Now that I am back in Gainesville, and I know I'll be staying here a while, I want to find doctors here in town so I do not need to drive to my hometown every time I want to see a doctor like I did when I was going to school here.
I started my search by looking in the yellow pages. I found a good number of doctors that way, but I realized that I have no way of knowing which doctors are good and which are not. Normally, I would just go and try some out. This is what I did with Joy a weekend or two ago when we wanted to find a good, affordable place to wash our cars or get them cleaned for us. We just took our cars to two different places. Next time we'll take them to two other places and so on until we know which place we like. This doesn't work so well with doctore because it will cost you $100 or more for each visit.
With that in mind I hoped to find a doctor rating service. I did. I found several. Unfortunately, people in Gainesville haven't really used these services much -- aside from one person who wanted to give a negative rating about a doctor here in town. Of the sites that I found, I liked http://www.compledentist.com the best. It lists every dentist in town by name -- not by practice name. Then you can rate each dentist. No one has really done the ratings thing yet, but this is a more complete listing of dentists than any yellow pages gave me.
The difficulty I am having in finding a dentist is inspiring another rant against the practice of medicine. I do not understand how we can all be so well informed and conscientious consumers of so many other goods and services, but when it comes to medicine we leave everything to chance.
Now that I have to pick blindly I am deciding on large, multiple doctor practice in one of the nicer areas of town. I don't really have anything to base my decision on other than whether or not our insurance is accepted at the practice, so I am assuming that large means successful and nice area of town will mean nice office.
Now I still need to find a general practicitioner, a mechanic, an accountant, a banker, etc. At least I know where to get my cars and my teeth cleaned.
I don't buy a whole lot of software, and I rarely ever pay for freeware, shareware, etc. I have purchased a handful of programs over the years though, and right now my favorite computer app has got to be Flashcard Exchange.
This isn't my favorite because I get the most enjoyment out of it or anything like that. It is my favorite because it is a web-based app that I paid for just once and can use at any time, anywhere, on any computer. I also use it a lot and it has helped me out a lot in studying Hebrew, Greek, and for my part-time jobs at UPS and now... Domino's.
For just $16.50 I get a lifetime membership to this flashcard program, which has a really nice free account available too. I liked the free account so much that eventually I decided that I owed the guy well over $20, so I got the full membership. The full membership is sweet because it lets you do all these extra things that are really helpful in learning things that you need to simply memorize.
The big thing that this software designer pushes for his full membership are Card Files. Basically, the card files allows you to pick and choose flashcards from all over and put them into one file. Then you can give the file any number of compartments. When you go through your flash cards the cards you mark as correct advance to the next compartment. The cards you mark as incorrect fall back to compartment #1. The designer recommends 5 compartments, and after using all different numbers I can see why five or more is a good idea. By the time you get every card into the fifth compartment you pretty much know them all.
Over time you tend to forget things that you memorized for a quiz, exam, or promotion, no? This guy anticipated that and he built in a schedule that you can set up so that the program sends you an e-mail reminding you to go through the flashcards again. You start with all the cards in a card file at compartment #1 again and then you go through them again until they are all in the last compartment. Doing this every so often helps you retain the information really well. After a while you are only going through the flash cards every other week, and you know them really well still so you get through them quickly.
Even with all these features I have to say that my favorite part of the app is that it is a web-based app. This can have it's draw backs (you can't use it unless you're computer is currently connected to the Internet) but my computers usually are. Now that I have multiple computers all with different operating systems it is a bonus to have applications that work on all of them without having to buy a new license (See MS Office for Windows and Office:Mac.)
Yesterday Joy was trying to make a number of phone calls to the state of Florida. I am not really sure about the details of why she was calling other than that she needed to set them straight about something. What I do know is that she was trying to get through for over an hour and kept on going through this cycle of pressing 1 if ____ pressing 3 if ______, y'know how that goes.
The problem was that they were busy at the end, and instead of having a system that puts you on hold and tells you how long your wait will be, the state just let you get through to a busy signal. So, you'd need to redial everything all over again.
