This round of car buying went much better than our last two. We’re fans of consumer reports and had become interested in the Infiniti G25x even before we drove it. But we spent a few exhausting weeks test driving everything on Greenville’s Motor Mile just to make sure it’s what we wanted. For some reason test driving cars is just exhausting. Eventually we had narrowed it down to a few cars, and then permanently settled on the Infiniti G25x. It’s a rear wheel drive sedan with automatic all wheel drive. There are, of course, a ton of other features. The car handles like a dream. We have yet to find anything with seats as nice as the leather we had in the MINI, but these are the closest we have come across.

Historically, we’ve been very stupid about these things – I will definitely not go into detail there. However, I will tell you the smarter things we did this time. I’ll start by saying our philosophy may be different than most. For starters, we share one car and have no interest in owning two cars. Since we own one car it needs to be very reliable. And I can’t imagine throwing down enough money to buy a car without it being something we will feel safe in and something we will enjoy driving.

Will discovered Fighting Chance. Essentially, when you’ve settled on a model you want, for about $40 this guy will send you a ton of information about the car, the real invoice price & msrp, the real fees that go with it, etc. He also provides a streamlined process to get the best possible price by contacting dealers and inviting them to bid against one another to sell a car. A lot of this is just logic, but for those who aren’t gifted with the ability to draft conversations and emails or organize this sort of thing together, then this will guide you through the process. Will got brushed off by plenty of dealers in markets where the car was in high demand, but this is business and he had offers of less than invoice on his first round of bidding within a few minutes. Fighting Chance was definitely useful, especially with regards to explaining aspects of the industry – because so many incentives are unique and private there is no true way to determine what a dealer has really paid for a car – this information was helpful in making an educated guess. Dealer incentives are varied and interesting. We were fortunate that on the second round of bidding our local dealer, Bradshaw Infiniti, matched the lowest price while throwing in some extras. Right now, the interest rate is so low that it’s practically same as cash. We also discovered that pricing on warranties is negotiable. I had no idea. We extended our warranty using a reliably backed company from 3 years to 7, interest free, for almost nothing. And if we don’t make any claims during the extension, they refund 100% of the warranty’s cost. The buying process was very smooth and the salesman, who was very professional and not at all obnoxious, spent a very long time walking us through all the car’s features before handing it over to us (although somehow there is less storage room than in the MINI?)

It comes with a built-in watch! I swear the analog clock is not why we picked this car... PS. It also glows when the lights are on.

Prior to buying the car, we got appraisals from a few places for our MINI. All were about the same but were higher than the offer made by the Infiniti dealership, so last night we left it at Century MINI. There were definitely some dark ages of their service center, but since they put someone from the BMW service center in charge they’ve been amazing (albeit overpriced) and we wanted to give them the opportunity to buy it first. We were reminiscing about some of the really awful and wonderful things we’ve gone through while having the MINI. We had always meant to name the car but never did. So, on our last day with it we were going over everything that’s happened since got this car. Left behind some leeching unhealthy friends, bought our house on the West End, went through the Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis and endless medical treatments for it, went through the death of our cat Al from kidney failure, went through the cancer treatment and death of our cat Vlad, took two new cats (Galileo & Pyewacket) into the family, and many other things I won’t list here. We realized we should just refer to it as Battlestar Gallactica. Which, if you haven’t seen, you should watch sometime.

Starbuck & Starbuck At Starbucks

So, we’re selling our old car and making more interest off that money than we will be paying in interest to the new car – a concept that the business manager agreed with. He was frustrated that many people couldn’t understand the bigger picture there. Money logic doesn’t always feel logical.

So in the end, we took advantage of  the timing to get an obscenely low interest rate, used the Fighting Chance info to start negotiations with sellers and let them bid against each other to get the lowest price on the car. We kept the sale of our existing car separate to simplify the deal and are left with a car we’re thrilled with, just prior to an inevitable shortage of Japanese cars. When discussing the inventory flow with the dealership, they told us that Infiniti lost one employee in the earthquake and 1,300 new, unrevealed hybrids were washed off the dock completely into the sea. It’s so hard to fathom that kind of damage.

So here it is – our spanking new car – I think every mile on it was driven by us. We were going to head down to Charleston and Camden to visit Will’s grandparents this weekend, but at the last moment work is requiring him to stay available 24×7 all weekend. At least this will give us some time to get used to all the settings before we’re on an interstate for very long.

