Ben’s Blog

As I mentioned in my last post, we took Luke to his first high school football game last Friday night in Belmont. As I expected, he had a good time. He enjoys being around people, and there were plenty of them at the game.

Toward the end of the third quarter we walked down to where the band was sitting so Cassie could say hi to her former band director. At Belmont the band takes a break during the third quarter, and when they started playing at the beginning of the fourth quarter, it got Luke’s attention very quickly. He loves music, and will “dance” to anything from his toy piano to a car alarm in the parking lot to someone tapping a spoon on the edge of a food container. Toby, one of the drummers and the brother of my best man, let Luke play with his drum. He was very interested, and at one point the band director commented that he was keeping a pretty good beat.

Luke playing Toby's drum.

Luke was wearing his new shoes that aren’t very snug, and they managed to fall under the bleachers not once, but twice. Luckily we were able to retrieve them.

Unfortunately, Belmont lost a close game after some questionable calls from the referees. Never a fun way to lose.

On Saturday, while Cassie went to a baby shower and took the boys shopping with her parents, I took my parents to Tishomingo State Park for a round of disc golf, which was a lot of fun. I think my dad really enjoyed it, so I’ve got someone in Belmont to play with now. I was pretty rusty after not having played for two months.

On Sunday my brother and his family and my grandmothers came to my parents’ house for lunch. It was a good way to end a fun weekend.

We’re back from our weekend trip to Belmont, and gas has gone up everywhere between here and there, where it’s available.

Only one of the three gas stations in Belmont had gas most of the weekend. It was going for $3.79; a steal as it turns out. I was topping off our tank every chance I got this weekend. Not only did we have to get back to Oxford, but we’ve got to go back to Belmont Thursday afternoon for my brother’s wedding and associated events.

On the trip home, it seemed that most stations had gone up around 30 cents a gallon. The average was around $3.99.

The big exception was the Pontotoc Wal-Mart, where we usually get our cheap gas on trips to and from Belmont. It was $4.29, up 60 cents from Friday afternoon. The station across the street from it was advertising gas for $3.89, but was out of gas.

Gas at Kroger in Oxford is $3.89, up 26 cents from Friday morning.

It’s being reported that refineries won’t be completely back online for eight to nine days. Most likely gas won’t be going up any more, barring worse news from the oil and gas industry. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for gas prices to go back down to their previous levels.

Several weeks ago I mentioned that my high school class was holding a planning meeting for our 10 year reunion. I finally got around to posting about the meeting on our class blog. We ended up having 13 people, which is a good showing for a class of 56. I enjoyed seeing everyone and look forward to the reunion next summer.

Back in the day, my high school classmates elected me class president, so now it is my duty to head up the planning of our ten year class reunion coming up next year. Yes, I’ve been out of high school a little over nine years now. I had always said we’d have a five year reunion, but I was busy toiling away on a Master’s degree at the time (among other excuses), so it didn’t happen.

In order to get things started I’ve called a planning meeting tomorrow in Belmont. We’ve tried to notify everyone we can find contact information for, which is approximately half our class. We had 56 people in our graduating class, and there’s a dozen or so more that didn’t quite graduate or moved schools in the year or so before graduation.

From all indications it looks like we’re going to have a pretty good turnout. I’m looking forward to it, because I’ve seen very few of my classmates since graduation.