Joy also tried to fax her information in to them, but that too yielded a busy signal repeatedly. Finally Joy pressed 2 for Spanish. I think that this happened on accident, but I can't sa for sure. Anyway, she had remembered the sequence of numbers from all the previous attempts and just typed them in when prompted. This worked like a charm! Someone was on the line to help her.
"Hi! I don't speak Spanish. Can you help me?"
The person on the line was bilingual of course, so he did help her out. It was such a relief for her and so exciting that I had to blog about it. Now we know how to get faster service on the phone too.
I don't know if/when I will get the financing I need to buy my francise and start working on that, so I've spent a good deal of time during the last two weeks looking for jobs. So far I have used Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, and looked in our local student newspaper.
I have submitted my resume to over a dozen different companies and called several local businesses that ran ads in the student newspaper and so far only two have responded. The first to respond was Brinker International. They had a management position open for the local Chili's, but they say that they already selected a candidate. At the time that I received that e-mail, I was pretty happy to have at least heard something even though it was a no. I was really wondering if monster and careerbuilder worked at all.
Yesterday, I got my second response. It was almost immediate and it made me really, really happy. I took a lot more time on developing a cover letter and formatting my resume for this company because I am pretty excited about the position. I submitted everything just before midnight on Wednesday, and then when I woke up on Thursday I already had a voicemail waiting for me and two e-mails in my inbox from this company.
I was stoked and I called the hiring manager back right away. She did a phone interview, and it seemed to have gone really well. At the end of the interview she said that I would probably recieve an e-mail of further assessments on Friday to work on over the weekend. Then the District Manager will most likely call me on Monday or Tuesday.
Now it is almost three o'clock on Friday, and I still haven't received the e-mail that I am anticipating anxiously. I have spent most of my time today working on my business plan and/or talking with the moneybroker that I am working with to get financing. I also spent some time looking through jobs, because careerbuilder sends me daily e-mails of jobs that supposedly fit my qualifications. I have done what I could to productively pass time, but I really want this e-mail or some sort of follow-up to come through. I'd like to know more about this job too.
This all reminds me of a funny and wise thing that I heard while I was working at UPS. I can't recall who said it or even if it was said in regards to UPS, but I'll never forget what this guy told me.
"Most people are unhappy with their jobs, but that is funny to me, because I know that most people ask for and even come close to begging for the jobs that they have. I can't help thinking that they chose the very job that they now hate."
Now that I am searching for a job again, I am realizing how right this guy was from the job seeker end of things.
UPDATE -- 1/24/2006
I have now received three responses to job requests. You heard about the first two here, so I am just reporting a new one. This was a job listed in the student newspaper, so two points for careerbuilder, one point for the newspaper and no points for monster.com.
The comments are still broken so I am just posting this as an update.
Joy and I drove to St. Augustine twice this weekend. We drove there and back once and stayed over night once for a three day symposium that my future franchisor was holding in St. Augustine.
Sunday Night
The first night there wasn't a whole ton of fun for Joy. We had just driven two hours across Florida to some social function that was slightly out of Joy's comfort range. To make matters worse, we had slept in and had a really late breakfast. Then we totally forgot about lunch so by the time we were in St. Augustine Joy was really hungry. I didn't stop to get anything to eat for her along the way, either, and that made things worse. My thought was that she had packed a good deal of food to eat just for the trip, and barely touched it the whole time.
Anyway, we arrived hungry and got into a bit of a fight. That made the night worse for Joy even though things calmed down once food was found. There was a really funny moment though! Joy was wanting food this whole time before the event started, and I was motioning her to just wait and we'd have dinner with everyone else. Well, Joy didn't want to walk in to the ballroom and be hungry the whole time, so we went on this long hunt for food only to come back to the ballroom and see this extravagant spread of appetizers and bar ready for us to enjoy. I get a kick out of that, but Joy... she doesn't think it is that funny.
