I know a small number of Hannah Montana tickets went on sale today at noon for the concert in Tampa later this month. Someone, the venue released additional tickets after the fact. More than 2,000 tickets went on sale and sold out in four minutes. The folks at the St. Pete Times Forum are under the impression this means 200 more people will get to see the concert. I think it just means more ticket sellers with higher prices and subsequently more empty sets in the long run. I saw someone selling a pair in the paper today for about $2000. Yikes.

I am looking for reports now to see if they had the same problem as before, which was that ticket re-sellers snapped up most of the inventory using software programs. The parents who simply want to buy two or three concert tickets never have a change in cases like that. There are sites online that specialize in hard to find concert tickets. I might hop over and see what kind of prices they have.

Tonight I signed up for a Half Life account. I do not really have time to get involved in a giant online role playing universe, but I am doing it for some research I am conducting for a character I am writing. The character plays Half Life, so I need to know a lot more about it and the best way to learn is to get right in there and get involved.

I am barely stumbling around the orientation island, or whatever it is called. I have no idea how to get off. I can fly, but I keep landing in water and I was lucky to get my appearance changed. I’m not going to spend any money, so I assume I will not be getting any of the cute fox heads and sparkly lingerie I see other characters wearing.

EDIT: As I looked back over this today and looked at the comment by Hannes, I realized I’d made a massive mistake that changes the entire meaning of this post. I did not sign up for Half Life. I signed up for Second Life. Vastly different.  Again, it is for research for a character, but I sure do need to pay more attention. Second Life is a free-for-all online RP game. Half Life is an award-winning first-person shooter game. Half Life takes skill. Second Life appears to just require an awful lot of free time.

For the most part, I enjoy the enhanced freedom that comes with not being married to my ex-husband anymore. He was very controlling and critical. He demanded that all of my decisions be joint decision made with him. I was OK with that, except that he did not feel he needed to adhere to the same standards. The day he came home with a Dodge Charger and a brand new car loan taken against my personal, pre-marital credit union account is a good example. That was a surprise to me and one would assume that making a decision as large as buying anew car with a high price tag should be something you do as a couple.

The times I miss being married, though, are like now when I am trying to plan my daughter’s birthday trip. We went to Princesses and Pirates at Disney last year with my sister and my nephew. Gigi wants to do it again, but my sister informed me that her son does not want to go, because he resents having to spend any time doing Princess stuff. He wants to focus on the pirates. So, I can go alone with Gigi, but I have to be honest and admit that I cannot imagine navigating the crowds without another adult along. It’s an event that is supposed to focus on child-like fun, but the adults in the crowds can be pushy and rude. You would think it was a convention for truck drivers, or Raleigh accident lawyers, or disgruntled government workers.

Most of my friend’s kids are older, or boys. It’s one of those times I wish I had a partner to go along with. I suppose it is best, in the end, to just buck up and go alone with my daughter. That way she will be 100% guaranteed that she can visit any ride or meet any character she wants. She was quite compliant last year and while we rode Pirates of the Caribbean 4 times, she only got to meet two princesses.

I was thinking of a unique way to mark Gigi’s things that she takes to school. I have her name written inside of her back pack and her lunchbox, but sometimes the teachers don’t take a close enough look and we end up with some other kid’s sweater in the pack. I ordered Gigi some dog tags from Quick Trophy that I initially thought she could hook to her backpack, but she ended up loving them so much that she wears them around her neck to school.

The tags are primarily meant to represent schools or teams as awards or tokens of support. I chose a pink tag with a music scale on it to signify her love of music. Then, I just had her name and her school’s name printed on the tag. I’m more than satisfied with the tags and I love that once we do start using it attached to her backpack, it will be a very quick way for her identify her bag if other children have the same pack as she does. Right now, though, she is thrilled with her little “award”. Yep, I told her it was her special award for being a sweet kid.

