Sep
29th

French eh?

I ordered something the other day from across the pond in France. I got an email confirming my order (or at least it looks that way) in French. Here’s a snippet:

-snip-

Votre établissement bancaire nous a donné l’autorisation de prélever le montant de vos achats dans un délai de 7 jours. Pendant ce délai, nous pouvons être amenés à vous demander des renseignements complémentaires avant de débiter votre compte (confirmation d’adresse, N° de téléphone, pièce d’identité, etc.) . Une fois cette période de 7 jours dépassée, nous n’aurons plus la possibilité de valider votre paiement et nous serons malheureusement contraints d’annuler votre commande. Dans tous les cas vous serez informé par email de l’état de traitement de votre commande.

-snip-

Allrigty then. There was some other text there that led me to believe my order went through. I finally received a shipping notice IN ENGLISH today which confirmed my thoughts. It all went off without a hitch. Got my tracking number and everything. Sweet.

Looks like fall’s finally here. It was nice and cool most of the day today. I hope it stays like this for awhile instead of just going from blazing hot to freezing cold. This is also one of the times of the year that I get some kind of dibilitating cold that knocks me on my ass for a few days. At any rate, I’m still going along with my regular daily does of echinacea to try and boost my immune system. I’ve been taking it for several months now and so far, it seems to be working.

Speaking of ordering stuff, Lesa recevied a drawing autographed by Picasso that she had won on ebay. It came from Germany. She collects that sort of stuff.

Sep
29th

I’m STILL full…

Lot’s of eating going on in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, Kay and I headed over to Logan’s to grab some lunch. Her friend Rochelle came and joined us. Kay had some sort of drama going on with a guy she knows that works there. It was funny AND uncomfortable all at the same time listening and SEEING their discussion. I turned to Rochelle and said “So… you make it through the hurricane okay?”.

After work, Lesa and I were going to meet up with Lorri at Simp’s for a drink and some appetizers. Lynn reminded me that we had made plans to go to Macaroni Grill for dinner. Off to Huntsville we went. Dinner was beyond fabulous. I ate, no lie, what seemed to be at least a pound of grilled salmon (on spinach orzcho pasta). I was struggling to get the last few bites down. I did manage to order dessert to go though - a honkin big slice of tiramisu. When I got home, I did a few small things then went to bed. It was 9:30.

More eating today as well. Lesa, I and Lorri had lunch at Currie’s here in town. I had the lasagna. Whew. When we were done, Lesa and I walked to a nearby gallery to check out… this girl I was interested in. Anyway, it turns out that after closer inspection, she was a bit young. I did run into Wendy, an old friend of mine, there working with one of the people at the gallery on choosing colors for her new home. It was good to see her again. Back to the office.

Had a good afternoon working on things and meeting with clients. After work, I again aborted the trip to Simp’s and went on home to eat take out and have my dessert from last night. Think I’m gonna go watch some tube then drum for a while. That’s the plan at least.

Sep
27th

Monday is here again.

It was a typical Monday at the office. I started off by bringin in 2 cases of Mt. Dew and loading up the fridge. We have a Coke machine but I’m more of a Pepsi products guy. I also brought along one of my Red Bull’s to ward off the afternoon sleepys.

Got several irons in the fire at work so I was pretty busy most of the day. Unfortunately, a lot of what I had to get done was in the hands of other people so I spent a lot of time trying to corral everyone into getting things done so I could proceed with my stuff. Had a bit of a misunderstanding with one of my co-workers regarding what I do that I hopefully cleared up. We’ll see. Had a meeting over in Huntsville today around noon so I gave Bernie a jingle and we met up for lunch at Atlanta Bread Co. just like old times. Stopped in over at CompUSA for the obligatory walk-thru. Glad we did! Yesterday, I bought two 50 disc spindles of DVD-R media at Office Depot for $29 each. (For those of you without DVD burners or who never buy your own media, this is a good deal - normally they are at LEAST $50 a spindle) At CompUSA, they had the same deal BUT with 8X media!!! Yippy skippy. I can write DVD’s in half the time now as all the media I had before was 4X. I also picked up a USB 2.0 hub as I’m all the time needing to plug either my camera or USB memory key in and my USB 2.0 ports are on the back of my PC which is a BITCH to get to. This hub puts it on my desk. 2 of the ports are on top so I can stick stuff straight down into it. This makes me happy.

