This is going to be a short post, been working all day & do not really feel like typing.

This weekend was a lot of fun. It started off with getting a new toy (more on that later) and ended with our friends coming over for a cookout.

I will hold off on blogging about the new toy for now due to personal reasons. If you have my email address you can send me an email & we will discuss it, but not blogging about it just yet.

Monday was a very good day. J-Train & Mrs J-Train (the friends formerly known as J&J) came over around 3p and we had a cook out. There was turkey burgers, hamburgers, hot dogs, BBQ pork, more hot dogs, corn, diced potatoes & onions, watermelon & more hot dogs… What can I say we like hot dogs…

After eating we spent the evening catching up on episodes of Deadliest Catch. J-Train & Mrs J had to leave around 9p since they live so far away.

I have found out that they are never allowed to leave. Last time they were over, they left & we had a tornado come close to hitting our house. This time they left & we had a power outage. Roughly 6,000 people in our area were without power until 1am. It really wasn’t to bad until I started to go to sleep and had flashbacks of the 28 days I spent without power after Hurricane Charley. Luckily I was able to find the medicine cabinet in the dark & soon after I was sleeping again.

We decided to head down to Bike Week this year for a couple different reasons - Michelle had never been, it had been awhile since we had seen my sister & brother in law, and most of all we wanted a vacation.

We arrived at my sister’s house around 10pm Friday night. No one was home (we knew this ahead of time) so we watched a movie, then went to bed. That was the wrong thing to do.

I think somewhere around 1am I woke up to someone yelling at us to get out of bed. Guess that means my sister is home. They had been out with some friends and she wanted us to get up & visit with her. After about an hour of talking with her, she got tired & went to bed. Of course before that happened we had to humor some of her requests, like “Here put these glasses on”. It was more of a demand than a request. So remember the pics that follow were done to appease her -

Saturday we drove down to “Broadway At The Beach” to see the motorcycle vendors. Here is Broadway’s website - LINK. They had all the motorcycle riders park in certain areas similar to a car show setup. There were thousands of motorcycles to look at. We spent a couple hours walking around here.

On our way back to my sister’s house we saw something very funny to anyone that has ever rode a motorcycle - a man riding on the back of a woman’s motorcycle.

Michelle had fun seeing all the motorcycles. They estimated over 300,000 motorcycle riders came to Myrtle Beach this year.

When we got back to the house, we were forced to divide our afternoon between laying at the pool & lounging in the hot tub… I know, it was a terrible decision.

Saturday evening we went to a biker bar ( HD Spokes) to see a motorcycle burn out competition. Unfortunately they had a new thing set up where you could hook your motorcycle up on a trailer & do a virtual drag race with someone else. Almost everyone had their motorcycles in line waiting for this, so we did not get to see any real burnouts. We left there early & went to Calabash, NC for a very good seafood dinner.

Here is a pic of my niece, me & my sister waiting for dinner -

Me & my niece -

Here is Michelle with my niece & sister -

Yeah, I am glad my niece lives a couple hours away, she is a bad influence on Michelle.

Sunday morning we got up & spent some time playing with the baby kittens that have invaded my sister’s house. Once we all got bored with this we headed to the Little River Blue Crab Festival. Contrary to the name, up until last year you could not find any blue crabs at this “festival”. It is a block party atmosphere set up with craft & food vendors.

Once again our afternoon was taken up by being forced to lay around the pool. Such a terrible life….. I think I could get used to this.

Sunday night we went out to dinner at Nakatos Japanese Steak House. We had a really good time.

I love going to Myrtle Beach. There is always something to do there…..Oh yeah & hanging out with my sister is fun to…..LOL

Just kidding. My sister & brother in law always make sure we have fun, they are great to be around.

Love you guys.

Here is a link to all the pictures from the trip - LINK

I know its been awhile since I blogged about anything. Sorry nothing overly interesting has been going on.

I have been hurting (knees & back) so I haven’t made it to the gym in awhile, so no gym stories.

I finally went to a doctor & had a full physical done. This is the first one since sometime before my 21st birthday. I found out I have super high cholesterol, my vitamin D is way down, I am a borderline diabetic & my blood work showed a super high count of inflammatory “things”..whatever the technical term is - I showed a very high possibility of arthritis. The amount of “things” in my blood were 654 (whatever measurement they were using), anything over like 150 is extreme.

So now I have to be on a low fat diet. Good news is I have lost 6 pounds in the last week.

Ok thats it for the health crap…. Moving on to what we did this past weekend…

Saturday our friends J & J came over. I guess I won’t type their full names since J didn’t in his blog.

Link- http://blog.haightonline.net/2008/05/12/cookout-with-g-and-m/.

I felt bad because they live like an hour away. Not super bad, because I am lazy & I am terrible about driving to see people… but still a little bad.

Since Michelle & I live in a small town there wasn’t a lot of stuff to show them. We started out the day by me showing off a small part of my rifle collection. Luckily J & J are cool. They do not instantly think someone that owns a rifle is some crazy nut job. I got to explain some of the history about the rifles & probably scared the neighbors too. BONUS…..

After big J (that’s what she said) got tired of all of us staring at him playing with the rifles (I think he was getting embarrassed) we drove to Morrow Mountain. It was a beautiful day to be up there. J & J actually got us out of the car, so we got to see views we had never seen before. It’s amazing what you can see when you actually walk around.

Next we drove off the mountain top & took them over to Lake Tillery. Here we watched some people canoeing. We also learned that if 2 people are facing other in a canoe they have difficulty paddling anywhere. Luckily for them, a woman a lot nicer than me pointed out why they were having problems. Me? I just sat back & laughed. This was also the time that I learned me & Michelle are way to much like J & J. Past things we have done in life, locations we are from & also the fact that me & J (this is getting hard to type, I may wind up typing their full names soon) like to annoy our girlfriends in the same ways - trying to stick our fingers up their noses, licking their faces, all that kinds of stuff… What??? You know you do it too, we just admit to it…..

Soon after this my hunger kicked in & we headed back towards town. I took this time to show our friends the HUGE Albemarle Mall (it consists of a Belks & a JC Penneys) & downtown Albemarle. I had to prove we didn’t live in the middle of nowhere, just a small somewhere.

We finished up the afternoon by cooking on the grill. I learned that grilled turkey burgers actually taste good. Thankfully J & J are not high maintenance. They are happy with sitting on the couch & watching Discovery & History channel. Hopefully we didnt scare them to bad & they will come back again.

Sunday was a laid back day. It was raining most of the day. Michelle didn’t feel good so I didn’t do much. I took Mom her Mother’s Day cards sometime in the early afternoon. Then I did some dishes & went to sleep on the couch.

I got woke up at around 7pm to Michelle saying there was a tornado in Albemarle. She is very terrified of thunderstorms & extremely terrified of a tornado hitting. So I went into my job of getting her to calm down by telling her that she was overreacting. While doing this I turned on the weather & saw an extreme close up radar of our little town & heard the reporters talking about a tornado being on the ground & heading down the road that heads straight to our house.

The thunderstorm was moving at 42 mph & the tornado was literally playing “catch up” with the storm. They said it was moving so fast you couldn’t really see the funnel cloud. About this time the very tiny hail turned into hail larger than a penny & was falling in what looked like a white wall coming from the sky. I have never seen so much hail.

Luckily the funnel cloud dissipated before it reached our neighborhood. That definitely made up for me being lazy all morning.

UPDATE -

Here is link to pics - LINK