sad emo kid

I opened a Chase checking account yesterday. I needed to set up a local bank account because TCF wanted to charge me a fee to use their ATMs since my account was opened in Illinois. In order to avoid that, I would have to open a new TCF account down here, and since their branches are hard to find and the closest one to me is really difficult to get to, it made little sense to do so.

I already switched over to using ING Direct’s checking account for all of my ATM and check sending needs and they are AMAZING! I freakin’ LOVE ING!! I have free ATMs in places I never imagined I ever would with them, AND they pay me interest on my checking account! But, I needed a convenient way to cash physical checks. Enter Chase.

I wouldn’t have gone with Chase, but they run the show down in the Phoenix area here. In addition, they sent me a coupon good for $100 if I open an account with $100 or more. I just got a $57 reward check from Citi card so I thought I’d deposit that, some ING checking cash (thanks to the seemingly endless supply of ATMs at my disposal) and cash in on that reward. Seemed like a solid plan to me, and in the end it was. But it had its hassles.

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I believe this is my longest delay ever. I started writing this almost 2 months ago and just decided to finish it up today. Guess nobody expected any different at this point, so let’s get on with it!

When Money and I originally planned the trip down, we decided that we would try to stop in at least a couple cool places to make the trip more entertaining. Of course, that was when we had planned to leave Saturday morning, which was even later revised to late Friday night. Instead, we didn’t leave until Saturday afternoon, which offered much less stopping time. We weren’t exactly on a schedule, but we had to get there by Wednesday, and once we started driving, we just kind of wanted to keep going. Plus, we could maximize the time he had to hang out in Arizona before having to hike the Grand Canyon. So instead of stopping in any specific locations, we just drove as long as we could every day and tried to take pictures of random stuff along the way.

Since we were so far behind and it was already so late in the day, we knew we wouldn’t get too far on Friday and decided that St. Louis would make a great first stop. One of the things we really thought we needed to get a picture of was the St. Louis Arch, which I had never seen it before and Money had actually been inside. Once we got close enough to it, I pulled off the expressway so we could stop and try to get a decent shot of it. This seemed like a good enough idea, except for one tiny little problem; I got off in East St. Louis.

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Sorry, I meant to get part 2 up much sooner than this, but you know how it is. I also didn’t mean to disable comments the last time around, guess I need to fix the default setting. Anyway, on to it!

So, there we were, Money and I both frantically calling around to all the rental truck places we could find in the phone book and on the net. U-Haul was the obvious choice, and they allowed you to tow your own trailer, which was great. The problem was, as I mentioned last time, they only offered a 2 inch receiver ball. Money called their main office to discuss it further as recommended by one of the local rental places. They were saying that they could install a 2-5/8 inch ball for $15, but they had no idea what class hitch they had on the trucks. Despite who we talked to, none of them had a clue was we were talking about. Great.

Then my Dad called me and said he talked to Penske and they had 16 foot trucks available for about $1,200, which was a few hundred less than U-Haul wanted anyway. I wasn’t sure if 16 feet would be enough, considering we had filled a 14 foot trailer and a full-sized truck completely, but I had little choice; we had to leave today! So, I called the local Penske place and they quoted me just over $1,000 with the insurance. On top of that, the truck was still fairly new, so it was unlikely we would have problems with it. That settled it, I was renting a 16 foot Penske truck.

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If you’re here, there’s a really good chance that you know I’ve moved to Arizona. What many of you probably don’t know is the “adventure” I had getting down here. The gist of my plan was the buy a truck and a trailer to get all of my stuff down to Arizona because it would cost roughly the same as renting a truck. The other bonus would be that I would have a truck while I was down there already and won’t have to buy something right away. I could also turn around and sell both for roughly what I paid for them, so in the end, the moving expenses would kind of be a wash.

So, I sold my car, and bought both a truck and a trailer, and on Friday, I put all my stuff in both. Actually, that’s a bit of a simplification. More correctly, my parents, my sister and the friend of mine was planning to drive down with, Money, helped me pack all of my possessions in both the truck and the trailer. This was about a 4 hour ordeal, because as much as I thought I had all of my things packed up, there was still a lot of stuff that wasn’t packed. On top of that, the more we packed up, the more it became apparent that I had a LOT more than I thought I did.

Another part of the plan was to ride my motorcycle through a good chunk of the trip down. Of course, the more of my things we packed in to the trailer, the clearer it because that that wasn’t going to happen. In the end, we got everything in (a feat we were all sure wasn’t going to happen) with only a handful of extra stuff left behind.

