The Stars That Usher Evening Rose

The weather even though ever fascinating to me still can be a pain in the ass at times. Every time we don't play golf it doesn't rain, but every time we do play golf it not only rains but it starts to storm before we are able to finish our round. The first few times we played it didn't rain at all but recently it seems that every time we try it does start raining. Two days ago we tried to play and only made it half way through the 9th hole before a storm rolled in. That day I actually got stung by a bee which is the first time in memory that I have ever been stung.

Today my dad and I went and saw that "Batman Begins" movie. Overall it was a decent movie. The movie basically describes how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. My dad said that because of that he actually enjoyed it more than any of the previous Batman movies. The one problem I had was at the theater we were at they had the volume up way to load. You could have worn ear plugs and still have heard the movie fine. At times the sound was ear piercing. Most theaters have the volume load I know but this was much loader than any other movie I have seen in a theater before. Anyway I would recommend this movie if you have seen the past movies or are a Batman fan. But, at the same time if you are new to Batman it is definitely a good starter film since it goes over the beginnings of the series.

Tonight my parents and I watched the 100 greatest movies quotes. My dad predicted that the quote "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" from the movie "Gone With The Wind" would be #1 and he was right, it was. My favorite movie quote of all time didn't even make this list, but I didn't expect it too. In case you didn't know already mine is from "The Usual Suspects" said by Kevin Spacey "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." I don't know why but I have always loved that quote.

Still waiting on the siding for my Aunt's house to arrive so we can get started on it. I just want to get it done and over with so we don't have to worry about it anymore. But we are running out of time as my Uncle (who is going to help us) leaves to go out of town this weekend for a week and then the following week when he comes back he will have company for a week and then the following week after that my parents and I are going to have company as my sister Cathy and the kids are coming down. So who knows when it will get done.

The pics of my dads car have still not been posted. They guy who took the pics said he was going to put them on his site told us just the other day that he was getting ready to get them developed. He also asked my dad if he could use the pictures for advertisement which my dad told him he could. So therefore my dads car will probably start popping up in certain car part magazines that this guys company has ads in. Every time we go out in his car we get all sorts of positive comments. Without fail everytime we stop at a light if I look around at the cars around us there is always someone checking the car out. In October he is taking the car up to Myrtle Beach, SC to a PT Cruiser car show. If I can I plan to meet him there since it is over a weekend and only about three and a half to four hours from the school. As I said before as soon as the pictures of the car are posted I will post the link here for you all to check them out.

Today or should I say yesterday the 15th was my dad's birthday. He had actually forgotten that it was today he was thinking it was tomorrow until I wished him a happy birthday this morning. We didn't do much for his birthday because he didn't really want to go anywhere. But, we did play golf. I had played golf yesterday with my Uncle and got a slight sun burn from it so today I put on some sun screen and headed out there again with my dad and my Uncle. It doesn't take much for you to get sun burn here or get a tan for that matter. Today I wasn't able to finish the round though as on my second shot on the 9th hole I pulled something in my right arm. I tried to continue to play but didn't make it past the 10th tee. It hurt when I took the swings so I knew that I probably should stop before I do more than just pull something. So from then on I just watched them play and helped my dad as he needed it. But, as we were on the 14th hole we heard thunder in the distance but they kept playing as it was only in the distance and we could see no lightning. As we moved on the clouds grow darker and by the time we reached the 16th tee the thunder had gotten much louder and had become more frequent, but we still really were not seeing any lightning. I recommended that they should probably stop playing anyway but they insisted they were so close to finishing that they wanted to try. Once we got to the 17th tee (a par 3 hole) I could now see the lightning off in the distance from the storm that was off to our north and west and the storm was slowly moving our way. I again said that they should stop but again they insisted on trying to finish. As they played on the lightning become more numerous. As they reached the green I started seeing lightning to the south of us as well. Finally after realizing that we were pretty much surrounded by lightning they called it quits before heading to the 18th tee. About 10 minutes after my dad and I arrived home the storm hit.

It wasn't one of your typical summer storms either. There was a ton of lightning all of which was cloud to ground lightning. Many of these strikes hit fairly close by, I even saw two strikes hit from within 100 yards of the house. The thunder was unbelievable. Most of the clashes of thunder were short lived but they were potent in that short time. They were extremely loud and shook the whole house. I have been in storms before with loud claps of thunder but in those storms those loud claps of thunder were few and far between. These loud rattling claps were almost non-stop. And the rain was insanely heavy, in probably an hour period I wouldn't be surprised if we got around three inches of rain. The pond next to the golf course out behind our house flooded over and spelled into the golf course. Our side yards on both sides along with the street turned into rivers. I bet the water in some places was more than ankle deep at times before the rain finally came to a stop. Once the rain stopped the standing water almost disappeared as quickly as it formed. Then about 2 hours after the storms had past we got the residue effects from it as we lost power for about 20 minutes so we worked on crossword puzzles.

