Gas at $1.82

Never thought I'd see that again in my life. We're not going to go back to the way we were driving before the huge price surge last spring, though. Too bad for the oil companies, they left the prices up long enough for new driving habits to form - at least in our family. Have you noticed that grocery prices haven't come down yet? they told us that transportation prices drove them up. HHmm.

I drove the truck to the west side of Springfield yesterday without feeling guilty every mile for the first time in forever. At the current prices that trip costs about $5.25. When gasoline was over $4. a gallon it cost about 12 bucks. ( I took the truck b/c the van was in the shop.)

I have to be happy with these little things. We were still able to spend a little cash on a few splurges: make-up, chocolate, a new CD of music... God is providing all of our needs, and a great many of our wants. Even if the lesson from the brokerage statements are that we have to trust Him for our future.

OK, let's just leave it at that. ~M.E.

Edit: Spoke too soon, $2.08 all over town this morning. what magic happened over night to make all the gasoline in Spfld worth .26 cents more this morning? No, don't try to explain it to me, I don't really want to know.

Status Updates

On Facebook, that internet excuse for real relationships, there is a line called your Status. It always starts with *your name* is... then you fill in the blank. You can replace the word 'is', if you wish. In one or two sentences you can tell your dozens or thousands of friends how you are doing. Those Twitter folk have it linked in so that we can see their every move and bodily function, and on the opposite end of the scale those that have what might be called a real life away from the computer screen may not use the function at all. In the middle are people like me. I try to make mine innocuous, vaguely interesting, and acceptable for all ages - since my 'friends' span the generations. I also try not to change it more than once a day, or every couple of days. I want people to *think* I have a life, even on those days when I use the computer as an excuse to hide from everything else.

Every so often recently I find myself thinking in Status Update Form. "Marci is...completely uninterested in making dinner, and wishes her family would revert to hunting and gathering their own food." "Marci is...going to leave these whiny hair-balls outside to freeze." "Marci is...inert, uninspired, and brain-dead." Yes, most of those that run through my brain are negative. You caught that too?

Today I'm trying an experiment. No More Negative Updates. Not on the 'book, and not in my head. For weeks now, I've let the negatives put the positives out of the picture. Part of this valley is of my own making, and it's time to start climbing out. "Marci is...going for a walk."

It's War

Ah! What lovely leaves we had last week. For several days the weather was warm and sunny, and the trees were showing off after a very favorable summer. But now, it's time to get out the rakes, blower, the tow-behind lawn sweeper, and the shredder and start fighting.



I post every year about "The War of the Leaves" like it's a new thing, but obviously it isn't. Every year between the third week in October and the third week in November the very tall,very abundant trees that ring our home dump their leaves. Usually after the most beautiful show of fall color - the one which gave our house it's name: Goldenwood.



After the Fall of the leaves, someone has to clean it up. We're not fastidious yard keepers, but we'd be buried in leaves year 'round if we didn't. Here's the statistics on this battle: by the end of the season Hannah and I will have gathered, and Harry will have shredded about a dozen piles, something like the ones on the picture. See the bag on the shredder? Harry will empty that some 5-7 times per pile. So he could easily shred and empty 60 bags. Each of those shredded bags represents about the amount of leaves you could pack solid into about 4 or 5, 33 gallon trash bags ( or at least 3 of those paper lawn and leaf bags city folk have to use.)So picture if you had to gather and bag maybe 250 to 300 garbage bags packed fill of leaves. Yeah, that's what we do. Before today, he had already shredded 28 bags. Today he will do about 20 more, and hopefully after one more shredding day later in the week, 80% of the leaves will be down, and we'll call it good.

The shredder compacts the leaves by crunching them into chunks about the size of a dime. They are then deposited 20 yards or so back in the woods, well away from the house where they are left to mulch themselves back to soil, and they are no longer fuel for a potential brush fire that could sweep through our yard.



Here's a lovely pix of a few of the enemy combatants.

posted for no reason

Other than I just noticed that this memory stick was in this particular computer. These eggs were in my fridge when I came home from Washington DC a few weeks back. ~m.e.

Incoherent thoughts after the election

So, It’s over. Finally. We’ve elected a new president. What a long two years. Whadda you know? We’ve got the one who is a big bite out of the far left side of the crap sandwich served up to us on the ballot by the major parties. At the very least it’s not Hillary Clinton. I’m profoundly relieved about that. If John McCain was the best the Republicans had to offer, they deserved to be booted from power.

I read that the new President is going to be inheriting the worst economy in about 70 years. Is this really the worst economy since the Great Depression? Wasn’t that stint in the ‘70s with its double-digit inflation, massive unemployment and ‘the energy crisis’ pretty bad? Well, Barack Obama seems to think he’s the go-to guy with the right answers, and he can change all this and make us all happy again. I wish him – and his friends in the House and Senate – a great deal of luck. It will be interesting to see what they do with all of the marbles, now that they have them.

The beauty of this all is that in spite of our differences, and the fact that 55.7 million American voters did NOT get their candidate elected, there will be no rioting in the streets, and the lights will still turn on at the flip of a switch – even in the homeless shelters. America is a great country.

God bless our new president. No matter if we voted for him or not. I’m not about to go around like the Dems did in 2000 and 2004 exclaiming that they wouldn’t claim GWB as THEIR president. At least we can agree that the dude who WON the election IS the POTUS. Besides, I live in Illinois, and on the front page of my morning paper they are gleefully anticipating all of the perks and pork that will be coming our way. It might be win-win here. Hey, they wouldn’t dare not give Chicago the Olympics now, and all the cronies he bundles off to Washington will leave room for a few hundred of those laid-off state workers to get their jobs back – as long as they’re Democrats.

God Bless Michelle Obama and those two lovely little girls. They seem to stand up well under the spotlights, let’s hope the media microscopes are kind to them. Good thing is that the oldest is only 10, so she won’t have to go through those awkward teenaged years in the Whitehouse like Chelsea Clinton or the rather unfortunate Amy Carter. At least not the first administration. Maybe their Daddy will take a page outta Rod Blaggo’s book and make them stay in Chicago and have normal childhoods. Yeah, Right.

Pack up the campaign signs! Put away the pundits! Stop the constant polling! empty the mailboxes of political junk mail! Maybe we’ll even start getting some real news on the TV.

I do have one very scary thought to leave you with. It’s likely that Obama and this new Democrat Majority will have three supreme court justices to replace, and they will change the face of the High Court for long after we find out that they, too, are bums, and we disgustedly flush them from office.

~M.E.

Miss Scarlett

Here's our merry murderess from the game 'Clue'. Why a lead pipe you ask? simple: It's not very PC to take your revolver out trick-or-treating. heh.

~M.E.

Goldenwood and other updates

* This is the time of year that our home was named for. The Hickory trees and the Sassafras are putting on a particularly lovely show this year, since they were so well watered this summer.

* I survived the Halloween party and so did everyone else. There is one broken camera, and some slight damage to the new painting that was sitting in the hall - the painting is fixable but the camera is a corpse. I may have to replace our stereo reciever, too. But it could have been out of order before and I just noticed it. The teenagers had a great time, and have already started planning for next year - when they have noted that Halloween is on a Saturday night.

* Harry is working hard on getting his #300 geocache before our third anniversary of starting to play the game. He is caching his way home from Chicago today, so he may hit that goal. We're pretty casual about this. Many teams get that many within their first year. We've got a life, though.

* November is my least favorite month. As of today it will start getting dark about 5PM, and I will start falling asleep at 6PM, no matter what.

~M.E.