I used to count down to the end of school in days… now it’s more like weeks or weekends, especially in the fall, because I’ve got some event pretty much every weekend, and it’s just easier to keep track how many weeks are left by how many events-on-weekends I have left.

Ok, I need to write about the weekend before I forget about it.

It started off Friday night, with Cowboy Band and the Ranger Christmas Parade (/). It’s the shortest parade we do, and one of the more fun parades we do because of that.

Saturday was the big event - the Neiman Marcus Children’s Christmas Parade (/). Hundreds of thousands attend, millions watch the syndicated broadcast; in short, we get tons of exposure, and the energy you draw off the massive crowds offsets the length of the parade. Also, I was on TV; you should check your local listings to watch the parade.

By the way, a big thanks to Carrie and Melissa (my sister) for letting me get the pictures they took at the these events, and thanks to David Coffield for letting Carrie borrow his camera.

I guess the only other blog-worthy thing that happened was Saturday night, I took my brother and sister downtown and we had dinner at Spaghetti Warehouse. I parked in the lot right next to the SW, and it was one of those where you park and then go pay a machine to get a stub to put on your dash. So there we are, standing in line for the parking-stub-machine, and this guy starts walking up behind me; I see him in the corner of my eye. He says, “Hey kid, come here.” Last thing I want to hear in downtown Dallas, right? I turn my head to look at him; he is a middle aged caucasian male (sounds better than white man), about my height, dressed semi-nice. He motions to me, and says “come here” again, this time a little more emphatically. So, I take a couple steps towards him, and wait for him to come the rest of the distance. He holds out his hand, and in it is a white slip of paper. “Here, take it. My wife and I just had pizza over there, so here.” Now, not knowing what the paper was, or why he wanted me to have it, I timidly asked “What’re you doing?” And that’s when things got interesting; he responded in a somewhat agitated tone, “Look, don’t be stupid, I’m trying to save you a few bucks here! Save your money, kid!” Totally not the response I was expecting, and it was only then that I realized that the white slip was a parking stub that had been paid for already and was good for the rest of the night. So, I took the stub and said “thank you” as he walked hurriedly back to his car. Strange, no? My brother was convinced it was illegal or something, and that we’d get in trouble for using it. I appreciated the random act of kindness, but his attitude towards me when I didn’t understand was way off base; his attitude alone made me wonder if there was something illegitimate about the stub (though as far as I could tell, there wasn’t). But, dinner was fantastic, and my brother and sister had a good time.

By the way, from now on I’m going to use this -> (/) to denote a new flickr set. For instance, above where I spoke about the Ranger parade, there’s one there, and there’s another where I talked about the Neiman Marcus parade. The will link to the set at flickr.com, so you can go through them and leave comments if you want. Clicking on will open a smaller new window with a flickr slideshow in it; these slideshows are an easy way to look at the pictures, and if you click on the picture, it will show a link to view that picture on flickr.com. As always, you can also browse my pictures right here on my website by clicking “Photos” on the navbar up there.