Apparently my Amy has a guardian angel that is a parent of one of the kids at the school she works at. This woman had an extra car that she is more then willing to sell to Amy for $50. Apparently is her husbands onld car from college and they have every piece of paper for everything thats ever been done to it. It runs incredible, the belts all look new, as well at the tires. the husband said that it will probably need an oil change as it had been sitting for a while (from time, not mileage)

It’s a 93 Honda Civic Two door hatchback with 128k mileage. Top priority is to take it to a shop and get it looked over and I told them that was the plan.

I drove it around the block and down the highway. It handles great (I really miss driving a stick). I felt a lot better driving this one then I did in the neon thats for sure.

Apparently the reason they were willing to sell for so little is that they already have a Commuter car, a Minivan, an SUV, some other car they are loaning a brother, and this one.

So, anything I should know about the 93 Honda Civic?

Amy desperately needed a car. We were working different schedules and I needed to be home early for when my son got home from school. Downside is that her credit got royally screwed from her divorce, so no dealer would touch her without huge sums of money.

Off to the classifieds we go. We found a nice little 95 Dodge Neon down in Richmond for sale for $1100. When we got there it was getting a little late but we still got in and drove it around. It looked great. The guy was a mechanic and it seemed like he took good care of it. We made the buy and it made the drive from Richmond to Fairfax with no problems at all. This was a little over a month ago.

Fast forward to yesterday. She calls me up at lunch time to say that she is stuck. She heard a small pop and the car now has no power. I go pick her up and I drive the car to the service station. It’s running on Idle, no power when I press the gas. a mix of white and black smoke coming out the back.

The service station says that one of the vacuum hoses for the fuel injector system blew and they would have to replace it before they can hook it up to the diag machine. No biggie, it looks like fixing that hose might do the trick. Well, after that is fixed and they can run the diagnostic, it looks like hell under the hood. Turns out the fuel injectors are stuck in the open position, the wiring harness is in horrible condition, the computer may be fried because they are getting really bad readings from it.

All in all it would cost well over $2000 to bring it back. I sadly limp it home (less than a mile and it used 1/8th of a tank) Amy is completely broken up about it. I just don’t know what else to do.

No really! This weekend was actually a fairly busy one! Andrew has been on spring break this last week and finished it out on Friday with some good gaming. (: (He and I both of course) I have been doing a lot of DDO and he has really gotten into Americas Army. Amy got to go out with some of her work friends so that left just me and the kid at home alone.

We usually have a good time and this one was no exception.

Saturday we had the joys of little league. I dropped Andrew off at 10am for that. Amy had another appointment that she had to run. This means that I get a good hour and ½ of me time! This usually involves me lounging on the couch and being a loaf, but hey, if that’s how I want to spend my time! Around noonish we go pick up Andrew and stop off for lunch at the pool place. I like being able to go to a place where they know me well enough that I get breaks on the food and pool. I think I should limit how much I take Andrew there. He’s starting to get pretty good. It actually pretty funny, whenever he makes a good shot (intended or luck) he gets this strut to his walk with the look of “yeah, I made that.”

After pool we went home for a quick break and then it was OFF TO THE CIRCUS!!! Yup, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus was in town. I had not seen this circus since I was very very small. It was really Amy’s idea but I didn’t take much convincing. Andrew was a little grumpy about it going in but once he was there and started having fun, that teenage angst melted away. The show was amazing, of course. We arrived a little over an hour early because they open the doors for a preshow where you get to go down to the three rings and visit with the performers. This was one of the best parts of the show because you are closer then front row and you can play along with them.

Our seats were really good, right in front of one of the side rings and right next to the Vortex of doom. Amy managed to get some great photos through out the show. She was also hit on quite a bit by some clowns! (She just claimed she was already dating one). At the end of the show we even got Amy into clown makeup! She will, of course, be killing me for making these pictures available. She complained the whole time but I know she had fun. We walked along the trailers for the performers and animals on the way back to the truck. I really have to admire the whole idea of joining the circus. These people go on tour around the country performing and entertaining in a way that they love. Oh to be a kid again!

Sunday we got up and realized it was Easter. Since I am not much of an Easter person, I really didn’t have much planned. I went out and picked up some Starbucks and an extra surprise. They had a really cool egg hunt kit. When I got back I set up breakfast on the patio and hid some eggs for Amy and Andrew. They had fun hunting around for them. Even Charlie (my cat) got to get out and enjoy the weather. After that it was jump into spring cleaning mode. We went full bore and got tons of stuff cleaned! It feels great to have the place clean, like a moral boost! Now if we can just keep it that way!

