Back To Reality

Well, after four and a half days off from work, it's back to the grind this morning. Even DeAnne's working today.

We had a good weekend. Courtney's sister, Jessica, gave birth to her little girl the day they had planned her shower for, so they moved it to yesterday. So with Courtney coming to town for that, Edwin came with her and they stayed with us Saturday night. We had a great time, as always. The girls did shower stuff and Edwin and I got to play games.

Friday, of course, was the Iron Bowl. I couldn't be more proud of Auburn's defense for the way they played. It was easily the best game the defense has had all year. If only they had been able to get some support from the offense, we could have easily come out the winners. Not being able to put together a sustained drive in the fourth quarter killed us. It kept the defense on the field for far too long and you can hardly fault them for giving up a touchdown after playing their hearts out for 55 minutes.

If nothing else, at least we put a stop to the Mark Ingram for Heisman talk. 30 yards on 16 carries = Auburn pwn'd you. It's a small victory in an Iron Bowl loss, but it's one I'll take.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul

Look Out, DeAnne Has Hit The Stores

We had a great Thanksgiving. We drove up to Anniston on Wednesday and had a good time with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Russ. We really appreciate them letting us stay the night.

Thursday morning, we got up and checked the papers and then had lunch with my Mom's side of the family. After lunch we hit the road again and made the trek back to Kinston where we had dinner at DeAnne's Mom's. I left DeAnne there last night and her and her Mom headed off to Dothan this morning at about 1:00. It's not quite as crazy as last year when they were in Destin at midnight, but still...they crazy.

Me, I'm taking the day off, watching the game and just relaxing. Have a good Friday.

--Paul

And We're Off...

So today begins the holiday rush. We'll be leaving this afternoon to head up to Anniston for lunch with my Mom's family tomorrow. We're staying the night with my aunt and uncle.

I do this every year, and I don't know if anyone that reads this has every donated to this cause, but this year's Child's Play Charity is under way. I've been mentioning it on my blog since 2006. Each year the guys that run Penny Arcade organize a charity based on the idea of buying toys and video games for a host of different Children's Hospitals all around the world. The total contribution since the charity's inception has now passed five million dollars and the goal for this year is another million. It's a great charity and given my experiences with Birmingham's hospital, it's one that really means a lot to me personally. Here's a direct link to the Birmingham Children's Hospital charity wish list: LINK. There's a lot of different stuff on it, all of which could really make a difference to a sick child.

Have a happy Thanksgiving and I'll see you all on Friday.

--Paul

Short Week

It's Tuesday, which means that the week is half over for me already. I'm taking off Friday, so tomorrow's my last day of work for the week.

So the holidays are upon us and here I am trying to loose some weight. That's never a good combination. Especially when you like eating as much as I do. I've been enjoying the elliptical. It's a lot more difficult than I thought it would be and I like that it's a smooth motion instead of pounding down on a treadmill.

On Sunday I beat Batman: Arkham Asylum on hard. So I've now done everything in the game that you can do. I'm sadly proud of myself. This is the first xbox game that I've earned every achievement for. I didn't get a prize or anything, but I guess the collector in me is coming through and saying "hey, you've completed this". I'm a geek, I know.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Welcome Home, Me

Man, it is good to be home. I was home by 3:00 on Friday, so we made good time.

So yeah, the weekend. After I got back Friday, DeAnne and I went to town and grab some dinner and hit Wal-Mart and Winn Dixie. Having been on her own all week, DeAnne hadn't really had a need to go to the store, so we needed to restock. We got back home about 7:30 and DeAnne decided that she really wanted to go see New Moon. We had driven by the theater on our way back home and at 7:30 there was a line already forming for the 9:30 show. DeAnne's always been a sport about going to see movies that I really want to see, so I agreed to go. So we hop back in the car and head for the theater. I dropped her off to get in line and since our theater is so awesome that it only accepts cash, I went to the ATM. I got back, we got tickets and then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, the first showing ended and they got the theater clear and let us in.

So I've read the Twilight books and I've seen the first movie and I'm not what I would call a "fan" of the series. They were all right, but nothing special to me. Of the books though, I personally thought that New Moon was probably the best of the four and the movie was pretty close to the book and it turned out pretty good. There were a few moments that were fairly cringe-inducing, but nothing like the first movie and they did a much better job with the special effects this time around so I didn't want to laugh every time someone started running really fast.

