Jeremy Herndon

I went to the Harley shop today. Come to find out, they were having an open house! I don’t know why they call it an open house, they’re open six days a week! I went in and looked around at all of their motorcycles; it made me feel young again! Salesmen asked me if I was interested in buying one. I told him I’d love to, the only problem is that I’m afraid I’d have to use my grocery money to fill the gas tank! He just laughed and said “welcome to the crowd!” Well, I did get a free hot dog and a soda out of it! And I did enjoy looking at some really nice bikes. On the way home, I stopped at Hardees and bought a cheeseburger. I hadn’t been to a Hardees in two years. It will probably be two years before I get the chance to go back again!

My wife is always fretting about paying our bills.  She keeps reminding me that we need to cut costs because the cost of living is going up but our income is NOT going up.  She is still upset about the price of gas having gone up so much in the recent past, and she is NOT happy about that at all!

So, she is constantly moving about the house, turning off lights and televisions and radios when there aren’t any people in the room.  I can’t even leave the living room for ten minutes to use the “facilities” without coming back to a darkened silent family room!  It drives me nuts!  When I complain to her about it, she says “well I didn’t know how long you were going to be gone, and lots of times you just go to bed or off to work or off running errands and don’t even tell me and don’t turn anything off, and I’m trying to save money and make ends meet.”

I hate that.

I’ve always heard that Utah is a beautiful state.  I’ve had several friends go there to attend college and they never came back!  I’ve had other friends go there on skiing vacations and send me postcards telling me how great the snow skiing is!  I remember learning about Salt Lake in Utah, and thought it was very odd to have an inland Lake that was salt water.  And I’ve heard that the Mormon Tabernacle temple is a beautiful sight to behold!  I’d love to go to a Utah Resort and check out the Homestead Crater too!  I love natural phenomenons like that!

I think that one of the hardest addictions to kick is the caffeine addiction! I love my morning cup of joe! I just can’t seem to get started without it! My doctor says I really should cut down on caffeine, that too much is unhealthy for me. So I have been slowly cutting back. I’m down to only one cup of joe a day. I’m pretty proud of that accomplishment! I’ve tried to switch to decaf for that one cup, but I get a terrible caffeine withdrawal headache that just does not go away – even when I take headache medicine! My wife tells me that every time she has tried to quit drinking tea that the withdrawal headache lasted for two weeks! I don’t think I can deal with that for two weeks and still go to work! Wish there was an easier way!

Walt Disney has always been a huge influence in our lives.  Both my wife and I can remember as really young children watching the Wonderful World of Disney on television, and of course watching the Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club!  We grew up with them!  And our parents took us to so many of the wonderful Disney Movies as kids.  I blame the Bambi movie for my wife’s refusal to eat venison!

My wife had the good fortune to go to DisneyWorld many more times than I have been able to go.  When she was younger she lived close enough to Orlando to be able to drive there in a one day drive, and spend a week with her grandmother that lived only a half hour away from Kissimmee!  She went there every year for many years!  Lucky lucky lucky!

But now her grandmother isn’t there anymore, and my wife moved too far away to go there frequently.  Many changes have happened; she’s never been to the Animal Kingdom part of DisneyWorld.  As much as she loves animals, I’m sure that is one place she would love to go the next time we can arrange to go.  We’ll probably be trying to rent a condo through the Orlando Vacation Rentals service when we figure out a good time to go.  We like having all the comforts of home when we go away and not just be confined to a small two-bed one-bath room at a typical motel.

I know that black snakes are not poisonous, but they can still bite.  So when I was clearing out the back yard a few days ago and decided to move a little bit of a brush pile, I was not happy to find a nest of black snakes.  And of course they were not happy for me to find them either!  They were defending their nest, and came right after me!  I started to smack them with my shovel to get them to leave me alone.  When I told my wife about it she was upset with me for hitting them.  She didn’t believe me that they came after me, but they did!  I wonder what she would have done in that situation!

My wife has been talking about setting up her own business as a Personal Chef.  I teased her at first, telling her that she’s a horrible cook.  She got pretty mad at me about that!  Probably because I was teasing her in front of friends.  My bad.  Now that she’s explained it to me, I think it is a fine idea and I think she would do a great job at it!  She said she would meet with her client to determine their wants/needs, and set up a menu for a week.  She would go do the grocery shopping for the food, take it to their house and cook it there at their house, using their pots, pans, and dishes.  She would put all of the food in the refrigerator with reheating directions attached.  And that would take care of their dinners for a whole week.  For that she would charge the cost of the groceries and $200.  If she could get a couple of clients each week, that would be great!

My wife was cleaning out our bedroom earlier today and found some partially used Disney World Tickets in her memory box.  She showed them to me and said that she was pretty sure that there was still a day or two left on them that we could use the next time we go to DisneyWorld.  DisneyWorld is our favorite vacation destination.  We never get tired of going there!  Our favorite park is Epcot Center; I love driving the race cars and going through The Land rides.  The shows are fantastic too.

