First snow. I leave tomorrow.

12/1/09 Tuesday
The first day of December and we have our first snow/sleet/rain of the year. The high today will only be in the mid thirties. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying out, God and weather willing, to Detroit. The plane ticket is purchased, car is rented, and hotel room reserved so that’s done. We got the funds transferred to our bank account so this morning I’ll pick up a wad of cash to take for the auctions. They require cash or certified funds with a letter from the bank and cash is easier. I called the airline to find out what the rules are for carrying cash and they said there are none unless I’m leaving the country. Works for me. I like to keep things simple. We decided to wait on getting the laptop till all this is done and settled. There are two reasons for that. One is that the cheap Mac book costs over a thousand dollars and the one I’m looking at is nearly $1700. I don’t want to run short on funds if I find a killer deal on some piece of farm equipment that will ultimately help me make money. The other reason is a possibility I can get it cheaper by waiting and shopping.

Hay equipment is an area I want to look at as there is definitely money to be made making hay here in Texas. I may not have enough money to buy a truck, trailer, and decent tractor as it is. It all depends on how the auctions go and with them it’s a roll of the dice. I used to hold two or three auctions a year at my warehouse so remember that well. Some of them I’d clean up on as people fought to buy stuff and some were duds.

The last auction I had, the one just before the wreck that put me in a coma, was the worst one I’d ever had when I needed a good one the most. It was a week after the 9-ll terrorist attack in New York and the whole country was in shock. Hardly anyone showed up and despite it being an absolute auction where a dollar bid got you the item two thirds of the stuff didn’t sell and what did sold for pennies. I was in bad shape by then, quite a mess to say the least, delusional and hearing voices among other things. What a ride to the bottom I was on, affected by an unidentified stroke and unrecognized brain injury on top of serious depression, drugs, and alcohol, in the midst of my divorce from the second wife. The car accident was the final blow yet strangely enough it was the start of a sequence of events that ultimately saved my life and restored it, with the culmination being reunited with Cherie, my first love. And now we work to build that life and create our dreams. So with that goal I fly to Detroit and hope to find deals.

I’ve got wood cut and stacked inside for Cherie to use while I’m gone. There’s a good chance I’ll bring back some firewood from up north. Depends on how much room there is on the trailer, you know, the trailer I hope to get. Firewood up there is dirt cheap and something I could definitely sell at a profit here in West Texas. Fact is there is so much I can purchase up there that I can double or triple my money on here in Texas that it’s a tempting business opportunity and would help finance our dreams for the farm.

That’s it for now. I’ve got lots to do to prepare for my trip. Can’t work outside for now because of the rain/snow but that’s ok. I need to figure out how to secure the Linksys router so others can’t tap in and go online. I suspect that someone accessed this laptop through our wireless. I used to put it in hibernate mode but would come back hours later to find it turned on and running. After finding the “blue screen of death” on it the other day I discovered porn and all kinds of advertisements for legitimate stores and even NBC on it. This was all found in my Picasa program that I use to store and organize my pictures. Weird and unsettling. There was all kinds of stuff that showed up like company and TV show logos. I turn my laptop off all the way now. Plus we can document satellite airtime being used when no one is at home. I called the satellite people up to check on improving our signal but didn’t hear anything good. If I wanted to cough up three hundred dollars to purchase their latest modem and pay more each month I could get a “little” better service but not much unless we spent hundreds each month. It looks like the cell phone companies offer better speed and more information usage, 3 or 5 gigabytes, not sure which but both are better than Hughes offers, for about the same price we are currently paying.