Veteran’s Day seems hard to celebrate, when so many people are ignoring it. The schools in my district are not closed. My daughter is at school today. One county north, the kids are out for the day.

If children are taught that a particular day of celebration is not important enough for a school holiday, they will be instilled with the idea that the holiday is meaningless and redundant. We assign importance to events at a very young age and once our minds have categorized something, it is often hard to change our attitudes.

So, it all begins in the home. We, as parents, need to teach our children the importance of celebrating the men and women who have served our nation in the military. Both of grandfathers and also my step-grandfather served in multiple wars. My paternal grandfather died in Italy in WW2. My maternal grandfather and my step-grandfather both went on from WW2 to also serve in Korea.

My heritage has Civil War and Revolutionary War veterans. My ancestors have been in the United States since the 1600s and protecting out land is a way of life. Protection our rights is a way of the spirit instilled in my blood.

Thank you, then, to those who have served and continue to do so. I will absolutely make sure my daughter understands the significance of Veteran’s Day.

It seems like every morning as I drive my daughter to school and listen to the news, I hear about the state and federal laws that are in the process of trying to pass involving relief for people with bad loads.

That’s right: bad loans. The lawmakers are trying to place blame on the loans. They are targeting loans that did not have fixed rates and ballooned up recently, hitting the loan holder with a very high interest rate.

Personally, I think getting a loan is way too easy and I’m not sure what someone is thinking by signing an agreement on a loan that they can barely affords even with the initial low interest rate. Do they really think that all of the sudden, after the interest rate goes up., their life is going to be so different that they’ll be able to handle the payments? Nope. They’re not thinking at all. There are just too many people who are unable to think even a year in the future. They focus on the now and allow the loan brokers to suck them into borrowing money they cannot afford to pay back.

I know the economy is flat right now. I know there is a great desire on all front to awaken the real estate market. I just don’t think giving personal loans to anyone who can sign their name is the best way to go about making the needed changes. More and more people who already have homes are borrowing against their theoretical equity, taking secured loans against their property in order to pay for other things: new cars, a child’s education, and even vacations. The people we bought our last house from owed the bank more that $100,000 over what they initially bought their house for 6 years prior, because they kept borrowing against the supposed equity to go on cruises and travel.

I’ll buy again one day, but I will first make sure my income is secure and I have enough saved to back up my situation. I think the ability to borrow money is a gift, and should be used wisely.

I was up way too late last night baking chocolate chip cookies. I started with a recipe out of a very old Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. I ended up with enough cookies to cover snack tomorrow fro my daughter’s class. I should have stopped, but I was not happy with the way the cookies turned out. Older recipes tend to use just a tad less flour in proportion to butter, resulting in a flatter, crisper cookie.

So, I started over with a bath of cookies based on the Tollhouse recipe. Those came out much more fluffy, but slightly more bland and sweet. And, I’m not sure what I was thinking making such a big batch of those. I ended up with over 5 dozen of the second variety.

Still, I was not satisfied and I made a THIRD batch. That time I fiddled with the flour, making a test cookie first to ensure I had the consistency I liked. I also went heavier on the brown sugar, to give the cookies more of the flavor I like.

So, now I have way too many cookies. There is no way that we will be able to eat them without freezing a majority of them. What in the world gets into a person that makes them stay up baking until 2 a.m.? I suppose part of it was therapeutic.

A lot of the bloggers I read on a daily basis have just been in Vegas for the BlogWorld conference. Let’s be realistic – it wasn’t all about the trade show, seminars, and networking. There was a lot of eating, gambling, and clubbing going on as well. And, who could blame a person? People don’t travel to Vegas just for business.

Florida has its fair share of Indian casinos, but there is no statewide law allowing gambling to the extent that Nevada has. That’s why so many of the companies that sell and service slot machines are focused out in Nevada and surrounding. You go where the business is. Even people who stay away from the tables and other high stakes games will try their luck on the magic slots when in a casino. When in Vegas…