Three Words Back...

Another Month That Got Away

September is like an old girlfriend.  There's proof enough that she was here for a while, but now it feels like she was gone in a day.  And there is no rewind.  No slow or pause to savor the last few fleeting moments.  Just a new day and a new calendar page.

And I love this time of year, even if it's all but a placeholder for the winter.  It's gone in the time it takes for a few leaves to turn red and gold on their way out of the tree.  I love the changing but wish the transition wouldn't end.

So long, Septiembre.  See you in 2009.

YouTube Tuesdays: The Great Cornholio

Heh. Heh heh. Heh.  I said "tube." Heh. Hehehehheeheheheh.

A Weekend With The Fam (...and about that lion picture)

What I wanted: a picture of me on top of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square.

What I got: a few pictures (and maybe video? I forget) of me unsuccessfully climbing up the back of a large lion statue.

As the Rolling Stones so famously put it, you can't always get what you want.

I just wrapped up a great two and a half days in west Texas with the fam.  Highlights included:

• Lunch with the kids at their school.  Elementary school lunch is exactly how I remembered it.
• Taking the kids to the fair.  Funnel cake, the tilt-a-whirl, bumper cars...good times.
• Forrest explaining how the tilt-a-whirl uses centrifical force to make it spin.  Or something like that.  I didn't catch it all.  I'm a year away from asking him how my cell phone works.
• Reagan taking suggestions all the way home for names of the stuffed animals we / she won.
• Hanging out with my mom, who took it easy on me and only bought 500 lbs of bird seed for me to unload from the feed store.

And now I'm in small town, Louisiana and starting my last new branch of 2008 first thing tomorrow morning.  Which means I need some sleep soon.  Like two hours ago.

i wanna be a lion...

  So when I got the call from David (text message actually, all the trendy kids are doing it these days) asking me if I wanted to be his special guest blogger, I knew that this would be no small task.  I do have a blog of my own, but it's just a jumble of sarcasm, restlessness and draining of emotion about dull things like mortgages, work and family.  Its never something I obsess over.  Blogging.  My blog.  Ummm yeah, I just admitted I obsessed over writing this blog.

And in trying to figure out what my blog subject would be about, I racked my brain (the internet) on blogworthy things.  First I headed over to Starbucks.com to read "The Way I See It" quotes.  While they were inspiring, they weren't really blog worthy.  Then I headed over to Mental Floss.  Perhaps I could find some exciting fact or piece of trivia that could wow all of his readers into thinking I was a genius.  Still, there was nothing there that really hit me as the right subject for my one shot to speak to David's readers (in his mind, his legions of fans).  I combed Wikipedia (the featured picture of the day, sadly, was a picture of a European Paper Wasp.  Not exactly inspirational), GraphJam (funny, but what can I say about a graph), David's old blog postings.  And while they took me through this long long stroll down memory lane, I still wasn't truly inspired. 

Then I thought about meeting David, times we shared, conversations we laughed over.  David and I met a little more than three years ago.  On our first meeting, he was kind enough not to tell me that I looked like a walking disco ball (see picture below, youll figure it out). 

He and I also got to witness one of the best concerts in one of the best venues in one of the best cities in the world (for those of you keeping track, that's Counting Crows, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles)  He's also a guy that was insane enough to agree to go to London with me.  Why?  I blame it on Starbucks giving him an uncaffeinated Toffee Nut Mocha that day. The courts could call it Temporary Insanity.  I'd call it a stroke of luck and trust.  Angela Chase would tell you that "we had a time".  And I'm sure everyone else has a great story to tell about David, but lets save it for his eulogy like 83 years down the road.  You'll probably need at least 82 of those years to finish reading what I've written.

So much like an episode, this blog is filled with a whole lot of nothing.  But if you're feeling like you read through this whole thing and got jipped, then I present you with this:

Yes, thats your favorite friend and mine, getting friendly with a lion

Take A Hike, Ike

It has been a crazy, hot, exhausting, mostly unplugged week.  And I have no desire whatsoever to recap it tonight.  Nor do I have the battery power at the moment.  But what I do have is free wi-fi from my old friend Justin, and a good movie going on the tv (3:10 To Yuma).  I may or may not have internet access over the next few days or week, but there will be a special guest blogger coming soon...probably on Monday.

