Clearwater, FL

Clearwater Florida road trip
Emily and I have been trying to take a vacation for most of the summer, but time constraints, and not wanting to drop $2,000 on a vacation, held us back most of the summer. I knew that Emily desperately wanted some quality beach time before she had to go back to school, and I really wanted to make sure she got that beach time. (Laying out at the pool for ½ of the summer really wears you out. Ha).
Our Neighbor’s business partner has a condo on the beach in Clearwater, FL that was cheap, so we called our good friends Bear and Amy and decided we were going to go. We decided to save some money and just drive down. It was only a 15-16 hour drive with cool towns on the way. The plan: Leave Sunday around 12:00 and drive straight through and get to the condo around 3:00 am and get some good sleep, wake up around 9:30-10:00 and have a long, lazy day at the beach. Leave Wed night and stay in Atlanta (½ way point) and spend Thursday in Atlanta and then drive home to St. Louis that night, arrive around midnight and then prepare for the 14 people staying at our house that week. Sounded perfect: right?
We find out that the owner was going to be there until Monday around 8:15, so we decided to head out anyway and just take our time on the drive; hell, that’s the point of a road trip.
3 ½ hours in we see a sign that says Super Man statue 1 mile, and naturally we were intrigued. If they were going to spend money on a highway sign, it must be cool right? We end up driving 3 miles off the highway and end up in Metropolis, IL: the home of Superman. The story is that the town was named way before Superman, but the comic book was not based on this town, they named Superman’s home Metropolis because they didn’t think anyone would name a town that, but low and beyond, never put anything passed Illinois! It was a cool stop, not worth driving 3 ½ hours for, but if you ever catch yourself driving past it, swing on by: it is a huge Super Man statue.


After that it was off to Nashville, TN. Nashville is definitely a town that I would love to spend a few days in. Downtown Nashville reminded me of a more country Beale Street. Lots of bars and restaurants, but instead of hearing blues blaring, you hear country music and karaoke, but oddly it was real cool.

Ate at Big River Brewery: good food and great beer.



This was the guy cleaning the windows in the background of the picture of Emily and I. He did this for a few minutes: Funny, in a creepy sort of way.
This was the point that I had my 6 hours of driving in and it was the girls turn to drive and let Bear and I try to sleep for a few hours.
So, instead of arriving at 3:00 am, we take our time, make lots of bathroom stops and end up in Clear Water at 10:00, with no time for bed, so we hit the beach with hopes of being very lazy. The greatest thing about this condo it was on a very quiet beach, so no tourist and Bear and I could get a great game of Beach Pong.

Emily in full swing during Beach Pong

We spend Monday night around our Condo and had the beach blackened salmon I think I have ever had. I love seafood, but Emily does not, so as you can imagine, I don’t eat much seafood. For 2 ½ days, I got my seafood for the year in. It was wonderful! Almost worth the 16 hours in the car.
Wednesday Bear and I booked Deep Sea Fishing: Finally!! Bear and I both have attempted to Deep Sea Fish 2 other times and both times it was canceled due to weather, so we were pumped about heading out. The girls booked an excursion to an island to collect shells and sand dollars.

Bear and I on the way out to sea.
Of course 5 minutes into the trip it starts to rain. Not a heavy rain, but a cold, slow drizzly that lasted for the entire 4 hour boat ride. The only dry place was inside the cabin, which had the A/C blasting, so mixed with our cold wet clothes, wasn’t the best place to be. But, despite our shivering through 4 hours, it was a ton of fun: highly recommended!

Bear caught the first fish

My first catch was a double!

Showing off our fish. As you can see in the background, it was getting sunny just as we arrived back to shore.

Emily and Amy on their excursion
Here are a few random beach shots




Atlanta is another very cool town that I could spend a week in. We went to the CNN Center

Which was very cool. We wanted to get the VIP tour of Robin Meade in the morning, but it was all booked up for weeks in advance. Emily and I watch her every morning, so we settled for a picture with the cardboard cutout in the gift shop

Olympic Park

Next we hit up the world of Coca Cola, which was amazing. We could have spent all day there, but time constraints only allowed 2 hours (we were told by numerous people that if you don’t leave Atlanta by 3:00, you get stuck in parking lot traffic)

They have a sample room that has 60 different Coca Cola brands from around the world, some were very good and a couple were just plain nasty. Bear and I made it our goal to try every flavor, it was tough, but we made it.

