I slept in most of the weekend.
We rearranged the furniture, so now we're actually sleeping in the bedroom.
I hung some blackout blinds so we can use the projector in the living room any time of the day.

Its a, ahem, unique arrangement. We are in apartment limbo.
We can't buy too much furniture, but we need to be comfortable.
I was told Friday that a full time position wasn't going to be created.
Thats good, because nobody ever made me an offer, and I'm still getting settled in anyway.
They were concerned that I might have taken it the wrong way.
I'm not sure what exactly goes on where I work.
I know they have a lot of meetings, and I know some of them are about me.
I can only guess whats been said by studying the behaviour of the people who attend the meetings.
It almost feels creepy. lol.
All I can do is give them my best effort, try not to make any waves, and see what happens.
Anyway, getting back to the apartment
If my contract runs out in November, we're going to have to move again.
Which means, we shouldn't buy furniture.

Another visitor has arrived.
Her name is McKenzie Jackson.
She's almost 9 pounds, the daughter of Renee Spurling and Jonathan Jackson.
She's Becky's grandaughter, and Ruth Czachorwski's great grand daughter.
And she's beautiful.
One wonders what will she see in her lifetime.
What beautiful things will come her way?
And soon, after we're all laid to rest, she will have her first grand daughter,
and she too, will be beautiful.
And she will come into a world so wonderful, we can't even imagine it.

Lynne's Café on Baxter Road
Here, you get fresh veggies, unique entrées and extremely friendly service. A waitress here sat down at our table and told us that the locals read 'The Leo' to find all of the happenings around Louisville. Its amazing, the number of name bands who just slide in and out of this place! Counting Crows is playing just 5 blocks away next week.


I really don't get why anyone would pour beer from a pitcher into a coffee cup.
Thats just disgusting. But another sign said that management isn't responsible for items left in the coat room, and there is no coat room. So, thats it, they're crazy, and they're lots of fun!
Lynnes Cafe is hosting an ugly lamp contest. The person that wins the lamp contest gets free breakfast for a year.

Bardstown Road is the place to go in Louisville.
Louisville is all about small businesses. They're motto is 'Keep Louisville Weird'.
They like the chains here, but the push is to keep the Mom and Pop stores open.
I just think thats GREAT!
 
Bardstown Road Houses
Musicians and other talented people live in houses along the road. Most of these old homes are residential, but also host some kind of business. I think I'd like living in one of these, and maybe have a Tarot Card reading / Web Site building combo in my living room. A customer would enter, I'd go through some a beaded curtains and ask them, "What would you like today? Would you like a website built, would you like to know your future, my sweetheart also does manicures, if you'd like that.". That would be cool.

Rod BBQ'd corn in the husk, garlic potatoes, T-Bone steaks and um, his trash!
The corn was especially delicious cooked that way.

We do now.
Finally, after all these years, I've got some new glasses. one set for reading, the other for driving.
I rarely need them, but when I do, I REALLY need them.
Becky got a new pair too. Her new pair is practically indestructable!
We both left the optometrist with dilated pupils.
So, we were both nearly blind, seeing rainbows around everything.
Driving home was a real challenge.
I didn't learn what I needed too though.
I wanted to learn what might make someone's eyesight fluctuate between fuzzy and good over a couple of days.
All the optometrist said was, try some Refresh Plus Eye Drops, and maybe take some Omega-3.

here is my recipe for  chicken and noodle skillet dinner 1 tablespoon vegetable oil 1lb boneless chicken breast                1 medium onion chopped  1 half cup 1 cup baby carrotscut lenthwise in half        1 cup frozzen broccoli 1cup uncooked egg noodles               1 can of chicken broth 1 can of condensed cream o chicken soup                        brown chicken and onions in a skillet stirin remaing ingredients bring to a boil reduce                       heat and simmer until noodles are tender add hot bread and you have dinner

Got up this morning to brush up on my stock jargon.
Chatted with MIKEY!!! YEAH!
Wrote a program at work today, to create test data, then tested it.
Writing programs from scratch is fun! YEAH!
Got home, went to Sam's and Walmart to get Becky a homeless cart...
You know, one of those carts that have two wheels.
She needs one to shuffle laundry up and down the floors here.
We also picked up an air mattress for Rod.
We popped his while camping...lol.
Swung by Rod's house, but Rod wasn't home. awe.
We dropped an air mattress off anyway.
Got home, and webcamed SONNY!!!! YEAH!
We spent about an hour or or so enjoying pleasant conversations about the whacky worlds we've been thrust into this last month. He's at Circus. I'm in Louisville. Everything is whacky!
Got off, and webcamed GMa!!! YEAH!
We chatted for some time, then Paul came down and got her microphone working, and life was GREAT!
We topped off the night by swinging by Hilton's bar next door!!! YEAH!
I wanted to try a shot of their famous Kentucky Bourbon.
It was a beautiful bar, all woodsy, plush and beautiful.
But, they were busy, it would have taken too long,
So, now its BED TIME!!! YEAH!!!

