posted by Travis on Jan 14
So I am still going with the exercise. Managed to do at least 5 miles every day so far. It is actually easier then I thought it would be to get back into it. I am having a really good time with it.
Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
posted by Travis on Jan 9
Ok, so I decided it was time to exercise again. I started out pretty basic. 20 pushups, 15 situps(that is all I could manage.) and 50 curls of 25lbs per arm, 20 toe touches and a 5 mile ride. I am dying. How sad is that? I can tell I am getting older, and I am gonna start exercising more to try and fight age every step. I dunno who thought up the bright idea of growing old gracefully, some fat person probably, but I am gonna fight it every step of the way! So I start my fight today, and will attempt to keep fighting every day. As long as it does not kill me. 
posted by Travis on Dec 24
This is cool! If you have never visited NorthPole.com, I highly recommend it! Very entertaining! They have a tracker, and a video update every so often! Very cool. Off to watch some more video! It is funny!
You can see all the Videos here.
posted by Travis on Oct 9
Here are a couple of shots of our new car. It is basically a small utility wagon. Sort of like a SUV with good gas mileage. It is awesome. Has plenty of get up and go so far. Of course, we have only had it for a day, but so far we really like it! And we got an awesome price!
Here is a shot from the front drivers side:
and here is a shot from the back passengers side:
It is awesome! We are thrilled!
posted by Travis on Oct 8
We went to Gateway Honda in New Port Richey to test drive a Honda Fit. We walked in, and had an idea we were not gonna get a decent price offer. We had gotten a quote of $17300 Out the door from another Honda dealer online, so we were figuring we would start there for price. The other dealer was only a 30 minute drive away, so we figured we could always go there if we did not like the price at Gateway or the Toyota. Anyways, we walked in to Gateway Honda and they had a couple of High Def Tv’s sitting around playing different stuff, and a lady walking around giving out cookies, water, Bagel Pizza bites, coffee etc. They also all had nice Flat Screen Monitors and a computer on every desk. Kinda made me think they were screwing someone over to get all that fancy stuff.
They basically refused to deal at all. They could not even get close to the $17300 we had been quoted from another dealer! The worst part is, they refused to just tell us that, they kept trying to lead us on, and not even get close to the price. Was really annoying. So after they wasted two hours of our time, we decided to go down to Sun Toyota. We walked in, told them we wanted to test drive a Scion XD and a Matrix.. We test drove both, discovered the Matrix was actually cheaper, and bigger, with the same gas mileage! Woo! Perfect! Everything we wanted, and they come back with a nice price! $17100 out the door. Not to bad.. Of course, that did not include the power package and cruise control etc. So I asked them if there was any chance we could get everything we wanted, with the same price out the door. They asked if they did that, would we buy it today? I said, sure. It was a done deal. So we bought a very nice white Toyota Matrix. Everything we wanted on it. Nice Stereo and air comes standard. It was all very nice, and low stress actually. And the room is awesome! Has an extra 2 feet on the Fit, and gets almost the same gas mileage!
We are now proud Toyota Matrix owners. I love it!
posted by Travis on Oct 7
So Emmy and I decided we really need a new car.. Do not really want to spend the money, but it is time. We always buy new, and our last car was bought in 99. It has run great, but this time we would like to get something a little nicer. If we are going to drive it for almost 9 years, it would be nice to have what we want, not what we settled for. So I have been researching. We are interested in the compact wagon type of car. The ones I have been looking at are the Scion XD, the Honda Fit Sport, the Chevrolet Aveo 5, and the Kia Rio 5.
I will list the features that we wanted:
- A/C
- Manual Transmission
- Remote locks
- Decent Stereo (Does not have to be anything great, but decent)
- Good Gas Mileage!!!!!!!!
- Decent room (If we ever have to leave because of a hurricane, we need to be able to take our cats, us, our dog and a few personal items and go. We would like to be able to put an appliance in the back to haul if we need to. In our old Hyundai Excel, we once hauled a dish washer we picked up home with us in the back. That is the benchmark.