Georgia Guidestones : America's Stonehenge

I’ve wanted to see the Georgia Guidestones since I first heard of them years ago. If you’ve never heard of them, this is the gist of it. Elberton, Georgia is the granite capital of the world. An anonymous group of conservationists from outside the state commissioned the work under the pseudonym R.S. Christian, and it was erected on March 22 1980 at the highest point of Elbert County. The project involves a time capsule buried six feet underneath an explanatory tablet to the East of the guidestones and the guidestone monument itself, which is a made up of four upright granite slabs, a center column, and a captstone. The upright slabs and capstone hold 10 guiding statements for a better world, translated into multiple languages, both modern and ancient. Starting North, going clockwise, the languages are Hebrew, Sanskrit, Hindi, Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Arabic, English, Babylonian Cuneiform, Russian, Swahili, Classical Greek, And Spanish.

To be honest, I think that the ancient languages on the capstone probably say less than the modern languages on the upright stones, but I can’t read Sanskrit, Egyptian Hieroglyphys, Babylonian Cuneiform, or Classical Greek. A shame.

The message on the stones :

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
• Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
• Unite humanity with a living new language.
• Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
• Balance personal rights with social duties.
• Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
• Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

The Modern Languages

Although the sun was pretty brutal the afternoon we found the guidestones, supposedly you can see the North Star through the center column and it is in some way aligned with the solstices and equinoxes. The upright stones mark the lunar declination cycle, and the capstone is designed to always allow a beam of sunlight to somehow indicate the day of the year. To be honest, the sun was almost blinding when we were there, so we missed all of this. Because the ground is uneven, I was also only tall enough to look through the center column from one side.

The Georgia Guidestones

Leave Room For Nature

Apparently there are 2 primary camps of opinion on the stones. The first is that they are truly markers of wisdom for an age of reason. I’m not so sure we’ve reached that age. To that end, there’s a camp that believes these are the 10 commandments of the antichrist and that because it is aligned with North South East and West, with the Sun, etc that it was built for sun worshipers or satanists. Like planetariums! Very logical. As a result the stones have become a target for vandalism. You can see this in the gallery I’ve uploaded. It’s hard to tell what the graffiti said before being cleaned off, but apparently it was about the devil and a new world order.

At any rate, if you’re in the area and don’t plan to paint anything on them or take a swing at them with a sledgehammer, it’s a neat little place to visit. It’s not a big detour on a drive to Atlanta. I’m glad we went, and I’m glad that tornadoes can’t knock them over and the stones can also weather the culture of the South.

The Grand Tetons

Maybe we’ve failed to post anything for 5 months or so, but we’ve actually been busy for a change We’ll try to post some updates over the next few days.

For starters, in late July we went for a 10 day trip to Jackson Hole WY, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. The entire trip was extraordinary. The weather was 40 degrees cooler than the misery in South Carolina, and the sky there is huge. It’s a different planet. In all, the party totaled 10 people: my aunt and uncle, Will and I, my parents, my brother’s family, and my cousin and his wife.

Although a bit touristy, Jackson Hole was a very neat little town. I had seen something about it once on Food Network and went to Pearl Street Bagels based on the show. They were fantastic. While exploring the galleries we met and had a long talk with an intelligent, interesting photographer, John Richter, whose work is absolutely stunning.

Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park are seriously deadly places. You are constantly in the vicinity of huge animals that wouldn’t mind killing you, there are no guard rails to slow your plunge off the steep mountainsides you are always driving on, and the unstable geothermal ground is essentially designed to suck you into pits of boiling water (or acid) if you stray from a path. Several people died while we were there and I don’t think a day passed that we didn’t see a K-9 unit somewhere in the park searching for someone. That said, it was absolutely fascinating and utterly gorgeous.

Our first and last days were spent mostly in Jackson Hole. We spent a fun few hours at Teton Village riding the tram to the icy mountaintop with my brother, sister-in-law, and nieces. We stayed in West Yellowstone in a large uniquely furnished lakeside cabin that apparently both Jimmy Carter and George Bush have frequented (bizarre).

The cabin featured a stuffed vicious badger on the wall of the children’s bedroom (great idea). My brother had to cover it with sheets. What a thing for a child to wake up to. I kept telling my nieces that the badger was just smiling at them, but even children aren’t that gullible.

The lake had lots of ducks, some otters, and a mammoth amount of underwater vegetation that resulted in some very happy fish. It was a great place to stay and had some gorgeous sunsets. Unfortunately, it also had some very healthy mosquitoes, so I was never brave enough to head out in the canoe.

Will's Favorite Bison

We spent most of the trip exploring the parks. It’s a photographer’s dream. Will somehow managed to make a sleeping roadside bison irate and we drove off just before he started to charge at us. I pity whoever stopped there for photos after us. I almost tripped over a beautiful napping elk. And I cheated and fed lots of sunflower seeds to ground squirrels and chipmunks. Trust me, they were spoiled before we showed up.