Atlanta made me realize how cool St. Louis is for having so much free stuff to do. We spend $80 in Atlanta in just 5 hours, and we only went to less than ¼ of the cool stuff
So, the trip was a success, Arnie made it with only one scare, we almost had to leave him in Atlanta and drive home with a new car, but he straightened up and turned off his check engine light. I think that Bear and I enjoyed the road trip a little more than the girls (they did watch 5 movies on trip). We arrived home around at 11:00 Thursday night, slept like a rock and woke up Friday to get ready for the weekend of 2 weddings and lots of house guest. 14 Friday and 20 Saturday and leaky toilet which leaked down to the ceiling in the living room. But, we have always said our house is always open for anyone who needs a place to stay, and we were more than happy to have everyone and ended up having a great time! It makes things a lot easier when all your friends clean up after their selves. Makes Emily happier, which means I am happy.
Alright, off to bed. Thanks for reading.
“May you live as long as you like and have all you like while you live!”

Finding the time

I write this at 11:08 at night and I just got finished up with work. With Planet Cash, and Fill N Thrill, I find myself working quite a bit. I have been making a very conscious effort to spend time with Emily, because she deserves it. I have a tendency to engulf myself in projects and just tune everything out. So, always in the back of my mind I am trying to make time to hang out with my lovely wife. It is a little easier with her being home in the summer. I can take a long lunch, or take a afternoon off and go shopping with her. Once school starts for her (August 10th) It will be harder to make that time, but it remains a huge priority in my life, a constant balancing act.

On top of everything, I have decided to coach soccer again. I am coaching a U-17 girls select team. I started out just wanted to be an assistant coach, but 38 girls came out to try outs and we didn't want to cut 1/2 the girls and give them no team to play on, so we just made two teams, with me being the head coach. I know that I have a calling to work with kids, and soccer has, and always will be an important part of my life. I have played since I was 5, and Pops help start the league at the Lake. Soccer was always our thing, and by being back on the field, it helps me keep his memory alive. And, even though I really don't have time for it, I am loving every minute of it. When I am on the field coaching, I get to play around, keep in shape and really just forget about everything else, except soccer. We are not the best team around, but the girls are a lot of fun and they are just happy to be playing soccer.

Fill N Thrill is still going great! We are installing 42 screens this week, which will take up all my time and then 8 screens in Branson shortly and then in 2 weeks adding 12 more screens in our West County Network, so things are really moving fast. I am not working from home as much as I want, maybe 50/50 now, which is not too bad.

Emily is ready to go back to school, she has had enough of being bored. Her goal was to spend most days at the pool, but thanks to the 70 degree we had, the pool was colder in July than June. Not quite as much fun to lay out with clouds in the sky. And yes, we have a heater, but we needed to fix it, but we figured, "hell, it's already June, why fix it now." "Well,"says Mother Nature,"because it is going to be 70 and cloudy and not have 2 days in a row of sunshine for all of July." ahhhh Hindsight.

Rest of our summer: Leave for Clearwater, FL with our very dear friends Bear and Amy and Chic and Noodle(he is pumped) on Sunday the 26th. Be back Friday with a house full of more close friends for a weekend of weddings. The rest of August is 2 soccer tournaments, and family Christmas (yes you read that correctly, Christmas in August. We have a family who, if you mention snow they won't leave their house for weeks. So, to make sure no one gets stuck in the snow, we bring you Christmas in August! It will mark the first time to have a family get together in St. Louis. Justin and I are very excited to have the family up! I have been looking forward to it most of the summer.

On a completely unrelated note: They are remaking Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp and for some reason I am really excited to see it.

Here is a link to the preview.

