Today is a really special day. Suzanne and I went on our very first date 35 years ago today. We went out to eat, I think at Red Lobster, and then to see the movie Endless Love. The Holy Spirit had led me to write to her.
The date was fantastic, but the movie was not so great. Still, from time-to-time on our anniversary, we will watch the movie. The song became sort of “Our Song” after we saw the movie.
Suzanne and I got married on 3 November 1984. It was great.
Suzanne is my Zing, which is a term that comes from the movie Hotel Transylvania and its sequel, Hotel Transylvania 2. If you have not watched either of these movies, you really should. The sequel is better, but it helps to know the back-story from the first one.
Suzanne and I have shared many wonderful, and some not so wonderful, times together. I love her. Thank you, Suzanne, for all the wonderful years together.
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Well, everyone, it is day 17 of the August Happiness Challenge. I know it sounds odd but, Skype makes me happy. Nothing will ever be as good as actually having your loved ones right there in the room with you. However, a video chat via Skype is the next best thing.
Skype is a free service and kind of easy to use. It does have some confusing things about it. Like almost all social media today, about the time you get it figured out, some yahoo on the other side of things wants to tinker with it to make it “better”. Better usually means a bigger pain in the … neck.
Anyway, when our Marine gets time and bandwidth at the same time, he can Skype call
us. Our daughters sometimes Skype with us, too. It is great being able to have all of us Skyping one another at the same time.
It would make me happier to have all of my children right here with me. That way I could know that everyone is safe. But, the next best thing is being able to see and talk to them via Skype.
We won’t get to see our Marine until next year (maybe then). Please continue to pray for his safety and that of his big brother, Jared, too.
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We are right at the halfway point for this August HappinessChallenge. I have to admit that it is becoming a little more difficult to come up with something each time.
Today, I want to talk about pinnacle moments in movies. I mean the kind where you think all is lost. The good guy is out of bullets, out of water, out of food, and low on any chance of winning when we hear the cavalry blowing “Charge” on the bugle as they top the hill.
One movie that comes to mind is the movie Iron Eagle. Doug Master’s father has been
shot down and is in an enemy prison where he has been put on trial as a spy and is scheduled to hang soon. Doug and his friends hack Air Force computers and get access to Air Force planes and equipment and Doug, along with an adult, flies in to the country that has his father.
His adult friend is shot down early on. Doug is now on his own. He is able to rescue his father and get him on the plane. He fights top-notch pilots and even an ace to escape the country. He is low on fuel, low on ammo and very close to the border when he sees a squadron of planes on his radar. He knows he does not have the fuel to outrun them. All hope is lost. Then…
This kind of movie with an unanticipated outcome happens at a time in the movie when we have been sucked into the action and suspense.
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Today, I am reading Shattered by Suzanne Gunter McClendon. It is a compilation of many heart-felt poems Suzanne has written. Each one gives us a peak into Suzanne’s feelings and to her life, at that time.
This book of poetry is a compilation of works done mostly over the last twenty years. From the depths of depression and grief, to the joy brought only by the love of my Heavenly Father, it covers a wide range of emotions. Over the years my feelings about writing have changed.
When I was a child, I wrote because it is what the teachers told me to do. Now, it is what my heart tells me to do. As a child, the writing was to get a good grade, to please the teacher. Now, the writing is to show the growing of my heart, and to please myself, and hopefully others as well.
For Friday 56 since the only way this book is currently available is the Kindle edition, we are going
to flip over to 56% of Shattered to see:
Windows to look inside Inside the darkness of your soul Soul full of longing Longing to be needed Needed by you, by your side Side of you I haven't seen Seen so well by others Others that have gone before Before you were mine.
I enjoy Suzanne’s poetry, and I hope you will, too. Remember, we will be offering Shattered FREE on her Birthday, 18 August. Don’t miss out!
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We are up to day 14 of our August Happiness Challenge. Today, I am going to tell you about a little animated movie that is just so great. The more I watch it, the more I see details that I missed in previous viewings. The animators' attention to detail is amazing.
The movie is Hotel Transylvania 2. It is the sequel to Hotel Transylvania. In this one, two of the main characters, Johnny and Mavis, get married and have a cute little baby, Dennis. If Dennis is not a vampire by his fifth birthday, he will never be a vampire. On his fifth birthday, still no fangs.
Dennis’ Papa Drac (his Vampa) and Vlad (his great-vampa) conspire along with his dad (Johnny) to
scare the fangs out of Dennis.
