Home owner

After about a week of haggling back and forth, my offer to buy a house was finally accepted last night. Yes, I will be the proud owner of my own house in less than a month.

It is a 3 story house (2 floors and a basement) and has 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. There is a fireplace and an indoor porch attached to the front entrance. They are including all appliances (washer, dryer, etc) and also a shed in the backyard. It is the corner house in a row so we have lots of windows and lots of light coming into the house. Oh, I can't forget the best part, it has Central Air!!!!

I'm so glad to be getting out of that little shit hole apartment finally and actually having some room to move around for once.

Updates

Not much to tell really.

I put in another bid for a house and hopefully I'll find out soon if they accept it or not. Its not exactly the neighborhood I was hoping to move to but the house is really nice.

I spent the last few days leveling my BLM with Shay which was a lot of fun for me. I'm almost 63 now and soon I'll be able to level with her WHM. I also finally got all my Mog Bonanza Marbles and hopefully I'll win something good.

We had our annual "Upward Feedback Meeting" at work this morning, which in reality is an opportunity to rip your boss a new one. Since I like my boss so much I didn't do any ripping, mostly just praising. The woman that directed the meeting is from Germany originally which I found pretty interesting. I wanted to talk to her a bit afterward but she was running late for something else so I didn't get a chance to.

Finally I felt my baby kick for the first time the other day. Its an even bigger reality check than the ultrasound was lol. I can hardly believe in less than 4 months she'll be born.

Thats it for now, talk to you again soon.

Problem solving

I have this problem. Its not too big of a deal right now, but eventually its gonna come to a head and its gonna have to be dealt with. It didn't start out as a problem. In fact it started out great and everything was going the way I wanted it too. I was happy with it.

Then things started to change, and hence the problem actually became a problem. I've made many attempts to solve this problem, but no matter what I do it lingers. I've tried being subtle and indirect, I've tried being blunt, I've even tried leaving it alone and hoping it would just go away.

None of it worked.

Now I don't know what to do about it. You see, the strange thing is that I actually WANT to have this problem. Its something I derive great pleasure from, something that makes me feel very happy. You may even go as far as to say that I love it.

So why, if its such a great thing, is there something wrong?

The problem is that I don't think its very healthy, and not just for me. Sometimes I think its just best to end it, and other times I feel there is a reason for it so I shouldn't throw it away. My gut tells me to hang on, that I'll regret it if I let go, but my head tells me that holding on will just hurt me more.

So this is the debate that continues to rage and I'm running out of time. I really don't know what I should do. I wish someone would give me a sign, or something.

Take me out to the Ballgame

So I finally made it out to the new Phillies stadium to catch a game there for the first time. I hadn't been to one since they played at the Vet, which was basically run down piece of shit stadium that was terrible for Baseball.

As you can see from the photo (I shamelessly stole from the Phillies website lol) it was me, my wife, and my parents that went. It was a cold and rainy day but we were lucky enough to have seats under an overhang so we didn't get wet. The stadium is absolutely gorgeous and there is a bunch of stuff to do there besides watching the game. They have a section that has a wall mural detailing the history of the team, games like fast pitch and virtual base stealing, and plenty of little places to catch a bite to eat.

As for the game, it turned out to be a pretty memorable one. Our back-up Centerfielder Jason Werth ended up hitting 3 home runs and getting 8 RBI's (both tying club records) as the Phils ended up beating the Toronto Blue Jays 10-3. Usually the games I go to are pretty boring and uneventful, and I was so happy I got to see something like that this time.

I have a ticket to the July 10th game against the St. Louis Cardinals, where I'll be going with a bunch of guys from work. It should be a good time, I can't wait.

Some changes

I felt that since the focus of this blog didn't exactly match the title that I would change it up a bit. I also changed the layout a tad to make it flow a little better. These are minor changes but I think it improves the blog as a whole.

Also for clarification, I did NOT have a baby yet, I merely found out the sex during the last ultrasound a few days ago. You already know that but figured I'd mention it anyway.

I still intend to write about FFXI but I'm taking it out of the title since I don't do it very often. I'll probably change the title again when I think of something more witty, but who knows if that will ever happen. My focus will probably still stay primarily on the Election until November, but I'm gonna mix in more real life stuff with it (since I should have plenty to write about in the coming months).

So stay tuned because things are going to start getting really exciting soon (.......no, not really lol)

Answer to my burning question

Yup, its a girl. I have somehow managed to defy my family genes (about 70% of Grear babies are boys) and produced a female offspring, much to the pleasure of my mother who always dreamed of having a daughter of her own.

I have to admit that I wanted a boy. I can relate better to a boy and feel like I would do a better job raising a son as opposed to a daughter. Nevertheless I am very happy to have a girl and am confident she won't hate me too much when she becomes a teenager lol. Who am I kidding, she'll have me wrapped around her little finger and I won't even realize it.

