A Trapdoor In The Sun

As most of you know, we spent the week of August 7th-14th in Avon, on North Carolina's beautiful Outer Banks. It was Chris and myself's first trip to OBX and Kate's fourth. The weather was wonderful the whole week except for one rainy Tuesday. We rented a cozy yet roomy beachhouse about 100 yards away from the dunes. We literally could wake up in the morning, throw our swimsuits on, and walk down to the water. The beaches were not near as crowded as the ones I remember frequenting while growing up on Florida's gulf coast. Most people would leave their beach chairs and unbrellas semi-permanantly parked in the sand, with no real concern of them disappearing. We left on Saturday the 6th on the 12 hour drive to Avon. Our poor Civic was loaded down like a camel trekking across the Sahara. With our three bikes were strapped onto the trunk, the bike rack was so weighed down that it left a permenant pressure dent in the bumper. The drive seemed to take forever, though hills and...

It's Saturday night here, and a balmy 88 degrees. Well, balmy is relative of course. If I were still living in Bakersfield, I would suppose that this temperature would be like mannah from heaven. Still, for Ohio, it's hot. We put up the tent last night, as Chris and the neighbor's six year old, Arthur, were going to camp out over night. I remember camping out a few times in our back yard when I was a kid. I felt safe being so close to home, yet still got that nice outdoor sleeping experience, minus the mud, bugs, raccoons, snoring campers the next site over, ect. Unfortunately, the tent was too hot for the boys to sleep and they ended up coming inside and sleeping in Chris' room instead. I had a real time trying to get Arthur to go to sleep, as he was wide awake and wired till the wee hours of the morning. Chris, however, values his downtime and punched the clock as soon as his head hit the pillow. Today, we went to the Pool and Highland Lakes again. We're trying to...

It's been a little while since I have posted anything. Actually, I had several drafts that I was going to post but I ended up deleting them. Summer is here and so is Christopher. This is his first year visiting us in a real house. He has been having a blast so far and can't wait to go to N.C. this year. His new bestest friend is a 6 year old living next door. They spend the evenings having light saber duels in the back yard and mud fights in the garden. We also bought a family pool pass for the season and have been enjoying that on weekends. The Highland Park pool can be a little crowded, but it has plenty to do for everyone. The best thing is, it's within easy biking distance from the house so all we have to do is grab a bag of pool goodies and ride down there. Of course, this doesn't work out too well when the weather is sketchy, as it was last weekend. During the week, Chris has been attending various camps at the Westerville Community Center. One week he'll ...

Act One...The Big Bang They say that the bad things in life generally come in threes. I'm not entirely sure who they is specifically, but thats for a different post. Saturday, May 21. We had just left The Great Indoors, after comparing prices on laundry equipment for our new house. I had picked up tickets for Star Wars Episode III and we were heading over to the local megaplex to catch Lucas' final installment, and had planned to grab a quick dinner at Grinder's, a local sub chain that specializes in oven-toasted goodness. We sat at the light at Sancus and Worthington Woods Blvd for what seemed like forever. Part of the road we were turning onto was dug up and was populated with the familiar orange cones of infinite construction. I decidedly turned wide, so I could turn onto Worthington Woods at a better angle. Then I heard the screaching of tires. Then the loud bang.. Our Honda jolted to the side and the impact threw us around the compartment. It took me a millisecond to ...

It's been a little while since I logged into my Blogger Dashboard. I don't think it's a question of having time, but of having the patience to sit down and write. We're less than a few weeks away from closing on the house. I'm a little anxious to get in at this point. The home inspection went okay... only a few minor problems were discovered. For some reason, the current owner was venting the dryer into the attic crawlspace. Talk about your fire hazards! We added an addendum to the contract requesting that this and a few other minor things be remedied. We also made our first major purchase for the house last weekend. We bought a big bottom-freezer refrigerator to replace the aging one the seller was leaving there. We had originally priced the unit at Lowes for roughy $1000 on sale..normally $1300. I went to ApplianceSmart, which is a factory outlet store that sells scratch/dent items from the vendors. We were able to get the same refer there for roughly $700, with s...

Good news to report on the home (finding) front. We are officially in-contract on our first house. Our new address as of June 3rd will be on Andrew Ave in Westerville. Last week, we were both quite frustrated and worried about the prospects of finding a house in the small window of time we had before Chris comes out. Thursday morning we went and looked at a house nearby the said house on Andrew with our realtor. The showing was a quite roomy split-level in an older Westerville neighborhood. The house was certainly acceptable, but it didn't quite have the character to make us fall in love with it. We left the showing even more depressed and uncertain. Later that afternoon, Kate was browsing through the MLS listings while on break at work. She forwarded me a few houses to take a look at. One was this lovely Victorian house in Reynoldsburg. It was in really nice condition, but neither of us really were interested in driving 20 minutes to and from work, and to be honest, Reynoldsburg...

