The epic quest to buy an investment property (or 4)

Hi, let me introduce myself. My name is Dave. By day, I'm a middle manager (some might say junior executive, lol) at a large dot com company. I work with about 30 software developers write software for our website.

My wife Jen and I had our first son, Toby, back in 2004. He was born prematurely and spent his first four months in the hospital. I took a leave of absence for the first six weeks. I'd spend a couple of hours over at the hospital each day, and then come home and while away the hours playing Everquest (or Evercrack as they call it). One day my friend Jon said that his girlfriend Beth was reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. (You should take a look at Beth's site. She bought a couple investment properties, maintains an impressive blog, wrote and published a book and leads tours to Bhutan.) Jon suggested I read it, so I downloaded it from Amazon to my computer (in the pre-Kindle days) and read it while I was playing Everquest.
I had always been interested in houses (dare I say real estate) -- another friend of mine, Suzanne, and I used to go to open houses on Sunday afternoon. I told Suzanne that I loved the book, and she said "my realtor David Sligar is a big fan...you should get together with him." So one afternoon I dragged myself away from the computer and had coffee with David. He got me pumped up to buy a rental house. To make a long story short, I bought a rental house in April 2004, when Toby was 2 months old, and getting healthy. I bought another one in January 2005, and a third in March 2008 as the market slowed.
The subsequent posts will be a day by day blow by blow account of the buying of my fourth house. Hopefully this will be interesting to and/or educational for someone!