I'm Digging The Blog Assignments!

Well here we are again! I've got another assignment in my quest to earn my bachelor's degree in marketing that requires a blog post! This is the kind of assignment I can handle, if only every course had a similar requirement.
Alas, my current course is Marketing Research or MKT 337 in technical academia slang. My goal is to chose a Fortune 500 company from an approved list and create a product idea for launch.

Well friends I have chosen PepsiCo. Those of you who know me know that I used to be a Coke man until I suffered just north of 20 kidney stones over fifteen years and since then I've drank around a gallon of water each day to stave off such nonsense. The past year however I have become an avid ice tea drinker and rarely touch any kind of pop anymore.

PepsiCo is a strong company with worldwide brand recognition. They own Lays potato chips which is important because my product will be Lays Baked Sweet Potato Chips to capitalize on this health crazed country in which we reside.

The Lays brand has been known in the last several years to have fans vote on unusual potato chip flavors such as Southern Biscuits and Gravy, Sriracha, Wasabi, and many more. They are limited edition chips and never added to the permanent product line. I have not seen a chip made by Lays out of sweet potatoes, let alone in the baked variety. I believe it would be a natural combination of sweet and savory in chip form and would fit hand in glove with how Lays has been market testing fan voted flavors to push the envelope in snack design. They've become known for adventurous flavors and this should be no different.

With the healthy main ingredient of sweet potatoes over the traditional russet and baked rather than deep fat fried, Lays Baked Sweet Potato Chips would appeal to the health conscious consumer that tends to work out rather than become couch potatoes. A large segment of the population is obsessed with healthy eating decisions but I'm sure like anyone, they crave a good chip from time to time! I can see potential value in a healthy chip!

To research this product I would look at surveys and focus group testing variations of sweet potato varieties, and see how they perform. This would be a fun endeavor indeed!

Hooked on Hallmark

Since October 27 I've been watching a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies. This is one crazy world, fast paced, angry, sometimes brutal. This world can be cold and uncaring, kicking you to the curb faster than you can get up and dust yourself off.

Hallmark hit on something, I'm not sure when the Countdown To Christmas began with the marathon of Christmas movies, a mix of premiers for the year and movies from previous years, but it's amazing.
I think of it as a lighthouse in a hurricane when the world feels like it's falling apart. Yes the story lines are simple and all formulaic but popular tropes are popular for a reason. Yes there are maybe 50 actors that reappear in all of the movies. Yes they all have happy endings. Yes they all make you feel good and most importantly they all give you an escape from the world for a bit.

Someone is grumpy at the start and happy by the time the credits roll, simple as that and you're missing out if you can't find a little joy in something simple like that.

Contentment has been a theme in my life lately. What is it to me, what will bring me a sense of peace and quiet in my head, and what steps do I take to feel contentment? You'll recall I'm working on my bachelor's degree and have been since 2015. Well I'd like to report I've got seven terms left! To break it down a little bit there are six terms in my school year so I'll finish in the first term of 2019!

After that my next goal will be to get my thirty years in at work, after that I'll be pension eligible! That will happen in June 2022. I'll have a steady and guaranteed income for the rest of my life and then I'll have a lot of options open to me! My mortgage will be paid off, most of my bills will be done and over with in fact! I'll truly be very free in a very real sense of the word!

So what do you do when you've got that kind of freedom open to you?

I don't know yet. I've been kicking around some ideas. I'd like to find contentment for sure but what is that exactly? How do you know? Is it long lasting or fleeting? I've been very content many times in my life thus far and sometimes it lasted for a long time but then it would end and would be followed by intense times of loneliness and loss. I'm somewhat content right now, just extremely busy with work and school but now I can see the very bright light at the end of the tunnel.

I'll have plenty of time after graduation to find out what I'm going to do with myself. We'll see what that looks like then but I'm excited for the future! I'm hoping for a Hallmark happy ending!

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well now, let's see what I've got to tell and what you wanna know!
I'm about a year and a half away from graduating from Southern New Hampshire University. Yeah I know it's a Northeastern university but it's got southern in the title so....I'm earning it you Yankees!

Second I've spent a beautiful day with my family and daughters! I started to brine the turkey yesterday around 9 A.M. and got it on the grill at 7 this morning. Yeah, I'm still a badass cook, don't forget it! Great Thanksgiving! Both Things 1 & 2 came up to spend it with me and their extended family. I know soon it'll be a very rare occurrence when we are all together at one time so I'm savoring all the time I can get with them.

