This Old Blog

Father's Day was mellow this year, just like it was last year. I called my dad, who will be 80 this year, and we spoke for a few moments. We exchanged pleasantries and give the ritual "happy father's day" greeting to one another. In all the years we've done this I've never quite gotten used to hearing the echo come back across the phone line, separated by 22 years. Later in the morning I had brunch at a local First Watch with my wife and my oldest daughter. I set some sort of record for the hostess when I ordered three of their pancakes (with blue berries) and ate the whole stack. She warned me they were large (plate-covering) and that maybe I wanted just two. Since it was brunch I was a bit hungry and ordered three. She was impressed when I finished them off. Outside the First Watch, the former Samba Room is evolving into Rocco's Taco's and Tequila Bar. I haven't a clue what the menu will be like, but it looks to be a fancy Tex-Mex restaurant....

First comfort stop, Ocala, Florida My mostly-annual January trip to see my family in Atlanta started around 1:15 am this morning at the Orlando Greyhound terminal at John Young Parkway. I got to the terminal around 11pm so I wouldn't be late and to be able to queue up early enough to get a decent chance at picking my seat on the bus. Normally I fly up, but this year the prices out of Orlando to Atlanta were trending towards the outrageous (Delta flights had hit $500 round trip and were going higher each day). So I booked a round trip bus trip between Orlando and Atlanta on Greyhound for a rather inexpensive $90. It's been a while (years, really) since the last time I traveled Greyhound anywhere; the last trip was up to Tallahassee so I could ride back to Orlando with number 2 daughter in the Volvo (which we still own). Traveling by bus was simple back then; walk in, purchase the ticket, wait for the bus, board the bus, and then get off at your destination. This time I h...

A year ago I purchased, and eventually returned, two Barnes & Noble Nook Colors. One was purchased by me for my wife, and the other was purchase by my wife for me. I wrote a review about my experiences with the Nook Color on `thewsreviews. In the end I returned both units because they were unsatisfactory for any purpose, especially as a e-book reader. A year later and Barnes & Noble produced a more advanced device called the Nook Tablet. I had absolutely no intention of purchasing the Tablet based on my experiences with the earlier Nook Color. But my wife and I started reading very positive reviews of the Tablet which led us to purchase it for each other for Christmas. The Tablet has proven to be everything the Color wasn't, but a review of the Tablet isn't the purpose of this post. Rather, it's what my wife and I experienced as customers at our local Barnes & Noble earlier this evening. Our customer experience was all positive, but very complicated. Here...