Did the Guad thing tonight. Seems it was Asian’s only as everyone else had things going on or were stuck at home covered in estrogen. (LOL, btw) Ended up picking up some things at Parisian as well as talking at length with Linda in the men’s department. I finally said, “Ok, sell me something.” Dang, me AND Kyle (tightwad.com) both bought stuff. Oh, Kyle’s roommates showed up and chatted a bit. It was good seeing them again. Back to Linda: I commented on her hair: “Um, what’s the deal with your hair?” She obviously had to get ready in a hurry and I knew it would spin her up… she went into detail about being tired, her kid, being in a hurry, yadda, yadda, yadda… it was funny. I was happy for a second time today.

Got home and found that the new grips I ordered for my pistols had arrived. I installed them without any problems and they looked great! I was happy for a THIRD time today.

All in all, it was a good Monday. I hate that some other’s didn’t fare quite as well. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Sep
25th

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Lesa, Lynn and me at BSJ.

Sep
25th

Whew!

It’s been a busy week for me for sure. The first part of the week was spent doing the Riverfest thing, the mid-part was getting my parents packed up and back to the Philippines and the latter part was wrapping things up at the office and going to Big Spring Jam.

Got some more pics from Riverfest thanks to Lesa. She did a really good job snapping some up close photos that some of the lesser digital cameras couldn’t capture well. She’s got one of the Canon digital SLR’s with some nice lenses. Big thanks to her. On the flipside, it’s got me thinking about a digital SLR now. Cheet.

After getting all the last minute arrangements done, my folks left Wednesday morning for the long trip across the ocean. I talked with them later and found that the trip went well… no problems whatsoever. Dad did have to get used to traveling with technology though as his laptop and digital camera were scrutinized at every security checkpoint. “That’s just part of it” I told him. Very glad they made it home safely. With them gone, I got going getting my place back in order again. Been cleaning, dusting, rearranging, etc. to get things back to the way I like them. Ahhhh… it’s nice to have the peace and quiet of being alone in the house again. I highly recommend it.

Work went well this week. No complaints there at all. Friday was good also. After a longer than I expected meeting in the morning, me and Joel headed over to Larry’s in Huntsville to do some shooting at the indoor range. I brought along my .45 and my 9mm. Joel brought his .357 magnum. We were both very pleased with our shooting. I was especially happy with my 9mm shooting. I still have to work with my .45 to get more accuracy with it. Either way, I won’t have any problems hitting a target in self-defense situation with either weapon since those typically happen at short range. The range master had us try out a sweet .22 rig he had setup with a scope and a bi-pod. It was awesome! At 25 yards, I could put 5 shots into about a 1/4″ group. I’m going to have to look into that. It’s a lot of fun, cheap (.22 ammo, what else?) and easy on you… no recoil, low noise, etc.

I was tired the rest of the day (had a big lunch you see) but had committed to go to Big Spring Jam with Lesa and Lynn. One nice thing is that we had been provided with tickets for free and also armbands giving us access to the VIP tent where there was food and drink free of charge! Food was excellent… they had no Corona but I made do with some Miller Lite. It wasn’t too bad after all.

They were good sports and went with me to check out the band “Breaking Benjamin”. I had heard OF them, but I wasn’t familiar with their music. Turned out to be a bit heavy, which was okay, but I knew it was a LOT heavier than what Lesa and Lynn were used to. I checked out a couple of songs then we headed on. One thing I LOVED was how the drums sounded through the PA. We have GOT to get some subs. Holy crap it was nice.

Met up with some of our clients who later joined us at the tent I mentioned earlier. Nice folks for sure. Saw some other friends there as well which was nice. Checked out part of the George Clinton set. He came out in… a diaper. I’m sorry, I don’t care how successful you think you might be in the music biz, you can’t pull off coming out in a diaper.

Headed back to D-town after that. Lesa wanted to head over to the Brick but by this time I was pretty tired and just wanted to get home. Got in around midnight and crashed.

Sep
25th

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Crowd view

Sep
25th

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Doing my thing

Sep
25th

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Another one.

Sep
25th

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Side view of stage.

Sep
25th

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Slammin the kit.