The whole movie is great and we pull for little Dennis the whole time. So what if his Vampa throws him off a 1,000 or so foot tower to make him fly when he can’t? What bad could happen with that? Don’t they teach kids to swim by throwing them in the water?
The movie is great. All the things that happen to little Dennis to try to get him to become a vampire are spell-binding and sometimes funny.
If you have not seen the movie, you may be able to find it on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I have watched it so many times that we bought the DVD.
If a 54 year-old, 285 pound redneck can enjoy an animated movie, you will probably enjoy it, too.
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Well, here we are up to day 13 of the August Happiness Challenge. I have told you about things that make me happy. Today, I am going to tell you about something that makes me happy and sad at the same time.
Last October our little baby, Xerxes the cat, lost his battle to feline Leukemia. Obviously, not having my little buddy around to play with makes me sad. But, his babies, some little human baby toys we bought for him, sit right here on my desk. Usually, I have them sitting right in front of the computer screen so that they can see the pictures of their daddy when his pictures roll though on the “Scream”.
I call it the scream because that is what I called it when I was talking in the Xerxes voice to be what he was supposed to be saying. I know normal 285 pound redneck guys who have had to fight their way out of bars while conducting a rescue don’t normally use different voices to talk for that cat. Normal is nowhere on my resume. Normal never worked for me.
I also said, “foam” instead of “phone”. He was our baby so, he most likely would talk a little like a baby if he could talk.
Seeing these babies, Spot, Two Spot, Jif, and Mouse reminds me of happy times. Spot and Two Spot are tigers; Jif is the elephant; and Mouse is, of course, the snake. He also had a toy mouse named Snake, but we can’t find it. Our youngest daughter named the last two toys. She also named her toy Santa Clause Brigette.
She will usually name things names that are opposite of what you would think about when you saw it.
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Welcome to Day 11 of the August
Happiness Challenge. Yesterday, I
talked about how I enjoy making the little graphics for the videos. Today, I want to share with you that some of
the images were drawn by my beautiful
child-bride Suzanne.
It all started out with a graphic she
made to illustrate how a deceased person was used to make the skin graft
for the ulcer on the bottom of my foot.
I thought the little dude was so cute that I asked her to
send me the image. She did and I
gave
him the name, “Redneck.” Since that time,
she has made several more of these types of images. I often use them to make graphics.
Redneck and his wife Anne are both used to make the logo I
made for this August Happiness Challenge.
Suzanne
created the image of Anne for an animated video I made about her and my father,
Su
Dee Lou takes on Papa Bruce. If you
knew Suzanne, you would
know that she is very quiet and not likely to call attention to herself at
all. This video represents the one time
that was not the case.
Yes, there are a lot of things about Suzanne that make me
happy. These little images are just a part of that.
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Welcome to Throwback Thursday. I am also going to use this as today’s August Happiness Challenge because remembering that time in our lives makes me happy. Suzanne has always been beautiful, but that night she was even more beautiful in her pretty dress and her hairstyle.
It was prom night, 1983. This would be Suzanne’s senior prom. Suzanne and I had been dating for over a year and a half. We were going to the prom and all was great.
I rented a tuxedo from Thomas and Sons Formal Wear and Suzanne’s aunt loaned Suzanne a prom dress. This particular aunt had four daughters, so clothing got a lot of utility. This particular dress fit Suzanne like it had been made for her, at least in my opinion it did.
As we approached time for the prom, it occurred to Suzanne that her best friend was not going. For some reason, no one had asked her out. Perhaps all the boys she knew were shy. Holly was not and so they were probably intimidated by her.
Regardless, Suzanne knew she would not have a good time if her friend did not go to the prom, too. So, she asked me if I would escort both of them. I told Suzanne to just call Mrs. Phillips at the flower shop and order whatever flowers she wanted and/or needed for both of them. I also told Suzanne to go ahead and make her a hair appointment for herself, if she wanted it
.
Well, prom night arrived. I drove in from the University of South Carolina in Columbia,
South Carolina, and went to the flower shop to pick up the flowers before time to pick Suzanne and Holly up.
I drove from the flower shop to Crescent High School and picked up Suzanne and Holly. We went by their houses and picked up the things they needed for the prom. Then, we went back to McClendon Manor so they could get ready for the prom.
