along the journey

Well we’re the proud, slightly frazzled, owners of a new (to us) Hyundai Sonata. We started the adventure last night and finished it up today around 7, as we drove off the lot with the car.
It’s a ‘99 with 30k miles. I think we got a good deal. We got about $500 below blue book value.

We left the house this morning at 11 or so, and got home around 8′ish. Very long, emotional week. Thanks to those who’ve been there for us this past week. I’m looking forward to next week so bad, just to have a week without any extra worries……God-willing.

I trust God. I really do. But I get in the way. I’m so anxious for everything to work out with this accident. I’m ready for it to be over and done with, and mostly it is….. however that doesn’t change the fact that we’re not going to be able to replace our vehicle. I hate trying to haggle with the insurance agents, I hate even the thought of haggling with them. But we need a vehicle.

Bottom line- they’ve appraised our car at $1700, that’s what they’ll pay for our car. We owe quite a bit more than that. So we’ll still be paying the bank but we won’t have a car. I don’t know what to do.

Amy said I needed to write better about what happened, mostly because she’s pissed that her entry didn’t turn out the way she was expecting. Anyway here’s what I typed up again, picture are in the extended entry, click the more link.

On our way home from work, Amy and I were on our way to Sam’s club to pick up some salmon. Rob and Suzanne were coming over for dinner. Rob was going to help me hook up my new server I had scored from work. I had come down Charles St, and made a right onto Fort Ave. As we approached the next block I noticed a VW Jetta inching out after stopping at a stop sign. We got closer and I guess she didn’t see us. As she crossed our lane, to turn left going the way we had just came from, I swerved into the other lane to try and avoid the accident, only to change the point of impact. Instead of broadsiding the car we met, sort of nose-to-nose.

Below are pictures of the car.
(more…)

Well last night on my way home from work, Amy and Caleb and I were in a yucky car accident. A lady pulled out in front of us and we hit her. She was stopped at a stop sign and thought she was clear to go. I did my best to avoid her by swerving to the left, but the next thing I know, I was choking on the airbag. Well not really the airbag, more like the smoke from the airbag. I hopped out of the car and got Caleb out, and Amy was able to get out of the car as well. The car that we hit was a 2002 VW Jetta. It was a long night. We didn’t go to the hospital, our car was towed. We’re mostly fine this morning. I’ve talked to both insurance companies this morning and it sounds like the other insurance company is going to accept responsibility. If they don’t then the lady will completely have changed her story, but we don’t expect that to happen. Going to get a rental car today, and a new car seat. I’ll take pictures of the car and post them here, probably before tomorrow.

In other news, all of my webservices are going to be moving from my desktop machine to an actual server. A Dell Poweredge 2300. Running RHL 7.3. FTP, SSH, POP3, SMTP, APACHE - I’m pretty excited. Rob set it up mostly while I was waiting on a tow truck. Thanks Rob!

Also I want to thank Rob and Suz for being here for us. It is greatly appreciated!

Well I had written a great big long entry and ended up closing the window before I saved! UGH! Anyway. Thought my new 80Gb HD had crashed yesterday, after an hour or two of troubleshooting I figured out it was the secondary drive on the cable that was thrashing, not the primary drive. So there was no data loss or anything, just the loss of a 14GB drive that I wasn’t really using anyway. I also realized the need for a backup system, if not just for our websites! Maybe I’ll setup a batch job to copy our web directories to a CD on a weekly basis. I’ll have to export the sql tables also. If anyone has any ideas about a easy/cheap way to do this, let me know. Windows OS.

I also realized how bad my heatsink/fan on my processor is acting up. I need one bad, I’m sure that it’s not cooling properly, and would prefer not to have my processor die because of it. Tom’s Hardware recommends one I found pricewatch for $1. But their minimum order is $5! Suppose I could look at Best Buy or somewhere, but I’m sure I’ll pay the markup!

I’ve been searching high and low for a web-based bookmark manager that I could install on my server that would be able to produce an rss feed of the categories. Sort of like blogrolling, but a locally installed product. I haven’t found anything yet and so I turn to the Lazyweb.

Features that I want:
• locally installed server, not someone elses service
• web-based, so I could add bookmarks from wherever I am
• categories
• produce an rss-feed that could be incorporated into any page

Hopefully the folks at LazyWeb can help either point me in the right direction, or start a project. It seems relatively easy, but I just don’t know enough to make it happen. If someone out there wants to take me under their wing and walk me through my first programming project, I’d be more than happy!