Ok, something pretty much only two of you know, I've developed a taste for beer. Yeah I know....go figure. Ok, here's the story. Once I started taking classes in the evening I'd have a hard time destressing from my job. I'd have a hard time concentrating on the materials I needed to study so I decided to go to my go to which is a scotch with a couple of cubes of ice, however the problem started when I found out after one or two of those, well, I didn't care about homework anymore! On a particularly stiflingly hot day after work, I walked back to the coolers in my local quick shop for a coke and picked out a couple of beers instead.

Yeah, I could destress and STILL do homework after one or two beers! Well the next dilemma was to find a flavor that I could handle. If you'll recall I got very drunk/sick on beer at the tender age of 19 and rarely, and I mean VERY rarely drank beer since. So I started sampling beers and found a couple I can handle and actually enjoy!

I settled on Pabst (The beer of the blue collars, screw the hipsters!!!! They corrupt everything!) and regular Budweiser. These are pretty much what beer should taste like and after a long day at work with a long night of homework lined up, a PBR tastes as sweet as anything I've ever had before! I've been consistently having one or two so I'm able to read what I've got to read, write what I've got to write, forget where I work, and move on to the next day. 

Well, let's see what else you'd be interested in dear reader, I made a 152 song playlist on Spotify from 70's country hits, one of my favorite genres. I've told you about my dad being a truck driver and how that's what we listened to when he would take me on the road with him once in a while! Yeah, give me a 70's country song title and I'll give you the artist and likely lyrics! Test me sometime, I dare ya.

Now I'm really into watching the Hallmark channel's Countdown to Christmas marathon when I'm not working or doing homework. What a great thing Hallmark has done here. Nothing but formulaic movies with happy endings, standard tropes, and leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy by the end. What more could you really ask for? If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's really something to make you feel good when this crazy world has got you down.

The Thunder seem to perhaps be getting their chemistry together! I've been a Thunder fan since year one, I've still got a magnetic schedule inside my locker at work from the first year. It's pretty special though to me, my mom and I text back and forth during the games. Something we've really enjoyed over the years and believe me, she knows the NBA very well. She's been watching almost every NBA game she can over the past three seasons so I bought her the League Pass so she could watch any game she wanted and she does! She probably watches on average two games every evening.

I know I've not updated my blog on a regular basis, I apologize for that. I write so much for classes that I really don't want to write much else but I've been on vacation for a couple of weeks and go back to work on Monday. I've got some stuff to say. 

The Influencers of Marketing

This week one of my assignments is to read a 60 Minutes story on social media marketers and how they are a driving force in today's world. Television marketers are becoming more and more nervous as streaming services with zero commercials or full on DVR functions that allow subscribers to skip through commercials become prevalent in the cord cutting movement. This means that there is more competition for the advertising dollar in places where the message of a company can be seen.

The evolution of this has been a rise in online advertisers and people with large online followings that are called influencers. Instagram is a huge platform for influencers to drive traffic to products that they enjoy themselves or for companies that pay them for a shout out. This can drive a large amount of traffic to a site in a very economical way.

I myself purchased a marketing course for physical products and one part of the course was how to use Instagram to drive traffic to your product. For example you can have an influencer shout out your product for a hundred dollars to his followers which might number in the tens of thousands.

If your product is shown to ten thousand prospective buyers and you get only 3% in sales, that's 300 buyers for a successful ad buy. To take this a bit further in how lucrative it can be consider your product costs 1 buck and you sell it for 3. That's 900 gross sales and you subtract 300 for your cost, and 100 for the shout out for a total profit of 500 dollars. Now if you can do that every week, well that's more pay than a minimum wage (7.25 per) job working 40 hours which would be a mere 290 dollars.

Now you can play around with that simple model as much as you wish but that's how influencers work on a basic level. Now larger influencers with millions of followers are more expensive and smaller influencers in more of a niche market are cheaper. It really depends on what you want to sell and in what market your niche is in.

I firmly believe it's too early in this evolution to predict where this type of marketing will wind up and how larger companies will find a way to move away from an uncertain future in TV to an increasingly online form of entertainment. It'll be an interesting evolution to watch and pay attention to being a marketing student and all!

