July 2008

Wednesday Hero: 1st LT. Thomas M Martin

1st. Lt. Thomas M. Martin

1st. Lt. Thomas M. Marti
27 years old from Ward, Arkansas
C Troop, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division
October 14, 2007
U.S. Army
An Eagle Scout, Thomas M. Martin took on cleaning up an old red train caboose as a service project. “He remodeled it to make it where people could go inside. If you saw it before and looked in it after he was through – it was daylight and dark”, said his former principal, Robert Martin, who is no relation. “Tom was involved in Key Club, German Club and band, making All-Region Band his sophomore year”, said Robert Martin. “He was a wonderful young man. Those that knew him knew he was funny and outgoing.”
Lt. Martin died in Al Busayifi, Iraq of wounds sustained from small-arms fire when insurgents attacked his unit during combat operations. He enlisted in the Army in 1998 after graduating high school and served in Korea before accepting an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 2005.
“He was very polite and respectful. I can’t think of him ever overreacting; he had a wonderful, good-natured personality”, said Pat Hagge, a family friend. “It’s a terrible tragedy; he was a great young man.”
Lt. Thomas Martin is survived by his parents, Edmund and Candis.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
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Blogs For Borders Video Blogburst

Our weekly podcast — vlog on illegal immigration and border security. In this weeks edition…
Our coverage of the rally against the enforcement of our immigration laws in Postville Iowa. Extra special thanks to those who helped fund the trip, thanks!


Make sure to visit our sponsor….

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If you’d like to sponsor a show contact us here.
This has been the Blogs For Borders Video Blogburst. The Blogs For Borders Blogroll is dedicated to American sovereignty, border security and a sane immigration policy. If you’d like to join find out how right here.

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Wordless Wednesday: Hummingbird

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So Much For One Fucking Day Off

Today is my first day off in eleven fucking days. I started out getting phone calls at 7:09AM and it didn’t stop until just a few minutes ago. Neither the relief manager who was running my Bremen store or the manager in training that was running my Temple store bothered to fucking show up or call for staffing at shift change tonight so I got to spend my fucking evening running around staffing one store and getting bread and checks since nobody bothered to pull them out. The other store wouldn’t answer the phone so i had to drive there next.

When I got there the ringer on the phone wasn’t working and when I asked the employees if they had wondered why nobody had called them they just looked at me like I had two fucking heads. Goddamn brainless fucks.

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iPod Touch Free 2.0 Upgrade

I came across the links over at Live Crunch. Personally I paid for the wife’s upgrade the day it came out but for those of you that want to save $10 here are a couple of links…

(Mirror 4) Download

(Mirror 5) Download

Go check out Live Crunch if you get the time…

There are some pretty cool additions to the software which includes the app store.

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Weirdness

Sundays are usually a pretty busy day at work. Not that the rest of the weekend isn’t but on Sunday everyone waits until after church and we do the same amount of business in about three hours that we do in seven on Saturdays. Needless to say I am usually pretty busy and don’t have time for foolishness or small talk.

So I am right in the middle of cooking the fairly heavy lunch today, just humming right along and one of the waitresses comes up and stands between me and the other cook and starts talking about Electrolux vacuums. What?

Both of us just looked at her like she had lost her mind and kept on cooking. I suppose it could be worse. I’ve had to stop what I was doing to break up fights, put out fires, call the law and all other sorts of weirdness before. While strange it was certainly not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened at work.

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Bombs Blast Istanbul…

Updated Monday July 28th 2008 – They are now saying that at least 17 people have died and at least 154 others injured in the bombs which went off this weekend in Istanbul.


At least two bombs have gone off in Istanbul killing at a minimum 13 people and injuring 70 others according to the government of Turkey.
CNN has the story up:

Two deadly explosions rocked suburban Istanbul Sunday night, killing at least 13 people and injuring 70 others, a government official told CNN Turk.
Istanbul Gov. Muammer Guler called the blasts “an act of terror.”
The back-to-back blasts happened in Istanbul’s Gungoren community at about 10 p.m., a journalist with Turkish news agency DHA told CNN Turk.
The journalist, Zafer Karakoc, said he witnessed the explosions.
Video footage from the scene shows several bloodied people being transported into ambulances.
Dozens of firefighters and paramedics were on the scene.
Glass and debris were strewn all over the brick sidewalks.
Authorities asked residents to evacuate the heavily pedestrian, working-class Gungoren neighborhood within an hour of the blast, reporters told CNN.
“This is just the type of neighborhood that ordinary people live in,” journalist Andrew Finkel told CNN.

