Friday Open Track-Back Post

I unfortunately don’t have a bunch of time this morning to post much of anything. After work this afternoon I have a short meeting and then have to be at the local high school to do the scholarship kick-off thing. It’s Homecoming there tonight so we need to be there a bit early in order to get a parking place. I am hoping I can manage to get out of the meeting pretty quickly. I short nap before the game would be very nice indeed.

If you have the time and are concerned about catching some of the sick pedophile bastards that haunt the Internet, go check out Warriors For Innocence and leave a comment.

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, , guerrilla radio, Right Truth, The Populist, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Nuke’s, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Haikugle

Venomous Kate is hosting a contest over at Electric Venom that’s sponsored by a flower delivery place. Write your Haiku about Google, post in the comments and whoever wins gets $80 in flowers sent anywhere in the world. Sweet, no? I’m so frigging cheap that I have to enter contests to send my wife flowers Winking

Here’s mine…

seven stinking chimps
flinging poo at each other
we work for google!

google is satan
deliver us from evil
go play outside now

Damn I suck. Post your Haikus in the comments if you dare. It’s OK if you make fun of mine because I damn sure am gonna make fun of your’s. They don’t even have to be about Google if you post them here, they could be about whatever you want.

Thursday Open Track-Backs

Open Trackbacks are a way to showcase your work and potentially gain new readers. If you are interested in joining in feel free to send me a trackback through Linkfest Haven Deluxe and see other folks that are also involved. You never know, you might find a couple of new favorite reads.

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Right Truth, The Populist, Webloggin, Stuck On Stupid, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Conservative Thoughts, Pursuing Holiness, Pet’s Garden Blog, Right Celebrity, third world county, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Right Voices, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Thursday Thirteen #5 – Thirteen Songs on My Motorola Q


Thirteen Songs on My Cell Phone

Sort of a simple list of thirteen, but they are some of my favorite songs.

  1. (We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock – Bill Haley and His Comets. A bit before my time but I love good old rock & roll.
  2. 21st Century Schizoid Man – King Crimson – I love the first couple of albums that King Crimson put out with Greg Lake. Their other stuff is also pretty good but I started listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer as a kid and he is one of my favorite vocalists of all time.
  3. Baby Please Don’t Go – Willy and the Poor Boys. These Arms of Mine is actually ‘our song’ but this is one of my favorites off of the album.
  4. Beverly Hills – Weezer. I don’t know what it is but I really like this song.
  5. Blister in the Sun – Violent Femmes.
  6. Bone Machine – The Pixies. I started listening to the Pixies just this past year and there isn’t much that they did that I don’t like.
  7. Caught in a Dream – Alice Cooper. One of my all time favorite artists.
  8. Go to Hell – Alice Cooper. This entire album just rocks.
  9. Headhunter – Krokus. An anthem of sorts.
  10. Hell’s Motel – MD45. The original version with Lee Ving (Fear) rather than the remaster that has Dave Mustaine doing all of the lyrics. The remaster was crap compared to the original.
  11. House of the Rising Sun – The Animals
  12. In the Evening – Led Zeppelin. Soon to be available on iTunes W00t!
  13. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes.

Nothing spectacular but I love music and each of these really entertains me.

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Just Five More Minutes…

You know, I just did not want to get up this early today. I am still trying to nod off as I sit here and write this. Just a couple more minutes of sleep…

This is the type of day where I would lie back down while waiting for the coffee to brew and then wake up two hours later. The wife is smart and all-knowing though and set it up on a timer. It was waiting for me to get out of bed and have that first cup.

Apparently I fell asleep on the couch last night because I woke up at two and went to crawl in bed then. I must not have slept very well. I don’t normally have this much trouble waking up.

I am spending today and tomorrow down in the hole. That’s my store with the incompetent manager. It really does sort of sit in a hole back away from everything, thus the nickname.

I’ve had two of my day shift waitresses give their written notice so far since this woman has taken over the restaurant. Both of them I am transferring to busier stores in order to keep them from quitting. I may be a picky asshole but they are my employees and I don’t like losing people unless I plan on letting them go for some reason. This close to Christmas I certainly don’t need to be losing any help, not to mention the fact that heavy turnover is never good for business. 90% of my business is repeat business and people like to come in and eat and see the same friendly smiling faces every day. It’s hard for people to learn your name when they keep switching.

Thursday is normally our meeting day but apparently my boss and his boss have to drive to Norcross to meet with our senior vice president. The meeting has been moved to Friday. When I reminded my boss that we also have a football game to do tomorrow evening all he said is, ‘yep, and we have a football game’ which pretty much means a fifteen hour day tomorrow. Not exactly my idea of fun going into the weekend.