Interactive TV

Where once a giant stood and spoke to you while you listened, now you can have a dialogue. Back in the day radio was king. Radio was how everyone was connected and kept informed of what was happening around the world.

You could hear today's news as it happened in some cases like the Hindenburg disaster which you can still listen to today. Even during the great depression the radio industry was strong and FDR started his Fireside Chats to talk directly to the American people without the media filter.

Then TV came along and a new form of entertainment was born. You could watch the people that were once just voices to you. Networks expanded their reach to cover the entire continental U.S. and eventually there was a TV in every home. Then the next big revolutions, color TV, cable TV, satellite TV, HDTV, and then smart TVs with streaming services built in.

What's left? Interactive TV. There have been some good experiments in refining the interactive TV experience since the widespread roll out of broadband internet. Back over a decade ago I remember watching the first season of Big Brother online and chatting with other viewers about what was happening. That was a great experience and then they started charging a subscription price and I lost interest quickly. It was great though as you could switch between cameras and see unfiltered what was happening in the house.

Since then (and thanks to an extended writer's strike) reality TV has found a place in American pop culture, much to my dismay and is here to stay. Networks started to build shows from the ground up with interactivity in mind coupled with the internet experience. Then then the next big evolution happened, social media became a thing. From the early days of MySpace to Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, producers started to utilize social media to have an effect in how the show would happen.

The Voice, a show I have never nor will never watch, was one such show. The producers coordinate with the talent, who then are interactive with the audience and on social media. All I really know about The Voice is that the chick that sings for No Doubt is dating a country singer and they are both judges. I've seen commercials and I'm more than familiar with the pop culture effect of the show and I can see that it's one of the more popular reality TV shows on today, where once American Idol reigned as king.

So if someone like me, that has no interest at all in such a show knows about it a little bit, they are doing a pretty good job. I do however have an interest in watching the evolution of entertainment and how interactive it is. After actually reading about what The Voice does that has pioneered a lot of interactivity, I'm not sure a media form exists yet that would be better. It seems to be the prime example of what to do right.

The Voice does so much with it's audience such as the instant save in which consumers are encouraged to tweet for their favorite. This engages audiences and creates the interactivity audiences will expect going forward.

I was once a firm believer in the idea that you didn't want to see your celebs in real life, you'd eventually learn that they were just people like you except everyone knew their name and everyone had a different expectation of what they'd be like in real life. All of which no one could live up to which lead to disappointment.

Today, if a celeb isn't interactive with their audience, you are disappointed. Tomorrow if a show isn't interactive with it's audience, you'll turn it off and find one where you are part of the experience. Where this leads in scripted shows is unclear but it's an evolution away from trying and a couple of failures away from succeeding and becoming groundbreaking.

Eventually you might see actual shows built for social media exclusively where audiences are the participants. Twitter for example, might give a task and then people tweet back their results of such a task for prizes. That platform has yet to be invented but you can imagine there are some producers out there that have been inventing and trying to make their shows as interactive as possible.

I for one, look forward to such a day!

My Digital Life

Long time no blog!
For those of you who know me know that since early 2015 I've been going to college to get my degree, which I changed from game design to marketing. This is going to wind up being a long post so strap in dear readers. My plan was to learn a skill for my second career so I can supplement my pension in 2022 and quit my job of (at this time) 25 years.

I'll be getting into my assignment after I let all of my readers know how I got to where I got to;)

I started at Full Sail, which turned out being a fraud of a "school." Full Sail started out fairly promising for the first four classes which they call the core four. There was a lot of instructor interaction, live lectures, and questions were answered promptly.

After that it started to slide downhill. 99% of the material the instructors used was found on YouTube and you were given a discounted subscription to Lynda.com. No text books, digital or otherwise. Very little reading in fact was assigned. If you couldn't see it for free like the rest of the world on YouTube then I guess they figured you didn't need it. I got fed up with lazy instructors, bad assignments, finals that had nothing to do with whatever material I had watched on YouTube and a general attitude of self importance due to their hype machine.

So after looking around I found a better school, a not for profit school, that accepted all of my credits I had earned the past year and moved onto greener pastures. Full Sail was four times more expensive per month than my current university is (Southern New Hampshire U) per term! Yeah, it's crazy expensive.

I transferred and started classes early last year! After a few terms and getting into the game design part even more I found that it really wasn't the skill I was looking to learn. It's a super competitive market, pay is fairly low to medium, and you generally had to work at a company with resources to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. Not exactly what I was wanting to do.

