Well, I finally did it. I changed the “main” domain with my hosting provider. I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time as it’s been rather annoying having a domain that is no longer operational being the main domain on my server. In order for this change to be made, everything needed to be deleted from all my web pages, so that was an undertaking to say the least.
Anyway, it’s all up and functional again.
In further news, I don’t think that I’m going to be going down to Alabama this weekend…well, I know I won’t be going, because that freakin’ Hurricane Gustav is heading straight for the small, delicate beach house that we were to rent. Seeing as how I didn’t want to spend hours upon hours in the car being “evacuated”. That wouldn’t have made for a very nice evening. Anyway, Melissa and I are working on some dog treat stuff, so it’s time to go and do some of that.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and had the main domain of my blog changed over to my photo site. So if you were wondering why my site was down, that’s why. Anyway. I’ve gotta make sure this site still functions as it should.
Oh, and Alabama got scrapped because of Hurricane Gustav. He’s just looming a bit too much for us to make the drive down there.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and had the main domain of my blog changed over to my photo site. So if you were wondering why my site was down, that’s why. Anyway. I’ve gotta make sure this site still functions as it should.
Oh, and Alabama got scrapped because of Hurricane Gustav. He’s just looming a bit too much for us to make the drive down there.

I never thought that I would be excited about going on a long weekend to Alabama, but this Labor Day, Melissa and I are going to be joining Brad and his brother down in Mobile, Alabama (I think that’s where it is) at a beach house for the weekend. There are apparently going to be many other people there, so I have a feeling it’ll be a good time. Save for any possible drama that may occur when you put 10 strangers in a house together (Real World anyone?), I think we’ll have an awesome time. It’ll be good to see Brad again, as I haven’t seen him since my Birthday in June.
This week I am working from home, and after a stressful work filled Monday, my week has gotten significantly less stressful, so that’s always a welcome change. Things with the project have been going slowly…as expected and don’t look to be changing any time in the near future. It’s nice that I am at least able to work from home some weeks, as if I were to be hanging out at the office with NOTHING to do, that would drive me insane. At least I can play with the dog, hang out with Melissa and fuck around on the internet.
After I wrote my little post about backpacking, I got to talking to my brother about it. We thought about it some and realized that 4-5 months of hiking may be a bit much, but 2 months of cycling across the country could be a good time. The last we spoke about it, the tentative plan of riding from Boston to California was thrown out there. It could be fun and interesting, but I don’t think it’ll happen for at least another two years. Scott was just admitted to Grad school, so he’ll be going back to become a teacher. This coming summer he’s going to be in job search mode, but the one after that, he’ll have the whole summer off. We’re thinking that the summer of 2010 would be when we could embark on any type of sabatical. We’ll see how everything pans out for that. It’s a long time away and lots could happen between now and then.

Car shopping is such a pain in the butt. I love the fact that I have so many options, but I hate the fact that due to my income, I have such a wide breadth of vehicles to choose from. I could get anything from a 1980 Porsche 911 to a 2004 Honda Civic to a 2001 Audi A4… All those cars cost around the same amount of money, but there’s such a vast difference in the quality of the cars. Not to mention that I could spend more than that or less than that and fall into a whole other range of vehicles to choose from.
Now, I’ve been on my Financial Peace University kick recently, and perhaps that’s going to be playing a bigger role in my choice of car than I would like to admit, but at the same time, I have such a terrible taste in my mouth for shitty old cars. If I were to follow the instructions of my financial plan, I would be getting a cheap car for $3k and using the rest of the money for paying down debt. Well, my problem is that any 3k car is going to be old and have issues. It may not even have an airbag, and frankly, that’s not a concession that I’m willing to make. I enjoy working on my car and I enjoy reading about them and learning about them, so for me to sacrifice and get something so very low end, I think that I would be terribly unhappy. In a previous post, I said that I wanted to pay off all of my student loan debt in 3 years. It’s going to cost around $1,000 – $1,200 a month for the next three years if not more. I figure that if I use the money that I have from the sale of my car, and tack on another 10k in a loan (another no-no according to my plan), then I would still be able to pay off my student loan in the same time frame.
As I am sitting here typing this, I am feeling guilty about it. I’m feeling guilty about making a financial decision that I know is the wrong one. I know every reason why I shouldn’t borrow money to pay for a car, but at this point, because I don’t have a car, I’m in a position where I have to make a choice. Do I get something that I’m going to be unhappy with for the remainder of the time that I own it, and want to sell it off ASAP? Or do I get something that I will be happy with for the next 3-4 years, that I’ll pay off in full while I am paying off my student loans?
I’ve still got another two months to think things over, because while I am on this project in Charlotte, I don’t have to worry about a car as I will be renting one for the next two months.