- Good reliability!!!!
- Cruise Control
- A lighter color paint job
Different people and places all have different things to say about each car. Some think the Honda is the best value, others think the Toyota. The Aveo 5 is the cheapest up front, but we test drove the Automatic version and it was a complete dog for get up and go. I hit the gas and it just bogged out. It did eventually respond, but I like something a little more here and now. I read a review talking about the problem, and they said it is even worse in the Manual Transmission, which is just sad. So it has slid down the list. The other thing that kinda discouraged us is that by the time you equip it similar to the other cars we are looking at, it gets a lot closer in cost.
We go to drive a Honda Fit Sport on Monday, it looks like a nice car, and the “Magic Folding Seats” are just cool. I really like the fold flat ability. Sadly, the only thing they have in is an Automatic, so again, even though we want a Manual, we will be test driving an Automatic. 
It does give us a chance to see the inside, and get a feel for it and see how it handles. We will be trying out the Scion soon also. At first I was discouraged by how much they charge for all the extras on the Scion, but the base model is not bad. Sadly, like the Fit, they are marking it up a LOT. I refuse to get ripped off this time. I have good credit at this point, so I will not let them screw me on financing and price. Before they basically told me I had no credit, so if I really wanted the car, I was gonna get screwed.. Like a dumb 20 something year old, I believed them. That is why Hyundai is not getting my business again this time, well, that and the fact they do not have a model I really like.
The Kia I am unsure of.. I have seen both good and bad reviews. I drove one Kia in the past, and it was a rental car with 1200 miles, and it was not starting well, which to me does not speak well of the reliability of a Kia.. The Kia also gets the worst gas mileage out of the group we are looking at. We will probably end up test driving one by the end of the month too, just to make sure we do not regret whatever car we do end up buying. The other problem with Kia is, they own Hyundai, and like I said before, they kinda ticked me off with the last car we bought.
Right now, in my mind, the front runners are the Scion XD and the Honda Fit Sport. If I can get them down to the price I am willing to buy at. I figure with tax and everything, I am not willing to spend more then $16500 out the door. Less would be better, but that is my max. So far, for the Fit, the quotes I am getting are up around $17300 out the door.. They are trying to tell me their Invoice price is what the MSRP is! I may have been born at the beginning of the year, but it was not THIS year! Duh. I found one page that mentions $14400 as the base price on the Honda Fit, a full $1000 less then what they are telling me, and that would easily get me below my $16500 mark for out the door pricing. The Scion XD is much the same, although, I have not even started trying to get quotes on those yet. I can only take so much idiocy at once. The Matrix also looks like a possibility, but have not looked enough at those yet to decide if it is even in the running.
I will post as I get more info on the stupidity of car buying! Make sure to vote for which car you would recommend in the poll in the tool bar on the left.
posted by Travis on Sep 24
So I went for the walk this morning, and saw only 3 chickens.. All out front of the park. The cool part is, the goats are back on Coastal Plains. I then come home to see Bleys had fixed pancakes for breakfast. Was nice! I then took a shower and ran Bleys down to get his permit, only to discover Florida requires you to take their 4 hour drug and alcohol course before you can get your permit. The nice part is he can do it online, the bad part is, we have to run back after he takes the course to get his permit.
I spent the rest of the day cleaning our bathroom and in general cleaning up the house. Bleys swept and mopped yesterday in the kitchen and entry, we will have to go over it again tomorrow to make sure it is clean when Emmy gets home. I always like coming home to a nice clean house, so I try to give the Love of my life the same. I think I am gonna try to head to bed a bit early tonight, my head is throbbing. I saw a cool thing today I am considering trying to talk Emmy into..I dunno. We will see what she thinks.
