On Friday Apple was releasing the next version of their Operating System called 10.X Tiger. Apple was having a kick off party for geeks like me at the Apple stores to introduce the new operating system. It starts at 6pm and I was not sure if I wanted to drive an hour to the store or not. Kim finally told me to go with Megan and have fun.

So off to the store we went. When we got there it was close to 7pm. A line out the door had formed for people waiting to get into the store. Now I truly felt like a nerd/geek/dork! People would stop and ask what the line was for. I would tell them it was for the new Operating System for the Mac. I would either get the look like “WTF are you talking about?” or “What a dork!” Oh well, I was here and I might as well wait in line to get what we came for.

Finally after about 20 minutes we got into the store. The lady at the front door gave us a ticket to scratch off for a prize. I am the one guy who NEVER wins anything. There could be 4 people in a room and giving out 6 items and I will be the one that does not get anything. So I gave the ticket to Megan to “Have Fun” with. She starts scraping off the ticket from the bottom. It said “Please see an Apple Rep to claim your prize”. Megan shouts, “Dad! We Won!!!” I took the ticket to get a look at it. What did we win? She was leaving me in suspense! Probably won a iTunes song or something! Well I told her to scratch the rest of it off. Holy crap! It said a 6 gig iPod Mini! I had to take a second look. I actually won something! Megan and I were so happy and I think that was the first big prize because a lot of people working there were like really surprised/happy!

It took another 20 mins to fill out all the paperwork but at the end we did get a new iPod!

Oh and I did buy the new OS for my Mac!

I don’t know if I told everyone that reads our blog, but we are building a new House!! The community we live in now is great except for one thing; half the houses on our street are either empty or they are rentals where people are moving out every 6 months. It’s crazy because each house in our neighborhood is worth well over $500,000. Every house is a min of 2600 sqft to over 3,300 sqft. The house next to use has been empty for over 6 months now and the other one across the street has never been lived in.

The problem was the builder let investors buy up all the houses. We did a count on the street when the phase we moved into on how many 4 rent signs were in windows. Of the 10 houses, 6 were rentals! Now I have nothing against rentals but I have a problem with the investors buying up the entire neighborhood only to dump them later. They were artifically inflating the prices of homes because they were buying them from the builders as fast as they could sell them. So now that the market has slowed down and its been over a year since they have bought the houses, they are now trying to sell them! They can’t rent them anymore because if someone can afford to pay 2,500 a month for rent they can pretty much afford to buy one of the houses themselves. The builders now realize the problem that has been created and are no longer seelling them to investors. And guess what! The prices are not going up like they were either.

So enough of my ranting of the place where we live right now. The house we are building is bigger than what we have now and we really love the floor plan. It should be ready in August for move in so we really can’t wait!