I’ve gone and done it. I finally got rid of the money pit I called a BMW. Granted, I still have nothing against BMW’s, and as a vehicle, they are an amazing piece of engineering, but that one…oh, that one…it needs to go to the crusher. Last Friday, I was supposed to be meeting with “Blair” who had contacted me through the BMW forums.
Blair sent me an email Thursday morning saying that he couldn’t meet up with me, but he was going to be sending a friend of his to pick up the car. I was thrilled, because I thought that the chances of someone purchasing the car who wasn’t the real buyer, were much better than normal. I agreed to meet his friend around noon the following day. Well, noon came and went, and I was informed by Blair that his friend left late, so was running a bit behind schedule. I didn’t really think anything of it and anxiously awaited his friend to pull into my driveway.
Finally, around 3:00, I get a call from Frank, the “friend” of Blair. Frank tells me that he’s had engine trouble and he’s pulled off into a gas station and won’t be able to make it up there. He asks if I can bring the car down to him, as he’s only around 20 miles south of Atlanta. I agree, again, not thinking that anything is terribly wrong. I ask Melissa and her friend Julie to come with my (them driving Missy’s car) so that I have a ride home. Well, after some discussion, we begin to think that things are a little strange, but since I have a deal pending, we all get in our cars and start to drive.
Upon pulling into the gas station, I see the “broken down” car that “Frank” was driving. It was a gold BMW 740i with dark tint and huge chrome rims. I pull up and park my car in front of this hulking bohemoth of a car, and note that there are 3 other guys sitting in the car which is idling…obviously not broken down. I park the car, get out and am told by “Frank” that “we should do this in the car…” he promptly opens the door, and throws down an overstuffed envelope full of money. He instructs me to count the money. I quickly count the bills, holding up a few of them to the light to check their authenticity. Everything looked good. We get out of the car, Frank signs the bill of sale, and the deal is done. Right as I am getting into Melissa’s car, I realize that there are two other cars in the parking lot that are full of sketchy looking individuals all “thugged” out. As I am getting into the car, realizing that my day may be getting worse, a Fulton County Sheriff’s car pulls into the lot. Melissa pulls out and we head up to the nearest bank.
Okay, I’m not going to lie, we were a little concerned. It was super sketchy, it was super random and well, that’s just not what I expected to see when I was to finally sell my car. The guy didn’t even look it over.
More than likely, Blair is a reseller that purchases cars and sends these guys out to go and get them. Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t care what their deal was, but the money was deposited and is now safe and sound in my account, ready to be applied to whatever automobile I choose to get next.

