My Favorite Blank

Happy Birthday to Lisa!

A good online friend of mine that I have known for more than 5 years now; is celebrating a birthday today! She is one of my most special friends in the whole wide world and I would certainly be lost without her. We met more than 5 years ago on April 1st, 2003 while playing in a cribbage league together. We both enjoyed playing crib (the card game); so it didn’t take us too long to hit things off. Lisa was just learning  to play crib or cribbage at the time and I taught her a few things in crib and Lisa taught me how to laugh, smile and just enjoy life in general.

I can’t believe more than 5 years has passed and it seems just like yesterday we was playing crib against each other in a league called Teammates and our crib games were played at Pogo in a room called Violet Eyes. I was on the Loonie Tunes Team and Lisa played for the Mistys. So even though we played on different crib teams, we kept up with each other everyday on MSN Instant Messenger. Even today we still talk almost daily on MSN Instant Messenger.

Even though me and Lisa share a lot of the same interests, we also have a lot of different opinions on other things and for more than 5 years now, we just can’t quite seem to get the other one on the same page. For instance, I know the Atlanta Braves is the best baseball team out there, but my friend from New York believes the boys in pinstripes are the best and she’s a big time New York Yankees fan. She even has an aunt that is real good friends with Bernie Williams (ex New York Yankee) mother or grandmother. So Lisa’s love for the Yankees and mine for the Braves has kept baseball an interesting topic over the last 5 years. We just need a Yankees and Braves World Series to prove who has the better baseball team and maybe that will happen this year.

Lisa is Italian and is a great cook! She sends me the stuff to make lasagna and it’s by far the best I have ever tasted. She puts a few things in a little container that has to marinate for a short time and by the time it arrives to my home in Georgia, it has one of the best smells you could imagine. Lisa’s Lasagna is well worth the 8 hours you have to spend slaving over the stove to prepare it properly.

Movies has been another very common thing we have shared over the years and I have watched about 500 more movies over the last few years because of Lisa, that normally I probably wouldn’t have seen. So since I like to play trivia from time to time, it’s really come in handy watching all of these movies I have now seen.

Today is June 5th and it is my very special friend from New York’s Birthday, so I would just like to take the time to tell her thanks for all the times and memories we have shared over the last 5 years and I look just as forward to the next 5 years and see what our friendship has in store for us. One thing I can say about Lisa, is life is never predictable when you’re around Lisa and just when you thought you have saw or heard it all, she comes up with a whole new way to yank my chain or make me laugh.

Happy Birthday Lisa!

Here’s a little song I found that touches my heart. I know your not into country music as much as me, but I like the message in this song and I think it fits a lot of the ways I feel about you!

More Than A Memory

HAVE A GREAT DAY AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY LISA!

Do you own a restaurant? Do you plan to open up one soon or have a friend that will be going in the food business in the near future? Well you’re going to need something for the customers to sit and eat on, so if you’re looking for some restaurant furniture, I have a good suggestion for you. Affordable Seating will probably have just what you’re looking for and at prices that won’t break you. They have a nice selection of restaurant chairs and other bar furniture that would make any restaurant look good. You will still have to worry about serving good and fresh food each day, but as long as you can keep up that part on your end, you can be sure that Affordable Seating will take care of the other end and your customers will enjoy your taste in furniture almost as much as the taste of the food. So if you still need the bar furniture in place before you turn around the “open” sign or would just like to replace your existing furniture; be sure to look at all the great choices you can find at Affordable Seating.

I like to collect baseball cards and really all of the sports cards like basketball cards, NASCAR cards, NFL football cards and I even have a few hockey cards in my sports card collection. Several years ago I use to go get a table at different flea markets in my local area and would usually spend about 10 dollars for a table for the day. I could use make that money back with a few dollars extra and I also would do some card trading and this allowed me to grow my collection that way too. It’s not a very profitable business to set up on the weekends and sell sports cards, but you can make a few bucks at it and it’s also a good hobby to have.

