So the carpet is picked and being installed this Thursday, the countertops are being started today, the house is almost done. I spent several hours Saturday furniture shopping. Pretty fun. I think I know what I'm going to go with as far as living room/dining room/bedroom are concerned. And I found the fridge that I'm going to get.

Andrea is such a sweetheart. She is calming and helps me focus on the things that are important in life. I have been raving about my desire to get a big screen TV for some time now, and I even thought I'd just get one right off the bat, while I was getting all of the other furniture, though. Andrea opposes the idea of going into debt for a big screen TV, though, and I could tell she thought I would be making a mistake. Yesterday morning while sitting in Elders Quorom, I realized that I don't need to go into debt for something like a TV. I can just wait a couple of months and save cash for it, then get it when I can pay for the whole thing. I think she was happy with my decision.

She wasn't impressed with my superior Google skills today, though. I guess I'll have to wait until the next challenge before I can display my skills again.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UBYPaNc57Ik&search=autism%20basketball

This story has been floating around the web this week, and just today I finally was able to see this video. Watch it, you won't regret it.

The new Blogger widget for Dashboard.

Dashboard is a cool feature in Mac OSX that contains tiny single-use applications. The Dashboard can be accessed any time by pressing a hotkey (mine is currently shown/hidden when I hit the F12 button).

On the back side of the widget (it flips around to show settings), the Blogger widget keeps your username and password, plus it displays a list of your blogs in a drop-down list box. On the front side you simply enter a title and the text of your post, then you save or publish the post.

VERY useful.

I got a call yesterday morning from the guy down at the carpet place. He told me that the carpet I chose had been backordered twice, and that if I came in and picked something new, they'd upgrade me for free. I was ecstatic, mostly because I had been having serious second thoughts about my choice of carpet color. I've decided to get a dog, you see, and the "Toasted Almond" color wouldn't really work best. I talked to quite a few people about carpet colors, though, and went in and chose a nice, soft, freely-upgraded carpet that's a nice dark khaki with some brown thrown in. Very nice carpet.

Today Andrea went with me to lunch. We went to Mi Ranchito and ate with some of my old Novell friends (Wayne, Evan, Deeks, Richard, Rusty... sadly Flora and Dave couldn't make it), then we went to the countertop place. Since I was getting new carpet and the countertop guy hadn't started cutting my laminate yet, he said I could choose a new color. I hadn't noticed how much green was in the Labrador Granite laminate that I had chosen before, and this time I chose, with Andrea's advice, a nice Jamocha Granite laminate. Should be really nice.

This change is an invisible one, though. I have moved my site from the old b2 engine to the blogger engine. I am hosting it on my site still, but the engine resides on blogger's site somewhere. I've spent quite a bit of time playing with blogger over the past year, and I've even recommended it to quite a few people, but only now did I decide to make the jump. As you can see, the posts look the same, but I only bothered to move the last few posts over. And, of course, the comments are gone.

I promise this will be the last change I make to the site for a while.

Andrea and I went home to Ridgecrest this weekend. We had the trip planned for over a month, and since we were still friends after we broke up, we decided to just go forward with the trip. We left on Thursday at 3 PM and it wasn't five hours before we decided to get back together and give it another shot. There were some issues that needed to be dealt with, but once they we discussed them more thoroughly we realized that there was so much goodness in our relationship that we couldn't pass up the opportunity to continue to build it. So we spent the weekend with our families, hanging out a bit each day, and things are going so well. I am filled with love for her, and she for me, and it's just great to be back on track.

We left Ridgecrest at around noon today, heading north on 395. We visited Manzanar and did the driving tour around the site, then headed up to Tonopah, Nevada. I was then pulled over and told that my license plates had come back "revoked." The officer gave me a $177 ticket and took my license plates away. I have no idea what it's all about, but all I can do is wait until tomorrow morning to go to the DMV to get it figured out.

