Well, didn’t make it home. The flight was delayed several more times as weather in the Newark area (and all over the mid-Atlantic) caused delays. Newark only had one runway open. So even after the plane arrived, there was delay after delay. It was about 30 minutes late to board. Maybe a bit more. Dunno. Forgot to count. Then a lot longer delay sitting on the plane. Ended up leaving just before 9 PM rather than just before 7 PM. Which means we missed our connection in Atlanta, which was the last flight to Melbourne for the night.

Which means I am at the Airport Marriot for the night. There was an 8 something in the morning flight, but we’d have to get up way too early for that, so we are booked on a 10 something flight. So I’ll get about 6 hours of sleep. Then head home.

Time for ZZZzzz…

While I was in the airport in Melbourne, waiting for my flight (which never left, but I’ll get to that later), I passed the milestone of 12052.9926 days since I was born. Woot Woot! Go me. It happened 15 Sep 2004 at 20:47:29 UTC. I was born at 16 Sep 1971 20:58:00 UTC. 12052.9926 days is of course 33 times 365.242199 days which is the approximate length of a year in days. Wow, that is a long time.

At the time it happened, I had no idea. I had meant to calculate the exact time it would happen in advance, but I didn’t get to it. Right as it happened (or a little after) they were telling us that our flight from Melbourne to Atlanta, after being delayed several times, had been cancelled completely due to mechanical problems with the plane. (Namely lack of pressure in a fire supression system for one of the engines… something they were not equipped to fix in Melbourne.) The next flight out of Melbourne would be too late for us to make connections in Atlanta for the New York area. So we scrambled for options for a bit, consulted with our management on what we should do, then we found a flight from Orlando to Laguardia that we might be able to make. Someone from work picked us up and drove us to Orlando… um… at a bit above the speed limit… we got to the gate about 6 minutes before boarding begain.

Anyway, in the hotel in Manhattan now. Right off Times Square. Need to be up in about 7 hours in order to get ready for the meetings we are here for. It is good that we made it. This is the second half of a series of meetings we cut short to run back home for Hurricane Frances. They would not have been happy again if we needed to reschedule again!

So, enough of that. 33 is fun so far. I’ll go to sleep now.

With this post I’ll start a series of posts putting up things I sent as email while my blog was down that I probably would have blogged if my blog was up at the time. I’ll do these occationally until I catch up with the present. No promises on a schedule.

This first one was sent to friends and family 11 Jul 2004 15:50 UTC:

Um, OK, lets see…

Here is a short recap…

After the last time I returned to PA on a Friday night (June 12), the idea was to start packing and such right away, have one week to do all the packing, pick up the truck on the next Saturday (June 19), leave PA on Monday morning (June 21), be back in FL Tuesday night (June 22), return the truck Wednesday night (June 23), and be back at work on Thursday (June 24).

That didn’t happen.

Around Tuesday June 15th my computer broke. I took it to the Apple store in Orlando, but they said they could not have it fixed before I left town. So I decided to take it to an Apple store in PA.

But I needed to do bills and get some other things done on my computer before taking it in. (By doing some voodoo I could sometimes get it to work.) So Saturday the 13th I did all that kind of stuff. Plus there was a fair in town that Brandy really wanted to go to. So we ended up doing that. No packing.

Then Sunday the 11th we took it to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA. But the guy there (unlike the guy at the Orlando Apple Store) was a complete asshole to us. So we ended up just leaving. Then when I left there the machine would no longer turn on at all.

Monday the 14th we had to deal with getting Brandy’s cars fixed up so they could travel. They needed things like tires and brake work and some work on some other things. So we ran around on that stuff.

Tuesday the 15th I took my computer to the Apple Store in Edison, NJ. They said they should be able to have it fixed by that Saturday. Woo.

Wednesday I don’t remember what I did, but I wasn’t productive.

Thursday I finally started packing. Did that Friday too. I was working mostly in the basement, packing up the hundreds of boxes of stuff I just move from place to place but never actually open. Not just the email archive, but also my homework assignments from 3rd grade and stuff like that.

I did prune the 1980’s era collection of full bottles and cans of cocacola down to about 25% of its original size. And I threw away a bunch of stuff. But no papers. Papers will never be thrown away. I did throw away some jars full of laundry lint, used kleenex and hair though. (Not all of them though of course.)