I love you Emmy, and I miss you sooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOooooooooooooooo much. I can not wait to pick you up tomorrow at 8pm.
posted by Travis on Sep 23
So I just got back from the walk. Seen a Coral snake, and some of the chickens. Then of course lots of squirrels and birds of different sorts. It also appears they got a bunch of track down for the stupid train. It actually crosses the path now at the crossing closest to cold corner. What a way to destroy a nice nature park. Try to turn it into some sort of freaky amusement park. Well, just thought I would post about the coral snake for Emmy. Love ya!
posted by Travis on Sep 23
So we ended up doing Outback for dinner. My Mom discovered a gift card she has had for a year or more, so decided we would use it up. Dinner was pretty good. I got a ribs and chicken thing. Ate only the chicken and fries, saved the ribs for todays lunch. Come home and read the MMA Weekly Live Results. Was a surprising night in MMA. I figured I would post the results here for Emmy, at least for the fights she would be interested in.. I will hide them on the next page.
I did want to comment how nice all of you looked in that picture you posted Emmy! Very nice! Very nice looking family!
posted by Travis on Sep 22
Ok, not so much wild, as lots of “wild” animals in the park. Saw 4 rabbits, 5 cranes.. The second couple would not actually come over to where I feed them, but was over by the tower. I also saw all 5 chickens, plenty of squirrels and cardinals. Great morning! I love seeing all the wild life. And it sure beats the wild dogs Emmy is carrying a stick to fend off.
So I realized yesterday I did not say how I installed Debian. I used their net install disk and downloaded the majority of my setup from the net. I picked a server that is fairly close to me and got great speed. Did not take very long at all. I just wish they gave the option(maybe they do, but it was not obvious) to pick and choose my packages more. I basically had like 5 options to choose from, and it installed the “standard” packages for what you wanted to do. Kinda cool, but kinda a bummer too. Some of us like to shave off what we do not need or want on an install. Like I said though, who knows, they may have the option somewhere that I missed, although, if they do, it was not obvious.
So the net stuff turned out to be no problem with Gnome. I figured it out, and you can book mark stuff and everything. Pretty cool. My major obstacle has really been trying to figure out which applications I should use to do what, as it is different in KDE. Not a big problem, just minor annoyances for the most part. For example, I have to use Firestarter instead of Guarddog for my Firewall program. Has a different interface, and I am still not sure what I think of it, but it has the monitoring of the firewall built right in also, which is pretty cool.
I have been learning more and more about the Gnome equivalent of Konq. It is called Nautilus. It seems rock solid. I been having fun setting background and panels up with nifty neato tiles. I used my grey brick and white brick tiles, and I think it looks pretty solid. Runs solid too! I am becoming more and more impressed. I will continue to play with this and when Emmy gets back, if I am still impressed, I maybe trying to talk her into switching over to Debian also. One of the cool things about that is, it would allow her to use CNR again eventually. Not that I think she needs it at this point, but I think she might like options.
So I had Pidgin IM on last night as I compiled it and am running it on here. If I was willing to run Debian Lenny instead(the testing branch of Debian) I could have just installed it with apt-get, but since I wanted to test the stable etch out first, only Gaim was available. Since I have had several family members start using Myspace IM, I figured I would installed pidgin, which gives me access to that, as well as my normal ICQ and Aim lists. Much easier to keep everything in one place. Anyways, my Mom happened to message me last night and ask what we were all to. I told her that me and Bleys were just watching some TV, and I had no idea about Emmy as she was in Tucson. Hehe, kinda surprised her. Anyways, after she got over the surprise, she suggested we go out to dinner tonight. She wants to go out for Mexican, which I have been very under whelmed with in Florida. I sure envy Emmy and her trip to Carolinas in Phoenix. Hope it was good Emmy! No clue what we will be having as I kinda told my Mom I had mostly been disappointed with the Mexican here. We will see though.
As I had planned on fixing Japanese at home tonight, I pretty much figure the food has to be better to lure me out, ya know? Ah well, we will see what happens. Love you Emmy! Tell everyone out there I said hi, and sorry I could not come. And give your brother and Jeannie congrats from me.