Ooops, I guess that I never got around to writing anything during the week last week but I did definitely keep myself busy! The week's fly by when they are busy and you've got to like them like that, so lets hope that the upcoming one goes by just as quick.
Not too much happening on this end of the world and didn't end up doing too much this weekend, I watched SWAT on pay-per-view on Friday night which was pretty good but definitely a guy flick. I also watched Bad Boys II last night and that is a great movie - if you haven't seen it yet I'd rent it tomorrow. And it has been raining here for like the past two weeks and it finally cleared up on Friday afternoon and we saw some sun, and then this weekend was beautiful both days - think that it was near 70' today! My major accomplishment for the weekend was two fold, first I dropped Montie off for his haircut Saturday morning (thinking that it's been like 4 months since his last one and was defnitely overdue), then went to Home Depot in town and picked up some bags of mulch for my front planters. And man, I've always used pine bark before but after a while they look like crap so this time I used some red colored stuff and what a difference it makes - sets off the bushes nicely and even goes well with the brick of the house. Here is a before and after pic of my project and I think that you'll see what I mean .......
And it's definitely getting closer to spring too and it should be here within another month or so. The sun comes up earlier in the morning and sets later in the day - now I just have to wait for my grass to wake up and my weekends will then be complete. And that reminds me, I've been watching lawn mower prices since last fall at Sears (the bestest place to buy a mower) and they are the same now that they were then :( I'm pretty picky when it comes to them so there are only like two that I'd even consider - they have to be self propelled and at least 6 hp with side discharge and they don't make too many like that any more. I even looked at Home Depot yesterday and they had nothing like I wanted so I didn't even think about buying one there. But then I was in my garage yesterday and looked at my old mower and the only thing that is wrong with it is that the self propeller doesn't work any more but the engine runs fine - so I decided that I'd try and find someone to fix it before I bought a brand new one ....... might even be able to get another year out of the thing.
And on my cell phone issues I did end up having to sell my phone to the person that won the auction on E-Bay that I had going so I shipped that off to her last week and then bought another one in an auction again on E-Bay for $25 that I am going to use instead of my old startac ....... so I sold one for $150 and bought one for $25, still didn't come out ahead though due to what the first one cost me. Now I just have to get my new one and hope that Cingular can make it work on their network - or I don't know what I'll do if it doesn't work.
I guess that's my weekend (and week) in a nutshell, still hanging in there and doing well and I hope that you are too. Drop me a line if you have a chance - and until we talk again take care and stay happy, k :?)
Hello again on another Sunday night ..... seems like I never find the time to write any other time :| And I just got back from a trip to San Antonio, TX yesterday - left here early Tuesday morning and left there for home early morning on Saturday. It was a good trip, great weather and near 80's each day - and I'm thinking that the weather we had there came here like three or four days later as it's the same here now ....... beautiful (and spring is in the air!). Neat hotel too, historic building and these wild birds running all around the hotel grounds, the peacocks were beautiful (and such hams at it too!).
The biggest challenge of my trip was in coming home yesterday morning and had a 6:30am flight and got up fine and left the hotel at 5:15am in plenty of time to catch my flight. But five minutes after I got out of the taxi I realized that my cell phone must have fallen out of my side pocket while I was in the cab so I scrambled and made some calls to the taxi office but they were no help at all. Then I called my phone and let it ring, no one answered and it went to voice mail. I hung outside for another half hour hoping that the guy would show up but he didn't and I had to get to the gate to catch my flight. The problem was that there was a huge line for the security checkpoint and it took me a lot longer than I had imagined, at least 30 minutes and I was still in line 10 minutes before my flight was due to take off. They were calling my name for final call and finally I got some of those in front of me to let me go first, I rushed through the screener and friggen forgot to take my laptop out of my bag! That really messed me up as then they had to test it for bomb residue (or whatever they are looking for), then rescreen it which took me another 10 minutes ....... I was freaking out pretty good. Oh, and just as I was about to the front of the line my taxi guy showed up and somehow managed to give me my phone back - thank you very much and here is a nice tip! And God must have been with me as my gate was right down from the check point so I caught my flight with like 37 seconds left to spare. Not a fun way to start out my day - that's for dang sure!
