Hello Family,

Hello Family,

The newest Gadberry household has been busy this year and has many updates to share. Both of us had the most exciting, albeit busy, year of our lives.

At the end of last year I moved to College Station to be closer to Lauren. As a perk, I was able to room with Travis from August until June. Lauren was busy with the spring semester and wedding planning, looking forward to taking the summer off.

Looking ahead to supporting a wife, I left my independent contract work behind in early May and got a “real job” at a medical research software company named Datatrak. I could not be more content in my position at the company. I have an over-affirming boss with superb upper-management directly above him. I am truly blessed in finding this amazing position.

Of course the highlight of the year was June 3rd when Lauren became my wife. Our honeymoon on the Riveria Maya was phenomenal, aside from having to sleep on two double beds for the first two nights! We snorkeled, wind surfed, toured Chichen Itza, rode a banana boat, touched giant sea turtles, and much more. Over a week in Mexico was grand, but it sure made me appreciate the good old USA. There are things we have here that are simply not available in Mexico, even in a luxury resort, such as 800 numbers, the FDA, customer service departments, and good water.

Lauren took the summer off so that we could begin to build our home together. It was a great time of relaxing and getting used to a new life with each other. In the fall she was in school again taking the most time consuming semester I have ever seen. Aside from the reading intensive Political Science and History classes, she also had to take Statistics and Fortran Programming. Who ever heard of a Political Science major needing a computer programming class?!? I can comfortably say that we both know Fortran pretty well now.

We have been attending a Newly-Weds Sunday school class at Grace Bible Church here in College Station. It’s been a great class for us and has allowed us to learn from other people’s hard knocks instead of our own. It has also been very affirming to see how much of the subject matter we had already covered. About 3 months ago in the Newly Weds class, my boss invited me to attend an FPU group. FPU stands for Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Since my wallet didn’t look as fat as I wanted it to, I decided to give it a shot. It has been a huge blessing in our lives. I highly recommend it to everyone, to both the young and to the not-so young.

Looking ahead, Lauren is now registered for next semester and plans to graduate in August after the second summer session. For those of you who are counting, that’s 3 years and 3 months from when she took her first class! After that, our plan is for her to get a job so that we can get closer to our first house. Hopefully that’s somewhere in the next Christmas letter.

Merry Christmas,

Aaron and Lauren

Introduction

So something’s wrong with your car. No? Then somethings wrong with your truck, suv, motorcycle, boat, etc. Why else would your be reading this?
I recently began having problems with my truck running very roughly. I figured a misfiring cylinder and started off by replacing sparkplugs and wires. When that didn’t fix it, I rebuilt the distributor. That didn’t do it either. I decided to try and find out if I had a different problem with the cylinders. I did a little research and decided that it wasn’t very hard to check the compression. The basic idea is that if the compression in a cylinder is considerably lower than the other cylinders, then you have a problem. The problem could be a valve, piston, piston ring, or probably a few other things that I don’t know about. Here’s how to do it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Iconbuffet is giving away their icons! They send you one pack every month, and not all subscribers get the same pack. So I just got the Taipei Night Market set. Once you get your set, you can send it to up to five people. So I’m open to trading icons with anyone who signs up and doesn’t get the taipei night market set.

Send me an [email protected] if you want to trade!