When you put up with terrorists in your neighborhood pretty soon they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
According to CNN the governor of Istanbul Muammer Guler reported that the explosive devices were placed just under 50 feet from each other. The first one was a stun grenade that was detonated first in order to get attention and draw people toward it. The second bomb went off within ten minutes of the first.
As of right now nobody has claimed responsibility for the bombs.

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Just Another Day in Paradise…

I had every intention og going to work out this afternoon before I came home. I even packed a bag so I could just change at the gym. Instead, I ended up working a bit later than I had planned and I just came on home. I feel like shit today. My throat is swollen, it hurts and I am tired as hell. I even took a nap yesterday afternoon so I know I got at least six hours of sleep between napping and last night. Part of it is the heat but I don’t know about the rest. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go work out, because I always feel better afterward.

Today is my ninth day straight at work. I will damn sure be glad when this coming weekend rolls around. I’m off and it will be awhile before I have any of my managers on vacation. As a matter of fact I think the next one is mine which is in October. I have at least two more to cover before the year is out but the long ones are done with.

I have some more stuff to post but I think I will surf the Internet and drink coffee. Perhaps I can wake myself up enough to be motivated…

Birds…

I love the early morning. It’s a shame that I can’t do this more often. I went outside for a smoke just a little while ago and just sat listening to the birds. Near and far they were all chatting with each other. In the pre-dawn hour it was almost overbearing there were so many birds chatting with each other, but pleasant at the same time. As a matter of fact I think before I get ready for work I am going to sit back outside again for a few…

Speaking of birds, we have a Hummingbird Feeder mounted on our kitchen window just off the deck. As I sat there yesterday afternoon a little hummingbird flew up to feed. It only stayed a few seconds as I moved a bit trying to see if I had my camera with me. Of course not.

The Hummingbird returned a few times yesterday evening. By the time I located my tripod so I could go ahead and focus the camera and sit still it was too late and didn’t come back. I think I will save it for today or tomorrow afternoon and get an earlier shot. Part of the fact that it didn’t come back was the fact that the girls kept running out on the back porch like a pack of wild dogs every few minutes.

Even after having to get up so early yesterday I stayed up pretty late. Of course I should have been to bed early but we decided to sit down and watch National Treasure: The Book of Secrets. It was pretty decent actually. The wife turned off disbelief mode for a couple of hours and got to enjoy it with me. The thing about being married to a science teacher is that it makes it difficult to use your imagination and just enjoy shit that you know CAN’T possibly be true or couldn’t happen. Hell, who gives a shit. It’s a movie…

I probably should have already gone to work but I am going in a few minutes late today. Actually more like an hour and a half. The two manager trainees are just going to have to deal with it for a while. One of them was at my Tallapoosa store yesterday, which is about seventeen miles from my house. She didn’t pull them enough food so the store was calling me at 11PM last night out of stuff. I ended up getting it to them but was not particularly happy about it…

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

This post is going to serve as my weekend open trackback post for July 25-27th. What’s Open Trackback? Well, that’s where you share your link to other people that might not have been to your site before. Share something witty, your best work, your wost work, or just slutty pictures of actresses. I don’t care (up to a point). Ping or trackback this post and your link will show up here in the body of the post as well as on my main page for everyone to see. If you want to do something like that regularly then check out one of the trackback blogrolls from my blogrolls page or click the link on the graphic above for more information.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, 123beta, Maggie’s Notebook, Right Truth, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, , Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Nuke’s, third world county, Allie is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, DragonLady’s World, The World According to Carl, Walls of the City, , The Pink Flamingo, , Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Wordless Wednesday – Star Wars Potato Heads

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