And I was also suppose to fly from San Antonio to Memphis, back to Dallas and then here to PCB but the Northwest guy was really nice and hooked me up with a flight to here straight from Memphis so I got home like 2 hours early and was here by 11:30am. I went and picked up the boy and then I guess that I didn't do squat the rest of the day ...... and today wasn't much more productive so let's hope I get back in the mood tomorrow.
I took a couple of pictures while I was in San Antonio, we went and checked out about six hotels that are our major competitors. While we were out we walked by the Alamo and here is a pic of the famous building - click
here to have a look although it doesn't look much different from all of the other old building that they have in that town. And we were on our way back to our hotel after visiting the other hotels and we took the scenic route - click
here to see us taking the river walk home. It's a really neat downtown and haven't seen too many other cities like it - there is so much to do minutes from the hotel and it was a really cool city too. I begin working for the Marriott full time starting tomorrow, well I started a few weeks ago but now that their Marriott Cluster person is out of the picture it's all mine ...... and I'm ready for it too!
Oh, and another neat part of their history is that they were home to the 1968 World's Fair and they turned that location into a park - and they have this space needle thing in the center of it that you can ride up to the top ....... I didn't do it but would have loved to. I would have also liked to have taken the tour of the river by boat where you get to see where everything is located - so the next time I go I'll be sure to do that. Here is another picture of the Hemisfair Park ...... pretty cool huh :?)
And I guess that's about it for another day - maybe I'll have a chance to write some more during the week but we'll have to see ....... I kind of think that it's going to be a busy kind of week. Oh, and I also decided that my cell phone wasn't all that it cracked up to be and isn't worth paying $40 a month for the next year so I cancelled it and went back to my old prepay account with Cingular - so disregard the phone number and e-mail address in my previous note. I also closed my auction on E-Bay yesterday selling my other new phone and made $40 more than the minimum that I wanted, now I just have to see if I can talk them out of buying it so that I can keep it! That's it - I hope the sun is shining where you are and that you have a GREAT week!
Here it is on another Sunday night all ready for another new week to begin. The house is clean and the clothes are washed, groceries are bought and I'm ready for it. It's been raining here for at least the last seven days, think that they said that we got about 5" of rain in that time period and it really rained over the weekend and created some heck of big puddles around here. At least today was the first day that it didn't rain, I thought that they said that we might even see some sunshine but that didn't happen, it was wicked windy out and cooler tonight too.
So, with the weather being like that of course I didn't wanna go outside, so I think that I messed around with my computer just about all day yesterday. My brother sent me the install disks for Office 2003 and got them yesterday - then after I installed them I had to customize it to my liking and I'm really liking Outlook's improvements the best ...... looks just like Windows XP with those cool colors and works even better on our network too ....... I think that I'm really going to like working with it. I did have to figure out how to get my Palm Pilot to work with it though and then that took me a couple of hours and then also got my palm to work on my laptop too, I spent hours just waiting for the computer to do its thing. My bro also sent me like five other programs but I haven't installed any of them yet - I can only learn so many in one day.
My other biggest thing that is going on is that I bought a cell phone from Sprint PCS and got that on Friday and it's the coolest phone that I've seen yet. I can browse the internet and check my e-mail as much as I want and I'll probably use it for that more than I use the phone part of it. I ended up messing it up though by changing my user name like three times before I found one that I was happy with and I'm still trying to get them to get it back working again and have been since yesterday morning ....... guess my last change got stuck in one of the servers or something and they have to figure out how to fix it. The cool part is that I can forward my work e-mail to my phone when I am out of the office and read it as it comes in, so I really need to get it fixed before I am traveling again. Oh, and my address on my phone is
sahanno@sprintpcs.com and my new cell # is (850) 276-9501. Oh, and the phone that I bought was a PCS Vision Phone Samsung VI660 and you can take a look at it by clicking
here.
I was also messing around with selling the cingular phone that I bought like a month and a half ago as I was really unhappy with them and decided to switch. I thought that I'd try and see if I could sell it on E-Bay so I put it up on auction yesterday too, one of my first. I've only had one bid so far and it was for half of the minimum price that I was looking for, so I'll give it a few days and see how it goes. I don't remember the link for the auction or I'd put it up here, but it wasn't one of my better marketing efforts.
The last thing that I've got going on is that I am going to hook up with Charles Schwab investors and see if they can make me any more than the .8% that my bank is getting me. They do a review of what I've got and then recommend what I should be doing so it'll be interesting to see what they come up with. I'll let you know in six months how it goes, I just hope to hang on to what I have and come out at least slightly ahead.
