Vacation Week: Weekend Piñata

We spent last week in Orlando enjoying time with the family. I am going to post a series of posts that cover the week. Instead of one long post that will be horrible to read, I will feed this out a little at a time.

“The Family” included my two brothers and their wives and children. They only have one wife each, but there is no better way to say that. Then my parents were there as well as my maternal grandmother and my wife and kids. In all, there were 17 of us hanging out.

PiñataWe drove to Orlando on Saturday (13th). Mom and Dad rented a house for the week. We contracted for a 3 bedroom house that 13 of us were going to use. But when assignments were made, they gave us a 5 bedroom, 4 bath house. Woot! That allowed everyone to sleep in a bed or air mattress. Our two kids were in our walk-in closet each on their own twin mattress. Big closet.

Sunday we went to church with my younger brother, who lives in Orlando. Later that day my older brother arrived with his family.

We celebrated my birthday a day early by eating cake and beating up a piñata. The kids had fun with it. I assumed that the rules were somewhat understood, but we had a bit of confusion. One of the rules that the Mexican kids surprisingly obey is that you don’t take candy from someone eles’ pile. Amazingly I don’t ever remember seeing a Mexican child steal candy from another child’s pile. They dive in to rake up the candy and once they have it, it is theirs. I had to do a bit of biting and punching to keep my brothers’ and nephews’ hands off my candy.

Review: Momentum is your friend

The sub-title is The Metal Cowboy and His Pint-Sized Posse Take on America. Yes, this is another book by the Metal Cowboy. It is the second one of his that I have read.

This book is about a summer trip he took with his two boys. They traveled 4,000 miles on a bike, a trail-a-bike and in a bike trailer. Though it is not strictly a journal, author Joe Kurmaskie weaves the events of the summer into a narrative of the highlights of the trip.

Because of the nature of the book, he was not able to draw on the vast number of experiences that he used in his first book, Metal Cowboy. At times this book dragged a bit just to bridge from one story to the next. Some stories were merely props to give background information for a later story. Where the stories in his first book were each a winning essay in itself, this book, necessarily, had some slower parts.

This book had much more cursing than the other book. I was pretty disappointed with that.

Though the writing style was as good as the first book, the stories were not as strong. That and the excess cursing causes me to say this is a book that could be skipped. I will probably re-read Metal Cowboy some day, but this one will be donated to the local library as I have no interest in reading it again.

Momentum Is Your Friend: The Metal Cowboy and His Pint-Sized Posse Take on America, Joe Kurmaskie, Breakaway Books, 2006, 318 pages.

Happy Birthday from PlaneT3rry

Last Thursday night I was in the Knoxville area again and I got to meet up with PlaneT3rry for the third time. We are starting to make a habit out of this.

This time was special though, I had to be on my best behavior. He was finally going to let me meet his wife. Actually, we had to prove to her that I was really a man so she wouldn’t think strange things about us.

The plans were that I would pick up Terry after the two of them drove to a meeting she had. Then Terry and I would go have dinner and do some general running around with me as his chauffeur for the evening. After we painted Wal-Mart and the Post Office red, then I would take him home and meet Jen, his “lovely and talented wife.”

As is often the case, plans got changed. This time for the better. Jen was able to leave her meeting early and join us for dinner. We had a great time eating and talking. Then, all of a sudden, we all geeked out together. Jen pulled out her Palm Centro, while Terry was on his Palm T|X. I had my iPhone and we all silently conversed through text messages, Facebook exchanges, Twitter comments and verbal snide remarks.

We finally parted ways with Jen going home to get stuff together for a weekend trip while Terry and I set out on the mission.

For Terry the goal was to get the gift cards that he was giving away prepared and in the mail before his trip. My responsibility was to help him spend the extra money on 2 separate gift cards. He needed $2.32 on each card, but Wal-Mart would not let him buy the exact amount. He had to buy $5 cards and I had to spend the extra $2.68 (exactly) on each card as my birthday gift (coming up December 15).

Immediately I knew that I wanted some snacks to help me with my 11 hour drive from Knoxville to Pensacola the next day. The trail mix I picked out got us to within $1 per card. Fruit was the best way to make up the difference. I decided on Apples and Bananas. I had to pick just the right size to make up the extra dollar without going too much over.

The fun part was explaining to the cashier what we were trying to do. We did a little profiling and looked for a cashier that might be able to understand what we were doing. Needless to say, Terry and I don’t have a future on the FBI: Behaviorial Analysis Unit. The cashier we chose was just one step away from clueless.

We made a math error on the first card which ended up deleting $2.32 and leaving $2.68. The second card did not work at all. So our attempt to be clever failed to give the desired results.

The good that came out of it was I got the coolest spontaneous birthday gift. The trail mix and fruit was only a small part of it. The best part was acting like a couple of college kids trying to play a prank at the expense of Wal-Mart. It was fun acting half our age for a short time.

My Thought Spot 25: Geocaching

This last week I started playing a new game called geocaching. I explained it in an earlier post. This episode is a recording of a recent geocaching trip where I explain a little bit about the game and take you on a sound seeing trip to find a cache.

Show notes:

Enjoy!

November Goals Report

Running
I only ran 47 miles in November. This is due to my stress fracture. I have run 864 miles for the year. I should easily be over 900 by the end of the year, but I probably won’t make my goal of 1000. I am taking one more week off for my foot before I attempt to run again. I am still doing other strength training and aerobic exercises to keep fit and healthy. I just should not run right now.

Reading
The goal was to read 800 pages per month. I have been missing it most of the year, but I am getting pretty close. This month was 767 pages. I have picked up several new books recently. I hope I can get to all of them soon. I have a huge pile of books on my “to be read” pile.