After my posting yesterday, I got to thinking about how I could release myself from the grip of the current life (work) that I’m living. Don’t get me wrong, I love my life, and everything about it is great, but I wonder if I would be happier doing something else, traveling a bit less, living in a different place or perhaps doing some other type of job. I do know that whatever job I’ll be doing after I leave Hitachi is going to be something local.
So what can I do to make myself feel a bit more free? Well, one of the perks of my company is that I get the time off between Christmas and New Year. In addition, I have 3 weeks of vacation that I can use whenever. I figure that I could take a solid 3 weeks off at that point. That would go a long way towards allowing Melissa and I the ability to backpack around Europe. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a few years now, and frankly, now is an ideal time to do it. I wasn’t planning on going up to me parent’s house for the holiday anyway, so this could work. Melissa and I haven’t had a whole lot of time to talk about it, but it’s going to be something we’ll be talking about in detail in the coming weeks.
I’ve been reading a little bit about the “joy” of backpacking, and one of the things that excites me is the non-plan of it all. Just arriving at the train station and deciding where to go from there. Will we get to stay at the nicest places? No, probably not, but I think it’ll give us some flexibility to go and have a journey that will be unlike anything that we’ve ever done. Perhaps this is just me and my kick about going off and doing whatever, but that’s fine. If I can isolate it into a single little trip, that’ll be fine. In the end, we’ll probably end up planning it a bit more or at least charting out options that we can pick from and seeing how it goes from there.
Aside from the thinking about the whole backpacking thing, I got to thinking about what sort of obligations I have to make money. I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have any crazy car debt that I need to pay off, I just have my student loans, which are being worked on. Perhaps after I have paid off all my student loans in 2-3 years, it’ll be time to think about doing something that will enrich my life. Maybe I’ll take 4-5 months and hike the Appalachian Trail, or maybe I’ll go live in Alaska for a year. Who the hell knows, but financial freedom will bring me a lot closer to having the ability to do those sort of things.

This morning, on my drive to Charlotte, I got to thinking about this study that I read not to long ago. It was about a group of scientists that were studying a bunch of monkeys. The monkeys all stayed in a room, and at the top of the room, there was a hook. On the hook, the scientists would place a bunch of bananas, and as expected, the monkeys would go ape shit. One day, the scientists installed a ladder below the bananas, thus allowing the monkeys to climb to the top of the ladder and retrieve the fruit. One day, after the monkeys had gotten used to getting their daily curved bounty via the ladder, a new twist was added. One scientists, undoubtedly smirking wildly, manned a fire hose and blasted any poor monkey that was in search of the sweet treats at the top of the ladder. This blasting continued until the other monkeys couldn’t stand to see it anymore and started to pull any monkey down that started to climb the ladder. This was all well and good and all the monkeys stayed dry and un-blasted. Eventually, it was time to remove a monkey and replace him with another. The new monkey, not knowing what was in store for him, started to climb the ladder. Upon reaching the first rung, the other monkeys in the room were on him like flies on shit, pulling his hairy butt to the ground, screaming something about “that damn fire-hose”….the scientists couldn’t really make it out over the clamor. Anyway, this behavior continued as more and more monkeys were replaced. Eventually, there was not a single monkey in the room that had ever once witnessed the horrific fire-hose blasting, much to the chagrin of the smirking scientist. What’s the purpose of this story you ask? Well, after time, all the monkeys just did what the others were doing. They went about pulling down the new monkeys without even knowing why they were doing it.
In my conversation with Brad, I was talking about wondering what I was going to do when I finally decided to leave my job as an IT consultant. I told Brad that I would love to be able to just up and move to some beach town in Mexico, or be a Sherpa in the Alps or move to a hut on the coast of Brazil. Why not? Well…that’s when I told Brad the monkey story. I guess I question if it’s necessary to have the flat screen TV, the big house, the Volvo, Golden Retriever, yadda yadda yadda, or is it more important to live your life and enjoy it in the present (within reason) and not really worry too much about the future? I don’t know. I am a planning type person by my nature, but the concept of living somewhere fun and exciting and different sounds like an appealing concept.
Melissa and I have been doing Pottery for awhile now (actually stopped for 2-3 months, but we’re back now) and this past Thursday we went to pottery. We got talking to the owners of the studio about how they got it started and it was actually very interesting. Both of them were involved in marketing, one did software marketing in the late 90’s before the tech bubble burst. Eventually, both of them decided that they didn’t want “that” life and said fuck it, lets open a pottery studio. A few years later, they did it and that’s all she wrote.
It’s interesting to see other people that were in a similar kind of environment to Melissa and myself just say fuck it and leave life as they know it and start something new. Am I going to be doing this tomorrow? Nope. Would I like to consider it in the future? It’s possible. Does a solid 6 figure income sound pretty good and comfortable? Yes…decisions decisions decisions.