ET's Info-Stew

We went to the movies on Friday with Liz and Cy to go see the new Batman movie. When we got out of the theater it was evident that it had just rained. When we got home we were surprised to hear, through the garage door, our fire alarms blaring! Afraid of what we might find, I carefully opened the door...but there was no indication of a fire. We checked the whole house, including the crawlspace and attic, but there was not sign of a fire.

On Thursday I was going to take off a half-day from work to go to the Colorado DMV with Jenny to get our cars registered and our driver's licenses. Just as we were ready to leave, Jenny realize that she had no idea where her keys were. She hadn't driven in a couple days, and she had been many places since then. We did a thorough house search, asked Liz and Cy if the keys were at their house or in their car, and Jenny called the places she had been, but nobody had found her keys.

The last blog entry seemed like a long time ago, and so much has happened. We got in to Liz and Cy's house at about 5pm on Monday. One Tuesday, we did our closing, pulled the truck in, and unloaded everything into the garage. In the last ten days we've slowly been settling in to our house. We're about 75% unpacked. We still have a handful of boxes in the living room and a lot of miscellaneous stuff in the garage. I won't be satisfied until everything is in a smart place. Fortunately there should be plenty of room to put stuff.

Yesterday Jenny and I, with tremendous help from Dad, Mark (my brother) and his fiance Heather, loaded up our 16 foot Penske rental moving truck for our move to Colorado. It turns out we had way more stuff than we expected and the truck ended up being fully loaded nearly top to bottom. We didn't have any appliances and didn't have much furniture (bed, TV stand, nightstand, two side tables), so the bulk was just household stuff. After lunch we finished off packing the truck and did our apartment walk through.

Last night the numbing agent wore off and I had constant moderate pain. For some reason the Tylenol with codine didn't do jack, so I took some Ibuprofen. That stuff did the trick and now I'm a happy camper. My most painful times were when I had that stupid gauze in my mouth. I'm sure it's there to help with the clotting, but it caused so much pain. I took it off for good when the pain woke me up at 2am.

About an hour ago I got my two left wisdom teeth pulled. I opted for the Nitrous Oxide, and so I'm not too groggy. But it's certainly been an adventure. For the first couple minutes of breathing the gas I was kinda freaking out because sounds were starting to get duller, my body was getting slightly numb, and I felt like I was having trouble breathing. But I forced myself to relax and that helped. I think going under N₂0 is kinda like hypnosis: you have to let yourself fall into it for it to have it's full effect. Having the iPod playing my music helped.

It's been about three weeks since my last blog post. So much has happened on the moving front in this short period of time. Jenny and I have seen a couple dozen houses, picked one, put down and offer, and got it accepted. We have a wonderful Realtor (Jeri) who has been amazing, and two lenders lined up. We've had the inspection and I've read hundreds of pages of documents. We have all our notices in to work and apartments, all our moving plans in place, and 70% of our stuff packed and ready to go. We are set to close on the house July 1st, which is a mere 3 1/2 weeks away!

Today is the second biggest turning point in my life. The first is when I moved from Colorado to California when I was 12. Sixteen years later, today, we have made it official that we are moving back from California to Colorado. We have been planning this for a while, and today I made it official by telling my employer. I wanted to wait to tell everyone until after telling my boss, out of respect for him, Sandia, and the opportunities they have given me. Well, it turns out they keep on giving.

Though my body says it's 10:50pm, the clock reads 1:50am. I'm in Orlando and in less than six hours I'll be waking up to start my SANS class. I would have liked to get to bed sooner, but then this blog post would not be nearly as interesting. Let's start off by saying, I'm INFURIATED!!!

Today we made the flight to Harris Ranch, and we had fun doing it. The total flight time was 3 hours, which is my longest distance and duration round-trip flight. We had hamburgers at Harris Ranch, which were quite good. And we found our 100th cache! So this flight was something special for us. At $125 per hour the flight cost a pretty penny. Combined with the Cal Airways member dues, a balance I owed, and the food, the whole thing cost $500. So, it was a $500 hamburger.