He Who Hesitates Is Lost

On last Thursday, the official opening of the holiday shopping season, I assembled my 2013 Christmas Wish List. After crossing out the hundreds of unreasonable expensive items, I was left with three things, only one of which was going to make it onto Santa’s sleigh.

Item #1 was something that would benefit the entire household for years to come with “blazing” networking speeds and extended range viewing of streaming video, a NETGEAR N600 Dual Band Wireless Router

Item #2 was something that would benefit myself for the next couple of years with “snuggly” warmth and proudly proclaim my allegiance to a certain baseball team, a Red Sox Shoutout Full Zip Hoodie

Item #3 was something with no real benefit and be used for probably about 2 weeks before getting sidelined to collect dust that has “gee-whiz” wonderment and a cool factor that would make me the envy of my small group of peers, a Micro Drone 2.0 With Aerial Camera

After spending the previous 6 days trying to decide which item I really wanted, last night I made my choice. Now, in hindsight, the decision was obvious, if Item #1 would have brought me that much joy I could have easily justified it sooner, Item #2 as a practical piece of clothing, could be purchased no questions anytime, but the only way I could possibly get Item #3 was under the guise of Christmas present.

With 3 days left on the discounted price time frame they had sold out of the Micro Drones! They mention they are getting some more by possibly December 12th. Should I wait? Or is this an omen telling me to go ahead and buy one of the other items?

On a related note, here is a 7-year old’s Christmas Wishlist dissected by her father: My Kid’s Insane Christmas Wish List

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