First, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We went over the mountains and picked up the car. We left here at 8AM and returned a year later. We got home this morning at 12:30AM. What a ride it was. The car turned out to be excellent. The drive was the worse.

Going over in the morning, just as we hit the CA side of the mountain, we had to chain up. The ground wasn't even wet. We drive with chains on for way too far and then took them off. How lame.

Then that night going back over the mountain on the CA side, we had to chain up, again on dry road, and drive to NV side with chains on. I think we did about 20 miles on dry and 5 miles on snow. Our chains did not fit the new car too well, so we had to drive 20MPH the whole way. It sucked. I was pissed.

Why does CA make you chain up on dry pavement? No reason for that. Idiots. I vow never to return to CA for any reason (in the winter :-). I guess the chain installers have to get paid. That must be the reason for the chain controls. It's always about money.

Anyway, we are home, safe, and with our new car! Jane is going to detail it, then I'll snap another picture of it. I'll post it here when it's ready.

We found a car. We are going to pick it up on Wednesday. It's a 96 VW Jetta GL with only 76,000 miles on it and AC. It was a good price at $4000. It looks real good and drives great. Needs tires and brakes, but that is easy. Jane really loves it. It will be a good car. I'm hoping that it will last another five or so years. Some day I'll be able to buy brand new cars. That will be cool.

The drive home was less than good. Our truck broke down. We blew the heads again or something. You know, white smoke coming out of the tail pipe. Anyway, we got Randy to tow us home. Now we have another dead car. They are starting to stack up.

So we are looking for a new car now. We have about $3k to spend. Jane really wants a white VW Jetta, 95 or newer. I found a few for around $3 online, but no white ones.

Anyone want a Mazda B2200 that needs a bit of work? I'll sell cheap.

What a great Christmas!

I got an Apple iSight Web Cam, A Playstation ][, some cloths, pajamas, some movies, and other items. I can't believe that I got a Playstation 2 for Christmas! It came with Mat Hoffman Pro BMX also.

Jane got a phone set with two phones, one is remote, some really cool wind up dancing clowns, and other stuff.

Everyone got lots of really cool stuff.

Merry Christmas!

It's snowing out side this morning. It's a perfect Christmas. There are tons of presents under the tree. We are waiting for the rest of the family to get here then we will open our presents. I can't wait.

The drive up was not too bad. Lots of snow fell on our way. We drive 25MPH for about 100 miles it seemed. But we made it here, just in time for dinner.

Kazaa'll take over all your bandwidth, install 50 viruses on your Winblows system, and give you crappy MP3 files that half are some gay guy breathing hard into a mic.

The main WRIP locked up again tonight. It knocked out POP3 again also. I'm so upset. I was running perfect for months, and now it's going to start messing up. Just in time for Christmas. I'm so bummed. I just know that the minute I walk out the door for Christmas, it's going to lock up and stay down for the entire time that I'm gone.

I'll probably have to cut my vacation short to come back here and reboot everything.

This sucks.

On a good note. My new spam filtering is helping. I went from 60% to 25%. Here is the latest stats:

Spamassassin Totals
Total emails for last five days: 2001
Total spam for last five days: 507
Spam percentage is 25.300%

So just in time for the Christmas holiday, my network goes unstable. This sucks. First I lose a hard drive in my main system. Then the new hard drive acts flaky. Now my main radio locks up. And every time something happens here it takes out one of my relays also. So I have to drive out to the relay and reboot it. The other relay works fine. What a pain in the butt. I guess I know what I'm going to be doing for Christmas....Rebooting the network every morning.

Welp, today is credit card cutting up day. We have payed for and closed all of our credit card accounts. Now it's time to destroy the cards. We are going to have a party tonight to do it. New new monthly payments are going to be $250 each month. That's a lot better than $900 each month that we were paying.

We will probably get our home all fixed up and finished with the extra money. Maybe even put a garage in. Definitely lots of trees around the property. I'm not buying the small ones anymore. They just take too long to grow and the critters eat most of them. 4-6 foot trees for now on. I want to gravel the drive ways also. That will keep the mud out of the house. I need to finish my office also. Paint the walls, build shelves, and a new desk.

I think one of the first things I personally want to do is build a half pipe in the back. I'm starting to get fat and lazy, so I need something to do to keep in shape. I have it all planned out in my head. I've been planning it for years. I think I'll need to put a roof on it, with some sides that I can open and close. The wind gets to really blowing here, so I'll need to do something for that. It would be nice to heat it in the winter.

Anyway, that's that.