I took this with my cell phone and posted it right there but the sun was so bright I could barely see what I was posting. Goddam this is an awful photo. Good thing I never uploaded this one to Flickr!
Mobile post sent by Richard using Utterz. Replies.
Mobile post sent by Richard using Utterz. Replies.
So the Best Western we stopped at last night apparently has a PC just off the lobby. I figured I would manage to come across one sooner or later.
The drive down wasn’t too bad. We managed to get out of Atlanta before the ugly afternoon traffic got really bad and while it was heavy south of town it was nothing like it would have been two or three hours later.
The girls were very well behaved. When I purchased the PT I made sure to get a DVD player installed for stuff such as this and it also has composite inputs as well, so I was able to hook up the gamecube for them to play. You can only watch so many movies before that gets old.
We arrived in Lake City, Florida shortly after nine pm last night. Room rates are OK, but this isn’t exactly the Hilton either.
One we get to Disney this morning I don’t know what kind of access I will have to the internet but at the very least I will use utterz and get a couple of posts up.
I have three days left of work until my vacation. I live for my vacation the last few years it seems, whether we are actually going somewhere or just hanging out at the house for a week.
Friday was the girl’s last day of school, all except the wife who has teacher work days until Wednesday. I managed to make it to my youngest girl’s Pre-K graduation ceremony on Wednesday but I ended up getting stuck at work at the end of year ceremony for my ten-year-old. She was pretty upset. I told her several times Thursday and then on Friday morning that I most likely wouldn’t make it but that darn sure didn’t make her feel any better.
Overall today was a pretty uneventful day but I have had a pretty shitty attitude at work. I don’t let it show but my thoughts aren’t about what I am going to do next at work, they are only on that drive to Florida in five days. I managed to get out of work (the first time) around one this afternoon and go get my oil changed in preparation for the trip. Damn, there was the finest babe getting her car washed at the same time…but I digress…
Work pays for my oil changes as well as all of my normal maintenance costs and gasoline which works out pretty well. They don’t pay when I’m on vacation everything up to and after that point is cool.
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Took a bit of a break to hang with the girls. I wrote the stuff above a couple of hours ago but by train of thought seems to have derailed…if it was ever on track to begin with.
So happy Memorial Day weekend everyone, and just remember the reason WHY we celebrate memorial day. It’s to honor all of those brave heroes that have died to keep us free. Although in theory they serve(d) to protect the Constitution of the United States of America and preserve our life, liberty and property in all actuality they did it for US. Their wives and children,mothers and fathers. Our heroes serve to better themselves and to protect us from our enemies both in peace time and at war. Remember that when you fire up the barbecue on Monday and take a minute or two to reflect on our fallen sons and daughters and respect those who are currently serving.
I will, as usual, be working on Monday but will be thinking about everyone nevertheless.
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So as I mentioned earlier my vacation starts Tuesday night. Actually Wednesday morning because it’s entirely feasible that I might end up working Tuesday third shift. That would suck as I have to take the dog to the kennel on Wednesday morning and then go see my doctor about my cholesterol levels from my last blood test. Apparently they have improved but not as much as she wants. Crap. I was hoping they would have gotten better. I am hardly smoking, working out (which helps your cholesterol believe it or not) and trying to eat better than I was. I’m damn sure drinking about 10% of the amount of coffee that I was just back in December. I have always put away three or four pots a day and not I am down to less than three cups. Even if I make it in the evening like I have today, I hardly ever finish it anymore. It’s just not the same not being able to have a smoke and a cup of joe at the same time for some fucking reason.
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Yet another break for awhile. I don’t remember what the original time was on this post but it’s a few minutes after nine and I had to get on the phone with my stores. My boss and his boss are required to work one third shift every four weeks and that would be tonight so they have been in one of my stores for the last hour or so.
