Corridor 9

After a long day in bed, and praying to the porcelain god more than a few times, I’m finally feeling much more like myself today. Yesterday was a long and painful day. I awoke around 2:30 in the morning yesterday with a bit of a pain in my stomach. I couldn’t fall back to sleep so I went to lay on the couch. Around 5:30, with little to no sleep, I finally realized that it was futile for me to try to go to work and called in sick a while later.

This was indeed the best option for me as I started ralphing about 20 minutes after I called in. Unfortunately I won’t be able to receive any call-backs this pay period, but there was no way I would have been able to perform if we had a fire. I ended up ralphing 2 more times throughout the day. It’s amazing how much better you can feel after such an awful experience.

I’m doing much better today. I awoke at 10:30 and didn’t feel like I had been sick at all the previous day. I even lost 5 lbs! WOOHOO! I guess the pain and agony was worth it.

I was looking at C9 lately and thought that it was getting a little cluttered. I enjoy the ability to read a complete blog article from the home page, but when I realized that C9 had a good deal of longer posts I thought it was getting to be too big. I have included a new plugin that will hopefully shrink the page a bit. This will not stop you from seeing the entire post, you’ll simply have to click on the more link below.

It’s my hope that this will make the page grow shorter over time. I could simply have reduced the number of posts on the home page. However, I thought that it would be better to have more posts. This way when a search engine scans my page, it will get a listing of 20 postings instead of the default 10.

If anyone has any problems with this plugin, please let me know so I can get them straightened out. Thanks!

UPDATE: This item has been REMOVED. I didn’t care for what it was doing to my posts.

Dad and I have decided to take a trip to the Grand Canyon this March. We were going to try and get onto another permit located at TheBackpacker.com but were unable to due to the demand, so we’ve decided to apply for our own permit. I’ll know in a week or so if we have been approved. I’ve decided to forgo the snow trip this month. Instead, I’m going to take a trip MLK weekend down to the souther end of the Cumberland Trail. I figured it would let me get in a bit of cold weather camping without the hassle of getting my own group together for the smokies. I’m going to take a bit more time this year to properly plan a winter camping trip.

Thanks to the change I had gathered over the years on my jar, I was able to purchase a few more supplies for my upcoming trips.During our trip to Louisville yesterday to pick up Abby, I stopped at Outdoor World to get some new The North Face Adrenaline hiking boots. I’ve been wearing them all day today and they feel so nice. They are a little on the warm side, but my feet still feel very comfortable. I’ll post an Owner Review of them when I’ve had enough time to form a report.

Happy Birthday Jesus!

May the Lord keep all those we love safe throughout their travels. Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone has a safe Christmas Eve tomorrow.

WOOHOO!!!!

As I’ve noted in the previous blogs, I’ve become a member of quite a few newsgroups. Last week I finally got tired of checking the Yahoo! groups page a dozen times a day and decided it was time to setup Outlook and start filtering my groups and emails through one place.

Innitial setup was easy as outlook was already installed. I quickly setup my default Charter account. Even though I rarely use that account, I figured it would be good to have access to all mailboxes from one application. Getting Gmail.com setup was a bit harder. The directions on Gmail’s site were right on, but when you ran a test, it would always fail. I tried just enabling the account and things ran perfect after that.

Yahoo was a bit more of a pain though. Because Yahoo thinks they are big stuff, they have made getting your email via pop3 a paid feature. I myself am not going to pay, so I had to find a work around. I started looking around online and found Ypops! This is a gateway that allows downloading of your Yahoo mail through Outlook, or any other email client. It works like a charm too.

Now I just have to sit back and let my emails come to me instead of having to check 5 different accounts at various times during the day.

Since I’m using Outlook for all my email activities, I figured it would be good to use it to sync my phone with. I had to download a new version of the Palm software, but setup was a breeze! now I can do all my phone and email activities through Outlook.

