Sunday, January 13, 2008

Milestone Birthdays and Car Shows

Well, here we are almost to the mid point of January already. Not a good sign when the slow part of the year is zippin' right by. The old saying "older you get the faster it goes" seems to be pretty much on the mark based on my experiences of late.For the most part the last couple weeks been quiet and the winter routine has been wake up (duh), go to work, come home, eat supper, play on the computer or watch some TV, or both and then go to bed, later than I should, to start the whole process over again.
This past Friday, the 11th, was the better half's 50th birthday and I wanted it to be a bit memorable so I sent her an Email birthday card to start off the day, followed with a personally delivered bouquet of flowers at lunchtime....the standard, or traditional for the less cynical, 12 Carnations with a single rose sticking out of the middle, along with some greens in a glass vase and this year, due to the number of birthdays involved, I included 3 black balloons that floated above the flowers. I delivered all this to her at work, after she expressly said the night before how she didn't want anybody at work to know about her special day. Whooops, bad me!

I got to the lobby and gave her a call to come up and of course by then she knew something was up. She took it quite well and as luck would have it one of the guys came back from lunch about then so I had to mention to him what was going on and as if I had it planned out in advance he went straight to the intercom and announced Wanda's birthday to the entire plant! Whoooops again! At that point my work there was done so I headed back to the shop to finish out the day.

After work we, along with Ri and the Greens, went to The Texas Steak House and proceeded to stuff ourselves with lot of good chow. Somehow the waitress found out that it was the wife's birthday (hey, stop looking at me!) and unbeknownst to me (1st time we'd been there) after we'd pretty much finished dinner she came out to our table with a sawhorse that had a saddle attached to it. The deal was the birthday girl had to go sit on the saddle. It took a minute or two to convince her that it was the thing to do and there was a threat made about me sleeping in the garage, but she finally got up and went over to sit on the saddle. At that point our waitress stood up on the seat of our booth and at the top of her lungs announced to the entire place that it was Wanda's 21st birthday (good move!) and that everyone should give her a big Yeehaa. So, that's what the whole place did.....YEEEEHAAAA...it was loud! So after that event we settled up the tab and headed back home for a quick break before heading off to the movies to see, of all things, "The Bucket List". Just the flick for someone that's wrestling with being 50 all of a sudden.
It was a good movie, funny / sad with a bit of a message. I'd recommend it as one worth seeing although I wished they'd have added more to certain parts of it. The ending was quite predictable, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
It was a bit after midnight when we got home and the birthday girl was ready for bed. My work was done and I didn't have to sleep in the garage!

Satuday I got up, made some breakfast and then got my camera gear around to make a little trip to G.R. to see this year's Autorama car show. I got there about 11 and stayed till about 3, taking pics and shooting the breeze with people I knew and people I didn't know.....watched a little campy entertainment and then, once I'd seen it all, I headed out the door and back home. There was homemade chili waiting when I got there so I filled up on that and spent the rest of the evening digitizing albums and playing with my websites.

Today was nap day. Again I got up, made breakfast, goofed around downstairs awhile and then crawled into my chair, threw my favorite blanket over me and made up for the lack of sleep I get during the week. When I finally decided to get back up it was suppertime.....geez eat, sleep, eat, sleep..........hey it's winter and it's time to hibernate. I think I'll go do some more of that right now.....another week is only 8 hours away.

Night.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Time to hang up the new calendar

Well, here it is the end of the first day of the new year and the end of the "holidays". It's not a new years resolution or anything but I've decided I'm going to attempt a project that I've thought about for a couple years now but never acted on and no, it's not another diet. For lack of a better name I'm calling it the PicADay project. What I'm going to try and do is take at least one decent pic a day that represents where I am or what I'm doing. Some days, particulary this time of year, it's gonna be tough to snag a good shot. I expect you'll see more than a few shots of my 4-legged friends in the months ahead, but then there'll be days during the warm months when it'll be hard to pick just one shot. We'll see how it works and how long I can keep the momentum up. I got today's shot so that's one down and 364 to go!

Last weeks short workweek went by quick enough without too many problems. We're in the process of painting the lab and sprucing things up. They bought me about 2 grand worth of tables and cabinets to store gages and tooling in and once the reorganizing is done I plan to tie up some loose ends that have been bothering me since I arrived.
Saturday evening we celebrated my birthday a day early by going up to Caminoes for dinner. The daughter of the original owner happened to be there and ended up waiting on us herself. That was cool. We've been eating there since our first date in early 1980 and it still hits the spot 28 years later. We came back home after dinner and hung around for awhile until it was movie time. We headed over to the Cinema 9 to see "I Am Legend". I won't go into the plot but I enjoyed the movie even though it was a bit out of character. Pretty scary in places. Wanda didn't care much for it because of that I guess. There were a couple incidences where we both were leaning back in our seats as far as we could get........We were home by midnight from the show and that was it for Saturday.

Not much happened on Sunday, just hung around the house. Ma and Jennette both called to wish me a happy birthday but that was about it. No cake or anything like that......not that I need a cake anyhow.....the fire permit for 55 candles would probably cost more than we can afford so it's just as well.
Yesterday I took a drive up to the compound to make sure that everything was still battened down securely. I took Bailey, Mercury and Jasper with me and they had a ball romping thru the 16 inches of snow they had up there. We hung around for a bit, took some pics and then got back in the truck and headed back for home. Probably won't go back up again until I can open the camper or at least fire up the chain saw once the snow is all gone.
I guess that's about it for now. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to present the PicADay shots. Either do it in here, start a new blog just for the pics or start a new folder in Flickr called PicADay. The last one is probably the way I'll go but alittle testing is in order first.
night.