ace’s blog

Today started out decent enough. I stayed up late last night and woke up late this morning to a phone call from one of my favorite people in the world. Did some laundry, poked around the house a bit and basically had a lazy day. Then 6 o’clock hit and WHAT. THE. FUCK?!

Throughout the day, Meri threatened me twice with not being able to see the boys. The first time was that I wouldn’t be allowed to see them unless I had a legal document outlining a custody agreement. (related text messages below)

Meri: One more thing, you need a custody agreement for when you get up here so you need to get working on that. I am not allowing the boys to go with you unti 1:49 PM

Meri: l one is in effect i do not trust you not to take them away. You lie too much, as was just demonstrated with the phone 1:49 PM

Me: define custody agreement? 1:56 PM

Meri: Something legally binding that states what the custody of the boys is going to be, basically we need to begin our legal battle since we are not in agreeance 1:57 PM

Then I was told that I would not be able to speak the boys unless I provided her with my drivers license number. This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. She said that since I only respond to “when she threatens to not allow me to speak to the boys” (which she will forever deny that she ever said that), that I would not be allowed to speak to them until I gave her my drivers license number. Of course, that was via a phone call and I don’t have proof that she said it.

When she said that, I got off of the phone.

Then she began texting me about my drivers license number. She said she needed it in order to get car insurance since we were still legally married. I would rather not be on her policy since I don’t want to be on the hook if she didn’t pay her bill but mostly since she and I were not in the same household anymore. It didn’t make sense that I be on her new policy. She and I texted back and forth quite a bit about it for a while. She demanded and I continued to refuse.

Her mom called me and left me a voicemail. I called her back. The call started off nice enough (“hi, how are you?” blah blah) but then asked me for the “number” that Meri needed. I said “what number are you referring to?” and then it got nasty from there. She demanded that I give her the number no less than 3 times. I told her that Meri and I would handle it and she asked for it again, saying that Meri and I had been working on it “all day” and that we weren’t handling it. I heard Eli in the background and since that was the reason I called her back, to speak to Aaron and Eli, I asked to speak with him.

Lucy said that he was “down the street” and that she had to go. She also said that I was being very rude by not just giving her my driver’s license number.  I was very surprised at that comment and so I asked her “I’m being rude not giving you my driver’s license number?” and she said “yes, you are”. I told her that I wasn’t comfortable giving her that information and she made several comments to the effect of “what am I (or Meri) going to do with that number”. I responded to that by saying that I don’t know what they were going to do with the number and that I certainly wasn’t going to give it to them.

She also seemed to imply that she was doing me some sort of favor by taking the kids to the White Mountains for a few days. She said something like “I’m up here hiking up this hill with your kids” and then trailed off from there. If I wasn’t so pissed at that point, I would have laughed (it still struck me as funny). What a psychotic woman. That apple didn’t fall far from that tree, that’s for sure.

So all of that has me reconsidering moving up there.

Despite all of the challenges that Meri and I have faced and will continue to face with our impending divorce, I was certain that she and I could hammer out some sort of custody agreement. She goes back and forth, depending on her mood. Before they all left to move to Massachusetts, she was ok with us sharing the boys half of the time. Then she changed her mind and said that the kids should only stay with me once every other weekend and one day during the off-week. She expected me to be fine with that because “that’s all most dads get”. I’m not ok with that, nor would I ever be.

Despite her opinion swaying from one end of the spectrum to the other, I continued to think that we would be able to work out an agreement on our own. I don’t know why it took so long but I don’t think that any more.

I have an apartment in Franklin, Massachusetts. My move in date is September 1st. My plan was to pack up a trailer and leave Orlando on August 30th. I don’t think I can do that anymore. I really don’t feel that the boys are any better off up near Meri’s family than they are down here. I initially thought that since Meri had so much family up there and that they all seemed to be cordial to me that allowing the boys to move up there to be near all of them was in their best interests. I also thought that Meri would be happier up there since she’s always wanted to move back home. Since she will be alone with them 1/2 of the time, her being happy by being up in Mass would mean that the boys were happy when they were around her.

Long story short, I believe it is time for me to get a lawyer and bring the boys back home. I’m filing for my divorce soon and seeking full custody of the kids. I don’t want to keep the boys from their mother so I’m hopeful that we will be able to settle on custody half of the time.

I never was able to speak to the kids tonight either.

What a great way to end the weekend.

Then, after a 2 and a half hours of that crap, I get this text from Meri.

Meri: I took care of the insurance, talked to someone for 25 min and she helped me given my situation 8:32 PM

Hallelujah! She told me many, many times that she could not get car insurance because she didn’t have my drivers license number yet she did end up getting it – amazing!

The last few weeks have been a very difficult time for everybody in my family. Meri and I have decided not to get a divorce, at least not yet.

