Scott Chester

I finished the sales and use tax paperwork this morning and paid the bill.  I’ve just been out of things at work this week and have been having a hard time concentrating. I’ve found myself making a few stupid mistakes, like forgetting to put everything in an envelope before sealing it and such like that. I think I’m going to work a short day tomorrow so I can spend the afternoon cleaning the house and getting it ready for the housewarming. I need to start baking the goodies as well, which I guess means I need to come up with a full plan of what we’re going to have.

I’m thinking we may need to serve dinner since it is such a long thing, but I have no clue who is going to be here or when really. I’ve received a few RSVP’s and am hoping that more people show up than have responded. It seems like some people don’t even know about it, so I’m not sure if the invites didn’t make it to them or what.

I was happy I got to go to Institute tonight. We talked a lot about the sacrament and the offering that goes along with it. We learned that we bring ourselves, an imperfect offering and that we receive Christ, a perfect offering, and the blessing to try for another week. It was interesting thinking about how the offerings have changed over time. Sometimes I think we really have it too easy here, but then I realize all the temptations of the world we have today that may have not been so prevalent back in old testament times and maybe it is all fair. Or maybe we just don’t have as great of faith as they did in the old testament.

I still can’t find the remote for the DVD player. Kenny even came over tonight to help look for it. I’m wondering if it somehow wound up in the trash or someone’s purse and will never be seen again. Maybe I need to find myself one of those crazy universal remote controls finally.

I got the electric bill today; it was only $160 for almost a complete month. Some people had been scaring me into thinking it was going to obscenely high. I’m not sure if it is really worth it or not, but I’ve got the windows open tonight and am hoping it will cool off nicely so I can sleep. It is still 78 in the house and about 68 outside, abut five degrees above where I would prefer it to be.

Oh well, I’m off to sleep - or at least to try and get some sleep before I have to go back to work in the morning.

I made another trip to Ashley in Colton today. I had volunteered to pick things up for Sister Rodriguez when I was headed up there the other day. She found some stuff she wanted to buy yesterday and I offered to help if I could. It gave me a nice break in the middle of the day to spend with her. Once we solved the puzzle of how to get the couch in the front door I came back to get some work done at the office and to get Nathaniel back on his way to fixing the pallet shelving problem. I think in the future we are just going to go new as it has probably cost us just as much dealing with these changes and such as it would to have gotten what we wanted in the first place.

I finally got my trash cans today. I was a little worried this morning since I hadn’t received them yet and it was trash day. I just put some trash out at the curb in bags, hoping they would at least take that, even though it was only about a quarter of what I had to throw away. I just didn’t want to go through the work if I was just going to have to bring it back in tonight. I’ve already filled the new cans and have a little pile of recyclables to go out next week. I’m sure after next week I will be all caught up. I also reprogramed my sprinklers after discovering that they were going off three times each day. I’ll need to keep an eye on things to make sure they are getting enough water, but I would certainly imagine that once a day would be more than sufficient. That should help me cut back on my water usage and help our shortage here in SoCal.

I went over to have dinner with Sister Rodriguez tonight. We got kind of a late start, so I missed institute for the second week in a row which I was afraid would happen.

I was going to try running tonight without the air conditioner, but after opening the windows upstairs and climbing into bed, I realized that without a ceiling fan it just wasn’t going to happen. I also have to wonder though exactly how much energy is really lost in running the AC at times when the windows could be open. If it’s cool outside, it shouldn’t take much to cool off the house and then it should stay cool from that point on, shouldn’t it? Maybe I should really look into a whole house fan as I know that would be cheaper than running the AC. I wonder about leaving the windows open downstairs though at night. I’m not really sure why, I just do. I guess the alarm system could handle my worries down there if I armed it at night with a delay on the motions. I also need to pick out and get some ceiling fans so they can be installed next week.

Whoa! Today was crazy! It started off pretty quiet, in fact I was thinking about heading home after lunch cause there really wasn’t much that I could do. I guess all that started to change when I started giving escrow a hard time about not progressing with things. They still hadn’t received the docs from the seller, so they couldn’t fund the loan and so forth. I guess I lit a fire under them or something cause not five minutes later I had a response about having received the docs from the seller. Then the loan docs were being worked on and would be sent over. Then I was being asked if I could sign docs tomorrow!

So, I’m signing docs tomorrow afternoon. I think I understand they have to go back to the lender for approval and then they fund the loan, the sale has to be recorded and we are on our way to craziness! I’m hoping that we can get recorded on Wednesday and take possession on Thursday so I have the weekend to worry about moving. It would also work out cause I think I could use the truck we’ll have on the days it is sitting to move and then later to get furniture and stuff.

Things also started getting busy in the office beyond my home buying. I don’t remember exactly what was going on, but I didn’t get home till 6:30. I guess it didn’t help that when i got home the first time I realized that I forgot to go to GT to drop off mics for this weekend. I also stopped by Pacific Sales and ordered my washer and dryer. They’re scheduled for delivery a week from Monday. I ordered my fridge from Lowe’s - I ended up getting the Samsung RFG297AARS. Mandi will appreciate that it is stainless steel and I found that while the Samsung and GE’s seemed identical, the software on the Samsung seemed to make a bit more sense. Primarily, there are two buttons for water & ice instead of the one that you have to constantly cycle through on the GE Profile. It seemed like a lot of wasted work to have to keep cycling through to find what you want. I also discovered from a guy at Lowe’s that Samsung makes the GE Profile’s, so that is why they look so similar. I guess that makes sense as GE was trying tou outsource and changeup most of their appliance division and now is working on selling it off completely.

