BlakeAtwood.com

I bought a computer for my grandmother recently. Before you start thinking that I’m the best grandson ever, she bought it with her own money; I was just the middleman. We bought her a Dell because I received an email with a “Back-to-School” special that was right in her price range, even giving her more computer than she needs.

Since we wanted to install the system this Sunday, when I head up to Waco to see her and the rest of my family, and since the last time I ordered a system from Dell (a refurbed desktop) it came from Round Rock, I told my grandmother I’d have them ship it to me in Georgetown, just a few miles from Round Rock, in hopes that it would arrive via free 3-5 day ground shipping before Sunday.

After checking the tracking number, I was shocked to see that the computer was being shipped from Tennessee! I was saddened by the fact, but chalked it up to the fact that my grandmother’s computer was not a refurb unit, and, ergo, was not being shipped from Round Rock. Oh well.

I just checked the tracking number again tonight (Friday). Where is the computer currently sitting? At a DHL station. In Waco!

I’m scheduled to receive the packages on Monday, one day after I’ve gone to visit her.

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Brought to you by a drug rehab recovery center in Malibu. Really? Really.

I was recently given the opportunity to have a free photo canvas made and shipped to my door from Canvas on Demand. The shipping was speedy and the canvas looks nice. There are more options than just the standard canvas that we received, some that colorize black and white photos, some that enhance your photos with artistically done brush strokes, and also the ability to choose better frames. As we were just trying out their service, we opted for the “Standard Gallery Wrap,’ which wraps your image around the frame. We also chose the 16″ x 20″ size.

Our hardest decision was choosing which picture to use. My wife is a photo nut (I just bought her a digital frame for our anniversary), so we had many to choose from. She wanted black and white; I wanted full-color. We settled on this picture (and this is the actual  frame; the photo quality is a little poor as it was taken with my cellphone). The pic is from our engagement photos, and I really liked the colors in it. Unfortunately, I did not know that the picture would be cropped. The original had us in the left half of the frame with nice fall foliage in the right half, a visual composition that I liked better than what we received, but the portrait on the canvas is still nice. I can’t complain too much since we received this for free. One suggestion would be a preview option of what the final canvas will look like. These canvases (canvii?) make a great birthday present or anniversary gift, so I’d recommend them, although you may want to go a little “higher-end” on the scale of what they offer to get the full effect.

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My family has apparently started a summer tradition of picking a concert at the Smirnoff Center in Dallas and all getting tickets. It began haphazardly last year with Chicago and Huey Lewis. You know, when the whole family goes (siblings, cousins, parents) you have to cater to all ages. Luckily, this year, and just this past weekend, we saw Ben Folds  and John Mayer. It was a good concert, not great, but good. Enjoyable at least. Ben Folds was a little more experimental than some of my family would have liked, and his cover of a Dr. Dre song was…interesting, to say the least. John Mayer’s a phenomenal guitar player, but should stick to playing, not talking. Too bad we couldn’t have all gotten Police tickets.

Possibly even more fun was the golf the next day at the Lake Park Golf Club in Lewisville. It’s a straight, short course, par 70, so I felt like I was doing a lot better than normal, which I was, at least for the front nine. I think I had 4 or 5 pars for the round, which is great for me. I also had the best shot of the day. I was two inches from the hole, a gimme, and I was goofing around, taking a large backswing with my putter and pretending I was going to launch the ball somewhere. I hit the top of the ball with the bottom of my putter, the ball spun high into the air, then dropped straight into the hole. I will never be able to do that again.

We ate at Babe’s that night, a restaurant in Sanger, TX. Great food, and the waitresses sing, and they’re actually good. Also, there’s a cutout of John Wayne that peers into the window of the women’s restroom. (I only know this because the Woman told me so - I don’t often visit women’s restrooms, what with their sofas and bathroom vanities). Going to Babe’s is almost as much a ritual as the family summer concerts are becoming.

It’s always interesting what kinds of rituals form as the newer generations grow up. To the loyal few, do you have family rituals?

