Seeing as it’s memoial day weekend, I found myself with some free time. Erika took the boys down to Arkansas to visit some friends so I’m here all by myself. I have a lot of things I need to get taken care of anyway, so it works out okay. If I can keep my motivation level up I will have opened the pool, power washed the driveway, stained the window trim out front, and cleaned the dishwasher innards before the weekend is over. Oh, and washed the Acura. And caught up on the last couple weeks of television that I missed. The list goes on .. suffice to say if I finish half of it I’ll be satisfied.

It’s been a busy month so far. Logan and Conner have started up baseball again, and will be starting summer school in another week. My college continues to creep forward at a snails pace. More importantly however, the good weather is finally here. I love the beginning of summer, it’s the best time of the year for doing stuff outside. I really want to take the boys down to Table Rock Lake and do some camping, but it is going to have to wait a bit longer due to other commitments. I’m also planning on a trip to World of Fun, the local theme park dealio out by Kansas City. They have a big water park there as well, so hopefully we can hit both.

On a personal note, I’m making good progress on my “bands to see before they die” list. I caught Neil Young out at the Sprint Center at the end of April, and will be going to see Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction in less than a week at the Starlight Theater. Neil was so so. I love the guy but damn he is getting old. He still puts on a better show than Bob Dylan though, so I’ll give him that. On the other hand, I’ve heard great things about NIN concerts so I’m really excited about that one. And after that comes Rockfest, the largest one day festival concert in America. It always delivers.

I snuck out to St. Louis a couple weeks ago to visit some friends who were in town. It was a nice break from the usual, and I had a great time. I just wish I could have visited longer. St. Louis is an interesting city, and one of these days I’d like to explore it some more. Immediately after returning from there I had to go down to San Antonio on business for the Air Force. I’ve been there a couple times before so it wasn’t anything new, and I was there by myself which made things a bit boring. I’ve never been very fond of that city, it’s big and sprawling and just down right ugly in most places. Still, I did finally manage to make the tour of the Alamo, and the River Walk area is full of bars and restaurants so it’s always good for some mindless fun. I think I contracted the pig flu or Ebola or something while I was there though, which resulted in me spending a good amount of time lying in bed hacking up stuff I didn’t know I had in my lungs. I’m all better now though!

Oh, the albums on the left are a few pictures from the St. Louis and San Antonio trips if you’re interested.

When Erika busts out the camera, she doesn’t mess around. I’ve uploaded the almost ridiculously large pile of pictures she took down at Disney World. It’s a daunting pile to say the least.

I was looking at the “spam” comments that this website manages to draw in. It’s an interesting mix of topics, from Viagra adds to various “adult” things to political stuff and everything in between. Of course none of it comes from humans, it’s all generated by automatic spamming machines out there somewhere. And then it gets annihilated here by my automatic spam destroying machine. Which honestly makes me wonder what the point is. I mean, do people really make any kind of money at all sending this nonsense out? Is this machine on machine warfare some sort of precursor to the coming Terminator like apocalypse? Could there be a secret world changing code hidden in it somewhere? One has to wonder. I occasionally browse through it just to see what they’ve thought up this time. And then I hit the delete all button, and it ceases to exist. I guess we’ll never know!

Things have been .. hectic around here lately. Without going into details, 2008 was a rough year, and 2009 isn’t shaping up to be much better. Hopefully it will all work out in the end, but who knows.

We had a much needed vacation this weekend. There was a big concert down in New Orleans called Voodoo Fest that a few of our friends down in Arkansas were going to and when we found out who was playing we just had to go. There was a bit of a hick up at the last minute when I discovered the flight I scheduled a month prior was for 7PM and not 7AM. Oops. To make matters worse there were no other flights available. We sucked it up though and made the fourteen hour drive all night long so we could get there on time.

The concert was great, stock full of the usual hippies and other people from random walks of life you don’t normally run into when you’re in the military. We also spent some time in the French Quarter, which was much more laid back then the last time we were there. It was pretty eye opening just seeing the coastal area. It’s still in shambles from Katrina nearly two years later. And when I say shambles I don’t mean stuff lying around here and there, I mean there are still entire neighborhoods lying around in piles completely abandoned. We drove by what used to be an upscale coastal village of home on stilts on the north shore of Lake Pontatrain and the entire thing was just swept away. Not one house remained. It was humbling.

We spent way more money than I planned and spent way too much time driving, but had a blast all the same. I wish life let us get away more often like this. No wonder rich people’s children are so happy.

Just a small update .. for all intents and purposes I’m finished designing the website at this point. As usual whenever I embark on a project like this I found myself going overboard. Well no more! All the basic functionality one could ever need is here, in a more or less easy to use layout. I see no real need to add anything else unless a reason presents itself down the road. It’s all about content now.

Along those lines I have started reloading stuff to the photo gallery, the most recent being the pictures from our trip out to Las Vegas. There’s a decent number of them as both myself and Riki had cameras and we were not afraid to use them. Enjoy!