Daddy's little girl, it has a nice ring to it.

Math time

So Tuesdays Indiana and North Carolina primaries have come and gone and Obama won big time. Even though he narrowly lost in Indiana, his blowout win in NC actually ended up completely erasing Hillary's gains in Pennsylvania. In fact he is further ahead now in both delegate count and popular vote than he was the day before PA's primary. So where does this leave us now? Lets throw out some numbers here.

The total number of delegates needed to win the nomination as of right now are 2025. Right now Obama has 1846 and Hillary has 1685.

There are 6 more primaries left that will award 237 pledged delegates, and there are still 276 undecided Superdelegates. Superdelegates are senior party members that are allowed to vote for whoever they want, and their purpose is to vote for who they think has the best chance of winning the General Election in November.

So that means there are 513 delegates left to get, and in order for Obama to carry the nomination he only needs to get 179 of them, or roughly 35% of the remaining delegates. Hillary of course needs to get about 65% of the rest to carry the nomination.

Now consider than if current polling holds up the remaining pledged delegates will be split about 50-50. So that will then make it about 1964-1804 for Obama.

That means that Obama would only need 61 of the remaining 276 Superdelegates to clinch the nomination, or a mere 22% of the remaining undecided's.

So as you can see the race is pretty much over at this point, and I've already put myself in General Election mode. Oh Hillary will no doubt drag it all the way to the Convention in August, but I hope the Superdelegates are wise enough not to let that happen.

On to the Conference Finals!!!!!

For the second straight series the Flyers pull a huge upset by beating the Canadiens 6-4 in Game 5 tonight. R.J. Umberger scored 2 times, giving him 8 for the series, as the Flyers came back from a 2 goal deficit late in the 2nd period to finish them off 4 games to 1.

Up next for the Flyers will likely be the Pittsburgh Penguins with their pair of superstars Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. Of course we not only have to deal with these two great players, but being that Crosby is the NHL's Golden Boy we'll have to deal with the refs too. Thats no biggie, we've gotten the shit end of the calls all playoffs and it didn't stop us then.

Rogue Galaxy

Keeping with my current theme of "Stuff I do besides FFXI and web surfing" I'm gonna write about a PS2 game I've been playing the last month or so. Its called Rogue Galaxy and is a Space based adventure where a crew of Pirates are looking for some ancient artifacts to unlock the secret to finding a mythical planet that supposedly holds infinite wealth.


Its a real time action based RPG that has a battle system very similar to Kingdom Hearts. I've grown to like this type of system as opposed to the traditional turn-based system used in most RPG's. Character advancement is achieved by leveling up with experience points, and abilities are learned through a system called the Revelation Flow. In this system you place items acquired from battles or chests in slots on the board to unlock abilities and open up slots for even more abilities. This can be frustrating because some drops are very hard to get from enemies that have very low encounter rates (hi2u Star Earrings >_>).


Another aspect I like about this game is the weapon fusion process. Basically every battle your weapons "level up" in a sense until they eventually Max out. When you have two of the same type of weapon Maxed out you can combine them into a new and (hopefully) more powerful weapon. This saves you money (kinda pointless since money is so easy to get) and time buying new weapons from out of the way shops.


All in all this is a pretty fun game without too many frustrations, and I like most of the characters. The story isn't terribly deep but not every game has to have one like that. Here's a few screenies so you can see how it looks.

Hey I can read too :)

Yes on occasion I actually do other things besides play FFXI and surf the web. Shocking I know. Its actually been quite a while since I did any real reading (besides baby books lol) but I just picked up this book I've had for a long time and started to read it.

Its called Starfarers and its a Science Fiction book about Space. I know, you'd never guess that from the title lol. Being the closet Astronomy freak that I am, I love books like these and try and read them whenever possible.


Well anyway its set in the future, and mankind has figured out how to travel deep into Space. The catch is that time moves much faster on Earth than it does on the ships, so a 2 month trip into deep space equates to 25 years on Earth. The big deal though is that we made contact with aliens thousands of light years away and they are sending an expedition to go meet with them. This expedition however is due to last over 10 thousand Earth years so who knows what they'll come back to. This book follows the journey of the crew selected to go on this voyage.


So far I'm only up to page 105, and it has admittedly moved very slowly, but I have hope that it will turn out to be a good book. Right now they are between interstellar "jumps" and stopped near a 40 star cluster. While preparing for the next jump they discover the use of nuclear reactors near one of the stars and are going to investigate it. It seems like its gonna get interesting starting right about now.


Other than that not much new. My Flyers won again last night and lead the Canadiens 3-1 in their best of 7 series and will hopefully wrap it up this Saturday in game 5. I have a lot of confidence that they can run the table and win the Stanley Cup, but there is still a long way to go before that happens. Well I can always dream big can't I.