But, over all, I have a beautiful wife who I love her and she loves me, a roof over my head, food on the table, a great family, wonderful friends, a job that I love and all around great health, so I couldn't be happier. I still find time to stop and smell the roses and realize just how blessed I am! I have posted some summer pictures below

Thanks for reading and keep on keeping on! mrrrrrrrrrr.

Norah with Auntie Em at Grant's Farm. Emily takes Norah every Tuesday.

Norah feeding the goats at Grant's Farm


Norah walking towards her new birthday gift from Mommy & Daddy and the Grandparents

Norah enjoying Mommy's brownie/cupcake/amazing things

Norah painting her horse with Auntie Em and Grandma


Just a random cute picture of Norah



Emily and I at Norah's birthday party


Justin, Mom and myself at Norah's 3rd birthday party.

Emily's hard at work

With Emily being out of school for the summer, she has created a long list of projects that she wants to get done for the house. This summer will be rush around to get a project done, then rush to get the house back in order since people are coming over and then start that process all over again.

I, unfortunately, have been very busy with work and have not had much time to help Emily with the various projects, so she has been tackling these alone. My main job was to put up all the new blinds in the house. Every window on the main floor finally has wood blinds.

I am very happy to be busy with work, have not been busy with a job for quite some time now, it feels good to get back into the flow of it. I am officially a partner in Fill N Thrill now. To be quite honest I was nervous and still am a little nervous to be jumping into a new business again. But, for the most part, I am very excited to part of such a new advertising medium. I have slowly backed out of sales in more into an Executive VP role. I basically make sure the company is running smoothly. All the commercials are being produced on time, customers are happy, etc. Here is a link to one of our commercials, just so you have an idea of what we

do: http://www.fillnthrill.com/adview/newmelle.html

The next phase of our business plan is finding distributors in other cities. We are heading to Springfield, MO next week for 10 different meetings to find a distributor there. If you know anyone who wants to own their own business with very little overhead, let me know. $2,000 finders fee!

Any who, I digress, back to how aswesome my wife is.

She spend last week painting and caulking the dinning room. We had talked about doing it for a very long time, and finally got it done. She is onto the kitchen now, so we will have pictures posted for that next week.

Here is the before shot of the dinning room before we moved in. (not our furniture).

Here are the after shots.

More updates to come. Keep on keeping on! mrrr

Happy Birthday Justin!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOUUUUUUUUU

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JUSTIN....HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!

Summer has begun

As I look at my schedule for the summer and see that we have no free weekends until the end of July, I realized that summer has officially started, regardless of what the calendar says. 

The past few weeks has been very busy for me and it shows no sign of slowing down. I try to lead a pretty stress free work life, but that seems to be over. Not saying that I didn't work hard before, but I had free time, and even some nap time. With Justin  and our new manager running Planet Cash and me just selling for Fill N Thrill, I had days with only one appointment. 

I have since taken over production, which means every new customer goes through me now, which I am very much enjoying. So, when a sale is made, I get the contract, call the customer and welcome them to Fill N Thrill and start the production process. I write a script for them, gather pictures and then we get a commercial produced. Then shipped back to me to work on the voice over and then get approval. Well, we have customers that don't check email, or respond to phone calls for weeks, which makes the process very difficult at times, but over all, I really enjoy it. We have a great partnership and it finally feels like the company is making huge strides forward and is firing from all sides!

We just opened a network in Oklahoma City, and as we speak Steve, our sales guy is up there pre-selling the territory. So, soon I will have commercials to produce for that territory. I am still very excited at the direction of company and can not wait to see how far we can go. 

 

 I am still selling, but slowly getting out of it. I enjoy sales, but it is very up and down, good weeks and bad months. I love working with the customers, and mainly, I still get to work from home. Which, will get harder and harder with Emily home more for the summer and the pool looking awful blue. 

Emily is out of school and now teaching summer school. Just for 3 weeks 4 days from 8:30-12:00. Not a bad gig. I think once she is done with that she might get awful bored being around the house, but we shall see. She has a list of projects that she wants to do, and once she puts her mind to it, she will get it done. She at times has a hard time realizing that, Yes I might be home, but I have to work. 

