I love this ad:
Discovery Channel: I love the World

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In December, two days after Christmas, I broke my big toe. It happened as I was getting ready for bed so, after a few curses, I went to sleep hoping it would feel better in the morning. The next day I decided to go to the doctor.

I would gladly trade the pain in my mouth for the pain I had in my toe.

I laid awake all night, drenched in sweat, unable to fall asleep due to the pain in my mouth. I went to the dentist this morning and he said I had a dry socket. The clot that was supposed to keep food and debris from affecting my jaw bone disappeared, shooting pain in each tooth, down my jaw, and up to my ear. Advil, Orajel, antibitoics, and even Lortab did nothing.

The dentist packed the socket with a small, medicine-soaked gauze that sent even more insane pain through my skull. At 5:00pm, I’m still awake and the pain is unbearable.

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My jaw is bruised and the pain still persits, five days after my wisdom teeth extraction. I went to work today, but while home on lunch the pain became too much to tolerate while on the clock so I decided to dope up on more pain medication and stay home.

I want to continue to work on the house, but I know its counter-productive to recovery to use my rest-time to work. Unfortunately, the house hasn’t changed much - except accumilate more messes - since I went in for surgery. So I’m laid up in bed, watching Daily Show reruns, blogging, and dozing off. While resting, I’ve also been playing Texas Hold’em at MSN Games. There are always people playing so it never takes more than a few seconds to hop into a new game.

I also re-discovered a few websites that I haven’t been to in a while. The first is mint.com. It logs into your bank and credit cards, evaluates balances, sends you alerts, and helps determine how to best manage your debt and finance. It’s all completely free, too.

The other is prosper.com. Prosper is a very cool website to make or loan money. Users are either “lenders” or “borrowers.” Borrowers can ask for money for things such as business loans and debt consolidation. Lenders can submit a bid for all or part of the loan requested by offering money and an APR. As little as $50 can be given by a lender and, if the borrower accepts, the lender will pay back the lender along with interest over 3 years (with no pre-payment penatly). Borrowers and lenders both must be verified to help prevent fraud. Experian gives a credit score to borrowers and borrowers must fill out information to receive a debt-to-income ratio. This helps lenders with establishing risk as well as APRs for their loans. Wikipedia, however, shows that about 10% of borrowers are one or more month late on their payments after 3 months of repayment. Prosper takes a very small fee from both lenders and borrowers. So, after these fees, the average rate of return on 20 loans older than 6 months is 4.89%. Nonetheless, this isn’t a bad ROI - espcially on principles as low as $50.

Categories: Miscellaneous
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I think most everyone knows, but if not - I asked Jenny to marry me:

Categories: Miscellaneous
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My naps and medicine have been helping the pain in my mouth post-surgery, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes sharing the updates on the bathroom we’re remodeling:

Bathroom with vinyl floor removed:

Ripping up the subfloor:

Jenny removing wall tile:

Removing the vanity:

Boxed under the vanity was a bunch of old stuff, including a Hustler magazine:

Demolition:

Scout helping guard the parts to the new sink faucet:

More demolition:

New floor:

New toilet!

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No, really. OUCH.

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I’m leaving in 30 minutes to get my 4 wisdom teeth removed. I didn’t get much sleep.

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Several things have happened since I last updated. I’m not sure why I had such a tremendous pause between posts. Since moving in with Jenny life has been very busy. Jenny and I have had our birthdays in 2007 following my last post, followed by Christmas, and numerous other events that I would have normally shared with friends and family but all of which managed to be superseded in importance by other going-ons of the time. Anyhow, I told myself I need need to be more involved and more regular on providing updates.

So what’s new? Work is going great. School too. Jenny has a light at the end of the tunnel in school, soon completing her degrees in Ceramics, Art Education, and a minor in psychology. Work sent me to Vegas in February as a reward for exceeding quality goals. March followed with the death of my grandfather and a flood of great memories from my early childhood in Illinois. Now that April is here I hope to continue to post frequently.

Jenny and I have been remodeling her house. The house was built in 1944 and is need of some updating. It’s a small, 2 bedroom / 1 bathroom house. The attached garage was converted into a den some years ago. We first tackled the 2nd bedroom, trying to create a studio for Jenny. Jenny does a great deal of photography, such as senior photos, but the room turned out to be too small. So we are in the process of switching the den (our office) to the second bedroom so that the den can become Jenny’s new studio. I updated the new office by moving the light fixture to the center of the room, painting the walls, staining the window trim and door, and updating all the light switches and plug outlets.

Second bedroom being used as storage:



Cleaned bedroom, being used as a studio:



Old light fixture:


Relocating light fixture:



New light fixture in center of room:

Stained windows:


Staining the door:

Categories: Miscellaneous
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Finally, some updates:

www.flickr.com More of brokenmod’s photos

More photos here.

Categories: Family, Miscellaneous
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