Cheryl Beckham

I actually got up on water skis and managed to hang on for a good 5 minutes or so, this has been a long time a coming. I went for a week end visit at my brother’s summer beach house, where he has all of his water toys at hand and we had ourselves a blast this time around, and the weather was perfect the whole time for a change.

I have always enjoyed water sports, swimming, boating, rafting, fishing, tubing, but have never been able to get myself up and out of the water each time that I have attempted to water ski, so this came as a big surprise and helped end the summer on a high note! And one of my nieces got the whole thing on video to be shown, I’m sure, during one of the family holiday season get togethers that will be here soon, ugh…

Google recently bought out a company whose services seem pretty impressive, so much so that I wanted to share what I have learned about it.

Grand Central is a company that will give you a “phone number for life.” That is only one part of it all. Part of the service includes the ability to ring multiple phones at the same time. You can put up to five number into the system and when you get a call it will ring all of them and transfer the call to the first number that answers it. You can even have an address book where you can define groups of people (friends, family, work, other). You can set preferences about which phones ring for which groups. So I can set it that friends and family ring my home phone, but work and others (anybody not in your address book is in the others category) don’t. It has a call recording feature (a message is announced to both parties); voice mails are retrievable by phone or online; you can set up a temporary number to forward calls to in addition to the configured 5 via phone or online; you can set ring back and voice mail messages specific to each group.

All and all it really looks to be a really nice service and is by invite only, but free. I understand that they have stated that there will always be a free version, but it appears that someday they will start charging for some of their premium features.

Now my question is, how does one go about getting an invite, looks like I have some researching to do now!

My passion for reading has been with me all of my life, although it take a back seat for several years after giving birth to my daughter, 12 years ago. Now that I am on my own once again, my ex has custody, for the time being, I have been excited about given more time on my hands in order to start some serious reading once again.

I have been a “Parrot Head” since way back and have always enjoyed the tropical type music that he is so well known for producing and I have heard that he has written some books lately, but have never seemed to be able to come upon any of his books until just recently.

So I was thrilled to find one of his books called “A Salty Piece of Land” at my favorite used book store, and for only $2 and I’ve really enjoyed the reading of it this past week. I’m glad that inside of the book it tells me the names of his other books that I will need to see if I can find at a good bargain also. I’m especially interesting in finding the one entitled “A Pirate Looks At Fifty”, if I can’t find it locally then I guess I could always look on-line and see if I can find it somewhere out there in cyber-world, for cheap.

The days of waiting for the mail man to come and bring good tidings to my door are long gone. What with email being the way for most folks to keep in touch any more, getting some sort of note, card or letter from anyone can only be expected these days around your birthday and the Christmas season.

My daily mail delivery usually consists of mainly of assorted junk mail and bills. So imagine my surprise and delight to find only one single piece of mail, all by it’s lonesome, sitting in my box this afternoon and this one piece just so happened to be my tax rebate check from our stimulus planning, soon to be our ex, President George W. Bush.

Now that I know the amount of the check, I will need to do some serious thought on what is the best way to use this precious bounty that has been bestowed upon me.

A couple of friends and I stepped out last night for a bite to eat and afterwards we went to see the recently released movie WALL-E  at the mall. Since we went to the last showing of the evening, we all were pretty much still full from our late dinner, so no one went crazy with the popcorn and candies, or their $5 sodas, which helped keep the cost to a minimum. These days none of us can afford to splurge much on extras like that anyway.

The film turned out to be animated and mainly geared towards children. This film possessed a not so subtle theoretical prophecy of the future in hysterically exaggerated terms, with an underlying sub-plot of a sort of the “lone survivor”, “wrong side of the tracks working stiff”, falls for the “top-of-the-line” classy, highly advanced, come to save mankind and got no time for silliness, fembot! A kind of love affair between robots. That in itself is a hoot! None the less it was quite unlike any animated film I had ever seen before. You just have to chill out and laugh. So, in my book, ’twas well worth the time and money to be seen on the big screen. Pay attention to minor details all through the movie, and you’ll not only laugh your ass off, but may find yourself giving some thought to things you’d previously paid little attention to.