So, here we are in the middle of April. Tax time has came and went. It seems like all of our plans for the summer have come together. Chris' airplane tickets are ordered...the beach house is rented, our vacation time approved. Chris is set up to go to a daily camp at the Westerville Recreation Center during our work hours. I'm sure he'll enjoy that! We bought tickets to a Reds/Mariners game in July... right behind home plate. This next weekend we'll hopefully score some tickets to The Phantom of the Opera, which will be touring through Columbus during the beginning of August. I'm excited about that as I've wanted to see it since my teens. The only uncertanty now, and it's a big one,... is the house situation. We still haven't found what we want in a house... and I'm wondering what's going to happen if we don't find what we want. Are we going to have to settle? Are we going to have to get a short term rental on an apartment or something during...

So I started a multi-user blog basically as a hangout for all my old friends I knew from high school and the 90's. Somehow, with the help of a few old contacts I was able to get the word out to just about everyone in our little circle of friends. It's quite amusing to look back and see how darn geeky we were and still probably are. Some friends have changed, some have moved or are moving. Some are doing the same thing they were doing 10 years ago... and that's fine... since you should live your life doing what you want, as long as it makes you happy and fulfilled in the end.

I think that maybe my first two ultra-liberal posts may have offended my dad. I was hoping they wouldn't. I love my parents, though we don't agree on everything, including politics! But that's okay, right? I actually really like and respect my father. I think he raised us in not always the best of economic situations and did a great job of instilling in us love, responsibility (although I didn't really catch on to that until later), and compassion. Recently, it really dawned on me as to how proud I was of my father. You see, my dad has worked at a private aeronautical company for many years now. Although he is extremely smart, he didn't really have the necessary post-graduate education to work in aerospace engineering, but someone who knew someone at my dad's company decided to take a chance on him anyway. My dad also had a mild stroke six or seven years ago which threatened his future, his employment and his life. He worked through therapy and went right back t...

We were approved for a loan this week so we can officially start the house-hunting process. We are still split between using a Coldwell-Banker Realtor and someone with Keller-Williams. Soon we should be into the process full tilt. We bought some nice mountain bikes for our trip to N.C. this summer. Chris is now wearing glasses. He is getting teased at school, with some mean kids calling him 'nerd' or 'four-eyes'. I just tell him to ignore them.

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Okay. I have the wonderful distinction, if you can call it that, of having my cube directly across from the department 'food cube' . That means every time there is a birthday, special day, retirement, bahmitzvah, ect... someone brings some sort of food-stuff product in, a mass email goes out to the department, and the next thing you know, there are 30 seemingly starved women huddled around the 'food cube' . It's a scene not much unlike a mass of vultures awaiting their chance to devour some recently deceased critter on the side of the highway. It's not that I have anything against bringing in snacks for special occasions, a cake for someone's birthday, or a bunch of pizzas to celebrate some company achievement. What bothers me is that it's completely distracting for that many people to be hanging out so close to my cube. Does this make me a bad, anti-social person? I don't know. Maybe I'm just easily annoyed.

Well, it looks as if winter left us for a while, only to sneak back up on us and scream, "PSYCHE!" Okay, I guess I shouldn't complain. There was only about an inch of snow covering everything when I got up.... nothing major. Life is still slowly waltzing by here in Ohio. We have three months left with the inlaws... I really cannot wait to move. On Sunday, we went and checked out a nice little Cape Cod in Westerville. I think it was a little out of our price range, but it seemed to have everything that we were looking for! All we would need would be about 25K extra dollars in the bank account!!! Cape Cod Open House We also went and "interviewed" a buying agent with Coldwell-Banker. He seemed like a nice enought guy, but we are going to check out a couple of other Realtors before plunking all our chips down on red, so to speak. Last week, Kate booked a fantastic beach house in North Carolina for us! We plan on taking a much needed coastal vacation this August. Chr...

People Who Suck This is actually quite funny. I'm sure that I fall into several catogories on this site's "Hit List".

Thank God it's Friday! I'm so jazzed that I'm going to be leaving work here in like 2 minutes. Actually after I write this really short and really to the point blog entry. This has been the longest damn day ever! Peace out.

Roger's Blog I guess this guy's quest has been short lived. Maybe he's taken up something a little easier, like stamp collecting. =)

Dropped Kate off at Starbucks today. She's working till' 8. Dropped by the Dublin Library to return some stuff... picked up about 5 more CDs and a few DVD's. I swear, the library is the best place on earth to get free stuff... well borrow stuff anyway. I picked up Alice in Chains Live, The Ravonettes, Jeff Buckley Live, some miscillaneous techno CDs and a Cure CD for Kate. Also got Secret Window, Hurley Burley, and They on DVD. Hopefully I'll make some time to watch them.

It's a little after nine on a Tuesday. Kate's in the bath. I'm on the computer. But I'm sure you figured that...The computer part that is. I've decided to pursue a degree in Web Design or a related field. Now I just have to decide what school I want to attend and what exactly my career path will be. Kate and I checked out a few houses over the weekend, and met a fairly nice agent. We're totally up in the air about where we want to live. Delaware feels like home, and we really miss it. But Delaware is 20 miles from the outskirts of Columbus. Sometimes, when Chris was out, we wouldn't get home until 7:00, so there's definitely a convenience factor to think about. We also saw a few houses in Westerville. One was really nice on the outside, but I think the inside needed some work, and the basement was straight out of a Wes Craven movie. The other house we saw was really cheap. REALLY CHEAP. I guess the old lady who had owned it died, and she hadn't updat...