That previous entry was put there using David’s Post-It utility. I spent lots of time this morning working on getting it to work. It’s really neat idea, if you wanted to post to this blog, you could do it using MT and by pinging a particular URL. Yes, very geeky, yes, probably more than you need to know! but wanted to share it none the less.

I got SoulTsunami from the library last week after reading a list of Top 5 books of particpants over at The Ooze. SoulTsunami was on there as well as a few others. Most of these books talk about a post-modern church. Mostly meaning that the church is going through a change. The main point of SoulTsunami (as I understand it from the intro and first chapter) is that there are three things you can do as a result of this change that is happening- run from it, deny it, accept it. The books main focus is on accepting the change, and is basically talkind about changes that are possible/likely in the near future. I’m barely through the first chapter and it all makes so much sense to us. I’ll read for 3 minutes and then come up on another sentence that I just have to share with Amy.

Last night she came in the room with me and as she was getting ready for bed, we discussed some of the things in the book. We can look back and see where the change happened in our life, but never really had words to discuss it. A quote from the book discusses something that Mark Twain talked about:

Amy and I basically came to the same conclusion shortly after we both withdrew from Valley Forge. It was the impetus for change, but we didn’t know it at the time. We were both bitter and tired of “Christians” who were deceptive and back-stabbing and gossiping. We stopped attending church for a year or two, before finally getting involved with the Cincinnati Vineyard. The Cincinnati Vineyard was different than the churches we had experienced. We kept going there regularly until we moved back to Baltimore.

We’ve been to 2 different churches since the move. The last one we were going to is the one that I grew up in. A lot has changed since then, but after going for 9 months, and being involved in a lot, we didn’t feel right there. We felt out of place. We started our search for a new church back in May. We’ve been going to the second church we tried since then. We really like it. It’s difficult to think about going there, but every week God confirms that that’s were we’re supposed to be.

Some of my goals/dreams/mission have really been strengthened or filled in while reading SoulTsunami and posts on The Ooze. I feel that I need an outlet to track what God is doing in my life. This is my journal, this is my journey- your welcome to follow along in my journey and leave your comments.

Original article: along the journey

Yesterday was Amy’s birthday. We went dropped little man off at Amy’s moms house and went to dinner at Red Lobster. I was prepare to go all out for her, as all out as you can go for Red Lobster, not worry about how much we were spending and stuff. Anyway we were seated within 15 minutes, and had our salad and biscuits pretty quick, but our food took like 45 minutes to get to us. I complained and we ended up getting free dessert- Vanilla Bean Cheesecake! It was heavenly. Anyway while browsing their little book, not the menu, but the book that has drinks and desserts and party trays and stuff, one of the things it talked about was gift certificates. It mentioned that their gift certs were useable at the Olive Garden and some other places. We had an Olive Garden gift card from a Christmas present. Well we ended up using that…. our dinner last night ended up being $25. Woo Hoo!! Dessert and all. Amy commented that she was happy we used the card at Red Lobster, since we always have pasta, and she was glad that we had something different for her birthday. We had lots of interesting conversation last night, some of it I’ve discussed over in my new blog. I’m trying to figure how to get that entry over here, so regular readers may read it without having to go to the second blog. Not all entries just that one in particular.

Amy’s started blogging again. Happy Birthday Sweetheart! Hope it was special!

This past Saturday after the rave, we didn’t go to bed until after 4. That’s the latests either of us has been to bed in a long time. This morning I was up at 5. That’s the earliest I’ve been up in a long time.

Last night my brother arrived on Southwest Airlines. A few more bags than usual. He’s moving here, again. This time living with our Aunt. He’s got a job who’s supplying him with a vehicle. His employer- a Christian, graduate of the treatment program my dad works for, and excited about employing Darin. This morning I picked Darin up at 6 and took him to work. Well sort of. The guy wasn’t answering his cell phone so we weren’t sure where to go, just what general direction, a neighborhood, along a 50 mile road. I left him at a McDonalds. I talked to him before I got to work, his boss still hadn’t picked him up! I’m excited about the possibilities for Darin, that he’ll be around, help us around the house, know Caleb as he grows, and scared at the same time. I’m hoping this is the time that he’s going to make it, get his life straight, get out of the old patterns of partying and late nights.

All things are possible!