I guess that's it for another day, may your Monday be a sunny one and we'll take it from there! Oh, and that reminds me that tomorrow is President's Day so some of you might even have the day off ...... I kind of do but my hotels don't so that means that I don't either. Lots of stuff to do though - so at least I'm keeping myself busy for now. Talk with you soon - I also hope that you had a wonderful Valentine's Day too :)
Well, here we are on another Sunday night, ready for another new week to begin. I didn't do all that much once again this weekend but did end up watching the Bartek Beasts, that's Baldwin, Shadow and Ole Yeller ........ her actual name is Bear and she must be like 20 years old :) I had watched them over New Year's Weekend while the family went to Orlando and they were a little easier this time, I think that their 90 pound pup is even starting to like me. But it gets kind of old driving over their three times a day and walking them - so I am glad that they got home this evening and my job is done. I even took Montie over there with me yesterday afternoon and he was freaking out and I think that he thought that he was staying as he stayed with them once when I went to Atlanta but he was much better once he found out that he was coming home with me.
Sunny and cold here though, 30's at night and 60's during the day. I still can't do too much outside these days as the lawn is dormant other than picking up a pine cone or 20 - seems like those things never stop falling. I also sent a friend's dvd's back to her that I have had for at least the last four months as I never get to the post office when they are open but that is all behind me now. I didn't realize it but you can buy postage on line and print it on your printer, slap it on the package and drop it off at the parcel drop in the lobby at the post office. I even bought a postage scale tonight at Wally World as the last few times that I sent stuff I had to use my bathroom scale - so now I can pretty much ship anything any time night or day ....... not that I ship all that much but it certainly does make it easy! If you ever want to use it - just click
here and bookmark it - and you can even leave it for your postman to pick up on their regular schedule.
Other than that not too much is going on these days, working on completing a budget for one of my properties and still trying to schedule a trip to San Antonio sometime in the near future. I spent most of Friday doing the budget and have most of it complete - now I just need to transfer it to the property for them to add some final touches. Finishing up on completing my taxes too - I used H&R Block on-line once again and I am having them check it before I file which should be in the next couple of days. The cool thing about that is that I printed out the last three years worth of returns in .pdf format and saved them that way, I like having it all in one place.
I guess that's about it for another day, I hope that all is well in your world and if you have a chance, drop me a line when you can. Otherwise I'll talk with you again sometime soon - may your Monday be a pleasant one :)
Evening and Happy Super Bowl Sunday, I didn't even watch the thing. It's been a pretty wet and cold weekend around these parts but I don't think that it rained anywhere near what they were saying that it was going to. I was in Tampa all last week and drove down there last Sunday night and then drove back on Thursday - one heck of a long and boring drive at that! I went down and visited my new hotel it's a nice hotel, small but tall and the people are great, now all I've got to do is learn how to use their new systems!
And I didn't do all too much around here this weekend, watched Finding Nemo on Friday night which was a really good movie (well kind of) and then watched Once Upon a Time in Mexico last night and that one really didn't float my boat, too much spanish speaking to even know what the heck was going on! Also on Saturday I went back to Office Depot and returned my modem for my Palm Pilot - and instead of buying a printer cartridge I ended up getting a Logitech webcam with zoom. You can check it out
here, I'm not real happy with it though and think that my old Intel takes a better picture. The good part is that it has a built in microphone and face tracking so if I ever do end up using it for video conferencing it works better than my old one for that. I also bought a stack of DVD+R dvd's - but then realized that I need DVD+RW in order for them to work on my dvd recorder but I probably won't return them at this point. I also washed all of the squashed bugs off of my front bumper and windshield on Saturday and luckily most of them came off I think.
I ended up grilling out tonight as one of my friends got me a case of Omaha Steaks and a box of twice baked potatoes for my birthday and this was the first chance that I had to try any of them - and they were TOTALLY awesomely delicous - that won't be the last one that I eat of them! And I guess not much else, still challenged trying to get up and running with my new hotels but I guess that will come in time, still not liking this change thing too awfully much. At least I'm home again for the week so at least I should be able to get some work done - like the two budgets that are due within the next two weeks that I haven't even started :( Have a great beginning to another new month and drop me a line if you ever have the chance. Good night for now and I'll talk with you soon.
