I don’t go the Jake’s very often, but when I do go I always have a good time. They have the “back room”, which is a huge room with a stage where they have concerts. It’s never very expensive to get in, and it’s a really good room for concerts. When they don’t have concerts, you can go back into the room and they have extra seating and another bar than the main one. When Texas Tech plays on TV, it’s a good place to go because there are a lot of TVs and projections. They have pretty good drink specials, depending on what night you go. Every night they have a happy hour from 7 to 8 pm where you get $1.75 drafts, $2 bottles and $2 well drinks. Some of my favorite nightly specials are Monday nights are 2 dollar margaritas, Tuesdays are two dollars drafts and bottles and cherry vodka sours, and Fridays are ten dollars buckets. They also have poker tournaments on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesday at 7 and 9 pm. They have lots of seating room in the front room, a back room that has several pool tables, and then the “Back Room”, where they have stages and more seating. It’s a good place to have a large group of friends because they have a lot more seating, but it’s also fun to just go with a date and sit at the bar or at a table alone and have some drinks.

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The good news is that even though Lubbock County has seen the diagnosed cases of HIV triple this year, worldwide, there has been new HIV infections have dropped 17 percent. More good news is that people living with HIV has increased and AIDS deaths have decreased due to antiretroviral drug therapy. This means that we are getting better a fighting the devastating effects of the disease and our prevention efforts are working. Lubbock is another story. If Lubbock would stop looking the other way and actually teach kids to use condoms rather than abstain, we might actually be moving in a positive direction like the rest of the world. With all of the sex on TV and other media that kids are exposed to, it’s a pipe dream to think that most of them will wait for marriage. Our society is becoming more open and accepting toward sex whether Lubbock likes it or not. Until a cure for AIDS is discovered it is crucial to do all we can to educate people into doing what they can to prevent the spread of the disease. HIV is a highly virulent pathogen. The main reason it is so dangerous is because the virus allows it’s host to live for a very long time and without even knowing that he or she has become infected. Infections like Hantavirus and Ebola on the other hand, produce symptoms and kill their hosts very rapidly. It is easier to stop these disease via quarantines and treatments since they are so easy to spot. If we can continue to to drag down the numbers of people becoming infected with HIV each year there is hope that we can stop this disease as well.

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This week was the last home game for Texas Tech this football season. The game was at 11 in the morning, which usually isn’t fun to start off but by the time the game is over you’re happy that it was an early one. I didn’t get to tail gate this game because I wasn’t there early enough, so when I got there we went straight into the game. I assumed we weren’t going to do too well, since this season has been tough on us. With that last loss to OSU and the loss to A&M before that, I was trying to be optimistic but wasn’t going to get my hopes up. So, when we started the game off with a field goal I was pretty excited that we were holding our own. And when we kicked their asses and won the game 41 to 13 I was ecstatic. It was the best last home game we could have asked for. Last year when they beat us and ruined our season, they played “Jump Around” by Kriss Kross and went wild, so this year we got to do it back to them and make them suffer. I’m glad that all the senior foot ball players got to leave their stadium for the final time with a win, instead of leaving defeated and upset. It was a great game and I am so glad that I have gotten to go to all the games this season, win or lose. I can’t wait for next year’s foot ball season to start!

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Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an episode of “What Not To Wear”. As the host of course! There are so many strange trends that are popular here in Lubbock that I can’t understand. Now, on a regular day you can catch me in anything from sweat pants because I’m leaving or go to the gym, jeans and a t-shirt when I’m at work, to a dress. But, when I do go somewhere that I am expected to look decent, I do. I absolutely love to get dressed up, and I love to go shopping. I love to go out, and one of the best parts of going out is getting ready with my friends. Girls here in Lubbock think that going out to a club means wearing as little as possible, no matter what your body looks like in it. Which is always a no. Just because something looks good on the rack doesn’t mean it’s going to look good on anyone who wears it. Sometime when I leave the house, I have to wonder what people are thinking. When I was in college, girls would be wearing little Nike athletic shorts with tall fuzzy Ugg boots. This is still a common trend that I see around Lubbock and I don’t understand. Are you cold, or are you warm? Shorts and fuzzy boots? Make up your mind. All the girls must have some kind of meeting together to decide what the next trend is going to be, because they all do these things at the same time. You can go out in Lubbock and you will see that all the college girls are dressed the same way. The mirroring each other thing is worse here than it was in high school, and I just can’t understand it.

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Another bar that I think is really cute is called Gas Light in Lubbock. A lot of the bars here aren’t really pretty on the eyes, and the people in charge of this one have really taken the time to make sure it’s comfortable and looks really nice. They have a few areas where you can sit on big leather couches, so it’s very comfortable to relax after a day of work and have a drink. They also have a selection of cigars for sale in the bar, so if you like to sit down and relax and smoke a cigar this is a nice place to go. Their drinks can be pretty pricey, and most of the specials just cut a dollar off certain drinks on certain nights. They often have life music, and small bands will perform in the front room or single people will sing and play the guitar. They have a big front room, with all the couches and a lot of tables, and then they have a separate back room. They also have a beautiful patio area, that looks over a lake. There is another bar outside that serves drinks for when you are out on the patio. One of the best parts of this bar is that they have waitresses. You don’t have to get up and wait at a crowded bar in line to get a drink, you an just order from your waitress and she can take care of it for you. I like going here, but only when I don’t mind spending a little more on drinking. I think this is a good place to take a date, it’s very dim and romantic and they serve small appetizers if you just want to take someone out for a drink and maybe have a snack.

