Jeff's Bad Grammar

Now I just posted a bunch of posts and I fully realize that my grammar and spelling and sense is skewed cuz school takes all my mental capacity so I don't have any left to use for English in these posts and the spell check only tells you that you spelled a word wrong, not how to fix it I am way to lazy to actaully think about it also I am a bad typer I just go and hope my fingers are in the right spot. So if you must feel free to make a game of to find all my mistakes. You can make corrections and email them to me and maybe I will get around to fixing them. But considering it took me about 6 months to make all those mistakes I will probably not get around to fixing them ever.
Sincerly
Jeff M. Clift, Esquire

Getting out of Dodge!

So in May we decided that we needed to go to a place where we could relax in the outdoors more than 50 feet from a major road and see the bottom of a river. So we headed north to Arkansas. We chose a very out of the way place. We were the only people camping there from Monday to Friday. Very Nice. We swam in the river cuz we could see the bottom. hiked around in the wilderness. Saw some cool animals. But Heidi (ok, and me) was freaked out about the snakes. We came upon the snakes as we were climbing around on the rocks. Yes they are water moccasins, but that was not the creepiest part. We watched one of them slither into the water and go under a rock. It came out again about half way (all under the water) then kinda backed up under the rock again. I don't think we went into the water again after that without quickly making our way to a deep area or faster current area. Cuz we thought that an attack may occur at our ankles by a snake laying in wait. The other weird thing was we saw a racoon when we first got to the camp and thought it wouldn't mess with one of our water bottles. Nope, just as I was falling asleep (not Heidi, she had already been asleep for about 58 minutes more than I) we heard our water bottle fall off the log we left it on, then it proceeded to wrestle with the racoon for about 10 minutes until the racoon bit a hole in and realized it was only water. Just as I was going to sleep I saw this greenish glow float by my side of the tent...a little creepy. But I just thought it was the racoon and somehow the moon light caught his eyes. I realized about a month later that it was just a firefly floating past. Oh, yeah, Heidi has a little difficulty skipping rocks, note the lack of good skip throwing form, but after countless hours of lessons she skipped a rock 5 times!!!!!!!

After our stay in this secluded paradise, we thought we would go to one of the highest points in Arkansas. Which is way higher than any place in Louisiana. But it was a little weird that at the highest point of the mountain range there was a Lodge, mini train, KOA style camp ground. I guess I am just used to the inaccessable mountain peaks.

We also are starting a family legend about how I scared off a bear and how Heidi saved me. So we didn't want to sleep on a hard concrete slab, so we chose the tent site that you had to hike about 1/2 a mile away form anyone else. We (me) carried all our stuff down there. The first night we thought it might rain so we were going to cover the tent with a tarp, so I get out of the tent to open the tarp up by shaking it and when I did that we heard this huge thing run away. Heidi immediately jumped in the tent and pulled me in too! Heidi maintains that it was a bear. We had been told there were bears that frequented this area so we needed to keep our food on a bear pole. My theory is that the main campground was full from bikers and one of them got really drunk and passed out in the bushes by our tent and when I shook the tarp it startled him and he got up and ran away! But Heidi thinks the bear story is better. So we'll probably tell the bear one when we get older.

Mardi Gras in Shreveport

We really like Mardi Gras! For all those who have only experienced a "western" parade- in the morning, daylight, fairly quiet except the high school marching band that plays just a little of key. This is similar to that, but put it at night, with loud music blaring from every float. We got cups and balls and beads, but this was a family friendly parade. But alas, no candy. I really like having it at night cuz then you can sit by the parade route and BBQ all day before they come. If you own a home along the parade route you can actually ask more for your house! Crazy, Eh? So we saw some friends there and gave all the beads they threw to Heidi to their little girl who seems to be suffocating under all the beads. We went to a party that the parades throw to stock all their floats with beads, cups, balls, frisbees, etc. On one float each crew member put a dozen bags of a 100 or so necklaces, there are about 10 members, so that's....alot of necklaces for one float. There were about 50-60 floats. I think I am going to invest in the plastic bead market. This is probably the busy season for the Chinese bead makers. Oh, we got a kick out of the child's love seat atop the ladder. It's an easy way to keep them from running off and you can still see them. I love louisiana ingenuity!

Moving???? Nope

So we were going to move to a different apartment cuz it was cheaper. We signed the lease and I went to open the windows to air it out before moving our stuff in. Well I hear the sound of water spraying behind the fridge, so pulled it out and found the we already had guests. Some big cockraoches that you can see, but many more of their little ones that don't show up. So we decided that we would just stay where we were and let someone else drop in to the permanent residents of the other apartment.

Our New Orleans Trip

So this is the Mississippi...I think. Doesn't it look so fresh and so clean!? Heidi had a difficult time persuading me from jumping in to swim. Her final argument was that we didn't want mutated kids in the future.

Now, most people think "let's party" when they think about going to New Orleans. Well, if you are reading this then we had to tell you about our blog and you probably know that Heidi and I think a little differently than most people...maybe, possibly including you. So we decided to go to New Orleans cuz they have more scooters there that we could buy. Not that we had one specific one that we were going to buy, there were just more choices. Which is weird considering how slow we are at making decisions.

This is the famous Burbon street in the French Quarter. When we told some of our friends they were confused at what we did there, cuz we don't drink, gamble, or participate in any questionable activities that are sexually related. Then I pointed out that the time of day we were there...see picture. It was afternoon, all those people that do the things previously described hadn't even figured out where they are yet.

This is on here at Heidi's request. She just got a kick out of it.
If you want more details you'll have to ask her.

Back to the reason we came to New Orleans. We thought we would just buy a scooter in the afternoon and then drive it home the next day. Good thing Heidi convinced me to borrow a friends mini-van. If you don't like this long story then you can just skip to the next picture.

We get to New Orleans and call a guy who had one posted up for sale. He said to come by about 5:00 and we could look at it. We give him a call when we get closer and he just says that he has to go to the hospital for an emergency and was a little bit weird about it. we didn't want to pry into his personal life, so we let it go. We decided to stop and at least look at the scooter parked outside his house since we were close. Heidi made an interesting joke. It was dark and the scooter was parked outside by some mud, so Heidi joked gross there is blood on it. (Both of us thinking it was just mud). The next day we call him again and go see it, well the reason he had to go to the hospital ER was cuz he crashed on the scooter and that really was his blood that had dripped onto the scooter. You would think that would be enough to stop someone from buying it but no. We thought it was better than the other one we looked at. So we decide to get it and he is going to meet us at the Wal-Mart (yes Wal-mart deals in automobile car title changed here) When he got there he said his title was with his girlfriend in Minnesota. That was what stopped us from getting it and then we called the other guy and bought his. Now we had to stay over night to buy it the next day. So instead of looking for a cheap hotel, we planned ahead and brought air mattresses for the back of the van. So the picture below is the inside our friend's van. You can't see cuz we covered the windows, but we are in Cabella's parking lot. Don't worry we brought our lap-top and watched a movie until we fell asleep.

(yes we know that this whole trip was dedicated to getting a scooter and we have no picture of our scooter)