Shot lots of photos, mostly of things that aren’t interesting to anyone but the events attendees. I might find something to share in there.

Community yard sale was alright, too hot, but what can ya do? I almost made enough to pay for the slot and all the stuff I bought! At least I came home with less garbage than what I had to begin with!

This post could have been longer, but I want sleep and once my girls get up, I do too whether I want to or not!

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My church is having Kidz Kamp this week. It is going to consume my evenings since I am the photo guy. My family is taking part in a community yard sale Saturday, that is eating up my mornings trying to get stuff together.

Is summer over yet?

So I pull into the driveway of a local church and start shooting the sky. Not getting much as I am using my point and shoot instead of the good camera, that shutter lag can kill you when you are trying to take fast shots of something. The sky was ominous, well at least during lightning strikes, it was nighttime after all. I turned on the radio in time to catch a warning about some rotation in the storm spotted by radar, again, nothing to worry about as far as I was concerned.

Then, all hell broke loose!

The back end of my truck lifted about an inch or so, not off the ground mind you, just flexing the springs a bit. Followed quickly by my truck getting pelted with debris from the field behind and beside the church. My reaction was instant and surprising, I yelled “Oh sh**” and floored it onto the main road. Putting myself into a better position to see what was going on. Only straight line winds, thank God!

I made a rookie mistake when I planted myself there. I put the incoming storm behind me, I couldn’t see what was going on back there so I panicked when the wind hit me. Had I been turned the other way I would have seen the winds coming through the field by the debris it was blowing around.

Through it all, I didn’t even get a good shot of the lightning, or anything for that matter. So instead, enjoy this portion of a rainbow that I shot several days earlier. Which was also shot on the crappy small camera. Not really a very good shot but at least it’s something new to look at here!

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While the women folk were picking cherries, I wandered off and took photos of things around me. This one was my favorite of the day!

Really, that good?

Huh, mine wasn’t so hot, as you can tell by the title of the post.

Want to know what happened that made my holiday weekend suck? Too bad, I’m telling you anyway.

It started out normal enough, the neighborhood pool was opening that Saturday so the girls and Becky decided to go enjoy that for a few hours. To make it even more amusing, they decided to drag me along, I don’t swim so all I do is sit in the shade and sulk while they swim.

When that bit of joy was over we decided to hit up the little carnival/fish fry that a local church was having. I asked if we could please stop somewhere and get me a Mountain Dew, gotta have it! Becky needed gas anyway so we went to one of the local inconvenience marts and tried to get this accomplished. I stayed outside and worked on gassing the car while Becky went in and got sodas. This is where things really started to go wrong!

I usually pay by card at the pump. I slid my card through and after a few seconds it says “invalid card”, what, what the heck does that mean? I try again and still get nothing. I walk into the store where Becky is getting ready to checkout, I inform her of the problem so she goes and tries it with her card while I try and pay for the sodas. No luck, my card won’t work inside either. We leave the building with no sodas and one not so happy daddy. Becky tells me her card won’t work either!

Our bank is just next door so we decide to take a quick drive to their ATM and see what is going on. Well, unfortunately their ATM was out of service, big surprise there. We drive to the next bank over and try to get a withdrawal there only to be informed that we have insufficient funds! What, I made sure the deposit was there Friday, I payed a few bills, but nothing that would drain the bank account.

At this point, I am furious. I tell Becky we should go ahead and go to the carnival/fish fry and try to enjoy it, we can go home and see what happened later. We get to the carnival and it is HOT, boiling hot and they are holding it on their blacktop driveway. I do not enjoy myself, mostly because it is so hot but partly due to the fact that I am fuming over the bank problem. We leave after an hour, since we don’t have money we aren’t getting any fish!

When we get home I head straight for the computer. I go to our bank site and look up our account, what I found darn near made me cry! See one of the bills I paid was to my ex-employer for my COBRA payment. I gave them a check for$185. When I checked my account it showed that the check had been cleared not just once but twice. Once for $185 and once for $10,124.86! Well, my account did not have that much in it, not even close, my fury turned to rage!

I called my ex-employers home number and informed them of what had happened. It appears that when the check was ran it went through alright but the next check they ran went under my account instead of the correct one. Alright, it’s 2:00pm on a Saturday, there’s no one at the bank. As a matter of fact, it’s a holiday weekend, there won’t be anyone there till Tuesday AND I AM BROKE!

So I spent most of my weekend sitting around and fuming over this whole mess. I started in with the phone calls early today and as of this writing everything seems to be back in order, except that my entire weekend was shot!

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This is from our March trip to the cabin. I had meant to post it much earlier but well, you know how I am. Anyway, here it is. All I have done to it is tweak the saturation some and cropped a bit. Enjoy, it brought back some good memories for me.

Mothers day was fun, especially if you are into forced slavery for a day! Not that I was forced into anything, I still had my keys, I could have ran and hid! (Just kidding honey, you know I love you.)

We bought some of those topsy turvy planters and put our tomato plants into them. I will say right up front that I was slightly skeptical of these things, but equally curious. So I will be documenting the progress of these plants throughout the growing season. Let me first tell you that it is not easy getting your plant into the darn thing. Now being a good science student in my younger days I seem to remember that plants tend to want to grow towards the sun, so hanging them upside down is already against their nature. That said, lets take a look at their progress after 4 days:

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As you can see, the plant is already curving up after only 4 days. It remains to be seen yet whether this is going to be a problem, stay tuned!

KFC's public shame

I used to love Kentucky Fried Chicken, that was long ago and far away. I have been there about 4 times in the last year, 3 times to get one of their famous bowls, Mmmm, and once to try and redeem a useless coupon that they and Oprah tried to pawn off on me.

This was the most poorly planned, and executed promotion in recent memory. KFC should have thought this out better. I understand they were overwhelmed, that was a lot of people descending on them all at once, all wanting one particular menu item. I do not feel sorry for them though. Maybe they should have watched how Denny’s handled their free Grand Slam promotion.

They did not plan ahead on this. The time should have been more limited and their employees should have been better educated on how to handle the sudden rush of business. The stores I went to were all still making the same amount of the grilled chicken that they normally did, big mistake when about half the people coming through the door were wanting that item.

It seems that each individual store was left on it’s own to handle the onslaught. Most of them did not handle it well. My local store included as you can see in the above image. That photo not only says a lot about my local store, it says even more about KFC in general. I for one have lost my respect for them and will not likely eat there again. I have way too many choices around here to waste it on KFC.