Oh So Much To Tell....

I'm sorry that I have been so lax in keeping my blog up to date. There is one particular detail that I should have mentioned a long time ago, but I wanted to wait until I could send cards to those people who deserve that kind of notification. Since that is going to take longer than I had anticipated, I will go ahead and tell y'all now.

I AM FINALLY ENGAGED TO HELEN!!!!!!!!!

And I'm kinda' excited about it, too, if you hadn't noticed. Here are a couple of pictures of the occasion that you may enjoy...

She was very surprised, which was difficult because we've only been talking about getting married for the past year and a half. We plan to have the wedding either the same weekend as her graduation or the weekend after that. That's 1 year, 7 months and 14 or 21 days (depending on the date) from now. I was so glad that it was as special as I had hoped it would be. I was able to cook her favorite dinner for her, for her roommates and for my best friend and his sister, whom I had brought with me to help celebrate the occasion. It was quite amazing. I love that girl so very much. Anyhow, there is more to my life than this single event, though not much more ;-)

Work continues to be monotonous and boring, though I have applied to enroll in a university and I hope that my pursuit of a degree will help to break up the boredom and sense of uselessness.

My story continues to stagnate, though I have come up with an idea for another issue of my "World of Places." I'm not sure how well that is going to come along; my book is not all that has been stagnating. I have recently picked up several of the books I had been reading and am trying to develop the discipline to read them along with the Bible every day.

More later....

Hey There Guys....

Well, it seems that my blog has attracted an unusual amount of attention lately. I have to thank Anonymous for his contribution of CatFurnitureDiscounters.com and BodyBuilding-Suplement-Freak.com, you know those are two websites that I really didn't know I needed until I saw them. Thank you, Anonymous for the valuable contribution that I'm sure you make to society by consuming oxygen on a daily basis.

Seriously, though, I am sincerely grateful to Duane for his encouraging words about life in the service. It is often easy to become bogged down in the drudgery of a few difficult days and forget about the really positive things that I have going for me in this line of work. I'm afraid that my blog does present an unbalanced view of life in the Marines. The lifesyle is really not that bad and I do not dislike being a Marine. You will never find a workplace that knows how to balance work and play the way that the Marines do. You will also never have a boss outside of the military who is required to ensure that you aren't being irresponsible with your paycheck. I am proud of what I do and of whom I do it with. I also do not begrudge anyone the benifits of what I and my brothers provide, simply because they didn't serve in the military. Ultimately, there are a lot of great things about military life, but that isn't what this blog is about ;-) If you want to hear the benifits of military life, you can find them at www.Military.com or at www.(fill in the blank).com. This is My Life, which is full of small miracles, insignificant wonders, and minor Everests. Enjoy!

In other news...

I am scheduled to leave to go home tomorrow. I am going to drive 3 hours to pick up my father and his mother (yes, that makes her my grandmother) and then proceed to Rutherfordtonto spend some time with my grandmother's family. From there we will drive 18 straight hours (I hope) to get home. I will have to fly back to NC on the 13th so my days are, as always, limited. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get home before Helen started back to college so most of her time will be spent in Waco. I'm going to be able to visit her on a couple of evenings and she is going to come down for the weekend, but for two people who should already be married, that is hardly enough time. Well, until we get married, there will never be enough time, I suppose.

The gas crisis has hit us fairly hard. Prices jumped by as much as $1.50 in a couple of days so I'm glad that I got a couple of extra cans of gas to take with me on the trip to Texas. We'll see what happens from there.

The newest verse in the Hurley Luck saga is about money. I was recently the victim of credit card fraud to the tune of about $60, which is not so bad until Hurley Luck kicks in. Being the contientious person that I am I called my bank and had them cancel the card number so that I could file a report and get my $60 back. Unfortunately, this means that I now have to use checks, of which I have 20. But that's not so bad because this should all be cleared up in a week or so right? Well, no. It took me a week just to find out which military investigation unit I was really supposed to file a report with so that I could file a report with the bank so that they could send me a new card. It doesn't help that once I filed the report, it's still goign to be 7-10 days before I can ask my legal department to go get a copy of the report so that I can send it to the bank. Well, I get down to 2 checks and there is still no light at the end of the tunnel. Then my dad's car (of course it has to be the one that I'm driving 1300 miles, not the car that can wait) needs a new timing belt, rather badly. And this is something that is best remedied before we get to Alabama. So there goes one check. Only one more day to go, I can make it right? Then my dad will have cash and we can take care of things that way. Nope, then the whole town goes crazy and starts buying up all the petroleum products in sight so I have to get some before I have to drive 1300 miles. There goes the last check. I managed to get cash back from the check, but since I had to prepay before I pumped, I didn't get back as much cash as I thought I'd get. So I now have $8 in cash, no checks, no check/credit card, a broken ATM card, and tomorrow is Saturday so the bank won't even be open so I can pull money out of my account manually! Tomorrow is the day that I have to drive 3 hours to pick up my father and grandmother, let's just hope that nothing happens between now and then, like a hurricane or something....