So that was Friday. Saturday I got to hang out at the house and wait for the CenturyTel guy to show up and look at our internet connection again. It was down pretty much all week last week and when he finally showed up on Saturday and got to looking around, he found a rusted out screw on the post out at the road. He replaced it and boom, internet works flawlessly.

So that's the weekend in a nutshell. I'm sure today will be a bit crazy at work trying to catch up from being gone last week, but that's just the way it is. Have a good Monday.

--Paul

I'm On My Way

So this is it. A few more hours of class and then we'll be on the road and headed for home. My bag is packed up and I'm all set. It's been a long week. The class has been good but it's covered a pretty broad range of topics and I think all three of us are experiencing a bit of information overload at this point.

A few happenings I've noticed this week:

Google announced (and released a test version of) it's own operating system called "Chrome OS". It's basically just the Chrome web browser running as an operating system. It boots in seconds and gets you on the web as fast as possible. Not so great for doing things like putting music on your ipod or uploading videos to youtube, but it should really shine on the little netbooks that have started getting popular.

The full release of facebook and twitter hit xbox live this week. It's a nice update but without a web browser on the xbox to use to view links that people post, the functionality and usefulness is a little limited.

There have been other things that I wanted to mention and now I've forgotten them. Oh well, see you all on Monday when I'll be in my own home again. Have a good weekend.

--Paul

Counting Down

I didn't manage to get anything up yesterday and this one's going to be short.

I've adjusted enough to the time change and we've now got what time to leave the hotel narrowed down so I'm sleeping later and leaving myself a smaller window in which to get ready and eat. I wouldn't say that I'm catching up on sleep or anything, but it's getting better. The only thing about it is that we're leaving tomorrow and that's just going to wreck havoc on my system all over again.
The food continues to be good. I ate my first bison steak last night and it was great. It was at a place called Ted's Montana Grill. It's owned by Ted Turner. It was probably the best meal I've had the entire trip.

Anyway. I better get going. I've got about 20 minutes to get ready if I'm going to have enough time to get a waffle. Have a good Thursday.

--Paul
Sent from my BlackBerry Smartphone provided by Alltel

The Good and the Bad

There's both good and bad things about going on these work trips. For one bad one, I miss my wife. For another, changing time zones this close to the DST change will really mess with your head (hence why I'm writing this at like 4:45 central time).

There are a couple of good things though. It gets me out of the office for a week and I get to do something new for a little while. It's almost like a vacation you don't have to pay for. That's especially true for the food. So far we've have Guthrie's, Carrabbas, Willy's Mexacana and P. F. Changs. Willy's was interesting. It was kind of like a Subway for burritos (spelling?). It was a huge and it was good.

It also helps to have company with me. This time around the are three of us: me, Brian and Julie so we're having a pretty good time.

I better get going. I'll talk some about the class tomorrow (assuming I have the time to blog. I may sleep pretty good tonight considering what time I woke up this morning). Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

I'm Out of Town

So. As you might have guessed from the title, I'm out of town this
week. I'm going to try and blog as best I can but don't be surprised
if I don't get much up this week. In fact, it's time to head down to
the car now, so I'm going to have to call it there.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul

Sent from my iPod

So I Guess You Noticed

I'm emailing this in real quick.  So as you've probably figured out by now, I didn't get to write a full blog this morning.  Our internet connection at the house has been spotty the past couple of days and this morning it pretty much just wasn't there.  So I spent the morning on the phone with tech support.  They've got a tech lined up to look at it but it could be tomorrow depending on the amount of work they have in the area.  Hopefully they'll get to it today and get it fixed. 

Have a good weekend.

--Paul

Maybe This Will Post

I'm not sure what's going on, but our DSL connection has turned to mud the last couple of days. I guess I'm going to have to try and figure out what's going on.

So yesterday turned out to be an adventure.

DeAnne's car wouldn't jump off so I took the battery out and we took it up to Wal-Mart only to have it test out good. I'm hoping now that it's just something with a battery cable, but it's probably still going to mean getting it towed, so there's no telling what kind of expense we're looking at there.

In the midst of all the car craziness, the elliptical made it to the store and had to be picked up.

Once we got it home and in the house it took probably just under four hours for us to put it together. We got it done just in time to run and get something to eat and make it to church on time. After we got home, we both tried it out. I have to say, I've never been on an elliptical before and I never really thought they would be very effective. I was wrong. After about 5 minutes on the thing I was breathing heavy and my legs felt like I had been running for miles. Those 5 minutes were about all I could handle. It looks like I'll be working my way up to the 30 minute work-out thing.

