Travel, Movie Reviews

To some people traveling is a glamorous thing, to others it is just part of their professional life and then to others it is just habit forming and becomes a combination of both. To some it just plain sucks!! Since my traveling life really started back in my high school and college days as a member of the collegiate football and track team that would total over 56 years and still going. The early travel was of course by automobile, train, and buses. Airplanes were invented at the time but air travel was for the very rich and just didn't make any sense for my kind of travel. My parents were not into doing much travel so I didn't catch my bad case of having to travel from them, it just came naturally. After graduating from college and then entering the US Army I found my travel became even greater and I knew then that packing and unpacking a bag would become part of my lifestyle. Since that time I have traveled to most of the USA states(48 to be exact) and 20 countries. Most of this was done while competing in some kind of athletics or in my profession, but very little for just outright vacation fun. It seems as though I try to make my business travel into some kind of fun travel and just forget about vacations. This past weekend I traveled to Florida for no business purpose and my sole reason for going was to see two of my old time friends and even see one of them re-marry, so I guess that was a pleasure weekend. When I started by sales career way back in 1966 I was given a new automobile to travel in and since cell phones didn't exist and long distance calls were very expensive we were expected to drive anywhere in our territory to see customers rather than call them on the phone. Gasoline ranged from 15-25 cents so it was pound the pavement and no worry on fuel cost. Now after all these years everyone has a cell phone stuck in one ear or the other, gasoline is $2.65 per gallon, computers keep us informed and business travel has a whole new angle. Back in the days of travel when my kids were young I traveled every week and when arriving home one week from a sales trip my youngest daughter, about 5 at the time, looked at her mother and ask, "is he going to stay here tonight?" Traveling can also make you a little disoriented, one week when I had stayed in 3 different hotels and finally got home at the end of the week I found myself getting up in the middle of the night to go take a leak I went to the approximate same area where the rest room had been the night before. Turns out in our house this was the same area that our laundry room was in, so I reached down to pull the camode seat up and it turned out to big the clothes dryer. Luckily I woke up enough to realize I was fixing to go to take a leak in the dryer, and then worked my way back to the real rest room. Most of the time when people age they kind of taper things off and especially do not travel as much; however, my travel has increased and just during the month of February and March I will be gone 6 of the possible 8 weekends. For March I am making a 3 weekend run, and then possibly in the last weekend will remain in Ransom Canyon. Now I am in Dallas for the Rock N Roll half marathon, actually running in it and monitoring the Athletes Honey Milk booth. Then next weekend I will be competing in the first triathlon of the season in Alpine, Texas, the gateway to the Big Bend Country of Texas. My point for all this useless gibberish is that I have been behind in my blogging because of all the travel and not being able to use my lap top computer to post on. Now I have that fixed and will be blogging like crazy again. There are all kinds of new news(that is why it is called news) coming to past, i.e. Tiger will go back to playing golf and limit his playing around to his wife, there is no football on TV, former Texas Tech coach Mike Leech(sp on purpose) will get his settlement from Tech and probably receive much more than he deserves, Athletes Honey Milk will become the most popular drink on the planet, and I will be traveling to many more points of interest in the next 9 months of 2010.

Movie Reviews: "Cop Out", **, Bruce Willis should be ashamed of himself for this boring, stupid movie. He is just passing the time of day and collecting his big bucks in the poorly done movie. He and Tracy Morgan play veteran New York(always New York cops, never do they do a show about cops from Lubbock) cops on the trail of a stolen, rare, mint condition baseball card, and wind up facing a merciless, memorabilia-obsessed gangster. Actually Willis owns the card and is going to use it to pay for his daughters wedding($48,000.00), so this story is so stupid it stinks to high heaven. Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references, violence and brief sexuality.

"Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief", **, The gods of Mount Olympus and assorted monsters walk off the pages of high school student Percy Jackson's Greek mythology textbook and into his life. And they are not happy campers. Zeus' lightning bolt has been stolen and Percy is the prime suspect. Percy adapts to demi-God status: his father is Poseidon. Lots of action to find the lightning thief and I can't believe I watched the whole thing. Rated PG for action violence and peril, some scary images and suggestive material, and mild language.

Academy Awards: Last week while in Florida I actually watched the Academy Awards ceremony that seems to last for hours and hours, well actually it does do that. This year there were no real surprises and I was real pleased with the results and thought they were right on. Crazy Heart was a big favorite of mine and Jeff Bridges won the best actor for his performance. Avatar won the best picture and that was probably a good pick. Even though I didn't mention them on this blog site I agreed with most of them, even though there was a couple of movies I didn't get to see since they didn't come to Lubbock. The Hurt Locker was a big winner and if it came to Lubbock, it came and went while I was traveling, so I must find it some where since it was a big winner.

greerman