My mom lives in Jacksonville, which is about 2 hours away. We just recently star started speaking again, after a 3 year hiatus. So since I don’t have a support system down here in Orlando, Meri really wants to take the boys to Massachusetts. She is from there and has a lot of family around that would help with child care if one of us needed it.

My parents were divorced. my brother and I stayed with my mom and since my dad was in the Navy, he was all over the place. He was mostly in California and we were in Florida. I know all too well what it is like to grow up without a father around. I don’t want that for my boys. I don’t want to be several states away. I don’t want to be an occasional phone call and a random card in the mail. I don’t want to be that kind of dad.
I’ve discussed my situation with my IT Director at work and asked if I could work out of the Massachusetts branch. He told me that it was no problem at all and that I won’t really need to go into the branch at all and that I could just work from home. That was a major relief!! I didn’t really want to have to find another job up there.

We’ve decided that we aren’t going to get a divorce right away. We are going to get separated and see how that “works” for us, for approximately a year or so. If both of us feel that we want to remain together, then we’ll get a divorce. We are going to live in separate places. The boys will stay with both of us half of the time. We aren’t going to be so rigid about that schedule – we won’t force the kids to go to either place if they won’t want to.

We don’t want to jump right into getting divorced. Neither of us can say that we are 100% sure that we don’t want to be together.

This weekend, we’re going to list our house on the market as a short sale. We have a realtor friend that is going to discuss the ramifications of short selling our home, on our individual credit reports and on us financially.

I’m already feeling very sad that my family is going to be broken up. Hopefully, after our separation period, we’ll both decide that we really want to remain together and we can stay married.

I’m either going to delete or move acedanger.com. Any and all content from any social site under the username acedanger will be moved or deleted as well. You will not know the new domain, if there even is one.

It’s too bad that this is happening. There is too much drama about this now and it’s just best to stop it now. It’s a shame, I’d rather not remove the information contained in this blog just because of a select number of people (that can be counted with one hand). I really like the name acedanger. I suppose this is for the best. I will sorely miss the name.

This is the final post here.

So does anybody know what today is??  It’s closing day!  So long big, beautiful brick house with no linen closets and a tiny pantry!  You had a big yard and that probably would be fun to have but I won’t miss the 2 1/2 hour lawn maintenance days; I won’t miss dragging sprinklers around the yard till 8pm; I won’t miss living in a neighborhood where nobody is outside unless they are getting into their cars to drive somewhere, not in the neighborhood.

I will miss the large yard (just not taking care of it); I will miss having my master bedroom downstairs; I will miss having a 500+ sq foot bonus room where my computer equipment lived, lonely sitting up there unless I was up there visiting it; I will miss the kitchen that was totally awesome and had double convection ovens.

So there you go, the abbreviated Memphis chapter in our lives is now closed, not to be sorely missed by myself or my wife (Aaron never gives us a straight answer!).

Well, it’s February 26th and we close on our house in 2 days!  It’s not too late for someone (YOU!) to snatch up a beautiful, (nearly) 3,000 sq ft, all brick vacation home in Bartlett, Tennessee!  Check out this site and send in all offers!  Don’t be shy about offering more than we are asking either.

Alright, enough of that.  I’m so excited the house is almost gone. A good friend of mine hooked us up by finishing up some small stuff that the buyers wanted done and the only thing we have to do now is wait for the closing paperwork, sign it and overnight it and then be done with Memphis FOREVER! (evil laugh).  The only thing I will miss about Memphis was the wonderful people I worked with.  In the end, it was the city that drove us back to sunny Florida.

About a month ago, I wrote a post about getting an offer on our house. That offer was crap and the people knew it. We countered their offer and they have yet to get back to us. I’m thinking they just couldn’t afford the house and were hoping that we’d give them a good deal on it.

Well yesterday, my wife got an email from our realtor (who is not a good realtor, stay away!) saying that she may have an offer for us. This morning, we woke up and my wife checked her email for any word. Well we got an offer on the house…a much better offer! We are in the haggling stages right now but I’m thinking that these people are going to be the buyers! Oh, the best part of the offer, should we eventually accept a modified form of it is that they want to close on Feb. 28th! Of this year! I’m looking forward to the counter to our counter.

UPDATE: We accepted an offer on the house.  We have some painting that these lazy people either can’t or don’t want to do but this may just be the end of the Memphis chapter in out lives!

Let me just say start out and say that I have not abandoned the blogging that I grew to like a lot during my significant downtime while I worked at Terminix. I have just been really busy; between work and WoW and house searching and then more work…plus I had a lot of work to do…at work. Lots of work…at work.

After a long search, I have found a place to rent in Winter Park! It’s about 7 miles from work so my commute time should only be about 20 minutes either way. The house we are renting is decent. It is 100% tile…no carpet. That was our largest limiting factor in looking for a place to rent. We were told that Aaron would *probably* be developing asthma in the next year due to his current allergies. It was recommended that we avoid carpet if possible so we did. I signed the lease today. We move in on December 20th. I will be flying to Memphis, for the last time, on December 16th, flying back with Aaron on the 18th and Meri is going to drive down on the 18th and 19th.

