Day 28

Good day everybody. This morning, Erin's mom headeded back home. Erin had to work. Her mom had gotten Lex a lap top computer for her birthday, and she ended up being a bit regretful about it mainly because it was so much computer for a 9 year old. What she had said to Erin in her defence about getting Lex a computer at such a young age was that she wants Lex to not be so behind the rest of the grand kids. Apparently a lot of them already have their own computers and are very computer savvy. The funny thing, at least for me, is that I never had my own computer till I was a junior in High School. We had a desk top computer at home, which was the family computer, and even with not having my own computer I still learned how to be very good at computers. My parents even referred to me as their computer wiz. Even after I left home, sometimes they would have problems with their computer and call me. For instance, one day my dad called me and said "Our computer has over 350 cookies. I called a tech guy and he said he would charge $300 for me to have him come out and take care of it." I was like "Holy Crap dad! Cookies are easy to take care of! You don't need to pay $300.00 to get it taken care of. I will come home and clean up your computer for free!"

So I did. After that point, any time they had a problem, I was the first person they called. Times have changed quite a bit. I haven't had to help them with computer issues in a while. I don't know if its because of how different my life is now, if it's because they have learned how to do things themselves, or if my younger sisters take care of it now for them. I know they no longer just have a desktop PC. They do have the desk top (not the same one I grew up with, but a newer faster one fortunately), but my mom has her own laptop. When I watched her on it trying to download music or an audio book from itunes, I could still tell that they are not the 'greatest" with them, but they are much better now. I guess a lot of people that didn't grow up with computers are making it a point to simply learn how to do the basics. They still don't know the in depth stuff, but they know how to operate and clear cookies and such. That stuff is pretty easy.

So anyway, moving on! About the laptop grandma bought Lex. The day she got here, I jokingly said "You know? There is a Best Buy in Davenport if you want to exchange for a smaller computer!" with a wink. When she was saying she was going to get Lex a laptop, Erin recommended getting her a netbook. She told her about my computer, how nice and compact it is, how I can still do everything I did on my old larger laptop, but how much better the netbook is. I love it! I got a Dell Inspiron mini, which has similar, if not maybe even better specs than my old Gateway. My gateway has a few things that made it a very big neusance. 1st thing was the battery life. From the day I bought it, the battery life was nothing like what it claimed. It said "Approximately 4 hours of battery life!"

What they didn't say was "you have to pretty much be doing absolutely nothing in order for it to last that long!" I swear! I never did 'a lot' on the computer that you would think it would die quick. I mainly browsed, listened to music, did college course work, etc, and my average battery time was maybe a little over an hour. One time it died in about 45 minutes. IT SUCKED! Problem #2. After I had it for about a year, a few of my keys fell off. I reattached some of them, but they kept coming off. I knew I was just patching it up temporarily and that pretty soon I would have to put it to rest. The only prob was, and I was well aware of this, that I knew I couldn't afford to buy a replacement computer immediately. We moved here to Clinton, lived here for a little over a year, and then I finally unpacked the computer. Problem number 3 with it was the ac adapter outlet. I don't know if it was the cord, or the outlet. Melissa remembers me talking about this. I could plug it in, and sometimes it would charge, sometimes not. If I rotated the plug, sometimes I could get it to start charging. So I, at one time, took scotch tape and got it to start charging, and then taped the plug in the position it was in. That worked for a while. I called around and researched what it would cost to just get my laptop repaired. The cheapest quote was $250.00 just for the repair. There was added costs because of me having to ship my computer to them.

Well as we neared tax time, I decided that for school I really needed a working computer. I also decided after talking it over with Erin, that instead of going for the same type of computer that Erin has (Macbook), I would go with a netbook. These smaller versions of laptops range in price from $250 to $500. The one Erin and I selected was priced around $350.00. After taxes and such, it was over $400.00. I wasn't sure what to expect. All I know was the day I got my laptop and started running the window's updates on it, and started doing things on it, I love it. My gateway was 15 inches wide. It was so heavy and not very easy to carry around. My netbook is ten inches, very lightweight. I literally can walk around carrying it in one arm without any possibility of dropping it. The gateway had to always be plugged in because of the short battery lilfe. My Dell netbook can last 7 hours unplugged. Having had to keep my old laptop plugged in, I am always running my netbook unplugged. The only time I use it while being plugged in is if I am playing World of Warcraft. It can last maybe 2-3 hours unplugged when on that game. I figured this would be the case because of the intense graphics that the game has.