So I did some more research and found a lucrative field that was flexible enough to be used in a variety of ways! Marketing with a focus on social/digital media. This will be a degree I can use on my own and create digital products, I can contract with someone and work anywhere I choose as long as I have my laptop and internet connection. I can do any of a number of things where this degree will apply for me and supplement my future pension handsomely!

My first assignment is to create a blog, how little my fellow classmates know I've written this one over the span of more than a decade and even though it was dormant, I felt it might be time to awaken it once again, perhaps briefly, perhaps as I used to blog. A daily basis before work.

Let's see here:
1. What sites/applications do I visit most often? Describe them.
I use my email application the most on a daily basis. I check it constantly for new emails on a project I've been working on since February and is still in work.

Facebook was a site I used constantly until my divorce. I would look at it all day on my phone to see who was doing what. I caught onto the fact that it was nothing more than a voyeuristic practice to compare your life with your friend's lives to see who was winning, who was happy, who was sad, and who was getting by. It turned into a source of anxiousness over time and I quit cold turkey. It's still active but I rarely log onto it. So you can say I have a very negative reaction to Facebook and believe it'll eventually be replaced by something else in this digital trending world. Will it go the way of MySpace? I doubt it but I suppose it could.

I use the Twitter app a lot during the day to catch up on news from work. In the evenings I'm usually on the SNHU blackboard for a few hours per night. I try to do two to three hours of homework each night and make sure my assignments are good before I turn them in.

MMORPGs were a huge part of my life for maybe 12 years, from Everquest to WOW and dozens of games in between. That was a social way of adventuring together and forming "friendships" through a common cause and platform. Yeah at the end of the day none of it was real but for someone that could use social interaction without being social, it was perfect.

The shiny parts of the MMO have kind of faded since their heyday in the late 90's and 2000's as gamers have latched onto more niche games on the mobile platform and for a cheaper to free cost. They aren't required to wrap up a large amount of time to complete something and can quit anytime they need to and put it back into their pocket.

Digital media in marketing today is very much a growth industry and is practically dawn before a golden afternoon. Companies, particularly gaming companies, worked out a free model to play their games. However they do offer you ways to enhance your game playing time by offering powerups, time savers, extra lives, bonus levels, card packs, or any of a thousand different ways to support the game makers and the overhead of running the game itself. I've found that I've spent more money of "free" games than games I purchased outright! That's not uncommon either as one of my close friends and gaming buddies, Abostang has done the same!

This was a brilliant stroke of marketing! It is similar to the drug dealer's pitch, the first one is free! This also translates to subscription services. Remember when Netflix was just DVDs by mail and you got six with a coupon when you bought a new DVD player? Remember when Hulu was a way to catch up on the network shows from the previous evening? Now look at them! For a reasonable price per month, you have access to more entertainment than you could watch in a lifetime! Updated each and every month as well!

Overall once you learn that if you just enjoy a medium for what it is, the brief time passer, the movie in the minivan to keep the kids quiet, or the salvation from the realities of the daily grind, you find that you can live with it and your decisions and move on when you get bored with whatever is your distraction at the time. 

So there I was in 2015. I had watched some streaming series on another Netflix binge and had finished it in record time. I asked myself if this is what I wanted to do every evening, come home, binge some show, go to bed, go to work, and do it again with weekends being reserved for the serious binging time. I had been a constant volunteer at my local community theatre for over seven years at that point and found myself burned out. No, I needed a challenge, to build my mind back up again instead of letting it atrophy in sitcoms.

What would I do....what indeed.....

I Hate Being An Ex Anything

So there I am, I'm watching YouTube videos and happen to run across videos I've shot myself. Yeah that happens when you log into your account.
I was watching Colder Weather and It's Been A While videos in their various forms, live, on screen lyrics, official, well you get the point when it dawned on me. Being an ex sucks.

An ex employee, an ex high school student, an ex youth. Yeah some people always think the future is brighter while some think of the past as the good ole' days.

I'm both.

I think the future is bright and I also long for the good ole' days but being an ex doesn't lend itself easily to either. It more easily lends itself to the present, the time being but without planning or without thought to the past.

My hopes lie in the future, my memories relish the past. One of the best times I've ever had was the big "Framily Christmas" I shared with my loved ones at Amy's house. That picture of us all on the staircase was truly a magnificent moment.