This first symposium dinner was pretty neat for us, because we sat at a table with the corporate comprtoller, one of the top three producing franchisees, and a couple who just started out less than a year ago. This was great because they joined us in succession and we got to talk at length with each couple and get to know them and get some advice for our new business.
We had to participate in this dinner, which actually worked in my favor for that night. The one time Joy was happy was when we went up to introduce ourselves to everyone involved in the company... all the corporate empoyees, the franchisees, the president, etc. Normally, I am really nervous with public speaking, but that night I did a pretty decent job. Joy did an even better job with a quick one-liner she tacked onto the end of my introduction, but that made everything even sweeter. We got aplause and cheering, and Joy was on cloud 9.
Monday
The next day we didn't need to be in St. Augustine until 1:45PM, so we decided to drive back and forth instead of getting a hotel. Joy's job gives her a car, pays for the gas, and takes a fixed amount of money from her paycheck to cover personal use of her car so it is a lot cheaper for us to just drive back and forth than pay $100+ for a night in a hotel.
So we drove back to St. Augustine and spent about ten minutes trying to find a bed and breakfast. We needed a place to park the car, because that cost $10 for all day parking pretty much anywhere close to the Casa Monica (that's where the symposium was being held.) We had checked out a few, but Joy wanted to do deeper research and get a better deal, so I told her that she could pick out the B&B, and I would go on ahead to the symposium.
At the symposium we watched a video of one of the production processes/facilities. Then we had this panel discussion, which I thought was really fun and awesome to attend -- considering I am not yet a franchisee. Basically, every major player in corporate sat at a table while all the franchisees took turns grilling them with questions, complaints, suggestions for improvement, etc. It was awesome. I got to hear first-hand all the problems that the franchisees had during 2005. Attending this panel disccussion helps tremendously in my decision making process. At the end of the discussion and throughout the rest of the symposium several of the big franchisees came to me and gave me statements about how this isn't how it always is, and that people were just voicing the worst of the worst complaints, comments, etc because this is the one time of the year to do it in front of everyone. Another cool aspect of the panel discussion was finding out how to affect change within the company. Basically, if you have a problem, you need to talk to the other franchisees to get it fixed or have it be really legitimate on its own -- then the company will do what it can to help you. A few people didn't get help though, because they had no support and their desires cost a lot of money -- money everyone else wasn't willing to pay.
At the end of Monday night we had a even more extravagant dinner. Joy was so pleased and impressed with the food that the hotel had for us. We had some of the best quality shrimp we'd ever had, stone crab claws, pork tenderloins with hollandaise sauce, OK, you get the idea. tons of fancy entrees, vegetables, and desserts. It was nice.
The end of this dinner was really fun and informative too. It was an awards banquet so I got to find out who the top producers are, what you can win from year to year, and how much business the very top producers do in any given year. This is helpful to me, because I also got to know what the "Rookie of the Year" franchisees did to win and now I can gauge about how well I can do in this business in my first year and in years following.
Well, that was embarrassing. I used my blog to edit a cover letter for some job and saved it in the blog, because I didn't have a better place to save it. I deleted it when I was done, but I never rebuilt the blog afterwards and the cover letter stayed. I just noticed this today, so it has been up for a while. :(
The reason I noticed is that I was checking to see if comments were working on the blog yet. For those of you who haven't noticed, the comments feature isn't working right now. No one can comment on my entries. This happened when we moved servers, and I don't really know how to fix it. Jordan has a few ideas of how to fix it, and will give them a try. Things will work out eventually.
Since my Guests! post Joy and I have had many, many more visits from our beloved friends. Everyone has been so great about coming by and seeing our new place. Joy is walking on cloud nine now, and I am reaping the rewards. woot!
Seriously though, Lana ended up spending two or maybe three nigths at our place. She doesn't make a whole lot of comments for better or for worse, but I can know report that our guest shower is very nice. Also, I might go so far as to consider a correlation between the time spent at our place with her place only 6-8 minutes away with some sort of positive assessment of Joy's hostessing.
Joy loves to be a hostess!