Speaking of work, I gave out my URL to someone today. That’s not something I do very often, simply because the content of the site isn’t particularly acceptable some days…I think I’ve only given the address out to one person the last couple of years but I slipped up today. I did ask her not to give it out so we’ll see. I also gave out my myspace url which is what most people really want anyway. They aren’t actually interested in reading or having a conversation, just blithe comments with stupid fucking flashy pictures in them. Whatever.
I mentioned a few days ago this plugin for Movabletype I have been using called Zemanta. It’s the one that inserts that ‘zemified’ pic in some of the posts. Anyway, as I type it checks what I have written every few hours and suggests pertinent links and photos that might be related. Here are a couple it has suggested thus far into this long wind-bagged entry this evening.
1. The Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund over at Hug Hewitt’s site. It has fuck all to do with my post but damn I’m glad to have found it. Here’s the link to the fund itself. Why don’t you take a minute or two on this Memorial Day weekend and go help out a Marine.
2. Celebrity Swimsuits over at Huffington Post. Huffington Post? WTF? That and the fact that they diss Jessica Alba. Oh hell no. She could drap a frigging toga over her shoulder in it at the beach and would still look hot.
I suppose that’s about it for the day. Want to know what I’m listening to today?
Even back in 1975 Judas Priest was kicking ass.
One more thing before I go. I am going to be out of town for seven or eight days and I am looking for a couple of reprobates who might want to guest post over her. Nothing major but it would be cool to have some other view points. Shoot me an email if you are want the keys to the place.
So I was thinking about some places I want to go on vacation in the future and immediately England, Wales and Ireland came to mind. Sort of weird for a person afraid of flying as I am but there you go. Regardless of how I feel about flying I still want to go check out several places including Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool.
One of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard show. I haven’t listened to it in quite some time since I’m not commuting any more but I always used to listen to it for both the consumer information as well as the vacation deals. I am not quite as cheap anymore when I book our vacations, otherwise we would have been staying in some dive when I went to Nassau for $75 a night but I do try to be frugal when I am looking at hotels online.
CheaperThanHotels.co.uk has some pretty good deals on hotels in England and the surrounding countries. Finding Dublin accommodation is as easy as clicking the link. Dublin is the largest city in Ireland as well as being it’s capital. It was originally a Viking city and as far as I know it’s been the primary city for several hundred years.
I watched a show with Anthony Bourdain a couple of months ago on Dublin, or rather some of the food and eateries in Dublin. The whole city has really been undergoing a transformation the last few years with plenty of new development. I don’t know much about that, but I would certainly like to head over to the Guinness brewery and hang for a while.
The picture to the left is the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin. Until 1919 this pedestrian bridge was a toll bridge, thus the unofficial name. It was originally called Wellington and that changed to Liffey Bridge but everyone still calls it Ha’penny bridge. Prior to building it there were seven ferries that ran across the river. The bridge itself is made out of cast iron.
They also offer Edinburgh accommodation as well as Dublin. In addition to Ireland I want to see Scotland as well. Scotland is situated in the southern part of the U.K. and Edinburgh is a favorite of travelers. It is considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Edinburgh is steeped in history and while movies like Braveheart are fictional accounts of what really happened, as usual with things like that there is at least a kernel of truth involved.
This is Edinburgh Castle, taken by Stuart Caie from Edinburgh and originally posted to Flickr.
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and I would love to go visit there as well. It is the largest city in Scotland and the second largest in the UK after London. It’s also the center of the United Kingdom’s shipbuilding industry. I’m not particularly interested in the engineering aspects but I would love to check out the shipbuilders and take lots of photos. The big thing about going to Scotland is that there is so much of our collective past in Britain that I want to be part of it. Glasgow accommodation is easily had as well as the aforementioned cities.
One more place I would like to visit is Liverpool. Liverpool accommodation can be had through the CheaperThanHotels website as can several other cites.
Anyway, Liverpool is just over 800 years old, having been founded in 1207. After having traveled around the eastern seaboard of the US several times and visiting what I think of as ‘old’ or even ‘ancient’ historical sites, 800 years seems like such a long time for a city to be standing.
