Category: Driving

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Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

It’s the 102ND edition of the weekly ‘Grab Bag’ of my miscellaneous thoughts:

1.  It’s not supposed to be in the lower-80s outside when we wake up early in the morning, and we shouldn’t have heat indices way up into the mid-90s late in the afternoon – during the final week of October !  This is not normal South Florida weather for this time of the year. If you want more normal weather then stick around. I see a very gradual cooling trend beginning this weekend with a noticeable cooldown in about 10 days. How much cooler ?  Stay tuned !

2.  I tend to accumulate a lot of loose change in one of the small compartments of my car. Sometimes it gets totally out-of-hand where if I were a real annnoying person I could actually buy an entire fast food meal for over $5 in all loose change – but I would never do that. What I try to do is to pick out about $0.75 or so in quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies so that I can use it for exact change whenever I walk in to a fast food joint or store. Whenever I do that it always seems like the total cost of my bill is so many dollars and 98 cents, so I end up using no change at all. When I don’t prepare in advance with loose change I end up getting a bill for something like so many dollars and 2 cents – or 14 cents – or 26 cents – or whatever so that I end up getting another pound of loose change. Make cents sense ?

3.  For a whole year from November of 2007 through November of 2008 I suffered through 8 colds. It’s been nearly an entire year since then, and I can only remember one minor cold over the past 12 months – and even that one cold may not have actually been a real cold. There have been sick people and their nasty germs all around me everywhere I go, and yet I’ve miraculously stayed on the healthy side. I know though that it’s only a matter of time before the germs gather strength and invade my body like there’s no tomorrow – when I least suspect it no doubt.

4.  One of the places that I now avoid as much as I can is Starbucks. It’s where I picked up at least several of those 8 colds from 2007 into 2008. Once I stopped going there (both locations – Homestead and Florida City) – the colds stopped. Nevertheless I have a dilemma to deal with now. Yesterday morning I tried this for the first time ever, and it was outrageously scrumptious. It was perhaps the most delicious instant coffee that I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. I want more now !  I may eventually find myself at a nearby Starbucks purchasing some more of them, or I may even buy some online.

5.  4 years ago this week we were dealing with the aftermath of the surprisingly devastating Hurricane Wilma. It was the most destructive hurricane to affect South Florida since Hurricane Andrew 13 years earlier. Water, power, and telephone service (mostly cell) was out in some areas in a wide swath of South Florida for up to a month, and traffic jams lined up at the rare gas stations and grocery stores that were actually open for business. Due to a blatant lack of preparation on my part I waited in line for gas for about 8 hours on one of those early days of the aftermath !  It seems like it’s been more than only four years since that chaos.

Be sure to check out my ‘Thursday Night Mini Thoughts’ later this week !

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Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

The 101ST weekly edition – and the kickoff of a brand new year of the weekly ‘Grab Bag’ begins … NOW !  Get ready for this !

1.  I missed the entire ordeal as the news was breaking LIVE to a riveted International television audience last Thursday. That’s right. I was actually working – at my job – as the ‘balloon boy’ saga was playing out over the skies of Colorado. I found out about it after the fact later that afternoon. We eventually realized that it was an elabourate hoax orchestrated well in advance. Should the ‘balloon boy dad’ go to jail for his hijinks ?  No. Should he perhaps be fined or be ordered by a Judge to reimburse the count(ies) and state for all expenses incurred ?  Sure. The guy made some bad decisions, and he lied to the authorities. But he doesn’t belong in jail. He also doesn’t deserve to lose his kids over the matter.

2.  My Washington Redskins are NOT a very good team this year. You can blame it on the special teams – the defense – the offense – the quarterback – the coaching staff – the front office – George W. Bush – El Niño – whatever. The blame game is not going to make them any better than they are now. The bottom line is that they have a lot of talent on that team, but they are simply not scoring points and winning games. The best teams in the NFL eventually became the worst teams – and vice versa. Are you a fan of your favourite sports team(s) only when they win, or are you a fan through the thick and the thin – through the blood, the sweat, and the tears ?

3.  Exactly one month from today I embark on the longest continuous road trip of my lifetime. On the 20TH of November of 2009 I’ll be driving approximately 825 miles from Homestead Florida to Gulfport Mississippi over the course of 14 hours. The next day I’ll be driving the remaining 590 miles to north of Dallas Texas as I begin a week-long holiday stay with my Mom, Dad, their cat, Brother, Sister-In-Law, Nephew-To-Be, and their dog.

4.  We climbed back up to the 80s this morning at around 11:30 AM – exactly as I forecasted last Saturday night when we last dropped out of the 80s at the start of our recent cold snap. Officially at the air base we dropped down to 59°F on Sunday morning, 56°F on Monday morning, and 63°F this morning. (Minimum temperatures were several degrees cooler in some of the farming areas around town.) I don’t expect another cold front over the next 7 to 10 days, so get used to a lot of sunshine, warmth, and higher humidity – perhaps even some more record high temperatures.