Last night we had a decent sized group over for late night pancakes. Who came? Well, Joy and I were there. We brought Jenn over, and after shopping with Nate at Sam's for a while Nate decided he'd hang out too. He brought Sourbeer after we called him to see if he was interested in dropping by. Oh, and we invited Megan, because we were planning on going out to dinner with her, but that wasn't working out because it was so late and things got kinda jumbled. She seemed excited by pancakes though, so she came by and brought her guy -- Jordan. Then we decided to call up Lana and Mike aka "Slim" and see if they were interested in attending this last minute, thrown together pancake shindig.
One highlight for me was setting everything up. Joy got really involved in making the pancakes and talking with Jenn and the girls as they arrived. Before that she asked me to help. She wanted me to "straighten up the place and get everything ready." I've been married just eight months, but I already know that this phrase is code for something. I don't exactly know what it means, but I do know that there are expectations imbedded deep into this code. So I got hopping, and I straightened and straightened and then I set things up as best I could. It paid off. Joy was really, really happy with me, and more importantly... she was impressed. She told me that when she finished making the pancakes she realized that all she was doing was making pancakes. There was still a lot to be done, but I had done everything else. She was impressed, pleased, and relieved all at once. Score one for David!
On the other hand, we had planned for the whole thing to last just one hour. This actually sold several people on coming by even though they probably should have stayed home and worked on this and that. Joy and I had great worries and regrets at the end of the night, because we weren't faithful in getting everyone out by 10:30. Hopefully, that is a good thing and means that fun was had by all, but Joy feels strongly about being faithful to what we say. She wants people to come back again, after all, and... "how will they feel safe in dropping by if they feel like they'll get sucked in for more time than they can afford to spend?"
Point duly noted (and blogged) dear. I'll try to do better with that next time, and my apologies to all.
Fortunately, Joy had so much fun playing house these last seven days or so that she is getting into quite the good mood. It's one of these long-burn good moods where I am able to start getting away with things. Finally! I needed this.
For those of you not keeping track, Joy got her new job back in late September, and up until December I was working at UPS part-time for tuition reimbursement (that never came through) and health insurance benefits (that did come through several times for Joy) among other things. So in the last quarter of 2005 we were suddenly awash in cash that we were not used to having after living on $10K or less a year for all of college.
So, in late October when it came time to give gifts for birthdays and with Christmas looming on the horizon we started to discuss the whole gift giving thing. Here we were with much more money than we were used to having. We only had one source of debt, which could be handled in roughly one month, and our bills were all planned for with far less income in mind. So we finally had the means to give really cool gifts. We could really splurge and do something fantastic for our friends! This was so exciting. Besides, we are married now, so combining gifts logically meant that gifts should be double what they were before, right?
Well, we did that for a few people, and then we got to thinking about some of the less obvious considerations that go along with being suddenly extra generous.
1. It really is fun to give. Knowing that we could actually afford to give 'dream gifts' like an iPod or generous gift certificates to iTunes, Best Buy, clothiers, etc. was really exciting.
2a. One of us felt like we should try to give equivalent gifts. There was this feeling that it would be unfair to give one person an iPod, another person a DVD player, another person a new set of tires that she needed, and another person a $50 gift certificate to iTunes, etc.
2b. One of us felt like we should give generously and match gifts to needs and dreams. Most of our friends don't have iPods, but one does, but she could probably use a nice jewelry box for her jewelry or maybe a external hard drive to safely store all of her new purchased songs. Equality doesn't need to be determined by cost or value, and furthermore why do we need to try to make everything equal? People aren't really equal. Some people have more needs or more desires than others.
3. Once this equality consideration came up, it was mentioned that giving extra generously could cause other problems. Most people like to give a gift that is comparable to the gift that they got. Otherwise they "feel like a butthead" (I got that miniquote from my in-laws this Christmas.) So, giving generously can force people into a weird position that we don't want to impose on people at all. Suddenly they have this iPod or whatever it is and they are thinking "Oh crap, I didn't get them a gift." or "Man, I only got them a such'n'such. Now what do I do?" or worse yet we have pressured fellow college students who are on a budget to spend about month's worth of food on getting a comparable gift for us.
