Got up at 7 AM yesteday. Amy to school by 7:30 AM. Time for a breakfast at Denny’s then we got the moving van at 9 AM. Started loading it up immediately. I thought work was closed yesterday. Turns out that was a miscommunication. I was supposed to be there. Ooops. Too late though, we were knee deep in moving furniture. Amy came home from school at 2:30 PM and immediately fell asleep. (Sick it seems.) Truck loading continued until around 8:30 PM. Back home and unleading by about 9 PM. (The dog really needed a walk when we first got home… it had been 14 hours.)

Then the unloading. All of us were tired and cranky. Unloading was done by 2 AM. We had moved everything to the old house that was too big to fit in a car. The rest would come slowly in carloads. Brandy noticed though that the truck wouldn’t start any more. We crashed by 3 AM.

6 AM the alarm rings. 7:20 AM out the door. 7:45 Amy in School. I make a quick trip to work, then head to a doctors appointment. Last word I had from Brandy is that she had called U-Haul and they would have someone call her about the truck and wouldn’t charge us for being late as long as it was because the truck was broken.

So I headed to the Doctor. A urologist. For follow up on those kidney stones. In addition to the usual “fill this cup please” I had some fun “bend over” and “let me squeeze that” type examinations that involved rubber gloves. (I’m being sarcastic when I say fun.) In the end, they just scheduled me for a bunch more tests. Kidney stones are unusual in people my age, even with a family history, and the recurring UTIs I get as well in between stones (which may or may not be related) make it even more unusual. Apperantly my “frequency” is also abnormally high for a person my age, especially at night. So, I have a few tests prescribed over the rest of January, with a follow up in early February. Oh joy. One of the tests is just X-Rays. If more kidney stones are actually large enough to be visible on the X-Ray (as I believe 2 of the 3 I passed over the last month were)… oh, did I mention the 3rd one? That was last week. It was tiny, but shaped like a needle. Sorry for not posting pictures. Anyway, if there are any big enough to see, he may recomend the ultrasonic stone busting lipotripsy thing rather than just letting them pass. We shall see. My dad had that a few years back. It did not sound pleasant. Although perhaps more pleasant than the stones themselves.

Sigh. We’ll see if after this round of tests they actually have anything useful to say. Last time I had a bunch of tests (around 2001) they didn’t come back with any useful info. Just “Yup, you have kidney stones. Drink lots of water and cranberry juice and avoid carbonation and foods high in calcium, and if it starts to hurt, take these pain pills.” Thanks.

Anyway, about half way through the Doctors appointment, I realized that I did not have my phone. But Brandy was supposed to update me on what was happening with the truck. Including perhaps needing a ride back from the UHaul place if she did end up returning the truck. So when I got out of the Doctor, I headed straight back to work… um… OK… um…. I stopped at a drive through coffee place because I was about to keel over from exaustion.

When I got to work I found my phone and started checking my voice mail. There were EIGHT missed called from Brandy. I started listening. Lets just say they started out happy, but got less and less so as they progressed. I ended up rushing to meet Brandy and eventually all was OK, in the mean time though, Brandy had had a very bad day. I’ll leave it to Brandy to decide if she is going to tell any more of that story. We’ll see if she posts anything about it on her blog. :-) I feel really bad for not having had my phone. Most of what happened to Brandy could have been avoided. Oops. :-( Between moving the furniture and this morning, Brandy may be fairly out of commission for days. :-( I’m very sore myself from the moving and such, I can’t imagine how Brandy is feeling. :-( We probably should have coughed up the extra cash to pay movers instead of doing it ourselves. But we are trying to conserve where we can. Sigh!

OK. Doctor’s appointment over. Coffee helping me stay sort of awake. I’m now back at work. Breaktime over. Time to do some work for some of our best clients. I have several things that need to get done today. Time to do them.

This is the view from our back yard.

It is the 17th tee I believe.

There are people coming and going teeing off every few minutes all day long.

The distance from the edge of our property to the teeing off area is probably about 20 feet I would guess. Haven’t measured, but it is close regardless.

I thought Chad would appreciate it.

It won’t stay there long though. Word is that the golf course has been sold to developers and a new housing development will be there instead within the next 2 to 3 years. Maybe sooner. That sucks a little, but on the other hand we probably got the house for a bit less because of it. So we’re OK with that.

Moving is moving right along. Right now we are going back and forth to the old house several times a day, loading up both cars with boxes every time we do. On Monday we have a UHaul to do the furniture. (We looked at having pros move the furniture, but it would cost about 5 times as much as the UHaul so decided to do it ourselves again.) The idea will be to move everything too big to fit in a car on Monday. The rest we’ll keep getting a car load at a time until everything is there though.

We’ve been staying at the new place though. No beds yet, so it isn’t the most comfortable in the world, but it is all part of the “this is now home” thing. Brandy has painted the kitchen and is redoing the paper stuff in the cabinets and other things like that. We’ve been washing and cleaning all over. I’ve been trying to figure out some of the pool gadgets, but we won’t REALLY get into that until after we’ve had it professionally cleaned at least once. (We got a check at closing for that since without the screen and with the pool left unmaintained for months, it is a mess… although they did remove the plants and tadpoles that were living there prior to closing.)

Oh, and we of course got the DirecTV and projector and DVD player and everything all set up. Had to have all that right away.