And yet, here I am, looking to the future but longing for the past. I cherish my daughters and tell them nearly every day I love them and that they make me one proud daddy. I look forward to holding my grandchildren and I look forward to many things that I can't even fathom at the moment.

I've got a tenacity in me, I'm a natural non-conformist. When someone tells me something, something inside my head asks an opposite question of "What if?" Most of the time I never voice it out loud but when it's overwhelming I do.

So yeah, sometimes I hate being an ex but there are things I'll never be an ex at.
I'm glad you know those things.

Learning To Live Again

First of all I might as well cut to the chase. I'm now a divorced man. Any of you that know the both of us know this or have strongly suspected as much.

Second, I'd like to ask any of you that know the both of us to please not treat us any differently than you did while we were together. It wasn't our faults and it was both of our faults, we've both cried and accepted blame so please love us both as you did before this news. You won't hear me say a bad word towards her and if you do then please call me on it. I mean it.

Third, I've still got the two most incredible daughters in the world! Thing 1 has enrolled in college and when she walked across the graduation stage, well there wasn't a prouder daddy in the whole place, I promise!

Thing 2 is enjoying her time in Japan and without a doubt learning so much more through her experiences than most people her age. (I almost said the "T" word, teen, which she takes great offense to being referred to)

I love them deeply and without reservation. They've taught me so much about being a dad and are both truly the best things that have ever happened to me and I'm always grateful to her for sharing her daughters with me and that's the God's honest truth.

What's in my future? Well as I borrowed liberally from Garth Brooks in the title it's pretty accurate. I've got very little natural talent when it comes to writing or making things up so I've had to borrow the sentiment from a real artist with the creativity I lack but I've made some plans and just this week took the first step in that new journey.  These plans are pretty broad and will take a few months to get accomplished but they will. I've come to some sort of peace, albeit uneasy at times, with myself.

I can't promise to update this blog as often as I did before but I'm going to try to get back into the morning writing groove again. It's a healthy habit that I've long been out of and I need that sort of outlet again for a while. It also plays a part of my future plans so I really need to get it going again.

It's a good habit, a healthy habit and I felt sharper when I did it daily.

Good Game

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday and while it looked like a blow out to start with the game turned around after a power failure and the Niners made it close. I turned it during the half time show as Beyonce was taking the stage, the puppy bowl seemed much more interesting and was.

Commercial wise it was decent. My favorite was a Paul Harvey essay on farmers during a truck commercial. I miss Paul Harvey, he seemed to be the everyman of his day. If Normal Rockwell was the painter of common everyday life then Paul Harvey was the philosopher of the common man.

I'm sure you can find the commercial on You Tube if not many of his essays. The one Rest of the Story that always sticks out to me was his story about Helen Keller who was a dedicated communist. We happened to have been studying Helen Keller in school during that time and I recorded it and brought it in to listen to. It had a shocking effect of disbelief as I recall. The teacher really didn't want to discuss it, I suspect she might have been a communist sympathizer. It was the only class I ever flunked in my school career.

I had forgotten all about that until I heard his voice during the commercial. Wow, what a memory. Funny how they come and go like that. 

On The Way

Alright, the beta readers have been secured.
I hired a graphic artist after Thing 2 simply didn't have the time to do the work.
He happens to be the son of one of my cousins. So I'll still be paying family to handle the work. He's pretty darn good too!

When my beta readers give me their critiques I'll evaluate them and rewrite the first draft to a draft that's much better and ready for publishing! I should be able to have it ready by March if things go well.

This will be a fun chapter to write, so to speak and I'm excited about a few other stories I've got rolling around in my head!

I'm Back!

That's right, my project has come to fruition recently and now I've got the time and energy to blog once again. I stopped blogging months ago for a reason. I was going to write a novel.

I did.

I didn't have time in the mornings to write both a novel and come up with a daily blog post. To start with I purchased a book called 90 Day Novel: Unlocking The Story Within.

Following it to the letter, well for the most part, I wrote away. An extra hour each morning, mostly anyway. When I was writing heavy I could hit the two thousand word mark but mostly I averaged about thirteen hundred words a morning.

I'm aiming for the self published world as I'm not planning on making a career out of this and it's really the easiest way for family and friends to access my work should they be so kind.

I mean I could set at home and email out Word .doc files but really who's going to be interested other than family and friends? Most of them will be kind enough to download it and maybe read a chapter or two before giving up thus politely saying they enjoyed it.