Now for the next few days I relax and let my sun burn tan as I do expect it to tan instead of peel since it isn't really a bad burn plus I also want to let the muscle or whatever it was I pulled get better. Then I will probably head out again and play atleast one more round of golf before starting the work on replacing all the siding on my great-aunts house. Overall though nothing overly exciting going on around here at the moment hence the long delays between post. Also that guy still hasn't posted the pictures of my dad's car but when he does I still will post the link. My dad has been getting tons of complements and looks from other people about his car as none of them have seen a PT Cruiser that looks like his before, my Aunt Rita calls it a "mobster car".

Yeah, I know I said I was going to post yesterday. But, I ended up being gone almost all day yesterday and not having time to post.

Continuing from last post we decided to go to Seaworld that Thursday. My dad, sister, Jacob, and Jillian left the house around 11pm and arrived at Seaworld about 30 minutes later. We entered the park and Jeralyn got a stroller that was meant more for carrying things that were bought than to carry the kids. We then made our way towards the far end of the park where the restaurant we wanted to go eat lunch was at. We went to go eat at the Sharks Underwater Grill and put our name in and since we had a 30 minute way we decided to walk though the Shark Encounter exhibit which was right there. You walk in and right away you come upon one of those underwater tubes that you walk through and this one only had different kinds of regular fish swimming around. Jeralyn didn't trust the glass/plastic or whatever those tubes are made out of. She kept asking questions about it that we mostly ignored. After exiting this tube you walk down a slow sloping ramp that winds around until finally you reach the main tube. This tube was in a much larger tank that held the sharks and other larger fish. In the tube they had one of those moving sidewalk things to keep people moving. Jacob thought this was really cool seeing all the sharks swimming around you like that. The coolest and probably largest fish in the tank was the large sawfish and it swam right up against the tank right over our heads and Jacob loved it. Finally we reached the end of the tube made our way up another winding ramp. Along this ramp there was a sign there that explained the tube was strong enough to hold something like the weight of eight elephants on it without breaking and Jeralyn says "Of course they would put that at the end after you have already gone through it." Once we left that we went back up to the front of the restaurant to see how much longer the wait would be and they didn't say they just told us to wait until our name was called. So finally after a couple minutes they called us and took us to our table. The restaurant was pretty cool they had one side of the restaurant that was basically all glass looking into the huge tank that contained the sharks and other large fish. We ordered and ate, I had the barbecue Chicken and Shrimp which I found to be pretty good. Now that we were full we decided to see what the park had to offer.

They told me they wanted to go check out one of the shows and they asked me what shows were coming up (they put me in charge of the map). I told them the two that were coming up within the hour and they decided they wanted to go see the "Pets Ahoy!" show. In the description it said this was a show where dogs, cats, birds and even a pig perform stunts. So we go in there thinking it was going to be some kind of show were there would be a trainer out there having the animals perform tricks. We couldn't have been more wrong. The lights went down, no one came out and then you see this mouse coming out from behind this curtain on the right side of the stage. The mouse then preceded to run across the stage, up a rope, and into a trapped door. Then out from that same curtain the mouse had just come from a cat comes out runs across the stage, up the rope and through the same trap door the mouse had gone in. At the same exact moment the cat came in the trap door the mouse pops out of a different trap door runs to the next door and goes in. As soon as the mouse went in the cat came out went the same route and in the same door the mouse did. This continued about three more times before the mouse finally went into a dog house. The cat follows goes into the dog house and you hear barking and the cat comes flying back out of the dog house runs across the stage and exits to the left. At that moment an English bulldog walks out of the dog house looks around then turns around pulls a string which drops a sign that says "No Cats Allowed" and the dog then walks back into the dog house. The show continued on like this. With the dogs, cats, birds, pigs, and even a skunk, performing on their own without the help of any trainers on stage. It was amazing I had never seen anything like it before. It still amazes me how they got those animals to do those things. Like a cat would set off a trap door and that would set birds off that would fly to the wall behind the audience and that would trigger another cat to walk on two thin, small metal pipes over head of the audience back to the stage where it would jump down and go though another trap door which would set off some other animal to do its thing. Only a couple times did humans ever appear on stage and when they did they were just part of the act. I would extremely highly recommend checking this show out if you ever go to Seaworld. It still blows my mind how they trained that mouse to do that.

