Ed Icionsub

This year we missed the Tennessee Renaissance festival. It is always on weekends in May, including Memorial Day. We’ve gone to every one since we moved here in 1992, but this year we had a lot on our plate and we kept putting it off. Next thing we knew, it was June and we missed out.

The local Ren Fest is always at the property of a man who built a real castle. Part of the Festival admission allows you to tour the castle. It was an ambitious undertaking and he did a lot of the work himself, including all the hand placed tiles in the castle kitchen.

The wife was looking at a web site with Halloween costumes and found a sexy pirate costume that would be great for a Ren Fest costume. We have always dressed up like peasants in the past, but if she wants to go as a pirate next time, maybe I will find a new costume for myself, too.

I had not even thought of looking on the internet for sexy Halloween costumes that would serve us as a Ren Fest costume. I’m glad she was looking at the Halloween site and got the idea. That opens up our costumes options quite a bit.

This is the same site that my step daughter used last Halloween when she chose a sexy cop costume to go to work dressed up on Halloween. All the employees were allowed to dress up in Halloween costumes as long as they did not wear a mask or wear anything too revealing. After all, it is a family shopping destination.

The good thing about this Halloween costume web site is that they have a category dedicated to plus sized women. So my stepdaughter was able to find something that she knew would fit and not have to worry about getting something too small and then sending it back.

Everyone on my street went over the county line and spent a lot of money on fireworks this year. We all headed outside around 9:00 tonight and started shooting them off in front of the house. There was no traffic on our street to worry about. What a lot of fun. All these guys running around making loud noises and setting off explosions. This is a rednecks dream holiday!

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is going to ruin a lot of people’s livelihoods and a lot of people’s summer vacations. You can’t go to the beach to swim and fish with oil in the water. So, this year we are going to spend a week in Myrtle Beach and enjoy the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve found the website, http://www.myrtlebeachgolf.net, to make the plans.

With all the different Myrtle Beach golf courses, you can go there for a week every year, for several years, and always have a new or different golf course to play. So you just have to pick which golf courses you want to play, and use the internet to book your tee times when you book your hotel.

In fact, there are Myrtle Beach golf packages that do that for you automatically. I love the way the internet makes planning a vacation so easy. I can do everything in just a few minutes from home or at work, have everything arranged. Then I turn over the rest of the details to the wife, and she handles the food, the entertainment, and the daily activities for the rest of the family.

Today was a great day for fathers. It’s our own day for being recognized by family and friends, and the gifts and special meals are nice, too. The new leather wallet and the Playstation 3 game were a nice surprise and very much appreciated. But to be honest, the recognition and the thank you’s mean a lot more to me these days than the new “stuff.” Thanks, boys and girls!

We had the family over today. At first we spent a lot of time outside, the weather was so nice and everything is blooming. So it was nice to sit on the swing and lawn chairs and just chit chat while the kids ran around the yard.

Eventually we made our way inside for a wonderful Easter dinner. We had bought a 10 pound Honeybaked ham, and we had a variety of side dishes, including scalloped potatoes, macaroni and cheese, spinach souffle, and pineapple spoon bread. For dessert, we had our choice of carrot cake or apple pie.

It was a really nice, low key day. I would really like to spend more Sundays with the family like we did today.

We bought extra eggs this week at Kroger so the grandson can color them for Easter. We are going to hardboil a dozen of them and let him color them all, and then the Easter Bunny will hide them early Sunday morning so we can have our own little Easter Egg hunt. Unless it rains. But last I heard on the TV news, the weather is going to be gorgeous all weekend.

There is an old saying: “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Today being April Fool’s day, most people are thinking about practical jokes and having fun with family, friends, or co-workers.

The only problem with playing a prank on me, is that once I realize you can’t be trusted, then I no longer trust you.

That goes for telling lies, as well, and infidelity. Some things just don’t get second chances.

We took the grandson to a free Easter egg hunt this afternoon at the Buchanan House landmark.

There were a couple of hundred kids there, and the hunt organizers had broken them down into three age ranges to make the hunt more fair. Our grandson is 7, so he was in the second grouping. He had so much fun running through the side yard looking for the eggs.

Depending on where you live in the U.S., the kids have spring break any time between the middle of March and the first week of April. We are in the middle of our Spring Break, but the school system in the next county over is not having their Spring Break for another 2 weeks, to correlate closer to Easter.

My grandson’s best friend, Cole, is lucky to be spending his Spring Break with his family in a Myrtle Beach resort. His family left here last Friday and drove straight across I-40 to Greensboro, North Carolina, then headed south on Route 220. It’s a long drive, but very pretty. We’ve gone to several Myrtle Beach resorts and know the fastest route and the best route, depending upon the time of year and whether I-40 is closed due to landslides or other bad road conditions.

Cole’s parents told me that the Avistar Resort is one of the best Oceanfront Myrtle Beach resorts, where you can stay right on the ocean and be close to a dozen great golf courses. To be honest, I’m not sure which is the best feature – being on the ocean or being close to the golf courses. I love both the ocean and playing golf, so I am thinking that the Oceanfront Myrtle Beach resort is the place for our next vacation.

The love song I just posted by Whitney Houston is my wife’s favorite song. But mine is this one, by Bryan Adams: