weekend adventures…

Final Expenses
Talk about an expensive couple of days!

car repairs – $941 (replaced radiator, radiator fan)
past-due taxes for 2005 – $409 (only $93 in penalties & fees – better than I predicted!)
Disney pass renewal – $209 (luckily, Sara helped me out with this one…)

The car really set off my money schedule because, well, who plans on spending nearly a grand on a whim like that?! It was spur of the moment, it was expensive, and a lot of people think that I got ripped off, but at least it’s done now and there’s a lot to be said for that. No AC in Florida is no fun, but a car that won’t even drive because it overheats when it’s idling is even worse!

Ring Shopping, Part Deux
For our afternoon together Saturday, Sara and I continued our ring shopping endeavors, which had pluses and minuses – the minus being that we only made it to a single store, and the plus being that she managed to find her hands-down new favorite. Good news because it was less than half the price of the ring she liked from Jared’s, bad news because the store is a really small business compared to everything else that we looked at and their “service plan” doesn’t even come close to what the others offered. Whereas with most other places, the diamond itself was covered if it fell out, and Jared’s even covered the whole ring if it happens to fall down the drain or get left behind somewhere, but this place covered just the tiny accent diamonds on the sides of the ring and that’s it. They recommended insuring it along with a homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, but I’d have felt more comfortable if they were able to cover it in house.

So that’s where we stand right now – Sara’s going to take the design to some other places to see if they can replicate it at a similiar cost / better service plan, although I’m still considering the option of going with the other place and looking elsewhere for service and replacement insurance. We’ll see… 🙂

My Disney Dad
And Sunday rounded out the weekend with a chilly trip over to Epcot with my Dad – to think that we’d let a whopping four weeks go by since our last visit! Blasphemy, I tell ya…

It was a good trip, despite the chilly weather, and we got around to as much stuff as we could before Dad’s legs just said, “Enough, already!” We didn’t make it on Soarin’ like we wanted to because the Fast Passes we got at noon weren’t good until 8:30pm and Dad just wasn’t going to make a 145 minute wait in the standby line without someplace to sit and rest, but we all still had a lot of fun and it was neat to take Dad back to someplace that he hasn’t been in over a decade. At one point he commented that it was nice to see that he was able to pass along the Disney bug to me, and I smiled inside, thinking of how I look forward to passing it along myself someday.

But not for a looong time, Babe! 😉

All in all a quick weekend, but good times nonetheless…

Surgery. Car Surgery.

Please keep my transportation in your thoughts this morning as my car goes into the shop to try to figure out why it’s making all sorts of weird, grinding noises whenever I try to use the AC anymore. Here’s to hoping that it’s merely a $.03 o-ring or something that they decide to have mercy on me for and install for free … but I doubt it. I fear that this one could be the most expensive repair yet, but likewise, it sucks not having air conditioning in Florida, even in February…

Meh.

a nice and quiet Valentine’s Day…

So good, old V-Day snuck by us this year without too much commotion, and that was kind of nice for a change!

Sara ended up having to work until 2am on one of her crazy, double-shifts at the hospital, so we really didn’t get to spend much of the actual day together. She ended up calling me up after work and persuaded me to bring takeout up to the hospital from our new favorite Chinese place so we could at least have dinner together, so that was good. Of course, she came home later to find the usual roses and chocolates and other objects of my affection to greet her at the door, long after I went to bed myself. Nothing fancy, but sometimes it’s the little, simple things that can mean just as much…

While she was at work yesterday, and pretty much every day, I tend to do a lot of reflection to try to figure out just how I got to this great place in life that I find myself right now. I’ve certainly entertained my share of life’s challenges, and probably got my swing at some of the more difficult romantic ones of the bunch over the past couple of years, and yet here I am today – head over heels in love with a woman who’s only faults to this point are that she hates doing housework and she refuses to kiss me after I’ve eaten anything containing peanut butter. On the other hand, she believes in me, but also has the guts to stand up to me when I’m full of crap; she’s open-minded and has no problems agreeing to disagree; and we share a sense of humor that can even be a little bit scary at times! We can tell each other just about anything, and actually have – an important sub-note!, and somehow we just seem to really work well together. Many people already have looked at us and said that we make a good team, and I think that’s a good quality to have.

In a few days we’ll have officially passed the 10 month mark, closing in on 1 year, and part of me still looks back and tries to figure out where all of the time went. Well, they may not have all been the absolute happiest of days, but we seemed to work through the worst of them and managed to come out the other side unscathed. I still look to our future together with a smile on my face – a big smile – knowing that I get to spend it with her, and somehow it makes fighting my way through all of the previous nonsense in my life seem worthwhile. If things had gone different, I might not have met Sara, and that’d be a shame because right now I couldn’t imagine it any other way than it is right now – just two honest and decent people, who happen to love each other very much, working our way through life together. At the end of the day, who could really ask for more?

