fall

Time Keeps On Ticking Ticking Ticking…

I hope I don’t get sued by The Steve Miller band for using that lyric for my post title. Anywho, it’s been awhile since I’ve published anything here at my home away from home and with good reasons. Of course, you have the obligatory statement about how there has not been much time for me to publish anything and in this instance, that is true. I’ve been really busy between getting WordPress Weekly back on track, maintaining Perfcast,  contributing on a daily basis to Performancing.com and then there is that crappy night job I have which always seems to ruin everything. In a nutshell, that explains why there hasn’t been a post published on this blog in awhile.

Back when I redesigned this site, I did so because I wanted to dive into experimenting with monetization techniques while also narrowing the site down to just a few categories. I’m still not interested in monetization right now so that idea has been tossed aside. As for slimming down the blog, I have to admit that I feel stupid by transferring all of my personal posts away from this site onto its own domain with its own blog. I thought I was doing a good thing by doing this but now, all I have accomplished is providing yet another site for me to update. I should of just kept everything under one roof and told people that if they don’t want to read my personal mumbo jumbo, to just subscribe to the categories they were interested in as I see each category being its own blog. I’m not sure yet if I will re-import my personal musings back into this site so the verdict is still out as to what I am going to do.

Asides from all of that, I am inching closer to finally being able to cut myself down from 32 hours a week at the grocery store to perhaps weekends only. There are some changes afoot over at Performancing. There are also some other opportunities opening up within the SplashPress network which may help me accomplish my year end goal of only working at the store on the weekends while blogging full time. With all of this going on, I am throwing away most of my living space and will be purchasing some equipment to transform it into an office. I’ve seen some nice looking furniture at Officemax which would look even better in my room. I feel I’ll be much more productive with an office environment compared with what I have now which is more of a mashup of a work space.

The leaves are starting to change color here in northern Ohio while Fall is definitely in the air. I have yet to have my annual fall picnic with my girlfriend but that should be coming within the next week or so as the leaves reach their peak color. Soon enough, it will be Winter time. The time of the year where there is not much to do besides blog. How are the leaves in your neck of the woods? Looking forward to Winter?

Before I let you go, I have decided to bring WordPress Weekly back online. Starting this Friday at 8P.M. EST, I’ll be broadcasting live with my Canadian co-host all things WordPress. The anticipation has been building and I am looking forward to interacting with members of the WordPress community yet again.

Last but not least, I have removed the URL field from the comments here on this blog. This means I have also disabled the CommentLuv plugin. This is only an experiment for the month of October as I want to see for myself what happens to not only the volume of spam, but which types of spam I receive. To read more into why I am performing this experiment, read this post on Performancing.com.

Picnic Turns Into Disaster

My girlfriend and I have started up a new tradition. Each year, we try to determine the best date to go out for a Fall picnic. This is no ordinary picnic. This particular one included steak, home made pumpkin pie, cheesy scallop potatoes and Hawaiian rolls. The weather forecast for Monday was perfect. A high temperature near 75 degrees with a calm wind, mostly sunny with increasing clouds during the day.

After working my usual 9PM-5AM shift, I hit the sack at about 6 AM. Woke up at noon, prepared the materials we needed and headed out the door at 1. Picked up the girl at a quarter after 1 then proceeded to stop at BP to gas up, buy a 20oz of Mountain Dew and clean the windshield. That is pretty much my routine anytime I take a decent road trip. We were on the road by 1:30PM but our plans had changed.

I received a phone call from a buddy of mine who spent the night at Salt Fork State Park. He told me about all of the muzzle loaded hunters that were in the area. After checking the park map, sure enough, just about the entire park was considered public hunting land. Because I didn’t want it to be my last day alive as I know someone out their would probably mistake us for deer, I decided to take the girl to Wayne National Forest which is where I do my Bigfoot related research, hike and occasionally camp.

It took us three hours to finally arrive at the location. As soon as we unpacked the car, I poured a quarter bag of charcoal onto the grill. Because the bag became empty, I threw the empty bag on top of the charcoal to help get the fire going. This was my first mistake. My girlfriend and I decided to do a bit of hiking as it was getting a bit late in the afternoon and the charcoal needed to burn through it’s surface layer before it would be ready to cook anything.

We went off on our hike and took some wonderful photos which I’ll link to in a little bit. After about a half hour of hiking, we decided to head back to camp. As we were retreating back to the car, it started to rain. The rain was not expected to be in the area until late evening, so it was rather disappointing that we traveled over 150 miles just to be in the rain.

When we returned to the grill, I noticed that my first mistake of putting the empty charcoal bag on top of the charcoal had diminished the effects of the charcoal. As it the rain started to come down a bit more heavily, I decided to throw the steaks on the grill anyway as I didn’t think they would take that long to cook. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough heat to properly cook the steaks and the rain just kept coming down. Thinking how much of a drag this entire situation had become, my girlfriend and I finally decided to leave the steaks on the grill and ditch them. She ended up tossing out the scallop potatoes she made and all that was left were 4 rolls and a pumpkin pie.

We decided to head to a McDonalds that I swear has the best food out of any of the establishments I’ve been to. If your ever in Woodsfield Ohio, stop by their McDonalds. Every time I’ve gone into that particular restaurant, they have made the food fresh, as you order it. I think thats the difference. At any rate, on the way home, the rain continued to come down. I almost hit 5 different deer and some idiot household let their dog loose which decided to run at and chase my car, forcing me to slam on my brakes because I thought I was going to hit him. I’m glad I didn’t.

Over 350 miles were driven for a hike of about 45 minutes, a ruined picnic, and unexpected, wrongfully predicted rain. Not all was lost. I managed to grab two videos. One of me driving down Interstate 77 South and the other from within Wayne National Forest. I also managed to grab quite a few foliage photographs from the area. That was one of the major reasons of driving this far down south as the trees are plentiful, filled with a variety of colors. My girlfriend and I had a chance to spend some quality time together, although most of it was within the confines of a car. My car was washed and I nabbed some good photos. Things turned out alright in the end!

Click any of the images to see a larger size.
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Click here to see a slide show of this particular photo set.

55 Seconds From Within Wayne National Forest