Vacation Journal - Day 5

Wednesday 6/20

I slept late again today. It was between 9:30 and 10:00 before I got up; crazy long for me. Walked out onto the dock this morning, and I saw a dolphin really close up. He was close enough for me to hear him breath out when he surfaced. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera, so no pictures.

Later, my wife and I went for a walk. We saw what might have been a hawk. I’m not really sure what it was, but it made a noise I’ve never really heard before. He was smart whatever it was, as we positioned ourselves to see it better, it moved, so I never could get a good view with either the camera or binoculars.

After my in-laws came back from their jaunt downtown, my wife and I decided to head out (without our boy) and do a little shopping out on Tybee Island again. We really like that little island. We did some shopping, had a light lunch, walked out onto the fishing pier, did some more fishing and even played a game of pool. Afterward, we decided to go back to the North Beach Grill from yesterday, and have a drink and look at the ocean. We might have stayed where we were at, but between the rain and the crowds of tourists, we decided the other place would be better. Plus, it would give me a chance to take a good picture of the lighthouse.

We took our time there, and just sorta soaked it all in. It was really nice, and the time was all too quickly slipping away, and we will have to get back in the van, and leave, back to Oklahoma, back to the daily grind, the jobs, responsibilities, and everything else. So, we took some time taking pictures to help us remember.

We came back, and I got probably the best view of a shrimp boat so far as it was anchored not far from our dock.

It was then time for dinner. We had some good shrimp, red potatoes, corn on the cob, summer sausage, and some crabs I caught today (about 7 or so). It was good, scratch that, it was real good!

We sat down, and then planned out route home. We decided not to go back the way we came, so the plan now is to head down to Jacksonville, Florida and then over to New Orleans. Then head home from there. We’ll spend the night somewhere on the way back. But at this moment, not sure where that somewhere will be.

Vacation Journal - Day 4

Tuesday 6/19

What a day! We got up and around, and headed to the Pirate’s House Restaurant for lunch, where we knew that we would meet, Captain Jack Sparrow. We wouldn’t tell my boy that he was going to be there, that was our surprise, but we did say we were headed to the Pirate’s House to eat. And there were all sorts of real pirates that have once been in that place. He was intrigued. Well, he noticed the Captain, and was excited, but kept his excitement down. Anyway, Captain Jack stopped by and chatted with us, and that was wonderful. I couldn’t tell if me or my boy was having a better time. When he found out we were from Oklahoma, he said, “Ahhh, foreigners then. If I’d known that, I’d not’ve sat down.” In the way that only Captain Jack could do, then he stood up, and left.

He came back, sat down, and chatted with us for a while. It was excellent!

Later, when we got back to the house, he was talking to his Nanny, and said, “I didn’t know Captain Jack was real.” Too good!

After dinner, we went down the river front and did a little site seeing and some shopping. Except the fact my boy wanted to come back here so he could play the silly PS2 that was here (we didn’t bring it), it was really nice. I finally threatened him that if he brought up the PS2 again, he’d not play it for the week, or be able to even watch the other kids. The complaining stopped!

Today, we also did some crabbin’. We managed to catch at least 12 crabs. Tomorrow, there is supposed to be some sort of crab stew/soup, or something. We’ll see how that goes.

On one of the tips out to the dock to check on our traps, I FINALLY saw the dolphins that I’ve heard everyone talk about. Seems they come into the river and eat the shrimp that have come out of the marsh. It was cool!

As I sit here and write this, it is raining. I like the rain. Always have. There is a good chance of thunderstorm tomorrow, so we’ll have to see if we’ll get to go to the ocean again tomorrow or not.

Vacation Journal - Day 3

Monday 6/18

Today, my wife and father-in-law made breakfast! It was so good! Scrambled eggs, home made biscuits, and sausage! That’s how every day should start out I really think!

My wife and I went for a walk, and looked around, and here are a few more pictures.

We spent the rest of the morning, trying to figure out what we should do. We finally decided we’d go to the ocean and play today. So, we got around, and headed to Dollar General for the things you forget to pack. You know, beach towels, sun screen, beach toys, that sort of thing. We then head to a grocery store (next door to save time) and buy drinks. Next stop, Payless to buy me some beach going shoes. Didn’t get the (payless version of ) Crock flip-flops since they were not in my size, but did get a cool pair. And my wife got the black pair of crock-flops that she really wanted for Mother’s day. (I got here the white ones cause I didn’t realize she specifically asked for black.

Anyway, we are now done shopping, so it’s off to the beach!

We have a great time! Shoot, saying we had a great time is an understatement! The sand was a fine grain sand, so it was nice. There were people around, but not so many you couldn’t have fun. My boy even found a few kids to play with.

We all got to play together, and that was what mattered. I even got a chance to get out and take some pictures. I wished we were there at sun-up instead of sun set cause some of the pictures I wanted to take were backlit. But I still had some wonderful pictures!

