One year ago today I sent this email to some of my friends and family. Because it was at a sensitive time and the new job was not yet final, I did not post it. One year later, I feel free to relate this story publically. Originally emailed 2005 Feb 20 17:35:18 UTC.

This is another non-web SPF. Please consider confidential until I give information more widely.

This morning the guy from Accent in Florida called. Got my voice mail at first. Wanted to finalize what we needed to to move forward. Brandy was on the bed still recovering from her back problem. Zuri was flying around the room. I considered going to another room where it would be more quiet, but I ended up staying there and I called back half an hour later. Got his voice mail. A few seconds later, he called back. Just as the phone was ringing, I saw some icing from Brandy’s birthday cake on the bed. So I scooped it up on one finger. Then I answered the Phone and said “Hello Pete” just as I licked the chocolate icing off my finger.

Then I got a sinking feeling. Brandy’s cake had not had chocolate icing. I quickly said, “Can you hold on a second Pete” and put him on hold. Brandy asked “What’s wrong????”. I said “That wasn’t chocolate!!!”. Yes, indeed, I’d scooped up a finger full of Zuri’s poop and shoved it in my mouth. Yum!

I spent a minute or so spitting out as much as I could and swigging some drinks to get the horrible taste out of my mouth. Then I got back to Pete… while both Brandy and I were still working to stifle our laughter. “That’s not chocolate!”

Anyway, long and short of it, I think we now have an agreement on how they will do relocation expenses. That’s on top of the verbal agreement on salary and other things we came to last week.

So, next steps are us finalizing the verbal agreements in writing. I’m writing up a summary of all our agreements this afternoon, which hopefully they will take and put into the formal offer and FedEx to me next week.

This is getting close to being a done deal. After everything is formally signed and legal and official, we’ll start the process of putting this house on the market and finding one down there. I’m looking at a potential start date of March 15th if the deal gets signed next week, but the first couple months I’d split my time down there and up here.

I’m hoping everything will be official by the end of next week.

Crossing my fingers!

I’ll of course send out a full announcement to the world, post on my blog, and all that sort of thing once things are fully official and legal.

Yesterday while Amy was with me at work after school, she told the story to a couple of people at work, so I figure the cat is out of the bag. Yes Pete, I accidentally ate bird poop while on the phone with you negotiating for the position down here. Oops. :-)

(Note: The date scale on the chart is wrong. Damn bugs in Quicken. It actually shows 17 Feb 2000 to 16 Feb 2005 for AAPL.)

Yup, my investing skills rock!! I am awesome!

To my credit though, I had no intention of selling. It wasn’t because I didn’t think Apple would come back. I was sure it would actually. My plan had actually been to never sell any stock I ever bought, just keep it for decades and decades and see what happened. Well, at least to never sell it because of how it was doing, but rather only if I needed the cash for something. I *wanted* to keep it. But in early 2004 what with being unemployed and all at the time, I did indeed need a jolt of cash. So while I kept some mutual funds, I sold all but one share each of each of the stocks I had at the time. I kept those single shares just for sentiments sake, and also just to make me keep watching “what if” I had kept the rest.

*EVERYTHING* I sold at that point (with the exception of Tivo) has gone up. Some quite nicely. But Apple… OUCH! My timing was just about perfect on that one. I bought it mere weeks before it crashed through the floor. Then I sold it mere weeks before it skyrocketed through the ceiling. Go me!!

Oh well! I’m sure I’ll get to the point where I am all set to be buying again, load up on some Apple again, just in time for it to crash again. :-) [To be fair to myself, I’ve had some good timing too, I did very nicely on GRMN, more than doubling my money in a relatively short time… although I would have made even more keeping it longer.] But on Apple… once more, OUCH!

But hey, on the flip side, last night coming home on the plane they upgraded me to first class for no apperant reason, so that was cool.

Oh yeah, and while I won’t post anything here before she posts herself, I hear the Jackal will have some news before that much longer. :-)

It has been awhile, so time for another new graph! Only a couple more new ones in the works before I start updating the old ones again.

Abulsme.com Steps Chart

As I was packing or unpacking or doing something to boxes in October 2004, I found a pedometer I’d boght years before.  I started noting the results daily.  A few days later I lost it.  I found it again at some point in December and started up again.  But I kept reseting the pedometer by mistake.  So for Christmas Brandy got me a new one with a cover.  This was much better, and seemed to give more accurate results.  I wore it all the time.  But it kept falling off my belt and I had to tape shut the cover.  Eventually I lost it.  So Brandy’s mother gave me a new one. In any case, the graph of how many steps I take per day continues…

So, given that, perhaps I’ll go walk some more…

Just an update on Brandy’s mom for those who are interested. She is being transfered to a bigger hospital this morning and is scheduled for heart surgery this afternoon. The bypass she had 10 years ago has degraded. They are putting in a shunt or stint or some similar device to reopen the problem area. The surgery is not as involved as an actual bypass, but any surgery involving the heart and the areas around it is still very serious. If all goes well, she should be out of the hospital and ready to travel home to PA within a week, maybe two. The Doctors say there is about a 1% chance though that things will get unexpectedly more complicated though. We’re obviously hoping for the 99%.

OK. During the day yesterday all my stuff finished transferring to Virginia, and last night Chris got abulsme.com back up and running on his servers. So the site is back up although I’ll still have to work out some details of some things.

THANK YOU CHRIS!!!

The old server still can’t boot itself, although I think I can remedy that as soon as I find some system disks. I won’t be able to boot off the clone drive I made though because of the firewire issue. I tried cracking it open and seeing if I could just pop the drive into the internal slot, but the drive types don’t match. Oh well.

I’ll have to work on what to do as a long term solution, but this will do short term.

I miss having the server right in my office though. There are not too many practical reasons why that is needed, but I just LIKE it. :-)