We had a pretty good time last night, although it was kind of quiet. We took Pete to O’Charley’s for her tenth birthday dinner and let her pick out whatever she wanted. Both of the girls were extremely well behaved, an unlike the Marine she didn’t pick out the most expensive thing on the menu. Although I let her order from the normal menu she still looked through the kids menu (and colored on it for a while) and she was extremely impressed with the fact that the kids menu is for ‘ten and under’. She made sure to let us know that she won’t have to order off of it after next year.

As I mentioned night before last, although we are having her birthday party on Saturday I stopped and picked her up a couple of gifts on the way home from work Tuesday night to wake her up with. One of them was this Technosource Rubik’s Revolution…

 rubikrev

Both girls have been having a pretty good time with it. Pete decided to share with her little sister RePete and she has had as much fun as her older sibling. It’s pretty good for hand-eye coordination and as you play it speeds up. She has been doing pretty good with it.

The other thing I pick up was this i-dog thing. It’s a plastic dog-shaped thing that you hook your iPod into via line out/in…

idog

It light’s up when the music is playing through it’s built-in stereo speaker, taps it’s foot, wags it’s tail and moves it’s head up and down. Oh yeah, it’s face lights up too. I made a pretty good choice with this one. Both girls were singing and dancing around the dog (as you do) at six AM yesterday morning. Pretty damn funny actually, but they had a good time.

Although it seems like I have spent more money on gifts than I would, we are kind of toning down the amount of them we are giving out. I want to get a bit more simple, particularly when Christmas comes. The only caveat to that is that my brother and his family normally come down and spend the holidays with us and it sort of sucks to get my kids a couple of gifts and then they get to sit and watch as their cousins open a ton of them. I usually go slightly overboard in compensation.

Fun With Tasers…

Just a quick collection of Tasers and news stories about taster incidents for your enjoyment…

The Real Fugitive…CAUGHT!

A guy that escaped from a New Jersey prison 28 years ago was arrested Wednesday at his Philadelphia home where he was making one last bid to conceal his identity and remain a free man.

Wedding Entertainment

When the wife and I got married 19 years ago, we didn’t have tons of money and neither did anyone in our family. The reception itself was held in the clubhouse of the condo’s where my wife’s Aunt lived at the time, and for entertainment we pretty much had ourselves and possibly a country music station. I don’t really remember too many details as I had been up extremely late the evening before. I do have lots of pictures though and they help bring the memories back. The one I remember most is the feeling of relief when we got the heck out of that place and drove off to go on our honeymoon.

Hopefully it will be quite some time but when the girls eventually get married I want them to have fond memories of everything that happens on that day and that includes even the Wedding Music because one of the big things that they will remember is the music that is played at the wedding. I can remember times in my life and certain years and decades by the songs and when I hear one it brings back those memories. That’s why GIGMasters can be such an integral part of the whole thing.

GIGMasters is the Internet’s premiere booking service for entertainment since 1997. The provide entertainments for weddings as well as other special events and have a large database that includes thousands of performers all across the United States and Canada. They will allow you to book a wedding band, DJ or musician in just minutes with access to audio, video and client reviews.

Wednesday Hero

Sgt. Robert M. McDowell


Sgt. Robert M. McDowell
30 years old from Deer Park, Texas
2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade

Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division
April 01, 2007 

Sgt. Robert M. McDowell was a military police noncommissioned officer assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion.

Originally from Deer Park, Texas, he joined the Army in February 1998 and completed training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

In June 1998 he was assigned to Fort Hood where he served until being reassigned to 1st Battalion, 1st Aviation Regiment at Katterbach Kaserne in Germany in January 2003. While a member of 1st Infantry Division, he served as an AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter repairman.

McDowell was assigned to Fort Drum in March 2006 after completing military police reclassification training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

He was deployed to Bosnia from February to September 1999.

His awards and decorations include the Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Joint Meritorious Unit Award, Valorous Unit Award, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Kosovo Campaign Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon, NATO Medal, Combat Action Badge and the Army Aviator Badge.

Sgt. McDowell was killed when and IED struck his vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq. He is survived by his wife and son, of Evans Mills, N.Y., and a daughter, Madison McDowell, of New Mexico.

Also killed in the attack were Staff Sgt. David A. Mejias, Staff Sgt. Eric R. Vick and Sgt. William G. Bowling. You can find more information about them at this site.

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 blog, you can go here.

Wordless Wednesday #6