Jerry Loggins

My wife is supposed to go to a convention next weekend down to Durham, North Carolina. She has recently been told that she has narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder, and that she is in danger of falling asleep while she is driving a car. As you can imagine, this has put our entire family into a tailspin. If she is in danger of falling asleep while she is driving, then we have to come up with alternative ways for her to get back and forth to work, and to and from the convention.

So we looked into having her take the Megabus from DC to Raleigh/Durham, and then a bus from the station to the hotel. Well the bus stops a couple of blocks away from the hotel, so she could use that for the trip down, but the bus that would return her from the hotel back to the Megabus station does not run on Sunday, so that would not work. A taxi from the bus station to and from the hotel would be very expensive, and since she has never been there before I am a little bit concerned about her being stranded someplace. Another concern is how many suitcases is she going to need to take with her; we don’t know yet what clothes she is going to be packing. We need to find out if she needs to pack any formal wear, or just business/casual attire for the entire weekend.

She’s already found a couple of ladies to share the hotel with the nights that she is going to be there, so that is good. I sure hope none of them snore! She is a very light sleeper. And I hope none of them need to sleep with the television on, either, because she never manages to sleep with any kind of flickering light or noise. That reminds me, I’ll tell her to be sure to pack some ear plugs and a sleeping mask to wear.

Our youngest son found out that she needs to go to the convention and that we’re having issues getting her there, so he volunteered to use a hertz coupon to rent a car, splitting the cost with us, and driving her to and from the convention. It turns out that he has a girlfriend that goes to college at Duke University and he wouldn’t mind going down there and visiting with her for the week-end! Problem solved!

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Can you remember life before the Internet?  (BI)  What an extraordinary change to our lives the Internet has become!  I can remember that far back (yeah, I’m showing my age!) and I can remember that our family depended heavily on the local yellowpages to find all of the businesses that we needed; from local plumbers and banks to local restaurants and barber shops! 

With the advent of the Internet, and the rapid acceptance and dependence of the Internet, I find it so much easier to use the Internet to do a local search for any business than going back to the old paper version!  And yes, we DO have the old paper version in the cupboard by the telephone, but I gravitate towards using the Internet first.  I really like how once I find the listing that i need I can often get directions to the place if I need them!  The paper version doesn’t do that at all!

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Guest post by Denise Traverse

How would you feel if your father started to smoke Black and Mild cigars? I was really surprised when we dropped by his house to find him smoking a cigar. I’ve never seen him smoke anything in his life! You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that! He told me that it was a gift from one of the guys at work, celebrating his new baby boy, and he decided to give it a try. Right about then Mom came home and chased him out of the house, telling him that she would not allow anyone to smoke anything in the house and she didn’t care WHO he was! Then she ran around the house waving a kitchen towel around, turning on the exhaust fans and opening the windows to get the smoke out of the house. Our dog Spooky, excited by all of the action and noise chased her around the house barking like crazy! I laughed until my sides ached!

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The weathermen were predicting a winter storm for last night, and for once the weatherman was correct. It DID snow. Just a little bit, but when we got up this morning there definitely was a little bit of the white stuff on the ground. Not so much that it completely covered the green grass; we could still see blades of grass coming up over the top of the snow. But, you could make a snowman if you wished to do so.

Knowing how crazy this area gets when it snows a little bit, I was really glad that no one in the family needed to leave the house for anything. Being the weekend, no one had to go to work. So if it has to snow, this was good timing. Of course the school children would have preferred to have a snow day from school, but the parents are relieved that they don’t have to scramble to get back-up babysitters for the snow day. Thank you Jack Frost, for the weekend timing of the storm.

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Do you remember back in the 70′s the Smothers Brothers (Tom and Dick) had a comedy television show? That was a favorite show of mine back then, there was plenty of good music and lots of laughs. One of my favorite bits that they would do was when one of the brothers would be “The Yo Yo man.” I think that might have been the first time I had ever seen someone actually do fancy tricks with a yo yo.

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