It was a chilly weekend, but a nice one. And things are supposed to warm up this week, which will be good. Unfortunately, it’s Monday, and that sucks. It’s a short week though, ‘cuz I took Friday off so I could take Fritz in for his rabies vaccination. I’m not really looking forward to it. He’s pretty good, but I don’t like to see him get stuck with needles and whatnot. I’m sure they’ll want to do the Lyme/Heartworm test. That’s worse than a shot (which dogs don’t really seem to feel when it’s just under the skin – which is good, considering how they bit the crap out of each other when they play), because they need to get blood. Siggy did not like that needle in his leg one bit, but Fritz was OK with it last time. Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to worry about it after I get the next four days over with.

As you probably heard, President Obama has been squandering tax dollars by traveling to college campuses and giving speeches to enthusiastic young folks (much to the chagrin of Jon Boehner, who says this is just plain terrible – and certainly unprecedented).  BTW, that link is to the Christian Science Monitor. I’ve always wondered, is that something that monitors Christian Science? Or a science monitor that happens to be Christian? Either way, there would seem to be an contradiction in terms, there. Anyhow, not to be outdone, Mitt Romney did his college tour this week as well, rousing the kids with tales of such exciting things as, um, well, office supplies.

The central theme Romney drove home was the fact that “sometimes appearances do not conform with the facts or reality,” and he applied it to such topics as the office supply industry, the intricacies of tax filing law and Dodd-Frank financial legislation.

“I have several examples of disparity between appearance and reality,” Romney said, launching into a lengthy monologue about his time as a private equity investor, when he discovered — to his critics’ chagrin! —that potential annual savings on office supplies were significant enough to justify an investment in bigger stores that could make their profits on higher sales volume rather than bigger mark-ups.

“What we found was they were spending a lot more than that I thought on copy paper and toner and supplies and software and so forth….

As you can imagine,  that really got the kids fired up.

I saw a headline in the paper that read, “Get Ready for Wider Swings in CNY,” and I figured it was a story about how our kids are getting so much fatter that we had to put in wider swings.  Turns out, it was about swings in the weather.  Snow, rain, drought, temperature.  They’re all varying widely, and that variation has increased steadily over the past 50 years.  Since that’s about how long I’ve been around, I figure it must be me.

I hope the temperature varies widely today.  Especially the temperature, ‘cuz right now it’s like 25 out.  It appears to be sunny, though, which is good.  Haven’t seen a whole lot of sunshine this week. 

Oh well, I guess I better go find something to do.

A rather annoying, sleepless night last night. That seems to have become the norm for me these days. And my days are spent sitting in a chair that’s trying to kill me. By the end of Monday, my back is a little sore. Tuesday, it starts hurting pretty bad around lunchtime. Wednesday, I’m in pain from about the first half hour on. So things are aching pretty bad right now, and tomorrow will be a real killer. Kinda sucks.

Speaking of things that suck, I see a new poll out there that has Romney leading Obama with independents (whatever the hell they are) by 12%. Early, I know, but that doesn’t seem like a good thing. I mean, if indies are already behind Team Romney – before he’s barely had a chance to shake his Etch-A-Sketch, they’ll have totally forgotten what he’s all about by the time November gets here. Especially with a compliant new media and a shit-load of PAC money waiting to be spent.

I don’t know what to expect from Romney, since he seems to say or do whatever he thinks will please the audience du jour, but I think he’ll go with whatever the Republicans in Congress come up with. And there are an awful lot of scary Republicans out there. Especially in the House.

So I talked with my mom in Anchorage, and she says that someone broke into her apartment and took her computer charger again. That’s right, again. Now, if you steal from a woman who is over ten grand in debt, has a car from the 80s, and can barely hold a steady job because of her health, I’d want to kill you if you did it a third time.

When I lived in Seattle, someone came into the house I was staying in and turned on the stove. It was left red hot the entire day. I told the people I was living with that it wasn’t me and of course they didn’t believe me. Missing telescope equipment, not me. When I lived North of Seattle someone managed to disengage my car’s parking brake and the damn thing rolled down the driveway and smashed into the neighbor’s tree. It caused the car’s window to shatter. The neighbors assumed it was me, but I said it wasn’t. Guess what, they didn’t believe me. When I said that someone drugged me at a coffee shop and I started acting weird and yelling in the U-District, no one believed me. (So, what the fuck if I dropout of school and toss change around UW. Fuck you people.) When my mom says that her computer’s charger and her bedroom clock radio was unplugged next to her window, I’m assuming that that is the absolute truth.

Tuesday! Oh shit, you know what that means. It’s time for everyone’s favorite show The Deadliest Catch. Now, I wasn’t always a fan of this show, but I really needed an excuse to excessively drink on a Tuesday night. Albeit alone, but another reason to be drunk as a skunk none-the-less.

I’m headed to everyone’s favorite state tomorrow. I wasn’t always a fan of Alaska, but when I turned twenty-one here in the lower 48, I learned that being a chain-smoking alcoholic was cool– and if you worked on a crab or a dredge boat you were even cooler. Don’t worry about me, I’ll try not to blend in with the fishes too much. Wouldn’t want to be floating in a river by the end of the summer.

Sucks to be you if you’re a disc golf fan in Anchorage today because that shit just got shutdown like a mother fucker. Too many drunks smoking pot playing frisbee is a big fucking deal, I guess. Don’t worry about elections that the ACLU or NAACP or NCAA or NBA or whoever-the-fuck thinks isn’t legit. Oh, and the 17 year veteran of the JPD who shot off 70 to 100 rounds after a night of drinking isn’t a big deal either, I think that’s just typical Alaska spirit right there.

