The big move again

Sometimes you really wonder what you were thinking in looking back at what you have done. What was I thinking in returning with the whole family, back to the great state of Texas? At the time it was definitely a huge decision for us to make. I was not too enamored with the job I had and in searching for usability jobs throughout the USA, I wandered upon my perfect job in San Antonio. We sold the house and off we went.

In order to save money we got rid of most of our stuff and whatever we fit in the 27ft U-Haul truck we took with us. Our oldest son drove my car and my wife drove our van on the big adventure. What made it even more challenging was that we had three cats with us! I tried as hard as I could and was not able to convince the family that it was a really bad idea to travel half way across the USA with pets. In the places we stopped for the night we not only had to find a place with two rooms but a hotel that accepted pets. We moved in the middle of the summer and the U-Haul truck A/C malfunctioned so with the engine and wind noise I was worn out each evening after the daily fight with the truck and traffic.


Before we left North Carolina, I had arranged for a 3 month stay in a nice townhouse near my work. When we pulled up to the rental office, they told me they could not accept our application as our family was too large for the townhouse. This was to become just the beginning of two years of trouble in Texas. Since we had no where to stay we moved around in several hotels until we found a very cheap In-Town Suites that had weekly rates. We finally found a house we wanted to buy, but our house in NC had not sold so we had to wait. The realtor we were using had a friend who rented us her house for two months while we were in a holding pattern.


The house we were waiting for and eventually bought was the same one we saw in NC in on-line house hunting The street appeal was amazing and the house was a couple of miles from work and across the street from Sea World's Shamu. It seemed like a perfect place for us. It had a super nice pool and a sport court, which both provided hours of entertainment for the whole family. Sometimes things that seem perfect are only so on the surface as we soon found out.


It is difficult to know what to say and what to leave out. We wanted to have a change for our oldest boys to hopefully wake them up into making new good friendships. That all back fired on us. Instead of a good change, things took a turn for the worse. So many bizarre things happened while we were in San Antonio. One night at 3am I found a policeman wandering through our house while one of our sons was in the police car in handcuffs. That was a high point. One morning while I was at work, the police called to tell me they found my son in the worst drug infested part of the city and I should hurry up and get him as the police were leaving him as they had real work to do. That was a high point. Then on the day we were heading to Arizona for a week long Christmas vacation, the police called to tell us they had our son in the juvenile detection center and we had to wait four hours before we could see him. That was a high point. One day we found out that between us and Sea World was a neighborhood that was riddled with youth gangs. One of our sons friends got beat up pretty bad a block from our house by one of these gangs. That was a high point. All of these were nothing compare to the highest point of all.

I knew something was odd on the night we first moved into our house I met our neighbor on the right side. He told me to watch out for the neighbor two houses down from us. Then a couple of hours later, this neighbor two houses down came to tell me to watch out for our next door neighbor! The neighbor on our left side had three corvettes. One was a Z06 with a $45,000 engine upgrade. When he started it up on Saturday mornings, I felt like I was at the raceway. No really bad, just odd. Things heated up between the two neighbors who warned me about the other after about a year of us living there. One Saturday I woke up to find the neighbor, on our right side, had all four tires on his white Saab 900 Turbo punctured by an ice pick and the whole side of his car spray painted blue, which is called tagging. A neighbor down the street had the whole front of his garage tagged with the same blue paint. Things were heating up to boiling point in our quiet cul-de-sac! The strange thing was that most of our huge neighborhood was gun carrying military good old Texans. The cops came in to figure out who was causing the problems. Within a couple of weeks the neighbor two doors down tried to kill our next door neighbor by running him over with his Ford Explorer. Our next door neighbor was badly injured with a broken pelvis, broken arm, four broken vertebra in his neck and a severely strained back. That was all we could take of high points. Even though my job was absolutely perfect and the best job ever, I decided it was not worth it and we sold our house in two weeks time and headed back to safe North Carolina. Thus yet another big move half way across the USA!

One of the few things we still miss from our San Antonio days is Rudy's Texas BBQ, which had a funny acronym of "The Worst BBQ in Texas". Kind of appropriate for our days spent in San Antonio. It is one thing to visit the Riverwalk, watch the Spurs play basketball or attend a conference in the Alamodome, but quite another to live where we did and see a whole different side.

The smaller move

Would you buy a house that looked like this photo? Let's to go back in time to our move from Apex to Fuquay Varina, which is related to a recent topic about why we wanted to leave Apex. While our Apex house was up for sale, my wife searched for houses with land - meaning more than 1 acre lot. After months of driving around, she located what is affectionately called a fixer-upper on 2 wooded acres backing up to a small lake. Now there are houses that need to be fixed and there are houses you should walk away from as they are beyond fixing. Looking back it was clearly in the latter catgory. I still remember the first time I walked into the house as it smelled awful and looked even worse. The owners had built the house 25 years previosuly and to save energy had burned wood in a pot bellied stove to heat the whole downstairs, thus the stale wood smell throughout the house. The wallpaper was the yellowed with age and from smoke. One of the oddest things was there were fabric needles everywhere on the walls, so instead of small nails, this is what they used to hang stuff on the walls. The vinyl flooring in the kitchen was torn in several places and the carpet was well worn brown and yellow shag. Would you buy this house even though it was over 2800 sq.ft. and cheap? Did I mentioned the outside with all of the beautiful trees? Only a picture can describe it.


After buying the house in January, I started gutting the whole thing in the hours after work and on weekends. It is actually a fun task and was one of the most enjoyable parts of modernizing the house, as realtors say. Just by removing the carpet the house already smelled better. Then my wife's parents came up for a family house painting party. The wallpaper was so old we could not remove it, so we had to use special paint called Kilz which specializes the removing stains and smells. This was bad in that it meant we had to paint every wall twice. Even worse you have to paint over Kilz within 24 hours or no paint would ever stick on it! My wife's father painted the drab brown kitchen cabinets white to brighten up a dreary appearing, yet large kitchen. The transformation had begun and was already paying off.


I paid to have someone come in and install vinyl in most of the downstairs, since the laundry, downstairs bath, kitchen and breakfast area were all connected. We bought two different shaded of berber carpet, one for the dining room and another for the living room. I eventually installed tile in the entry way, but that is a story in itself and will be left for another day. I completely destroyed all of the bathrooms and remade them from scratch, since the faucets all leaked and toilets were completely brown from the lime in the water. The water smelled like pure sulfur, so we had a water softener and conditioner installed. In order to get them to work we had to get a new water pressure tank. In doing so we noticed the hot water heater was under the house in the crawl space and because of the limited space was only a 40 gallon tank. We hired a plumber to install two new 40 gallon ones, just to make sure we never ran out of hot water, which we never did! And the hits just kept coming.

About half of the wall sockets did not work so I relaced every one of them, which took me days. Once we were all set to move into the house and the wife started up our first load of laundry, smoke started coming out of the fuse box. Half of the breaker panel had shorted out due to the overload. That alone was $900 to repair using a local electrician. Soon after moving in we noticed other things, like the roof needed fixing to the tune of $4500. The following summer was a severe drought in this area and our shallow 60ft deep water well dried up. No wonder our water was so bad in the house as we must have been sucking the water out of the pond behind our house! A new 250ft deep well only cost $5000. Then one of the heat pumps died and since you cannot repair 25 year old A/C systems, we had to replace them both to the tune of $5000. Looking back, I wonder where in the world all of this money came from, but it sure did disappear quickly.


There were many other repairs, but I have blocked most of those out of my memory. I did stain the whole outside of the house one summer. We had cedar siding so you cannot paint it, you have to stain it. The smell of new oil based stain was quite overwhelming. I would try to get the kids to help stain the lower parts of the house, but they were quickly over powered by the intense burning fumes. We had wood bores eating up the cedar siding, digging holes everywhere, so those had to be killed and the holes patched before the staining began - that is a bad memory still there. I almost forgot about the kitchen cabinets project, where we all tackled it as a family after a couple of years living in the house. That was fun destroy the whole kitchen and then building the cabinets from scratch.

The final repairs happened when we sold the house and moved to San Antonio. We found buyers for our house, as that was one of the things we learned from the last time, don't move before you sell the house as two payments are not fun. Once we arrived in San Antonio, the buyers complained the septic tank was not large enough for the house. After much haggling, we clearly lost and paid to have a new one installed, which was $6500 down the drain - pun intended. We had lived in the house for 4 years and all of our hard work resulted in us loosing tons of money, but many good memories are still in with us from those times, not related to remodelling of course.

teeth - are they straight enough?

Time to take a digression back into the moment and talk about teeth. This was a big week in the life of our youngest son as he finally was fitted for orthodontia (or braces as it is more affectionately called). Our insurance covered a little under half of it, but still the sticker shock was a bit overwhelming. I remember the days when I heard people getting braces for $2000. Well those days are long gone for good. I have perfect teeth and I am often asked if I had braces when I was younger. Some of my genes may be bad, but the teeth genes are the best and strongest. My daughter is up next for this exciting event, but at least the dentist takes monthly payments to cover the cost. I have heard from upper class co-workers that the latest trend is to get braces for your kids even if they don't need it - kind of like a prestige thing. Now that is America at it's worse.

