The god of Thunder

Posted by bulldawgy on June 9, 2011 None comments

Dawn and cousin April are in town for a brief visit on their way back from a little vacation at the beach.  It’s always good to see them and for John Michael to get to hang out with one of his older first cousins.  The boys, that is Jackson, Joshua and John Michael, have been hassling me for several weeks now to go and see Thor.  Since I had already seen it once on a guys hall pass, I wasn’t in a hurry to see it again. Our new company made the opportunity ripe, so we packed up the Suburban and headed to Movies 400.

The only caveat to the whole ordeal was that I made all the children pay for their own tickets!  When you have a gaggle like we do, it’s hard to pay full price for tickets and take everyone.  In the interest of fairness, I also allowed them all to buy their own drinks too (we snuck our candy in, and before you go and judge me, you shameless scowl, you know that you do it too)!

So it was Thor and jumbo Coke Icees for everyone.  Good times.  Plus, I actually liked the movie better the second time around.

Worse Than We Think?

Posted by bulldawgy on June 8, 2011 None comments

Martin Feldstein in the WSJ writing about the current state of the economy.  He’s not a fan of Obama’s economic policies and makes some good arguments against the necessity or appropriateness of several of them.  In the end, the piece is a little more political that I’d hoped.  But it’s worth the read.  Especially for nuggets like this:

“The drop in GDP growth to just 1.8% in the first quarter of 2011, from 3.1% in the final quarter of last year, understates the extent of the decline. Two-thirds of that 1.8% went into business inventories rather than sales to consumers or other final buyers. This means that final sales growth was at an annual rate of just 0.6% and the actual quarterly increase was just 0.15%—dangerously close to no rise at all.”

Enjoy.

Eight, Even After France.

Posted by bulldawgy on June 6, 2011 None comments

Been back in the U.S.A for just under a month now and I’m feeling a new groove.  Don’t really know how to explain it other than it is…. well… it’s like déjà vu.  Sort of.  You know, the feeling you have when you are certain that you have done what you just did before.  It’s like that.  But not exactly.

Maybe it is more like seeing someone and knowing for certain that you have seen them before because they are so familiar.  Yet no matter how hard you try to put your finger on it, you cannot figure out who exactly they are.  You know how that can be.  It can be very stressful on the brain as you search and strain to try to figure out who it is.

Or maybe it is more like catching a glimpse of something in the mirror, something that looks exactly like a place where you have been.  You look back into the mirror and …. poof …. it’s gone.  Like it was never even there, except that you know it was there.  You just saw it, dangit.  You know beyond a shadow of a doubt it is real – but no matter how many times you look away, and then look back in the mirror – it’s gone.

Anyway, I can’t quite place my finger on it.  It’s not a bad groove – it’s sort of a melancholy groove – involving a search for that thing that I’ve done before, or the name of that person I saw on the street, or that image in the mirror that was there and is now gone.

Sometimes, at least for me, a song will so capture the essence of the moment or the place of my mind or heart, that I latch on to it – working it out over and over and over again – until I have sucked out all of the meaning that it has for me.  Most recently, Laura Story has provided that song for me.  As I listen to it and soak it in, my current groove is found in it’s melody, in it’s lonely piano, and in it’s lyric.

“What if Your blessings come through raindrops, what if your healing comes through tears, what if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You’re near…” – Laura Story, Blessings.