DSL is not available at the new location (too far from the CO for reasonable service) so we are going the Cable route again. Should have an install date by Wednesday. Hopefully it will be installed shortly after that. I’m hoping for this week, but it may well take a couple weeks. The data line for the house should be active Tuesday though, so we’ll have at least dialup there.

Oh, and I started to set up the data line, and the first phone number it suggested for us when translated to words spelled 321-ORGY-DOLL. But there was a computer glitch and we had to start over. (The stupid online BellSouth thing didn’t like Safari and kept giving me an error on the final form telling me that I had to be over 18 to register even though my year of birth was properly 1971.) The second time we got 321-SALT-MAP. Too bad, although I guess Salt Maps are OK too. I like salt and I like maps. So all is good. NOTE: This is going to be a data only line, for the Tivo and the like, so if you call it, don’t expect anyone to answer.

Well, it is time to take another load to the new house, so I have to sign off for today.

We don’t have those pictures we promised yet, but will by later this week. Promise.

Last night I was going through my paper “in box” to make sure all the financial transactions I had receipts for were entered into Quicken and all outstanding bills were paid and such, just to make sure that everything was in order, and we knew exactly what the money situation is for closing, and more specifically for after closing, when we start having to spend money on immediate needs to get the place ready to move in. (For instance we need a washer and dryer and a mattress and such.) I was doing all that until around 08:00 UTC.

Then I decided that this might be a really good time to get the “Sam’s Net Worth” graph going again. I’d been slowly pulling the data from Quicken to do this over the last month or so, each time I did bills I had been printing a report with one quarter’s worth of net worth data at weekly intervals and putting that data into Excel where I was graphing it in my own peculiar way. (Not satisfied with the graphs Quicken produces out of the box.) At the rate I was going, I was adding a quarter’s worth of data every couple weeks. It would be a few months before the graph was up to the present and ready to post. So I decided to accellerate that and enter more data.

Well… Next thing I knew it was 12:00 UTC. I’d extended the graph so it now covers July 1994 to December 1998 though. I thought about continuing straight through until it was up to the present, but it would take a few more hours, and I was exausted, and frankly it was already the time I should be waking up. So the Sam’s New Worth Graph’s return will have to wait a bit longer. (It will be soon though, I’m going to be carefully monitoring things as we adapt to this move and the new conditions… as usual of course the web version will have the vertical axis labels removed, so folks can see trends, but not actual numbers.)

Anyway, finally headed to sleep. Then Amy woke up and started popping her head in every ten minutes. She wanted all kinds of things! She was up and ready to go. She’d set her alarm for some ungodly early time for some unknown reason, and had actually woken up. (She often sleeps through it.)

Anyway, I finally got to sleep. It is now 3 hours later. I am up again. Just woke Brandy up to go get Amy up (who of course fell back asleep). I am about to go hit the shower and get dressed and ready.

90 minutes from now we meet our agent for a final walk through of the property. There are a couple things they were still supposed to be working on which should be fixed by now, even at this late date. (The money for the screen is still going into escrow, some of which will be released to the contractor immediately after closing for them to schedule the work, the balance paid when the work is done… probably not for a couple months yet given the continued backlog for that kind of work.)

3 hours from now we go to the actual closing.

When that is done, we will have a house.

Then we have to start getting everything in order. We have planned out how we will do a lot of things. Others we decided to wait until we could actually be in there to even plan. There are a bunch of things we will need to buy right up front. We have worked out a preliminary budget we will have to live within for those sorts of things. (As well as a tentative budget for the amount we will need to live on PERIOD once we are in the new environs.)

Stress Stress Stress!

But this should be good.

If all goes well, which I presume it will, we’ll take some pictures of the new place and post here late tonight. And I suppose we’ll announce the new address then too.

Oh well. Gulp. I need to get ready. Already not really enough time to get breakfast or lunch or anything before we meet the agent. Maybe coffee.

Oh, have I mentioned I am sick as a dog right now too? Yucky cold, nasty cough, and lung reading thing under 400. Bleh! I probably should have tried to get more than 3 hours of sleep.

Oh well!

Time for another Darkflash. Things that I sent out as emails when I didn’t have a blog for a few months that I would have normally posted. They are almost done. Really. Anyway, this one was originally sent to friends and family 8 Sep 2004 06:27:39 UTC.

So, we spent some time in New Orleans. Tried to go on one of those walking tour things, but the one we had the pamphlet for turned out to be canceled. So we just walked around by ourselves for a bit. Bourbon Street was a bit overwhelming for an already tired 8 year old though, so we didn’t stay long in that area and caught a kids movie instead. There was also a lot of swimming in the hotel pool.

Word from a few people we have talked to back in Melbourne is that the house is basically OK. Apparently a palm tree out front fell over, but otherwise things look OK. And at least some of the neighbors have power, so there is a good chance we will have power too. So it is looking good. We won’t know for sure until we get home though. And we picked up a small generator at a Home Depot in New Orleans just in case we were still out… and for the next time the power goes off. :-)

We are on the way back now. In Tallahassee for the night. That’s almost exactly half way home from New Orleans. We’ll go the rest of the way home tomorrow.

Work reports that the office is undamaged, but still without power. They were trying to set up today with generators. I’ll be back at work Thursday. The trip I was on that had to be called short will probably be rescheduled for next week.

So looks like things should be normalizing. Probably one more update once we get home.

Later all!

Happy Trees and Boxes Day from the Minter/Donaghy/Roney’s!