Window Shopper

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Not long ago, my husband and I made two videos that showed how much we love where we live; the slower pace, the lakes, trees, wild life plus the historic places for people to see and enjoy. Hometown videos give the viewer a picture of the life in a small, rural village. Beginning as a retirement town and fast growing into a family center as well, this area is blooming into a retirement hub as well as a tourist attraction in the summer months. We enjoy the benefits of both the retirement area and tourist attractions with the several lakes, recreation centers, restaurant, tennis courts, drive through golf course and so much more. We enjoyed making the videos because it is just pleasant to live here.

Even now, when the weather is starting to turn cooler, we have seen those who are dedicated to their sports heading to the tennis courts and golf course with rackets and golf bags in hand. Enthusiastic golfers and tennis players still have a lot of time before our weather makes it less possible to play the game they seem to love so much. Occasionally, we head in the direction of the golf course, driving into it since they ran the street right through the course which we thought was weird but is fun nevertheless.

All in all, this is a good place to live with the prices somewhat cheaper here than other places. Housing is easier to find and affordable. When others are paying over a hundred thousand dollars for a place to live, you can find many, many places that are far less in price. We live in a neighborhood that has woods nearby. In this village, only a few houses are on a street and the woods is part of the charm. Each neighborhood has their share of the trees to live around. Sometimes in the fall, we will wake up to a family of deer in our yard. So beautiful are these creatures. Yes, this is a good place to live.

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This project was born out of a contest that I entered a while back concerning a person’s hometown video. This was a work of love that I did not actually think I was going to be able to do properly. The truth is that I had no idea what to do for a video like that. And then my daughter sent a wav file of her friend’s singing. He had sung as a personal request at a party for someone. He said it wasn’t something he would pick for himself but he did like the song. When I heard it, it was the answer to my dilemma. I had the basis for my video in hand. With his permission and a good deal of footage from around our area, the My Hometown Video was born.

It has now turned into a sort of travel brochure for our area. Some local people have seen it and loved it because it shows a positive side to where we live. I enjoyed doing the work on it with much thanks to my wonderful husband who took a lot of the footage with our camcorder. He could walk to places I could not go. Also many thanks to the guy who did the singing on the video, Mr. Kenny Ray Jackson, a wonderful singer/song writer, though he did not write this one. It will be familiar to many of you! Here now is My Hometown Video.

If you enjoyed this, please give me your comments. If you want to visit, please check out traveling in Arkansas! It is amazing. By the way, you can also tell me if you didn’t like it. Just be kind. That’s all I ask. If you are not kind, I delete!

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Ordinarily at this point, I would be wanting to tell you about places to go, things to see for vacations. This year, I cannot think how to do that because of the astronomically high gas prices which, shockingly, have reached a national average of $4 a gallon according to AAA. And of course, it is conveniently at just the time that most Americans are wanting to travel on their family summer vacations.

I think it is an absolute shame that the oil companies, who are increasingly greedy and self interested, are causing the American public to change their whole lifestyles to serve the CEOs and companies so that their pockets can be lined with bucks from those of us who can ill afford to even pull up to the pumps these days. I don’t know about you but in our house, we cannot afford more than a couple of tanks of gas a month even in our rural area. The price at the pump here is somewhat lower at the current rate of $3.89 which is horrifying to us but much lower than other areas of the country.

At our house, we could not afford the gas prices over the $3 mark let alone $4. We, like so many Americans, live on a fixed or semi-fixed income. We unashamedly find ways to have an income but are constantly stopped by other just as greedy companies that think they can run our lives. The oil companies make us pay extremely high prices at the pump while the internet company, Google, chooses to slap us down when we do the horrendous thing of blogging for money online if we do not do it Google’s way.

Through it all, these money grabbing companies are going to not only bring the American public to it’s knees, it is going to bring down the whole country as they are currently doing. What is it going to take to change all this? I have no idea. Wish I had a magic bullet to fix it all but I do not. My only advice, as crappy as it may sound, is to stay home this vacation…not going to the pumps at all. Let the greed of the oil companies have their day by not having the sales they expect to have. The problem is that all people do not go on vacation at once. So it will hardly be seen at the pump unless we all agree to boycott the pumps for a few days. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

As for Google, that greedy company online that does not want others to share in the wealth of the net, we are choosing to blog for pay anyway. Some of the blog for pay companies are getting the idea of not basing their criteria on the page rank that Google shows those of us who do blog for pay. That is a step forward and I certainly hope that Google falls on it’s nasty little internet tail bone. It AND the oil companies as well as the oil people in the middle east deserve everything they get when they do fall on their posteriors. I just hope we can enjoy that instead of standing in a food line somewhere. Sigh.

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