many months back i was very excited about my PUR water filter. i was excited that it was a better filtering system than the brita filter due to its 2 stage filter. it got rid of all of these micro-nasties and it was all good.

now, 6 months later, i realized that i haven’t changed the filter…ever. i know, i know, gross! it’s ok, though, i don’t drink much water at home. instead, diet coke seems to be the drink of choice while i’m at home. but i went to target today to pick up a new shower curtain and passed by the water filter aisle. i decided to buy new water filters and when i got home, i replaced the filter.

the water tastes just oodles better now! go figure, huh? i need to find some way to remind myself to change the filter because the slow and gradual change in water quality wasn’t noticed by me all these months.

i’ve been trying to figure out exactly how much money i can afford to spend on a house. keeping in mind that i have a wedding that i need to be paying for soon, it just seems staggering. purchasing things in the tens of thousands of dollars is just something that i haven’t had much experience in doing. it sort of freaks me out.

so i’ve decided to try to track my spending habits. in the last six or so months, i’ve not been able to make generalizations about my spending because my spending is just erratic. there are some months where i may have saved a couple of hundred dollars. some months i’ve saved a couple of thousand dollars. how can there be so much discrepancy especially when i haven’t bought any new expensive camera gear?

i don’t have a very good feel for just how much of a mortgage i can really afford, so i’ve just given up trying to figure it out. i have a fuzzy number that i’m just gonna guess i can spend and when the time comes, if i can’t save quite that much money, i guess i’ll just have to stop getting so many pearl tea drinks.

dude! i’m gonna be an officiant!

that’s right, yo. i’m the merry marrier.

greg asked me to the officiant for their wedding. so now i’m gonna be the guy binding them to a life of marriage. who would have known? that’s cool. i’m gonna go see what it takes to be an officiant now.

after about a month of inactivity due to the volleyball season ending and the winter break, i’ve been horribly out of shape. on sunday, we went to celebrate geoff’s bachelor party. this bachelor party was a big paintballing outing. needless to say, my legs are absurdly sore. going up and down stairs is torture. i’m just barely able to walk around. i don’t think that i’ve been so sore after a day’s worth of activity before. it’s nuts.

now with volleyball coming back, i’m not sure if i’m up for it yet. i’m still sore and it has been DAYS!

the start of the new volleyball season is upon us. it’s been weeks since i’ve last played and so i think that it’ll be a pretty rusty effort tonight. i’m hoping that my soreness from the weekend’s festivities won’t be too much of a hampering for tonight.

today is also the first day back from vacation. it wasn’t as bad of a transition as i thought it would be, but it still has been a bit of an adjustment to get back into the swing of things. it looks like it is going to be another busy quarter, though. every time i think that things will be slowing down, i’m wrong. =P

the other thing that i’m going to be trying to do is to eat a little bit healthier. this doesn’t necessarily mean that i will be eating healthy, but rather that i will try not to eat as much bad stuff. is that really any better? i’m not sure.

after volleyball tonight, i’m going to try work on the big wedding web site. christi and i have started a blog there. it isn’t public yet, but we’ve got a he said-she said format. there’s still a lot of work on the web site that needs to be done. it’s starting to get a little daunting.

speaking of all things new, i briefly looked at what it takes to become an ordained minister to perform a wedding ceremony. it looks like it is pretty easy and can be done all online and done quickly. it’s sort of frightening how easy one can be ordained. i had passingly mentioned to a friend that i would be their officiant because they were talking about needing to find one. i can set up a whole marrying business. i would call myself “Mike the Marrier” or something equally silly. it’d be fun.

i’m back from vacation. the cayman islands were great! the weather was nice, topping out in the low 80s and i think it might have gotten as cold as 67 or so. man, what a nice break from the FREEZING weather here. actually, today isn’t so bad, but the nights do get a wee bit chilly.

i did a lot of diving while at the cayman islands, i took some pictures (some awful underwater ones too!) and with every new outing when taking pictures, i think that i learn something new. what i learned about underwater photography is that you need very powerful lights. yeah, what i had with me was woefully inadequate. i guess that just means that i need to go spend a zillion dollars worth of gear to take nice pictures underwater. oh well.

now that i’m back from vacation, we’re in full swing with two major things: the wedding and buying a house. buying a house freaks me out. housing prices are still pretty outrageous here in the bay area and the kind of house that we want is pretty expensive. single family homes can be cheap, however, if you don’t mind living in the ghetto. unfortunately, living in the ghetto is not something that i would really like to do, so the house hunting continues.

i even got pre-approved and everything for a house so it seems like i know what kind of a budget i have for the house and all, but as i am going through all of these motions, every so often i pause and i admire at all of the big grownup things that i’m doing. it’s like i’m an adult or something.

does the house have good schools nearby? what about the roof? what about termites? geez, i do sound like a grownup.

wedding planning is also in full swing. i’m going to be working furiously to get the wedding web site up, too. from what i understand, it’s going to be fantabulous.