Counting the Cost

For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? ~Luke 14:28

I'm backing out of the purchase of the land I was buying. There were just several things that weren't coming through in time, and after carefully considering what all the little things were likely going to cost I decided it wasn't worth it to go forward.

I really hate to back out of the deal, but that's what escrow is for. I'm losing my earnest money, plus the money I paid to the Water and Sewer District to do the availability study. I might still build a house, but if I do, I think it will be on a smaller scale. One of the things I didn't like about this was that it was going to tie up most of my money for an extended period of time.

Shallowbrook and Altoona

Perhaps I'll flesh this post out a little bit later on, but I posted a bunch of pictures and audio from my trip, and I wanted to make it available.

There are so many photos, it's insane.

Altoona Conference:

• My photos
• Recorded meetings

Shallowbrook photos:

• Mine
• Abby's
• Caitlin's
• Joanne's
• Michelle's

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Update: Well, it wasn't Comcast that slowed the connection down, it was my roommate. He set the QoS on the router to label packets originating from my Linux box as "bulk" in stead of "standard." This basically tells the routers and gateways along the way across the Internet that it's okay to drop those packets, because they're not important. Our other computers are set as "premium," which is a higher priority, so when there's contention on our router, the other computers win. That was annoying, and it didn't accomplish what he wanted to accomplish, which was to give his computer a higher priority than the server, because that was already the case.

Anyway, I fixed it, but that doesn't stop a billion people trying to access the pictures at once from slowing down our connection and getting him mad again.

Let me know how things are working.

Disconnect

Peoria has free WiFi too. But Minneapolis doesn't. Minneapolis sucks.

I'm waiting here in a cafe for Jeremy and Michelle to arrive, and then later Drew. Darrell is going to pick us all up together.

I'm guessing my luggage will arrive safe and sound in Des Moines at 1:30 or so this afternoon. Too bad I won't be in Des Moines for another week. I knew this was going to happen, I even spoke to the lady behind the counter in Minneapolis, but she assured me that bags are better routed than people at airports. I think it was too late by then anyway, my luggage had already missed the flight from Las Vegas.

I should get my luggage at some point tomorrow afternoon.

Poor Gerald. He was supposed to pick me up in Des Moines at 5:30 this morning, and I didn't have his number, and I couldn't get on the Internet to look it up.

Travel "Arrangements"

I use the term loosely.

I booked a flight from Seattle to Las Vegas to Des Moines. This was good.

Except that the Northwest cancelled the Des Moines flight, so when I got to Las Vegas, I found out that in stead of waiting until 12:30AM, I had to wait until 6:55 at which point I would fly to Minneapolis, and then connect to Des Moines.

I spoke with the airline, and they said that because I purcased the ticket online (from Orbitz), there was nothing they could do, except reschedule my flight, but there was no flight to get me to Des Moines any faster. So I asked them about getting me a hotel voucher, and Orbitz pointed at Northwest, and Northwest pointed at Orbitz. Apparently I had been "notified" of this change in an e-mail entitled, "Prepare For Your Trip - Des Moines 7/7/06" which I had assumed to be simply a reminder, since there was no mention of a change: it was merely reflected in the "Ticket Information" section of the e-mail. In any case, what was I supposed to do? Get another flight within two days?

The solution to this particular conundrum lies in the fact that I am in fact not headed to Des Moines at all, at least not until next weekend. Really, I need to get to Bradford, Illinios, and there are other airports with connecting flights to them that would cut travel time off my trip: Peoria and Moline. Once the Lord brought this new approach to my attention, I had only to chose between the two. I could get to Moline earlier, but it would be easier to get a ride from Peoria, since there are likely others using that airport and we're not supposed to get to Shallowbrook Farm until the afternoon, so Peoria it was.

I still won't sleep in a bed tonight, but I wasn't going to anyway, and this will actually cut time off my trip to Bradford.

I know, I know--I'm passing up the perfect opportunity to spend nine hours "doing" Vegas and getting married to a hooker by Elvis.

The airport here in Vegas has free WiFi, you just have to give them an e-mail address to log in as a guest. I hate it when they try to charge exorbant amounts of money for access, simply because they can, especially at airports where people have paid to be, and might need to log in to check travel arrangements and confirmations.

Independence Day 2006

God bless America.

Here's some photos from a hike in Newcastle that took us near some coal mining ruins.

Nothing says Independence Day like blowing up a little piece of your country.

Here's some photos (and some video) of fireworks. God bless the soverign native peoples of Washington state, and Jeffrey & Cody for once again spending exorbant amounts of money on fireworks.

Here's last year's fireworks. (Mostly videos--large files, and lots of them!)

Please be nice to my poor server sitting behind a cable modem (and anyone else who might be interested in accessing it). Its upload bandwidth isn't all that great.