Where was I? Oh, O Canada! Our home and native land!…

Well, we didn’t get the heavy rain they said we would last night. Instead, we got a few inches of snow. It was a regular winter wonderland out at my house – and just a bit of a hassle getting out of the driveway, now that the snow tires are off. No snow in Syracuse, though. Just rain and wet and cold. Supposed to be like that all week, I guess. Good thing I managed to get the grass cut yesterday. But it was pretty cold out there on the tractor. It was OK for a while, but it takes me about an hour and a half, and by the time I was done, I was chilled to the bone. I even had to light the pellet stoves, and I thought I was done with that. I’m starting to think the year without a winter is about to be followed by a year without a summer. Of course, it’s only April. Worse, it’s only Monday. There’s a long way to go yet.

Happy Earth Day, planet Earth. Back on the very first Earth Day, I was about nine and a half years old. That was a long damn time ago. Fortunately, during the ensuing 42 years (42 years! Holy shit, when did that happen?) we’ve stopped polluting the air and the water and the land, have made huge strides in getting off of oil (why, we Americans use a mere 19 million barrels a day) and coal with alternative energy, and are taking Climate Change seriously.

Yesterday was bleak and dreary, with rain pretty much all day. Drizzle, mostly, but cold. It made it impossible to do much of anything, so I cleaned my office (which has been needing it badly). I carted a lot of crap down the basement, and threw a bunch of other stuff away. I’m not saying it’s spotless, but I can actually see the surface of my desk. I should probably get around to painting the underside of it (not that I don’t like the look of bare 2x4s.

Today is cold. Just barely up to 43 degrees at the moment, and not supposed to get much warmer. I definitely need to get the grass cut, and am hoping things will dry out a bit before I get started.

Oh well, time to get back to doing whatever was I was doing while I wait for things to warm up a bit.

Damn near noon on 4/20, and I’m not stoned. And not likely to be. How sad. But life goes on, so I reckon I’ll have to find some other way to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. At least it’s Friday, and a very nice one, weather-wise, from what I hear. In a shocking surprise, the weather is supposed to turn to crap for the weekend. I guess that gives me an excuse to sit around and read all day. Except I’d prefer to sit out in the sun and read. But you take what you get.

I had to laugh when I saw the headline of this article – “Right and Early” – because it naturally made me think of Marc the Shark (or was it Mark the Shark – or Marc the Sharc?). It’s all about the liberal media bias – particularly on the Sunday Booblehead shows.

While you might expect to see a lot of Republican candidates and their surrogates in the thick of a Republican primary contest, the four Sunday morning talk shows—ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday—have been extraordinarily friendly terrain for the right, as a new FAIR study documents.
[…]
In the eight-month study period, partisan-affiliated one-on-one interviews were 70 percent Republican—166 guests to Democrats’ 70.
[…]
Men overwhelmingly dominated one-on-one interviews, at 86 percent: 228 male guests compared to 36 women. Meet the Press featured the fewest women, with just six female interviewees—three of whom were Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.-Minn.), the presidential candidate.

Guests were also also ethnically homogeneous, with 242 white interview guests (92 percent of the total), 15 African-Americans (seven of whom were Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain), four Arabs or Arab-Americans, and three Latinos.
[…]
If you buy the assumption that the Sunday shows simply must feature lawmakers in one-on-one interviews, the roundtable debate format could at least give these programs a chance to bring in more diverse voices. But these segments are hard to distinguish from the lopsided interview segments.
[…]
Women were just 29 percent of roundtable guests. The ethnic diversity was similarly woeful: 85 percent white and 11 percent African-American, with 3 percent Latino. Other ethnicities made up an additional 2 percent of roundtable guests.

Damn liberals.

Barack Obama not only hates sty-at-home moms, but he also hates successful rich people. He had the nerve to mention that he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but Mitt Romney isn’t going to apologize for his dad.

Of course, nobody is asking him to. And we all know how hard it was for Mitt and Anne to survive in college without working a day, only cashing in Mitt’s crappy stocks. Poor Mitt. Poor Anne.

As Vernon mentioned, sad news yesterday as Dick Clark passed away at 82 (which really isn’t sounding very old to me these days). I’m sure I don’t need to mention what college Dick went to, or where he got his start on the radio.

I will mention that Dick was on hand the day that SU played then #1 Nebraska in football in 1984. He was on hand to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of SU’s only National Championship (and SU actually astounded the football world by beating Nebraska that day; I couldn’t talk above a whisper for a week after that).

So long, Dick.

I began my commute this morning listening to Johnny Cash’s version of “I Hung My Head.” A cheery little ditty to help get me in the mood for today’s meeting (for which I am holding out hope that there’ll be a last minute cancellation). Not that I wasn’t in the mood already. I was awakened at about 2:30 this morning, and never actually got back to sleep, so let’s just say I’m tired and a little bit grumpy. Not as grumpy as everybody’s favorite Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, I bet.

Seems Sheriff Joe might be in a little bit of (well-deserved) trouble.

A three-person disciplinary panel of the state’s high court said there was enough evidence to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the sheriff and three of his closest allies participated in what the panel believes was federal crime in December 2009.

The alleged crime doesn’t stem from battles over immigration, pink underwear or any of the other things that have made Arpaio famous. Instead, it deals with a feud among local government officials in which the panel said the sheriff and his allies took things way too far.

It would be nice to see Joe in a pair of pink panties. No, wait, I take that back. It’s actually a rather unnerving thought. But it would be nice to see him go down. No, wait, that’s kind of an icky thought, too.

Speaking of icky thoughts, it’s almost time for my stupid meeting.