The geology of the area is breathtaking. The most disappointing features of the park were Old Faithful and the Petrified Tree. Other geysers are cooler and less crowded. And the petrified tree is… well it’s an old stump. I mean…seriously…

The most fascinating features for us were the smaller geysers and pools, the lake, the ravens, the wildlife, the beautiful sky, the crazy rock formations, the trees, and the myriad of lovely people all over the park. At least half the families we met were from other countries — England, Germany, France, Holland, Japan…

Osprey Nest Between Madison Jct & West Yellowstone

We ended up with about 500 photos after deleting the fuzzy ones and those where I was too short to prevent having half the photo filled with the sideview mirror or car door. Yellowstone lake is one of the most beautiful parts of the park, and photos really cannot capture it. A lot of our shots of the thermal pools turned out surprisingly well. Of course, the bacteria in them can be deadly in about 7 different ways. Most of our shots of bears turned out terribly and had to be deleted. We missed a shot of a grizzly sleeping under a tree with all four giant paws stuck up in the air. The wildlife out there have a sense of humor all their own.

After posting our gallery on picasa, one photo has been inexplicably viewed almost 800 times, compared to the maximum of about 20 views for all the others. It’s the osprey nest that we became so fond of near Madison Junction on the drive home every evening. So I’ll post it here. It reminded me at the time of a Dr. Seuss illustration and is definitely one of my favorites.

The summer heat takes a big toll on my MS – fatigue, muscle pain from spasticity, blurry vision, balance, etc. Although I did not have the ability to truly hike on the trip, the cooler weather and lack of humidity made my MS symptoms lessen so much that Will and I could walk for hours and miles. It was remarkable how much better I felt there in so many ways. After Will saw what a difference climate made in my ability he was amazed, and we are seriously considering where we would want to live in the future.

That trip can never be replicated, but hopefully it won’t be another 10 years before our next vacation.

In the meantime, Will and I are planning some day trips in Atlanta, Asheville and Charleston in the coming months. Recommendations for can’t-miss things to do there are welcome as always!

Will & Sara at McPherson Park in Greenville, SC

As of today Sara and I have been married for 9 years! It’s been a long road and I can’t believe all of the things we’ve seen, said, and done. Some days I feel like we’ve always been together and others it feels like no time at all. One thing is for sure, I am the luckiest guy in the world.

On January, 19th 2001 we piled into Sara’s white 1991 Mitsubishi Montero with Ben Chabot and his then fiance Caitlin and drove to the Little Wedding Chapel in Easley, SC. I remember our family and friends packing into the woefully small chapel and laughing with us through the next 30 minutes of comedy gold.

Highlights:

• Meeting the minister minutes before the ceremony in his bright yellow plaid suit and matching bowtie; (un)fortunately(?) he wore a robe for the ceremony
• Sara’s mother thinking that her father had already, “given away the bride,” but not heard it as he is somewhat deaf and whispering very loudly while crouching and tugging on him to sit down
• Sara and I being forced to stand and bend uncomfortably over the kneeling bench we asked be removed several times. That’ll show them! We’ll stand and bend over you uncomfortably!
• The operatic rendition of the lords prayer with trademarked country twang played on a cassette deck that had the entire chapel in peals of laughter by the end
• My botching of my vows, “with this ring I be wed…,” WTF was I thinking?
• Being trapped with my Grandmother Byrd during the reception who I believe was still convinced that I was either gay or had impregnated Sara and was forced to marry her; I still cannot understand how these conflicting ideas can occupy the same place in anyone’s head…
• Sara being trapped during the reception with a mutual friend who had been gone all summer and was desperately in love with her
• Sara’s Dad is the spitting image of Norm Abrams. I’m not kidding. My Grandfather Wayne is quite the furniture builder and artist and was convinced we had no small celebrity on our hands and felt compelled to introduce himself and discuss his love of the New Yankee Workshop. Both men are slightly hard of hearing so the conversation went something like this:

Grandfather Wayne: “I’m Hugh, Will’s grandfather.”
Sara’s Dad: “No, I’m Sara’s dad, Jerry.”
Grandfather Wayne: “No, I’m Hugh, Will’s grandfather.”
Sara’s Dad: “No, I’m Sara’s dad, Jerry.”

x20 or so until Sara walked up and straightened them out…

• Being pelted by birdseed so hard it left marks and Sara shaking birdseed out of her over styled hair for about a week after
• Leaving the wedding with Ben and his fiance to head home for champagne
• Champagne had been left in the freezer by someone and exploded into champagne slushy
• Going to Nick’s Tavern to drink with some friends when your freezer is full of champagne slushy
• Getting almost too drunk to consummate your marriage and finally managing it way too late above the heads of your best friend and his fiance who for some reason were spending the night

