Last Sunday was our first anniversary (it’s is crazy to think it’s been a year already!).  We spent the weekend at my uncle’s mountain house on Roan Mountain.  It was a nice break from Charlotte.  It was also my first time there since almost six years ago.  I put up a set of pictures from the trip, for all who may care to see them.  One thing I need to comment on is the year old cake that we ate for our anniversary.  Amazingly, it was still moist and tasted good.  Stephanie’s mom did a good job of wrapping it up somehow so that it didn’t get freezer burn.  I was pretty scared before taking the first bite.

Well I thought I had more to say about the trip but I guess not.. enjoy the photos!

We got older but we’re still young

As of yesterday afternoon, I became a member of the working class of America.  It only took the company three and a half weeks to realize I was the best person for the job and offer it to me.  I start Monday morning, and I’m very excited and very nervous.  I can’t believe that after all this time i will actually have a real grown-up job.  I’ve never had one before that I had real responsibilities.  I’ve always been just an intern where what I did didn’t really effect anything else.  Let’s all hope and pray that it goes well and that I like it.  I won’t be doing anything to extreme my first few days, just getting orientated and reading a bunch of SOP’s (standard operating procedures for those who aren’t familiar with the acronym).  Then I get to shadow a veteran employee until I get the hang of what they do exactly.  But I will be getting paid and not sitting home all day eating my self into obesity.  So congrats to me for landing a job.  I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Today when I was logging out of Yahoo Mail there was an ad for a site claiming to offer a free PS3.  Since this was an expensive-looking ad on Yahoo, I figured maybe it was a little less sketchy than, say, an offer to transfer a Nigerian prince’s money out of the country.  So I clicked it, carefully read the terms and conditions.  Most importantly, I saw “Membership is free and you will never be required to pay for evaluation products.”  It just said I needed to evaluate some products- two “top offers”, two “prime offers”, and two “premium offers.”  Obviously, I wasn’t going to give them any kind of information that they could use to charge me (credit card number, bank account number, etc).  But my name, address, and phone number are already in the phone book, so I wasn’t too concerned with giving out that info.

So I signed up.

Then I went to look at these products I needed to “evaluate.”  The first group had things like Columbia House DVD club and Real Rhapsody music download service, where I would have to sign up for free trials.  Which would require giving a credit card number, but no charge if I canceled within like two weeks.  Well I wasn’t interested, but I wanted to see what some of the third-tier products were.  Check this out:

HAHAHA!  In theory, they would reimburse me for my fifteen hundred dollar purchase, making good on their claim that I wouldn’t have to pay for any evaluation products.  I think I’ll pass.

Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara!  We love it so much.  It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it.  We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there.  They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing.. I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure).  They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy.  Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat.  The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.

My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it).  Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns).  The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone.  It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive.  We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get.  Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car.  CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it.  Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up.  I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)

So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours).  We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell.  The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet.  We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).

I took some pictures of the car, be sure to check them out!

Since everyone else is talking about Wii, I thought I’d weigh in.  I guess I’m a member of the group Tycho described as “people who like it because they are ‘above the fray,’” but really I think it is because I never liked “Revolution” all that much to begin with.  I’ve been worried that they were going to turn the code name into the official name, as they did with the Nintendo DS (which I still think is a pretty boring name).

When I first saw it I didn’t like it because I didn’t know how to pronounce it (my first guess was “wee-eye”, like in radii).  Once I got used to automatically thinking “we,” it started to grow on me.  I think a year from now no one will really have a problem with the name.  I mean, really, didn’t you think “iPod” was a dumb name the first time you heard it?  But it seems to have worked for them and no one really questions it now.

The thing that does bother me is the grammar.  Reading a sentence that begins “Wii is” just makes me want to hit someone with a third grade English book.  The term is likewise distasteful as a direct object: “It’s about Wii.”  I naturally want to say “It’s about Uus” or something.

One last thing- I’m going to call the controller the “wiimote.”  I haven’t seen anyone say that in any of the five or six news/blog posts I’ve read about the topic.  I’m so clever.