A few words from Maui

Mark: jellyfish don't hurt as much as you think they would
Darron: Mark looks better topless than you think he would

Until next time... we're out!

8 hours till departure

It's late, and it's still hot, and I can't sleep.... So naturally I thought of blogging.

Mark and I are leaving early tomorrow morning to wade through the security at SFO and board the plane for our free trip to Maui.

And so the rest of my life goes on hold. No more thoughts of car purchasing, no more thoughts of preparing for the new school year (which is a terrifyingly close 9 days away after our return). I'm focusing on making this a heck of a vacation.

Tuesday with Vladimir

Wanting to expand my car buying realm o' possibilities, I ventured to San Mateo on Tuesday for a lesson in driving with a manual transmission. My teacher? Vladimir!

Vladimir is one of those people that, when you meet him, you think he'd make a great character in a book or a movie. He's an older fellow, somewhere in his 60s I would guess. Originally born in Russia, then moved to Uruguay when he was one and a half. So he learned Russian from his parents and Spanish from living in Uruguay. His parents worked with a lot of Ukrainians, so he learned Ukrainian. He also met a lot of folks from Brazil, so he learned Portuguese. He moved to the United States where he of course has learned English, and now just for kicks he's learning French. Amazing!

He used to be an airline mechanic, but now he runs a driving school.

And he's a good teacher, too. Plenty of patience. He definitely made me feel successful. After 90 minutes of driving time, I felt like a pro. Of course, I was driving an older, not too powerful 5-speed. Can I handle a 238 horsepower 6-speed RX-8?

I applied for a $30,000 loan from the local school employees credit union. The loan committee was going to meet today. I assume that, since I didn't hear anything to the contrary, my loan is a go. I've been given a 3.9% APR. Not bad, eh? Over 60 months, my payments would be about $522. I can afford that.... I think.

Chat about Chat

Ok - so the chat room is having a few... problems. "Cindy" at ipowerweb.com has assured me it will never crash again, but I think it just did. So, try it, but it may not be working. I'll see what I can do.

We had a great conversation going between Phil, Stace, Chris, and myself, but the chat room would have nothing to do with us after about an hour or so.

What was your experience with the chat room? I've heard about some problems with the cursor jumping out of the chat window and also some troubles with the backspace key.

Leave a comment below!

Chit chat

I added a chat feature to the main page. It's a way to bring all whopping 5 members of the prez2012 community together if they ever happen to be online at the same time.

Well, maybe it's more than 5. But in terms of regulars, it's about 5.

A question comes to mind. One, is it worthwhile? Given that people have Yahoo! Messenger or AIM, with all their chatroom capabilities, why would anyone use a funky little chatroom on my site? Well, I suppose if there were A LOT of people visiting prez2012, then it would have some use. This could be a hangout place, like Denny's is late at night when you have nothing else to do and it's the only place that's open.

Go ahead and give the new chat a try - click here. Probably won't be anyone there, but you never know!

Add your comments - do you think I should keep the chat? When you went in, was anyone there? Did you find a date?