We got into Gainesville late in the evening and stopped for the night at a Days Inn. After a [good] night’s sleep (it was as good as it was going to get, frankly), we headed back on the road onto the turnpike. There was some traffic congestion when we first got onto US-1 but we did get to Steve’s before sunset. We even had time to relax in the pool before bed.

On Sunday, we went out to Veteran’s Memorial Park on Little Duck Key for a swim. The beach there is a really nice one. The shallow ridge goes on to what seems like forever. Steve took the boys out pretty far, I could hardly see them from the shore. They also enjoyed searching for shells and coral pieces near the shore. It wasn’t too hard as the “sand” there is pretty much made of broken coral and shells. The water was also very warm and was much to my liking. Weird as it sounds, I really do prefer warmer water to wade in than the more frigid water that public pools like to use. It’s a good beach and we’ll probably head back tomorrow.

Yesterday, the rain kind of ruined any plans to go out anywhere as most things down here require the great outdoors and sunny weather. After lunch, we came back to the house and relaxed a bit; the kids played some games and tried their best to practice different ways to get themselves upside down and so forth with handstands and cartwheels.

Today we did make it out of the house for most of the day. We went down to Key West and parked the van in at private garage so we could walk on Duval Street for a few hours. We stopped at the Hard Rock Cafe for some ice cream and water. Both were very nice to have on this hot day as it got to 94 degrees while we were out. I took a few pictures of the memorabilia and it was pretty awesome to be in the same room as the instruments and garments of these familiar rock legends. After the Hard Rock, we continued up Duval and checked out some souvenir shops. After a couple of hours, we walked back to the garage to find the passenger side door was open! Luckily nothing was missing. I’m guessing that one of the kids forgot to close it. Yeah, lucky there. We went along Whitehead Street to see the Southern-most Point and back onto US-1 heading north back to Big Pine Key.

We did get held up in a traffic jam on US-1 though at about mile marker 20. When there’s an accident on this road, it’s just a catastrophe as US-1 is the only road in and out of the Keys to the mainland. It is, for the most part, two lanes and bridges. The accident apparently started at 1:30pm and involved a dump truck spilling its entire load on a bridge. We had left Key West at 4:20pm and didn’t get back to Big Pine until about 6:45pm. Yeaaaah, that was fun. All part of the great adventure, I suppose. ^_^

Well, time for bed. More details on our exploits later this week.

The day was good. Jake thought it was cool that he got his own visitor badge at the security desk when we came in. We went up to my cubicle and he was introduced to my coworkers. After taking part of my morning ritual of hot cocoa and daily origami, we set out via the gerbil tubes into the campus to work on a ticket. Jake did seem interested in what I was doing when I talked with our customers and I explained to him how we could fix the problem at hand. Afterwards, we went up to the hardware team’s area and my ex-team lead gave him a personal laptop teardown session. I had forgotten the camera at my desk or else I would have a picture of that. Well, tarter sauce.

We went back to my desk for a bit before lunch. For lunch we went down to our cafeteria where Jake was amazed at all of the different kinds of food we could choose from. He settled on some pepperoni pizza & breadsticks. Yum! It was a pretty big piece but he ate it all. After eating, I took him on a quick tour of the main campus buildings and the main courtyard, dodging goose pooh as we walked.

In the afternoon, we went back out to the other end of campus to clean up some virus from someone’s PC. By that time, the cafeteria was giving out some free soft-serve ice cream sundaes to the kids so we headed there for a treat. Most excellent. Back at my desk, Jacob told me that he didn’t have anything to hang off of his new lanyard that one of my coworkers gave him. Mine has my ID badge on it so I figured I would make him one of his own from a Post-It, markers, and a quick picture. I think it came out pretty good. Jacob loved it and it was a great addition to his report he was writing about his special day. He was sure to bring it to school today when he told his class about his day. His report was pretty complete with the badges and pictures. Overall, it was a good day and I hope he learned something. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

Simply put, advertising is the promotion of products, services and ideas. These promotions are sponsored by companies and groups that want to provide information to their target audience. This information could be about certain characteristics, features, and usefulness of a product or service. Idea-based advertisements usually found in political ads are also generally seen and heard when an election is coming around. Today, advertising can be found in many forms: newspapers, printed flyers, billboards, skywriting, television and radio commercials, product placement in television shows and movies, web site pop-ups, and unsolicited e-mail messages known as “spam.”

With the abundance of advertising in everyday life, a person can be overwhelmed with conflicting views about the products, services, and ideas being perpetuated. It may be hard to discern what the best product really is or who is really right about an ideology. The advertisements themselves can possibly change our way of thinking about the outside world and ourselves. While advertisements provide people with information, there is the possibility that companies are not doing so in ethical and truthful ways; that they are only trying to sell a product with no regard to the actions of the consumer or the consequences of those actions. Modern advertising may actually be harmful to individuals and society as a whole.

While a person may think modern advertising is as simple as selling a product, those same people may not realize the deeper influences that advertisements make on a subconscious level. For example, there is a typical class of advertisements that help create societal expectations of beauty such as promotions for diet products. These ads create the illusion that if a person uses this product, he or she will be irresistible to the opposite gender. In some cases, this can be true; however, the average consumer probably does not look like a supermodel; the chance that one product will forever change their life is slim to none. More often than not, we as a society believe what we see. We see things happening on television commercials so we believe they will happen for us as well. There is nothing wrong with looking beautiful, but the way commercials portray the average person can be questionable. The “average person” on an advertisement has a gorgeous, trim, hourglass figure or a rippling set of six pack abs. We probably have doubts that the average person is so fashioned, but we want to be like them regardless. Our society’s expectations of what a person should be and how they should behave have been molded by popular culture, including modern advertising. Since society expects perfection from us, we have been ingrained with these convictions. Advertising gives us assurance that there is a road toward perfection; there are products and services available to make us flawless. “Advertisers create and exploit these insecurities” (Schroth). By bringing these concerns to the surface while providing a solution, advertisers create a need and tell us how to cure our ills all at once.