Jasper Jones

Would you drive over two hours to be at a concert by the Eagles? That’s what a bunch of kids fro school did last night. They all left out of here at 2:00 in the afternoon - late classes be damned! - and drove up to Nashville to see the concert.

It was evidently an awesome show, but I couldn’t go. For one, I had to work and I get my schedule 2 weeks in advance, so I can’t just take off from my shift on every whim. For another, I’m trying to make money and missing work doesn’t exactly help me reach that goal. Another big reason is that tickets for that show started at $110 for arena seats. Like nosebleed section, can’t see anything but the big screens on the stage for closeups and little specks on a big stage thousands of feet below you. That’s not getting my money’s worth out of tickets.

My idea of a great concert is getting as close to the stage as you can. No more than 10 rows back. MAYBE the balcony if it is the first 3 balcony rows. Other than than, I’d rather listen to the good music on my iPod and in the car.

Gave my dad a call last night just to check in and see what he and mom are doing. They are good and they want to come down here for a visit if I can work out my work schedule to have time with them and maybe go to dinner together for a few hours.

Dad has decided to add on a sun porch to the back of the house and make it into a “man room” so that he has someplace to put his stuff and maybe a game table. Maybe its his mid life crisis to want his own pool table and a poker table, but I guess that’s better than a Corvette like so many old guys buy in their last desperate attempt to feel young and sexy again. Besides, I’d like to shoot some pool with the old man anyway.

He’s going to buy this cool round table that has a top that flips over from a regular table to a poker table. I’ve seen those around and never thought my dad would be getting one. But he’s already found the one he wants on the internet and told me to go look at the web site called DiscountQualityFurniture.com and click on the brand name Powell to see what he’s going to get.

I had never heard of Powell Furniture but what do I know about nice furniture? That’s something my mom has always taken care of at our house and I will admit that she has great taste. She always likes the best quality of everything, even if it means waiting a little longer to afford getting the better brands. I’m surprised my dad is even getting involved in this, but it’s for his man room, so I guess that’s why he picked it out.

So I checked out the web site and I can see the cool table that my dad is talking about. I see this place has a lot of other brands, too, and I was surprised that even I recognize some of the brands, like American Drew and Coaster furniture. I must have picked that up from being around my mom.

My roommate bought a nice little laptop for use at school but I brought my desktop PC from home and we spent the day yesterday setting it up with a wireless network so Alex can get online with his laptop while I work on my PC. We’re sharing one good printer over the network, too. There’s no sense in both of us buying a printer, and we don’t really print much stuff except homework anyway.

Alex wants to put up a web site for his hobby, motorcycle racing. He keeps his bike out in L. A., but over the summer he was in enough races to earns good points and be contender in the west coast racing circuit. Since he won’t have to quit early to go back to school next year he expects to do even better when he can be there to finish out the entire race season.

We spent a little bit of time poking around on the internet looking for a good domain name for his web site, but didn’t find anything that really grabbed our attention. The good ones were already gone, of course.

We have to find a cheap web hosting site, too. Once we find the right domain name we have to transfer the name to a host so we can put up a template and start the site design. I’m piggybacking on my Dad’s web host account, so I’m not much help with that. Alex needs to find a host in his own name, so we started looking for a hosting site.

We’re using a site called web hosting choice that lists all the top web hosting sites and ranked them according to which ones are affordable, reliable, have excellent uptime and provide tech support. They have a chart that lists the top 10 sites and tells you how much they charge for a setup fee and their monthly charges for hosting services.

The site has links directly to each hosting site so you can sign up if you find one that you want. So now it’s up to Alex to read up on their plans and decide which one he wants. Since it is supposed to rain here all weekend and we’ll be stuck inside, I guess we’ll be designing his web site over the weekend and getting the first part of it set up on the internet.

Everyone in Florida has been on edge for several days awaiting the landfall of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay. The state got lucky last year with minimal hurricane damage and so far this year it has been light again. But Fay has been bearing down on both Florida coasts was a vengeance, and it did come across the bottom third of the state yesterday, bringing a lot of rain and wind. Experts predict that once Fay hits the Atlantic again she will regain her strength and swing back across the top third of the state in a boomerang effect.

