A Pound of Thoughts

Today has been an interesting day, so far.  I am on my way to  Brunswick, Maine for a company meeting (currently on the plane flying over New Jersey/NYC).  The only real excitement I’ve had today was a gate change in Atlanta.   Our flight was supposed to leave out of Gate D35 (we waited there for a good hour), then found out that the flight was leaving out of gate D15.  Remarkably, neither flight was late today. 

And the weather!  Absolutely beautiful!  I can’t wait to see the landscape up there in Maine.  Later on tonight I’ll include a few photos (if I can get to take some tonight, which probably won’t happen until tomorrow!)

Well, I guess I need to get off here.  Writing a blog post on a plane isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…No room!

Until later,

God Bless!

Well, the first half of my wife’s Praxis test went well, I take it.  However, she did say that the test admins were very slow and didn’t know what they were doing.  She had to report there at 7:30 this morning.  She said the test didn’t get started until 8:30 as a result of them being newbies.  Murphy’s law.

After the first session, we left for home (which is only 45-50 minutes away from UM) to drop off some stuff from our trip to Gulf Shores.  We were able to relax at home for about an hour and a half. She had to report back to Univ. of Mobile at 2:15.  We got there at 2:25.  We anticipated that the afternoon session would run late based on this morning’s performance.  Hopefully it won’t run too late.

I’m ready to get back to the cottage.  Tonight is my night to cook;  I’m fixing up gourmet hamburgers and Johnsonville brats (pronounced “brahts”).  Yum yum!!

Later on I’ll post a photo of the spread.  It won’t be as big as it was last time, but it’ll be just as delicious!!  Until later…

Good morning, everyone!  I hope y’all are having as wonderful a Saturday as I am.  Thursday evening me and the wife left L’dale for The Beach Club in Gulf Shores, Alabama.  Yesterday was a lot of fun.  We spent a good deal of time sleeping, eating, and swimming.  I have pictures of our cottage, I just don’t have them uploaded to Flickr yet.  As soon as I do, I’ll put them in a phoblog post.

This morning my wife had to take the Praxis II test at the University of Mobile for her education degree, so while she’s taking the first two-hour test this morning (7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.) I’m over at Moka’s Coffee Shop in Saraland, bloggin’ away.  And it is such a beautiful day today.  Not very many clouds in the sky, and not all that hot (yet).  My sister-in-law, V, suggested Moka’s and made a statement that it was “better than Starbucks“.  At first, I didn’t know if I’d agree with her.  But after having their Caramel Latte, I must say that I agree 100% with her!  The coffee is wonderful!

Ah, the utter relaxation of a sofa in a coffee shop with a laptop at hand.  It’s utter geeky bliss!  I suggest you all give it a shot.  There’s nothing like it.

It’s hard to believe that it has been three weeks since I last posted on here. Where does the time go?? And what has taken my attention that I haven’t been able to post on here regularly? Well, last week I was quite literally out to sea. (Work-related.) The two weeks before that - who knows?!

Oh well. That time is lost. Now it’s time to re-enter the world of the blog-o-sphere-o. So what have you guys and gals been up to since I’ve been on hiatus?

Post away your activities in the comments.

Bumped and Updated (9:19 p.m.): I told you I’d add a picture of my T-shirt, and here it is:

(08:58 a.m.)…Um, well, I don’t know! Anyway, something happened over the weekend that has the Mississippi Gulf Coast pretty excited. My wife being one of those very excited. The Hard Rock Casino Biloxi is finally open!

I have a T-shirt from there now (since my mother-in-law went and we didn’t). I will post the picture of it later on this evening when I get home. Be sure to come back and see it!

Here’s some quotes from the Sun Herald article:

Brothers Emile and J.B. Fallo liked the view from the parking garage. They liked the elevator.

When entering the tall, but narrow, lobby on the Hard Rock Casino’s opening day, Emile and J.B., 74 and 85 years old respectively, pointed admiringly at the rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia - shirts, pants and guitars.

The brothers Fallo have lived in Biloxi forever, they said.

“We done seen all the casinos,” J.B. said. “We just wanted to see this one.”

Apparently, it’s a pretty spectacular casino:

“Let’s go see the pool!” J.B. shouted above the din, adding to an onlooker that he had watched its first construction from his apartment in the Windjammer across U.S. 90 before Katrina. “You’ve got to see this pool. They’ve got a bar around it.”

I wonder what the sculpures were that these two were taking pictures in front of:

Further into the lobby, mother and daughter Rubyan Gibson and Anna Howell were taking turns taking pictures in front of the sculptures in the lobby area while quietly bopping to the tunes blaring from the speakers.

“This is amazing,” Howell, 19, kept saying to her mom.

Gibson, 44, kept beaming in agreement, adding: “I love this music!”

And not only Mississippians were there…I imagine there were people from all over there for the Grand Opening:

Keith Brooks said he got here a little early from Pensacola this morning and headed next door to the Beau Rivage while waiting for the Hard Rock to officially invite guests almost two years after Katrina delayed its opening.

