First Mike and Annie Prodoehl invited a very special little man into the world.  Lincoln James Prodoehl!  I love the name  Can’t wait to meet this guy!

Nick and Candice Hester introduced a new Baby Boy on July 17th at 6:03pm EST.  Beautiful little boy.  Can’t wait to meet this guy too!  Here is Nick’s announcement to the world via Facebook

Davin and Megan are expecting another.  They are once again waiting to learn the sex.  I don’t know how they do it!

Last but not least JP and Allegra have another little girl on the way!  I hope I get to see her before she goes into labor so I can pet her belly

I hope everyone is having a great Summer  Karen and I have been watching ZJ stand and crawl all over the house.  We are still waiting on the Sellers bank approval on a short sale.  Hopefully we will have some good news in the next couple of weeks.  In the mean time my thoughts are with my Father who will be going into sugary next Wednesday.  Luckily he is the toughest guy I know and I know he will do great.

“But one of Moore’s theses in “Capitalism” is that those who have extreme wealth exert extreme influence over our political system, with the goal of enacting legislation that will help them accumulate even more wealth. Moore laments the system that “worked” in earlier decades when so-called captains of industry were taxed sufficiently so that the U.S. could grow along with the corporations–the money put back into infrastructure and education and hospitals. He also suggests that the very rich had more of a social conscience.”

source: http://www.dvdtown.com/review/capitalism-a-love-story/dvd/7898

Another month has goes by.  Two months since my last post!
March has been a wonderful month!  Other then the start of the allergy season and a losing bracket I can’t complain.  Quite a few experiences for me to write about.  I hope you enjoy.

Dusty’s Last Hoorah!

March started out with a bang with Dusty’s Bachelor Party in Orlando Florida.  While I can’t post much about the experience…  I can say it was a blast!

Dusty's BP

ZJ

ZJ continues to grow at an unbelievable pace.   If you haven’t seen it yet check out Video Clip’s of our Growing Son!  ZJ is currently 15 lbs.

Growing Strong

Fire Scare

While Lauren Cattaneo and Lissa (who always seems to bring the heat) were in town we came home to a 2 alarm fire in our townhouse complex!  Scary day.  Jess Zaks and Lauren came to Maddy and Molly’s rescue and put them in Jess’s car while the fire was extinguished.

Forced Vacation

I apparently accumulated too much vacation over the last 6 months and was forced to take an unscheduled break from the daily grind.  I happened to play the break during St. Patricks day and Chris Odom saved the day by coming to Charleston to party it up!  It was great to catch up and slam a few car bombs with a good friend.  The day after St. Patricks day we were pretty hung over so we decided to do something fun and sober so we checked out the Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum.

This picture cracks me up!

March Madness

Maryland’s defeat was brutal and my bracket is shot.  Enough said

Work Projects

1.  I am still working on Dunn & Bradstreet Reverse Transition Application Inventory & Compliance.  I have learned some interesting processes on managing application inventory, licensing and compliance.

2.  I am starting up my role as PM in charge of managing all items network related in a mainframe migration for Zurich.  We are moving a Mainframe from a Zurich Data Center in LA to a CSC Data Center (CDC) in Chicago.  Hopefully I can find an excuse to travel to either as I would love to see the Piaggi’s in LA or the (soon to be) Walkers in Chicago.

Personal Projects

Small projects moving along.

1.  My projects for Paula vW. Dail, PhD are almost complete

writingladllc.com

MemoriesofyouBook.com

2.  We just updated melissabarrickphotography.com to ProPhoto 3

3.  I need to build Casey Spears http://prestonlandscaping.com/.  Thank you Casey for your patience.

4.  I finally finished creating Erin Shaklee’s DVD of her wedding.  It includes a short video that is fun to watch

5.  I need to make Jimmy and Christa’s wedding video.  Now that I am done Erin’s I can get to it.

Fun Month coming up…

April 9th - Lance Visits Charleston to meet ZJ  We also timed his trip right so he could catch…

Spiritual Rez plays Sunday April 11th @ Chai’s Lounge & Tapa’s.  It is definitely the best place in Charleston to watch them play and grab a drink.  If you have no plans definitely come.

April 23rd – Mom & Pop’s fly down from Maryland for ZJ’s Baptism

April 25th – ZJ gets Baptized

April 27th – ZJ’s Half Birthday!  6 Months Old

April 28th – Taylor visits Charleston!

