I changed my mind. That's what women do.

I kept the Blackberry. I'm not sure why.

I still have time to take it back if I want, but it is kind of convenient.

Although there are numerous features that I disabled because I will never use them.

And now I have even more reason to complain about people forwarding emails.

It's bad enough to receive 42 silly poems and jokes every day. (Which I rarely read, by the way, so if you are someone who sends them, you are wasting your time and mine. Unless it's really short, or something political, in which case I will try to read it if I can find the time.)

But if you want to be sure that I will not read your email, forward it, requiring me to scroll through the hundreds of email addresses it was forwarded to before me.

That's annoying on the computer. It's torture on a Blackberry.

IT'S SIMPLE TO COPY AND PASTE!!! TRY IT!!

And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop sending me those email angels or pictures of Jesus that tell me I am going to burn in hell if I don't forward them.

Please. Just stop.

Anyone want to help me move?

We still aren't finished moving. Except for the furniture that I hired movers for, I've done it all by myself.

So I spent the weekend slacking off.

I was so excited yesterday when my husband said he was going to the old house to get some stuff. Finally, I was going to get some help.

He came back a few minutes later, with some fishing poles and a bait bucket.

I'm pretty sure that he could have fit more than that into the truck.

And he keeps talking about how stressful moving is. I don't see where it has caused any inconvenience for him whatsoever. He left the old house one morning, and showed up at the new one that evening. His bed was made and the cable was hooked up. What more could he ask for?

Maybe he's stressed because he can't find his way home anymore. I was following him the other day, and he turned on our old street. I had to call him and remind him that we didn't live there anymore.

Bye Bye, Blackberry

During one of my husband's temper tantrums last week, he destroyed yet another cell phone. It's really a shame when a grown man can't control himself enough to avoid breaking things when he's pissed. I'm being conservative when I estimate that he's probably destroyed 10 phones in the 10 years that I've know him. Thankfully, it usually happens while he is working, so I don't have to see it. But I always get to see the results. This time, the phone looks like it was hit by a semi. I can't imagine what he did to it, and I really don't want to know.

The last couple of times, I've refused to go get him a new phone, but made him do it himself instead. Why should I be burdened with replacing something that he destroyed on purpose? However, today I did go to the Alltel store and get him a Blackberry.

In case you aren't aware of this, we own a commercial pool service and repair company. We have some large country clubs with high-tech equipment on their pools, and he gets email updates when there is a problem with chemicals, etc. He's able to look at the chemical readings and decide what needs to be done to correct any imbalance. Apparently, it's easier to check email from a Blackberry than a regular cell phone. I didn't know that until recently. (Even though I do have an iPod now, I'm apparently still way behind technologically.)

For those of you who are as clueless as I was until this morning, a Blackberry is basically a phone that is a computer, as well. As a matter of fact, I guess it could also be considered a camera, address book, notepad, GPS navigator....I'm really not sure if there is anything that it doesn't do. It even has a few features that I'm too scared to try.

Anyhow, as soon as I got home and tried to use this thing, I knew he would hate it. Never mind that web surfing is painfully slow. He probably wouldn't do anything other than make calls and check email with it anyway. But the keys are so small that even I can barely use them. Dialing out on it is difficult, and his fingers are larger than mine. It's hard to hit one key without hitting two others next to it. For him, that's grounds for smashing it into a thousand tiny pieces. And he doesn't need another excuse to do that.

I have been told that I can have this thing if I want it. But I don't think I do. I have always said that I don't need my phone to take pictures or video. I don't need any games. I don't need a calculator. I don't need any special ring tones. And I definitely don't need internet or email access on my phone. I just want my phone to be a phone. Is that wrong?

When I'm home or at our store, I have to be glued to my computer. And I'm rarely away from one or the other of those places for more than a couple of hours. Gosh, I think I'd rather NOT have to deal with email during that time. Am I going to pay $50 a month to be harassed by our customers while I'm trying to take an hour break by the pool?

I think not.

I should probably start packing, huh?