According to the local weather forecast, the fringe effects of Fay will come all the way up here if she truly does boomerang back across Florida and bring us a few days of wind and rain. Probably cost us a weekend of really bad weather. Guess we can hunker down and crack the books, and maybe get online for some interactive gaming if we have to stay indoors all weekend.

Bummed to hear that Bernie Mac died. He was a funny man and a good actor, too. I really liked all his movies and I watched a lot of his TV shows.

The cool thing about his TV show was at the beginning or at the end of every show he would talk to the audience directly and express his frustrations or his view of the situation covered in the show. And he did it in such a funny way. The premise of the show was pretty unique, too. He played himself as a comedian and brought in a wife and three kids who weren’t his kids but he agreed to take them in. So you had an almost stepfather situation and I think a lot of stepfathers could identify with what went on during the shows.

So, Bernie Mac, thanks for the laffs and for all the good things you did while you were here with us. We’ll miss you and your work - I can’t think of a single person who could ever take your place.

Looks like Wednesday will be movie night for us. I found a showing of Batman that starts at 8:10 and that gives us plenty of time to get home from work (me) and school (her) and change clothes, grab a quick bite to eat and get to the theatre in time for a long ticket line.

Really looking forward to this - I’ve heard so much from all the advance publicity and my friends that have already gone to see it. I was thinking about taking my 5 year nephew to the show but my friends all say that it is way to violent for him. I’m not sure about that - he’s pretty matter of fact about violence on the TV and movies - he scoffed at me once when I asked about a different movie that he’s seen and he said, “It’s JUST a movie! It’s NOT real!” I was pretty impressed that he said that, but I still have doubts about exposing a kid to really violent scenes. Even if it doesn’t scare him, I wonder what kind of impression it is making on him? It can’t be good on some level - will he grow up so de-sensitized to gory things and cruelty that he has no compassion for people? That is what makes serial killers for goodness sake.

Well, I called Gretchen tonight and talked on the phone for a long time. She’s really nice and actually very easy to talk to. I don’t want to talk too much about my dating life on my blog, so let’s just leave it at we’re going to get together again this week and go see the new Batman movie. I don’t know why I haven’t seen it yet - I’m a sucker for action movies and this is the blockbuster movie of the summer.

I’ll let you know if we think it measures up to all the hype.

Late summer is the time for rodeos all across the country. There are still two rodeos that I haven’t been to yet and I’m hoping to go to one each year after I get out of school.

I’ve alway wanted to go to Canada and the Calgary Stampede rodeo and festival every July is the perfect reason to go across our northern border.

And for the rest old west of America, the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo is 10 days of everything cowboy.

We met some girls while out on the lake and ended up pulling them on the tube for a few rides. They liked it a lot and didn’t mind riding as spotters while Jon and I took turns water skiing.

So we got their phone numbers when we dropped them off at the dock and I went ahead and called Gretchen, the blonde one, Monday on the chance she might want to go have dinner or maybe catch a movie. She said dinner would be nice but she warned me that she’s a vegetarian. So now I don’t know. I’m all about healthy eating, but taking meat out of your diet is a little extreme. Plus it really limits the places you can go and now I wonder if I order meat will I offend her? I’m not interested in giving up meat - even for romance.

So here I already invited her out and she accepted. So I don’t know where we’ll go eat - the places I like aren’t vegetarian. So we’ll see how this dinner date turns out.

Had the chance to try a new drink last night after work. New to me, anyways. The wait for a table at Longhorns was crazy long so we stood around the bar for a while waiting for our table ready beeper to light up. I didn’t really feel like drinking a beer right before a big steak dinner, so I asked the bartender for a suggestion and she came up with the mojito. Let me tell you - this is a great drink!

I watched her make it. She took a tall glass and dropped a couple lime wedges in the bottom. Then she sprinkled a couple teaspoons or so of sugar into the glass. Then she sprinkled some mint leaves in the glass and took a little stick-type bar tool and smashed the stuff in the bottom of the glass to mix it up. (Found out later that the tool was a “muddler.” Who knew there was a tool for this?) The lime juice melted the sugar into a thick syrup and mashing the mint leaves spreads the mint flavor through the syrup.

Then she fills the glass with ice cubes and pours a couple shots of white rum over the ice. Fill the glass the rest of the way with club soda, and stir. Now, that’s nice! Great for a hot summer day.

Now I need a muddler for my home bar and I’m ready to try this at home.