The other big news of the day is that I was invited to attend the a company wide videocast of our CEO talking about us making over $2 billion last year. Now that would cover a lot of braces! I was not anyone special, I was picked at random from the general population. There was fewer than 120 people present and most of them were executives, so the number of worker bees were definitely a minority. It would have been exciting to see gifts given to those in attendence like on the Oprah Show, but no such thing happened today.

Lastly, our oldest son rode home with me today and I found out that he has a job at Walgreens pharmacy as a photo technician. He enjoys himself after retiring from the restaurant business, which he did not enjoy. At least today all is well.

The big move

Now that I have headed down memory lane, I am finding it hard to stop, unless of course that some current dramatic event occurs that I must talk about.


Before I talk about our life in San Antonio a couple of years ago, I must give a background for our big move back to Texas. Over 10 years ago we made a big decision to leave the oil industry in Texas and return to the east coast and thus the move from Texas to North Carolina. It meant leaving my career in Geophysics for a pure software developer role. We settled into a brand new house in Apex that was one of the first houses built in that neighborhood. We had a buyer lined up for our house in Buda, Texas but at the last minute they backed out. We had to pay two mortgages for almost a year, which was really tough on the finances. It was a typical new neighborhood where the houses were very close together. We liked our house because it had no fence and the house behind us had one of the largest lots in the neighborhood so our tiny yard seemed pretty large.

Our kids loved to skateboard and rollerblade up and down the street with their friends, and I installed a basketball goal in our driveway for even more enjoyment. Soon we found our next door neighbors became very agitated at us. He did not like our kids walking on his perfect lawn. He also did not enjoy how our basketball would go into his lawn and little feet would retrieve it - trampling his precious grass. Soon after he put up signs on our side of his lawn, "Keep of the Grass". Like that was a good idea with some many young boys around! That was might as well have said, "Please stomp on the Grass". Soon afterwards we got a dog and when he caught the dog going to the bathroom on his grass, he called the Town of Apex to report us for letting our dog run around without any restraint. After four years in that house, we decided to move out where we could have some land to ourselves and be free from pesky neighbors. Next time I will talk about that small move within the Raleigh area.

almost dead

My daughter has a friend who is having her tonsils out soon. When I heard this it reminded me of an event in my own life when I was that same age. I used to get the flu yearly when I was a kid and it would generally knock me out for a week. One year was worse than all the rest. I need to digress a bi for more context. We had around 25 chickens with a single rooster. I would gather the eggs most mornings and each spring we would breed about the same number of chicks. About the same time of year I would get the nasty task of completely cleaning out the whole chicken coup. My mother realized my flu symptoms were related to my unwholesome chore, so I did not resist her insistence that I quit.

Before I stopped my chicken cleaning duties, I just could not get over my flu symptoms one year. I was on the local basketball team and we had a big game coming up which I could not miss. On the morning of the big game I had trouble getting out of bed as my stomach hurt so much I could not stand up straight. My mother took me to our family doctor 1 mile away and he had me rushed to the hospital 10 miles away (the distances are important). When I arrived at the emergency room, they rushed me into the operating room and quickly took out my appendix. I had gange green and my appendix had ruptured about 30 minutes before they removed it. Later the doctor told me I had come close to dying. The drugs I received gave me serious hallucinations that I still remember.

What does all of this have to do with tonsilitus? I shared a room in the children's ward with a girl who had her tonsils removed. I was in the hospital a week and so was she, so we got to know each other pretty well. It took me several days before I could walk on my own and she did not feel like moving either. We finally both made it down to the community room to watch TV and play games, which was a whole lot better than being bored in bed. I don't recall her name at all, but I remember she loved eating her meals of cold ice cream, when I didn't feel like eating at all.

From that day on, my mother used to tell me how thankful I should be that GOD had spared me for a reason.

to Lasik or not to Lasik

There was an article in the local newspaper this morning about LASIK eye surgeries that have gone bad. It brought back bad memories of that fateful day in the summer of 2000.