So anyway, back to grandma getting Lex the big dell laptop. When I joked around about best buy, she actually thought it was a good idea. Apparently she was already thinking about wanting to exchange it. Well, last night she said "I want to talk to you about something. How about tomorrow you and I take two cars out to Davenport. I want to go to Best buy and go ahead and exchange the computer for a netbook." I was like "I'm confused. Why do we need to take two cars?" "I'm leaving to go back tomorrow." She said. I hadn't thought about that. I knew she was leaving on Sunday. Now it totally made sense. Saturday morning, while we were eating breakfast before heading out to Lex's soccer game, I was talking to her about netbooks and why they are so awesome. I told her how mine is actually as fast as my regular laptop was. I told her how I could still do everything I would normally do and it handled them great. I logged onto it and let her play around with it. From what Erin told me, when Erin recommended 'netbooks' for Lex, her mom thought she said "Notebooks." Well I guess seeing how well mine ran convinced her that a netbook was a much better fit for Lex's first computer.

I had mentioned to Erin after the talk about going to Davenport that I was just concerned with gas. I am pretty good about making my gas tank in my truck last between paychecks. Lately I have only been filling up one out of my two tanks. Sometimes as I'm a few days away from payday I have to really stretch it thin, but usually I have been able to make it. She talked to her mom and her mom said she'd be more than willing to help me out with gas. That was great. So this morning when Erin left, Lex wanted to ride with Grandma, and they were going to follow me. We stopped by the gas station and she put $15.00 into my truck. I was perfectly happy with that because I was on a quarter tank and $15 would be enough to get me out to Davenport and back and still have enough to last me the few days until the next pay day. Thank God for GPS! once we got into Davenport and on the right street, I recognized the area immediately. We were right smack dab in the middle of one of my Route areas from when I was a Schwans driver. Ah the memories. ;)

Thankfully I kept Zoe happy on the way there when it was just she and I riding together, because I brought a baggy filled with two different kinds of cereal for her to munch on. I realized shortly after we left that I forgot to bring a binky. When we got there, my back silently squeeled at me when I climbed out of the truck. 45 minutes of sitting and bumps, still in recovery from when I hurt it apparently. So we went into the store, and flagged down a sales rep. We immediately went to where the netbooks were, and grandma showed lex which 3 she had narrowed her options down to. The one Lex chose was cheaper than mine cost, but had a slightly larger hard drive. The big difference is operating system. Mine came with Windows 7 and Lex's computer is XP. Both are very good operating systems. When we left, I figured we should have a few dollars in our account still, and I knew the ride home without a binky would be hell. So we stopped at Target just down the road. Looking at the binkies, the cheapest pair was $2.69. As far as I knew, we only had $2.40 in our bank account. So I called our HR Block emerald card. Last time I checked it was when I drove down to Des Moines to meet the grandparents so that I could pick Ally up and bring her home. Sort of a "meet in the middle" kind of arrangement when Ally had been down there with them for a week. I literally was going to run out of gas and I pulled off at a gas station. I pulled my wallet out and pulled out every card I had, 99% were prepaid cards with one being the income tax HR block card. Thank the Lord, the emerald card had $16.00 on it. I put gas in and we made it home. Until that happened, I did not know what was going to happen.

I remember driving the usual 5 MPH above the speed limit and thinking "what am I going to do? We will make it home. How though? It doesn't matter. Thank you Lord for being with us. Thank you Lord, for I know that we will make it home. I know that you are watching out for us." Well then to hear on the card, expecting only like $2.00 or something, "You're emerald card account balance is $16.58." I was like "THANK YOU!" When we were at target, I thought "lets see how much is on the cards I have." The first card I dialed was the emerald card. Seeing as I put $16.00 in gas in, and the balance had just been a little over that prior to that fill up from what I could remember, I was positive that the emerald card would be a no-go. When I entered the card number, it said "Your emerald card account balance is $6.47." I looked up again and once again said "Thank you God." The thoughts going through my head again were that I walked into target knowing what I needed, and God was watching out for us. Not only did he make it possible for me to get the binkies Zoe needed, but I bought a box of 100 Calorie snack packs for us to munch on on the way home. It wasn't a lot to eat, but I figured a snack would be enough for the ride home and we could make lunch at home.

