Life and timely updates

Hmmm, I haven't updated in mass e-mail form since last summer. Here's what's in the news!

Housing:

This one is on the top of my list and for good reason. It's been an interesting time since my last update in June. My former roommate of 2 years and friend of 8 years got married in September. Good for him. As such I was forced to find a new roommate or take over the entire rent. I resolved to find a new place of residence with a roommate that I had met only a few times. Upon taking residence in our new apartment, my newly found roommate requested that I move out as soon as possible. I'm still not sure why, but I guess it's all for the best. I moved in with Jeremy's brother Chris and we had a great time living up on top of Cherokee Bluff. But wait, the moves aren't over. I moved after three months there when I was afforded the opportunity to move into one of the rescue squad stations. The beauty of this is that it presents almost all of the benefits of apartment living but with no rent of utilities. The only requirement is that you staff four shifts a week if there is a truck available. There has not been a truck available since December!

That makes 3 moves in under a year's time. Let's go for one more. Moving is fun, right?

Living at the rescue squad station allowed me to save a little extra cash in preparation for stage II. What is stage II? I'm glad you asked. I have been using the mortgage crisis as an opportunity to buy into the housing market. After a few months of searching, I found a great place and got a contract on it! Here comes the beauty of irony. Due to the mortgage crisis, investors are pulling money out of the marketplace. Last Thursday several banks realized they didn't have enough cash on hand. They've been talking about it on NPR with all of the government bail-outs and such. Anyhow, even though my credit is excellent and my loan was a breeze to write, there were no funds available to transfer when we were supposed to close last Friday. We still haven't closed, but they assure me that we will... someday. While this isn't much more than a disappointment and an inconvenience to me, I'm sure the sellers are furious. They were silly enough to move their stuff into their new house even though we didn't close. Now they're staying with friends and waiting it out like me. In conclusion, at some point in the future I will have bought a house! Picture attached!

Work:

I'm still working at Melaleuca. Things are going well for me there and I enjoy it a lot. We got a new maintenance coordinator and a new electrician last spring and since then we have been improving by leaps and bounds. Things are still changing rapidly and we will begin construction of a huge new building (in addition to our current one) this year pending our president's final approval.

Rescue Squad:

I actually don't have any good rescue stories. I suppose that's good as nobody has gotten hurt, but they're fun to recount. I did take my watermanship test for the water team and made a record breaking perfect score! The test consists of a 400 meter swim, a 500 meter kick with flippers and no arms, 15 minutes treading water, and 100 meter towing a victim. I wasn't the fastest in each of these categories, but I consistently finished each segment in under the allowable time limit. Yay!

Racing:

I did the Icycle cross country mountain bike race again this February. I've done it for the last two years, and this year it definitely failed to measure up to its name. The day of the race turned out to be a wonderful 50 degrees and the ground was dry and fast. It was cold enough last year that I got frost nip on my big toe! With a fully recovered toe it turned out to be a great weekend!



Until next time,

-Derek-