*

That’s it for now.  I hope everyone has a good April Fools planned

I have titled this post 01/10 as I have no real subject.  Just a few updates on projects I am working on.

1.  http://www.sphs99.com – In an attempt to get an email address from everyone in my graduating class I created a Joomla CMS hosting a PHPBB3 forum and Gallery2 gallery (merged using JFusion).  It is pretty much an exact replica of http://www.umdphidelt.com .  Check out the yearbooks I have been scanning into the gallery .  Others have offered to scan theirs in as well but I am not holding my breath!  As of right now 63 of 409 classmates have registered.

2.  Photoshop Phunhouse – A fun place to post images I photoshopped.  Currently only Melissa Barrick and I post and not very often.  If you play with photoshop send me a message and I will add you to the page admins.

3.  A book website for an author

4.  I am proud of Karen for writing her first blog post on Jr’s blog titled A Perry Wonderful Christmas.  Karen did a fairly good job of capturing the Christmas spirit.

5.  Karen recently discovered our friend Katie’s new cooking blog http://sotastysoyummy.blogspot.com/ .  She is a huge fan and is having a good time following some of the recipe’s she is finding.  Karen’s first dish from So Tasty So Yummy…  Pasta Pie

6.  With my Fathers help I updated my website Project Page

7.  Sonny Maxwell Perry Jr. has his own projects going on

SKYSPOT Enterprises

That is it for now.  Plenty to keep me busy.

We miss home and look forward to the weddings to come this summer!  Can’t wait to introduce ZJ to everyone.

Cheers,

ZP

Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle

Joust

Defender

Star Wars

ROB

Ikari Warriors

Zelda

Katie’s Games – I can’t believe you gave these to Scotty!

Athena

Goonies

Mario Cart

NHL ’94

Streets of Rage

Sonic the Hedgehog – So original I know!

Altered Beast

Great times! I can’t even imagine how much time I invested in these games

Hope you enjoyed the trip through memory lane.

I also have an order with babybestbuy.com that has been in processing for 10 days! If items are on backorder don’t offer them on your site! Whatever happened to “Not In Stock”?

This post is my official rejection of buy.com and babybestbuy.com. Sometimes purchasing things over the internet is not worth the delay or the effort of tracking.

Great Uncle Fred

For my 90th birthday, I climbed the steps of the ten stories of the VA.
Set my goal for 92nd to dive off tower at Crandall Pool at West Point.
They have torn down the old tower at Delafield because of a fatality.
I guess that I am probably fortunate enough for the coach to say OK off 3 meter board but not the tower. When I got up on the board, I must have looked like the biggest coward anywhere because of my Peripheral Neuropathy. All I could do was to very carefully take one cautious step forward after another. I wasn’t afraid of falling into the water but I surely didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of the West Point team which was practicing.

I must have looked “scared” to death.

I used to appreciate the springiness of the board but it was nerve wracking, each step I took– thinking will the next be ok?. I actually stopped just about six inches from the end of the board afraid to try another step for fear of losing my balance. I said to myself, “well here goes”.

The first thing I knew I was in the water. I don’t see how I ever accomplished the dives I used to do in that short period of time — of course I was then taking advantage of the springiness of the board– not tryng to dampen it.

It probably looked horrible but at least it wasn’t a belly flop.
Mission accomplished within limits.

Uncle Fred 1939

Uncle Fred 2009

Way to go Uncle Fred!

Cash for Clunkers

Karen & I decided to capitalize off the CARS program before it shuts down next Monday and buy a new car. It was hard to pass up an opportunity to trade in our 1997 Nissan Pathfinder worth nothing for $4500. Especially since everyone else in the U.S. seemed to be taking advantage of the program and I am going to end up paying for it anyway via taxes. Here is a little walk through of my whole experience. Enjoy.

Karen & I decided to look into taking advantage of the CASS program while in Maryland two weeks ago. After visiting the CARS program webpage we found out that the Pathfinder did qualify and that to get $4500 out of the program we had to improve the Combined MPG (average of highway & city MPG) by at least 5 MPG. This was not hard to do since our Pathfinder averaged 15MPG. There was a lot of options.