Faith, for me, is very hard. It's always been hard for me to just give it all to God and have 'faith' that he is taking care of it. But with how lately I am giving everything negative in my life, all worrysome thoughts, cares, stresses, etc, to him, I have also noticed other things. I think I already mentioned this, but at Erin's job, they are now going to train her on another part of the restaurant. That means Erin will be more useful to them. She will get more hours, and possibly get payed more and be happier with working there. While I was walking around doing my rounds at work, I was thinking about this. After a few minutes, what occurred to me was this. I have been giving everything troubling me to God. Thanking him for us both being employed. Asking him to continue blessing us in our job. Acknowledging the fact that 'yes we do not make enough to pay the bills,' but that I know in my heart that through His help, everything will be taken care of. Shortly after that, Erin is in a way moving up. There can be only one explanation, and it is that God is in control of everything. He is the one who is responsible for all the good that happens in life.

Tonight when we were all hanging out here at the house, I layed down on the couch just to relax. Well, I was tired before then and I really felt it when I layed on the couch. Cool breeze coming through the window, I was very comfortable and I easily was dozing off. I didn't really get a "nap." I just dozed off for a little while. Zoe needed some more diapers and so I took the girls with me and went to the store to grab some. I decided I really didn't feel like cooking, so I picked up meals that you can cook in the microwave or bake in the oven. They were good, but apparently extremely rich. I had similar problems with my stomach that I did when I ate pizza ranch the other night. Apparently my stomach prefers me to eat very light foods. OH WELL!

I had to do some more work on my english paper, but wanted to get some world of warcraft time in. I decided I would first log on to WoW, and play for a while. I ended up leveling my new mage from 3 to 6 in probably about an hour and a half. I love that character! My priest will always be my #1 and favorite character, but my mage is definitely worthy of being #2. After I reached a point where I was ok with logging off, I shut the computer down. I went and got dinner ready, and after we ate, I logged back on the computer and continued my english paper. We will see what my teacher has to say about it in the morning. I have a meeting at 8:30 with her. Conferences of some kind. All the students had to sign up for a time slot to meet one on one with the teacher. I don't know if we will just talk about the paper, or about the whole class, or what. Although I'm dreading it, I signed up for 8:30 figuring that I wanted to get it out of the way first thing so that I could just go home and maybe go back to bed for a little bit. Erin's working, so Zoe will be at the sitter, which will give me at least a few hours to catch up on sleep.

So in closing, I would appologize for this mile long entry, but I'm not going to. ;) I'm a writer. Hardcore to the bone, and I'm not afraid to show it. In fact, the more that comes out of me through writing, the better I feel. The other day when I wrote in my book, I took my book from page 85 to page 92. I got on a good track and I opened up my mind even further and I just went with everything that came through. I do have my dry spells where I want to write, but don't have much coming to mind, as I'm sure Melissa has also had. However, even on those days, I will still write as much as my mind will allow me. If it turns out to be a short entry, or short addition to the book, so be it, but I will write every day none the less.

The lesson for today will be this. Faith. Like I said, it is so hard. To simply say "I have faith that this will work itself out," and believe in it, is hard as hell. But when you are able to give it completely over to Him, and have complete faith in what you are praying for, then amazing things happen. The best part of all is that when they happen, you will be able to tell. I know not everyone out there is a religious person, and if that is the case with any of you, then obviously this won't mean anything to ya. For those of you that know where I'm coming from, I'm sure you will understand and hopefully agree about this. That is pretty much the lesson for today. Have faith, believe, and know that He is working on it. The bible says "Ask and you shall receive," and "knock and the door will be opened to you." Think about it. ;) I will write more for you all tomorrow.

Thanks for being here.

CB