Well, here I am, back home from a fun, extended weekend. There’s nothing better than taking some days off work and hitting the road for a little trip. Well, except for a big trip

Here’s the run down of my weekend. Make sure you’ve got the time, because this post has turned out to be really LONG…

Fri, 3 March, 2006

The Trip South

I set out for Nashville around 2:30pm on Friday. I was heading down south to visit my brother David and sister-in-law Elizabeth in Nashville, TN and my paternal grandparents just south of Owensboro, KY. No rain and partly cloudy skies greeted me as I hit the interstate and stayed with me all the way. It was about a four hour trip with no traffic. I lasted an hour before I broke into the snacks.

The Arrival

I arrived at my brother’s condo around 5:30pm Central Time. Elizabeth welcomed me; David was still at the lab playing with his mice. Sometimes I think he likes them a little too much. He came home soon after, though, and the talk of food began.

Dinner Time

Each time I visit Nashville, or any other city for that matter, I look forward to trying a restaurant that is unique to that city, one that isn’t a national chain, something with a nice ambience. After much deliberation, we decided to try Merchant’s Restaurant. It had supposedly received good reviews, and Elizabeth had enjoyed the one she had been to, so off we went. After circling the block by the Gaylord Entertainment Center three times (also called ‘cruising’ and thus illegal in that area), Elizabeth and I were getting nauseous. David finally decided to valet park the car before we started retching, so all was well. First thing we noticed at the restaurant was how empty it was. I think it was about 6:30 or 7:00, on a Friday night, so I’d expect it to be fairly crowded. There were three, maybe four parties seated that I could see and the bar was empty. The ambience wasn’t much to write home about either. It looked like it could be a fancy place, but the TVs hanging from the ceiling showing sports programming took away from that. Oh, well, on to the food. My brother and I decided to try the filet mignon. (This is the point where I’d say something about that “special” coupon that Elizabeth had, but I’ve given her a hard enough time about that, so I’ll leave her alone…for now ). Unfortunately, the filet was very disappointing. It wasn’t “butterflied” or wrapped in bacon and wasn’t near as tender or mouth-watering good as the filet mignons I’ve had at much cheaper places. I didn’t like the mashed potatoes that came with it very much, either. At least the bread was pretty good…

Hanging Out

We returned home and just hung out for the evening. Of course, I wasn’t going to get away with being in town without being a computer repairman. David’s laptop was having trouble (again), so I started working on it. David had attempted to reinstall Windows on his own without success, so I started the process over and made sure I got all the Windows updates (including Service Pack 2). Ugh, his laptop was not meant to have SP2, even if it’s installed before any other software/drivers were installed. The wireless internet hardware in his laptop does not work at all with it. After messing with it for a while, I decided to reinstall all over again and not do SP2 this time around. In the meantime, we played some Halo on the Xbox and I got my butt whooped. I never was good at that game.

Sat, 4 March, 2006

Breakfast

We awoke bright and early on Saturday (well, for me at least) with a full day planned. First up - breakfast! It’s my favorite meal of the day and David cooked a good breakfast for me. Ham, sausage, biscuits, gravy, eggs…mmm. Thanks bro!

Paintball

No time to sit around and digest. It was paintball time! David and some of the guys in his Sunday School class were nice enough to plan a paintball outing the same weekend I was going to be in town. We headed south of Nashville with Middle Tennessee Paintball as our destination. For those of you familiar with it, it’s similar to Diehard Paintball here in Northern KY. What was supposed to be a group of thirteen from the church initially looked like a group of four, but we ended up with seven. The people at MTP told them we could play amongst ourselves if we had a group of ten, so we were unsure how this was going to work.

