On my way home from Chris's on Tuesday I stopped to get gas. When the pump auto stopped it came up as 12.000 gallons. Thought that was nifty.

When I got home, an ambulance was in front of my neighbor's house (who has 24 hour nursing care). The few times that I've met her, she's been really nice, so I hope she's ok. Although I do keep seeing the nurses' cars so I assume that she just had a bit of a problem and it's resolved.

Earlier in the day, the Mediacom guys came and seemed fairly knowledgeable. I did show one of them how to ping from OS X (since in their classes they were never taught that). They said that the wire into the family room was covered by a spliced cable and wasn't a single wire back to where it's split in the house (Family room and Living room upstairs there are random cables that go to the upper level and dining room, but I think that's kind pointless and I've been pulling them down (they're not even hooked up anymore). I mean come on, it's a two bedroom house, do you really need more then two TVs?) So in talking about what can be done, they're no longer supposed to drill through supporting walls (the one between the furnace room and the family room is) and running the wire down the wall would be problematic at best. So I offered to move the access point and etc into the Utility/Laundry Room. That way, they could run a wire off the splitter straight to the source and get the best signal possible. I even let them use my rarely used cable ties (since they were in the house and have to trek out to get them). In doing that, they also checked from the house to the street, re-grounded a wire and grounded a wire in the house too. One of the two said that sometimes bad connections can be solved by grounding the wire and they'll run fine until the static charge builds up and then run like crap until the static has discharged...This does sound like a load of crap to me, but what do I know. But being that it's grounded outside and inside, it should resolve the problem. After moving my wireless access point, NAS device and the cable modem into the laundry room, it seemed to work better, with a very steady download and upload bandwidth test (just under 8 megabit down). The good thing, is that it gets these things out of the family room, so it'll be easier to move forward with the planned upgrades for that room. I still have to move the laser printer (6+ years, same toner cartridge), the color printer and the web cam (which isn't currently hooked up to anything, so no updates). I'm gonna point it out the laundry room window. I was actually thinking about that the other day, and someone could easily figure out who was home by where it is placed now. So Mediacom has done right by me. At least for now. The good thing is that there is also a phone jack right there so if I were to switch over to DSL, I'd have an easy time switching over...

We also went to see some row houses in a new development between Waukee and Clive. These are drastically different from each other and from the kind of generic houses that are built by several developers in the area. Lots of nice touches that make me happy. But when it comes right down to it, the one that we want would kind of stretch our budget to an extent that would be almost unlivable. I ran a few numbers and it'd be tough. Shannon was very excited, and here's the thing, without the wedding debt, it wouldn't be a big deal. My end of the year raise has given us a bit of breathing room again so it's not so tight as it was (going out to eat isn't as big a deal as it was, nor do I feel guilty for occasionally going out to eat for lunch at work (I'm talking every few weeks here)). But it doesn't change our financial picture so much.

What we really need to do is save more and spend less. So in a couple of years a lot of things about our financial picture changes (2.5 years for my car to be paid off, I think Shannon's Student loans are close to being paid off (mine are...uh...a while)) and hopefully we'll be able to kill that wedding debt (though we'll have to be more aggressive about it). And given that, and our current rate of salary growth, we can put more money away, and afford a nicer place. There are always new developments going up here and there, so if we want some place brand new where we can choose colors and what not, then we could...or if we wanted to buy a place and then get someone (or ourselves) to do improvements there.

Part of me though, looked at this area with dread. I really do love living in Beaverdale. I'm close to a lot of my favorite places and shops. Walking distance to some. I really am hesitant to move out. All the places we passed by on the way out to the place are very chain-like. I'm sure there's good stuff there, but you usually don't get the same flair that you can expect from something that is local and close to someone's vision.

Anyways, after some ice cream, the depression left Shannon, and she started looking forward to updating the family room. It was Bordeaux Cherry Chocolate, which was quite good.

Anyways here's a list of things we need to do:

Paint Upstairs Bathroom
Paint Kitchen
Paint Family Room
New rest of the roof
New windows everywhere except family room
new water line
etc...