So after working from home for my finance job for almost two months, I added a second job so that we could have a chance to do more than tread water financially. Getting out of bed yesterday morning @ 6 was one of the most difficult things I have had to do in a long time. It is so cold and dark!
However, really my problem now is going to be finding time to meet all of my committments. I am still leading a small group for high school boys, participating in a small group with my friends, helping on the weekend directing at church, staining furniture for the nursery, doing video work and all kinds of stuff.
So what am I saying? I guess I am just tired and sitting here in a training that I am required to be at and I would rather be doing anything else.

So I got most of that stuff dome yesterday. Spent some of the best $20 ever on a sprayer for my weed issues and it was borderline miraculous how easy it was to spray our whole property. It would have taken probably 4-5 hours before but it only took 50 minutes.

Well I wanted to always take pride in thought out complete sentence and idea style posts but in light of my current level of busyness (interesting note that busyness and business are only one letter different) I am going to do a Mark Artrip style list update on lots of things at once.

• I am in the middle of a three week period where we will have 14 client meetings in 15 days. There is prep work and follow up work for each of these. Also I have moved my desk three times in the last 10 days as we transition through the final parts of the punch list at the new building. Bottom line is I am tired and ready for a change of pace.
• Our grass is growing! The back yard now has a green tint. I will post pictures someday.
• I am working with five of the high school boys on making a rules video for Hume Lake camp this summer that is shot entirely in Halo 3. Both aspects of that are a challenge since I am not allowed by the rules (student produced) to run the production of it.
• Erin has had a difficult week with some of the things going on at work. You could pray for peace for her if you get a chance.
• We are going to see Prince Caspian tomorrow with friends. Looking forward to it although not as much as Ironman.
• Holy Crap! Ironman was amazing! The announcement of that sequel took 48 hours too long for me!
• The Office is back! The season finale was sick! Those last 30 seconds after the last commercial break made my day!
• I talked to my brother today. He called from Afghanistan. I do not know details of what he is doing since he was selected for a classified operation but he is at least safe and wants everyone to know he is fine.

So the question of who do we actually write for was posed by Mark Artrip in a comment this morning. Also there is Jason Rice’s most recent post that addresses the issue of bringing out your own personality in a blog and deciding how much to really care. Really, I do not have any answer to the questions yet but maybe I can work through it quickly and for your own amusement. I think there are a couple of scenarios that I will explore before I define this whole blogging thing for myself.

1. I write this for other tech nerds. Sure there is the discussion about who should be called nerd or geek or whatever, or even if the nerd label has gotten “too cool” as was mentioned in this last issue of Wired magazine. I think that the problem with writing for tech nerds would be that tech people already dominate the internet in almost every way imaginable so what do I really have to add that is not somewhere else? Any foray into making this an actual tech blog would result in 200 links to sources in every post and that is way too much work for my level of dedication to this blogging endeavor.
2. I write this for general consumption. This is a strong contender because I do consider myself at least semi-well rounded in a lot of different areas. Over enough time I think that I will have probably covered a very broad spectrum of categories and part of my hope would be that I could offer some small additional insight or perspective to whatever it is that I am talking about at that moment. Maybe I am not really cool enough or have enough “experience” or whatever to have anybody listen to me but I don’t care. Whatever.
3. I write this for my friends. I subscribe to several different blogs of close friends and I find it interesting to keep in touch this way. I do not have to feel bad about not calling and really when you think about it, blogging is just long-hand multi-media capable texting. I think a primary purpose is to let my friends, especially long distance ones, know how things are going in my life.
4. I write this for myself. Maybe this is the acceptable nerdy way of keeping a diary, or at least fulfilling the same purpose in a physiological sense that writing in a diary would meet. Does that mean that I am going to spew forth my thoughts unfiltered to the whole world? Certainly not. Does it mean that I can use this place as a space to quickly post my thoughts on a subject for quick reference at a later point? Absolutely.

I finally wrangled down the contractor on costs. Holy crap! This has been a long time coming. I declared I was done with the financial part of this contract two weeks ago and that got me absolutely nowhere. This time I am going to refrain from such a proclamation. Still, hooray for major progress and a sense of accomplishment in the workplace. Also hooray for marble work surfaces throughout the office! I am now officially getting excited to move in to the new offices.

So there are some good things and bad things about owning a house just like my good friend Mark Artrip is discovering with his recent posts about his to do list. At the top of my to do list for probably the next couple of months is cleaning up and renovating the back yard for really cheap. Those of you who have not seen our house at all can check out those pictures here.

So the inside has gotten most if not all of the loving as far as time and money is concerned and justifiably so since that is where we spend most of our time. But as swimming season approaches we and presumably our friends and associates are going to be spending more time outside and this means that we need to have our act together so that people are not traipsing through wondering what kind of trailer trash leave their yard like this.

So the process has begun to transform it. This album on Facebook shows a combination of three weekends worth of work so far. The first pictures are from when we started and highlight the weed problem that developed almost overnight. Turns out that rocks block pretty much nothing in the way of weeds. The second pictures depict the struggle to take out tree stumps and level out that rise that goes up towards our back fence. So this topic of yard work will probably be one that gets updated frequently if not every weekend. I will do my best to share the things that I learn about planting grass, swimming pools and sprinklers or whatever unforseen issues come up.

So this morning I am doing a little drive by on the construction site. Not the bad kind, but the kind where you randomly drop in on the contractors and make sure that things are actually happening and are going to happen in the way that they are supposed to. Tony is a really great guy but right now it seems like his subcontractors are pushing him around. I have been waiting for three days for answers to some really simple questions that we need answered before we can make final decisions. The question “how big are the marble slabs that we are ordering?” should be a relatively simple one to answer. Or “how much does light A cost and how much does light B cost?”
All this being said I am hoping that these things, marble fabrication and overhead lighting choices do not set us back into the stone age on our timeline. cross your fingers. more later.