Jeremy Herndon

One of my favorite local restaurants is the Outback Restaurant. I love their mashed potatoes, and they serve a great steak too. Sometimes I order the pork chop, but I have to order it without any spices on it; if I forget to do that I don’t like it at all. The are two things I don’t like about eating at the Outback Restaurant – first of all their booths and chairs are not very comfortable, and second is that on the weekend if you don’t get there early enough you have to wait a very long time for a table.

It’s a good system that they have, though, for waiting for a table. They take your name and give you a type of pager that has lights on it. You can go outside and sit on the porch and have a drink while you wait for the pager to go off. Usually by the time you have finished your drink, the light on the pager flashes and then you can go in and be seated, so it’s not usually too bad. Unless the weather is bad, and then it’s not so good because they have very limited, very uncomfortable waiting accommodations inside.

I was just watching a video that I found on the BBC website about the attempt to recapture a chimpanzee that escaped his cage through an unlocked door. It was rather amusing; the chimpanzee was on a rooftop and two zookeepers were trying to recapture him. They were trying to shoot him with what I have to guess were tranquilizer darts, but the chimpanzee saw them and rushed them. The zookeepers tried to escape the rushing chimpanzee, but the chimpanzee actually grabbed one of the dart guns from one of the zookeepers! Fortunately the chimpanzee just tossed the gun aside – can you imagine an armed chimpanzee? They finally got the chimpanzee to come off of the roof using bananas as bait, but the video did NOT show the actual recapture scene. I hope they treated him humanely.

I was surprised when I logged onto my blog today to see that I had a huge number of spam comments awaiting moderation! I don’t really understand how these spammers work, if it is an automated system that they send out spam comments. I’m curious about how they pick and choose which blogs and posts to put their stupid spam comments on. I’d be interested in learning how that works, not because I want to do it myself, but it is a curiosity to me how they manage to get through to me in the first place. (And by the way, I don’t like the canned spam lunch “meat” either!

My aunt’s birthday is coming up next week.  I want to send her a nice floral arrangement, but I don’t want to spend all of the extra money that you spend when you call your local florist and “wire” flowers down to her location.  I think that you spend way too much on the “wire fee.”  Especially in this day and age of the Internet, where so many companies have websites that you can go to and find what you want that is local to where you want it delivered. 

For example, since my aunt lives in New York, I can “google” the term “New York Flower Delivery” and up comes a really nice website for petercooperflowershop.com.  They have drop-dead gorgeous arrangements for sale that are very reasonably priced.  They have same day New York Flower Delivery service , a 100% satisfaction guarantee, no delivery fees, and same day delivery.  I think that this New York Flower Delivery will get my order for my aunt’s birthday next week! All I have to do is pick out which arrangement to order!

I’m afraid that I am going to have to put the car in the shop this week, it is running rough, and I don’t want to be out and about going to or from an errand and have it quit on me. Especially when there are so many “dead spots” in the cell phone service out here. It acts like it is running out of gas, but it has plenty of gas. So I put a can of dry gas in it, thinking that maybe it was just some water in the tank, and it ran fine the next day, but started acting up again the day after. So maybe it’s the fuel filter, or the fuel pump. I don’t know, but it needs to be fixed!

Just one more aggravation, another thing sucking the money out of my wallet!

Our neighbors love to play golf.  That seems to be all they ever talk about!  When the weather is good, and they have a few hours to spare, they are off to the golf course!  Lucky for them the nearest course is only five miles away!  During the winter they like to take a golf vacation at a Myrtle Beach Resort. They spend a couple of weeks there every year.

I understand that there are a hundreds of golf courses down there! Sounds like a true golfer’s paradise! My neighbors say that they like to change around between the different Myrtle Beach Hotels for a little bit of a variety. They say there are so many Myrtle Beach Resorts down there that they could spend each vacation at a different one the rest of their lives and never stay in the same one twice! I imagine the same could be said of all of the golf courses down there too!

Sometimes I get really frustrated with new electronic devices. My wife just bought a device that is supposed to be a VCR/DVD player and recorder. It was delivered today. She bought it because she has a video camera that records on tapes and she had no way to transfer it from the tape to a digital format so she could copy it onto a DVD or send it as a file over the computer.

So as I was saying, this thing was delivered today and now I’m trying to set it up. Of course it is not working the way the instructions tell me it is going to work, not even the initial set up. So I’m getting frustrated. I don’t understand why these things don’t work the way the instructions say they will work! Technology and machines are great when they work the way they are supposed to work, but when they don’t work that way, they are a huge pain in the neck!

My sister is on her feet all day long. She has been trying out many different types of shoes to make her feet more comfortable. Her doctor told her to try those ugly looking “croc” things that he says doctors wear but she said that they are just too ugly, and according to a fashion Internet website she reads those things are officially “out of style” so she doesn’t want to wear them

So, I’ve suggested that she try a nice pair of lightweight hiking shoes. Made to be comfortable for people who are on their feet all day long, I think that hiking shoes just might be the answer for her shoe dilemma.  She looked at me like I had three heads, but I told her that I thought if she ordered her hiking shoes through Zappos.com she had nothing to lose because Zappos pays for shipping both ways.

I don’t know why I always wait until the almost last minute to do my taxes!  I think it is a bad habit that I learned from my parents.  They always waited until the last minute to file their taxes; I can remember driving to the Post Office at 11:45pm and dropping the envelopes with the tax forms in the long handled net that the Post Office Employees were holding out to the cars as people drove past them, so the people could just drop their taxes in the nets and not have to get out of their cars.

I know that my parents did their taxes at the last minute because they had to pay taxes every year and they didn’t want to part with their money a second sooner than they absolutely HAD to.  But, come on, driving to the Post Office at 11:45pm?  That’s carrying it a little bit too far!

I’m lucky; I always get some money back, which is why it makes little sense for me to wait until the last minute to file my taxes.  I think maybe it is really a case that I’m afraid that if I file them any sooner, I will get some forms in the mail afterwards that will require that I send in a revision, and I don’t want to have to do all of that extra work!

I admit that I like to watch television.  I like to watch it a lot.  Some of my favorite television shows include Burn Notice and the CSI shows.  And Criminal Minds, and NCIS.  I find the plots very interesting, and I try to video tape them if I am going to miss them and watch them later.  I have to admit that I like video tapes, and it has been depressing to me to find that video tape recorders seem to be leaving the market in favor of DVDs.

My brother has been trying to convince me to switch from cable television to Direct TV satellite television.  He has had satellite television for a couple of years now and he loves it.  He watches a lot of movies and sports channels. He says that there are a lot of great DirecTV Offers right now that I could take advantage of if I sign up now. I told him I’d check out the DirecTV Specials and see how they compare to what I’ve got now. If it’s a good deal, then it would be smart to switch!