Author: Chris M. Day

I'm 59 years old. I've been online for 33 years - starting with my own dial-up bulletin board system in 1993 - and continuing with AOL, my own dot.com web site, Myspace, WordPress, Twitter / X, Flickr, and Facebook.

Categories
Blogging Commerce Food Holidays Shopping Weather

Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

1.  This morning me and my brother visited a local area (Plano Texas) Walmart, and this particular Walmart was something special. It was brightly lit, sparkling clean, smelled good inside, had fully-stocked aisles of unopened merchandise, had extra wide aisles, and had cheerful and helpful employees working all around. Oh yeah – and the MASSIVE parking lot out front had no active crime scenes. So I guess that not every Walmart is just like the one that’s close to home that I pretty much avoid.

2.  Post Walmart me and my brother drove on over to Sonic, America’s Drive-In for an early Lunch. After a few years of watching the very low-budget yet very amusing commercials on television I finally got to experience the culinary delight (in my brother’s car) that is Sonic. They have an extensive menu (including Breakfast), but I selected something very basic – the Bacon Cheeseburger Toaster Combo (with fries and a Sprite). It’s was a rather delicious 1,045 calories (424 of them fat calories). I wish we had Sonic back home in America’s Riviera. Once upon a time (before Hurricane Andrew) we had two of them in the Homestead area alone. I ate there occasionally back in the day. Nowadays in order to eat at Sonic we (South Floridians) have to go north up to The Palm Beaches or north and west over to Naples. It’s just not right !

3.  39°, 40°, and 44° – Those have been the minimum early-morning temperatures thus far since I’ve been here (Sun., Mon., and Tue.). Right now at 2 PM the actual air temperature is 61°, but we’ve got gusty northwesterly winds so wind chills are way down in the low-50s. Next week when it gets much colder here in North Texas I’ll be back home in South Florida basking in 80° warmth and higher humidity again. Bring it on !

4.  I asked my brother (who is technologically savvy when it comes to modern cell phone devices) what is the difference between ‘3G’ and ‘4G’, and strangely enough he had no clue. This made me wonder if the average consumer knows what exactly a ‘G’ is. One thing is fairly certain though. My antiquated cell phone from the middle ages (2004) is ‘ZeroG’. But it does just what I want it to do – send and receive text and Twitter messages and the occasional call.

5.  This Thanksgiving my family is trying something new and different for our MASSIVE LuDinner meal. We’re going to The HoneyBaked Ham Company to grab a 3-pound boneless ham – sliced and glazed. This will be our first turkey-less Thanksgiving meal that I can ever remember, so perhaps it’ll be the start of a new tradition. My sister-in-law will be making all of the various side dishes that will go along with the tasty ham. I just hope that one of those side dishes is either spinach or collard greens or broccoli. YUM !

Those are my ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. Be sure to check back here later this week for my spontaneous ‘Thursday Night Mini Thoughts’.

Categories
Animals

Monday Night Funnies

Buddy Roosevelt Day is my brother’s and sister’s-in-law soft-coated Wheaton Terrier dog. He’s 8½-years-old, so that’s nearly 60-years-old in dog years. He was born in Orange Park Florida (near Jacksonville), and he was discovered in a pet store by my brother in October 2001. Incidentally Roosevelt was his original name, and now it’s his middle name. As the story goes my brother did not pick Roosevelt out. It was actually the other way around. Roosevelt saw my brother walking around the store, and the dog decided right then and there that he would be going home with my brother – and so he did.

That’s Baby Boy, Budster, Cook, Cookie, Cookie Monster, Kid, Little, Little Kid, Little Man, Punk, Punky, Stink, Stinker McStinkerson, Stinky, and The Boy (all various nicknames for him) as he appeared about 5 years ago.

And here’s Buddy from this past Halloween as Super Buddy:

Categories
Animals Food Health Sports Weather

The Major’s Walk-A-Thon

Sky: Clear
Temperature: 66°F
Dewpoint: 45°F
Relative Humidity: 47%
Winds: SE 6 MPH
Barometric Pressure: 29.92 Falling

After I watched my visiting Washington Redskins give up the shutout and the game to the hometown Dallas Cowboys in the last 3 minutes of the game I decided that the only reasonable thing for me to do was to walk around my brother’s neighbourhood for a little while, and so I did for a refreshing 28 minutes and 48 seconds.

Here are my walking thoughts in 15 words or less:

– Me, my Brother, Sister-In-Law, and their dog Buddy went on a 1.5-mile walk.
– They live in a rather large subdivision of cookie-cutter style split-level houses.
– It’s a peaceful and quiet neighbourhood just perfect for suburban families.
– The sky was crystal clear and as deep blue as can be during the 3 PM hour.
– It was in the mid-60s, but this was a different mid-60s than I’ve felt before.
– It was a dry mid-60s – compared with a more humid mid-60s typical of home.
– At first Buddy (the dog) was leading the way.
– But soon thereafter he was slowly stalling out.
– He was pretty much exhausted halfway through the walk.
– What do you expect from a canine that’s approaching his 60s in dog years ?
– Right now Buddy is passed out on a chair.
– When my sister-in-law exclaimed that we had gone a half a mile I concurred.
– All I did was look at my watch and see that 9½ minutes had elapsed.
– Since I typically walk a mile in 19 minutes flat I knew that she was right.
– Once our walk was done we had all worked up a sizeable appetite for food.
– So we ventured over to The Cheesecake Factory for a MASSIVE Dinner.
– I enjoyed the Lemon-Herb Roasted Chicken.
– Of course I saved room for a large slice of cheesecake too.
– Of course I indulged in the ‘for a limited time only’ Pumpkin Cheesecake.
– Walking hard and eating hard – that’s how I roll on this Sunday !

Categories
Driving History Life Music Travel

Saturday Night Retro

This afternoon I completed the first-half of the longest road trip of my lifetime. In addition to the 804 miles that I drove over the course of 12½ hours yesterday (Friday) I drove another 577 miles today (Saturday) over the course of about 9 hours. That’s 1,381 miles of driving on Friday and Saturday, and now it’s time to sit back and let other people do the driving while I do the relaxing.

Although I’ve driven in the great state of Texas before (mostly rental cars out of San Antonio) this is the first time that I’ve driven my own personal car here. It’s also the furthest west that I’ve ever driven in my own car – eclipsing the previous westmost record holder for me – New Orleans about 5 Summers ago.

I’ve now conquered with my own car all of the states with coastlines along the Gulf Of Mexico. I’ve also previously made it about halfway up the Eastern Seaboard – up to Maryland. This Christmas actually marks the 20TH anniversary of the first time that I drove to and from my previous home in Northern Virginia all the way to and from Homestead Florida (about a 2,200 mile round trip). I did that in my new car at the time – a 1989 Geo Spectrum.

When this song first hit the pop radio airwaves during the Summer of 1996 I thought that it was the perfect road trip driving song. It’s bubbly melody and beat totally encouraged me to surge past the posted speed limit at times and get wild and crazy on the highways !

It’s Crush with their MASSIVE dance smash that’s all about that “Jellyhead”: