Super Productive Busy Day!

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Yesterday was a busy day for Lori and I.

We started the day at 9am with our Tax appointment. I always feel stressed and unprepared going into my tax appointments… though my tax lady always assures me I’ve done well preparing paperwork. We ended up skating by this year thanks large in part to me bumping up my 401K contributions in the last 3 months of the year. So we end up getting breadcrumbs from the state and a few slices of bread from the Federal. What a relief, we get money back after all and I’m glad we don’t OWE any taxes! I can’t wait until next year… bring on the “little” dependent!

Next stop was Babies ‘R Us to register for little “guido”. That took about an hour and a half and by the end of it my mind was NUMB and I wanted to just leave the store! I thought we registered for a lot of stuff but apparently there are things we missed so Lori’s going back to add stuff probably on a daily basis! Though, on the way out I saw the coolest/cutest little Hawaiian shirt and I nearly cried. I shot it with the register gun I can’t wait to put our little guy in his first Hawaiian shirt!!

Next we headed to Whittier to a baby furniture store to look and or buy. Before arriving, we stopped for lunch at the El Pollo Loco and sat near some CHiPs who were telling some pretty crazy stories. They kind of helped us to end our lunch early and move on.

We arrived at the store looked around and saw stuff we liked. We knew going into this place that their prices and quality were better than Babies R Us and other larger/chain stores, also if you spent over $1000 they’d throw in a free (almost $40 value) mattress for the crib and that most of their stuff is available for pickup pretty quickly.

The owner guy came up and asked if we had any questions and since we were already well informed and the prices were clearly indicated, the only question I had for the guy was, “what kind of cash discount do you offer.” He played confused and I explained it again, “If I bring you 100 dollar bills, what kind of price can you give me?” His eyes light up and he said “oh yes, we can definitely save you money because then we, uh don’t have to pay credit card processing fees…”

So we had him put together a quote on and armoire, dresser/changing table, adjustable 4-in-1 crib and a glider. He ended up upgrading our “free” mattress to the second best one they offered ($110 value) and also gave us a good discount which just so happened to round down to a multiple of 100 :)

I said OK and I told him I’d be back in 10 minutes after I hit up the BofA down the street. Quick withdrawal there, came back and paid for it all and loaded up the dresser and crib and then made an appointment to pick up the glider and armoire for the following Thursday.

Next we headed home and I began to re-arrange the second bedroom. The plan is to move my computer into the corner of our bedroom. Since I had the second bedroom setup as an office, this also meant router and coax had to move. Luckily when I first setup the network I had most of the distribution running from the living room to the other rooms so It really was just a matter of moving the FIOS coax from the 2nd bedroom to the living room and then moving the existing sat/tv coax and ethernet to another spot in our bedroom.

My dad came over to help move stuff and (since I have a touch of claustrophobia) he happily climbed under the house and helped re-route the coax and ethernet. It only took us about 15 minutes to do so and re-terminate.

After this was done we loaded up our dining table, chairs and couch chair to bring over to my dad’s house. Our dining table has always been too large for the two of us and we decided to get a more reasonable sized table and set of chairs. The couch chair and ottoman we haven’t used since we’ve moved so it was in the way. I dropped off that stuff and headed home.

On my way home I got a call from Keith inviting me along with a few other guys from church, to celebrate his birthday at the TGI Friday’s. It seemed that first rounds *had* to be black and tans, which was fine by me. I ended up having two and they were quite refreshing. After the first round a “blue” something was ordered which just looked like a LARGE chick drink. It was passed around I snapped a few photos of people posing with the large effeminate drink. Overall it was a It was a fun evening which ended with a few challenges. The first was to eat 6 Saltine crackers in a minute. The second was to eat a teaspoon full of cinnamon. Both challenges disallowed water and were pretty funny to watch. I capped some photos and video on my crappy camera phone, I’ll post them if they turned out half way decent.

Long day, Long Post, if you made it this far you win the prize! Press the red button to find out what it is!