I’d love to get in and talk about institute last night and the jubilee years, and all that, but I really need to get to sleep. Hopefully Sister Dowden will post a hub or blog on it!

I spent entirely way too much time in the office today. i was there shortly after 8 and was all alone until almost 2 when pyro showed up with lunch. It was fairly quiet, so I was able to get a lot done, but that also lead to a lot of boredom with no one around to motivate me… I got my email down to two messages though, so I must have been doing something right and also got the support system down to zero!

I got home taught for the first time possibly ever tonight by Tyler. It was good talking with him and learning from him. I went straight into Institute and then an elders quorum presidency meeting. Next thing I know, it’s after 11 and I just got home. Needless to say, I will probably be late to work in the morning. I think I’ve put in enough extra hours this week so it will be OK and I’m leaving early tomorrow…

Not too much to report from today either, so I’ll try and keep this short. We continued playing with some phones and I still think that Windows Mobile is the clear winner. We got a Treo 700wx today but discovered that it is running Windows Mobile 5 instead of 6 Pro which my VX6800 is running. I also realized that the lack of buttons on the treo could be somewhat limiting. Maybe the fact that I can’t text message while driving is honestly a good thing with the larger keypad and it will help keep me out of trouble. I’m thinking, today anyway, that I’m going to stick with this new phone and we’ll take it from there.

I went to institute tonight and then came home. I didn’t get to bed early and instead spent time talking, playing and eating cake. We had some great rain today and it is pretty darn cold outside. It got cold enough in fact that our heaters stopped working at the office and we had to pull out the space heaters. Well, everyone else has already had theirs out, I just had to pull mine out to keep warm.

Oh, for the record: The Blackberry still hasn’t gotten any data from Exchange. We’ve still been struggling to get any of their conduits to work without installing something directly on the Exchange server which I am reluctant to do.

I decided to sleep in this morning. I actually woke up before six, but it was about 7:30 before I was able to get myself out of bed! I had a productive day at the office and got my work email down to 6 messages! My to do list is still growing, but many of them I am waiting on time or other people to be able to check off.

Institute tonight was good. When we first started the class I thought our pace was a little slow and we were getting a little too detailed, but I am really enjoying the pace and the detail now. Things I never know or never realized are becoming so much clearer to me. Sister Dowden does a great job leading the discussions.

Larilyn, Maegan and I went out to BJ’s after Institute because Maegan was starving and neither of them had been there before. We’re checking things off her list of things to do almost as fast as we’re adding them!

I finally got this MSN Direct service working on my Nuvi 680. It took two phones calls to them this morning and a reset of the cord/antenna. It could have been the reset that did it or it could have been the switch between markets that did it as well. (We changed it from Riverside to San Diego.) I then quickly learned that while you have access to all markets, you really only get one market’s data at a time. For example, if you’re at home in Fallbrook (San Diego market) and are planning a drive to somewhere in Los Angeles, it won’t know anything about the LA market until after you have travelled into it. I’ve also discovered that the service is really not that great. I have full coverage in my house, but next to nothing in my car around town. Apparently I got enough coverage somewhere along the line to get some traffic information for LA because when I got home tonight I found that I had freeway speeds for LA, the problem is I don’t know how old they were! It sounds like they really need to find a way to integrate both the FM Traffic and the MSN Direct service simultaneously into the device. Most people would probably even pay for twice the annual fees if they knew they could actually get data that would help them while driving.

Well, enough of a rant there, I’m off to bed! Tomorrow… WICKED!

Well let’s see. I was at the office till almost three this morning because I got some crazy idea to wipe our domain in order to fix a few problems were were having. Most of it worked well. Exchange is now happy and quickbooks is working except we have some annoyances due to the programs lack of support for accounts without administrative rights. I spent today continuing to clean up the mess Batch and I left last night and making sure I was on top of the other actual office work.

I missed the activity at church last night which I hear wasn’t very well attended. I need to get better at going again and if nothing else showing my support. I did make it to institute tonight which was great as always.

Maybe I can get a good night sleep and actually enjoy an evening to myself for the first time in a while tomorrow. I enjoyed watching CSI this evening. Since I’m so far behind I wouldn’t even know the difference between a rerun and a new episode! I did recognize the episode of Without a Trace, though this was probably a good thing since it allowed me to turn off the TV and maybe get to bed a bit earlier than I would have if I was glued to the tube.

So I see the CA DMV has a cool new printer that fits inside an envelope! I got my car registration today, dated as issued 1/31/08 - today! I was thinking that was some great delivery time for snail mail if they could manage to get it out sameday, but then i saw that the envelope was postmarked on the 29th. Does that mean they figured out how to fit a printer into a tiny envelope to issue the registration on the date of receipt or do they have some crazy method to estimate the delivery date and use that as the issue date? Does any of this make any sense? Why not just print the date it was printed on it and put it in the mail?