Aug 16

We’re less than a week until our trip to South Carolina. I can’t believe it went so quickly. It will be great to see my daughter again. She sent us her first military picture. I’ll attach it to the blog if I can. Actually, she sent it to us yesterday, but since I didn’t post a blog entry, I’ll just pretend it was today. She looks good. But, she looks smaller. It’s probably the picture. It looks like we might have another person coming with us on the trip. My niece might be tagging along. That will help also with my granddaughter. She’ll have someone to play with in the car while we’re driving. We bought a portable DVD player and we’re taking a bunch of cartoon movies for them, but I’m sure she’ll get bored of them pretty quickly. We’ll be in the car for more than 24 hours. My stretch of the driving will be easier, because it will be at night. I’m sure that she’ll be asleep for most of it. We also bought a couple of MP3 players. They were cheap and it turned out that we got what we paid for. They work and everything, but they’re difficult. So, I went out and bought some blank CDs. (I would rather listen to them through the car radio anyway) So, I’ve spent the last two days burning music CDs. That’s another good thing about me driving at night. I can listen to my music without everyone complaining that they don’t like it. (I’ll still complain about theirs though) My wife started making some music CDs, but she got frustrated after a little while and decided that she would just listen to the radio along the way. We’ve driven long distances before. (Colorado to New Jersey and back about a thousand times) So, she knows that the stations will go in and out. But, it will help the time go quicker as she searches for new ones along the route.
There are under forty games left in the season and it doesn’t look like we’re going to make the playoffs unless we hit a major hot streak. We lost today, but won yesterday against the Marlins. I’m still going to root for them and watch them, but it’s a good thing that football season has started. (Actually, I think that is what I said when football season ended last year and baseball started up.) I am expecting the Broncos to do much better this year than last year. In fact, I might get to go see a game this year. My wife can get two tickets to a game through her company. There are only four available, and she signs her name up as soon as they announce that they are going to get them. It’s a good deal, buy one and get one free. They’re about seventy dollar tickets, so it ends up about thirty five each. We got them last year, and I took my nephew. Last time, we were pretty close to the field, right to the left of the Bronco’s tunnel next to the end zone. If we can get them, I’ll probably take my youngest brother. I don’t remember how we got the tickets last time, but I took my other brother to see the Vikings play. So, it’s my youngest brother’s turn.
Speaking of younger people, School starts the day after tomorrow for my youngest daughter. She will be a senior this year. I can’t believe that all of my kids are that old already. My wife took her out driving today. She takes the test for her driver’s license the beginning of next month. She drove all over and was almost perfect. The only thing my wife had to complain about was that she came up to a four way stop and stopped too far back. When it was her turn to go, it probably looked to the other drivers that she was moving up to the line to stop again. But, since it was the car directly across from her and her turn to go, no one on the side road even tried to go. That’s not something major, so I’m giving her an A+ on driving today. She is getting better and better each time out. I still would like to see her parallel park more and about a week ago, she was pulling out of a parking spot and started turning the wheel as she was backing up before she cleared the other cars. So, I think I would like to see her park and un-park several more times.
It has literally been months since I’ve worked on any of the books except for the Great Detective sequel. I’ve kept up with that one only because I’ve been sending the short stories off to my daughter in the army. I’ve made the hidden message inside it something to do with her. But, I am going to break that trend today. I am not going to do anything tonight except work on the River of magic and post this blog. So, I’m putting in Telsa, Ratt, and the Eagles in the playlist tonight for background listening and I’m getting started.
-Thom