Over time, this blog has turned in to a place where I occasionally speak my mind. I know a couple people that check it from time to time, but the audience doesn’t matter to me, it’s more a way to track my thoughts and some events in my life. So, this seemed like the perfect kind of thing to post here…

A friend of mine tried to commit suicide a few days ago after dealing with a bunch of life problems. She drank a bunch of alcohol and swallowed a bunch of pills in a decided attempt to end her life. After doing so, she, luckily, realized it was a bad idea and told her parents, who were luckily at home, what she had done. She was taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped and is still under supervision and awaiting a doctor’s release.

I’m writing this because I just got back from visiting her.
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. In that time, a lot has happened, one of the more important parts was that I stopped doing my grocery shopping at Jewel. Why? Well, it’s kind of tricky, but I’ll give you the gist of it.

See, I’m partial to the self-checkout lanes. They are faster because I don’t have to deal with the banter of the cashier, if someone is taking longer than someone else, I can easy just jump over behind the faster person and they are win-win because they require less staff to work them. At one point, the Jewel I went to installed these absolutely retarded new self-checkout machines that had conveyor belts. Why is this retarded? Well, the beauty of the normal lanes are you scan something, toss it in a bag on the scale and then scan the next thing. It’s faster, and when you are done, all your stuff is bagged and ready to go. The conveyor eliminates the bagging part and saves it for the end…. dumb. It adds a step to the process (bagging at the end) and slows things down further because you have to wait for the last person to finish bagging their stuff before you can start sending yours down. On top of that, it takes extra time for the belt to weigh the products! It’s absolutely the biggest step backwards ever. Thankfully, they kept 4 of the old, non-retarded machines there so I could use those. However, this also meant that other people were reduced to these 4 machines too (since everyone else seemed to also think the new ones were retarded), instead of the 8 they used to have. So I found myself waiting more often. But, the poor decision by the management wasn’t the only thing that did them in.

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After an insane amount of time without a gallery, I’ve finally got it back up and I’m working on getting all the images back online. I’ve ditched Gallery2 because it’s slow and stupid and uploading images caused a database error. I hate Gallery2!

I’ve switched to Zen Photo and I couldn’t be happier. Even on our admittedly slow server, it runs like a champ, and uploading images is as simple as copying files into the directory. Genious!

Without further adieu, The Gallery!

First, we’re back from Arizona. And I must say, it was an excellent trip, to put it lightly. Desert shooting, Teeth, my first beer in some four months and seeing the ol’ runnin’ crew; this trip had it all! In total, we have almost 900 pictures from the trip too. I’ll get those up as soon as I settle on some gallery software for sure. I’ll say it will happen soon, but let’s face it, it probably won’t.

I’m now pretty stable at 160 pounds, which was my target weight. Along with all of the fat, I lost a lot of muscle mass too. To help with this, purchased and now regularly use a set of Pushup Pros, an Ironman Double Ab Wheel and an SPRI medium strength resistance band. I’ve managed to get some muscles back in my arms and chest (more than I had before, in fact), but I really need to focus on my stomach now. I’m much thinner, but I’m still pretty flabby around the mid section. Hopefully I can get into some crunches/ab wheel/yoga routine, but we’ll see; the running should help once I start that back up too.

And that brings us to the title of the post. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve had to buy all new clothes. This is fine, and it’s something I pretty much needed to do anyway, my clothes were old and I needed freshen up the wardrobe. Unfortunately, this also means that my kickass leather jacket no longer fits.
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I’m back again baby! Chillin’ in Arizona right now, fresh out of the drive-through liquor store where I bought my first beer since I started my diet (and it was delicious). I write this up now from the hotel room via the ol’ n800 using the iGo bluetooth keyboard. This is actually the first time I have broken the thing in too, and it works pretty damn well.

Anyway, I’ll be getting a ton of pictures up in a while. For now, it’ vacation time brothers, vacation time brothers, vacation! Go Cubs!

Well, after wearing my new jeans for 2 weeks straight, I thought it was time to switch it up. I failed to appreciate that my old jeans are still ridiculously huge though. Check it out.

These jeans never used to be tight, just comfortable and the right waist. Now, I can fit my fist sideways into the waste; I think it’s time for another new pair of jeans. I also started rocking medium sized sweaters now, which look good and are quite slimming. For the record, I’m down to a solid 170, though I’m starting to notice I’m losing as much muscle mass as I am fat. Time to start doing some exercise again. Besides, I need to get down to 160 by the end of the month so I can enjoy some beers down in Arizona!

As for Aaron’s request, it’s all kind of here, but I’ll post a rundown at some point. For now I need to get to sleep though; got to vote for Ron Paul tomorrow morning before work