awhile back (getting lost yet in this paragraph?) we had ordered a fridge, range, and a washer and dryer, pretty essential things you need for a house. We told them they could deliver it to us on the 27th as long as it was in the afternoon. So here we are resting before we finally sign the papers, we get a call around six in the morning. “We have your appliances and will be at your house to deliver between 8:30 AM and 10:00 AM.” Wow, what great timing, that’s almost the afternoon… After a few phone calls, we were able to get a hold of the guy that we ordered from that got a hold of the home owners (at that time) who were able to let the delivery guys in! Whew, didn’t know things could get so complicated. Back to the signing… as I mentioned before, we had a personal check for our down payment and handed it over… no where did anyone tell us we need a certified form of cash. The lawyer didn’t really appreciate this, so it was off to the races! I quickly made my way to the credit union to get a cashier’s check and the lawyer preferred this method of payment (heh!), and I made great time. We got to meet the builder’s/owner’s and they seemed like really nice people. Closing only took about an hour and then it was official, me and Susan were homeowners, scary, huh?

Following closing, it was finally time to move (dang, we should have packed our stuff before now!) We didn’t spend the very first night in our new house, but we had an air mattress filled and ready the next day. And so began the great haul of 2007. I managed to pack more stuff in my car then I thought was even possible. I lost track of how many car loads it took, but luckily the drive was only about 15 minutes. It took all week to get our stuff out of the apartment and it still wasn’t completely emptied (I couldn’t fit the really big stuff in my car, or could I?) Susan’s folks had planned to come down with a trailer full of stuff from the Soo (we inheirited a lot of stuff…) There was a lot of confustion about the trailer, but in the end it all worked out, and we managed to pack the rest of our stuff into the truck and trailer. We finally had our very cushy queen-sized bed back (yes we are spoiled… that air matress doesn’t come close to a good night’s sleep on a Sealy). We even got a lawnmower, even though we don’t have a lawn per se, but we did have some dandelion fields that needed to be cut down. After heading to the store to pick up a stud finder we hung a beautiful painting (that we got from Susan’s grandma) above our fireplace. We were busy unpacking and organzing, and unpacking some more, and some more organizing. It’ll take awhile but we might get all our boxes unpacked. Beth stopped by with Marcus to check out the new house and he kept us entertained for awhile.
What about Scout? I just realized I haven’t mentioned anything about Scout yet. During the transition phase she got to have the apartment to herself. I stopped by after work to pick up the mail and to feed and water her (she was always happy to see me, and not just because I brought her food…) On our trip back with the trailer, she got to ride in the cab of the truck, and wasn’t too fond of the drive. Once we got her to the new house she was pretty confused I think. She darted upstairs and around the house until I finally caught her and set her up in the bathroom on the first floor. She meowed quite a bit and after awhile quieted down. She grew pretty comfortably in that bathroom and wouldn’t come out all day (we think she was really scared of the baby…) Everytime we took her out she’d take off for that bathroom. She liked going up on the counter and just lie there (one time I actually found her lying in the sink… silly cat). It took a couple of days but Scout has gotten used to the house. She’s got a new bed that she just loves… she does like to sleep under our newly inheirited couch, but I guess that’s better then the bathroom.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’d have realized I didn’t mention the results of the test for the full time job with Dow. Apparently I passed the test and went to the next step in the process, which was a phone screening. I had scheduled the time to be at the same time I had a meeting with my supervisor (doh! I thought my meeting was at two, but it wasn’t…) I managed to get myself out of the meeting with my supervisor and was able to proceed with the phone screen (she actually had a conference call anyway, so it worked out pretty good…) I thought the screen went pretty good, but I found out the other day I didn’t qualify for the next step (an actual interview on-site). Oh well, it was worth a shot… Things are going pretty slow at my current job, the project I had been working on since I started (last October) was cancelled, so I have a few things to finish up by the end of May and I’ll be starting work on a new project (yes… more boring documents to write, I can hardly wait). Susan might be getting a promotion soon, it sounds like she’s going to get it we just don’t know when right now (hopefully everything works out, her boss’s boss has some quirky business policies).

