Jeremy Herndon

Cruising around online last night I was checking out some of the more popular game sites. I don’t play many games online but on occasion I will have a bit of time on my hands and feel the urge. You don’t see many girl games, or at least you didn’t use to. I stumbled onto a site easygirlgames.com that is chock full of girl games. I sent the link to my 10 year old niece that has her own computer and may enjoy some of the girl games that they have offered and  listed there.

I remember that there was a major push about 6 years ago in an effort to get more games that would appeal to the female population, girls in particular. I haven’t paid that much attention to it to tell you the truth but I do know that there seems to be a good effort from the gaming companies to fulfill this need.

A couple of months ago I decided to buy a couple of tomato plants.  I’ve never grown tomatoes before, and I didn’t know what to expect.  I planted beefsteak tomatoes, and they are ripening at a good comfortable pace so that we are not overwhelmed with fresh tomatoes.  I never expected fresh tomatoes picked out of our garden and eaten the same day would have so much great flavor!  My wife is surprised that I’m eating them because whenever we go to a restaurant and get a salad I order it without tomatoes, proclaiming that I don’t like tomatoes!  Well, now I’ve decided that I like them a lot, but it will be hard for a restaurant to come up with tomatoes that taste as good as what I’ve got growing right outside my door!

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.

My sister-in-law recently decided that she wants to learn how to shoot a gun. She has had one for several years but never learned how to do anything with it at all. A few weeks ago some new neighbors moved into the house next door to her and she is afraid of them; she thinks that now is a good time to learn how to shoot! So she’s going to come over to my house this afternoon and I’m going to take her to the shooting range and teach her how to use her gun.

I can remember when I was a kid my mother showed us how to make candles, using wax, chopped ice cubes, and milk cartons.  It was so fascinating, stirring the melting wax, pouring it over the ice that we had poured into the milk cartons.  What was really cool was peeling the milk cartons off after the wax had cooled and seeing the really neat designs that the ice had left in the candles!  That is just one of the fond memories I have of my childhood; doing fun things like that with my mother.  She is such a crafty lady!

Recently my mother decided to try her hand at the cottage-industry candle making business. She wants to make soy candles and sell them at craft fairs. She loves to make candles, and she figures that it would be a great way to make a little bit of pocket money while doing something she loves to do! She told me that she found a great website called jarstore.com where she can buy wholesale Libby jars for her new candle-making business. Libby jars are her favorite jars.  She has asked her best friend Carol to come over and help her at the craft fairs; they can sit together at the tables and visit with each other in between customers.  I told her that if that’s what she wants to do, then she should go for it!

I have a very old floor lamp that I was given by a dear aunt. She tells me that she bought it over thirty years ago. I love it dearly, but it has finally given up the ghost. The socket died, and I decided it was appropriate to rewire the entire thing because the plug was the old fashioned kind that just was not as safe as the newer ones. So I went to the hardware store and bought what I needed to rewire the lamp. It took a couple of hours to take it all apart and rewire it, but I did it myself and it turned out fine. I had called an electrician and asked him how much he would charge to re-wire it and he had told me it would cost over $100! The rewiring supplies cost me less than $20, so I’m thrilled that I saved $80 by re-wiring it myself! And I’m thrilled that I kept the lamp from going to the junkyard, so I did my part to save the environment today!

I was reading the web hosting articles and tutorials that I found today on the webhostingrating.com website.  My sister asked me to teach her how to set up her own web page, and I figured that I really didn’t know that much about it to really teach someone else!  So I turned to the Internet to try to educate myself better.  My mother always used to say that the best way to learn something is by teaching it to someone else!  I think she was right!

One of the things that I like about this particular web site is that it has recommendations based on ratings and reviews for the top 10 web host companies, but it also reviews and rates companies that provide cheap web hosting too.  There’s a lot of information packed into this site!

I was reading on the Discovery Channel’s website that a new car will be hitting the market later this year.  It is a flying car!  Basically it is a plane that has wings that can fold up so that you can drive it home and park it in your garage.  It will fly for 500 miles on one tank of regular unleaded gas!  Now I think this is a really awesome creation, and I’d love to have one!  (I’d also like to get one of those car-boat things that were sold back in the 60s! – oh, and a hovercraft!)

Anyway, it will retail for (are you sitting down?) $194,000!  I think I’ll have to wait a few decades for the price to come down!  But it sure would be really awesome to own one of them!

I’ve always had a soft spot for our feathered friends.  I keep a pair of binoculars and a bird identification book close at hand so if I spot a bird I haven’t seen before I can get a closer look and try to figure out what it is.  From time to time I’m thrilled and blessed to spot a few American Bald Eagles near our house!  But sightings like that are few and far between.  I mostly see hawks, blue jays, robin red breasts, grosbeaks, woodpeckers, doves, nuthatches, finches and cardinals.  Once in a great while I see a Northern Bluebird – what a thrill that is to see that!  I see way too many turkey vultures and buzzards for my liking, though, if you know what I mean.  I understand that they are a protected species and I know that they have a job to do, but they give me the creeps! 

I’d like to put a few Quality birdhouses and birdfeeders in our yard to help care for the birds in our neighborhood.  I suspect that if I did that I’d see a lot more of them in the yard a lot more often.  I’m just not really sure what is the best kind of birdhouse.  I love the colorful and whimsical ones, but I’ve read that the plain ones are more attractive to the birds.  What do you think?

Do you remember me telling you I went to Lowe’s to buy a shelf to display a motorcycle on?  Well I did manage to buy the shelf, and I just finished putting it up.  My wife went with me to help me find it (I think I forgot to mention that in my previous post) and she was the one who found the shelves.  I had never noticed them before on my many trips to Lowe’s, but she remembered seeing them.  We asked a couple of store associates to show us where they were but they were no help at all.  Anyway, we found them, bought the one I liked the most and brought it home.  Today I put it up and put the bike on it.  This is how it looks!  Pretty sharp, right?

I went shopping today at Lowe’s with the intention of buying a decorative shelf to put some statue type home accessories on (OK, it’s a small motorcycle model that looks like the perfect size for a cat to ride.)  Anyway, I was walking down the lighting aisle, trying to find the shelves and walked past a really cool table lamp that is a theme lamp of Harley Davidson motorcycles!  At the base of it is a soft tailed Bike, the lamp shade has HD logos on it, the headlight on the bike lights up and the lamp makes a vroom vroom noise! 

The thing stopped me in my tracks!  I reached out for the price tag, afraid of what the price might be.  It was only $14.98!  Well, of course I immediately started looking for the boxed up lamps that haven’t been opened yet and snagged one right away!  I was especially excited when I went on the Internet to see what it is priced at other places and saw it for sale on some websites for almost $80!  What a bargain I got!  Now I have to find the perfect spot in my house for it.  It’s going to look so cool!

I received a gift in the mail today from one of my brothers.  Apparently he didn’t get it to the post office in time for me to get it before Christmas.  But that’s OK – I always say “better late than never!”  Anyway, it was another really cool gadget for my computer!  It is a wireless mouse that looks like a yellow Mustang!  I’ve been wanting a wireless mouse for quite some time now, but could never really justify the expense.  So it is totally awesome that my brother sent it to me for a Christmas gift!  I have a great family!