“We won a little bit, lost a little bit,” Brooks, 37, said, while smiling and scanning the slot machine horizon.

Although we are not gamblers, we will be going there to eat this weekend - at the Hard Rock Cafe. I must say I’m looking forward to it!

…of sports, that is.  Brittney Reese, a track-and-field athlete at University of Mississippi in Oxford, has just earned herself a ticket to Osaka, Japan, to compete in the World Track and Field Championships.  Read the full article here.

She competed in Indianapolis, Indiana, over the weekend at the U.S. Championships.  She almost won, also.

Reese came within an eyelash of matching her personal best in the long jump, placing second to Nike’s Grace Upshaw with a jump of 21 feet, 10¾ inches.

The kicker, as Reese freely admits, is she led for nearly the entire competition. The 28-year-old Upshaw, a three-time U.S. Outdoor champion, hit 22 feet, 1½ inch on her final attempt, which gave Reese one last shot at beating her more-experienced contemporary.

Reese sprinted down the runway and did just about everything right… except she caught her toe on the foul board. When she landed in the sand, she realized she’d have to settle for second.

Either way, she’s headed for the World Championships starting Aug. 25 in Osaka, Japan.

There’s just one rub, though…she needs to get a passport - and fast.  I am happy for the girl, I really am…I just have one thing against her - Why couldn’t she have attended Mississippi State instead?? (Just a joke…congrats, Brittney!)

Well, our trip here is almost done, and it’s barely begun. K and I arrived here late Thursday night, after stopping in Mobile to grab a bite at Romano’s Macaroni Grill. We’re staying at The Beach Club in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Unfortunately, we have to leave tomorrow morning to resume everyday life. But, I thought I’d include you in a little bit of our action yesterday.

We got up yesterday morning and enjoyed wonderful breakfast buffet that included everything from grits and eggs to biscuits with sawmill gravy and muffins. We were so full it was unbelievable. Then after that we decided to take a little trip down to the beach.

This is our path to the beach. Straight ahead from our cottage is the clubhouse, with the condo towers on either side.

My wife, her brother, his wife, and our nephew Noah, as well as my wife’s parents, and myself of course, are staying in a three-bedroom, three-bath cottage. This an outside view of our cottage:

This is the living area. It’s very nice. There’s a high definition TV in every room:

Here’s the kitchen:

And here’s the hot tub:

Here’s a view of the hot tub and the grill. The grill is awesome. That’s where I spent last night grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, as well as some brats. Tonight I’ll be grillin’ porkchops and steaks.

And last but not least, here’s a picture of the beach. It was a little windy and cool yesterday; maybe today won’t be as bad.

Don’t you wish you were here? I guess I need to be going - I need to go marinate the steaks and porkchops, and then head to the beach! Until tomorrow!

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Why do some people insist on getting on someone’s bumper and hovering
there? That’s what happened to me this morning. My morning was going
very well; I got up earlier than usual, got ready, left the house. I
even had time to stop by Subway and get me a little honey mustard & ham
roll for breakfast. But after that is when he/she showed up on my
bumper.

I was traveling in the left lane on a four-lane highway, going fast
enough but not really speeding. And this idiot decided that
since his/her car was nicer than mine, he/she could do whatever the heck
he/she wanted to. So he/she got on my bumper. Well, let’s just say
that I wasn’t too happy about that. Since there were cars in the right
lane, and I could have gotten over if I wanted to but not without
slowing myself down considerably, I decided I would stay where I was and
go the same speed I was going. I decided not to let him/her have their
own way. And we stayed like that for the next five miles. Ahh, the
joys of the simple things in life!

But then once I got around all the cars on the right side, I went ahead
and moved over. Before I had a chance to get all the way over, the
idiot-in-the-nice-sportscar was already by me and doing about 100 mph.
Funny thing is, about three miles up the road was a traffic light. And
when I got there (it was red), there he/she was, in the left lane, and I
pulled right up beside him. “Didn’t get you very far, now did it
Idiot?” I said to him/her (to myself).

Why do people like that think that speeding ninety-to-nothing is going
to get them much further ahead of the people they’re passing? Some
people just never learn.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this, but in case you haven’t, three men are missing off the coast of Australia. Their catamaran was found Friday with food on the table, the engines running, a laptop up and running. It’s a very bizarre case.

Newscoma has a good post about it.

The police are saying the search was called off "based on expert medical advice, which suggests the men could not have survived this long in the water."

"It’s certainly very unusual," said inspector Warren Webber. "It seems very unlikely we will be able to say exactly just what has occurred at this point in time."

Yup, it is unusual. It’s like something out of the Twilight Zone. What could have happened to these men? Could they have been swept out to sea by rough waters? Were they kidnapped? Who knows? I doubt we’ll ever really truly know.

 
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