Business as Usual

I had a bit more to say than could be said in a tweet or status update, so here you go!

Yesterday, we had a lovely half day at UTM due to impending doom (AKA snow), so Karen and I went to check out the semi-new restaurant in town, Parnell's Grill. It's a small place, as the building used to be a donut shop, but the food was great. I've heard they are doing well enough to be looking to expand the building or something along those lines, which isn't usually the case for new places in Martin.

However, a more typical scene for Martin's economy taking place at our last stop, Movie Gallery, was a going-out-of-business sale. I know that the chain is probably downsizing because they just filed for bankruptcy (again), but I don't know if our local store was doing a good job of competing with the well-established (and cheaper) Movies to Go. Regardless, they are selling a good majority of their wares. Karen and I picked up two Wii games and Ironman on DVD just in time for the snow day. Guess we won't be getting anything productive done...

To complete the (sadly ironic) picture of the Martin economy, there is a new store being built just down from Movie Gallery in the University Shopping Plaza. (Can anybody tell me what that is going to be?) It's being built where the old KFC sat empty for five or so years as an wonderful eyesore. So the big net gain on new stores in Martin this season? (Or year, for all we know...) A big fat zero.

Something closes just as something new is about to open, and though we citizens of Martin might be happy or maybe even proud for a few months when this new store opens, we still have virtually no new growth.

I'm not really complaining, because I like Martin, unlike a lot of people my age. Plus, Martin's economic/business situation doesn't impact me that much because I'll be off to grad school soon. But for those still here, and for those students coming here in the near future, I wish Martin could successfully add and KEEP a few more businesses (stores and restaurants in particular) thriving.

What are your thoughts?

Try

"You can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes, you find you get what you need."
The Rolling Stones

There's your inspirational quote for the week.

Rolling Stones performance after the jump.

Go ahead, live a little

I'm starting to think of my blog as a side project that I don't have time for. Thanks to the advent of Twitter, my thoughts can be put out faster, in shorter snippets, to a larger audience. Three or four years ago my thoughts would have been put out into a LiveJournal blog but that was kind of boring.

Ok, really boring. I was not a great blogger in high school...but what has changed, eh? Ha!

Then, of course, came Facebook status updates (did I join in 2005 or 2006?), but until about 2007 or so, Facebook didn't do a great job of parsing those out for other users to read. Users had to go to each others' pages to see what was up (gasp, I know!) Thanks, Facebook, for feeding our inner stalkers by adding the News Feed and Live Feed. They make it so easy to find out what's going on with friends (not that it's always useful). Plenty of people had problems with the ease-of-stalking Facebook has enabled, but I for one have it to thank for helping my mindless drivel find its way into the "cloud." Also, kudos to Facebook and Twitter both for working seamlessly together.

Thinking of side projects that I don't have/make time for anymore, aside from neglecting the blog:  photography and reading.

As far as photography goes, I'm in that rut where I keep taking photos (several hundred in fact) but I lack the time, and often interest, to go through marathon processing and uploading (and then naming, describing, tagging, etc.) sessions to get the final product on Flickr. I'm doing well if I get up 2-3 photos a month here lately, so needless to say, I'm falling behind. I've already mentally checked off some photo shoots that I'm not likely to ever touch again from 2009, but there is still about half a year of photos piling up in Adobe Lightroom.

And then on the reading front, suffice it to say that I've had four geography texts checked out from the UTM library and I've renewed them four times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that one of the renewals included the Christmas break so it was about a month long... You see where this is going. Fortunately, I think faculty/staff can renew books indefinitely, instead of the three time max limit for students. Mostly, I read Twitter and the news. I even get the news from Twitter (CNN, BBC).

I hate to end this in a circle, but going back to blog subject, I've been thinking of switching over to Wordpress. Problem is, I don't know if I want to have them host it and just migrate my matt-cook.com domain over, or pay for cheap hosting and run their content management system (CMS) from the host. Then there's the whole issue of having to migrate the content from this blog over, which shouldn't be a big nightmare, but is still a few extra steps.

I didn't make any resolutions for 2010, so I'm not going to promise that I'll blog more or post photos more, etc. ...

But I'll try, on occasion. You know, before I get to grad school and have no life for 5-7 years.