Author Archives: Britton

The Selling Continues: There Goes the Corvette

We have been continuing to steadily sell our stuff.  Some has been easy to sell, some a bit harder.

This last weekend I sold my 1975 Corvette that I’ve had for 13 years.  I woke up and thought “Today is the day I sell my car”.  So I took some pictures and listed it on Craigslist.  It was sold that night!

Last_Vette
Picture of the Corvette the Night it Sold

It makes sense to sell it on a few levels.  First, it doesn’t make much sense to take it to PR.   Second, it would cost a lot to ship.  Third, the frame would most likely rust away quickly.  Fourth, it’s almost 40 years old.  Fifth, well the list goes on for a while….

corvette
On one of our first dates 13 or so years ago

I was pretty lucky with the car though.  I sold it for what I paid for it and I got to enjoy driving around in an old Corvette for many years.  Those memories will stay with me forever.   We took it on some of our first dates. Schnoodle rode in the cubby area. We took it on our wedding. I even got my first speeding ticket in it.

 

 

Corvette Hill

On the flip side, I don’t have to worry about it any longer.  It did leak just about everywhere it could leak from and I was always afraid that it was going to break and cost a lot of time / money to fix.  Now I don’t have to pay insurance and registration on another car too.  I no longer have those worries floating around in the back of my head which is nice.

Another big item, gone. And another step closer to Puerto Rico.

How Does Coincidence Work?

My friend Sean, Cassie and I were talking about coincidence yesterday over some nachos.  It would seem that we all believe that strange coincidences happen to all of us and that it is kind of magical.  Like just as you talk about someone; they call you on the phone. Or just when you need something it appears as if out of nowhere.

When I was younger a friend of mine saw a hat that he really wanted.  He was dirt poor so the chances of him getting it were practically non-existent.  Later that day we were driving down the road and he saw something in the middle of the street and made us pull over.  He ran out and picked up, you guessed it, the EXACT same hat that he was looking at earlier.  It was as-if the universe had sent it to him.

In the most recent case Cassie and I had a $20 gift card to use at Safeway (our local grocery store).  We had received this gift card through our participation in the Weigh and Win program at the Library.  Anyhow, we were gathering a few items at the store; seaweed, a couple apples, trashbags,  oranges and a hand of bananas.   When we were using the self checkout we had put everything on the scale except for the bananas and it came to around $19.76.   Hmmm that’s close and we still had these bananas to weigh.   I looked at Cassie and said “Well…The bananas are going to throw us over $20 if we buy them.”  She looked at the bananas and with her out of the box thinking replied “Well..What if we buy just 1 banana?”.

You see I had viewed the bananas as one item.  I sometimes forget to use my brain and instead revert to what I am starting to call “Default thinking” which is just programming and isn’t really thinking at all.

So we picked one banana and threw it on the scale.  To our surprise this is what we saw:

safeway
A .23 cent banana to EXACTLY $20 Total

We could have picked any other banana, or checked out in any other order and it wouldn’t have turned out this way.

How does coincidence work? Is it some kind of non-local dark energy at work? Science is now seeing evidence of a “fifth force” that controls an invisible “dark energy”.  Perhaps this has something to do with it?  Some kind of quantum entanglement?

In either case coincidence needs more attention.  The next day we saw a robbery at Safeway and I am not sure how this all relates yet.  I have a feeling it has to do with helping others as the robbers simply ran out of the store with a cart full of food.  They started to throw it into their car and drive off.  These people needed food so badly that they stole it and here we have free gift cards in our pockets.

I suppose this is where religion and spirituality or just higher purpose comes into play which would be our next logical step as  humans.  We have our basic needs met and are trying now to expand into the next layer of hierarchy of needs.   Instead of thinking about the robbery from our perspective as witnesses we are now thinking about it from the perspective of the robbers and the store clerk who attempted to stop them by standing in front of the escaping car, and how we are more connected to the event than just watching it unfold.

In our pockets we had received the gift of free food.  How do we connect this with those who truly need it before they rob a store?  Apparently being on the front of the local newspaper promoting it isn’t enough.   And maybe this is looking into things too deeply…lol.  In any case life is much stranger than it appears on the surface.

Drywall Free Interior Walls

I was driving into work today while day dreaming about the house in Rincon.  I was thinking about what to do with the wood house and specifically about what to do about the interior walls.

The wall cavity between the outer siding and the inner panels/drywall seems to make a great place for bees, rats and bats to live.  This is a problem, because while I don’t have anything against any of those things in general, I don’t want them to live with me.

We know we are going to paint the inside of the house white to brighten it up.  The inside has never been painted and is all a natural wood color so it tends to be pretty dark.  I thought…”well who the hell needs drywall?  Or wood paneling?”.  Here in Colorado we need that space to insulate us from the outside which gets pretty darn cold.  The only purpose it really serves in our Rincon house is to cover up the studs and apparently make nice nests for  pests.

It is fairly hard to locate pictures of what I have in mind but I did find a few.  no drywall
Here is the idea

Basically remove the existing panels and drywall, clean everything out and paint.  Done.   It also provides shelf space.

Now, I am not sure we would do this in every room, but we don’t have to.  Some of the wood paneling can just be painted white and some can removed and the empty cavity painted.

Wall 2
Another example grabbed from Google images.

Back to Work -A Comparison

Work
Building Where I Work

Well it has been close to 2 weeks now since I’ve been back to work.  I surprisingly picked right up where I had left off 2 months before.  Not much, if anything had changed.  It was kind of unexpected but at the same time not surprising.

In this building I work in a similarly drab cubicle. I think that is one of the descriptions of a cube dweller.  A lot of your life takes place in a well….a cube.  The cubes are almost exactly the same with very little variation as with the inhabitants of the cubicles…. And the roads leading to and fro.

As you can probably guess by the way the building looks, we don’t do art.  Nope, just data.  Lots of computers.  It isn’t too terribly exciting, but it is complicated and sometimes challenging. And almost always the same.

Having some time off has given me a lot of perspective.

Tall Yard 2
The building where I want to be…and even there I will be mostly outside

I am glad I have employment and I did realize by coming back that I have learned my System Administration job fairly well.  I put a lot of effort into it and it shows.  Being able to just pick up and sail freely along is cool just due to the sheer amount of information that I have to know in order to do it.  I like to learn and grow and I feel that I have accomplished my goal of being an Application System Administrator.  I knew I could do it; and I have.

I want to be a tropical farmer, innkeeper and a surfer too.  I am sure I’ll look back at some point and be able to say that I’ve also accomplished those goals. I am ready to live where there is more green every day than grey. More plants than computer screens. More sensations to experience than sitting on my behind.

In the mean time, I will go back to the stark, dull building that shields me from the harshness of the outdoor world of Colorado… and plan my escape.