Also, my grandmother made a point to say how much she appreciates the fact that our extended family gets along so well. It’s something I thought was absolutely normal growing up, but the older I get the more I realize how fortunate I am to have the family I have.

Josiah Daniel joined the outside world on April 11. He made it here safely, and is now probably sleeping, eating, or doing that other thing that babies do. His two sisters, 5 year old twin girls, will hopefully learn how not to pull him both ways at the same time.

In other news, we visited the hospital a few days after he was born. We made it to the hospital approximately twenty minutes before tornadoes began ripping through the Fort Worth area. The Texas Motor Speedway had to be evacuated as it was a race weekend. Some One was looking out for us.

…to pay for our big dog’s food…

See what you think.

(I don’t know how long the link will be active…)

For the sake of my cousin, an SRV lovin’ and talented lead guitarist in his own right, I rode three hours to San Angelo with him to play as part of his band at a citywide, all-church event. Originally it was meant to be a youth event; somehow it transpired to this citywide event with a somewhat much older demographic.

We’d practiced together one time about a week prior to this gig. I was also worried about the couple of original songs they wanted to do that I’d never heard. We arrived at the church with plenty of time to soundcheck and setup, but we did neither. I spent an hour or so typing our words for the screens in the front of the church.

When we actually get up to play our music, it was 10pm, and maybe 30 to 40 people were still at the church. We begin playing, only the lead singer’s guitar wasn’t working due to sound system problems or bad cables or divine intervention. He begins preaching and prophesying over the song we’d begun playing behind him, taking it slow so he could be heard but building to crescendoes at certain times to emphasize the points he was making (although my monitor wasn’t working so I never really heard what he said). We wound up playing 2 or 3 “songs” for two nonstop hours.

It was a very freeing musical moment in that everything I’ve been playing in the last year or more has been so structured. The looseness and creativity required of the music was very cathartic. So, all the worry about playing the songs well faded to nothing because we didn’t play them.

We also got done at midnight, then ate at Applebee’s at 1am, and returned to our bassist’s home a little before 2am.

Over the last few months, I’ve been a freelance wedding videographer for Crescent Video. They do some amazing wedding videos, a few of which you can see on their website. Last night, I filmed a wedding at the Tarrytown Methodist Church in Austin. Gary, owner of Crescent, told me the significance of this church. Along with being the church that our President, George Bush (G.Dub), attended while governor of Texas, it was also the place where, reportedly, Barbara Bush whispered into her son’s ear, “I think God wants you to be President.”

The wedding went off with only one hitch - that of the bride to the groom. The reception was at the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin. (Yes, my wife was slightly jealous because she loves that hotel).

Also of note from this last week was my mom’s surgery. She had to have a piece of bone from her hip surgically removed and placed into her neck. This is the second time she’s had a procedure like this done. She came through surgery just fine, but couldn’t keep fluids down for a couple of days. Fortunately, she’s back home (well, at her mother’s house) and will be recuperating for the next six weeks, which is good, because she needs a lot of down time.

As my sister had the nightwatch with my mom, my wife and I got to take care of her two kids, both girls, both 4 1/2 years of age - twins, to be precise. We’ll skip all the descriptives and just say that I don’t know how my sister does it.

Pictures of Bogey and Mia

she’s not a rat in a cage, but she may be just a little confused. This is my cousin’s kid, by the way. She’s a hoot.

By the way, that is my dog and that is her cage. She didn’t look to upset to be replaced.

I wonder if I’ll exist long after I’m gone.

Sometimes I’ll do searches looking for what websites link to the website I’m involved in. To wit, I was checking what sites link to tnova.org, my church’s page, and found this old…gem:

http://sudrumguy.freeservers.com/

This is one of my old homepages, and the funniest thing about it is that, when I had the site, it was free, and there was a small banner ad at the top of the screen. Now when you look at it, there are banner ads everywhere. It’s a little humorous, and it makes me glad I can pay for my own site now. So enjoy. There’s some good stuff there that I’ll have to copy to my new site soon.