Believe me I've got no illusions as to the worth of this novel however it's a story I wanted to tell. This will never be confused with the work of a real author, believe me. It's a lot of pop culture bantering and a fantastical setting that I feel I'd be comfortable in.

The characters are what I spent the most time developing and the story really takes a back seat to them. After rereading it I can say the ending felt a bit tacked on so I rewrote a bit of it and added some more stuff. I'm not sure if it worked well or not but that's not really up to me, I can say I'm happy with it though and really couldn't end it any other way with my characters and the situation they were in. Well in my view anyway, you may see it differently.

I've also got no illusions about the genre I chose. The Zombie Apocalypse genre is almost as overcrowded as the Vampire genre was in the mid-90's.

The format is always the same though:
1. Unassuming, innocent day.
2. People get sick.
3. Sick people bite more people.
4. Survivors struggle to find refuge and safety.

With very few variations that's how they all go and I've read more than my fair share so I decided to add a few slight alterations to my story without making it totally self aware and thus a satirical joke.

There are good parts and bad parts of this story but it's my first attempt at serious writing so as a first effort I know there's plenty and plenty of room to grow my skills and develop a better style of writing.

So why isn't it available right now? Easy, it's not formatted yet. Honestly it should be easy but for some reason I'm not grasping it. Once it is formatted though and I've secured cover art for it then it'll be uploaded and published!

I'm not sure how long that will take but it'll happen when it's ready to happen.

So in short, I'm blogging again. I'm not sure if it'll be daily as it once was as I'm really out of the habit but I'll do my best to keep it interesting.

By the way, if you'd like to offer your time to become a beta reader and offer feedback on the weaker points of the story. Email me, you're hired!

Amazing Experience!

My Wife pulled off a huge success today! She took a group of untested teens and younger to a theatre contest and they brought down the house!

They had three judges there, they were famous for theatre success and had Broadway directing experience. One judge had taken his show to this same contest and wound up winning the international competition.

After performing your show then the judges come down while the cast sits on the front row and they give you show notes. My wife was called "An excellent director", "Congratulations on a wonderful and fun show", and had practically everything good to say to our cast.

Let me set this scene a little, the show that went on before ours and after ours didn't have such kind remarks.

Our show was interrupted several times by thundering applause and laughter! This show that My Wife, GhoulGal, and Teehee put together was simply amazing! When you consider that we rehearsed in the lobby, didn't have a full cast and barely had enough to put on the show we could while doubling up some roles, rehearsed with lights for the very first time yesterday on the competition stage and that was only the second time of rehearsing on stage period, the limited experience at least half of the kids had while for a few it was their very first experience at all, and this was done during summer camp season! The full cast wasn't there for rehearsal four or five of the six weeks!

When you consider all of that AND add that our teens were competing against regular season adult shows they simply rocked this show! No other way to say it! They did their director's proud!

I'm very proud of my wife for taking the time to bring this show to the stage, it'll be an experience that will not soon be forgotten by me or the cast! Sunday we find out what if anything we've won. I feel great about our chances of bringing home some excellent awards for our troupe!

First Friday Cabaret

Yes this is one of my infrequent blog posts while my project is underway for the next three months.
I have to blog special occasions and this one is special!

My Baby and Piano Genius rocked cabaret last night! To a standing room only audience too! They played for nearly a full hour and had massive ovations after every song and music number! I was so proud of both of them and especially the song that Thing 2 joined them on, Louisana. Her violin cried while My Honey provided the soulful voice and Piano Genius provided the core of the sad song.

The story is about a flood in Louisiana in 1927 and six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. Such a deep and soulful song that really brought the house down!

The night was amazing! They did so well!

The Blog Posts Will Be Sporadic

Over the next few months the blog will be very sporadic. I'm working on something in the mornings now and that'll take away from my blogging for now. Over the past month they've been pretty hit and miss anyway and that's one of the reasons.

So for now something else demands my morning attention and I might go a week or more without blogging. I'll return to my regular blogging schedule eventually though!

Monday Monday

Here we go again folks! A short work week for the wonderful Fourth of July! The day in which our Founding Fathers decided to break away from England and venture forth upon a new path of governing!

Come on Wednesday! Looking forward to a day off in the middle of the week! Yeah it'll be hot at work today, I'll have a lot to do and I'll sweat so much that I'll feel grimy and dirty for days but I'll make it through, come home after and enjoy my Honey this evening!

