A few “Signs of the Times” to enjoy on a Sunday afternoon.
My mind at work.
Why don’t we have signs like this in Vermont?
Oh yeah…we have all these trees that stop the falling cows.
Teach you to pick your ball out of a natural hazard
and toss it back onto the fairway!
And this one is from my neck of the woods…
This guy has the right attitude.
Have a nice day!
Oooowwww-I went to the dentist this morning for the last in a series of VA approved procedures that consisted of removing 3 broken teeth (all molars) and one filling, the last removal and filling I had today. My dentist, who actually is quite good, saved the worse for last–the last meaning that this particular broken tooth still had a live root in it plus most of it’s hardware still in place. If I had to do it all over again I think I would have done this one first and just got it over with since the others being were much older, deader than a doornail and a piece of cake compared to this one.
Saying this one particular tooth was stubborn is like saying that Frodo Baggins just took a day trip to Mordor to return a lost ring.
When applying a pair of hook-jaw locking pliers to the task, bracing a foot on my chest and having his dental assistant haul away on his belt for good measure didn’t budge the ornery piece of chewing equipment, he finally achieved success by duct-taping me to the chair and using a block and tackle rigged to a beam in the ceiling with the hauling end of the rope run out the window. This was attached to the 3 point hitch of a medium size, diesel powered, 4 wheel drive farm tractor his brother-in-law had brought over and running her in low gear the tooth finally came out. Once they bolted my lower jaw back in place, I was done (good thing we were in farm country or I might still be there).
The saving grace of all this rather painful fracas is that I didn’t have to pay a dime for it which is just as well. I always thought that having to pay the exorbitant fees charged for dental work these days and all the pain and aggravation involved is akin to being kicked in the face after I’ve been clubbed to the ground. I may not not be too fond of this particular service related disability of mine which was the reason behind all this dental work but at least I had the work done without having to go bankrupt to do so.
Now for a couple of Percocet and a few days of soft food and I’ll be right as rain. Next time though I’m bringing a glob of plastique and a roll of detcord. Diesel fuel is expensive nowadays.
So I sit down at the computer, bring up one of my trusty local blog editors with at least 3 posts revolving around my little pea brain ready to write up, categorize, tag, title and publish. I love it when I feel like this cuz’ there’s always a couple of good posts in it. It’s a beautiful day, bright, sunny and in the 80′s–no wind, lightening, or hail to take out the power as it has been of late. So off I go…
…and the power goes out.
Ooookay. So maybe somebody turned on the air conditioner that broke the power company’s back, who knows?
Wait…
…and the power comes back on.
Power up the computer, reboot the wireless router, Internet’s back, did my post get auto saved? Yes, it did–onward.
Banging through the first paragraph now and on to the second–alright, time to scrounge that image off of Google News, got it! Insert into post, align properly and…
…the power goes out. [Insert: Vivid cursing here]
Wait…
So what the hell is this anyway? It’s beautiful, it’s sunny, not even a breeze so what is it this time? Another squirrel blow itself up in the sub-station? Sheeesh!
Power comes back on.
This time I’m waiting. Empty the dish washer, put away dishes, put away freshly washed clothes, walk around house just to say I did, come back in…power still on. Power up computer, reboot wireles router, check for saved post, onward once again…
Second paragraph down and onto the third–made it! A fourth and final closing paragraph, tag and…
…power goes out.
Okay, that’s it! Call power company, get a recording, says that Newport is experiencing a power outage (no sh**), all crews working on it, blah-blah-blah-natter-natter-natter, so why wait on hold just to get a tired, fed up operator who will just tell me the same thing?
Ate dinner, went for a walk with my honey.
And now we’re back. Did the power up, reboot routine again, post was saved as usual, finished it up and publish…success! It’s up! it’s there! Power’s still on! Four hours to publish a four paragraph post but I made it!
Yes!
Now onto the next. Do I even remember what it was supposed to be about? Oh yeah, it was about…
I’ve been a bit worried about the state of the market over the past month or so. All this talk and news reports on how bad off the economy is getting, big businesses losing their rear ends, high price of oil and food etc, so why wasn’t the overall market reflecting all this? What the heck am I referring to when I say overall market?
Knowing that Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 are not the end all and be all of the stock market, the 3 have been long been considered the “standard” index of how the old U.S. is doing. I was actually becoming quite concerned during the last month where the Dow was showing between 12,300 and 12,600 when I figured it should show about where it was at the time of this writing (11,194). It seemed to me that the longer “the market” was up at previous near “bullish” levels and not reflecting what actually was happening, the harder the fall would be.
So what a relief it was when all things market-wise began to finally reflect the news reports and the graphs began to flatten out to a level that better reflected the times. I began to figure that the whole thing was being held up by nothing but air there for awhile and I’m sure that those who invested heavily in certain stocks aren’t too happy at the moment but it’s always a gamble when playing the stock market–even when the forecast for the foreseeable future was good.
For me, my relief was based on the fact that I own no stock at all, no 401K plan, not even a lousy Certificate of Deposit not that I didn’t start out my working life working towards that end but best laid plans of mice and men and all that. I just happen to depend on all the services and goods that a healthy economy (and stock market) brings to common folks like yours truly and if the market falls through the cellar hole then me and mine are in for a hard time. So watching the the market finally head downward as I expected it to do a couple months ago and ultimately level out again at more reasonable levels brought a small sigh of relief. At least it’s holding it’s own for now.
With all that’s going on these days I’m finding myself simply not trusting in any sort of previous status quo. How about you?
I may not be the world’s biggest Obama fan but the latest news stories about him getting a “discount” on a new home is absolutely ridiculous. Can’t they do any better than this?
Obama Got Discount on Home Loan – washingtonpost.com
The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a “super super jumbo.” Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.
Two pages of this tripe in the article no less with all sorts of “OMG” type statements that mean absolutely nothing at all except this; the guy got a fair deal, that’s all.
The going rate at the time was around 5.94 percent which means his so called “discount” was a mind boggling .315 percent which saved him about $300,000 on a 1.65 million dollar house. They even managed to drag Tony Rezko back into the picture by bringing up the point that his wife had bought the adjacent property for $625,000 then sold a portion of the the underdeveloped property to the Obama’s to increase their yard space–oh, heavens to Betsy, the guy’s obviously on the make.
This is not news.
Hell, I did better than that when I bought my house down on the south shore of CT years ago. I locked in a fixed interest rate better than 2 percent lower than the going rate and a paid significantly less than the asking price along with absolutely no closing costs while I was at it. Sure, my place wasn’t a 1.65 million dollar restored Georgian mansion but then again I didn’t have a 2 million dollar book deal going either. No one actually offered to increase my yard space by selling part of theirs but I already had a good size yard anyway so who needed it? Just more to mow is the way I look at it.
If this is the best the media can do to dig up dirt on Obama then someone’s slacking, he hides it better than any politician in history or maybe there’s just not that much to dig up after all. Either way, this is about as newsworthy as me buying my house in CT was.
Of course it did make me write up a post about it didn’t it?