After we finally left, we decided to find a place to eat, and have some sea food. I mean, we ARE at the beach. We ended up eating at a little place right next to where we parked, the North Beach Grill.

We asked for their specials, and they started rolling off steak specials. We informed the waiter that we were from Oklahoma. We have cattle. What do they have in the seafood category? He chuckled and proceeded with other specials. We started out with some chips and salsa. And after just that, my boy said we should eat here for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I couldn’t really blame him, cause it was good. We ordered our food. And while waiting on it, my boy got up to go to the bathroom, took about 3 steps, stopped, and projectile vomited!!! It was so gross, and I felt so bad! Luckily, the people closest to it (which was on the far side of us) had a little one, so I’m sure it wasn’t the worse they had ever seen. I felt so bad though. I carried my boy to the restroom, and checked on him. He said he was fine, and wanted to stay and eat (our food hadn’t even gotten there yet) so I had him wash his hands and face and to finish using it. Everyone there was excellent, especially our waiter who donned on some rubber gloves, got a bucked of water, and proceeded to clean up the mess! We had at least 2 of the staff stop by and check on our boy. That really impressed me. We still have not clue what caused it. My guess is some sea water in the belly, followed by sweet tea and chips and HOT salsa.

Dinner came, and it was wonderful! My boy had a burger and fries. I had a crab cake sandwich, and my beautiful wife had a sautéed shrimp dinner. There isn’t much to say about dinner. It was just excellent. Like my son, I would love to go back there before we leave and have more, but part of the fun and exciting part of vacations, is going and doing things you’ve not done before. (Second vacations are for repeat visits!!!)

As we left, I turned, and the moon, mars/Venus and the lighthouse on Tybee Island were all there a-glow! It was too cool. I tried taking a picture of it, but I’m not real happy with they way they turned out, but this one isn’t too bad.

As we left, we made sure we had our camera out, cause we saw a sign coming into the island that is unlike any sign us land-lovers have ever seen, and we just HAD to get it’s picture.

Vacation Journal - Day 2

Sunday 6/17

When we finally stopped for breakfast in Alabama and I was ready! When the guy asked me what I wanted to drink, I just sat there looking at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

Later, after my 3 hours of sleep, I was riding along, and we kept seeing what looked like the arms that come down in front of train tracks. We couldn’t figure out what they were for, well, at one of the stops we took I asked. They use it to block traffic when evacuating for hurricanes. Made since, just not something you see in Oklahoma.

We got here around 5:30ish or so on Sunday evening. Just in time for dinner. First, I’d like to say thanks to Dave for loaning me his GPS system; we had very little problems finding this place with it (just a bit but that was because of road construction that it didn’t know about, which was around the town we ate breakfast in).

Anyway, off that tangent. We ate, and then I walked around the plantation a bit. Here is where we are at.

Vacation Journal - Day 1

Saturday 6/16

My boy was up with a coughing fit Friday night/Saturday morning, so we were up with that. Then he woke up around 8:30 on Saturday feeling what seemed refreshed. I got some packing done, and went with my mother-in-law to get the van. My boy and I did some shopping, hit the library, and had some lunch (not necessarily in that order). I got a chance to bake some chocolate chip cookies, and then my wonderful wife and I loaded up the van with the majority of our stuff, and I took it over to my mother-in-laws so she could load her stuff and come and get us after Vacation Bible School. Then home I went and laid down for about an hour. Managed about a 30 minute sleep out of that hour of lying down, then it was time to get around and ready for VBS.

After VBS, we called my in-laws, and I got a shower and cleaned up by the time they got to the house. We finished loading up the van and we got off around 8:30-9:00 or so. Our first stop was the airport. My wife had to fill out some papers to be added as an additional driver to the van. I took her license earlier in the day, but without here signature, that didn’t do any good. After that, QT for some caffeine, cause I’m going to have a very long night ahead of me, and I didn’t get as much sleep Friday night as I liked or as long of a nap as I would have liked.

For the most part, I didn’t have as much trouble as I was afraid of, especially considering how tired I was feeling at only 11:30 as everyone else was starting to dose off.

Back from Vacation

We're back from vacation.

We had a really good time. I've written posts while I was away, but didn't have access to post them, so I'll be posting them each day (two posts at most).

Happy Anniversary my Love

Today is my 9th wedding anniversary, and I love my wife more today than when we were married!

I love our anniversaries. It's cool to look back. As I was telling my dearest love it's hard to believe we have been married for 9 years.

She is such a wonderful woman! I'm so blessed to have her as my wife.

wedding picture

picture taken a couple weeks ago at our daughters graduation.

Happy Anniversary my Love! I love you.

Cheap Movies

I found out that some movie theaters have specials during the summer.

The Owasso 10 is one of those theaters. For $9/person, you can get a season pass. The run the same movie every wed-fri, and there are 10 movies scheduled. If you don't want to go every week, you can buy tickets there for $2/person.
Click the link for movies and times.