Our house is looking better each day, though our lawn needs some serious work. I mowed it again this weekend and put some weed killer on the front lawn (it’s a very long and tedious process to spray that stuff). Hopefully most (or all) of the weeds die and we can plant some grass in the fall. Next year, we’ll have a beautiful lawn (I hope). We got our mailbox up and mostly straight. I learned how to use a post-hole digger, it’s a lot of fun, trust me (especially when the dirt is hard and has rocks in it). We also put some shades up this weekend, they look pretty slick. We’re still trying to figure out what we want for our big living room window, but that sounds like a girl thing to me…

We finally got the internet back (it was rough living without it). Charter’s contractors were to come last weekend (May 5th) and get us hooked up. They actually got there earlier then I expected and the contractor was pretty nice. I helped drill the hole in our house and get everything hooked up. The cable worked fine, but the internet was a different story. It was about 10:30 at night and I finally got my computer hooked up (wow pretty good for a CS major, two weeks without his PC), and wouldn’t you know the internet didn’t work. Alright, I’ll give Charter a call and see what happens. For those of you who don’t know, 1-888-GET-CHARTER, does not work on cell phones, but I did manage to find a bill and a number to call. After being on hold for awhile I finally got through to someone. After unplugging, shutting down, replugging, booting back up, the internet still didn’t work. Apparently our modem needed to be provisioned, but the provisioning software was down, but I could call back in four hours and should be able to get provisioned. I didn’t call back at 3:00 in the morning, but I did call before church. After waiting on hold again, and doing the exact stuff I did last nite, I was then informed again the provisioning software was down… (silly me for thinking they’d actually have it working…) This time I was told to call back in a day or two to get provisioned (sigh… gotta love Charter). I did notice different lights were flashing on the modem later that day and tried the CD they provided us (before it hadn’t worked, but now it seemed to be doing it’s thing). I gave Charter another call, and success… they finally got our modem provisioned. Then the guy tried selling me stuff which was kind of funny. Here’s a transcript of the call:

Guy from India: “What do you use the internet for?”
Me: “Surfing forums and posting messages.” (almost…)
Guy from India: “What webpages do you visit most often?”
Me: “I don’t know, my computer’s not on and I can’t remember.” (hah, I almost couldn’t hold back laughing… he had told me to turn off my computer, but hadn’t mentioned to turn it back on yet)
Guy from India: “Do you use the internet for music, video, or gaming?”
Me: “No.”
Guy form India: “John, how would you like to upgrade to a faster internet?”
Me: “No.”
Guy from India: “…” (didn’t catch what he said, the connection was going bad).
Me: “What?”
Guy from India: “…upgrade…” (again missed what he said)
Me: “Okay?”
Guy from India: “Okay thank you very much, John.”
Me: “Wait! What? I don’t want an upgrade.”
Guy from India: “No, John we wouldn’t upgrade you without your permission.”
Me: “Okay… bye!”
Guy from India: “Have a…” (click)

So yeah, calling Charter’s a blast, especially when your tech support becomes a sleezy salesman.

We also got our bikes out yesterday and went for a “tour” of the neighborhood… becoming very jealous of the other lawns in our subdivision (someday…). We did get some good ideas about what to do for landscaping and I can see the gears in Susan’s mind are already turning… We also managed to find a really good ice cream place only a short distance away (you can get beer there too, beer and ice cream must go good together…) We also got to see Spiderman 3 the other weekend, man was that awesome, definetly recommend it! We’ll probably be hitting up Shrek the Third this weekend and I’m hoping it’s as good as the others!
And with that you are now up to speed as to what is happening in the lives of Susan and John (go ahead and pat yourself on the back for getting through this, you deserve it 😉 ).

