Sidney Hometown News

(I've just created this blog so as to give my faithful readership the opportunity to read my posts at their leisure and in the privacy of their own homes.)

Good morning from sunny Sidney, NE!

Let me start things off with the following: I just purchased my first rifle! It's an SKS semi-automatic. Apparently, the store get shipments of these "vintage" rifles from time to time, and being employees, we get first dibs. The wierd thing is that, being a used and foreign weapon, it gets dipped and shipped in something called Cosmolene (sp). This stuff is like really sticky oil and it gets dipped and baked into every crevice and cranny. So, right now, it's sitting in my friend's 'easy-bake rifle oven' - essentailly, a big wooden crate with a bunch of high power light bulbs in it. I guess it gets up to about a couple hundred degrees in there.

So, I guess I've completed the transition. Moving to Sidney has been pretty stressful and frightening, but I think we've really begun settling in. I mean just the other day, the wife didn't yell at me at all! I waited until about 11pm when I finally reminded her of this, though. She told me she was too tired at that point to really put a sincere effort into it, so I let her off the hook. I'm really understanding that way.

The house hunting is finally coming to an end - I hope. We're basically pre-approved and all the mortgage lady is waiting on is our finalized contract and my DD Form 214. Apparently, when I left the military, they gave me a piece of paper and said something like, "Don't ever lose this piece of paper." I don't really recall the conversation, but the wife assures me they did.

Well, anybody who knows me knows that the FIRST thing I'm going to do with some important documentation is lose it, and that's exactly what I did. I literally don't recall ever having laid eyes on this thing in the nearly 8 years since I left the AF.

So, I told the mortgage lady all about my poor organizational skills, and she was very sympathetic. She told me, basically, that without it, I could forget getting a VA loan and would have to do it like regular people do. I laughed and laughed, then immediately started googling my ass off trying to figure out how to get a replacement DD Form 214. The joke's on her, though, because they now have that information online in some fancy "database" thingy.

So, with that paperwork in transit, and with the pre-approval, etc, there's every chance that we can close on that house by the end of the month. No later than the 15th of April, surely.

I think I mentioned in my last message about how the landlord wanted us to move into the basement while they did some "peaceful" rebuilding upstairs. Again, I laughed and laughed. Instead, I compromised and allowed him to do the upstairs bathroom and some of the wall removal while we were at work. Little did I realize that the plaster from the walls would soon be decorating every single surface in the house! My computer was under like an inch of dust, and my kids were nowhere to be seen! Fortunately, they were done with the dusty bit within a couple of days, so tonight I wiped down al of my stuff and recabled the computers, and everything is all shiny again.

We got all the servers at work sorted out for DST and I haven't heard anything today, so I'm guessing nothing exploded.

Anyway, I suppose I should cut this short-ish. What do you think of the BLOG format? Obviously, I'm a big fan, but I'd like to hear from you - the little people. Feel free to post to your hearts' delight. If you have any trouble, just send me an e-mail and I'll try to figure it out.

Anthony
Somewhere in Nebraska