Turns out MTP was just a mass of chaos anyway. MTP had told us they were expecting three groups, ours included, so we figured each group would rotate through the fields throughout the day. Uh, no. I don’t know how MTP has managed to survive doing business like they do. First off, it cost the same to play whether you rented their gear or had your own. That made no sense to me. At Diehard, they only charge you for “all day air” if you have your own equipment. Secondly, and what made matters worse, was that there were only three or four people working when we first arrived - one collecting money and waivers, another handing out equipment and filling air tanks and one or two refs. Yeah, that’s right, one or two refs for three groups which amount to about 50 people (I actually never saw a third “big” group as we had been told, but the place was open to the public that day, so with all the people who showed up on their own to play, it was like a third group, anyway). Usually, you have at least two refs for a game of five on five. It’s not like we all showed up unexpectedly, either. Our group had to put down a deposit, so I imagine the others did as well, so the people at MTP knew what to expect. The other group was the Boy Scouts (or maybe it was the Cub Scouts - there were young kids) so they played on their own field with only their group. The refs watched over them. Well, they tried at least. For those of you who know what a speedball field is, imagine 20-30 kids and a few dads crammed onto the field. It was mass chaos for them, especially since many of them had never played before. It was hilarious watching these scouts line up 5 deep behind a single bumper then act surprised when they got hit.

It was near 12pm by the time we got to play our first game. The owner of the place finally pulled himself away from the equipment and air shed long enough to ref a game. Other refs started showing up gradually, but they were still in short supply. So much for being just our group - everyone at the place other than the scouts were in on the game. It was a twelve minute game of center flag on a woodsball field. Besides the chaos with so few workers, the place was fairly nice. They had about 8 fields, three of them woodsball fields of pretty decent size. The first game went fine, and the owner had said we were going to play games back-to-back, so we were ready to hit the field again. 15-20 minutes later, we were still waiting, so we took matters into our own hands. We grabbed three other players to make two 5 person teams, went to a speedball field sans ref and played 6 games almost one right after the other. Good times.

I could go on and on about that place, but since this is getting long winded, I’ll sum it up. We ended up playing about 12-13 games on the various speedball and woodsball fields, which wasn’t bad at all considering. Tons of paint and some aches and pains later, we called it a day. Or more appropriately, the owner told everyone to leave since they were closing. (This was at 4pm - seems early to me.) All in all, the weather was nice, we got in plenty of games and had a good time despite MTP’s best efforts to ruin our outing.

Dinner

Elizabeth was kind enough to fix dinner for the warrior Vaught boys that night, and one of my faves to boot - chicken fettuccini alfredo. It was a nice, relaxing meal and I ate my fill. Thanks sis! Almost better than than overpriced Merchant’s!

Swing

The fun for the day wasn’t over yet. As if coming down on a weekend when paintball was planned, this was also a weekend when the The Nashville 20/30 Christian Swing Dance Group sponsored one of their bi-monthly Jump, Jive & Swing events. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I thought it would be like the SwinGallery that I attend here in Northern KY. It was like it, but on a much larger scale. The event was held in the gymnasium of a local church and there were more people at the lesson than SwinGallery can even hold in its dance studio. I’d say there were easily over a hundred people there for the beginner’s lesson, maybe another 20 for the intermediate, and that was before the dancing itself started! It was awesome to see such a big group of swing dancers!

Since I haven’t been regular in swing dancing lately, I decided to do the beginner’s lesson. Figured I’d give David and Elizabeth some pointers, too, since they’re new to swing. The lesson was well-organized and well-run, better than the seemingly haphazard and often confusing lesson that SwinGallery does. I was really surprised at how smoothly the lesson went with so many people there. One of the nice things about going to a lesson is meeting new people. You rotate partners throughout the lesson, so you get to meet many people before the dancing even begins. For me, this is a great ice breaker and makes it easier to ask girls to dance later on. By dancing and interacting during the lesson you get a feel for who you connect with, who you get a good vibe from. Jamie, if you’re out there, it was nice to have met you and I wish we could have danced more. Maybe next time I’m in town we’re run into each other again!