Not a half hour after getting the ticket, we were continuing east on U.S. Highway 6 when a critter walked across the highway and I was unable to miss it. The thing was huge, though -- we think it was a badger, but we'll research it tomorrow to figure it out for sure, and it went under the left side of my car. I heard a horrendous scraping sound, though, so we pulled over to examine the car and found that the entire left side of my front bumper had been ripped off. I'll take photos tomorrow.

So as you can see, quite the expensive day for me! I am happy, though. I had a woman by my side that I care deeply about, and that made it so the other things didn't really matter. I was a tad frustrated after getting the ticket, but she put her arm around me and comforted me and calmed me down. It was so natural, too -- she really cares about me! -- and I was so excited about the feelings of tenderness she gave to me that when I ran over the animal it didn't even bother me. I was actually excited about the adventure of it all. We ran back in the pitch black to see what kind of animal it had been, then ran back because it was freezing cold.

It was just such a happy afternoon and evening for me.

That's all.

Life is pretty good. I'm really excited about the townhouse. I'm really happy with my job. Yesterday I got to go up to Peoa to see the company headquarters that is being built. It is surrounded by pastures and fields and a nice little creek that is supposedly full of brown trout.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave for California for the weekend. Andrea will be joining me, which will be nice.

My bid on the townhouse was accepted with a couple of addendums wherein: 1) they wouldn't pay the closing costs and then 2) they agreed to raise the price of the townhouse to include the closing costs. This morning I went and picked my countertops. I had gone to the shop yesterday and tried to make a go at it, but I just felt so unprepared. This really is a decision that is going to haunt me for the length of my ownership of this townhouse, regardless of what I choose. They tell to pick one, then they put you in front of at least 1,000 swatches. It's simply a ridiculous proposition. I took one of the cabinet doors (knotty alder, solid wood, really beautiful) as well as the kitchen tile (a pale ceramic) and the bathroom tile (a nice travertine) in to the countertop shop with me, and I was finally able to make a choice after a 30-minute internal debate. I'm going with a laminate that resembles a dark granite. I can't remember the name off the top of my head. It's nice, though. I think it'll go really well with the black appliances and the knotty alder.

On Monday I'll pick the carpet.

As many know, I decided to stay in Utah for a few more years. Not wanting to continue paying rent, I started looking for a townhouse in the area and I settled on a new one being built in Lindon. This afternoon at 5:00 PM my real estate agent John Root faxed my offer in to the seller's agent. Hopefully we'll know by tomorrow morning if they accept or not. I doubt they will -- my offer stipulated that the seller pay the closing costs, which is unlikely to happen because it's a new property that a lot of people are interested in -- but if they don't, I'll just resubmit again tomorrow afternoon with different terms, which I'm sure they'd accept. I am hoping to close on it and move in on March 20th, just after I return from Glenn's wedding.

My lady and I called it quits yesterday. The whole thing really had a numbing effect, but we felt like it was the right thing to do. This whole "feeling" thing is a hard area of life to truly understand, but knowing that we both felt comfort in the decision we made has made it at least tolerable. I am happy to report that today I haven't done any of the following: swerved my vehicle, cursed, thrown anything, broken anything, spoken ill to anyone. I have, however, spent hours buried in the Noah's web site so that I didn't think cry about what has just happened, prayed several times, convinced myself twice that what I needed to do was call her right now and beg for her to take me back because we clearly have made a mistake, convinced myself twice that what I REALLY needed to do was just breathe in and breathe out and accept the decision that we made with the Spirit and be patient and give it some time and realize that it will all make sense at a future date, and gone to FHE and communicated like a normal person with normal people instead of continuing to do battle in my head with a brain that is clearly not in a state to make rational decisions at the moment. In the end, I feel again the peace of knowing that the correct decision has been made. That'll have to be enough for now. We will continue to be friends. We have such a good friendship that it seems foolish to throw it away.

I do adore you still, Andrea, and I always will.