– Let’s get spontaneous.
– Let’s be reasonable – do it my way.
– This is the 37TH weekly edition of the ‘Thursday Night Mini Thoughts’.
– It’s my favourite weekly blog series to compile, as there is no planning for it.
– I’m glad that it was an instant out-of-the-box smash from the very start.
– It’s a Thursday night tradition since January 2009 !
– Today at work I led hard, I worked hard, and I laughed hard.
– It wasn’t that easy though, as the devil was working hard as well.
– It’s a good thing that I’ve got a stronger offensive and defensive line.
– The devil is a total idiot.
– His dirty deeds are done dirt cheap.
– Yeah I know we used to hang out a lot, but I ain’t got no time for you now.
– This Sunday morning at Life Pointe Church we’ll be partying like it’s 2009.
– Pastor Travis J. will be leading a message on beer and partying.
– If you’re near Homestead then grab your drinking buddies and join us.
– You won’t regret it pal.
– I’m getting carried away with my DVRing.
– I hit a new all-time high of right around 60 hours of recorded material.
– I’m declaring this Saturday as ‘DVR Appreciation Day’ in my living room.
– My ‘spaghetti models’ have settled down a bit.
– I believe that I’ve got a reasonable weather forecast for this upcoming weekend.
– That is if you live right here in the greater Homestead area.
– Here’s what I’m forecasting:
– The POWERFUL cold front should pass through by 6 PM on Saturday night.
– At 7 AM on Sunday morning get ready for temps. to bottom out near 64°F.
– We will remain in the 60s and 70s all day long on Sunday.
– It will feel cold on Sunday (day and night) due to gusty north winds.
– Monday morning should be even chillier with perhaps some upper-50s around !
– It will be bone dry, so you may shock yourself as you touch your car.
– This will be our coldest air felt here in nearly 6 months !
– I am so looking forward to it.
– Maybe I can turn off my A.C. on Sunday and let the fresh air in !
– Tomorrow night on the ‘Disco Party’ it’s a little deviation from the norm.
– I’ve got a television sitcom theme song to present to you from 1979.
– It’s considered to be one of the greatest flops of its generation.
– It was a ‘Disco Sitcom’.
– Be sure to check that out tomorrow night.
– On Saturday night we’re gonna go all techno on your ‘Retro’.
– Get those glow sticks ready.
– Those are my ‘Mini Thoughts’ for this week.
– Keep it real dudes !
Category: Music
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 !
1. It’s Columbus Day, and it’s a day of relaxation for me after a lot of walking and a lot of driving. I drove 415.5 miles over 37 hours. That’s about 3 weeks of normal every day Homestead driving for me, and it’s just as I had planned out prior to embarking on the road trip. 201.3 miles of driving occurred on Saturday as I drove from Florida City to Lehigh Acres by way of Everglades City, Naples, and Estero. The remaining 214.2 miles of driving occurred on Sunday on the return trip back home to Homestead from Estero (where I spent the night) – via Naples and Plantation Key.
2. On my Saturday morning drive over to the southwest coast of Florida I stopped for brief visits at the Big Cypress National Preserve Oasis Visitor Center as well as the Everglades National Park Gulf Coast Visitor Center just south of Everglades City. I don’t think that I have ever been to Everglades City before. (If I have then I don’t remember it.) It’s very small and very historic. About 500 people live there full-time. I plan to return back there during the cooler winter months to walk around the historic downtown area and check out the museum there.
3. After a MASSIVE Lunch at Pinchers Crab Shack at Tin City on the waterfront in Naples, a walk to the end of the long city pier over the Gulf Of Mexico, and a nice scenic neighbourhood drive along the peaceful and quiet south coast of Naples I proceeded up to the big movie theatre north of Naples to get out of the mid-90s heat and sun – and to see the current box office smash “Zombieland“. It was campy and hilarious – perhaps a future cult classic ?
4. It was so great to hear my radio station – The Call – over in southwest Florida. They just recently moved over from 107.5 FM to 107.7 FM in Naples. It’s an extremely weak translator station, and it was a bit ‘staticky’ all around the city – but a weak CALL-FM was definitely better than no CALL-FM. Up closer to Fort Myers I picked-up the much stronger 91.9 FM signal of The Call. It sounded great up and down I-75. On Saturday night I made my way over to Lehigh Acres (10 miles east of I-75 and Fort Myers) to attend a rock concert at a church featuring Jubilee, Horizons Fall, and Manic Drive. Rob from The Call was there. It was cool to hang out with him for a little while. All three bands rocked the joint hard and LOUD !
5. On Sunday morning (after church in the park) I visited the Naples Zoo to check up on my animal friends. I then walked around the Coastland Center Mall to cool off a bit before making the return trip back to the southeast coast of Florida. This was my first visit over to the Naples area in about 20 months – way too long. My next visit will be much sooner than that – hopefully sometime during the upcoming cooler and dryer winter season. I think that it’s reasonable to state that it’s no longer ‘possible’ that I plan to eventually live in Naples, but that it’s ‘probable’. I fell in love with Naples all over again, and I wish to live there in the future. There is so much that I wish to see and do over there, so that will justify my more frequent visits to the area, and with each new visit I’ll be looking around for potential new neighbourhoods to call my future new home.
LATER TODAY – 2 MORE BLOG POSTS:
– ‘Celebration Community Beach Church At The Park’
– ‘Life Pointe Church Plantation Key Lime Pie’
Flashback to the Spring of 1977. I’m 9-years-old – getting ready to turn 10-years-old, and I’m hangin’ out with my friends down by the creek at the bottom end of Red Wing Lane in Lanham Maryland. One side of the creek I ruled. I was in charge. The territory was known as ‘Chris Day Valley’, and it stretched for as far as my imagination would allow. On the other side of the creek my friends ruled, and their territory was known as ‘Wolf Pack State’. Our two territories neighboured each other, and we were friendly nations. See – even back then I was mastering geographic boundaries !
As I was compiling the paragraph above (and wandering around on the web) I believe that I may have discovered two friends of mine (simultaneously) from that neighbourhood and that time period. I’m gonna try to connect with both of them. I see their pictures (avatars) online, and they look very much as I remember them from over 30 years ago. One of them lived in the last house on the street right before the creek and the two ‘territories’. The other lived in a house just behind mine, and he was one of my first good buddy friends.
Playing on the radio back in the old neighbourhood up and down Red Wing Lane was a lot of Disco music. ABBA (from Sweden) weren’t really a Disco act, but they got with the times when they had to. The result was their only # 1 smash stateside and perhaps their most memorable anthem of the era. It’s “Dancing Queen” ! RE-LIVE !
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