“A Whole New World…”

(Admit it. Most of you are singing the theme from “Aladdin” right now.)

It is a whole new world here at popcornjackterry.com. There have been a lot of changes going and I wanted to find a way to make this website a whole lot more user friendly. That was the easy part. The even easier part than that was telling my friend and web designer “Hey, this is what I want done.” Apparently the hardest part was the actual doing of it. You could take everything I know about computers, put it into a thimble, and there’d still be room left over for a side of fries.) But she did it. For free. On her own time. And because of that I can not thank my friend Tam enough.

That being said, hopefully the site is a lot simpler to navigate. There are separate links that take you to where you can purchase either book, “Chasing Ghosts” and “This Ain’t No Self-Help Book: Meditations for a Modern Age”. There is a link that will take you to the Tommy Bahama Rumologist page, which is updated at least twice a week. Every Thursday (“Thirsty Thursday” as they call it at Tommy Bahama) there will be the weekly post, basically an exploration into some aspect of rum, whether it be the history of rum, a certain distiller, a particular drink, or whatever rum soaked trouble I’ve gotten into that week. In addition, there will be one or two other posts, much shorter ones, that just update you on my rum-life. There’s also a link to my twitter account (I’m officially a twit) that I’ll update a few times a week. About what, I don’t know. Finally, there’s this, my blog.

This is going to serve two purposes. The first is to continue exploring the changes in my life, the issues that I addressed in “This Ain’t No Self-Help Book.” These will be…well, I was trying to avoid the word, but it’s the one that fits….essays that will hopefully give you something to think about, maybe show you a new perspective on life. More importantly, they will be words of positivity and inspiration. As such these will be posted on Mondays, because really, who needs positivity on a Friday/

The second purpose is as much for me as for you. You see, I quit my full time job for the summer. I have enough left from winning the Rumologist contest and will be still be working a couple of shifts a week that, if I live simply, I can take advantage and spend the summer writing. A lot. The issue is that I’m lousy without a deadline, in that I will late until the last possible minute. And if there is no last possible minute established, well, then I’ll just keep sweeping my floors. So by checking in once a week, I will be making a promise to you and therefore challenging myself, so when Labor Day rolls around I can look back and see a collection of accomplishment and not just a succession of bar tabs.

In the end it isn’t really a whole new world. It’s just a new way of looking at it. Sometimes we need that.