Meanwhile all that week Brandy had been working on packing stuff upstairs that we actually use, and stuff from her own house. (Although from Thursday on it was all my place.) She was much more productive than I was.

Saturday we were supposed to pick up the 24′ U-Haul. But they did not have one. Starting Friday night they kept saying things like “don’t call us, we’ll call you when we have a truck”. Sunday morning Brandy yelled at them and they got us a truck.

So around noon Sunday (this is the 20th now) we went to U-Haul. They said they didn’t have a 24′, but they would give us a 26′ they had at no extra charge. So we got all that set up, signed the papers, and were walking out to the truck. But it was blocked in, so Brandy went back in to tell them.

Several minutes later I go in. Brandy has discovered that while we wanted a 24′ and were being given a 26′ Diesel because there were not any, the people after us in line wanted a 26′ Diesel because they were towing a car, but were being given a 24′ non-Diesel because they had no 26′ truck. Uh… something wrong there. So Brandy had offered to switch with them. The U-Haul guy was redoing the paperwork. He got the other people all set, then was working on me.

But now the $2200 charge would not go through on my credit card. Because he had to cancel the first truck, then charge the new truck. And the cancels do not take place immediately. And I had made sure I had funds to pay for ONE truck, but not two. He kept trying and failing and called the number to talk directly to them, but no luck. He told me I had to call my bank. (And by the way, this was the ONLY one of my cards that I could have done this on at the time, none of the rest could have handled the charge… normally some of them should have been able to, but none could have at the time…) Anyway, I after several phone calls and lots of time on hold, I got all the U-Haul charges cleared off and verified my balance to make sure I had enough. So I had him tried again.

Failed.

I call the bank back. Turns out because the guy had tried several times to run the charge, the automatic security features had kicked in, and fraud protection was in effect. The end result… I could now use my card any place in the world EXCEPT U-HAUL!!!! Which was the one place I needed it!!!! They said the security office that handled such things was closed for the weekend, and I’d have to call Monday to get it cleared, and there was nothing they could do to help me in the mean time.

Bastards.

Turns out though that there would be no problem with a check, and U-Haul would accept a personal check. So we went back home, and luckily Brandy knew where my checkbook was (I thought it had probably been packed already, but it hadn’t been.) And back we went, wrote a check, and finally we had our truck… about 4 hours after we had the FIRST truck and almost left.

Meanwhile, we were a day and a half behind schedule already. But we finally started loading.

We ended up getting help just from my friend Jon (his wife and some came for awhile too). And there was still lots of packing to do, and we had to disassemble some things (including removing doors from the refrigerator) to get things out and too the truck. Jon came three or four times over the days we were working. We ended up taking about four days to fully load the truck.

And then it was so full that there would clearly not be enough space for all the stuff Brandy wanted to bring from her house.

Oh, and I forgot the shellac. But this email is long enough for now. I’ll continue sometime later and talk about the shellac and then the days at Brandy’s house, then the drive down… etc. Fun stuff.

I’ll have to save these to blog once I get my site back up too.

OK, people have been bugging me and bugging me, and I have been pretty bothered myself by being blogless over the last few months. The problem has been lack of broadband. We tried to get cable installed and failed. Then we tried to get DSL installed and failed. Then it looked like we might move again before too long. Now it looks like it might be a few months yet. So we may try cable again. In the mean time, I figured I’d just unpack the server machine and plug it in again to make sure it was still working and stuff.

So of course, first thing it did was ping dyndns to tell it where it was, and boom, abulsme.com was live again. Of course, it is on a 56K dialup which most likely will not be up 24/7, so it may flip back to the site down message at random times. Not to mention it will be ungodly slow. But it is there. Here. Sort of. I guess I’ll keep it this way for awhile just to see what happens.

Then maybe we’ll go ahead and get cable, or DSL, or something.

If it manages to be up semi-reliably although slow I may start posting again.

Abulsme is currently in the process of relocating from Pennsylvania to Florida. The server that normally hosts abulsme.com is either on a moving truck, or has not yet been brought back online in Florida. Expect this site to be back online by early to mid July. In the meantime, you can still email me.