So we’ve made it through September and are on the relentless march toward winter. How exciting. And now it’s October, aka, “Beer Month,” which is ironic since I haven’t had a cold frost one in almost two weeks. I find this to be horribly depressing and, frankly, not a life worth living since it was the only thing I actually had to look forward to, and now it’s gone. For the time being, anyway. I was somewhat concerned that my new dizziness thing was a result of my blood pressure (which the beer isn’t particularly good for). After some research, however, I think what I have is BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo), which is unrelated to the beer.

But the beer is bad for the gout, and my blood pressure is certainly high (and I have my Annual Health Assessment coming up on Halloween, so it would be nice to not get bitched at for having high blood pressure – as if bitching at me is gonna make it lower). So maybe I can hold out until then, and maybe it’ll help. At the very least, I’m saving money (even if I’m depressed and all I want to do is go to bed as soon as I get home).

I really wish they’d make pot legal here in NY. I don’t think I can through the rest of my life sober.

In other news, after renovations, they re-dedicated a building at SU the other day with none other than Oprah Winfrey as the guest, um, ribbon-cutter or whatever. Afterwards, she went to one of the poorer neighborhoods around here to check out the Mary Nelson Youth Center. I guess she liked what she saw, because she whipped out her checkbook and cut a personal check for $100,000 (seriously – just said, “so you need, like, what? About a hundred grand?” And then wrote out a check). Whatever you may think of Oprah, that’s pretty impressive. I mean, I don’t even carry a checkbook around with me (truth be told, it’s always a struggle to find it to pay the property tax bill).

Speaking of taxes, they’ve decided that they need to spend $18.5 million renovating our local schools (mostly the high school), which look a lot nicer than the schools I went to as a kid (and I went to some pretty nice schools). If this passes, it’ll raise my taxes about $125 a year. Doesn’t seem like much, but I’m getting pretty tired of it. I think I may need to run for the school board, because those of us without kids need to have a voice in all this stuff.

Well, I’ll go and vote against it, for all the good it’ll do.