Why is it that organizations like the ACLU, whose purpose is for the advancement of civil liberties, neglect the civil liberties of Christians so often. They want to take God out of the schools and the government. What about the civil liberties of Christians who want God in our schools, and want our leaders to have a strong Christian foundation. With statistics today showing that 83% of Americans as Christian, why is it that the minority of the population is getting the majority of the say-so in regards to when, how, and where Christ and Christian principles are displayed or practiced. Seems to me that our rights as the majority simply don’t matter anymore.

Good Morning All!

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve been up since 4:45 this morning. I thought I’d post a bit.

I’m at the fire station today, and hope that my day goes easy and quiet. I’d like to sleep all day, but I’m not sure thats going to happen today. Maybe all the white shirts will be off today. That would be nice.

I’m looking forward to Christmas, and only have a few more presents to buy. I think I can get this done on thursday…. I hope.

Anyway, I’m rather tired right now, and wish I could get back to sleep, so I’m sure this is a bit jumbled. God Bless All!

Well.. the last few days have been exceptionally busy. After finally leaving work on saturday morning, we ended up going Christmas shopping all day long. We were out till almost 11 pm. When we finally got back I decided it would be a good idea to setup the bunk beds. This was a poor planning decision on my part as I thought it would only take about 30-45 minutes. It ended up taking over 2.5 hours! We finally made it to bed at 1:45 in the morning.

Sunday was filled with running around. After church, we went to mom & dad’s house for a birthday celebration for Kristie. Then we had to run to Sullivan because Kendall was in a Christmas program at the church. All in all it was a long, tiring day.

Woohoo…. a number of years ago today, Kristie was born. Happy Birthday Dear!

Well, I’m nearing the end of my stay at the MFD asylum. Not only have I been on restriction to the same building for the last 57 hours, most of the time has been spent doing absolutely nothing. I’ve surfed the web, slept, ate, slept some more, ate some more, read email, and finished articles for BGT.org.

Yesterday I submitted my second Owner Review to BGT. This completes the pre-testing phase of my requirements. As soon as an editor takes a look at my post and authorizes it for upload, I will be able to apply to test gear. BGT is currently on a break due to the Christmas holiday season. The editors aren’t required to edit anything prior to January 3, 2006. I can still hope that this gets done a bit sooner though as I’d really like to get my hands on some winter gear.

I found a site dedicated to podcasting about the outdoors. One of their episodes even talks to the founder of BGT. Take a look at WildeBeat.net or just click on the Testing Backpack Gear Podcast from show #3. It should play in Windoze Media Player, and isn’t but 7 or 8 minutes long.

Bored out of my mind. Hope this 72 hour stretch goes quickly!!!

I’ve just finished my second Owner Review for BackpackGearTest.org. I’m hoping to start testing equipment soon. I’m sure there will be some winter gear that I can test on my expedition in February. The process in itself isn’t all that hard, but it sure is time consuming. I know I hated writing reports in high school…. .maybe if the teachers gave out free gear it would have been more worthwile for me to receive good grades.

I’m also stuck at work till saturday morning. This isn’t necessarailly a bad thing as Kristie’s birthday is on Saturday. I would hate for her to have to get used to me working holidays and special occations this soon after we’re married.

Kendall and Abby’s bed will be here tomorrow. I’m hoping that I can get off work for the 30 minutes it will take them to deliver it. I don’t plan on having them set it up, as it would be easier for me to set this up myself saturday. That way I know every piece is there, put on correctly, and isn’t all scratched up.

I’m thinking about changing my itinerary for the February trip to the Smokies. I’ve found some information at Eastern Mountaineering School that has lead me to look into a mountaineering survival class instead. I thought that the class would be the best of both worlds. It would allow me to prepare for some of the more extreme hikes I’d like to do out west, and would allow me to get my snow fix in as well. I think it would be quite fun as well as being very informative Now if I can just find a way to come up with the money……

Hmmm…. seems to me my birthday is in February. What a wonderful coincidence

Oh, my aching back!

After 2 complete days of cleaning, we can now declare the house a home. The only 2 things I have left to do are remove the garbage from the garage, and relocate my highboy tool box here. I must say that I’m not used to working this much, and it is shown in the way my back and head are hurting me right now.