Of course most people know of Liverpool from the home of it’s most famous citizens, the Beatles. In the 1700’s Liverpool controlled a pretty big portion of England’s slave trade as well as 40% of the rest of the world’s trade.
The industrial city peaked in size about a hundred years ago with a population around 800,000 people. Now it’s somewhere around 400k. Liverpool went through a period of time where unemployment and industries weren’t doing very well but it seems to have rebounded and is growing faster than the rest of England now.
I think if only given a choice of one place I would have to go to Ireland. While I want to visit Scotland and the rest of the UK Ireland holds more mystery, at least for me.
So it’s been a couple of days since I’ve had the opportunity to post anything. Nothing particularly exciting has been going on in my world. Same old, same old. Work, go to the gym, tan a couple of days a week, sleep. I have one more day until I get a couple of much-needed days off though. Sunday I’ll have to call and get my staffing and go in if I can’t get the stores staffed but other than that I’m off. It should be interesting calling Sunday morning. The manager that’s off today and tomorrow has messed some stuff up and knowingly hid changed her figures so that she wouldn’t look as bad on the weekly reports. Can you say Enron?
The thing is, we don’t let it go as long. As soon as something like that is noticed we dig through the books and fix the problem. Oh, and then any money that’s missing after we fix it? The person fucking with the numbers gets it taken out of their paycheck. If those bastards from Enron and Worldcom were made to pay back everything out of their personal fortunes it never would have happened.
In this manager’s case it was only a couple of hundred dollars but it’s not the first time. I will most likely write her up, that’s of course if she doesn’t give her notice first. As long as I get my days off this week I don’t care anyway. After Monday I have two managers going on vacation back-to-back which means a long stretch for me.
Oh by the way, the Georgia Renaissance Festival is going on right now. I had originally planned on going last weekend but as I couldn’t find a babysitter at the time we elected to stay home. We ARE going this Sunday, so any of you reprobates that want to meet up out there, come on down and look for my bald head which may or may not be sporting the hat I picked up last year. Hell, I may even wear my purple ren fest shirt. Probably not though, I figure it’ll be T-shirt weather. It looks to be pretty cool. The Royal Lipizzan Stallions are there this year. I’m interested in seeing the show. Also if you buy tickets off their web site (the link above) you save a couple of bucks.
If you’re afraid to hoist one with me and just want to check it out later or something I think it runs until the first weekend of June. That’s when we normally go, the last weekend, but we will be in Disney World at that point.
Hopefully I can get some more good tramp stamp pictures this year. Should have seen my ass chasing down some of the women last year trying to get a good shot.
One of my favorite vacations ever is when I stayed in Connecticut for a week. One of the cool things about it is that we drove in to New York while we were there. I had never been to New York prior to that visit and really was looking forward to it.
Our friends had a house on Long Island Sound and they were pretty familiar with the area. It was pretty cool because my friend’s father drove us into the city and first took us on a driving tour. Mind you, this was back in the mid-eighties so a lot of the city had not been cleaned up like it is now. There are so many things to do in New York, especially now.
One of the first places we drove through was Harlem. It was filthy. I think that it must have been just prior to having a bunch of development done as there were just blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings that looked like they were getting ready to be torn down.
We drove on to a parking garage and went on foot after that. We rode the subway for a while. It was pretty cool but almost surreal. Very old train cars, lights blinking on and off and they smelled like urine. From what I understand things have been cleaned up quite a bit.
After that we went and saw Times Square and toured Greenwich Village and then made our way to Central Park where me wandered for a while. We finished up the day meeting his mother at the Plaza Hotel. We had supper at Trader Vic’s. It was great! Everything was strange and new and this had to be one of my favorite vacations ever.
One of the things about the tour through the city that I remembered is that we got a very personalized tour. Trusted Tours and Attractions also has personalized sightseeing tours in some of the best places you can imagine such as the Miami Seaquarium, places in Atlanta, Boston and 23 other cities in the United States.