4a. When we first talked about this, one comment was made that it would get pretty expensive to get all of our friends gifts in the $50-$100 range instead of the typical $20 range or the college-budget norm of $5-$15 range. We've got quite a few friends (and hope to make more all the time) so $100 multiplied by a few dozen gets into the thousands of dollars.
4b. A counter point was brought up though. We spend money on stuff here and there to make us happy, keep us entertained, improve our quality of life, and so on, but none of these things that we buy or services that we pay for are nearly as valuable as any one of our friends. In fact, if we compared what we received from being friends with our people to the yearly cost of other entertaining, edifying, and pacifying things we spend money on... friends would be worth far more than a few generous gifts here and there.
So, we were pretty much at a standstill with all of this. We've given it a lot of thought, and we'd like extra opinions. Also, I would really like to magically know what everyone truly thought about all this. I suppose I will just ask, but y'know what I mean...
Oh, and... you might be wondering what we did about all this between October and now. You might be thinking... Christmas and a few birthdays fall in between those dates. Well, you'd be right! So here's what we did. We decided to start off with the usual. Do what we have normally done. Yep, that's right. We played it safe for Christmas. We're taking risks on birthdays with the big stuff, but playing it safe on Christmas. Why?
Well, even though we were making more money things changed and we had a lot of uncertainty. Also, it seemed like a comprimise between being fair and even and splurging in a big way. Besides, it is so much easier to make someone feel really valued (which is the whole point of all of this in the first place) on their birthday when it is just their day, then on Christmas. Oh, and birthday gifts seem to eliminate some of the comparison problems because Joy and I don't have birthdays near most of our friends (except me and Jenn, of course) and our friends birthdays are pretty well spaced out from each other.
We've barely been living in our new apartment for a week, and we've already had a number of guests. This is really fun for me, and makes Joy happier than I am. She loves guests and being a hostess.
On Saturday night the Wiens came over to see the place. This happened less than an hour after we drove into Gainesville from our hometown, which is four hours away. That was fun. Joy showed Jaime her wedding video slide show thing, and this really cool wedding scrapbook that her sister-in-law gave her. We also went out for dinner at Carabas. It was pretty much a double date, but we never thought to call it that.
Two days later, Mike aka 'Slim' gave us a call. He was coming through Gainesville on his way to Jacksonville, and wanted to see how we are doing. He suggested dinner at our place, which is fun. We like inviting people, but it is also cool when people invite themselves. It's always open-invitation with David and Joy.
So Mike arrived with a few salmon filets and a bottle of Shiraz just before 7PM and we all made dinner together in our new kitchen. It was fun. Joy planned up a strawberry and spinach salad, because Mike has been craving it since the first time he had it, and we also had green beans and other fun, healthy stuff. To really make it fun, we got out these huge platters that my college roommate CJ and his wife Natalie got us for a wedding gift. Joy was absolutely thrilled with all of this, and we took pictures of the food and the platters and everything. We've got plans to send them to CJ, Natalie, and Mike in a couple of days.
Fast forward another two days plus or minus a few hours, and I am getting a call from Lana. She's not much of a phone person, so I was shocked by the call, but in a really good way. She says that she is in Gainesville and was wanting to come by and see the apartment. I tell her to come on over, but that Joy will be a while because she's working. Then I call Joy, tell her the news, and she decides to call it a day and come home because she is so excited about showing Lana our new apartment.
Once Joy and Lana arrive, we do a tour of the apartment, talk about our opinions of it, and so on and so forth. Then Lana tells us a short story and announces that she's spending the night. This was awesome and just too funny, because once again people are feeling free and welcomed at our place. Joy loves that, and I think I kinda like it too, but we'll see.
Hanging out with Lana from like four to midnight has been fun. We opened Christmas presents, taken pictures, had dinner together, went to view a house for sale by owner, let Lana try out my Bowflex, went for a run, used our apartment's gym, and then watched the first half of the Rose Bowl. Since then we've showered, and now we're all working on individual stuff. Lana's got this big project that she's doing, and Joy is helping her intermittently while working on her own stuff. I'm sitting in the office/Lana's bedroom waiting for them to be done so Lana can help me decorate the room.
