I’ve been debating giving away my turtles for awhile now. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, but I think taking them to Denver would be a big pain. The tank itself takes up the entire back seat of the Jetta. So last night I decided to create a listing on craigslist in an attempt to give them away (with a small adoption fee).

I must say that I am amazed by the response. I didn’t think anyone would respond for at least a week, if not more, but so far I have had five different people contact me. Furthermore, I didn’t post the listing until around 10PM so I’ve averaged about one person every three hours. I’ll be sure to use craigslist more often.

One of the people who has contacted me seems like a great fit as a future home for my turtles. They already have two turtles, tree frogs, fish, and birds. And to top it all off they have plans to build an outside enclosure that they could use in warmer weather. They wouldn’t want to be outside right now, it’s snowing like crazy!

We spent our Thanksgiving at home preparing an excellent dinner for ourselves. The highlight was the turkey breast that I put on the smoker for a few hours. The meat turned out delicious. The rest of our meal was of the add water and stir variety but it was still very good. I hope everyone else had a great dinner as well. Happy Thanksgiving!

I love the fact that I’m already half way through this work week. Isn’t Thanksgiving the greatest?

In other good news, someone placed an offer for our house already! We received word of this on Sunday morning just before our open house. The open house went on as scheduled, although there weren’t any visitors. This was blamed mostly on the Chiefs game which was at the same time, but we are a little skeptical of the amount of advertising used. We did have three more groups come through for showings yesterday, bringing the grand total to nearly twenty. Perhaps we can get a bidding war going, wouldn’t that be nice? The house has been on the market for less than three weeks so I think we are way ahead of schedule. We really need to find a house in Denver now.

Now that we’ve taken a couple of days to forget about the move, it’s time for us to get right back to it. Kim is currently in Denver for the week and has looked through some more places. Again she’s seen lots that would not work for us and fortunately a few that have some potential of being the one. Maybe by the end of the month we’ll have something picked out, or at least a much smaller list.

As you can tell we’ve been touring lots of places, 30+ so far. To keep track of everything we have been using an Excel spreadsheet to list all of the important details and also our comments. I’ve even gone as far as color coding it for the ones we like (green) down to the ones we dislike (red). This was working great for us minus the fact that we had to send it back and forth in email each time we changed anything.

Today I decided that this had to stop and I finally checked out Google Docs & Spreadsheets. First of all, they made it very easy to import an existing document and just about all of the formatting transferred over perfectly. With just a few more clicks the document was saved online and was shared between myself and Kim. The online storage is great because we can access it anywhere we have an internet connection, so we no longer have to email it back and forth. This also allows us to edit it very easily and immediately save it in one central location. I’m loving it so far!

We spent the weekend house hunting in Denver. My parents joined us for the marathon search and for good times in the mile high city. The majority of Saturday morning and afternoon was spent touring 15+ different properties in various neighborhoods near downtown. Ideally this is where we would like to end up, someplace near the Highlands or Uptown area are at the top of the list.

It still amazes me how much more places are selling for compared to Kansas City. Our house would easily sell for over $200,000 in a similar location in Denver. Monthly rental fees don’t seem to be too bad, but I don’t think it would be possible for us to rent again after owning a house of our own. As of right now there are a couple of town homes that interest us more than anything. We may have to raise our price limit a little to see what else that brings us. Keep your fingers crossed…

PS Happy 27th Birthday to Kim today!

If you didn’t already know, we are moving to Denver sometime in early 2007. Our house is now officially for sale, we have a sign in the yard and everything. Feel free to spread the news if you now of anyone who is looking for a home in the West Plaza area of Kansas City. You can see photos and more details on both ShawGroupHomes.com and the Reece & Nichols website.

In case you are wondering why we are moving, Kim was promoted/transferred to the Denver office of her same company. Obviously it will be a little hard to leave some of the things we have in Kansas City, but we are both looking forward to living in Denver. One things for sure, we’ll be able to snowboard way more than before! If things work out for me, I may be able to continue working for the same company that I currently work for. If not, it’ll be back to the drawing boards for this guy…

Happy Halloween! I want to pass candy out tonight to all of the little kids, but I’m not sure what the trick-or-treating hours are. Actually I’m not even sure if there will be any kids around our neighborhood. This is the first year that I will actually be living in a house that isn’t my parents. Previously I always lived in an apartment, besides that year I spent living near the University of Cincinnati campus. Trick-or-treating there involved kids asking for beer.

I asked Dominique and Bianca what time trick-or-treating was and they just told me that they went when it was dark out. Thanks to the recent time shift it was dark outside around six last night when I left work. Maybe they are right. Does it start at six? I guess I will find out tonight…

Everywhere I go today is cold! I woke this morning and couldn’t get out of bed. The temperature in the room was 57 degrees! I attempted to turn on the heat yesterday for the first time and it started off working just fine. Then I heard a ton of noise coming from the basement a half hour or so later. Then a few minutes after that it completely stopped working. Good thing the furnace is under warranty still, it will be looked at tomorrow morning. At least this gives me the perfect opportunity to try out the fireplace. Perhaps I should sleep next to it tonight.

The temperature outside is a cool 46 right now, and I’m sure it was in the 30s when I left the house this morning. The first heat that I felt this morning (besides a shower) was when my car finally heated up. I knew at that point I would be warm from that point on until leaving work later today. Well I was wrong. The office is freezing today. They must have the air conditioner on still or something. I haven’t even taken off my jacket yet today. This is crazy and it’s only the beginning on October! Don’t get me wrong, I like the cold more than the summer heat, but I expect the inside to be warm.

For once I feel like a repair man! Last night we did something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, clean out the exhaust hose from the clothes dryer. Shortly after moving we realized that the hose was not connected to the back of the dryer after the humidity in the basement increased with the use of the dryer. So we reconnected the hose only to find out that the dryer would now take forever to dry the clothes. And to top it off, there was now a distinct burning smell coming from the dryer. I concluded that the exhaust hose itself was clogged with lint so we immediately disconnected it again resulting in humidity and lint thrown throughout the basement.

That was until last night. Since the hose was already disconnected from the back of the dryer all I needed to do was disconnect it from the pipe to the outside of the house. Then we took the flexible hose outside for a thorough cleaning. We used one of those dusters with a telescoping handle to remove piles of lint from the hose. I think we filled an entire grocery bag with lint! Once we had it clean enough we hooked it back up to the pipe and to the back of the dryer. We haven’t turned the dryer on yet, but hopefully Kim will do that tonight while I’m playing tennis. I hope we fixed the problem.

This coming Sunday I will be joining Phil and Doni for the Walk to D’Feet ALS as part of the “Stormin’ for Norman” team. Please join me in the fight against ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) by making a contribution in support of my walk. Sorry for the late notice. I should have posted this a long time ago but it slipped my mind. I would appreciate any donation you can make and I’m sure the rest of the team would as well.