They also have an eNewsletter that you can sign up for as well. If you are planning a vacation you can get some pretty good ideas of places to go. Not only that but Trusted Tours and Attractions is giving away a free Handheld GPS unit in a drawing. You have to sign up for the newsletter in order to be entered into the contest, so head on over there.
So I paid off the trip to Disney when I woke up this morning. W00t. $5400 in six weeks. That kicked my tail, trying to make sure I made enough to pay for it as well as the bills. I know it’s still eight weeks away but time flies and the end of May will be here before you know it.
With both of us working out trying to lose weight, we may end up having to get new clothes before we leave. Of course I very rarely buy clothes so the same stuff that’s been in my dresser for the last six or twenty years should fit me through several size decreases. The wife may want to get more stuff, at least for the pool. I’m sure we’ll end up looking for bathing suits, if not for her then for the girls. I think one piece swimwear is called for in this case 🙂
You would think that going to Disney that we wouldn’t spend much time in the pool, but even at the end of May it’s pretty darned hot in Central Florida. The last time we went to Disney was in the middle of October and we swam then too. I expect that we will spend a bit of time in the pool every day and I know we’re planning on going to at least one of the water parks.
When I went to Las Vegas in 1987 we stayed at the Holiday Inn. I think it was called the Holiday Inn Circus or something along those lines. I don’t really remember. We weren’t there all that long. We walked up and down the strip but it was late, so the only Las Vegas Casino that we visited was Caesar’s Palace. There are a couple of ‘iconic’ casino/hotels I think of when I’m talking about Vegas. Caesar’s Palace of course is one, but the Sahara is another. Remember the TV show Vegas with Robert Urich? Dan Tanna was the man. Of course I was twelve when the show aired, so anything even remotely resembling an action series like that got me all excited. Ocean’s Eleven was set there too, at least the original was. I don’t remember where the remake was set. Anyhow, the point is that the TV show and movies set in Las Vegas always show glimpses of the familiar landmarks, including the Sahara.
Would you believe the Sahara is 55 years old? Holy cow! As a result you know right now you can get a really good Las Vegas deal on a vacation at the Sahara. It’s changed immensely over the last 55 years too. Some of the city’s coolest rides are at the Sahara, they have great restaurants on site including the NASCAR cafe, and over 1700 rooms and suites to choose from. Check out the Roller Coaster…
That going backwards stuff is enough to make me want to hurl…
Even though I have already made plans for our 20th anniversary it would be kind of cool to plan a Las Vegas wedding and surprise the wife. Not that I would want the kids there or anything, although I suppose if we were going to be that close to the Marine (he’s at Twentynine Palms, California) we would have to take them and pay him a visit.
Anyway, the point is it’s been a long time since I’ve been to Las Vegas or anywhere else out west for that matter, and it’s high time we went out that way on a vacation.
So the girls are officially on spring break for the next nine days, including the wife. Unfortunately I will only have one of those days off 🙁
I think they are planning on going to the Atlanta Zoo tomorrow and then Sunday they are driving back down to Hilton Head to spend a few days with our friend Niqui before she moves. I wish that I could go down but I am unfortunately going to be stuck at work all week. As a matter of fact I am going to have to work doubles on Sunday and Thursday. I’m not particularly looking forward to that. I hate working doubles but unfortunately sometimes this business calls for it. My profits haven’t been all they could be and I need to make sure I have plenty of money when it comes time to go to Disney, and that’s the money I am making now.
…I was looking at the local wally world when I was picking up some supplies for work on Wednesday and I came across a pair of skate shoes. Pete was dying for a pair of these toward the end of the school year last year and I almost got them but I don’t know if she wants them anymore. I think I will wait. Don’t really want to spend any money right now as it is.
I think I will surf the web for a while and then shower. I want to hit the sack at a decent time tonight. We are doing a benefit