From that show we made our way over to Shamu stadium. Both Jacob and Jillian had been waiting to see Shamu. On the way there though we stopped and got to pet some sting rays. We also checked out Dolphins Cove where you can have the Dolphins come right up to the side and maybe even pet them if they get close enough to you. They were pretty cool as they liked to tease just about anyone they could. The Dolphins would knock their toys right over within reach of someone and then just as the person would go to reach for the toy the Dolphin would knock it away. One person even got in short tug-a-war with one of the Dolphins. But the lady lost and let go. From there we stopped by the Manatee exhibit and also saw the baby alligators. From there we picked up the pace and got over to Shamu stadium so that we would know we could get a seat. The kids wanted to sit in the splash zone to get wet so we got about 8 or 9 rows up on the left side of the splash zone (Splash zone goes back 14 rows). Before the show started by dad bought some Shamu towels one for us to keep and gave the others to the kids. The show started and it was pretty much what I had expected a bunch of whale jumping along with the trainers getting in the water with the whales and do tricks with them. Then it was time to splash people. Up to that point in the show the largest Killer Whale we had seen was 17 feet long and weighed about six thousand pounds. The next Killer Whale they brought out to do the splashing they said it was 22 feet long and weighed about 12 thousand pounds. You could definitely tell it was much larger than the others. The sole job of this whale is to splash the audience. It did this but swinging its tale quickly into the water sending large splashes of cold (52 degree) water into the audience. The center got the worst and the Whale slashed the people just to the right of us and the people just to the left of us but missed us. This made the kids upset because they wanted to get wet and didn't. We told them we would come back for the night show and would sit in the center in the splash zone so we would get wet.

From there we went to get some food across the the way from Shamu stadium at a place called "Mango Joes". My dad and I both got the Caesar Chicken wrap, Jeralyn didn't want anything, Jacob only wanted Fries, and Jillian wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We ate that and ended up just sitting there for a little while and next thing we knew it was about 30 minutes until the night show at Shamu Stadium. This show was 10 minutes shorter than the day time show and had rock music (the map claimed modern day rock but in reality it was mostly things like "YMCA" that they played). This was like the day show but faster paced and only half the amount of talking by the trainers. Again time came for the big whale to come out and splash people. Like we had planned we were sitting in the center in the splash zone about 4 rows up. We felt for sure we were going to get wet this time. Well I'll be damned if the whale didn't splash everywhere but the center. We again got away without a drop on us. Funnier even is that if we had sat where we had for the day show we would have gotten soaked. We just were not ment to get wet that day I guess. This of course made the kids upset once again but what can you do. We tried.

From there quickly as we could we made our way across to the other side of the park to see the fireworks show that they called "Mystify". We made it litteraly like two minutes before it started. The show was storyline based like I figured it would have been. They had this big fan of water spraying up which they projected images across that followed the story line. The story was of a kid who as having a dream and he was looking for Shamu. He was just about to get attacked by hungry sharks when Shamu saved him and his mom woke him up. But to this story they had some music and a bunch of different kind of water fountains. Some which which shot way up there. Then there was the fireworks that also went along with the story. Overall the display was decent but I think I have to say I liked the firework show at Magic Kingdom from last year more.

After the firework show we slowly made our way out stopping in some of the shops on our way out. During the day I saw a group of people wearing a cool Seaworld hat so I went around looking for it while Jeralyn looked for stuff for the kids. I found my hat in the last store before the entrance. After buying my hat the kids wanted to go in the candy store that was next store so I took them over there and I got them some lollypops that they wanted. I got a small box of Coconut Patties which is just coconut and sugar partially dipped in Chocolate. My dad went into the ice cream parlor and got himself an ice cream cone. From there Jeralyn returned the stroller and we made our way out of the park. The parking lot was already mostly empty which made getting out easy. We arrived home 30 minutes later and the kids went to bed.

We had planned to go to Animal Kingdom Friday but between the kids being tired from the day before and the rainy weather we decided not to. Saturday Jeralyn and the kids left around noon to head to the airport as their flight left around 1:45pm that afternoon to head home.

Like I figured it was a long post that is why I had decided to split them up. In other news my dad finally got his PT Cruiser back from the shop. He just finished putting almost $3,000 in it putting some kits on it and adding horse power to it. He added and new air filter to it to increase horse power and also added dual exhaust to give it a nice sound. He put a continential kit on the back of it. Put finder skirts over the back wheels. He got some chrome smoothie wheels put on it. He had some port holes put on the sides of the hood. He also got a sun visor put on over the windshield as well as having a fire extinguisher installed in the car. So he is pretty much only a couple parts away from having a gangster car. When I say gangster I am talking back in the day gangsters like something Al Capone would have driven. The guy who did the work on the car took some pictures of it and said he is going to post them on his webpage so when he does I will post the link so you can see what the car looks like now.

Well things last week didn't go exactly as planned thanks to mother nature. Last Tuesday we had planned to go to Seaworld but at 7:30am or so it started storming outside and the rain continued all morning so instead we decided to go to the mall. Then of course it stops raining around noon and didn't rain again that day so we could have gone to Seaworld anyway. But we went to two different malls as my parents were looking at new washer and dryers. I looked for a CD I wanted ("Epica" by Kamelot) and never found it so finally on the way home that afternoon the last place I looked in I finally gave up and ordered it.

On Wednesday we made plans to go to the Dixie Stampede and kept those plans since it was indoors. Wednesday was a carbon copy of Tuesday with storms rolling in around 6am and rain continuing up until noon. We arrived at the Dixie Stampede around 5:15pm or so. We walked around and looked at some of the horses in the stables before finally going inside and meeting up my moms Aunt and her daughter-in-law who were already there. We got in and found them and sat down with them. The room we were in was full of these narrow but really long tables filled with people along with a balcony on the second level going around the top. There was a stage in the front and a bar to one side. We all got drinks, most everyone got a Strawberry daquirie (they were non-alcoholic kind so the kids could have them too). They had a pre-show in this room with this lady that sang and a guy who played the piano and sang. They also had a magician all of which were very crowd interactive. Eventually it was time for the main show to start so they had us leave and head through two double doors out to the arena. They had it split up with one side being the North and one side being the South. We were on the South. The waiter came around and talked to everyone explaining what was going to happen through the evening. He then walked around selling flags to the kids. Both Jacob and Jillian got one. Then the show began with some buffalo running out with some cowboy type people coming out on horses rounding them up and eventually sending them back out of the arena. The waiter then started coming around givening everyone rolls, soup and our drinks. The show continued with a lady coming out talking to us about what was going to go on that night. The show was mainly a competition between the North and the South. The food continued to come this time with a small whole rotisserie chicken and a small piece of smoked pork and some kind of seasoned potato and a small corn on the cobb. The show continued as we ate and they had several competitions such as ring retrieving, horse races, pig races, ostrich races, and other events along with some cool tricks mixed in. The North won the first 2 events and we won the next 3 events then the North won the next event and then we won the following one to give us (the South) a 4-3 event lead. The desert then came which was a apple pastry of some kind. We then also split the next two events to keep our 5-4 lead. Then we had the final event which explained that not matter what who ever won this event won the whole thing. So in other words even if one side had a 9-0 lead the team with zero could still win. The final event was a crowd event. They had each row on each side pass a flag from one end of their side to the other end of their side and which ever side gets all their flags to the end first wins. Well our side was slow and the North got all their flags over first so they won the whole thing. This really upset Jacob as he really wanted to win and he said that next time we came we had to be on the North. I tried to tell him that the North didn't win every time but he still insisted the North was better. The show then started to wind down and they took all the dirty plates away and then the show finally ended with Dolly Parton singing on a video screen which I thought was kind of lame since she cant exactly sing in my opinion. We then headed out and then headed back home. The show overall was decent and the food was great. I would recommend it especially if you have any younger kids to take with you.

I was going to post about when we went to Seaworld on Thursday as well but I think since this post is already long I will post about it tomorrow to make it easier on what few readers I have. In other news though it seems that my older sister Jeralyn is heading towards a divorce. Thomas, her husband, said he was going to get a lawyer to get a legal separation. They have been have a lot of problems for about the last year to year and a half and she has talked about leaving him for a while but it seems he is going to beat her to the punch. He said he can't take it anymore and wants to get out while he still will have money in his pocket. Little does he realize that the money wont last long as he owes my parents close to $30,000 which has he has been trying to find excuses to push off paying it for a long time now and it isn't going to take much more for my parents to sue him to get the money back, especially if they do go through with the divorce. So we shall see how that goes.