McClendon Manor had plenty of room for just such a thing. There was the yellow room where Suzanne and Holly got ready. There was a vanity with a large mirror that was just right for the two of them to put on whatever makeup they chose to wear and it was also good for them to see how they looked in their prom gowns.
The flowers Suzanne ordered had baby’s breath mixed in the arrangement. She had ordered that, but she did not know that they would look the way they did when she got the flowers.
This created a good deal of frustration for Suzanne. We put some of the flowers in the refrigerator at McClendon Manor and then went to get Suzanne’s hair done.
The beautician styled Suzanne’s hair and she helped Suzanne get the flowers in her hair just right.
We went back to McClendon Manor to get ready for the prom. Once we were ready, we drove to Anderson to eat at Red Lobster and then it was off to the Iva Elementary School cafeteria where the prom was held that year.
One guy with two dates caused quite a stir in that conservative little town. There was no end of whispering going on. Some we could hear and understand, other we could just hear murmurs.
Most of the guys we could hear were supposing what kind of night we were having. Most of the girls whispered that there was no way that they would allow their boyfriend to take another girl to the prom, even if it was their best friend and they were all out together.
For us, it was just three friends hanging out together, no more, no less. We had a great time. I danced all the slow dances with Suzanne and most of the more upbeat dances with Holly.
We left the prom and we took Holly home first. After we dropped her off, I took Suzanne back to her house and then I went home. It was a great evening and there was a lot of talk about what must have happened between us.
One has to wonder, is everyone else’s life so boring that they have to see flamboyant things in a simple matter of three friends going out together? If the shoe had been on the other foot and one girl went out with two boys, her reputation would have been completely lost.
Suzanne and Holly remain friends to this day, even though we have kind of lost touch with her. She is still Suzanne’s friend and we do hear from her from time to time.
What about you? Has there ever been a time in your life when something simple and ordinary has gotten blown out of proportion? Were you ever the subject of idle talk or rumor? Tell us about it in the comment box below.
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Welcome back to the August
Happiness Challenge. We are on day
10 and going strong. Right now, I am
very happy to have my two lovely daughters home from school.
The other day I told you about how making the videos makes
me happy. Our youngest daughter asked me
to record the stories I have told them for years. Our youngest son wanted me to record the
stories of when I worked with the rescue squads.
Well, one thing that makes me happy is trying to create
interesting little animations for the videos using simple shapes. Yes, they look a little like something a
child of five or so could/would create. But, they are fun.
It amazes me how some of these things come together. I will have a rough concept of
what I want to
do and boom, they come together very differently than what I envisioned.
This is sort of like those posts or articles that just write
themselves. My story about racecars
and the whole story of Molly’s
World just wrote themselves. The
original Sailor
Bear did the same thing.
The Sailor
Bear story just seemed so natural that sometimes we even forget there never
really was a Sailor
Bear in our lives.
Have you ever started writing something and had the words
flow out on their own? Is this a muse?
Drop us a comment in the comment box below and let us know
your thoughts.
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Welcome back, race fans. We are in day 9 of our August Happiness Challenge. We are at just a little over 29% of the challenge and we are still going strong.
We may have to pit soon and take on a little fuel and some right-side rubber, but overall, we think this has been a good race.
No, people, I am not a NASCAR enthusiast. In fact, if you read my post called Fish IHave Known, you may remember I get all my fishing done in the first five minutes. I get my race watching done even faster.
However, I am a little nostalgic about #2. No, not the kind of #2 most people think about when they think of that term.
The number 2 I am thinking of is race car number 2 on the dirt tracks back in the area where I grew up. Number 2 was the number and the name of the racecar our Western Auto Associate Store sponsored.
The car was built and raced by Alton Carnes of Carnes and Towns Garage in the major metropolis of Iva, South Carolina. The car was orange. But, not just any orange; it was a special orange.
Alton Carnes and his friends painted cars as part of their living. And they were very darn good at it, too. Well, when it came time to paint their racecar, they decided to custom mix a paint. So, they went into their paint shop and experimented with colors until they came up with Number Two Orange. This was a special paint with a secret formula.
They painted the race car with this special paint. And, they decided that to promote it, they would paint the Western Auto Store’s flagship vehicle with this special paint. The truck was soon given the name “Old Red.” Why a vehicle that is about as orange as one could get would be named Old Red, I have no idea.
Well, again it makes me happy to think of the races we went to see the car we sponsored, in part, race. Both tracks they raced on were dirt tracks in the middle of no freakin’ where.