About six different times, I tried to meet with the lady who owns the townhouse we are supposed to be renting. Every time, she had a reason that she wasn't available. One day last week, I even drove to the townhouse to meet her husband/boyfriend/business partner/whatever (that's another story), and he didn't have the lease ready. Finally, on Friday, I told her that we had to get it done this weekend, considering that we need to start moving on the 15th. She told me to call her back that evening and we would make arrangements. I called her a couple of times that night, and twice on Saturday. I couldn't get in touch with her. I was pretty sure we were going to have to start all over and try to find somewhere to live. Finally, she called me Sunday and we met them last night.

After all of the aggravation, I was expecting to hate this woman, but I really like her. She's a nurse, like me. She hates it and no longer practices, like me. She used to work in the neonatal ICU, just like me. And she's a conservative and willing to vote for anyone she has to in order to keep Obama out of the White House. So you know she must be very intelligent, like me. ;)

Unless you are a liberal. Then we are both racists. *eyeroll*

But most of all, when she found out my age, she was shocked and said that I look 28!! So now I LOVE her!

Anyway, we signed our lease. And she wants to sell us the townhouse, so we're going to talk to her about that in a couple of months.

I love the townhouse. Even though it's not right on the water, there's a community dock just a short walk away, and we can see the drawbridge and intracoastal waterway from the porch on the second and third levels. But the main reason I want to buy it is because we haven't even heard on the house we made the offer on yet, but we have to move now, and I'm tired of being a nomad. I don't think I'd want to move again in 6 months if someone gave us a house.

Time wasted

My mobile broadband card has been going dormant and disconnecting me for a couple of weeks now. It is important that I am able to go online from our new retail store, so that I can remotely connect to my home PC and do my work from there. So, I spent an hour in the Alltel store today. I ended up with an upgraded version of the card, that connects using the USB port rather than the express card slot. It connects using EVDO Rev-A, which is supposedly faster than what I had before. The sales rep also upgraded the PRL. It's always nice to have your PRL upgraded. And now that you are impressed at how techie I am, let me tell you that I don't completely understand what most of that means. All I know is that now I can connect to the internet for more than 3 minutes at a time. On the other hand, I wasted the 2 full days that Captain Chaos is in school, by spending hours on the phone with Alltel and in their store. So I got no work done.

As if that wasn't enough, I got back to our retail store and decided to find more excuses not to work.

So I cleaned out and reorganized my wallet.

Now I have a stack of unfinished paperwork, but my credit cards are in alphabetical order.

And I have a speedy net connection, allowing me to blog about it.

I mean, the whole morning is shot. You don't really expect me to start working at 2:00 in the afternoon, do you?

(These Publix brand fat-free banana creme pie flavored yogurts taste like banana pudding! YUM!)

Moving....

I know I haven't been blogging as much. I've been really busy. I'm sure my regular readers who don't really know me have given up on reading this, since I no longer post the witty, thought-provoking stuff that I used to. Ha.

So, this is for family and friends who are wondering if I'm still alive and what is going on with me.

We finally found somewhere to move while we wait to see if our offer on the house that is in pre-foreclosure is accepted. As it turns out, we found a townhouse that we really like. We almost like it better than the house we are trying to buy. I didn't expect much, as we were really just looking for a way to live cheaper for a short time, but the townhouse is much larger than I thought it would be, and it has a lot of features that we really like. There are 3 bedrooms, plus a bonus room that could be another bedroom or office. The living room is huge, and the kitchen is pretty good size, as well. It's three stories, with a 2 car garage on the first level, and balconies on the 2nd and 3rd levels. There are 2 pools, and although this particular unit isn't on the water, the community itself is, and there is a nice dock and a boat slip available. Even better, the people who own it are wanting to sell it, and offered us a lease-option.

I was worried about not having enough room if we moved to a townhouse, but it's actually bigger than the house we are in now.

I don't know what we are going to do about the house we've been wanting, but it's obviously going to take a while. It's a short sale, and we aren't even 100% sure that our offer has been presented to the bank yet. The people who own the house are going through a divorce, and they HATE each other, so everything turns into a huge fight when they try to discuss it. So, we might end up buying the townhouse. It would be nice not to have a lawn to deal with. And even though we wouldn't have a yard for Captain Chaos to play in, the playground that I sometimes take him to is literally in the backyard. You can see it from the window in the master bedroom.

So, I have no idea where we are going to end up eventually, but I do know that it's time to start preparing to move, for the 6th time in 5 years. :(