We went to DisneyWorld for our honeymoon, and we’ve gone there once since then.  Our favorite memory is when we went to the Epcot Center and they had a “living statue” there.  We were watching a crowd gather around the statue and saw that people were posing for pictures with the statue.  The statue looked so real – it was all white like a marble statue, but every now and then it would move just a little bit.  There was an attendant there picking out people to come out and pose with the statue and the attendant took their cameras an snapped their pictures with their own camera and then hand it back.

The attendant picked my wife and I out of the crowd to come and pose with the statue.  So we stood in front of the statue, smiling for the camera.  Then before you knew it the statue was grabbing our heads and mushing our faces together so we were kissing for the picture!  What a riot!  Everyone in the crowd was laughing!  And the picture came out great too!

You know, thinking about that vacation is definitely making me want to go there again soon! I guess I’ll be getting in touch with orlandofuntickets.com to see about getting more tickets to go there soon!

My wife has been looking for a job for over a year now.  Her parents live nearby and they run a store.  They keep telling her that they are shorthanded and that they need help.  She keeps offering to help them.  They keep telling her that they don’t want her because she can’t lift 50 pounds repeatedly.  I think that is bull.  If they need help that badly I think that they can make some kind of arrangement to let her work and help out without having to lift that much weight – team lifting would be a good answer!  It is very frustrating to sit and watch this happening, but I have to keep out of it, which is hard to do!

Its getting so that almost everyone I know has a home alarm of some kind in their house.  My mother-in-law just recently installed a monitored home security system in her place after her next door neighbors house was broken into.  We all felt that was “too close for comfort” and encouraged her to put in an alarm system; especially since she is elderly and lives alone in an area where her house is not easily seen from the road.  It really could be quite dangerous for her safety if some criminal broke into her home – he could do a lot of damage and no one would know about it!

I have to say that I’m very disappointed about how much weight the passing of one entertainer has in the presentation of the news. There are a lot of things going on in this world that is newsworthy, but the news is focused mainly on the passing of Michael Jackson. Yes he WAS a great entertainer, and I’m sorry that he has died but he really should not be the biggest story we are hearing about! I will be glad when the news media finds something else to report on!

My wife told me that it is time for me to order some more work clothes from the Workinggear.com.  It’s been over a year since I’ve bought any Carhartt jackets or Dickies coveralls.  They both take a lot of abuse, but I really put mine through extra tough punishment.  Even though they are still in good repair, they are pretty badly stained and my wife says that it makes me look unprofessional to go to work in clothes that look dirty after they’ve been washed.  So these old work clothes will be retired to my odd jobs around the house instead of going out on the job with me.

So I’ve given her the “go ahead” to order some new clothes for me, and asked her to order a couple new pairs of Levi’s while she’s at it.  I like the fit and comfort, as well as the durability of Levi’s, and it’s time that I retired my old work Levi’s, moved my “good Levi’s” to “work” status and replace my “good Levi’s” with new ones.  I try to rotate them like that a couple of times every year.

I just read that Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska!  She had two years left to serve in her term.  She’s being very vague about the reason she is resigning, saying she can better serve America outside a government role.  I wonder what that means!  I can’t imagine that doing this will improve her odds of ever winning the Presidency!  What a shocker!

Lately I’ve been reading in the local newspapers and hearing on the television news shows about how crime is on the rise.  More homes are being broken into, more purse snatching going on in the local stores.  Unemployment is on the rise and that naturally causes crime to rise.  It’s a sad fact of life, but there it is.  Not much one can do about it but try to keep yourself, you family, and your home as safe and secure as possible.  The business of installing home security alarm systems is on the rise!  A very competitive market right now, with bargains to be had.

I was quite upset yesterday when I went to the store to buy a few items that I needed. I only needed to spend $15, but my wife and I like to use our Discover card to pay for things because we like the rewards that we get every month. I was very upset when the store told me that the credit card was declined because by card was over the limit! The last time I knew, the credit limit was over $11,000 and I had only $2,000 on the card! I pay the bills every month in FULL and ON TIME! I was never notified that the credit limit was dropped, and I have no idea why it was dropped! I called the Customer Service line and they won’t tell me why it was dropped. I am NOT pleased at all, so I guess I’ll be paying with cash from now on, and although I won’t be cancelling the card, they won’t be getting much of my business from now on!

My wife has signed up for some ballet classes that start in a couple of weeks.  She used to take ballet when she was a young child growing up.  She’s been going crazy the last couple of days trying to find a local place that sells Capezio Dance Supplies because she wants to buy a Capezio leotard to wear to class.  She hasn’t had to buy a leotard ever before because her parents used to buy them for her.  After all, she was just a little girl!  So she’s been looking around and can’t find adult size leotards anywhere in town!  So it looks like she is going to have to buy them off of the Internet and hope they fit her.