Glen Brammell

Around here, Memorial Day is a huge holiday. Not only do all the governemnt and military offices take the holiday very seriously to recognize the contributions and sacrifices of our servicemen, servicewomen and their families, but this is also the unofficial start of summer.

Tonight on the way home from work I stopped at the gas station to fill up and the place was jamming with people at every pump. People were getting an early start on the weekend by getting gas, buying beer and those cheap styrofoam coolers, and grabbing big bags of ice from the convenience store freezers.

Since the weather is supposed to be sunny and hot, this is the perfect weekend to find a beach and get a start on our summer tans.

Robots are here to stay, but we don’t have much use for personal robots yet. I would really like to have an R2D2 robot and a C3PO to help me out.There are a lot of things I could have a robot do for me that I would rather not have to handle myself.

I guess the closest thing to a personal robot is the Roomba vacuum cleaner. My sister has one and loves it. It cleans the floors by itself and does great on everything except stairs.

Last time we ate at O’Charley’s we were invited to sign up with our emails for special offers. I have an extra email account for junk mail and places that require an email to sign up, so I did sign up for the O’Charley’s program.

Soon after I got a nice offer in my email to save $5 on any meal check over $20. That’s a nice chunk of change off a small bill, so we decided to go and have brunch.

The brunch menu has a lot of choices and we ordered the big platter with a little bit of everything It was a lot of food and we couldn’t eat it all, so we took the leftovers with us for the dogs to have a treat.

It was really tasty, a good price, and saving $5 was nice treat, too.

Now that Spring is almost here, I’m thinking seriously about planting a little vegetable garden in the side yard. I think that is the only spot around my house that gets enough sun to be able to grow anything. It’s a small patch but maybe big enough to save us a little money on groceries and be a little healthier for us, too. We could plant some tomatoes, green peppers and maybe some pumpkins and summer squash. That would be a good start to test whether I have a green thumb or not.