I guess it’s all worth is though as now we won’t have to do this again till our next move.

Well… I thought we had the house clean today, unfortunately that was just a pipe dream. We had straightened up some of the house the past few days in an effort to try and turn the house into a home. Unfortunately, we hit a big stumbling block today.

The garage has always been a disaster area. It looks like someone threw boxes in there and conjured up a hurricane to stir things around a bit. We started working on the back bedrooms to get them in order as my plan was to get everything in the house cleaned up, then conquer the garage. Kristie brought up a good suggestion though. She said that we should clean the garage, put everything that is going in to the house in its respective rooms, then totally clean the garage. This will prevent us from cleaning up the house, then having to find new places to put the stuff we pulled out of the garage. Continue Reading »

Yesterday was quite eventful. After getting off work in the morning, I ended up taking Kristie to work cause the roads were so bad. I then tried to come home and work on her computer for a while, but as the weather worsened I needed to go pick her up from work early. No peace for me. I did however get most of her computer done and am in the process of finishing it up today.

Last night, right as Kristie and I were sitting down to watch a movie and eat some dinner, mom called. I could tell something was up by the tone of her voice and how she was dragging out the conversation. Usually if she needs something she’s straight and to the point, but not last night. It turns out she was calling to get my advice about something.

Apparently she fell the night before, and cracked a rib! She should have gone to the hospital as soon as it happened. She should have gone to the hospital as soon as dad suggested it. She should have gone to the hospital earlier yesterday when she had the chance… but NOOOooo. She waited till later that night to call me. She didn’t even tell Kristie about it when they talked on Wednesday night. She knew Kristie would have told me, and I would have left work to take her then.

Needless to say I kind of pressured her into going to the hospital. It’s one of the perks of being a son and not a husband. I can be a pain in the arse as much as I need and she’ll always love me, can’t make me sleep on the couch, and I don’t have to listen to the constant nagging as dad would if he would have been as “persuasive” as I was.

We ended up staying there for about 3 hours due to the majority of car wrecks that happened during the storm. The Doctor confirmed that the rib had a minor crack, and gave her some medicine for pain, along with directions on how to stabilize her side to keep it from hurting throughout the day.

All in all, it was a trip well worth taking. I’m glad she went, even if it wasn’t as serious as we’d though.

Last night was quite active thanks to Todd talking one up.
I’m by no means superstitious, but in the line of work we are in, there are just certain things you don’t say or talk about. One of those is the possibility of having a fire later on in the day. However, seeing as how he’s an engineer and all he has to do is stand by the truck, Todd decided to shoot his mouth off yesterday morning by saying “Gee, as cold as it is we’re liable to have a something today.” NO NO NO!!!! You don’t elude to the fact you may work, this brings about a certainty that it will happen. Just like fire alarms happen in 3’s, it you talk about it, it will happen.

Sure enough, about 8:30 we had a nice little house fire off Park Avenue. Fortunately, everyone made it out safe, but most of the building had significant smoke damage. Just a simple reminder to not only be careful what you wish for, but be careful what you say as well.

Two things happened today that were completely unusual.
I didn’t think I would see the two categories listed above together in the same post. In addition, I never thought there would be a circle of guys at the fire department praying together!

This morning, a firefighter off another shift said they had talked with one of our engineers about meeting daily to have prayer before the leaving shift goes home and the arriving shift starts working on daily cleanup. One of the officers that works here has a family member that isn’t doing so well right now in the hospital, so we thought today would probably be a good time to start. Less than 2 years ago I could never have seen 12 of us joining hands, praying in unity, but God works in mysterious ways. It’s a positive move in a department that has seen so much negativity over the past few years. If it’s in God’s plan though, it will happen!

I’ve added a new section to the sidebar in place of the weather segment. I’ve started doing reviews of outdoor gear and decided I’d like to have a local copy on C9. I’ll be posting a number of various articles here for your viewing enjoyment.