We moved into our townhouse about a year ago and things have been piling up in the garage. The garage is where I go to get away. Have the garage door up a couple feet of the ground, aim a fan at the fire detector and light up a cigar.

But today I decided to do something useful. The garage is a mess. Empty boxes all over the place, tons of cobwebs, overflowing ashtray. So, I’m moving stuff around, picking things up. The wife decides that she needs to go to Target to buy some household junk. Her car is in the garage, mine is in the driveway. I hear her close the door and she drives away.

Its an hour later. I’m thirsty. Go up to the door to the house. Turn. Locked. Crap. Check my pockets to see if I have my cell phone. Nope. Argh. Oh well, I got my laptop with wifi and a DVD of American Dad. I can amuse myself till the wife comes home.

Almost done with 5 episodes. Gotta pee. Really bad. Don’t want to ask the neighbors to use their bathroom, thats just embarrassing. Oh man, there are some empty Pellegrino bottles lying around. Is the top of those bottles wide enough so there is absolutely no potential for spillage?!? Oh Christ. What about the Dasani bottles? Oh boy.

Wait. T-Mobile lets you send SMS messages from their site. Awesome.

“Woman, you locked me out of my own house. And I have to pee. Now.”

By the time Stan and Hayley had made up by the end of the DVD, the wife is home.

Disaster averted. Wifey is going to have to make it up to me for this.

The CNNMoney.com site has a couple of interesting articles: Top 10 cities: Where to buy now and Top 10 foreclosure markets.

Interestingly, Atlanta is on both lists. Some of the folks who have been commuting from the boonies are looking to move back into the city and driving up prices in certain neighborhoods. With the city expecting 500,000 more people over the next five years, the ‘burbs are also going to see greater demand, so the whole metro area should see a decent boost in home prices.

People like to show off in Atlanta. From all the luxury cars and McMansions, a lot of folks got roped into ARMs they can’t afford anymore. With GM closing down a couple of plants and Delta seemingly going belly up every other day, there are plenty of opportunities for real estate flippers.

Too bad I have no extra cash lying around to take advantage of this.

Ok, I’ve been eyeing wp.com for some time now. Frankly, I was getting tired of downloading and installing new releases every few weeks. Of course if I kept up with backups diligently, it wouldn’t be a big mess if a security issue compromised my blog. Lets be serious though, everyone knows how important backups are, but does everyone have a backup plan? Yeah, right. So, I was looking for a hosted service.

Wordpress’s best feature by far is its community. Folks turn out awesome themes and plugins constantly. And every now and then, I tried out some themes and random plugins. I’d always change themes depending on my mood. Finally I decided I needed to find a simple theme that I could be ok with and not want to change a whole lot. Ok, so I needed a hosted service with some simple themes.

I wanted my own domain as well. Wasn’t thrilled at the idea of having boredandblogging.whateverhostedservice.com. That is so 1990’s.

Obviously wp.com does most of these things very well. I use my domain for email and wp.com doesn’t allow for email and the blog to be on the same domain. Of course I could just ditch my email and give WP control of my domain. Umm, no. Using blog.boredandblogging.com isn’t so bad.

The auto-saving of drafts is an awesome feature and the dashboard overall is a nice upgrade to the standard wp installation.

This is my first post using wp.com and I’m thrilled!