Stay tuned...I know she'll do a great job.

Alive And Okay

I am currently in The Woodlands (northern Houston area).  The area is still widely without power, but there's an Emergency Response Team at our hotel, thus the wi-fi connection allowing me to post this.  I'll tell my own personal Hurricane Ike story later, but I wanted to put up something to say that all is well for me personally.  Not air-conditioned, and not smelling the best, but in comparison to several other areas I'll take a little body odor.

YouTube Tuesdays: It's Like Trying To Catch A Falling Star

If this song doesn't put a smile on your face, then it's time to check your pulse.

Spin Doctors - Two Princes

How do you talk to an angel, anyway?



Forget Chris Noth and Sex and the City, this is what I hear in my head when I hear the phrase "Mr. Big":



Um, there's a small chance that I listened to this song a few hundred times after my first high school crush crashed and burned:



At first five videos seemed a bit much, but what would Flea think if he found out I picked Mr. Big over the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Waiting On A Sunday Afternoon For What I Read Between The Lines

Props to anyone who remembers what song tonight's headline comes from.

Okay, so anyway...I've got a road trip coming up.  A two thousand mile road trip.  Or as I like to think of it, a chance to listen to about 500 songs on the ol' ipod jukebox.  And that's where you fine readers (and music listeners) come in:

I need road trip music.

Of all moods and genres, shapes and sizes.  Something to roll the windows down and sing along with, something to spin my own wheels on across the quiet miles.

I'll be driving west across New York, veer southwest along Lake Erie towards Cleveland, then I'll steer my way through Columbus and Cincinnati, look for the bluegrass near Louisville and Elizabethtown, resist the urge to pick up a second-hand banjo in Nashville, stop for some delicious barbecue in Memphis, keep an eye out for the highway patrol around Little Rock, pull over in Texarkana and kiss the ground on the beautiful side of the state line, count the blue bonnets as I detour towards Dallas-Fort Worth, before finally landing in Houston.  And along the way there will be copious amounts of road trip junk food and Sonic beverages over crushed ice.  It's going to be glorious, and I can't wait.

But back to the point.  Long drives tend to get a little a lot boring, so I need all of your help in staving off the boredom and kicking in a few (or quite a few) of your favorite road trip songs.  Can't wait to see what you guys come up with...

Throwing Darts On The Map

A few weeks ago I reached the one year mark for this crazy "life on the road" bank job.  Have I mentioned that?  I don't think so but I'm too lazy to look it up (but not so lazy as to not blog at all tonight, which I think is pretty awesome of me since I have to be at work in eight hours...and somewhere in there I have to listen to Sarah Palin's speech, get some sleep, get up, shower, shave, and iron a shirt...as usual, a good night's sleep is the loser here and you fine blog readers are the real winners).

(Sorry to throw in two consecutive parenthetical remarks here, but one of CNN's talking heads just used the phrase "red meet American" when I'm pretty sure he wanted to go with "red-blooded American...hahaha...I mention this with full knowledge that if a camera was pointed at me I would surely throw out a half-dozen bad puns before the green light switched to red.)

So yeah, as I was saying, I've been traveling with the bank for a little over a year now.  In that time I have opened branches in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and New York.  I've helped out at other branches in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.  At the end of this month I will start on a new branch in Louisiana.  People, I get exhausted just listing all those states in a sentence.

One state I haven't spent much time in lately is Texas.  That's going to change soon enough.  I'll be driving from Albany, New York to Houston, Texas in two weeks.  (More on that two thousand mile trek later, though).  After a week of meetings in H-town, it's off to Louisiana for another branch.  But after Louisiana?  All signs are pointing towards an opportunity to return to the Lone Star State in the not-too distant future.  How cool is that?  More details when things are official.

YouTube Tuesdays: And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors

Check out my new shirt



Pepsi never (and I mean NEVER) looked so good before.



For the back to school crowd.



Bo knows.



Kids, please pay attention to this next one.