A Time to Move - Again

Well, here we go again. We're moving this weekend, but our intentions is this is the next-to-last time. We're close to deciding that Texas is home for good. There is so much to love about this state. The climate is nothing short of spectacular. Mild winters, and even the height of summer is very tolerable. The best part is the spring and fall in which for about 6 months out of the year the weather is between 70 and 90 degrees and sun, sun, sun! Now you leave North Texas (DFW area) and things change no mater what way you move. Southern Texas (Houston, San Antonio, etc) you get humidity of which we have little, West Texas (El Paso) and you say howdy to a summer of 110 plus weather and snowy winters. The altitude and climate off the gulf combine to make it very temperate and low humidity. Basically everything Indy isn't.

Anyway we've decided to go to Big Bend in March instead of the Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater. That trip will be saved for more like September when we won't freeze our collective asses off. You can still get down to almost zero on March around the canyon, and in a tent camper you cease to have fun below freezing.

So, as I mentioned we're moving, but only a little ways. We're moving from North Arlington, to Grand Prairie. Grand distance total, about two miles. The new apartment is much more like a townhouse because we have a garage. So we loose the storage unit, break even on the square footage (about 1200), and pick up a patio once more. Something that I have to agree with my wife that I miss. Its nice to chill out on the patio in a not too uncommonly nice winter evening. The other advantages is that we stay in the same school district for Patrick, so we keep our free daycare and no school change. I think it looks like we loose less than $200 from the budget, so its hard to complain. As long as the house stays rented in Indiana, or sold (even better), we're fine. I'm starting to warm to the idea of keeping the Indy house as a permanent investment property. As long as we keep it down to a slow hemmorage of a couple hundred a month or less, at the least it becomes a nice cash reserve when retirement rolls around. The realestate estimaters say it will be worth about $175,000 in 25 years when the house is paid off, but there is little chance I'm working until I'm 67. I'll either be retired or dead by time time I'm 60 (18 years from now). I'm banking on the former. We still have our plan for a camp ground business in 5 years, but 10 might be more practical. At that point Patrick will be off to college. 52 isn't too old to start a new career/business, is it? Might be a nice working retirement and we should be able to have between 100 and 200 thousand but away. Add the house in Indy sale, maybe another 40k in the bank, we could have upwards of 250k to invest. Call it 150 in business expenses (buy or build), and a hundred in operating capital to see through the first two years. Not too shabby.

I don't know if I mentioned but I started my birth parents search about two weeks ago? A company called Givenright located in the Seattle area where I was born. I've considered it for about twenty years, but only really began to consider after my adoptive parents both passed (mother died in 95, father in 2000). They always said it was fine if I looked, but I never felt right doing it while they were alive. Anyway I paid the starting fee and turned them loose. So far no results, but the group of files where my records should exist are in dissaray at the county. There was a fire at some point, and they cannot find my original birth certificate likely as a result of the fire or a missfiling. I've said aloud that it doesn't mater, but inside I'm beginning to realize I hope I find them. Having no living parents is not as easy as it sounded. 42 is too young to have no living direct family. There is my adoptive sister, but she is a lot older than me (seven years) and we never had that deep connection of some siblings. I find myself hoping for some connection with these birth parents. I don't know, but I never felt that deep love for my adoptive parents that some seem to have and it makes it difficult dealing with my wife and her family. Plus I really want my mother/father to know they have a beautiful, healthy, smart and happy grandson here in Texas! I'll post more on this when I hear from the search people. I want to email them every day, but I don't because I know with as little as I paid they need to just be left alone to do their thing.

Scattered

My mind has not been terribly with me these last few weeks. I've got a good hold on the new direction I want Chosen II to go, but can't quite seem to generate the energy to consistently work on in. I'm sure this is at least partly the fault of Eve Online. I've stayed away from MMORPG every since I screwed up and let me Ultima Online account die (a good thing), but decided lately that some sort of online game would be a good distraction. Tried City of Villians and quickly discovered it was a complete waste of time. Decided there was no way in hell I'd join the global geek community on WOW, so I found Eve Online. This game is everything an SF game should be. Since Oz is such a major brownshirt, he'd probably dig this game. Tens of thousands of planets, only one massive server (the only MMORP to use a supercomputer), and hundreds of skills. The only thing it is missing to many of the MMORP crowd is a personal touch. You spend all your time in a ship and only ever see your characters face on the character sheet.
I've been playing a couple months and have varied between complete enjoyment and indifference. Suffice it to say I've like it enough to get two accounts so I could have to different types of characters. You can have three characters for each account, but you can only develope one at a time. One guy in the online corporation I belong to has six.
Anyway, there are two things that keep me coming back.
1) the utterly freeform play aspect. There are mission available and such, but you don't have to do any of them. There is money to be made by killing rats (npc pirates), kill pirates (pc pirates) for sometimes huge bountys, mining and refining, exploring, you name it. Fascinatingly libertarian world. There are even PCs running a weekly lottery.
2) player based economy. SWG could only dream of this level of player based economy. The system only provides base bpo (blue print originals), asteroids for raw materials, and rats to kill for some bounty money. Every other item and ship is researched, built, and sold by players!
Anyway, it's a huge waste of time but I'm hooked for now. Most nights its only a few minutes to log on and change skill development, but lately i've fallen in with a group that is trying to move into what is called 0.0 space, or the deadliest of the PVP (player versus player) zones. I've gotten a reputation as a devil-may-care type so I'm tasked with the exploration. I do have the knack of escaping and talking myself out of nasty situations, so what the hell. Anway, if you're interested, you can check it out at eve-online.com. The game is actually almost four years old and continues to grow. Client download is free, as is a two week trial account (the first taste is always free).
On the home front Patrick went back to school after 'winter break' finally. He was developing an attitude anyway. I love the hell out of that boy, but I dread the onset of hair and yelling. Joy continues to hate her job. She's in a zone of acceptance, but we've lately considered an option that might involve her being able to leave that sort of work for another. All I'm going to say is that it would involve a surgical procedure.
We bought a new trailer last weekend! We fell in love with our old pop-up trailer in Indiana. I got it for like $200 and rebuilt it myself (Joy helped with the canvas, of course), and was bummed when we left it behind in the move to Texas. Well, I got a super x-mas bonus from my job ($1500!!!! almost fell over) and found a similarly priced trailer in Austin. What better present for the family than camping fun?
So we went through a minor drama that ended up in my Wrangler having a trailer hitch and the turn signals no longer working (don't ask). The plan had been for Joy's Cherokee to be the primary towing vehicle, but she has a customized bumper and Uhaul got cold feet.
Anyway, we went down on Sunday last to check it out and was quite impressed. It's a 1996 Skamper pop-up. Its in excellent shape compared to our old one, but obviously a ten year old RV. We could camp in it now if we wanted to (a big improvement, it took me two months to make the old one usable). There are only three little areas of maintenance. A small hole in the canvas in the front, a broken door lock, and a missing hatch over the front storage compartment. All told its about two hours work on the weekend. Now I can't wait to go camping when the weather improves, which down here is about a month. Usually by mid February the weather is in the 60's to low 70's. Whoot!
Well, that's all that's going on. My new years resolution was to spend a little less time online, and a little more typing.