Yield - What the bonds have paid in the last 7 to 30 days. Kind of worthless to look at.
Net Asset Value (NAV) - What the bond fund is worth, per share.
Total Return - What the bonds have paid dividends, along with their Net Asset Value changes.
However, I can't seem to pin down what period of time this value uses. Hopefully, its over 12 months.
Without knowing the time frame, its worthless.
The way it plays, if I remember right
The bond funds spit out a dividend, and the NAV goes down.
The NAV eventually goes back up...and it spits out another dividend.
While its doing this, it becomes very hard to track, unless you have kept a log of everything.
For example: Take an instance where you invest $100 to buy 100 shares in a bond fund for $1 a share(nav).
When the bond fund pays a dividend, its NAV drops to $.90 a share. Fair enough.
The bond fund pays out a 10% dividend and you don't reinvest it in the fund.
You get $100 because the Dividend=$.10 . You have 1,000 shares worth $900.
You gained nothing. You only gain $10 gain when the NAV goes back up to $1.
The bond fund pays out a 10% dividend but you have the dividend purchase more shares.
You get $0 because you rolled the Dividend over, the NAV drops to $.90 .
You now have have 1,100 shares worth $1,000 (1000x$1 + 100x$1)
You gained nothing. You only gain $10 when the NAV goes back up to $1.
There may be an advantage to buying the bond fund, right before it pays the $10 dividend.
The price of the fund before it pays the dividend should be $1.10, I'd think.
All of this makes funds very difficult to track without keeping a log.
If you have the dividends payed to you, then you have to keep a log of all payments.
Its comforting to know that if you have the dividends paid to you for years and years and years, its unlikely that the NAV of the fund would ever drop much less than your original purchase NAV.

Today, I spent the whole day fighting Freddy Kruger.
I only slept a few hours last night, and that Vicodin doesn't leave your system like it should.
So, I kept nodding off.
It was harder staying awake today, than it was on our 35 hour drive to Louisville.
Rough day!
I had two meetings today, on top of it all.
One was a conference call with about twenty people connected. Very anticlimactic.
I hear, that if I worked salaried at my job for a year,
I could pretty much transfer anywhere in the country.
I could even end up working in that old data center in Las Vegas, right around the corner from GMa's.
Wow....it is a small world.
hmmm.

But I thought you wanted out of Lost Wages?

I invested in the SWHFX mutual fund.
I invested in Schwab’s Schwab Health Care Fund (SWHFX)
Its Average Return runs around 8%
If anyone has any investment suggestions, I'm all ears.

How about investing in the "SAE fund for the monetarily disabled". It is my means to pad my wallet, and bribe Jeffwee and others to like me. The return on investment is -100%. Would you like to write me your first donation check now, or a bit later? 

No, you give me money and/or other valuables, and I give you a very valuable nothing. 

Up most of the night.
The dentist gave me a script of Vicadin, which I gratefully took.
Vicadin seems to make me itch, and it keeps me up for some reason.
hmmm.
I guess it'll take a few days for the infection to go down.
And I thought it was all over, too.

Good Luck with the dentist, Jimmy... I tried IMing you yesterday, and got no reply. It said you were online.

He told me we could save the tooth, like it was a cherished life form...haha.
I told him the tooth had no use, it had nothing to grind against. It wasn't a chomper.
Once again, I heard the story about how I'm going to look all goofy.
They always say its because my teeth have nothing to rest against, they'd fall over or be pointed in all kinds of directions (they teach that story in Dental School, I guess).  I told the dentist what I really wanted was dentures or plates. And I'd like two sets of them made. 
I told work I'd be coming back in unless they turned me into a drooling idiot.
Well, that's what they did, darn-it! Taking any kind of time off at this job is insane. But then again, coming in, frothing at the mouth and sounding like I lost half my brain could damage my already, odd, reputation worse.
I really wanted them 10 years ago when I had more jawbone.
The jawbone deteriates from tooth decay. If you have no teeth, you don't suffer as much jawbone loss (as I understand it). Anyway, I'm scheduled to come back 8/27/2007 at 2pm

you didn't drink to much, just don't fish when your vision is blurred! silly boy .. you need to stick to things that are relative to the number of beers you have had.. fishing after more than 15 beers is not the right thing :-). On the other hand  don't get up and have another beer the next morning. get up eat some real good breakfast and take a nap.. you  feel like a new man after that. :-) All in all it was great to have you with us for the weekend

Yo Dude! now we camp for a couple days and enjoy the life of fishing eating drinking and the Glorious game of Corn-Hole. A new experiance the the city slicker of las vegas LOL

I should do like Yahoo, Aol and the other sites do for logons
They put a graphic up to verify a human is trying to log in.
Another long day. Got up at 5am.
Found the web site had been abused. So I wrote a fix and put it in.
Figured out my project's design was flawed.
I corrected it, but...
The real problem is, I've sent the Documentation to several users for our meeting next Tuesday.
So, my first meeting may make me look bad.
Work keeps asking me if I'd consider full time.
Its a toss up of benefits verses dollars.
At any rate, I told them I couldn't commit to anythingt until my contract is up in November.
I indicated I would like that.
I finally got the seller's documents to sign.
Grady called and said if i could get it signed today, the deal was probably blown.
All this happened today, on a Friday, around 4pm.
I had to go home during rush hour, get the docs, find a notary and a Fed Ex place.
All this I had to do in a town that rolls up its side walks at 5pm.
My brain is fried again.
Somehow, we pulled it off, and I think I lost some of my hair.

