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Insane

This week has been absolutely insane, hence, no updates. I think I pissed off a lot of car salesmen last weekend when I went looking for cars. That tired me out a lot. I think for most of the day I was saying “no, I’m not interested in buying!” They are extremely persistent buggers over here, much more so than what I experienced in Australia. Once they actually realise you’re not going to buy they turn into incredibly rude people. Mind you, I was looking at used car dealerships where they’re not really interested in forming a relationship with the customer so maybe that had something to do with it.

As if purchasing a car, cancelling stuff over in Australia and initiating stuff over here wasn’t enough, work has been an absolute hassle. Put it this way: people have gone well past their limits, including myself, and we’re all a bit in the “care factor zero and rapidly falling” zone at the moment. I am completely and utterly exhausted.

This may be causing me to have the weirdest dreams ever and sleep quite irregularly. Case in point: I had a dream that I was back in Pata (in country Australia where I grew up as a kid) and I was lying down in some shade next to the shed enjoying the breeze. I then heard something say “Master… Master” and I turned my head and saw a kitten that was talking to me. It then said “Feed me”. As if that wasn’t scary enough, I also had some birds later on in my dream asking the same damn thing. It’s like the scary movies that have the scary children playing – good example is “the ring”.

Luckily though I’ve got Pendulum’s debut album “Hold your colour” to get me through. I had to download a torrent of the album because my CD won’t be arriving for at least another month! That was an insane time to wait and so I’ve been listening to the album for the last week. Highly recommended even if you don’t listen to drum and bass very often or don’t really know what it’s all about.

Crazy lightning


Crazy lightning
Originally uploaded by daecks.

Over the weekend there have been some massive thunderstorms here in South Florida. Today in fact there was a strike so close that it made my speakers squeal from all the interference. Here is one of the shots I was able to get. The lightning in this shot was striking ground somewhere behind the apartment. Still pretty damn close though.

Err, pick another consulate

A little while back I had to book a Visa renewal interview at a consulate outside of the US. This interview was set for early September at the consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I actually would have liked to have found one in Canada because that’s further away and I can visit Mexico pretty easily from where I live, but I couldn’t even find free slots in Canada before the end of the year for some weird reason. It seems I’ll be trying Canada again though.

I got curious today and decided to find out what was is goin’ down in that part of Mexico. According to this article: “The United States will close its consulate for one week to assess the security of its employees and consulate visitors in this Mexican border town [Nuevo Laredo] after a shootout between drug gangs using machine guns, grenades and a rocket launcher.”

Right… I think I’m going to change some plans 🙂

Car purchasing

I’m now getting pretty excited about the whole car purchasing thing, and I’m finding it quite fun to go about looking for cars. I felt I was restricting myself to the Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix thing too much because I really hadn’t researched what else was out there.

So I went for a walk around in a caryard to see if I could find anything that I liked. What was the closest caryard? The one just outside. There are probably a couple of thousand cars in the parking lot and this gives me the perfect opportunity to go around and look for something that fits the above criteria. I found one that caught my eye: the Mazda Protege5. This is based upon the reliable Mazda Protege platform and from what I’ve been reading on the Internets is pretty good value for money and very reliable. I’m leaning towards a second hand version of whatever car I get because, believe it or not, I’m in money saving mode at the moment and I’m really tightening down the screws so I can afford to travel around.

Anyway this weekend I will be test driving the Mazda Protege5 plus anything else I notice. I think the only thing that will really be a thorn in my side will be car insurance, but with some advice I’ve received from friends I should be able combat that.

Ooh, and where am I going to be living? Not far from where I live now, which makes it about 10 minutes from work. This is good, because not only is it still close but it’s also cheap and I can carpool to work. Thank god that was organised without too much hassle. Whatever the case, Aug 25th is approaching fast and I want to have this all sorted.