Now, as for the reason for my long break from writing - I've been in and out of town quite a bit, traveling to Cedar Rapids for business (and, as you will find out, a little bit of pleasure!) and taking a week off to Orlando during Cherrie's summer break. My trip to Cedar Rapids was a pretty slow one, but it started off pretty rough. I almost left for Iowa without my work badge, which would have been a very bad thing, since I would not have been able to get into the building without the door guard having to check with my manager back in Melbourne every single day. I'm sure my manager would have a fit with that one!
What was particularly fun about this trip was getting to travel around with Ron (mostly for business, of course!). We went to Bellevue for a day, where he showed me around our plant and also took me to see the mighty Mississippi River at a lock-and-dam! I've seen quite a few dams in my life, and maybe even a lock-and-dam at some point, but I'd never actually watched one at work. Basically, a lock-and-dam is a dam which has a special lock area that lets barges and boats traverse from one side of the dam to the other, not unlike the "airlock" found on spacecraft and submarines. Since the level of the water on one side is higher than the other, the boat must first get locked inside the lock, then the water level in the dam would be adjusted to match the level of the destination side, and the boat would then be pushed through the gate smoothly and go on with her journey!
Another very entertaining point of my trip to Iowa was getting the chance to shoot Ron's rifles at the rifle range. I haven't shot a gun at a range since I was about ten years old! I did actually shoot a .22 inside Kaveh's apartment when we were young and very stupid in college, but a .22 is nothing like the guns Ron has! I shot ten rounds on his M1A1 (basically a civilian M14 rifle, similar to those used in Vietnam) at a target 100 yards away using only "iron sights", or without a scope. I think all but one bullet hit the target. Most of my shots were inside the second circle, and two of my shots were within inches from the bullseye! I took my target home to Florida and put it on my cubicle wall to warn co-workers to not upset me...
Ron himself fired his World War II vintage M1 Garand rifle, which was an even larger caliber weapon. Plus, he shot his gun way faster than I did, ripping through two magazines in under a minute each! I took around one minute for each round I fired, to give you a frame of reference. And he was accurate, too - even at that rate of fire, he got all of his shots in about the same place around the 7:00 angle in the second belt of his target. After playing with the guns, Ron let me take a picture with both of his rifles to send to my friends (and my dear readers!). The picture to the left is of the M1 Garand, and the picture in the paragraph above is of the M1A1.
I returned to Melbourne on Friday afternoon, when I was supposed to close on our new house. However, due to some paperwork and transfer issues, the bank was not ready to close yet, and so, we just relaxed over the weekend. We rescheduled for Monday morning, but even by then, the parties were not ready to close. I finally put my foot down and headed to the title company at 1:00 PM, six hours after the initial schedule, and we lucked out - they had just received the necessary transfer. So, as the title of this post boldly proclaims, Cherrie and I are now official homeowners! Now, the REAL spending will have to take place, as we start working on painting and doing homeowner things like getting furniture and mowing the lawn and so on!Immediately after closing on the house, we headed to Orlando to take our little vacation. Because I had gotten an invitation from the folks at Orange Lake Resort to attend a tour and let their sales sharks try to talk me into borrowing $12,000 at 17% APR and spending $650 a year to maintain a condo that I get to stay at for one week each year, they gave me four days and three nights at the nearby Clarion hotel, as well as two tickets to the Disney park of my choice. I picked the Magic Kingdom for two reasons - first, we haven't been to the Magic Kingdom since the beginning of 2005 when my friend Jose visited from Holland, and second, so I could download the special treasure for my Pirates of the Caribbean DS game! Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera, so we didn't take any photos at Disney.
Immediately after our four-day, three-night vacation, we headed up to Gainesville so I could attend my first classes for UF's Outreach Engineering Management program. The first day and half were comprised of orientation stuff, and they put us up at a very, very crappy hotel. I'm told we were supposed to stay at the very snazzy Country Inn and Suites (where, incidentally, one of our upscale socials for the weekend with exotic hors d'oeuvres was held), but they didn't expect a grand total of fifty-six students to show up, and so, they had to move some of us unluckier ones to the crappy Extended Stay America. Our first room was incredibly smokey, and it seemed as though they had just sprayed a ton of RAID everywhere to kill some roaches or something right outside the door. Plus, our air conditioner had leaked all over half of the room! After some work, we were fortunately able to move to a much better room.
Well, I figure that's about all I have - any more and I'll probably have to take another hiatus just to get away from the keyboard for a little while! No new poll this time, I have to think of something else good!
