Year in Review
Note: This is the 3rd part of a four part series, the object being to give a quick review of my experiences in the year 2010. In this part I will cover the months of July, August, and September.
July – The Hike
At the start of this month Casey and I went with our Grandma to a family Reunion for my Grandpa on my Mom’s side of the family. Case and I didn’t really know that side of our family that well since we never met our Mom’s dad.
Mom wasn’t able to go to that family reunion because she was in Europe, visiting England, France and Italy. You can see some pictures of that trip featuring Howie by clicking to post from July of this year.
The 4-H fair came and went, still isn’t the same when you aren’t in 4-H but I went to it a couple nights and watched the Demolition Derby.
A big story this month was the return of Kong! He had went missing back in June and miraculously returning 5 weeks later. He was really skinny when he came back, but he was alive. I took him to the vet and everything checked out and he has been happily living inside with us again.
In pet news Pepper was still doing good, mom bought her a new soccer ball and she has gotten really good at playing ball.
Then of course the main event of the month was the Hike over Mount LeConte which I have reviewed in detail here:
http://nomadwaystation.blogspot.com/2010/07/hike-or-that-time-i-walked-over.html
I had gotten pretty good at doing my walks here at home, regularly doing 10-11 mile walks in 90+ degree heat so I was pretty prepared but it was a tough trek for sure. The rest of vacation was good as well, Casey and I saw Ramsey Cascades, and we played putt putt golf and all of the rest of the great Gatlinburg things.
August – End of Summer
Well as we transitioned into August I began to walk less, I guess it was because the Hike was over, but I kind of wish I had kept up better with it.
Dad had his Power of the Past, he didn’t seem to enjoy it as much this year but it is a lot of work for him. I went a few days of the show but it was about the same as always. I hadn’t been the year before though since I was living in Indy.
Megan Brant had a party at her new place now that she had moved to Bloomington, it was a good time. I was going to take Bruce and Megan S. down but Bruce bailed on us so it was just me and Megan heading down to hang out with Megan, Emily and Amanda. We played board games, talked and just hung out that night.
D&D games were still going strong throughout August, but people’s schedules where changing so we could see the beginning of the end on that front. I also remember hanging out with Bruce and company one night at his wife Megan’s place that turned into a great night in which we ended up at Denny’s and someone took a syrup shot… lots of great quotes from that night.
Mom went back to work at school, and Dad was getting ready for the harvest. It had been super dry this summer so he was going to be starting right away. Really I don’t know if we had a real rain all August.
September – Farming
While my August wasn’t very eventful, September started off with me doing a lot of farming. Dad was hitting the fields and since I wasn’t doing anything I spent the biggest part of the first 3 weeks helping him by hauling wagons and emptying them. Grandpa hurt his back so Dad did really need me a little this year. Honestly not a lot to say about that, other than I listened to a lot of talk radio those weeks.
Here are a bunch of photos from farming:
http://nomadwaystation.blogspot.com/2010/09/september-photographs.html
Also during September Mom, Casey, and I went to a Purdue game with our cousins since Derek had just started his freshman year at Purdue. Purdue won the game vs Ball State. We all had a good time.
(Again a pic is in the above link) Dad had stayed home to fix some of the machinery we had broken while working in the fields. It was actually good for him to have a day to fix things since the weather had been so good, we hadn’t had any reason to stop since no major breakdowns had occurred.
Earlier in the month I had began putting books on half.com, books I had from school and wasn’t ever going to use again. I did pretty good selling them and made a little money.
I also bought a new laptop this month. Since moving home I had been having some trouble with my desktops hard drive. As well as the fact I don’t have wireless on my desktop I was back to using my old laptop, which was a middle of the line laptop from before I went to Purdue (2004). Needless to say it was very outdated. So…. After about three weeks of looking over computers and thinking about what I wanted. I pulled the trigger on the Dell laptop I’m using now.
Since school had started I had put in an application to substitute teach and this month I had my first class. A half day for my old Biology teacher in high school, it was easy… had them watch TV and that was about it. It was nice to do some I guess real work that I got paid for, even if it wasn’t much, and would lead to me having to fax like four papers to the unemployment office telling them that this wasn’t a full time job.
I was also searching a lot more for jobs this month, going to the truck stop at least once a week just to upload applications. I knew my unemployment would be out in November so I needed to get something by then.
On the entertainment side of things, a cousin of Bruce’s came home for Labor Day weekend and ran a one shot D&D game, but this was pretty much the end of the summer of D&D for my group of friends. All of our schedules had begun to change and getting together late at night wasn’t going to work anymore.
I did also start his blog in September, and began the tedious efforts to import all of my old MySpace blogs over here, since Myspace and Blogger don’t work well with each other, this is a time consuming process. But I’m glad I started when I did now that Myspace’s Blogs are set up differently.
(I don’t know if I will ever be able to see my oldest myspace blogs so they may never get over here)