Thanks for a fantastic 10 months so far, and a lifetime of happiness to come, Sara. I love you…

Why it must suck to live in Alabama…

Sex toy ban upheld in AL, adult gizmos = illegal devices
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/15/sex_toy_ban_upheld_i.html

So guns are still a-ok, but vibrators are a no-no? Can somebody please fly to Alabama and explain to these stuck-up hillbillies how to use their sex toys? Because for a ruling this asinine, clearly they’ve got the wrong thing up their asses…

Also…

Is it just me, or are eBay sellers getting more and more aggressive as the years go by? I won an auction Saturday afternoon for an SNES game – something pretty cheap, maybe five bucks – and today I got an e-mail from the seller stating that if he didn’t hear from me by tomorrow, he’d assume that I wasn’t going to pay and report me to eBay.

The auction only ended 44 hours before he sent his “Final E-Mail.”

The dude makes no mention in the posting of being a stickler for getting payment info directly after the sale. Was he expecting me to paypal him his $6 (most of it in “shipping fees”) two seconds after the sale ended?!

I love my Tivo, but…

…if there’s one “feature” that I really hate, it’s the one where it jumps back to the last channel you had selected if you leave it on the playback screen too long without choosing something.  I’m usually in the other room when it happens, likely in the bathroom, and since I never remember to mute the stereo before I get up, we get blasted back into the stone age with whatever stupid commercial happens to be playing at the time.  It scares the crap out of me every time…

I can leave it on the same HBO On Demand screen ’til the cows come home … what’s the harm in leaving me on my list until I finally come back two hours later?

exercise is hard

So I just got back from my nightly workout … boy, what a conundrum I have.  You see, as I put in my 45 minutes on the treadmill this evening, I had plenty of time to analyze and over-analyze my exercise habits, or lack thereof, and try to figure out why it’s so hard for me to keep a regular schedule.  I’m sure it’s the same problem that a lot of people run into, but here are my thoughts…

For me, it seems to be all about getting over that hump and actually physically getting myself to the gym – once I’m there, I’ve yet to want to wimp out and leave early, and usually I actually end up pushing myself harder because I’m finally there (as in tonight’s episode), but ultimately just getting there seems to be my big obstacle and I’m not sure what else I can do to motivate myself to take that initial step.  It was kind of bizarre because while I was “working it” tonight, with Eye of the Tiger blasting strong and no one around to critique my singing along (best workout song EVER!!!), I surprised myself by realizing that I don’t actually mind physically working out like I would think that I might.  I know that it’s something that I really need to do for myself and I feel good even during the act itself, but it’s getting that first foot out the door that’s been a killer for me lately.

And the problem is, my options are kind of limited unless I want to drastically change my daily schedule to accomodate this … which maybe I’ll just have to, I don’t know.  Right now I’m working 9:30am – 6:30pm (often later), so my day usually gets me up shortly after 8am and I try to be home by 7pm.  Sara’s been working afternoons this month, so if I can dodge the other distractions, my plan is always to get down to the gym as soon as I get home and get it out of the way before I get sidetracked.  Unfortunately, I usually end up getting sidetracked with Internet, housework, writing – you name it, and when the time creeps up to pass 10pm, if I haven’t eaten yet I normally fit that in and don’t have any time left to go exercise at all.  I suppose one option could be to get up earlier and go workout before I go to work, but that causes issues because obviously I don’t like getting up early, and I don’t really care for working out first thing in the morning in public anyways (I just feel “yucky” until I get my morning shower – the sweating from exercise makes it much worse…).

I think the obvious then would be to simply work on my motivation so that when I get home after work, I just get out and go do it before I do anything else.  This is hard because there’s always laundry to start, dishes to clean up, and of course, plenty of websites to read up on!  But I’m only asking for every other night from myself, so you’d think that I should be able to pace myself and make it happen.  I really have to make it happen because one night a week is just a bit less than what the doctor ordered!

Anybody got any tips to lend for staying motivated and actually getting the ball rolling???  I’m told that once you get two or three weeks into a full-blown routine, it becomes much easier because your body just expects it – just like shaking a habit – but I’ve yet to get three solid weeks of exercising every other day like I want to, so I wouldn’t know.  Aside from just making a bee-line to the bedroom to get my workout clothes when I get home and tuning out absolutely everything else, I don’t know what else to try, but I’m certainly open to new ideas!