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So I wonder what was up with people getting sick on American Idol Hollywood week. Sheesh. Like I said, it reinforces my excessive use of products like Purell and fist bumps. Yes?!

People were bear hugging flu-girl (formerly known as tent girl) and holding hands on stage. What did they expect? It will be interesting for sure to see what happens in the upcoming week. It looks like there’s even an ambulance involved plus other people dropping like flies!

So do you have any favorites yet? I haven’t really seen any standouts for me. Possibly after group week we’ll have a much better idea.

Related articles

• American Idol Drama: Symone Recovers, but Now Tent Girl Is Sick! (eonline.com)
• ‘American Idol’ Group Night: All Drama, No Singing (mtv.com)

This is a video of our day at the National Western Stock Show. We obviously started in the stockyards among the cattle and the trade show booths. Then we checked out the mutton busting. That is pretty hilarious!

We attended the evening horse jumping competition called the Gambler’s Choice. The point of the competition is to jump as many fences as possible. Each fence has a point value based on its difficulty. They can only jump one fence 2 times. They make their way for 60 seconds racking up as many points as possible. If they knock a rail off, there is no penalty, just no points for that fence.

When they are finished with their sixty seconds they can choose to “gamble” their score with the joker fence in the middle. If they choose to jump it and make it, 200 points are added to their score. But…if they knock a rail off, they lose 200 points. But, if they choose not to jump the joker they don’t gain or lose their points. So if you come in second place after your 60 seconds, it may be worth it to do the joker to push you into first place. Which is what happened in the video, so be sure to watch!

I can’t say that it was a happy scene watching Drew get eliminated. It was far from unpredictable though. Paula Abdul, L.A. Reid and Nicole Scherzinger have not really been her fan for some time. L.A. Reid wanted to see her out weeks ago.

Up against L.A.’s boy Marcus in the survival song, L.A. was obviously going to send Drew packin’. Paula and Nicole on the other hand, were probably not keeping Marcus as much as they were eliminating Drew to give Simon a little som’ a dat.

I was very much OK with Astro’s exit. I’m not into hip-hop or rap, but it was because of his entitlement attitude. Like he was on there to teach the clueless a thing or two about real life.

I’m still good with the results. Drew, 14, has plenty of time to come back and make it huge. Astro…well I’m sure he’ll be around.

Microphone Photo Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Ouch! I was really looking forward to seeing this movie. I was left with the feeling of ‘what the heck was that’? It was cute, from a computer animated point of view.

The story line was all based on a mixture of childhood stories from Jack and the Bean Stalk to Humpty Dumpty. But it seemed a little disjointed and I was left confused. This was the movie of choice for our after-Thanksgiving tradition. It did not measure up to the ‘Monsters Inc.’ and ‘Toy Story’ from previous Holiday Seasons.

I give this one a 3.5 out of 5 stars and which fits into my “wait til DVD” status.

That is until next time. Just kidding.

After some pretty major business changes over the past couple of years, I was left with a lot of infrastructure dust to sweep up. Another project has all but devoured my entire life and it’s been killing me, literally.

I’ve been learning that if you don’t reserve space for you, there will always be somebody or something that is waiting there to use up every piece of you.

Now I’m learning to say no and re-enforcing my personal time boundaries…and paying the social price for it. But it’s worth it.