Jeremy Herndon

I’ve loved downhill skiing ever since my very first experience on the bunny slope over thirty years ago. Over the many years since I have had several wonderful skiing holidays, and some not so wonderful.

One of my most memorable holdiays was when I signed up for a long weekend ski trip with a singles ski club to charter a bus to go to SugarBush in New England. I can’t even remember now if it was in Vermont or New Hampsire! I just remember it was a terribly long bus ride with a rowdy crowd of folks. We had rented out several condo townhouses. Shortly before we arrived we stopped at a small grocery store and were advised to buy “supplies.” No one knew exactly what that meant so although I stocked up on a lot of food items to get me by for the duration of the trip, most of the folks just bought beer and cigarettes. When we arrived at the condos, many of the people then realized that there was no grocery store or convenience store nearby and they were out of luck on getting much food!

Well, I shared much of what I had bought, and in return the group paid for a lot of my meals at the ski lodge (something I wasn’t exactly planning on eating, but oh well!)

Lesson learned? Make sure you really know where your food supplies are going to be coming from so you don’t get caught without anything to eat!

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.

I wish that every garment sold in stores that has buttons had an extra button sewn into an inside seam.  I am always pleasantly surprised when I find a garment with an extra button like that; I think it is a mark of quality.  I really hate it when I have a shirt for a few weeks and then all of a sudden I notice a button is missing!  If the shirt doesn’t have a spare button sewn inside it somewhere, I usually can’t wear the shirt anymore because I can’t find a good match for the other buttons very easily. 

My wife has suggested that whenever I buy a new shirt to put a dab of clear fingernail polish on the threads of the buttons.  She says that will help to keep them from falling off.  She even showed me where she keeps the clear nail polish!  I think that’s a clever idea and I’ll try to remember to do that in the future!

I’ve been watching the television show series Ax men on the History channel lately. I ask my wife to tape it for me and then I watch the tape later on during the week when I have time. Sometimes I forget to ask her to tape it for me, and then I get angry at her for not remembering to tape it! I forget that she is juggling a lot of things and expect her to remember every single detail of what I want. So then I get mad at myself for getting mad at her! Oh well, she is a forgiving woman! Fortunately I’ve found that the show is on several times every week so if I forget to ask her to tape it I can usually watch it again later on anyway. So it’s all good.

Over the course of my life, I have had to take several student loans to get through college. I was not a good enough student in high school to get many scholarships or grants, and my folks were not in an economical position to pay for my schooling. If I wanted to go to college, then I needed to get as many college loans as I could get. Unfortunately, the college expenses exceeded the amount of money that I could borrow through the subsidized programs and I even had to get a couple of private student loans to finish up.

I’m really glad that I was able to get these loans to get my college degree, but I have to admit that I am finding it difficult to make the payments on the loans.  I’m worried that with this economy going the way it seems to be going (prices keep going up) that I’m going to be having to ask for a hardship deferral on the loans, which is something that I really don’t want to have to do.  I want to get them paid off!