Multiple races were run each weekend. Just before the start of the series of races, a water truck would go around and water down the dirt track. The first few races were as muddy as a pig pen. Cars would slip and slide in the mud and bump into one another.
After the first few races, the track began to dry out. By the main event, the track was very dry and dusty as it could be.
Then, the real fun started. Number Two and about twenty other cars would pull out onto the track and take warm up laps. By the time the second warm up lap was completed, the air was full of that bright red Georgia clay that so many people talk about. It was literally everywhere.
We would watch and cheer Number Two on to victory, or so we hoped. After the races, we would climb back in my mother’s car and ride the thirty or so miles back home. The next day, I would take two shop vacs, empty them out, and gang them together to make a suction force of about 50 horse power to try to get all that bright red clay out of the car.
To give you an idea of how strong this vacuum suction was, take your average size dog, and put him on a tile floor. Then, imagine enough force to pull that dog across the floor toward you. That is about half the power this combination of vacuums had. It took about two hours each week to get most, not all, of the red dust out of my mother’s car. This was a usual Saturday thing after going to the Friday night race.
Sometimes Number Two won, sometimes it lost. But, we had fun either way. Believe it or not, it was kind of fun eating hot dogs covered in red clay dust.
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Okay, maybe it is cheating to use one post to cover several memes especially when the memes fall on different days of the week. I guess that is a little cheesy, too.
Well, for those of you who have missed any of these different memes, let me acclimate you to the different ones.
The first item up for bids, as Bob Barker used to say, is the August Happiness Challenge. Each day during the month of August, bloggers who choose to participate in this fun challenge are asked to share with their readers what makes them happy.
Today, I choose to tell you that reading a good book makes me happy. Anyone who has followed this blog at all knows by now that I am not a huge reader of fiction. However, my child-bride and I have taken on a personal challenge to read all the classics together. Right now we are fighting our way through Frankenstein. In the book, we see how misunderstood the creature is and what a wimp Dr. Frankenstein is for not manning up and doing right by the creature.
Good ol’ Bob, bless his little heart, tries to help us all make money from blogging by giving us some “common sense” advice and some real world examples from this blogging experience.
My first impression of this book was that it is like many other books that spend a great deal of the first part of the book selling you on the ideas they are going to tell you about later in the book. Sort of like we Southern Baptists call “Preaching to the choir”. Obviously, we are concerned about making money on our blogs or else we would not have started reading the book in the first place.
Speaking of advertisements and self-promoting, if you would like to read Kindle books, there are a whole passel of them you can get free. You can read these books on your Kindle reading App.
You can get the app free for your phone, laptop, or other device by clicking on the banner ad in our sidebar. A little FTC required notice here: If you download the app using the link in the sidebar, we will receive a referral fee.
Okay, the third stop on our journey is Book Beginnings. In this great meme, blog authors are asked to tell you the first sentence or two, the first paragraph or two, or whatever, of the book they are currently reading.
When we open the book to the beginning, we read:
In early 2007 I was talking to a friend of mine about the idea of building websites full of free information to help people. After brainstorming a bit, I got a couple ideas of topics that I was passionate about: Proverbs and Personal Finance.
Good ol’ Bob, our author, is a Christian who thought about creating a blog about Proverbs, a very noble idea, indeed. And, of course, personal finance is one of my favorite subjects so, I like the idea he had.
Now, we go to Friday 56. In Friday 56, we open up the book we are reading to page 56 and quote whatever catches our eye. If we are reading on an e-reader, we can just open up the app and go to 56% of the book. Since I am reading it on my laptop using the free Kindle reader I told you about, here is what it says at 56%.
One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way.
The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it. But even more important than the few visitors you will pick from it is the relationships that you can develop with the bloggers.
As I am sure all you bloggers will agree, good ol’ Bob has some good, common sense advice for his readers. Later, Bob talks about using our analytics to test to see which ad placements earn us the most money. He even tells us how to set up an A/B test.
In reality, if you are new to blogging, this will be helpful. If this ain’t your first rodeo, it might help remind you of the things you know you should be doing, but for some reason just plain forgot.
And, thankfully, this isn’t another of those books about how to make money blogging that simply tells you “follow the tutorials.”
Well, happy reading. If you have any helpful hints you would like to share with newbie blog writers like this ol’ redneck boy, please do so in the comment box below. Thank you.
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