So hopefully we can get DeAnne's car fixed today and we'll see how I do on the elliptical this afternoon.

Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

DeAnne's Car Is Jinxed

I don't know what it is about DeAnne's car, but it seems that every year about this time it has some sort of electrical problem. I'm not sure how many batteries we've put in it, but it's been a few. Last year, she had a battery cable go bad and have to be replaced. It's been crazy and a little weird that it always seems to happen around this time of the year.

Well, last night it happened again. We got in her car to go to town and it wouldn't crank. Battery's dead or at least on it's way to being dead. It had enough juice to ding when I opened the door with the key in the ignition. I didn't feel like dealing with it last night, so now I'll have to jump it off and get the battery replaced this afternoon along with picking up the elliptical and then having Awana tonight at church. It's going to be a busy day. I guess I'm going to go get started.

Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

Title Trouble

Looks like the days of struggling to find a title are back. I'll have to come up with a new scheme like the Beatles thing. I guess I could try another band. We'll see.

My new guitar came in yesterday. So far, I really like it. It's a good size, has a good neck, a nice sound and plays really well. I still need to plug it in and make sure all the electronics work, but outside of that, I think I found myself a keeper. I'll get DeAnne to help me take some pictures to post of facebook.

Something else I'm excited about is that DeAnne asked me to look into getting wall hangers for my guitars. It's something I've always wanted to do but never had the chance to do before. Since we're getting the elliptical and rearranging the office to fit it in, she decided that she liked the idea of hanging the guitars as decoration. Hopefully since they'll be out on the wall and easy to get to, I'll also play them more often.

Speaking of the elliptical, tomorrow should be the big day. I'm scared to see what it's going to take to put this thing together. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Exercise, Here We Come

DeAnne and I bought our Christmas present to each other last week: an elliptical. As a fairly large piece of exercise equipment, the question then became: where do we put it? That single, simple question led to what I now call "The Great Cleaning of 2009".

It all began on Saturday. Starting in the guest bedroom, we emptied out the dresser we had in there for storage so that we could move it to the storage building. We also moved the hutch from the office to the guest bedroom. We then went down to the storage building and began the real work. We ended up with two car loads going to Christian Service and one truck load of trash, got the dresser moved down there and ended up with a fairly good looking, organized storage building.

Then came yesterday. DeAnne woke up sick again so she stayed home while I went to church. After church we rode over to Kinston and ate lunch with DeAnne's Mom and then I took a nap while DeAnne helped her Mom start putting out Christmas. I came home, went to church and then arrived back home to find DeAnne in full cleaning mode again. This time her focus had shifted to the office. Before it was over, we had moved the sitting chair from the office to the guest bedroom then cleaned out the closet and moved all of DeAnne's scrapbook stuff from out in the office to the closet. The plan now is to put the elliptical in the office. It comes in on Wednesday.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul

The Old Standbys

I don't have much to talk about so I'm going to fall back to my standbys: music and T.V.

The new Weezer album is awesome. That's about all that really needs to be said about it. I'm probably biased because A: I like Weezer. B: Butch Walker helped produce the album and I like Butch too.

I've got the new Wolfmother album but I haven't had a chance to really listen to it. A few of the songs have come up on my iPod but I would like to listen to the whole album before I pass judgment. The couple of songs I've heard have been good though.

FlashForward is still awesome. It's been steadily getting better. We're totally hooked on the show and I can't wait to see how the season ends.

I recorded V but haven't had a chance to watch it. People, meaning blogs on the internet that I've seen, are saying that it was good but maybe moved a little faster than it needed to. I guess I'll see for myself when I get a chance to watch it. DeAnne has no interest in it at all since it's about aliens.

We're still watching all our other shows too. Glee finally comes back next week after being interrupted by the World Series for two weeks. Heroes is still the girlfriend that was great when you first met her but when you really got to know her she turned out to be scary crazy but you just can't bring yourself to break up with her either because you don't want to hurt her feelings or because you're just scared too. And though I'm hesitant to admit it, The Vampire Diaries has got me hooked.

Have a good weekend and a good Friday.