That's enough to get me through today!

Last night My Honey saved the Theatre from burning down! She was there when things went Bang! It seemed the AC unit had blown up so she went around and checked the breakers and then called the power company. Good thing! With the heat the way it is I wouldn't be surprised if the power grid downtown just went up in smoke!

I'll have to talk to her today about what happened as I was sound asleep when she got home from rehearsal.

It's Running!

The pool is running away! The filter works fine, the new pump is a work horse, and now I'm filling up to the right amount! I'll go chemical shopping today and then it's all done! The triple digit heat will mean nothing anymore!

The girls and My Honey are happy and that's what is important:) There is now a way to cool off in the hot sun and feel refreshed! That's the goal!

The Pool Days

Today will mark the first time in roughly ten years my pool in the back yard will be operational. Fully operational. It's nearly full now. My neighbor happens to work on pools for a living and this year we actually have the funds to do some minor repairs and get a pump and get the filter going.

The last pump was pretty old and locked up and after looking at the prices I decided it wasn't worth it. However my neighbor happens to have a newer pump and we just purchased it. He'll be over when it starts to cool off and we'll get things lined out!

The pool has been shocked and via a submerge able pump the water is circulating as it's filling. During the hundred plus degree days to come it'll be very nice!

So the pool days are now upon us!

Chief Justice Roberts

As we made it through this triple digit week we now find ourselves on the verge of a weekend! Yeah it'll be a busy weekend but you know something? It's forty eight hours off and not at work! My oven of a shop will stay unused for the next two days and I won't be there!

Well yesterday something pretty big happened. Obamacare was upheld by the supreme court. Chief Justice John Roberts was the surprise swing vote in this case. A shock to everyone however as this article points out this might have been a crazy brilliant gambit that will allow everything to happen just as the conservatives want to happen and boil liberal frogs one degree at a time.

I'd say if Chief Justice Roberts thought along these lines then he without a doubt set the table for conservative win after conservative win for decades. What's even more important to remember is that the next president will be selecting two if not three justices in the next eight years. The dreaded Ginsburg is hanging in there but she will retire in the next eight years, Stephen Bryer is in his seventies. Kennedy is in his mid seventies as well and he usually sides with the liberal wing. The third could very well be a conservative judge in either Thomas or Scalia.

It's not all bad, and if this is accurate as I said above, it could be political gold for the long term. Obama is now forced to call his mandate a tax and that tax is now leveled on mainly lower and middle income families that can't afford to purchase health insurance. It won't bother those that have insurance or those that can afford it in the least. It's a gigantic tax though on those that can't afford health insurance and now it's unavoidable that Obama has to run on that.

Today Is The Day

This is the day that will make or break the present president of the United States. Today his legacy will be determined and he'll go down as a Carter or a better Carter (who by the way has been criticizing Obama about the drone strikes, if you have Jimmy Cater criticizing you about something you know you're doing something right) either way Obama will be compared to that failed presidency.

Today the Affordable Care Act will be ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court. No one knows how much will be struck down right now but if the individual mandate is struck down then the whole thing will fail. Obama will be wearing his bruises for a while as he heads into his campaign trail rhetoric.

Believe me, he and his cronies believe it'll stay intact. I believe it'll at least be gutted enough to where it'll be ineffective if not outright struck down. Then there is no way in the world where this congress will get something passed before the election. If the law stands then it'll be repealed if Romney is elected. Well that's what he says anyway. I really don't trust Romney that much and think he might wind up as Obama light but time will tell.

Regardless of what happens today it'll be interesting and it'll make a difference one way or the other for every single American. Whether you'll be forced to buy health insurance or pay a fine if you don't. Today is the day that I feel Obama will go up in smoke and have a hard time recovering from.

Bring It Heat!

One of my coworkers and I might have discovered the perfect summer lunch meal. Seven layer dip.
It's easy to make, filling, and very tasty! You don't have to cook it, it's served cold and in my hot oven of a shop that's the best thing about eating something cold!

I made up a dip last night, it's actually eight layers though: refried beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, cheese, olives, jalapenos, and for a topper, bacon bits! Yes, this will feed me the rest of the week and possibly into the hottest times of the summer!

I'm ready now for what the summer brings! I was just about sandwiched out anyway. This will be good for a long time though!