One would marvel that the marriage lasted the first night. As I read this back to Sara now no one is more surprised than her that we made it past that first night when at my parents dropping off my Dad’s tux and she finds out Ben and Caitlin are spending the night. Our wedding night. Good god, what was I thinking. Fortunately our honeymoon was much better and salvaged my bumbling during our wedding. We spent 4 incredible days at Hidden Mountain Resorts in Sevierville, TN. Our ride up to Sevierville was treacherous and beautiful. It started snowing in the mountains of NC and things got cold and icy very quickly. The poor Montero had a time on the mountain hills and when we finally got checked in we were pretty much snowed in. It was a great time and just about the only real vacation we’ve had since we’ve been married. The few times we made it out were for a few nice dinners and games at some arcades near Pigeon Forge.

At any rate when we got home it was back to work and things weren’t peachy. Sara and I were poor and it sucked. We were living in Government housing and barely making livable wages. We both had insurance thanks to my job but things were uncertain as the company had just filed Chapter 11. Sara was working for her parents at their Frame Shop and making more than I was. I decided things needed to change and started looking for new work. Fortunately for me an old classmate from High School IM’ed me day and told me he could get me a job in Greenville, SC with Trivergent. Trivergent was a communications company that was having financial problems but were in the process of being acquired by Gabriel Communications in St. Louis, MO. I figured moving from a low paid job with no security to a higher paid job with slightly less security was a no-brainer and we packed up and moved to Greenville. Sara’s drive got shorter and I walked to work from a cheap condo we rented downtown Greenville on West Earle St.

During the early years of our marriage I honestly can’t understand why Sara stayed with me. Maybe she saw there was some raw potential there but at 21 I was insufferable. I thought I knew everything and never thought for a second before making it known. I’m convinced I drove away some people I was really close to because of my attitude. Fortunately she worked through the process of growing up with me and I learned the world wasn’t black and white and it was possible to see things from another perspective. We had long conversations about what we could do to improve our relationship. Sometimes we’d stay up and talk about it all night. (We did this about two weeks ago in fact!) At some point I decided I wanted to be a better person for her and started work on improving my less than desirable qualities. It’s not been easy but compromise is the name of the game. If you love the person you’re with don’t you want to be worthy of their love? Don’t you want the last thought in their mind when they fall asleep that they’re glad to be with you and not, “That asshole forgot to fold his clothes again?”

Things worked out and the new company became NuVox, Sara started working there, I was rapidly promoted, we both learned an incredible amount about telecommunications, the Internet, and mergers and acquisitions, met some terrible people and some of the best people we’ve ever known. In the last 9 years we’ve started two failed businesses but are still trying, moved five times, bought a house, bought two new cars, been introduced to the amazing Siamese breed, enjoyed a short time with our first Siamese, lived a melancholy and sometimes downright painful year and a half with our second Siamese and his bout with lymphoma, learned to live with Sara’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, taken each other to the emergency room, and so much more than I could ever cram into one sentence. What have we learned from all of this?

When I look back on the last 9 years I’d say that demolishing the typical husband and wife roles has played the biggest part in keeping both of us happy. She’s my best friend, my confidant, my partner, my love. Not my cook, maid, chauffeur, dishwasher, or slave. I can wash the dishes or cook dinner and she can work 80 hours a week and bring overtime when we need it. I don’t own her and she doesn’t own me and neither of us does these things because it’s, “the husband’s/wife’s job.” We do them because they have to be done and we understand how it feels when you’re doing them by yourself and the other person doesn’t help.

At the end of all of this exposition I can sum up the key to our successful marriage in one sentence. This is not all about you; don’t be a selfish ass. I think far too many people forget that in a marriage you can’t always control what the other person is going to do or think or feel and you have to be able to truly understand and live with that, rational or irrational it may be. It’s all about the patience and willingness to learn, understand, and grow with your partner.

I know you all probably read this far hoping that you’d get some quick and easy tips to make things better at home so I won’t stiff you. For 9 years here are 9 things that have made things immeasurably less tense in the evenings:

1. Mint – Until the end of 2008 Sara managed the finances by herself. She did a great job on her own but she couldn’t say no to me and I had no idea what our finances looked like. At the end of 2008 when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis she made me sit down and look over them with her and I promised I would be more involved so she wouldn’t feel like, “mean mommy,” when she had to say no. Mint let us import all of our financial accounts into one portal where we could quickly and easily extrapolate where our money was going and what we needed to do to get our finances working better for us. If there’s a better tool out there I haven’t seen it yet.
2. Dishwasher – Moving into a place with a dishwasher eliminated the biggest point of contention between us. Who’s doing the dishes? You might not think about it much but consider this; doing the dishes for a regular meal that you cook for two people takes just about as long as when you cook for 4-5. You typically use the same amount of pans, skillets, measuring cups, etc. as you would for cooking a larger meal and these are the things that take the longest to clean. Buying a dishwasher gets you back 45 minutes to an hour of time every evening you’d otherwise spend washing dishes after a meal. Over the course of a year that’s about 15 days of time each year you could be doing anything else.
3. Keeping each others secrets – If I told you my wife would kill me…
4. Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, and more cats – They are ridiculous, loving, fun, and they lower your blood pressure. You can also blame them when someone passes gas.
5. CatGenie – Seriously, with all those cats, who really wants to scoop litter? Let them use their own cat toilet.
6. Working Cars – So many other things are broken, do you really want to be stuck in the house when your air conditioning is broken because you wanted to save $500 at the dealership?
7. Comfortable Bed – It’s hard to be mad at each other when you’re falling asleep in a comfortable bed
8. A great sense of humor, especially about each others’ neuroses
9. Common Enemies – Fighting against a common enemy or problem is the first step towards working together!

EPILOGUE FROM SARA, WHO JUST DISCOVERED THAT SOME OF HER FAMILY MEMBERS READ THIS.

Hi everyone! Silly Will — I’m actually a virgin and have never even tasted alcohol. Love you!

Welcome to Collier-Byrd.net. Sara and I have been meaning for awhile to put up a web page to collect photos for family and write about our various interests but I can be a terrible perfectionist and spend way too much time getting something suitable before I ever (or never) get around to using it.

This time I’ve decided to try something different and put up a WordPress site, start posting, and we’ll work out the bugs as we go. I think we’ll actually get use out of the page this way and work on the non-content pieces when I have time.

As I said, the original idea was to collect some photos for family and friends, but we also have a lot of interests we’re planning to cover. Sara was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last year and we have been doing a tremendous amount of research about the disease. As her father’s side of the family has a history of the disease, it wasn’t at all unknown to us, but suffering from an auto-immune disease is a lot different from knowing about it as a result of family, friends, or acquaintances learning to live with one. Sara really wants to compile a lot of the information we’ve found and relay her personal experiences living with MS to date in hopes it may help others who know someone with MS or people who have been diagnosed that are learning to cope with it. The side benefit of this will be to (hopefully) raise awareness about the disease.

My primary focus for the foreseeable future (other than MS) is working through several professional certification tracks. I have been working for ISPs and Telecommunications companies for the better part of the last 12 years now and while I do have a lot of on the job experience and more than a fair bit of knowledge about the Internet and how it all works, there’s definitely no shortage of new things to learn. I’m currently CCNA certified (Cisco Certified Network Associate), and working towards my CCIP (Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional) and CCNP (Cisco Certified Networking Professional) certifications. At some point, once I finish these two certifications, I am planning to work on the service provider versions of the JNCIA (Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate) and JNCIS (Juniper Networks Certified Internet Specialist) certifications to round out my experience. When I finish all of this, depending on what I am spending most of my time working on (Cisco or Juniper gear) I’ll look into pursuing one of the IE (Internet(work) Expert) paths. As I’ve got at least a year or two of work in front of me to get to a point where I am choosing an IE path I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself but I definitely want to have a rough timeline in my head to help moving me forward. Part of my learning process is putting together training materials presented in a method that clearly conveys the concepts and ideas I am studying, so I would say that you should expect to see a lot of boring and very technical information about Cisco and Juniper routers as well as different routing protocols, RFCs (Requests for Comments), and IETF drafts on emerging technologies.

Outside of career and health related pursuits Sara and I would like to travel. To start we will probably take day trips on the weekends to see the things we can reach in a day’s drive. As we run out of things to see in a day’s drive we’ll probably start flying. Eventually we would like to see all of the US and plan trips overseas. There’s so much to see and do and we’d like to do as much as we can while we are young. We’re hoping to put together photo diaries to track our travels and we’ll be posting them here. Our first big trip will be to Yellowstone for two weeks at the end of July next year when Sara’s uncle retires. Her aunt and uncle are taking their family out to Yellowstone for a group trip so we’re already planning our days and hoping we can make the most of it.

At any rate I don’t want to put together any kind of gigantic list of everything we’re planning or not planning to do with the site. We hope it will grow organically as our interests and tastes evolve and change and with any luck, you’ll be here with us for all of it.