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On 19th Street close to Memphis there is a little restaurant called Jazz. Before I was 21, a few of my friends and I went here to eat dinner. One of my friends was taking a class called The History of Jazz, and she was required to go there once a month and watch a jazz band play. We decided to make an evening out of it, and all go together and eat some dinner. I absolutely love the food there. They call themselves a “Louisiana kitchen”, and they serve food that is Cajun. The atmosphere is what makes this place one of my favorites. It just has an older feel to it, all made of wood and really small and close together. I love bars that have little original things they do, and here people sign their names on dollar bills and then hang them around the restaurant, so you can look around and see peoples’ names that have been there or the pictures they drew on the money. Every week they have a live band play really good jazz music, so you can go in there and eat dinner and get a live show at the same time. They are getting more popular and have opened up a few new stores, but Lubbock is where it started. When I turned 21, we would go in there and eat and they have a good selection of bottled beers and a few selections on draft. Their happy hour is Monday through Friday, 3 pm to 6 pm. I would say this is a good place for a group to go and hang out, and also a good place to take a date.

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My cousin Riley lives in this new living complex called The Cottages here in Lubbock. It’s pretty close to the Texas Tech campus, just a bit east. It is on the bus route to campus as well, so if you don’t want to walk or ride your bike you can get a ride on the bus to school. Well, they are really nice looking and have a well-put together feel from the outside, and the insides have nice features to them as well. The floors look really good, and they have nice decorative crown molding and little details that really makes it look good. BUT… they have a lot of other issues from what I’m hearing. I’ve heard a few stories of things going wrong in them, and one in particular that scared me. Someone who was living on the second floor had some kind of leak problem, and their ceiling actually fell through and ruined everything in the apartment. In my cousins apartment he is always have trouble with the plumbing in him room, most of the time it isn’t even working and it might as well be like he doesn’t have a restroom. On a side note, he went potluck with his room mates and they are awful. They are always having parties on random nights during the week, they broke his big screen TV and wont pay to repaid it, and they are always eating their food. And, through all this shit, he isn’t supposed to “break his lease” and move out to go somewhere else. He plans on staying there for yeah with some different room mates he has already signed a lease with, but they were making it kind of hard for him to move out. He finally got it all settled now and is getting out of there and into another cottage, thank God. I think this place is just like most of the living places here for college kids, made too fast and not too personal. They’ll do what ever they can to ensure they make money and don’t care about the satisfaction of their customers.

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I am so ready for it to snow here! I love this time of the year, I have always lived in a town where it snows around this time of the year, and here in Lubbock it doesn’t really do the same thing. Although my home town is only 170 miles north of here, the weather is completely different during this time of year. They have already gotten snow a few times this season, and we have yet to see one little flurry. When I was in school there, we had actual snow days because we couldn’t leave the house to get to work, here they will have them when it starts to snow a little beause they are scared of the drivers. There are a lot of people living in Lubbock from Southern Texas to go to college, and none of them really know how to drive on the ice. I’ve been driving on ice my whole life so I usually feel pretty safe behind the wheel, but it’s the others out there that don’t really know what they are doing that makes it dangerous. It’s not their fault, they just haven’t had to deal with it and sometimes do dangerous things while out on the road that puts themselves and others in danger. I have yet to built a snow man in Lubbock, while in Dumas we sometimes build entire igloos just for fun with the snow. I’ve never had an issue getting my car out, while sometimes in Dumas I wasn’t able to leave the driveway beause of the snow behind my car. I hope we get a good snow this year while I am in town visiting, or we get a decent one here in Lubbock!

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Speeds is a pool bar in Lubbock. The tables are alright, they might not be the nicest but they are cheaper than competitor pool halls in Lubbock. They have some pretty good specials during the week for drinks and pool games and they have karaoke on the weekends. I used to work here, so the people that come are pretty regular and you get to know them. They have a college night, with cheap pitchers and free bowling for those students who bring in their college ID. These nights were always really fun, it’s nice to find some place where you can drink and you can do something fun for that cheap. I haven’t heard of anyone going in there in a long time. I stopped working there back in 2007 and have only been back a few times since. It kind of seems like they haven’t been taking care of the place, they need to do a lot of renevations but just don’t take the time to do that. But, fi you’re just looking for a good time and something cheap and you don’t care what it looks like (haha) then Speeds is a good place to hang out for those who are tight on the budget. They even have foosball!

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In Lubbock on the news for the past few days they have been talking about the increase in cases of HIV coming out. Last year, there were 11 confirmed new cases of HIV in Lubbock county total, and already this year there have been over 29 cases. So right now we’re sitting at around three times as many as last year. They’re blaming it on a lack of education, which I can see as being true. I just wish people understood that these are their lives. Not just, oh no I have to get some pills to fix this, but LIVES are at stake. I don’t understand why public schools refuse to educate kids before they get into these situations. We can turn a blind eye only so long, these new cases being evidence for that. I hope me writing this right now is at least getting to someone, if only one person. Simple education can help this. Wear a condom. Go get tested. Limit your partners. I’d rather you didn’t, but if you’re going to do it, be as safe as you can. Parents, talk to your kids. I understand it’s an uncomfortable thing to discuss but it’s on you to protect your children and educate them to keep them safe. If you never told them not to touch the stove, why wouldn’t they try it if they really wanted to? Warn them. Protect them. Educate them. TALK to them and let them know you’re there and not going to just punish them for being curious. This is something you just can’t pretend isn’t going on to make yourself feel better.

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