Unfortunately, my stomach wasn’t behaving, so I didn’t do as much dancing as I would have liked, but it was still fun to watch everyone - especially David and Elizabeth I think I may have been inspired to go swing dancing more often. I’m already planning on going this week, which will be my third time in the past week, and more than meets my yearly goal.

Sun, 5 March, 2006

Church

After an eventful Saturday, I wanted to sleep in on Sunday, but David and Elizabeth invited me to go with them to their Sunday School class at Brentwood Baptist Church. Of course it was at 8am. Yuck! It was good to go, though. BBC is a pretty large church, with membership close to 6000. That’s definitely not rare for Nashville, though. They’ve got some huge churches down there.

In Sunday School, we had a discussion on Luke 13:10-17, as well as some tangents that went along with it. Some interesting points were brought up and it was good to hear the discussion among the members, rather than just talking by the leader.

We went to the church service after Sunday School. The preacher was doing a series on the book of Romans and this week he spoke on the end of Chapter 2.

Basketball

After church, we rushed home for some Basketball Action! The University of Kentucky men’s basketball team had its final game of the season against Florida on Sunday. It was a home game, senior night, and an important game for the team to secure a berth in the NCAA tournament with a decent seeding. Too bad the team didn’t play like they wanted to win. They lost 79-64, their 11th loss of the season, which is almost unheard of for UK basketball. Now, our chances of making the tournament take a hit. We should still get in, but our seeding will be very low. The SEC Tournament starts on Friday. If we have a good showing there, we could salvage something from the season. I’m not crossing my fingers…

Computers and Xboxes

While watching the game, I reinstalled Windows on David’s laptop…again…and did all the updates up to SP2. Stop! I wasn’t about to go beyond that. Everything seemed to be working - except the wireless connection. It was doing better than when I installed SP2, though. SP2 caused it not to work at all, but the laptop was at least getting a recognizing there was a wireless network available. Windows would connect to it and showed strong signal strength, but I still couldn’t get it to connect to the internet. The IP address assigned to the laptop was not the 192.168.1.x IP address from the router that I was expecting, but instead was a 162.x.x.x. IP. The Ethernet connection worked fine, thankfully. Anyone know what could cause this issue and how to fix it?

After the game, I challenged my bro to a game of NCAA football on the Xbox. I needed to avenge my poor showing on Halo, and I did, once again taking the title over my little bro. Seems we each have our strengths.

Grandparents
Back on the road again! I was heading back north with plans to stop at my grandparents’ farm in Beech Grove, KY. It’s always good to see them since I don’t get to but a few times a year. The trips have been more frequent lately, which is nice. Can’t beat the slower pace of life on the farm, the good home cookin’ and the fellowship with my grandparents. We had an excellent dinner, watched some history of Kentucky (the State of, not just UK) and enjoyed each other’s company. It was good to sleep in a bed again, too. My body doesn’t like David’s couch AT ALL.

Mon, 6 March, 2006

The Return Home
I woke up on Monday morning very refreshed, had a nice breakfast, did some work on my grandparents’ computer and before I knew it, it was time to hit the road for the trip home. They never let any of us leave without a final meal, so I filled up my stomach with lunch, packed up the car with all kinds of good home cooked food and set out for home. Being so stuffed from the meals, I actually made it to Louisville before I started snacking!

I had some time to think during the trip home and came up with some very interesting ideas for my internet caf�. Not sure how feasible these ideas are, or even if it’s a good idea or will work, but hopefully I’ll write about it soon. I’m at least excited to brainstorm on the ideas.

The playlist for this road trip included the following:

• Audiobook: Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
• David Crowder Band (Most of their discography)
• Oval Opus (I forgot how much I enjoyed this local - to Cincinnati - band)

Wow, my fingers are tired after typing all that. I hope at least one person reads it all the way to the end… Sorry for any grammatical or spelling errors - this was way too long for me to re-read the whole thing again