J.P.

I’m sitting here in the kitchen, taking a break from the workday and eating my lunch. I’m still trying to eat healthy and the scale has not been kicked across the room in a while since I began this effort the last week of August. That’s a good thing. I worry that the BMI scanner doesn’t work properly when the scale is kicked across the room like a field goal attempt between the sinks.

The house is quiet today. I find this a little surprising, since Earl is in Memphis through late tomorrow night, but Scott is here until tomorrow afternoon and Jamie is doing his usually Wednesday business about the house. Right now it’s a matter of getting his truck fixed and Scott has gone to pick him up (I almost wrote ‘gone to fetch him’, but I thought that would sound haughty), so other than me the house is empty and I’m just listening to the hum of various appliances and the click click of the clocks on the minute. Even Tom is enjoying some fresh air on the front porch.

This morning I saw a mention of something called a “Honey Boo Boo” on Twitter and I had no idea what the person was talking about. As I type this, someone with the Twitter handle @hotdesigner just informed me that BooBoo is a tubby reality child star. I wonder if that’s something like the 1993 pop sensation Jordy with “Dur Dur D’Être Bebe”. Actually, I don’t really wonder it all because anything that is called Honey Boo Boo is certainly not worthy of my attention. It’s kind of like this fad called a Kiki. I was told that a kiki was a party meant to calm my nerves. There are fewer things I find grating in this world than people piling into a gathering called a kiki. I didn’t even really care for Kiki Dee, why would I want to go to a party in her honor? I find the whole thing dubious at best.

I’d rather calm my nerves by enjoying the quiet.

So Saturday is officially the first day of Autumn up here in the Northern Hemisphere, but Mother Nature is giving us a little bit of a taste today, with a cool, dry autumn breeze and ample amounts of sunshine. I’m smiling right now because this is the beginning of my favorite season. I just love the crisp feeling found at this time of year. I love the sounds the leaves make and the magic one feels on the wind that is rustling those leaves. I just love the energy of the world at this time of year. I find it rejuvenating.

Despite challenges at work today, the smiling continues.

Today was the first day in nearly a week that I did not ride my bike this morning. I opted to work out in the basement instead; lifting weights, doing push-ups, that sort of thing. The magic of the season helps me find the energy to do this. The only thing I wish would happen is that we would put the clocks back in sync with the sun, so we could all have a little natural in the morning. This would make getting up a little bit easier.

So Earl and I have planned our vacation for the end of the year. After doing some careful calculations and the like, I determined that I had exactly one week of vacation time left and Earl always has some spare time lying around in his attendance file, so we are getting away for a week in December. We are flying to Houston on December 1, doing some Texas things for a few days and then driving to New Orleans for the latter half of the week, to return home on Saturday the 8th. While driving in the New Orleans area we may do a side trip to Mobile, Alabama just to get Alabama and Mississippi onto the list of visited states. That will raise the tally to 44.

We decided to go to Houston because we’ve never been there before. I have briefly been to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and we had the Jeep adventure outside of Amarillo when we had to take refuge from a tornado under an Interstate 40 bridge back in 2005, but other than that, Texas is a lot of unknown to us, so we are going to do some exploring. We might make it down to Corpus Christi just because we can and because I am a huge geek, I hear there’s a road somewhere around Houston that has a speed limit of 85 and I simply must drive on that and take a photo of a sign.

We have both been to New Orleans before but our last visit was in 1999, so we thought we were due for another visit. My memories of New Orleans are a little hazy because the last two visits were during radio conventions and I think I was cocktailed fairly early in the morning. Who knows, maybe I’ll do the beer for breakfast thing again. Plus, we’ve always flown in and out of New Orleans, so it’ll be nifty to drive from Houston to New Orleans and see what the area around NOLA is like.

We figured that the first week of December would be a good week for us to get away and do our thing. I’m looking forward to the trip. I hope we get the opportunity to meet any gentle readers that might be in the area. If you’re along the way, please drop me a line so perhaps we can say hey. It’d be fun!