Where to begin… well let’s see I’ll start off with this past weekend. It was definitely a busy one. On Saturday we went to see the Adam Sandler movie, “Reign Over Me”. The movie was good, but the movie experience was crap (literally). Before getting to our seats, I noticed near the back a mother and her baby, and was suprised Susan didn’t say anything (she hadn’t noticed the baby yet). After the trailers came on (really loud), the baby started crying… He pretty much made a scene for the whole movie and his mother didn’t help much by “baby-talking” back to him. Susan was going to write a letter (I don’t think she has done it yet…) about letting a baby into a movie (especially one with a non-G rating…) The baby also had to relieve himself (like three times at least), which didn’t help things. After the movie we went over to the bowling alley. We played three games and I managed to break a hundred on the last game (had 84 pins in the tenth frame… managed to pick up a spare and knock seven down on the next roll). After bowling, we found out the alley is ghetto enough to the point they don’t take credit/debit cards (I thought Visa was everywhere I wanted to be…) After getting some cash from the ATM machine and paying for our games we headed over to the air hockey table. A few rounds later I spotted a couple of pinball machines in the corner. I hadn’t played pinball in a very long time and managed to get a free game on the Lord of the Rings machine and on the Simpson’s machine (both were pretty fun). Susan also managed to score a free round with the Simpson’s. Sunday we went down to the Midland Community Center. This place is huge-mungus… we went there to play a little raquetball. I thought this place would be picky about their courts so we carried our tennis shoes in. After reserving the court (and getting some directions to where the court was, yeah it’s that big…), we managed to find the courts in the basement… which were forgotten about I think. They aren’t the nicest courts to play on, but atleast there wasn’t gaping holes in the floor (they really need a new paint job, and refinish the floors.) They also had midget doors, you actually had to duck down to get in the court, which is kind of weird. Once in the court I noticed there were three observations windows above on the back wall. I could see there was no glass in them and thought to myself, hmmm…that’s kind of dumb, the ball could easily go through there. Sure enough five minutes later the ball had gone through one of the windows. At the end of the day I had to run upstairs three or four times to fetch our ball. Susan actually managed to hit the ball through our window through the window on the other side and our ball landed in another court where people were playing. That must have been something to see, a ball just flying in from no where (hah!) Work has been pretty slow this week… just got a rejection later from the last place I interviewed at… Wednesday we went back to the community center and managed to get on our court (Court #2)… This time there was something different about the walls… there were a couple of blood spots, must have been an intense (and gruesome) round of racquetball. One of the splotches was about 7.5 feet off the ground (how the heck do you get blood up there??) After tiring ourselves out we stopped by the 7/11 where we got a couple of slurpee’s. Susan managed to spill hers all over the counter which the cashier was nice enough to clean up. Though she didn’t think we were on the same bill… we came in together, we got slurpee’s together, we got to the check out together, but apparently we needed seperate bills… (almost walked off without paying for one, heh!)

Last week was a week of recovery. It all started when we had to stay up to watch the time change. Well I guess we didn’t really “have” to see the time change, but we did rent a few movies and ended up getting all are clocks set at two in the morning. The day after I wasn’t a hundred percent, but I thought that was because I was sleep-deprived (we had to get up early for church…10:30 =P). Monday was not a good day, I was running a temperature just over 101 degrees and all I wanted to do was sleep. But, there was an annoying thing called work I had to go to (it was a pretty rough day). Once I got home, I hit the bed and apparently was really out of it the rest of the day. I actually thought I was dreaming and in “my dream” I had driven to Taco Bell. I realized it wasn’t a dream at all when I saw the slip in my pocket the next day. Ibuprofen seemed to counter the fever, but I was right around 101 when I didn’t take it (for three days…) Wednesday was about all I could take and finally went to see a doctor. I was pretty surprised when the doctor entered and he didn’t wash his hands. He introduced himself, we shook hands (and he got my cold germs on his), and after examining me he gave me some instructions. I should take 4×200 mg Ibuprofen plus 3xAdvil Advanced Relief twice a day (if that sounds like a lot of drugs in one day, you’re probably right…) He also said I’ll be getting worse the next couple of days, and the end of the weekend I should be starting to feel better. Well, I did up the amount of Ibuprofen to two pills at a time, instead of one, but I didn’t really feel like taking over a dozen pills in one day (and I did start feeling better on Thursday =) ) The doctor also failed to wash his hands after we were done (wonder how many other people are going to get sick now…) Probably won’t be seeing this guy again… Susan took care of me, and in turn she ended up catching the cold. So this last weekend I ended up taking care of my wifey (and she says I’m cranky when I’m sick…) We didn’t do a whole lot this weekend and Sunday was pretty much watching a lame-o “scary” movie marathon (though entertaining…) I actually did some cleaning yesterday, and plan to get my side of the computer room looking good soon. We finally got some groceries last night, we didn’t have a lot of food in the fridge (or cupboards for that matter) last week.

As for the job hunt, I got a call back from a hiring company for Delphi, apparently the amount of money they offered to Delphi was too much (but I’m worth it 😉 ). I also got a callback from Daimler-Chrysler, but I haven’t gotten back to them yet. I’m not really interested in working in the automobile industry… As for my current job, it has actually been kind of interesting these past couple weeks. I’ve been down in the simulation lab running, on actually CAN machines (70’s computerish clunky things), a program for our dryer/scrubber system. It’s been pretty cool, I think I’ve become an expert on loading a program now (only had to do it about 40 or 50 times…) Maybe I’ll become a programmer in the future, but until then, I’m stuck writing boring word documents all day long…