After a comment I realize I didn’t give the stats from the new PC, so here they are:

• nVidia nForce4 SLI Chipset
• AMD® Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4200+ 2.2GHz
• 64KB Instruction Cache + 64KB Data Cache
• 512KB Level 2 Cache + 512KB Level 2 Cache
• 2000MHz HyperTransport System Speed
• 2.0GB Dual Channel DDR-3200 RAM (Expandable to 4.0GB)
• (4) 512MB DIMM Memory Modules
• 500GB (Dual 250GB RAID 0 Array) 7,200RPM Serial ATA Hard Drives
• 16x DVD-ROM Drive
• 5x Double Layer DVD+R; 16x8x16 DVD±RW; 48x24x48 CD-RW Drive
• Asus 19” DVI LCD
• PCI-Express x16 nVidia GeForce 6600 Video Card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM Video Memory
• AC97 8 Channel Stereo Audio Chipset
• PCI 56K V.92 Fax/Modem Card
• 56Kbps Data / 14.4Kbps Fax
• Built-In 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter
• 7-in-1 Media Card Reader
• Compact Flash I/II, IBM MicroDrive, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital Card
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition (Service Pack 2)
• 535 Watt ATX 12V SLI Power Supply

I have had my computer, in its current incarnation for about 4-5 years now. Through those years I have done little spot upgrades here and there. Maybe a new video card, perhaps a new CPU. For the most part it’s stayed pretty much the same through all of this. I even still have a bunch of the old files I used for shout-casting back when I was with TSN. Well, I am sad to report that the beast has finally died. This really didn’t come as much of a surprise. It had been acting up quite a lot recently. The HDD would sometimes decide it didn’t want to register with the BIOS. The graphics card would decide that it wanted to reset itself at the most in-opportune moments. Overall things were just starting to run slow.

Friday evening was the clincher though. When I came home from work and went to turn on my PC, it came up to the Bios and would go no further. I tried swapping out memory, pulling the CPU, disconnecting the drives. Nothing worked. Ironically enough, just that morning a friend of mine dropped of a Microcenter ad on my desk and I saw a very nice PC that fell into my price range (I had been plotting to buy a new PC for a while now). After my tests I finally gave up and headed out to the store.

Within an hour I had spec’ed out a full system, including monitor, that fell in the price range I had planned on. I even got the full 3 year warrantee on it (covers in home repair). Now I know what some of you might be thinking. Why buy a system like that when you can build it yourself for so much cheaper! Your right, I could have found out what the best motherboard was (from the 8000 current manufacturers) and Checked into the best memory, type and speed, for that motherboard. Then start looking at the 150 different video cards that I could choose from…etc etc etc. And then after all of that I could spend a full weekend Installing and configuring and praying that I don’t run into some sort of compatibility issues. Or, I could spend an hour at Microcenter and get something all ready done and Covered by warrantee so that if a part DOES fry somewhere down the road, I get it replaced. I Build and maintain machines all day at work, Why would I want to do that at home too.

So I now have an awesome computer at home that will last me for the next 3 years at least. I can run all of the latest cool stuff and it looks amazing! And best of all, No quirks (yet)!

Wow, I don’t think I have ever had a daylights savings time hit me as hard as this last one did. I was dead yesterday! Who would have thought that loosing an hour would do that. I figured I would just go to bed like normal. I don’t even think I had issues sleeping. I just didn’t want to get up and dragged ass all day long. (it’s MY blog, I can say ass if I want to). This was a pretty busy weekend as well. Did some gaming, some sight seeing, and some cleaning!

Friday and Saturday can probably get lumped together because all we really did is just relax. I played some DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) (I should be writing a review of that one soon eh?) and Andrew and I watched some TV. Amy worked on her homework and even got out with some of her friends. Andrew actually caught the cleaning bug and went to town on the house. I was very impressed (apparently so was he.) While Amy and I made a run up to the mall to get the oil done on her car, Andrew grabbed the vacuum and went over everything, and got his room in spit spot shape. Now if only it would last.

Sunday was our day out. We packed up the truck and headed for the wilds of DC! Yup, it’s cherry blossom time in DC and EVERYONE ON EARTH is there! Seriously, I don’t remember seeing it that busy out in the parks there. Of course it was a beautiful day to get out and see things. We parked at the International trade center and walked over to the American History Museum. We must have walked around in there for about 3 hours and I think only saw about ¼ of what was in there! Notable sightings were the Information Age exhibit with one of the first Apple computers. They also had an old IBM that is identical to one I still have in my closet. (I should pull that out and power it up.) Amy really enjoyed the First Lady exhibit. And the America on the move side was a lot of fun as well.

After the Museum we headed out to the area around the Washington Monument. The blossoms were full bloom out there and really a sight to see. Andrew got to run around the Monument and Amy and I finally got to sit and rest for a while. Around this time we figured it was time to head home. We still had some time in the day and still had some things to take care of. Everyone was pretty worn out so we even called it an early night and I remember sleeping like a rock. So why was I so dead on Monday?!?!

Anything I put on here isn’t going to be read until Monday anyways, and by then April fools will be over. I had some great ideas for this one too but it’s just not gonna work on a weekend!

This sucks. Here’s a cat