I like to find things that will increase in value over the years and baseball cards certainly fit into that idea. I’m not sure how many cards I have in my current collection, but it’s pretty safe to assume that I have more baseball cards than 99 out of every 100 people that might read this blog post. If you would like to start a baseball card collection up, I would recommend going to the flea markets and searching out some of the best deals you can find there. Some people just like a specific team or players and the flea markets allow you to just go buy those specific cards for your collection. If you buy the cards by the pack or cases from sports card companies or from the places that sell baseball cards, you will be getting very few of the cards that you really want. You do get cards of people that might not have a lot of value now and in the next 10 years; you might have a card that is really worth something. Rookie cards are the best way to go and they are the most popular cards in the sports card trading industry. So try to hunt down all of the rookie cards of players that are rookies now or will be rookies in the near future. You will have to pay more if you start buying rookie baseball cards of players that are already all stars. You want to buy when the cards are cheap and sell when you think they are at the height of their value. For those of you that own Alex Rodriguez rookie cards, I would suggest waiting for him to pass Hank Aaron on the all time homerun’s list and then trying to sell them before he breaks Barry Bonds record. Your selling point then is that you can tell your customers his cards will increase in value once he breaks Bonds homerun record and they will. However, if you wait until after he has the record, they might not be as much as an upside to his value and it could be difficult getting equal value in the form of cash for his rookie cards. So remember that and keep up the hobby of baseball card collecting for the next generation of kids and young adults to have fun with this hobby as well.

A new breakthrough is causing a buzz in the medical community and for stock holders in Los Angeles County. The molecule Ethocyn is proving to be a skin-rejuvenating weapon on the war of aging and this new breakthrough could mean younger looking skin for us all. The company that is behind this breakthrough is Chantal Pharmaceuticals and it is being led by Dr. Chantal Burnison. The news didn’t take long to reach the investors in Los Angeles County and now the pharmaceutical company is leading the pack compared to other small business stocks in the area. This might only be the start of things and this news may grow much bigger over the next several years, as Dr. Chantal Burnison tries to discover a solution to aging skin. The public wants a cure on the aging process and since aging is a chemical process, there actually might be a cure for it someday. We may all have a new weapon against aging if Ethocyn continues to perform as well as it has in recent studies. This would help both men and women reduce the effects of aging from the appearance on our skin. Let’s just continue to keep our fingers crossed that his new revolutionary wrinkle-reducing ingredient will be the answer that so many men and women are looking for these days. We do need help in this war and none of us want to age any faster than we have to and I’m sure there will be a lot of supporters to Dr. Burnison and her staff that are working on this miracle at Chantal Pharmaceuticals.

I am someone that likes to pick up a deck of cards from time to time. One of my favorite card games would have to be spades. It’s real simple to learn and most can be taught the basics of spades in about 10 minutes or after a couple of games. The really good spades players and the ones that have tons of strategy for the game, learn those over several thousands of games and they can’t be taught as quick. It seems most spades players have different opinions on things and the way they like for the game to go. One of the best ways to play spades is with 4 people and having teams of 2, where each player gets 13 cards dealt to him/her.

Finding a good partner to play spades with can be tough and it’s important that you work as a team or you won’t be maximizing your hand or your partner’s hand. Something as simple as leading off with a certain suit is important and if you know your partner is out of that suit, you want to make sure he/her gets a chance to win books or tricks with their spades. A book or a trick is given to the team that has the highest card out of the 4 played. Whoever starts the round will play any card in their hand and the next player must play that suit. This goes for all of the other 3 people after the first card is played and if you don’t have that suit, you may then throw a spade which trumps the round then and can only be beat with a higher spade. You must be out of the suit to play a spade and if you have a card in the matching suit you must lay it down.

Now if you have a partner that leads off the game with an Ace and you don’t have any cards in that suit, you may play something other than a spade. If you don’t have the first card that is laid down to start a round, you can throw anything that you like. So if your partner throws an ace, you know they should win the trick or book, so it gives you the chance to throw off one of your lowest cards in your hand or you might want to throw a card that you don’t have many left in that suit, so you can be one card closer to cutting that suit with spades.

If you have 3 other people that you know and can get them together for a spades game, but sure to do that sometime. We have sat up all night and played for hours and hours a game of spades that would go to 500, 1000 or if we had a lot of time to play we have been known to play to 5000 before. Depending on the rules will determine how you keep score in spades, but the most common way is that a book/trick will equal 10 points for everyone that you and your partner bid. So before the first card is played each person tells how many books/tricks they think they can get. So if a team bets 5 books/tricks, they will get 50 points for achieving that. They will earn 1 point for each book they get over that, but if they get 10 tricks in a game, they must go back 100 points. So it forces teams to try and bid their hands properly, but if you bet too high and don’t get your books, you will lost whatever you team bet. So you could lose 50 points if you and your partner only got 4 or less books that game. So since you can go backwards on the scorebooks, a game to 1,000 will usually last for about 3 hours and a race to 5,000 can start in the evening while it’s still daylight outside and there is a chance you will still be playing when the sun comes up the next morning.  Get with your friends and challenge them to a game of spades and remember there is no table talk allowed in spades, so if you know you can win a book or want to suggest a card that your partner should lead with; it’s not allowed in spades and the no talking rule in spades, is what makes the game so fun!