March 29, 2003 Wow I'm good at journaling - a whole 19 months since my last entry. Good thing I'm not Catholic I guess - confessional wouldn't be that helpful for me :( Gosh a lot has happened in this timeframe - let me try to catch up to everything. December 2001 - Shannon and I seperated. In retrospect a good thing though horribly difficult to go through. I met Ann online a few days later - the Lord works in marvelous ways - always a new door opening up somewhere. April 2002 - went to visit Ann and a few other friends in Chicago - had a marvelous time. Went to Willow Creek to church - Wow! May 2002 - Ann came to visit me in Omaha - went to the zoo and had supper with Jason and Debbie in the Old Market - also ran across Shelley and Gage down there (was a bit nerve wracking). September 2002, Sean's home life sort of self distructed so he came to live with me until he's out of high school - has had its ups and downs but all in all has been a pleasure - he's a wonderful kid. October 2002 - my Birthday!! Woohoo! November 2002, Ann came to visit for a while to sort of recoup from not feeling well - ended up staying :) She and I are now engaged!! (January 2003). No we haven't set a date yet - no we don't have a ring yet - quit pushing!! *laffs*. She is the most incredible woman and I'm so fortunate to have her in my life. What a treasure. God has truly blessed me. I'll try to journal better in the future!! (yeah right)
September 12, 2001 We awake this morning to find that the images were not from some horrible nightmare but we indeed real. We have once again heroes in America - they are working the ruins trying to find their own friends and neighbors. Woe to those who did this....
August 21, 2001 Not a very good day....my dog Alley that we have had for nearly 10 years died today. We got her when she was nearly two - so a fairly normal lifespan I guess but that doesn't make it any easier. She went to sleep outside on the lawn today and just didn't wake up. We have to take her to the vet tomorrow to have her cremated...and it's odd to have her in the house now looking so peaceful as if any moment she should be getting up to nuzzle me to pet her. I'm gonna miss her a lot.
August 8, 2001 Wow what a busy two weeks but we've been getting so very much done at work. Linux to Netware authentication is working fairly well so that our users have fewer userids and passwords to remember. Have a few minor bugs to work out yet but nonetheless. Josh and I took pictures of a huge moth today on a light by the Carhart Science building - very very cool. I'm feeling a major urge to go diving again - gonna have to get ahold of Ed and see if anyone is diving - not that I have a free weekend anytime soon so perhaps it is irrelevant.
July 31, 2001 Ok - so I'm not doing too terribly well on the whole journal thing. Need to work on that I guess. Oh well. The last two weeks has been rather busy with catching up on work. Oh - the web server is now running on an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.113 Ghz machine so the pictures render much much better now - much faster. I need to start work (hopefully this weekend if I can get some time) on PHPix doing some improvements I promised the author I would help with and at least having a fast machine is some incentive. I've been doing a lot of machine rebuilds for folks lately that were having computer problems - so all in all I've installed 4 of these beasty processors in the last 4 days. Very cool heat sinks - pictures coming soon. Got my Advanced Open Water Certification card in the mail the other day *evil excited grins*. Very very cool - has a pictures of a small cetacea on the front (that's a dophin in particular). School starts in 21 days - I'm not really ready yet but I will be soon. Very exciting things that we are doing at work - lots of new services for users that I'm very excited about. Church is fun as well - doing lots of neat things with the "Seven" service and working on an LCD projector proposal for church as well that is taking up quite a bit of time. Well - that's my life for now - I'll try to do more frequent updates in the future....
July 16, 2001 I'm back! Vacation was wonderful, Cancun was as relaxing as ever and the diving was absolutely superb. We had 6 dives, got Advanced Open Water Certified, started on 7 different specialties (Deep Diving, Navigation, Drift Diving, Underwater Photography, Underwater Naturalist, Night Diving and Boat Diving). We had wonderful meals all week long. Shannon and I swam with dolphins at Xcaret (a Mexican national park near Cancun) (yes, Shannon swam with dolphins!!). We caught a few days of sun by the pool, a little bit of happy hour at the swim up bar and of course, the most important thing by far, I got lots of Key Lime Pie. Hopefully I'll get pictures up tonight of all of the fun stuff. They won't be annotated right away but that will be coming in the next day or two (Shelley). Unfortunately I attracted the wrath of Montezuma right before we left on Saturday morning which made the trip home less than enjoyable, in combination with a full customs inspection (polite but incredibly thorough) and very very nearly missing our connecting flight to Omaha (the very nice man had them reopen the plane door for us without tickets). Nonetheless a fantastic week....
July 4, 2001 Happy fourth of July!!! Wow - I've not been exactly sterling in the daily update thing have I? Oh well - the explaination - a very very busy week with lots of preperation for Installation services for the new senior pastor at Our Savior's and actually doing those services on Sunday as well as our first three Open Water Certification dives on Saturday and the last one on Tuesday (pictures). Monday night was Shelley's birthday (for those 5 of you in the world that she didn't tell ahead of time). We all went to the Tuscan grill here in Wayne to eat and give her her gifts. Wow - what an incredibly bad dining experience. Notice the nice WHOLE catfish that I have there. I ordered a fried catfish fillet - not sure how the fillet grew a tail and backbone but hey - I'm not a fish expert. Anyway - it was the source of good fodder for lots of laughs. Also got to play disc on Monday (Yea!!) and we had a really good game though it was rather hot and humid again. Tuesday morning early we had a shock as lightening hit Grandma's old house and it burned badly - not to the ground - but nonetheless badly damaged. Thank God no one was living there at the time. I hope to add a guestbook and some sort of automated e-mail based journal software to the website tonight - we'll see how far I get. Also using Dreamweaver now to edit pages instead of Word (OK OK - just stop the flames already - I know). Very nice so far - though honestly I know next to nothing about editing HTML and what makes a good editor. In a little while we are heading next door to a block party - the first ever in the neighborhood. Friday we leave for Cancun!!!! I'm very excited :)
June 26, 2001 Got PHPix fixed today – now very impressed with the software. Thanks to Netscape for actually providing a helpful error message that means something. There are times when IE just sucks rocks. Looks like the Scuba diving classes are back on schedule so that Gage (Shannon (wife)’s sister Shelley’s boyfriend) and I can get our PADI Open Water Certifications done in time before we leave for Cancun to get our Advanced Open Water Certification classes down there. He and I are just a bit excited about all of that. Went running again this morning with Chad – in a thunderstorm – very fun. Had a nasty nasty storm last night – small hail and lots of wind and rain. Had to have a 4 in the morning cuddle session with frightened family members, including the two dogs. Between that and taking Tylenol Cold medicine right before bed I’m just a big groggy tonight (never ever take Tylenol Cold/Sinus (daytime) medicine right before bed…sheesh…can you say jittery dreams?
June 25, 2001 Today we start the journal. Wow – auspicious eh? Got some photo album software put on obi-lan to organize my photographs. Needs some work – either the installation or the software itself – not sure yet but I’ll look at it in the near future or perhaps scrap it and write my own. Also started working out again today. I am bound and determined to get in better shape this time. All I can say was that it was very very warm and windy playing disc tonight…yipes.
