Born on a Mountaintop in Tennessee
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
After Chris and I got ready and gathered all of our belongings in virtual darkness early the morning of Sunday, March 16, 2008, we left Ryan and Becki’s house in Pooler and bid farewell to our three-day Savannah, Georgia getaway. The ride home was fairly uneventful after stopping for breakfast at McDonalds, the car lighter that charged the iPod transmitter dock died, and Chris realized that he had left with one of Becki’s bags in his trunk. That is until we made our way into Tennessee… Read the rest of this entry »
After our return from Minneapolis, Lisa and I immediately began getting set for our big move. We were very excited to get out of the Woodman Park Apartments and get into the brand spanking new and luxurious Peppertree Apartments. As nice as these apartments were, amazingly they were part of the Low Income Housing project, so you had to make under a certain amount to get into them. This was accomplished by creating a lowball estimate of how much we were forecasted to make the following year. Since Lisa and I were both hourly employees of Kroger, we could project our income working a minimum amount of hours. 
Bob and I began the morning of Monday, March 31, 2008, quite leisurely. Although our motel, the Guesthouse Inn & Suites on the northern outskirts of Houston, still had no internet service, I guess they make up for it with an amazing continental breakfast that actually included eggs. Mom would have been proud. Our first stop of the day was at the Minute Maid Ballpark (formerly Enron field), home of the Houston Astros. The first scheduled tour of the day didn’t begin until 10am. 
I’m not sure exactly where I got the photo of Anthony Quinn – maybe at a movie memorabilia show in the mid-80′s – but I do know that I held onto it for a long time without doing anything with it. Finally, during my autograph surge of 1997, I sent it off to two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn. He responded in kind by adding his brilliant and handsome signature to this still from Zorba the Greek, perhaps his most famous role - surpassing even the fame of his Oscars for Best Supporting Actor in 1952 (Viva Zapata!) and 1956 (Lust for Life).