--Paul

Christmas Is Coming

The madness has begun. DeAnne's has officially started Christmas shopping. She's made her list and she's checking it over and over and we're well on our way to having the shopping done and out of the way. As much as she loves shopping, there's something about Christmas shopping that just stresses her out. I think it's that she doesn't think she'll be able to find something for somebody or that what she buys won't be something somebody likes. She's actually rather good at it I think. She tends to get great gifts for people and just seems to have a natural ability to find things that people will like. I on the other hand, am terrible at shopping. Both for others and for myself.

One note about today's post. This is the first post in 10 days to not have a Beatles lyric as the title. If I had anything to give away, I would say let's have a contest to see who can name all the songs the previous 9 titles are from, but I have no such goods to give so a contest it would not make.

Have a good Thursday.

--Paul

Listen To The Music Playing In Your Head

As a quick update to yesterday's post: the Republican candidates in both the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races won yesterday. It was a pretty major upset in New Jersey where the Democrat was an incumbent. So it looks like yesterday was the first shot fired in the mid-term elections next year. The Republicans will point to yesterday for quite some time. The next year or so should be pretty interesting.

Outside of politics, I've got a pretty good number of things that I'm interested in. Not that I have to tell you guys that. Simply look through the archives of this blog and you'll see posts that cover topics about a variety of different topics. One of the biggest is music and one of the things that I've always loved but haven't done much in a while is playing guitar. I'm hoping to change that. The first step I've taken in making that change is that I bought a new guitar on Ebay. It's an Ovation acoustic/electric. I got a good deal on it and I figure that if I don't like it I can always turn around and sell it and at least get my money back.

I miss playing though and I'm hoping that this is a great guitar that will inspire me to dig deep and really start playing again. I think my playing fell off because I felt like I didn't have time. I'm just going to have to make time and I plan to do so as soon as this new guitar. I'll post pictures when it comes in.

Have a good Wednesday.

--Paul

The Sun Is Up, The Sky Is Blue

The time change may have messed with my sleeping patterns but at least now when I get up in the morning I don't have to stumble around in the dark and hope I don't kill myself on a piece of furniture or something. You also can't argue with the way the weather has been the past couple of days.

I know I've been talking a lot about politics lately but it's something that's become a bit of hobby for me. Today is another big day in the political world. It's election day for a few states. Most importantly New Jersey and Virgina. Both the Democratic governors in those states are trailing in the polls behind their Republican opponents. A lot of people are looking at these elections as indicators for what could happen this time next year during the mid-term elections. Historically, the party that the President is a member of looses ground in both the House and Senate in the first mid-term election of their Presidency. The question for the Democrats in 2010 will be how big a loss will they suffer? The Republican party itself still lacks any kind of real leadership or personality to head the charge, but I think Obama has proven to be so radical that he alone is solidifying the conservative opposition. The independent voters that really turned the tide for Obama last year will certainly decide what happens in the mid-terms. If Obama alienates too many centralist independents, the Democrats stand to take a beating next year.

Don't forget that a similar situation played out for Bill Clinton. Two years after taking office with a Democrat controlled Congress, voters cleaned house and led by Newt Gingrich, a huge class of freshmen Congressmen came in and worked out several major parts of their "Contract With America". If the Republicans can find someone to really lead the charge and can develop a message that really speaks to those that are disappointed with Obama and the current Congressional leadership, then a change may certainly come.

Have a good Tuesday.

--Paul

Any Time At All

The time change has wrecked its usual havoc on my sleep pattern. At 9:30 last night I thought I was going to pass out standing up and then I promptly woke up at 5:00 this morning, ready for the day. I did mange to roll over and get another 30 minutes in, but I was still up and unable to get back to sleep at 5:30. Oh well, happens every year.

The weekend was great. We headed down to Mobile Friday afternoon and got there around 6:00. We then went over with Courtney and Edwin and ate dinner with Don and Laura and hung out playing games all night.

Saturday Edwin and I went to the University of South Alabama Jags game with Don and Laura while the girls went shopping. We had a good time at the game. We tailgated for a couple of hours and then watched the first half of the game. This is the first year the Jags have had a team and they're working on a five year plan to become a D-1 school in the Sun Belt conference. Right now they're mainly playing military schools and that was the case Saturday. The score was 44-0 at half-time (in the Jags favor), so we went ahead and called it there and headed back home. I just checked the website and the final score was 64-6.

Sunday was church and all too soon it was time to come back home. We always hate leaving but it's always fun to go pick up Emma and see her so excited to see us.

Have a good Monday.

--Paul