Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

Ok, so mostly feelings don’t go here, ’cause I don’t like sharing some stuff with the world, but…  The last week has been absolutely awesome, and I’m not going to go into gritty detail, just some surface stuff.  Like the weather has been hot, but not unbareable and there’s been a breeze and I’ve been outside in it enjoying it almost every day.  Also, I’ve been getting enough sleep which makes the day go faster and my attitude better, I’ve had a great time with friends almost every day since last Thursday.  I have some awesome friends.  Last night was several nice conversations and I found out that one of the guys at church works for the Nashville Civic Design Center and is working on the project for our neighborhood!  I got paid today, which makes life a little better yet.  Yes, doing things for other people is a wonderful way to make yourself feel good.  I love doing it and it’s always nice and usually a bit overwhealming when others do for me in time of need.

Lots of rambling here, but this weekend is only going to be better!  Lots of cool stuff coming…

So after checking out the blog this morning, it seems like everything didn’t get imported correctly.  I can search with the search button, but can’t see categories or click on the date archives and have approved results… SO, I think I’ll just wipe the thing and start over, so clean start, new categories and all that happy stuff.

It’s been a hard week, Sunday morning, Angelon, mom’s older sister, suffered a massive stroke and was life-flighted to Vanderbilt hospital where she was worked on all day and was not responsive.  She passed away at 1:37AM Monday morning.  Mom is still pretty upset, all the sisters were pretty close.  So today I’m going to the visitation and tomorrow to the funeral in Red Boiling Springs, TN.  This is the first of the siblings to pass away.  My sister is coming in from Memphis this morning to be here as well, and hopefully bringing Elizabeth, her youngest, with her.

Welcome to some Southern Culture! Friday night a few of us went to Adams, TN to visit the annual Thresherman’s Show. Specifically we were going to see the mule and draft horse pull that was taking place on Saturday night.

It was really hot and there wasn’t much shade, but they were just getting started when we arrived. I’ve never been to any kind of pull, tractor, mule or otherwise so I’ll describe in as much detail as I can remember. There were four classes of mules, lightweight, midweight, heavyweight and big. The horses were all in the same class. They started off with the lightweight mules, which weighed in at less than 1950lbs for the team (of two). I can’t remember what weight they started by pulling, but they ended at 4,900lbs! The light and mid weight teams get three chances to pull the weight the specified distance. For lightweights I think the distance was 10 feet and the midweight’s distance was 15 feet. The judge stands behind the sled and holds a pole in place and watches the dragging chain behind the sled until the yellow tape passes his pole at which time he blows the whistle to signal a successful pull. If forward motion stops at any point the whistle blows and it is considered a pull. For the light and mid weights like I said they get three tries, during which the judge never moves the pole so the distance is an aggregate distance, but for the heavier animals after a single pull, the pole is reset to the rear of the sled and the participant gets to keep the best of 3 pulls, not add them together. The mules and horses wore cleated shoes, with one cleat in the front center and it looked like just a long shoe in in the back that had the tips turned down to make two cleats in the back. It was dark by the time they got to the horses so I didn’t get any pictures ’cause I didn’t want to use the flash since all the animals seemed to be really high strung and easily spooked. The biggest horse team was incredibly huge! Their feet were about the size of a good sized pasta bowl and their rear ends were close to the top of my head. There was only one pair of big mules that was pulling with the horses and they stopped at 6,500lbs. They didn’t get eliminated and didn’t seem to be struggling all that much, but he didn’t have anyone to compete against, so he was just pulling to win his class. The horses continued and 2 teams went out on 8,000lbs, but the really huge pair pulled it with no problem and took first. Check out the flickr pics I took! Some would say it’s cruel to the animals, but I don’t think so, just a friendly competition with an beautiful display of animals working in tandem and with their handler to pull some impressive weight.

Nothing like the 4th of July to celebrate two of the nation’s favorite pastimes: eating large quantities of meat and blowing things up. I went with the fam to a eat grilled hamburgers and some of the best blueberry pie anywhere at some of my parent’s friend’s house. There was also some home made butterfinger ice cream involved which was delicious.� After that, a few of us went to the the fireworks downtown, but we stayed out of the traffic of the true “downtown” by picking a spot on the hill near my house. Nashville’s fireworks this year were impressive, but not nearly as much so as last year. There were several places that listed different times for start of the show, some said 9, some 9:30, but most said 9:30. We arrived and staked our claim about 9 and ten minutes later the show started! Last year it seemed like the show went for almost 40 minutes, but this year’s was about half that. They still had some of the cool hearts inside of circles and planets with rings, but I didn’t see any smiley faces this year There’s just nothing like being outside in decent weather with friends, smoking a great CAO cigar, and watching an incredible display of colorful explosions. Hope everyone had a happy 4th!

Ok, I’ve finally got a Flickr account set up (here’s my flickr page) and have uploaded a couple of pics of my motorcycle. I have a series of photos from my GPS bracket installation I did yesterday, but I need to sort them out and pick the relevant ones to upload. I also need to get out the old windshield and do a old to new comparison on them. This is a pic of the new windshield installed

I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to add the cool sidebar thing to show a few of the recent photos on the blog page… haven’t completely figured that one out yet.

It’s summer and the temp is up along with the humidity, today was mid 90’s and it felt like over 50% rel humidity. Just muggy and miserable, reminding me of why I wanted to be in Alaska this summer. Tomorrow is slated to hit 96! One good thing that comes to Nashville in summer is the Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman. We went this week to hear the Del McCoury band play and had a wonderful time. The band is great with only 3 microphones on stage, and they move around to fit the songs and solos. It’s really nice to have a group that can entertain as well as they play.

The Jamie Cullum concert is this coming weekend and I’m really looking forward to that one. I really do have a rediculously wide taste in music.

Can I just say out loud THANK YOU KEVIN O’MARA! If it weren’t for your proclaiming the greatness of flickr and wordpress I wouldn’t be doing any of this Thanks for the html link too!