Its funny when people try to hack this system.
There's really no useful  information in this system to steal or get.
And almost everything is out in the open.
Gotta love it

But I'm doing it for free.
I know, I said I'd fix toilets for what work is paying me but
The apartments hopper quit filling up and rather than wait for management to fix it, I went out and bought a Flowmaster for $6 and threw it in. Plus, I hooked up most of the Ice Maker.
Our internet is still not working.
A guy from Insight came out yesterday, and totally botched the job.
He hooked up the cable TV, and just left the cable modem.
After spending an hour on the phone with Insights Support (which, right now, costs me 45 cents a minute on my cell phone), they determined the modem  was just plain BAD.
Someone left the cake out in the rain, alrighty...lol.
I would be upset, but they gave us a digital box for free.

Friday, we signed papers for the apartment, but we couldn't move in yet.
So, we just hung out at Suburban.
We ate pizza at Old Chicago's, and I've gotta say, it was the best pizza I'd ever had!
Saturday, we moved into our apartment.
It took two trips to move out of the Suburban.
Then we bought a TON of Walmart furniture (airbed, chairs...)
We moved all of that in and passed out around midnight.
Sunday, we had to exchange another VCR (without a tuner in it, which we need)
Our GPS went strange on us, and we ended up at a Walmart in New Albany.
On our way back, we had to go down Albany's back streets.
We actually got stopped at a railroad crossing for 20 minutes (I hopped out and picked flowers...lol).
Albany's a beautiful, small town with very old Buildings.
I64 was out to Louisville, so once again, we had to take a detour and I blew a flat!
Finally, about noonish, we got back to Louisville.
Churchill Downs with Rod and Jessica.
Rod and Jessica met us at the apartments and gave us a lift. They are such great company!
Becky picked the horses and won!!! Yippee!!!
Ending the day, we went to The River Front Park
Cool place. There's a Joes Crab Shack high on stilts over the river.
The park has a water jet show, and lots of grassy areas. 
Kids were playing frisbee football and soccer. It looked like a blast.

We're going off line until we get our new internet service
Have a GREAT WEEKEND!

I'm really excited about this change.
Entertainment is in walking distance. A CVS is just a block away.
I noticed that most of the Kentucky Towers dwellers don't have a car.
To get from the street to our apartment
- we have to park in a garage
- go to the 3rd floor
- walk up a ricketty stair/bridge to our apartment building
- go down and around a hallway
- take the elevator to the fifth floor
- then go down the hall to our apartment #503.
There is no convenient way to get from the parking garage to the apartment at ground level.
However, if we take the bus
- We can enter the apartments directly from the front
- take the elevator to the fifth floor
- then go down the hall to our apartment #503.
So, either we find a place to park at ground level, or we take the bus.
This is going to be so much FUN! And I am going to lose weight!

We move in 3pm tommorrow...yahoo!!!
Kentucky Towers: 513 S 5th #504, Louisville, KY 40202, (502) 585-6300
Our apartment is on the 5th floor of this 1920's high rise.
In its hay day, was a ritzy hotel. The Hilton is across the street from it.
They are refurbishing it, along with the rest of the downtown area.
I'm curious, and paranoid, about moving into a high rise.
But this one looks REALLY COOL!!!
It has 100 washer dryers, a swimming pool on the 5th floor, an excercise room and shops on the first floor. 
A Hilton Hotel and a coffee shop are across the street. 
Fourth Street Live, Louisvilles ritzy party area, is one block away.
Best of all, its only 10 minutes to work, 
the drive is simple,
so its unlikely that I'll be blasting the stereo,
then miss a turn at 70 mph,
and end up headed towards Nashville,
like I did the other day.

The people are very friendly and mostly attractive.
- A security guard showed us the route from the parking lot to our apartment and was nice enough to walk us through the route. He said its a quiet building.
- I talked to a front desk clerk from the Hilton who was smoking outside. She said we were going to love it. She had a lease 4 blocks down the road.
- There was a crazy lady sitting at a bus stop yelling things, probably talking to god.
- A fellow hit me up for a dime. Another hit me up for a cigarette.
- Three girls walked in alone at different times.
Each dressed like they just came from a company party.
One said she was involved in politics, and just got back from Washington DC.
So the people are going to be quite varied, but not threatening.
Our next challenge will be finding furniture on a shoe string budget.
We won't have an internet connection until Wednesday.