Another week is done. Frankly, it's been a month of Mondays, working different hours than my to-present standard hours due to new project work and responsibilities and working with others on their hours. Next week I may get a break and get back to my "normal" hours, which would be great as my Bride is done with another school year and we could have some late afternoon/early evening hours together... It'll be a celebratory weekend, congratulating my Bride for surviving her school year as well as getting named Teacher of the Year at her school!...

__________________________________________________________________________________


Randoms:

I've always been a classica/ Rat-Pack era Vegas / romance / traditional & modern country music listener, but lately I'd gotten away from listening to music daily... no radio in the office, and the local stations playing more and more commercials, and so many of them trying to sell me drugs I don't need (just like the TV networks). When I bought my Saturn Sky last November it came with XM radio already installed and a three-month trial. Well, thanks to commercial-less XM stations I am again listening to my favorites genres, and my new favorite XM stations are Highway 16 and Watercolors. 16 has introduced me to some (for me) new names who have become new favorites: Sugarland, Little Big Town, Taylor Swift, Kellie Pickler, Julianne Hough, Carrie Underwood, Colbie Callait, Phil Vasser, just to name a few... and thanks to CMT faces to go with the names. And, thanks to this handy dandy iPod I can listen to their music anytime I like (especially during my short lunch breaks, or when I am doing housework or working outside). As Scotty said in Star Trek V: "the right tool for the right job!" Well, the iPod is a great invention and has made it so easy to get back to listening to my favorite musics whenever I like...

(Of course, Lorrie Morgan remains my all-time favorite country musician!)

__________________________________________________________________________________


We're closing in on the longest day of the year (northern hemisphere)... June 21, as well as the "official" start of summer, although summer temperatures have already arrived. Sorry, Algore, but these are the same temperature ranges we've had every June since I moved to the South Carolina Lowcountry. There ain't no man-made global warming going on here... this here's called "SPRING" and "SUMMER". Back when I was delivering papers in my car back in 1979 or 1980 we had summer temperatures which were over 100 every day (not including the heat index, which would make it a feels-like temperature of 115-120), and the inside of my car back then would reach 115 or 120 while I was delivering newspapers (had a thermometer inside my car, and unfortunately no air conditioning... but I was young enough then to handle it easily). If it was hotter three decades ago why wasn't it called man-made global warming then? Oh yeah, forgot... for there to be warming it has to get hotter every year... so if today we're in the high 80s and 28 years ago we were in the 100s... hmm, the math I learned in school tells me we COOLED OFF...

__________________________________________________________________________________


We planted gardenias around our house when we bought the house ten years ago. Those same plants are over six feet tall now (along the front driveway) and have blossomed for the season. The bouquet of those blossoms is incredible, if not very intoxicating to the senses. Just another one of those things we look forward to here in the Deep South...

__________________________________________________________________________________


Gonna have to start looking for more tax deductions. Now we're down to two Presidential candidates, one from each major party... one wants to make "change", which he translates as rolling back the current tax cuts (he's an idiot, as the tax cuts will end automatically anyway thanks to a stupid lazy greedy Democrat-controlled Congress); the other wants to have new taxes to "combat global warming" (he's an idiot if he thinks but raising taxes on companies to contribute to his "global warming" initiative isn't going to cause the cost of every damn thing we need to skyrocket). Neither one wants to, oh, drill for our own oil on our lands and off our coast lines, even though other countries are already doing the same (anyone notice the Chinese wells off the Florida coast?). Guess we may be forced to end our cross-country adventures... that's ok, there's plenty of places we can visit close to home yet... either way, this time next year I will be bringing home less net pay than I am now. Frankly, thanks to the failure of Congress to allow domestic drilling and forcing us to depend on foreign oil suppliers, I am already keeping less net pay than LAST year because for me  the cost of just going to work has gone up over 300% and my paycheck has not...

__________________________________________________________________________________


We're a few weeks from the start of our favorite summer series: Monk, Stargate Atlantis, Burn Notice to name three. Until then, we've got the DVDs we bought earlier and movies from Netflix to satisfy our viewing entertainment...

__________________________________________________________________________________


The first week of New Food Network Star is over... Bride and I were already guessing that the comedienne/cook would be the first one to go... she wasn't as funny as she was supposed to be, we guessed...

Hiya, hope this finds you doing well, I'm just flitting about to say hello to everyone while I got a moment!