This weekend will be a much needed relaxing weekend. Going to sit on the dock at the Lake for 8 hours and do nothing, no cell, no lap top, nothing.  We try to take a trip like this at least once a year and i look forward to it as soon as I get back. On the quiet side in a crappy little cabin and a dock, which is all we need. So, if you call me this weekend, not going to call you back until Sunday.

I find myself blogging less now a days. With so many people on facebook now and following my twitter, I feel people are staying connected. But, I am still trying to keep up with the blog. I am doing my best blog fans: all 10 of you!

Grandpa is getting a pacemaker put in Wed, so keep him in your thoughts and prayers. Seems to always be something with him. He is a fighter

Hope all is well in the world out there with everyone else. In the mean time, keep on keeping on!!

mrrrrrr

Hello out there!

Nothing huge or exciting is going on right now with the Tyler Household, but I just wanted to write and let you all know that we have not forgotten everyone. ha.

The pool has been cracked open, after a long week of battling to get the vaccum to work and get the water clear and ready to swim. Then the heater crapped out, but with the solar cover it keeps the water around 75 degrees, so with the sun out, it is very swimable. The heater should be fixed next week to make the water perfect. 

I will admit, there were a few times that curse words flew out of my mouth and I regreted buying a house with a pool, but once I got it open and was able to float around, it was worth all the heartache! I am looking forward to Sunday to be able to float and spend all day in the pool with my lovely wife!

This weekend the Tylers are heading off to Kansas City for the Musick's reception: There were married back in February. It is always nice to spend time with Brandon and Cassie, they are a great people and some of our best friends. 

• Last night, playing softball I badly bruised my heal, which has made walking an extremely tedious task, so I spend most of my day sitting on the couch. 

• Emily will be done with school June 2nd, and then June 4th she will start teaching summer school for 3 weeks. Then by July she should be able to relax and do nothing: at least until she looses her mind from boredom. She says her kids are crazy as the school year winds down. 

• I am still rolling with Fill N Thrill, and really enjoying it. It is such a cool advertising product and who doesn't love working from home!? We are moving very fast to get them up around St. Louis. 
  

• We still have Planet Cash, but things actually seem to moving forward...finally. We are just waiting on the counter offer from the other lawyer. Hopefully have things wrapped up within the next month. 
  

• Winston is still 8 lbs over weight, and really not seeming to loose any. He is content just being King Fattie of the Tyler house. He spends most nights staring out the window barking at the neighbor kids playing street hockey. He is awful tough let me tell you. And yes, Truman has managed to survive a whole year

• Emily and I are very excited to be an Aunt and Uncle again! We have been spending a lot of time with Norah. We pick her up every Tuesday around 4:00 and have her for the evening, really enjoyed it. No kids for us yet, I know everyone keeps wondering. 

So, those are the quick updates for the Tylers. Hope all is well with everyone else. Keep on keeping on!!

updating continues

Over the past month, the Tyler pad has gotten some major upgrading! The previous owners loved country blue and plants. We, hate country blue and plants are nice, but way too much maintence and if you know us, we are maintence free types of people! We, mainly Emily, has spend much of the past year pulling out over grown plants and bushes that they just let ride, she has worked very hard in the yard to get it up to speed.

The siding is a bluish grey color, but with the old blue shudders, and black front door, it made the house look very blue. We didn't want to replace all the sidding now (we are in a recession), so we decided to try to change the shudders to black, and paint the front door and mailbox black to give the house more of a grey look. And, as great of bargin shoppers Em and I are, we found custom shudders at Home Depot that someone had ordered, and never picked up, so they were marked down 75% and they just happen to be the size we needed!

We tore up the plants, (and by we I mean hired it out) and mulch, had to rebuild the wall since it was falling over, planeted new bushes and threw down rock. We are very happy with the result. 

Here is a before picture of the house. It is hard to see the blue with the big tree that was full of ants and bees right in front of our house. 

 After:

Here are some pictures during the landscaping construction:

keep on keeping on!