Tuesday we found out we got turned down for our house loan. Building, that is. Seems the bank wanted more "Comps" (Houses like the one we wanted to build in the area & what they’ve sold for, etc.) but, there just aren’t any comps in the area for a mostly cement house. Damn! Then they had a ’worry’ about our debt to income ratio. Let’s see: we owe on my truck and the overdraft for the visa card. OTT we pay rent and utilities. OUR bank said our debt to income ratio was great (but, unfortunately, they can’t help us with a loan because we want to build in MASON COUNTY). Other than that: Who knows? SWMBO and I have excellent credit ratings (around 700 each) so I just don’t know.

So, we decided to go with the "Box" House I found a couple of weeks ago and just try to buy the thing. It’s a HUGE house. 4300 sq feet with a two bedroom & living room & kitchen mother-in-law apartment built in on it’s own level. (I think I mentioned it in an earlier post.) Nice place. Hope the neighbors can get along with me.

So, I was out at the property Sunday, Monday & Tuesday anyway since it got over 70 degrees each day. Finally got some color to my cheeks! And my face got some too! Damn, it was nice out there! SWMBO even came out for several hours yesterday and I got some pretty good footage of her operating the digger and pushing dirt. Once she learned to just push the forward/backward levers she really got into it. Think I’ll post the video on YouTube!

Today we spent running around working on financing for the Box house. Just got back from spending several hours in (something like) Golf Banking filling out the paperwork. They love doing VA loans! And since SWMBO and I both have our VA eligibility everything ought to go okay. I say Ought To. We’ll see.

Then I took SWMBO to the Silverdale Mall and fed her one of her favorite sandwiches at the food court. Then we walked around and managed to spend ONLY $50 at the Barnes & Noble. Got out of there cheap; for us.

OTT, not much going on. Still ripping our dvd’s even though I have to do it on the tvserver and copy the files to my computer to convert to avi format. Sill trying to learn FL Studio and have added Finale & Sebilius to the line up. Want to start on 3ds Max too.

Bought a shopping cart "program" for my Brother-In-Law to test and see how well it would work on his site. With a little work it would work well. He still hasn’t done anything and I’m ready to call it quits and cancel the website and everything. Sometimes I want to call him up and tell him "Bud, get off your fat ass and make this work or quit your bitching about how life has fucked you." But if I did SWMBO would give me a hard time about it. Ah well…

Anywho, the two DNS file servers I bought are working great! I’ve filled both 1.5tb drives about 2/3’s. Still have about 900 GB available on the other server. Cool!

Oops, gotta reboot. Later!

In awhile. What can I say? Sometimes just the daily routine takes all your time. If you’re normal, that is.

Gads! What have I been doing? It’s all run together. Still getting to the property when I can to move dirt around. Still doing the regular daily stuff around the house.

Did get in those DNS-321’s I ordered. Set on up with a 500 GB drive. Damn thing reformats the drives. Won’t use NTFS format so I had to copy everything off the drive I wanted to keep (500 GB worth of movies) to my local drive (what a pain!) before putting it into the NAS. Took only a few minutes to reformat the drive.

Took a bit longer to set the NAS itself up. Wasn’t really hard or anything; just took awhile to match it to our internal network. Then you have to set up users and access and permissions. Pain in the butt! So I got it all set up and started copying the movies back to the drive. Fourteen (14) hours later it finished! Fourteen! For 489 Gig!

Then I installed the 2nd 500 GB drive and set it up as our music/data drive. Took only 2 hours to copy all the music to it. But it is working great! SWMBO can listen to her music and I can watch a movie at the same time. We can both watch different movies at the same time. I like it!

COSTCO has an ad for 1.5 TB drives for $110. Took Philip (our 70 yr old neighbor) to COSTCO with me to pick one up and let him get some shopping done. He spent so much time browsing the free food sample handouts that I spent about 30 minutes just waiting on him before getting into line. Then, when it was time for me to check out, the checkout guy told me the $30 off coupon wasn’t any good until Monday. Damn! But I will be making a trip back to COSTCO Monday!

So, when I get the new drive; one NAS will have 2 500 GB drives; one set up or music and the other for data. The other NAS will have 2 1.5 TB drives; one for television shows and one for movies. Too cool! I’ve already set up a computer to act as the "projector" to show whatever on the big tv. It’s working great too! That ATI Radeon 9000 video card works great for showing things on tv as long as I don’t install the ATI drivers. Go figure!

Then, last Friday after we got home from our date, I stuck a cd in my dvd drive, it spun up to about 1 MILLION rpm and the disc shattered! After that I couldn’t get the drive to respond at all. Damn! I even took everything apart and back together to no avail. So, yesterday, I went and bought a new dvd drive ($62!), came on home and installed it. No Go! Still! Damn! So I redid everything. Still didn’t work. Damn Damn!

So, while setting up the new tv server I put both drives in it. Both working great except sometimes the old drive doesn’t want to open when I press the button. Which I could live with because this means that something is going wrong with the drive controller in my computer. Damn Damn Damn! I can’t afford a new computer right now.

Anywho, it’s Easter Sunday and we’re waiting for my brother-in-law to show up with his new girlfriend. I’m cooking ham, taters & carrots and gotta get back on that. Hope y’all had a nice one!

Summers On The Way!