Year: 2013

37,000 Creeping Cars

House Of Refuge
Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge No. 2

We started our drive home from Florida this morning just like we started our trip down on Tuesday, under cover of darkness and in the rain. This morning’s rain did not rival Tuesday’s, but at times it still caused us to slow a little bit for safety (although quite a few fellow travelers didn’t subscribe to this theory.)

The rain mostly disappeared around Cape Canaveral at about the same time as the Purple Whale passed through it’s second milestone in a little more than a week at 37,000.

We had an early lunch at a Cracker Barrel just into the state of Georgia and we were making pretty good time until about 30 miles later when all three lanes of traffic came to a grinding halt. Unlike last time we stumbled onto an Interstate Parking Lot, this time we were just coming up to an exit. Donna crept the 1-1/4 miles to 36B and started our back roads journey about 60 miles sooner than planned.

We both agreed that it would be fine even if the detour took us an hour longer than it would have had we stayed in the crawling traffic, as traveling at 65 MPH was literally and figuratively 10 times better than 6.5 MPH.

Blimp!

Goodyear Blimp

We are visiting Donna’s sister and family in Florida and this morning we told them we were going for a walk. Well, we went for a WALK! Needing a couple of things and with the only place open on Turkey Day around here that would carry all of them being a CVS, off we trekked to a shopping center a little over 2-1/2 miles away. As a bonus, there is a DD nearby for mid-trip refreshments.

We were about a half a mile from their house on the return trip when I heard a distinctive buzzing sound, I knew instantly what it was, a blimp. The sound of one flying is very unique and to me unforgettable, but maybe that is because of my first experience of hearing one.

Back in my high school years the favored hang out of my friends and I was behind a junior high school just down the street from one friend’s house. There was a slight hill at the end of the big open field that served as the school’s soccer field. We would sit near the top, close to the tree line, surveying what we considered our kingdom.

Many a summer night was spent laying back on the hill consuming purloined beers and smoking cigarettes while solving the important issues of the day. One particular evening after three of us had finished off a couple of hand rolled smokes we heard this strange buzzing sound. First we each looked at each other to make sure we weren’t the only one hearing it. Then we started speculating wildly as to what it might be, there was of course the typical paranoia, but soon that changed thoughts of a possible UFO.

As the noise peaked, the stars that were bright in the sky above us started to disappear. Soon, nearly all the sky above us was black and the buzzing was deafening. We knew any minute now that we would be beamed into the space ship and be confronting little green men.

Suddenly the sky erupted into daylight as thousands of LEDs started to spell out a word – G……O……O……D……Y……E……A……R

Where Are My Shoes?

Got up this morning to go to work and my shoes were not where they were supposed to be. I checked in the bedroom closet, I looked in the living room, I looked everywhere. Twice. No shoes anywhere.

When we get home from work we enter through the garage and come into what we’ve named the Computer Room (for obvious reasons), but it is also the shoe taking off room and the coat hanging up room and the dropping the mail on the desk room and the Goodwill donation staging area.

Monday night we had to do some running around and our Goodwill pile was big enough that we decided to drop it off while we were out. That’s right, on Tuesday morning my shoes were in a box of similar items in the back room of the local Goodwill Store. The heck of it is, looking back, I think I carried my own shoes out of the house and put them in the trunk.