Ed Icionsub

The Christmas shopping season is gearing up for this years buying spree. Most of the big stores who have championed “Black Friday” for years have decided to push their “Black Friday” up a couple of weeks and jumpstart the season with two more weekends of sales and special deals.

The grocery store has a bell ringer outside the entrance door already. The grocery store is also selling fresh cut frazier fir trees now. I think this is just too early to buy a cut tree and put it inside a house. Christmas is still 5 weeks away. That’s a long time for a cut tree to have to keep its needles.

One thing that it is not too early to consider purchasing is the Christmas cards for this year’s mailing to friends and family. I like the idea of ordering my cards online. The online greeting card printing is the same good quality printing that you used to have to order from a stationery store. But now you can go the psprint.com and pick from a huge assortment of card designs and place your order from the comfort of your own home. Choosing the inside greeting and placing the order is fast and easy.

Weekends are getting more precious – especially the days that we don’t have rain. Since the weather forecast is for rain tomorrow, we decided to get outside today and rake as many leaves as we could. We ran out of leaf bags and had to just leave huge piles of the leaves in the side yard. Hopefully I can get out to the store and buy more bags before it starts raining so we can get the leaves up off the grass.

All the women are abuzz today. Not only is the new Twilight movie in theaters, but Oprah has tearfully announced that she is quitting her TV show. It’s been a rough couple of days for estrogen.

Oprah is a huge empire of TV shows, movies, a magazine and who knows what all. When Oprah says that she likes something, there is an immediate surge in interest for that product. For example, this press release details a Christmas gift idea that Oprah has endorsed in her monthly magazine.

The idea behind the gift card is that you can customize the card with a photo of yourself, your family, your dog, your company logo – just about any graphic that you want to upload and print on the card. So it is a very personal gift idea.

Just about every teenage girl that I know and their moms are all excited about today. They’ve all been counting down the days to the USA premiere of the second vampire movie, Twilight: New Moon.

I did watch the first movie. It was pretty good. I don’t think it was worth all the hype we are getting for this series of books about a clumsy, silly high school girl and her vampire boyfriend.

We will soon find out if this new movie is as good as the first one – my daughter and wife are going tonight to the 11:00 pm showing. It was the first one they could buy advance tickets to see – the earlier shows have been sold out for two weeks.

When my brother had his martial arts studio in Virginia, he had enough students to make it worthwhile to run classes each night during the week and then three classes on Saturdays. The only problem with running the studio himself is that he never to got to take a day off. So he had to train and use another teacher to help out. Once he had some help, he was able to start competing and taking his best students to competitions.

Once you get to the advanced levels, you learn how to use different weapons and need to buy Martial Arts Equipment like padding and some of the weapons. His studio sold some of the basic things but when he needed special equipment he would get online to find the right things and have them shipped to his home.He began a nice collection of weapons and trophies as he advanced through each fighting level.

Thinking back on all those fights, I think he did a great job in each of the competitions and he taught quite a few students who went on to win championships, too. When he suffered his stroke, the hardest thing for him was admitting that he would not be able to teach karate any longer. Letting go of the studio was probably the saddest day in his life.

I still think of him when I drive by the area where his studio is being used by the teachers he trained. I’m glad to see his dreams and life’s work continue to help others even after he has passed.