This visually striking memorial is located within Anthem Community Park. Featuring classical architecture with a contemporary twist, five marble pillars in graduated sizes represent the unity of the five branches of the United States military. Precise alignment and elliptical openings in the pillars allow sunlight to pass through and illuminate a mosaic of the Great Seal of the United States at the foot of the pillars at 11:11 a.m. each year on November 11th, Veterans Day. Haydon’s services included constructability reviews and cost estimating, as well as earthwork, concrete work, and overall project supervision for the Memorial. Click the picture for more details and construction pictures.

• On Friday night FamilyGeeding ate dinner at our local Mama’s Daughters’ Diner.  The atmosphere as well as the clientele brings a real small town feeling to it and reminds me and WifeGeeding of our small town roots.  It would be a perfect place to film a scene in a movie about a presidential candidate coming in and making rounds to garner votes.  We were about half finished with our meal when our waitress informed us that an anonymous person in the restaurant paid for our meal in full.  While surprised and extremely grateful, I felt bad because we could easily afford our meal and just wish someone else could have been on the receiving end on this random act of kindness.
• That act of kindness did make us order dessert as I didn’t have any cash to leave our waitress a tip.  Not to mention, WifeGeeding loves their homemade pies.
• It would have been great to have the deductive observatory skills of Sherlock Holmes that evening so I could have identified the gracious person that paid for our meal.
• There have been a few occasions in which I purchased a stranger’s meal and asked to remain anonymous, one time it ended up as a quite embarrassing moment that I should write about later.
• DaughterGeeding knocked all the food out of the dog bowl and WifeGeeding started to pick up all the loose pieces when DaughterGeeding said,”No mommy, stop.  I made the mess, I need to clean it up.”
• During halftime of Fox NFL games you’ll see the NFL on Fox cast sport Microsoft Surface tablets which is an obvious advertisement.  But on Saturday night I was watching the UT/West Virginia game on Fox and during a commercial Curt Menefee was in an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet on the NFL on Fox set.  Conflict of interest plugging two tablets?
• Mack Brown stated that was the first overtime game he coached.
• If you excuse all the off field stuff there’s absolutely no reason why Johnny Manziel shouldn’t win the Heisman again.  His stats are not only better than last year but butter than any other candidate.
• The Dallas Morning News had a good article about how Lee Harvey Oswald’s widowed continued to live in the area and even had a small quote from one of his kids and how her mother revealed who her father actually were.  It must have been odd having some paparazzi follow your school bus to school and not know why.  When I first read the article there this picture of Marina Oswald standing in front of the assassination spot with the Sixth Floor over her shoulder, but the photo has since been removed.  I guess I never really thought about it before, but it took a lot of courage to move from Russia to the U.S. at that time in history and then to continue to live in Dallas as a Russian immigrant whose husband killed the president.
• I actually laughed-out-loud watching the new Discount Double Check commercial with Ditka and the sausage pillow.
• Last night Barry posted an interesting article from the Boston Globe about Ted Cruz which give you more insight on how he’s always been taking a logical approach at being the odd ball.  I will agree with Cruz on his one quote, “And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of getting married and becoming a father, is it often leads one to take a more measured approach to life.”
• More observations from Double Down: Game Change 2013
  • Jon Huntsman seems to be a very nice guy, but he seemed too nice of a guy to sling mud or play the game and was very disappointed in what his party was becoming, especially how it was trying to appease the Tea Party and wanted to run as an independent.  He did however have a major conflict of interest when secretly starting his campaign while being Obama’s Ambassador to China.
  • Karl Rove was responsible for convincing Rick Perry to switch political parties.
  • The Bush family really don’t like Perry and there’s a lot of history between the two.  When Perry was leading in the polls, W actually told Romney not to worry, that Perry would be do something to screw things up and not to take him seriously.
  • The Bush family really wanted Robert Gates to be the president at Texas A&M and Perry was trying to keep that from happening which made Barbara livid, and Rove warned Perry the one person you don’t want to tick off is Barbara Bush. Remember, Bush 41 has his library on the campus and he and Barbara will be buried there.
  • I wasn’t aware there were any gay rumors about Perry but it was enough of a concern that he had to address major potential donors that nothing like that would pop up.
  • Right before the campaign Perry had major back surgery that compressed nerves and used a non-FDA approved experimental stem cell procedure.  The back injury caused him to stop his beloved hobby of jogging which helped with his insomnia, but once the jogging stopped he no longer could sleep which made him appear dumber than normal.  During the campaign he even went in for a sleep study and stated to use a CPAP machine which he didn’t like.
  • Donald Trump introduced Kim Kardashian to Perry during a meeting in NY.
  • When Romney’s staff started to quote stuff from Perry’s book, Romney thought they were joking because it all sounded so absurd.  There was even one point where Perry was giving a speech and stated he had four points to make and held up five fingers.  As he made he point he dropped a finger and at the end had a confused look at why he still had one digit remaining on his hand.
  • In some closed door meeting Perry yelled at Romney who stood up as if he were to leave and then just sat down and sulked.  From that experience Perry worried how Romney could stand up to someone like Putin.
  • W’s nickname to Chris Christie was Big Boy and he even had a 45-minute conversation with him about the costs of running for president.  There seemed to be two major hurdles for Christie to entering the race, he didn’t feel he was ready and his family wasn’t really on board.  When the Bush team got word of Mrs Christie’s concern about raising children in the White House, Barbara Bush actually called Mrs Christie at her Cantor Fitzgerald office for about an hour long conversation that alleviated a lot of her concerns and let her know how kid friendly it actually is.
  • The book goes into a lot of detail on how much pressure Christie was getting to run, especially from a lot of billionaires in a surprise meeting saying he would basically have unlimited funds and from the Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes stating the would have the full backing of their media resources.  But through it all, Christie never felt he was personally ready for the job and had too much respect for the office to just run on momentum when he didn’t feel it in his gut.  And it that, I really admire the man.
  • Christie was the path to all the New Jersey fundraising money, which is substantial, and Romney was livid when Christie wouldn’t allow the fund raising.  Christie wanted to hold off to a more narrow field so the money could be better targeted and spent.
• If you are going to shoot such a pic, clean the seat first – Ohio State – Michigan rivaly at its finest
• 12 Funny High School Mascots In Texas
• The magnetic light switch is a nifty idea, seems like a good place to keep your keys.
• How IKEA cleans the ball pit – looks like each one is washed individually.