I started by querying the internet masses (Facebook, umdphidelt.com) and found a few recommendations. Melissa Barrick had recommended a few quality Jeeps but after one phonecall I learned that Jeep was not acknowledging the CARS program anymore as the government already owed them too much money. Looks like we were running out of time. I started looking online and found a great resource @ HybridCars.com. They have a great list of cars that have excellent gas millage and allow you to sort on average price. After surfing around for a bit I decided I wanted to stick with an SUV if possible. My father had recommended looking into a Chevy Equinox as he had done a little research and believed it was the most bang for your buck. I also liked the Saturn Vue as an alternative. It was time to go shopping.

After doing a little research on cars.gov I found that I needed to bring proof of insurance and registration for a year to the day as well as the title. I grabbed my entire “Car” folder in my file cabinet and Karen and went to Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolet dealership to get started.

Now this was my first experience ever going to shop for a new car. I had expectations on what I would be confronted with. A slick, fast talking guy who wanted to push me for as possible. To prepare myself I figured out a price range I could afford (including an estimate for taxes, title, tag fees) accumulating the $4500 rebate into the equation. After arriving to the dealership a friendly Sales Rep named CJ took Karen and I greeted us and after a few words about our objective he took us for a ride in the Chevy Equinox. To be honest I was not impressed. It definitely did not have the wow effect I was hoping to get out of my first car. At some point I told CJ that I was also looking into the Vue. This was a mistake. He began to smear Saturn stating it had no backing of a large company like GM and would soon be bankrupt. This was a bad move on his part as it made me think “hey now, your in the same boat buddy”. CJ also pointed out that the Vue was little more then the same car with a different badge. After test driving the Equinox CJ saw a Vue on the lot and he showed it to us. Turns out he was right. It was pretty much the same truck. Crap!

Eventually we started looking at Cars. We looked around at a few. We looked at Chevy Malibu. It looked good compared to the trucks I had just driven. Soon Karen had to leave to pick up a friend from the Airport for a bachelorette party this weekend and left me with CJ. I eventually went inside and started to build a Malibu configuration that I might like but after 10 mins Karen called and confirmed that she did not like the car. I was thankful that she called because in reality I did not like the prices he was quoting and was not thrilled with the car. I shook CJ’s hand and decided to leave and head to Saturn to see what they had. I was pretty down by this point.

On the way towards the Saturn dealership I saw a Nissan dealership. Now Nissan has a good reputation with the Perry family. All together over the last 20 years my family has purchased 3 Maxima’s (Mom & Dad) & two Pathfinders (LP & I). Each vehicle had lasted us a very long time so I know they made quality vehicles. I was not happy to be shopping Japan but figured I had given the U.S. a chance. Lets compare.

I was greeted by Jose (pronounced Jo-say) who was a very educated black man with a foreign accent. Jose was dressed in a very expensive looking outfit and was friendly as hell. He walked me into the lot and showed me a few cars. None of the SUV’s could meet the combined 20MPG level I had to meet so I went straight to the cars. After reviewing the cars I checked out the Altima. This car is Badass. After walking through the features and taking it for a test drive I was sold. The 2009 Nissan Altima was JD Powers Highest ranked mid size car in initial quality. It is very classy and fun to drive. Eventually after 4 hours of negotiation we made a deal.

Apparently the car is too fun to drive. After owning it for 3 mins I got a ticket going 49MPH in a 40MPH zone. I tried to explain to the cop that I just bought the car and was not use to the sensitivity of the gas pedal and was focusing more on the features then my speed (which was true). Believe it or not I was not testing out the power out when I got pulled over. Here is a map I made showing the location of the experiance. To say the least it is a quick way to kill the buzz of buying a new car. Hopefully the judge will have mercy. I am not trying to start off with two points on my record.

When I got home I found that Karen was very happy with the purchase. I met her monthly payment quota and she loves the car. She even had a house full of friends in town to show it off to. I was still a little peeved about the ticket but was happy to be done with the process and was happy with the final output.

Today during lunch I took the car to get detailed and took some pictures of the old Pathfinder and the new car. Say hello to my 2009 Pearl White Nissan Maxima 2.5 S!

Death Mark

Goodbye 1997 Pathfinder

Hello 2009 Altima 2.5S

New Cockpit

Push Button Ignition!

Karen and I have come to a consensus with your help. We agreed to keep the house at 74 during the day and 72 at night. Thx for your help