OK, I've gotten the midnight announcement. We run a tight ship here now, and midnight means bedtime. Goodnights all around and then on with the snoozefest!
Joy got me RebelStar: Tactical Command for Christmas this year, and it just came in the mail today. I've played through most of the introduction so far, and I like the game a lot. What attracted me to the game in the first place was how similar it was to a game that I had seen many times and always wanted to play, but never got the chance to play. Now I feel like I am finally getting that chance, and it makes the whole thing all that much better. So far the only disappointment that I have with the game is that it's 2 player mode isn't what I was expecting. Basically, you have to pass the GBA back and forth between the two players instead of playing somewhat simultaneously. I still want to try it out at some point though.
This afternoon Joy called me and asked me to meet up with her at the mall after she was done with work. She had to return a few things, and she wanted to see what Victoria Secret had to offer this year. We got a suprising number of things done at the mall in addition to shopping, because there is both a RadioShack and a Verizon store in the mall. I was pretty happy with the trip.
When we got home we had stuff from VS, RadioShack, and The Limited.
My blog is now being hosted on a new server. I don't really know what this will mean in the short run, but it should be an improvement for me in the long run. I am even considering posting pictures soon. I don't know if they will be attached to the blog or if I will set up a different site just for our pictures. I don't really tell me family about my blog, but I'd want them to see my pictures so another site sounds like a good idea to me.
I am also in the process of learning how to use iCal. It is easy enough to use, but I want to do some very specific things, and all new things come with a bit of a learning curve. If I can get iCal set up to be just like I imagined it I will be very happy with life in general and my miniMac specifically.
Here are the things I want to do with iCal...
-Schedule my appointments.
I don't have that many appointments, so I wouldn't exactly have much to schedule, but I want to start getting in the habit, because appointments do happen from time to time.
-Create a recurring To Do list.
-Schedule To Do list items.
I basically want to wake up, go to my computer in the morning, and have iCal tell me what I planned to do that day. I tend to prioritize tasks and events to later dates (I could just say 'procrastinate' but I have a high regard for this particular behavior.) I want to actually get these things done, but my tendency is to reprioritize and then forget. Perhaps iCal can help.
-Develop a make-shift delivery schedule.
When I get my new business up and running I will need to make periodic deliveries. I think that it would be nice to schedule as many of these deliveries as possible. If I can schedule them, then it would be very convenient and pleasing to me to have iCal tell me what deliveries I am making that day.
-Wishful Thinking To Do list
I can't possibly be the only person out there that has one of these. I want a list of things that don't really have a due date, are really low priority, and are sometimes just tasks that I think would be neat to get done. Some examples of this might be reading a book that I am interested in reading, or establishing some order to my filing system. These are things that I don't really need to do, but would like to keep track of for days when I am bored, but wanting to do something productive.
-Share schedules.
iCal seems to do this really well. I don't know for sure, because I am just getting started, but I like what I see so far. Joy often asks me what my plan is for certain periods of time. She'll come to me and say, "So, David, what's your plan for this afternoon?" She claims that she doesn't care what my plan is as long as I have a plan. I've tested her on this, and it seems to be pretty true. I can tell her that I plan to relax and do nothing, and she lets me carry that plan out. Now, I want to sort of reciprocate by having actual plans for a day that I can let her in on quickly and easily. I imagine this sounding something like this --
"So, David, what's your plan for today?" (Joy checks to see if I am on task)
'Well, I plan to do absolutely nothing for the next half hour, and then I am going to get up and put a load of laundry in the washing machine. Then I plan to go to the computer to balance our checking accounts and update Quicken. After that I've decided to clean the hammie bin, vaccuum, and then I'm going to go get dressed and go for a run. After the run I plan to shower, and then I'm going to study until I feel like it is time to make dinner.'
I think that she should like that.