November 2008

It’s been a pretty long and tiring weekend here at the Miles casa. I ended up going to the emergency room late Friday night with a kidney stone which I finally passed earlier this afternoon. It’s amazing how much pain something so mall can bring you. Getting the damned thing out was almost anti-climactic after the weekend. Due to the pain pills that the doctor gave me I slept pretty much 20 hours yesterday, thus the lack of posting here or anywhere else for that matter. Yesterday was the first time I’ve had to call in sick to work in about six years.

Hopefully all of you folks out there are having a great Thanksgiving, even those of you who don’t celebrate.
This year is sort of a first for me on Thanksgiving and it’s not a good thing. Those of you that know me from my old site know that I run several restaurants so Holidays are not something I get to spend with my family. We celebrate Christmas on whatever days I happen to be off closest to Christmas. Most years it’s the weekend prior to the holiday. Last year we celebrated a couple of days later. My kids are used to Santa coming at weird times.
Thanksgiving though isn’t a huge holiday in the restaurant business. You get a great breakfast and then it dies around 11am and picks back up from 7pm until about 10. No big deal. I’ve always managed to shoot out of work in time for the family to drive to my aunt’s house in Stone Mountain. This year however, due to my grandmothers health, they are eating at 2pm. I’ll be lucky to get out of work by 2:30 and that’s if my three store managers get all of their shit done on time. I don’t leave until they do. There’s no way for me to make the hour and a half drive to Stone Mountain so this year the wife and girls will be attending without me. Sort of depressing actually. I had to go in to work supper supervision tonight and the entire way to my Bremen store I was cursing under my breath and had decided that this would be my last fucking set of holidays working. It won’t happen of course but I certainly am not very happy about it.
I guess once I get out of there I’ll come home and put up some more Christmas decorations and then take a nap or something. Hopefully the wife will bring me a nice plate of turkey and dressing.

Lance Cpl. Samuel Joyce, from Boston, accepts a bagfull of toys during the Toys For Tots 5k Run at Fleet Activities Yokosuka. Runners donated new toys to the local Marine’s Toys for Tots program.

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 Have Every Right To Dream Heroic Dreams. Those Who Say That We’re In A Time When There Are No Heroes, They Just Don’t Know Where To Look

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.

So I’ve dumped all the action streams stuff and gone back to just displaying the posts. It was one thing having them at Shadowscope where I post several times a day but it’s an entirely different beast when I post here a couple of times a week and have 5,000,000 tweets showing up in between.

All Information Was Found On And Copied From MilitaryCity.com

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.

I haven’t done much in the way of blogging in the last several days. Worked a ton of hours this past week but I have also been pretty sick. Some kind of bug has been going around, both girls were out sick at the end of the week and I guess I got the bug as well. Friday night I worked a double but I ended up sleeping in my car from 7pm on and the waitresses cooked. Had shit coming out both ends.
Since the girls had been sick Pete missed her field trip to the Georgia Aquarium on Thursday. She was not very happy. She’d been up most of the night previous blowing chunks so we wouldn’t allow her to go to school. To make up for it we took the girls to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga on Saturday. I was feeling pretty weak when we got out of bed but it’s not often that I get a full weekend off so we decided to go anyway.
Chattanooga is a couple of hours from the house so it makes a nice day trip. I figured we could go check out the Aquarium and then maybe go see the Chattanooga Choo Choo and hopefully go to Chickamauga. I’ve been to the battlefield but it’s been about 30 years or so.
We met Eric and Fiona for a nice lunch at a place called Big River. It was a pretty decent place. The beer was good too. They brew their own. The food was good but I couldn’t eat very much. For that matter I haven’t managed to eat much since Thursday. After lunch the girls and I parted ways with Eric and his bride and we went ahead to the Aquarium. Pretty cool. I’ve posted some of the pictures over at Flickr. The links are below in my Action Stream if you want to check them out. This one’s not the best shot but it is one of my favorites.

Cpt. Gussie Jones was born in Arkansas and was one of eight children. She began her Army career by enlisting in 1988 as a personnel clerk and climbed to the rank of a sergeant.

In 1986, Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Arkansas Central University. She was selected to attend the Army Enlisted Commissioning Program and earned her second bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University in 1998. It was in nursing.

Her career as a registered nurse and a commissioned officer began in September 1998 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. In 2002, after completing a course in critical-care nursing, she was assigned to Beaumont Army Medical Center, where she became a mentor.

“She was a very dedicated person and was always smiling, said a co-worker and friend, Capt. Susan Gilbert. If anyone asked her to do something, she would do it. And she was very kind and gentle and patient with the patients.”

Cpt. Jones died of a heart attack while on duty in Baghdad, Iraq. During her 15 years of military services, Jones received a Joint Service Commendation medal, four Army Commendation medals and three Army Achievement medals.

“She was so much a part of their team, and so her death must really affect their morale,” Gilbert said. “I’m very worried about the other soldiers because they’ve lost their battle buddy.”

All Information Was Found On And Copied From MilitaryCity.com

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.