I started wearing eye glasses when I was in the 5^th grade. Well, I was supposed to that is. I could not see the blackboard in front of the room, so I went to the local optician for a checkup. I got glasses but was too self-conscious to wear them, so I stained to see the blackboard the rest of the year. I have always wondered if that was made my eye sight so bad. Every year for my annual checkup my eyes got worse. Finally when I was in college I tried contacts but I had a stigmatism so I could not see with soft contacts. I tried semi-permeable contacts and got severe eye lacerations, so that was the last time I wanted to put something in my eyes. I played football, basketball and baseball and seemed like I always had broken rims, which I often would tape to keep them together. I also did not like sweat pouring on my glasses and making it hard to see when playing sports. Finally when my glasses became too think to be comfortable, the technology improved to where the lens could be ultra thin, so wearing glasses was bearable.

When working in Saudi Arabia I made enough money to try goggles, which looked extremely bad but never broke when I got hit in the face playing basketball. In the land of freely flowing money, I had several friends fly to the capital of Riyadh to have RK done by one of the original Russian inventors, who worked for the king. When my eyes finally stopped changing yearly, we were living in the Raleigh NC area. I read in the loal newspaper that an eye surgeon who worked under this same Russian man lived in Greensboro and would be coming to Raleigh to start doing LASIK. I set up an appointment and at the last moment decided to have both eyes operated on. I was not really nervous as I trusted this doctor, for some odd reason.

On the morning of the surgery, I signed a release form that basically gave me no recourse if something when wrong. It was a bit scary on the morning of the surgery as I meant the other opthamologist, who programmed the laser. I wondered how he tested his calculations, since every person has unique laser settings, and he no one double checking his work! Once in the surgical room, even though I was sedated with Valium, I could smell my eyes burning as the laser sculpted my eye - that was not right! All of the sudden they stopped without saying anything and starting doing the same thing on the other eye. Then I could tell that they were doing things to my left eye they had not done to my right, so something had gone wrong. After they completely the surgery and had me wait with my wife for 30 minutes, the surgeon finally came in to check my eyes and told me what had happened. The flap on my right eye malfunctioned and they could not do LASIK on it, but completed it successfully on my left.

After arriving home and sleeping the rest of the day and night, I woke up to see a different world. My brain kept telling me - I could see and I couldn't see, all at the same time. My left eye went from 20-800 to 20-40 but my other eye with stigmatism was stuck back at 20-850. The biggest shock was that I had to wake 4-6 months before it could be corrected as the flap had to totally heal. I could not read a book, I could not watch TV, sunlight really bothered me, and I was night blind. I had to wear a black patch over my right eye in order to survive the daily grind. I found a way to work from home during this time, but the room had to be completely dark and I could not work longer than 45 minutes at a time as my eye got really tired. It the worst time of my life as it was depressing being a prisoner in my own house.

When 4 months passed I was able to have a second attempt to fix my right eye. It was definitely scary, but after 4 months of torture, I had to trust someone to fix my problem. The surgery was successful, but then I had a real problem of both eyes fluctuated but were normally 20-45 and my driver's license was expiring in a few weeks. In order to drive both eyes must be 20-40, so I was really wondering what would happen. I found if I got plenty of rest and did not strain my eyes in the morning and wore sunglasses when I went out, my eye sight was good. Somehow I got my driver's license by following these steps and within 2 years of my eye surgery my eyes were stable at 20-25 and my night blindness disappeared.

Thinking back, I don't think it was worth it, as I will be wearing glasses again as LASIK does not cure eye degeneration due to old age. I can only help friends become aware of LASIK problems as I cannot change the past!

babies vs. teenagers

I have decided that all newly married people should consider that their cute cuddly adorable babies may one day become hormonal teenagers. It was the furthest thought from our minds when our small children were amusing us with their feats of splendor.

For the last week, everyone in the family has been looking at photos we have saved through the years. It has brought many a laugh to us all. Maybe it is news of day, like our son quitting his job before he finds another or our son who has a bad habit of being loud and waking me up in the middle of the night or our youngest son who is one minute pleasantly happy and the next like an uncontrollable hornets nest. I think I like looking at baby pictures more than the current reality.

A good friend of mine told me once that we had no hope for calm obedient children as I have rebellious disturbing genes. I can recall those teenage years and glad I never have to relive them. I was definitely out of control and only a small group of faithful friends could stand me. I was only grief and trouble for my mother. My dad was not present as he left the house when I was 14. Just as well, as life was not any better when he was around. I only heard recently that dad got fired from every job he had and typically that was yearly. I always knew that following Jesus would be the cure for my nasty life, but I never even thought about the consequences of my genes! I think mixing my bad ones with my wife's at least diluted them as none of my kids are as bad as I once was - thank goodness.