mike utech dot com

March Madness has hit West Chester.

yeah, i’m a bad blogger
little bit was sick most of this weekend, mom is still dealing with being sick and it even got me a bit yesterday. trying to just be over it.
the kids keep asking to go for a bike ride, so tonight - if homework is done, we will trek out to the neighborhood. i need to walk and they like to ride their bikes beyond the driveway.
as a follow up to the last post. twc still hasn’t disconnected our cable! slackers. and we aren’t without tv though, we got direct tv - only have it on one tv but it is so much better. now just need to remember to turn on the parental controls.

Well Dave is certainly having an effect on the Utech household.
Tonight I called and canceled our TiVo service. Anyone interested in a Series 2 Humax TiVo with an 80GB hard drive? or two? TiVo doesn’t make much sense since my second phone call was to Time Warner to cancel our cable. With some of the issues we have been having with the kids and homework and behavior I think it is best for a while. And it will add almost $70 to the debt snowball…

Sundays are the busiest day of the week for me. Being a part of a portable church, our one Sunday service means about 5 hours of work for me. This week was no exception. We are getting ready to move the Student Ministry service to Sunday mornings, preview is next weekend. So we have purchased enough equipment to have two services at the same time, some of the stuff in the main service was upgraded and the existing is passed over. One of those items that was upgraded was our sound console (technically it isn’t a mixer once you are over 20 channels). Journey Church is now the proud owner of an Allen & Heath GL2400-32. The music and even the speech was so clear and dynamic today it was unreal… as we work out the kinks over the next couple of weeks I am sure it will sound sooo much better.
So it is really late now and I am off to bed, will have to get the podcast taken care of tomorrow. Also need to get some of the music out from today, we played back the recording right after service and it sounded exactly like it did during the service, it was amazing! If you are looking for some pro audio or other music equipment I would highly recommend Guitar Center, especially the one in Cincinnati, they have really got some great people there.

so remember when I was talking about money (two posts ago)… and a couple of weeks ago Tom spoke about Money|Margin during the Stressed? series. The main point of his talk was, “If we create more margin in our finances we will reduce stress.” Well as previously stated, we got on Dave’s plan and started our emergency fund. Well, Murphy decided to show up this week.. I got a reimbursement check on Sunday that I deposited on Monday, so we had some extra money in checking when my paycheck went in on Wednesday. Due to a calculator error (as best as we can tell) when my deposit was written into the checkbook and balanced it was added in as double the actual amount, but with the extra funds already there it just didn’t click… until today when I checked the online banking site and saw that they show that we have an available balance of N and the checkbook shows a balance of Nx3, given that we had just sent some checks out this morning I ran up to the bank that has the emergency fund account and moved some back to the back with the checking account. But you know the best part… we had the money to cover the mistake!!! Do you have ANY idea how just awesome that is!? Margin really does reduce the stress surrounding money… just wait until we are debt free!