The AMC 20 has a free movie, every wednesday from June 27 to August 15 (except for July 4th)
Click the link for movies and times.

To see more theaters, check out this.

YEA!

We voted today on a new pastor at church.

I'll give more details later. Just excited.

picasa flickr

100_5546.JPG
Originally uploaded by jarrard@swbell.net

Today, I found a plug-in for Picasa that lets you upload pictures to Flickr.

http://picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net/

If you like Flickr and Picasa you'll probably love this!

First day of summer break

Today was my boy's first day of summer break!

He slept late, laid around the house in his underwear, and by 11 he was "bored". hehe

More Mozilla

As many of you know, I love Firefox. I use it for about 95% of my web browsing (that other 5% is at work where they can't manage to write apps that work on anything but IE).

Anyway, I recently got Mozilla's Thunderbird for an email client at home. I have Outlook, and have the 3 email accounts I check and my wifes on it. However, every time I went to send an email, I'd forget to change from the default account (my wifes) to mine, so it always looked like she was emailing people.

So, to reduce confusion (mainly for the people that never understood why my wife was emailing them), I downloaded Thunderbird. And so far I like it.

While looking at add-on's and the like tonight, I saw reference to 2 other projects. The SeaMonkey Project and Calendar Project.

The SeaMonkey Project is "Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application."

The Calendar Project is broken into two, Sunbird and Lightning
Sunbird is a stand alone calendar program while Lightning embeds the calendar into Thunderbird.

I installed Lightning tonight, and linked it to my Google Calendars with a add-on I found called Provider.

It appears that all will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

So, don't have (or want) Microsoft Outlook, you might want to give one of these a try.

Flag Ceremony

The Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Brownies were all invited to help take down and fold the Service men's flags at Floral Haven. This is a yearly event.

My boy and I went with about 5 other boys from our pack (and their parents) to help.

We got there, got signed in, and had the event explained to us. We lined up, and had a parade to the center. (on the route there, I found my grandpa's flag) Once we reached the center, Taps was played. Then the flags in the circle around the main large flag were lowered and folded. While this occurred, I took my boy back to see my grandpa's flag. Which he was very interested to see.

After the main flag was lowered, all the scouts were released to start lowering and folding the flags.

Here are some pictures.

Grandpa's Flag

Graduation!!!

First off,

WOO HOO!

Ok, now that that is out of my system...

I am so proud of my daughter. She made it to graduation. I wasn't always sure she was going to make it, but she did. There was much blood, sweat and tears leading up to this day.

She was so nervous tonight it was funny. It was a good thing she didn't have to give a speech or she might have died!

We had a really good time. My wife and I made much noise as they called her name and she walked across the stage!

It took me forever to find her after graduation, but I finally did thanks to my wife who called me and lead me to them.

We came home for some homemade salsa, guacamole, and the like. We also had some cake which my mom made and decorated. It was really good.

1 down, 1 to go (in 11 years).

Some Senior Pictures

Ok, here are a couple of senior pictures that I thought I would go ahead and post. I was waiting for my second batch to come in, but figured in my cousin complained in my last post that there wasn't any pictures, I'd go ahead and show you two.

(Click for larger images)

Happy Mother's Day

I wanted to wish all the mothers that read this a Happy Mother's Day.

And for those of you who aren't mothers, go make your mothers Mother's Day happy :)

Senior Pictures

Yesterday, we got my daughters Senior pictures taken.

I'm not sure there is anything more difficult than narrowing down pictures to get.

You'll see some soon.

USS Batfish

Saturday, the Cub Scouts went the USS Batfish Volunteer day. To help clean and get the Batfish ready for a reunion of the crew that had served on the Batfish during WWII.

The Batfish was a WWII Diesel Submarine. We were lucky enough to get a tour of it from one of the men that had served on the Batfish. The cub scouts really had a good time. We got there late because of a soccer game (which was pretty good), but we made it for lunch and the tours. And afterward, most people were headed home, but I made sure we got some work so my boy could work.

This was not only a Batfish memorial, but also a war memorial as they had other items there.

If you have never been, I'd urge you to go. I went once as a kid/teenager (don't remember how old I was), and this was my second time there.

Garden

I did some more work in my garden the past 2 weekends.

Last weekend, I re-planted tomatoes, bell peppers, and jalapeño peppers that the late freeze we had killed.

This weekend, I was able to plant my corn. In a couple more weeks, I'll plant my pole beans and squash. Later this week, I hope to plant some cucumbers.

Yesterday and today, I picked 2 strawberries. But unfortunately, the birds and/or bugs got to enjoy the them, instead of me.

And finally, I noticed that my blackberry bush had blooms on it tonight. They weren't there yesterday when I mowed.

Beam us up Scotty

What kind of nerd fan would I be if I didn't bring this up.

Today, (Saturday), some of actor James Doohan's (Scotty from Star Trek) ashes will be launched into space.

You can ready more about it here.