Monthly Archives: January 2008

Temporarily No Room at the Peterman Inn

We’ve got company.  For around a month or so.   My sister and her great husband, Kurt, will be living with us for a bit while they prepare to move into their own place.  Times got out of whack and they couldn’t make it a simple one jump transition, but the Lord has blessed us with the space and we love to have them.

I’m helping them move stuff to a storage unit today and then we’ll discover the answer to the question we’ve been asking: did they get a big enough storage unit or not?  Because if they didn’t, we’ll have other issues – like moving the stuff a second time 🙂

iTunes Movie Rentals: Patience in Zeros and Ones

I just started a download of a kids movie for the girls to watch on our way home from Washington next Tuesday.  It is a good thing I started the download today because its going to take the next six hours over this DSL connection to download the movie.  Granted its nearly one gigabyte in size, but great googly-moogly that’s a long download time.

I’ll try it again at home once we get there and see what the download speed looks like on my slightly faster connection.  I predict that unless people plan on renting in the morning and watching in the evening this service, too, will flounder and movie rentals will still be free from other file sharing networks because the quality may be lower, but the speed will potentially be faster.  Of course I could be wrong and this will be the next big thing in digital media.

Update: after an hours time the process has climbed to an estimated eleven hours.  11, ten plus one, or longer – however you prefer it.

WA, WA, WA, WA!

We’re leaving tomorrow (Tuesday) to go to Washington state.  We’re visiting one half of my in-laws (the mother & step-father-in-law half).  We’re having our second and a half Christmas.  The first was the day after Thanksgiving with Grandpa & Grandma Peer (the other other half of my in-laws), the second was on actual Christmas, and then on Friday I understanding we’re having our other half of Christmas in January.  What fun!

I suspect I shall not be getting a goat for someone else, but I’ll enjoy the time with family.  With luck I’ll also be able to see a friend from long ago, too.  He may be coming up to Portland to see us.  He was an usher in our wedding.  I hope he can make it and we can make it 🙂

Ta-ta for now!

Pimping My Own Stuff: Credit Rate Reduction Rally

This week I’ve started a Credit Rate Reduction Rally.  This is a movement to get people to consider calling their credit card companies and asking for/demanding a lower interest rate on their old credit cards.  A lot of consumers don’t realize that they can get lower interest rates and this is a way to build awareness.  I’d love to hear any stories that you’ve got about trying to get lower interest rates, or in some cases, what rates you were able to get and what techniques you used to get them.  Some people have to fight for lower rates and others just get them for being on time with payments.

Do please check it out, and if you use Digg.com, please ‘digg’ the link above.  Oh, and I’d love to have you blog this, or tell a friend about their opportunity.  I’ll be writing an article a day this week on the benefits of lowering your credit card interest rate.  Here’s the first article.

Praying for Spam

I have been getting some interesting blog spam lately.  It doesn’t get published because of Akismet, but the latest rash has been coming from a ‘guy’ named ‘gary’ who has any number of problems that need prayer, but most involve the word pray or prayer an inordinate amount of times and usually also involve ‘DD’ in the content.  Maybe ‘Gary’ needs a breast enhancement and is raising money to do so via blog spam.  Example:

URGENT………………..

Kindly request to have prayer groups passing on praying the wisdom and strength from God for 9 to 20 departments need to be assisted to reach DD by Aug 2008. My family are in a financial difficulty and need to seek for ways of confronting with wisdom and ways.Let the honor to God
(from: Gary)

Maybe I should pray for ‘Gary’ to have a supernatural man-boob growth so that he’ll stop spamming my blog.  Of course the problem with that is that ‘Gary’ might then just spamming my blog comments with weird trans-gender link requests instead.  So maybe I should pray that God would give ‘Gary’ access to a good counselor or a friendlier inmate.  I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but an inmate would definitely be involved with some places that want men with ‘DD’.

Spam is one of those blessings within a curse because you hate the spam, but it brings such immense humor with it.  I think that we should kill all the spammers, but after they’re dead they should be forced to go out on stage at comedy clubs and then further forced to read out loud their emails.  Well, some of them anyway, I don’t think we need some of the more perverse letters read, but you could go with any number of the financial transaction spams and get people rolling.

2008 Birthday and Christmas Wishlist: Buy A Farm!

This year for my birthday and Christmas I would like to make a donation to World Vision to have a family, or families, gifted farm animals.  I sure could use some new pants, a new computer and things that I can afford myself on my birthday and at Christmas, but I’d rather open a card that says, “We got someone else a goat for you!”  I can’t milk a goat very fast, but there are plenty of families that could use a goat and would be able to milk it almost as fast as my dad used to be able to milk a cow.  But that’s another story.

You can look into donating animals to families at World Vision’s site here. Work with me this year to gift a farm animal, or partial ownership of a farm animal, to a third world family that could really use the help of an animal.