5.  This will be our last full weekend of Daylight Saving Time. On the following Sunday morning – the first of November – at 2 AM local time we fall back to Standard Time, and I am so truly looking forward to being back on ‘real’ time. I’ll have the daylight when I want it – at 6:30 AM rather than 6:30 PM. BRING IT ON !

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Driving God Music Radio Travel

My Fantastic Journey: It’s In The Lyrics

Last Saturday night up in Lehigh Acres Florida I went to a rock concert featuring Jubilee, Horizons Fall, and Manic Drive. All 3 bands rocked the joint hard and heavy. Jubilee screamed to the Lord Almighty, and they sounded pretty good too. Central Florida’s own Horizons Fall belted out a bunch of cool purpose-driven tracks including their emerging radio smash hit “Broken Man”. Manic Drive headlined the night. They also headlined a very special night for me nearly 33 months ago on the 20TH of January of 2007. It was the night of my very first Christian rock concert – and the very next morning I went to church for the first time in over 30 years !

Manic Drive put on a fantastic set – although it was shortened just a bit due to the fact that the lead singer was a day or two removed from being sick in bed with the flu. You could tell that he was slowly recovering and struggling just a little bit, but he was still a class act about it all. He performed admirably through the adverse conditions, and he and his bandmates made up for the lack of song performances by talking with us in-between the songs that they did perform. Good Stuff !

Here’s one of their great hits that they did NOT perform that night because it was admittingly too ‘hardcore’ for a dude that was on NyQuil. It is perhaps my all-time favourite Manic Drive song EVER !  It’s “Memories”:

I saw piercings galore, tattoos everywhere, spraypainted hair, and some other interesting creatures of the night, but through it all I saw The Holy Spirit shining through His creations as bright as can be. When it came time to speak directly to God through prayer you could hear a pin drop in that place. It was truly miraculous – like only Jesus Christ can deliver to the masses here on Earth !

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Blogging Career Driving Holidays Life Travel Weather

Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

1.  THIS is the momentous 100TH edition of the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. That’s 96 editions here on WordPress over the past 23 months – and 4 editions before that on the MySpace incarnation of this here blog. This week also marks the end of the 2ND full year of ‘Grab Bag’ editions. Next week we begin Year 3. Thank You so very much for checking out this blog on a regular basis – and for helping to make the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’ the flagship weekly series of this blog. It’s the blog of my Life.

MEMORIES –> Check out the very first edition of the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’ from Tuesday October 16TH 2007.

2.  Well I ‘tweased‘ about this late yesterday afternoon, but now I’m not so sure about it. I’m referring to some cooler and dryer air that should be approaching us late this week into this upcoming weekend. Or will it ?  My amateur weather forecast now differs slightly from that of the National Weather Service. My ‘spaghetti models’ now struggle to pull the powerful cold front all the way through the southeast coast of Florida. If my forecast is correct then it won’t get nearly as cool and dry as it could otherwise. I do believe that Saturday and Sunday will be our coolest two days in a row since last May with Sunday morning being noticeably cooler. Expect Sunday morning temperatures in the upper-40s near Tallahassee, upper-50s near Orlando, mid-60s near Naples, and close to 70° here in Homestead.

3.  You know what was really cool about the very start of my recent holiday weekend road trip ?  On Saturday morning as I walked down to my car to kick it all off I glanced up at the sky and I saw a really nice hot air balloon up there looking down at my neighbourhood. When I saw that I just knew that the time was right to declare the start of my short little vacation. As I began driving northbound the hot air balloon drifted westbound over Redland.

4.  My 415.5-mile road trip was a smash hit – a successful dry run to a much longer road trip that I shall embark on in less than 38 days. I’ll be driving about 7 times that distance round-trip over the course of 10 days when I drive to and from the Dallas Texas area to visit my family for the Thanksgiving holiday. It will be the longest road trip of my entire Life – but not by a whole lot actually. I drove up to the Washington D.C. area a bunch of times when my family still lived up there (prior to about 13 years ago).

FACTOID –> My 415.5-mile road trip was completely toll-free courtesy of Krome Avenue, Tamiami Trail, and I-75.

5.  Please don’t misinterpret one of my comments from one of my blog posts from yesterday. While I have fallen in love with the greater Naples area, and I do plan to eventually move there sometime in the future that will not happen anytime soon. I’m thinking long-range here. I have a wonderful job over at the air base in Homestead. I’m a 25-year Federal Government employee, and although that’s a lot of years with the system I can’t retire anytime soon. Now that does not necessarily mean that I plan to wait until I can retire before I move to Naples – or even buy a home over there. I’m still many years away from such a concept, but I do believe that I will eventually become a resident of Naples or the surrounding area. I will also become a more frequent visitor of the area.