In “I STILL have a house to sell” news, couple number 27 came by to look at our lovely home since we put it on the market many moons ago. They are very interested and decided that it was the house for them. They have a house to sell and it is currently on the market but is not showing well because “they have too much stuff and it makes the house look small”. They are currently in the process of trying to get approved for financing for both their mortgage and for the mortgage for our house! That sounds like a lot of work to me. We were told that they stopped looking at houses after they saw ours. If they do not get approved and still want our house, we are going to offer them a lease with an option to buy. That would be awesome to not have to pay a mortgage AND rent!

So anyway, I should probably get back to work. Work is fun, minus being insanely busy all the damn time. I’m doing a lot of AJAX integration (but not with XML, we use JSON because it’s faster) with LANSA. If you have no clue what that all meant, here’s a simpler way of saying it: I’m doing wicked cool stuff on the web! My JavaScript skills have increase dramatically in the past 3 months! I am having a lot of fun doing the actual coding part of my job. Now the operations side I could do without but you have to take the good with the bad.

We have made most of the arrangements and I am very happy to finally be able to say that Meri and Aaron will finally be moving to Orlando on December 18th! Meri is going to drive her truck to Orlando and I will be flying down with Aaron…alone. Although Meri has done this many times, this will be my first time flying with him alone and I’m kind of nervous about it. He’s a great kid and all but I know he can get grumpy when he has to stay in one place for a short period of time, thus causing me to get grumpy. Now all I have to do is fine a house for us!

This weekend, we are headed to St Louis to watch the 49ers kick the crap out of the lowly Rams. It should be fun! Meri, Aaron and I are meeting my father-in-law up there. He’s like a super-fan so I’m kind of hoping, for the sake of the trip and for everyone’s happiness. I’m resigned to the fact that the 49ers suck (but are doing very well lately!) but I don’t think he is happy to admit that the Rams good days are far behind them! It should be fun either way. I’m looking forward to it.

WoW is awesome! I’m not addicted as some people I know are but I enjoy playing. I won’t be playing much once my family is back with me but until then, I’ll be playing me some Wow!

I talked my boss into letting me work from Memphis two weeks at a time, instead of our originally negotiated one week. Two weeks with the family at a time?! Who would have ever thought I wouldn’t be spending all of my time with them?! This has been one of the more difficult times in our lives, especially now that Aaron is fairly aware of what is going on.

Meri took Aaron trick-or-treating tonight and she said that he loved it. Aaron got to knock on every door and say “Happy Hawoween” (he has issues with his L’s). The when the people would put candy in his pumpkin, he would fish it out, tell them what it was, and then say “Thank you for [insert candy name here]“. I really wish I could have been there with them! He asked Meri if tomorrow was Happy Halloween again and then asked if there was going to be any more trick-or-treating again tomorrow. This is the first year that he’s been into it like this. Next year will be fun too! I’ll just look forward to that.

In other Wood family news, a woman came to look at our house for the second time in 3 days! I’m going to take that as a sign that she liked it a lot the first time. Our realtor seems to be stepping up lately and really getting the ball rolling. As much as we disliked her style initially, she does seem to have a fire under her ass now, for which we are thankful.

Now, back to WoW! I’m Nakhand on the Ner’zhul server in case anybody is interested…

November 8th will be our third wedding anniversary! Three years! Who would have ever thought that that I could get a woman, a real live woman, who possesses both the ability to hear AND see, to stay with me for three whole years! And that is just the length of time that we’ve been married. I think we dated for 4 years (on and off) before we got married.

You know what’s great about the third anniversary? There are two types of gifts that correspond with the third wedding anniversary: the traditional and the modern. If you don’t want to click those links, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of them: the traditional third wedding anniversary gift is leather, and the modern is crystal. Now being the technology minded kind of person that I am, I would generally go with anything labeled “modern”.

Not this time! What says “Baby, I’ve missed you so much since we’ve been away from each” other more than leather?! My isn’t getting a wallet or belt, she’s getting something we can all enjoy…well, something I can enjoy…

Hm, that’s probably a little too much information for all of you. I hope neither of our parents reads this. In fact, if you know me, just pretend I didn’t write any of this and also that you didn’t actually read it.

Now since it is officially Saturday, I can very, very happily say that I get to see my gorgeous wife in one week! Just seven more days and I get to see my wife and son. They must both be really excited! Haha. I’m really excited. I will be able to see and touch my wife and be able to pick up and toss around my son. I am so ready to go back home and see them! I hope my house sells soon…this whole being apart from my family is the absolute worst part of my otherwise cool new job.