As Independence Day approaches, I find myself driving past a lot of fireworks stands. This always amazes me because I was under the impression that fireworks are illegal. Is it possible that they are legal to sell, just not legal to shoot them off? What kind of logic lies behind that premise? I’m always tempted to stop in and buy some fireworks. I enjoy shooting them off after dark at my place. My wife gets very nervous that I’m going to hurt myself, or set the woods or house on fire, but so far that hasn’t happened. I can tell every year that she is just waiting for something bad to happen so she can say “I told you so!”
I haven’t bought any fireworks yet this year, but the temptation grows ever stronger as the day approaches!
Nick had hip replacement surgery a few years ago. Since he was fairly young and athletic, his doctor recommended using Zimmer Metasul Durom hip replacement cups for the surgery. These were specially designed for younger people who are likely to outlive a conventional hip prosthesis. Since then we’ve been hearing that there are a lot of medical and legal issues on zimmer durom cup. Apparently there is a significant failure rate that was unexpected!
Well, of course there has been a lot of scrambling going on by Zimmer, trying to get releases signed by the patients, to release them from any liability if anything should happen to the cup down the road. Zimmer is trying to lay the blame of the durom cups failures on surgeon error. Nick told me that he is going to get as much information as he can about the issues and find a durom lawyer to represent him in the event that he needs to file a durom lawsuit.
I was very saddened to learn of the passing of Michael Jackson. He was one of the most talented people in show business. We’ll never know for sure if he was a pedophile, but we DO know for sure that he was a really good songwriter, singer, dancer, and choreographer. The music industry will miss him terribly. As I was watching the news about how people were reacting to the news, the show kept cutting to people standing around the Apollo theatre. The were celebrating his life. Although I commend people for celebrating the life of someone who has passed, I felt that there were way too many people who were just interested in having their faces plastered on television. That disgusted me more than you can even imagine!
Have you ever heard of a musical instrument called an ocarina? I sure hadn’t – until my oldest son suggested that I buy one to give to my youngest son for his next birthday. Well, I couldn’t let on that I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went online to find out what in the world he was talking about! I went to the shopwiki website and found that the ocarina is a musical instrument. It is a type of flute. They range greatly in price, from as low as $3 to as high as $79!
Apparently the reason why my son thought it would make a good birthday gift is because there is a Zelda video game that features this little instrument. I’ve only ever played the first Zelda game (I thought it was a lot of fun but too addictive!) myself, but my kids are fans of all of them. There are quite a few good looking ocarinas on the market! Sounds like a fun little instrument to learn how to play!
My wife was sorely disappointed today. She had stayed home from work because she was sick with a bad sinus infection. She spent most of the day in bed, but she said she was looking forward to watching Dr. Phil for a change. She hasn’t been able to see any of his shows this year because of her work schedule. And she has been too busy to be able to tape the shows to watch later. So she was feeling that if she had to stay home sick, at least she’d feel good about being able to watch Dr. Phil. She was sorely disappointed when she turned the television on at 3pm, only to find that this summer they are featuring OLD reruns from years past – the show was one she had seen before a long time ago! So sad to get her hopes up, just to have them dashed by old reruns!
I’ve noticed that a lot more people are spending more effort on making their homes more comfortable lately. Because of the economy, and the price of gas, many people have changed their vacation plans to “staycation plans” and using the time to make their places more enjoyable. My wife and I enjoy driving around and looking at the different landscaping designs. We’ve noticed a lot of really nice lawn treatments using Outdoor Planters to line the homeowners driveways and sidewalks. Along with some nice landscape lighting, I’ve seen some spectacular designs!
I’d like to buy a Garden Planter myself on our back deck. That would really liven up the deck, having a variety of annuals blooming all the time! And I love having cascading petunias flowing out of Window Box Planters and almost reaching the ground. Container gardening is a good way to grow invasive plants and keep them from over-running the whole yard.
Yesterday my wife was talking with a group of friends over breakfast at a local restaurant. One of her friends was having trouble with her computer and asking for advice on how to fix it. She was talking about how she was having trouble connecting to the Internet after she had downloaded the newest version of MSN. I think the general consensus was that it was a coincidence, that her motherboard had probably died on her. During the conversation she learned that her friend only had dial-up Internet access because she had Satellite Directv which did not provide her with fast Internet connection.
My wife asked her if the Direct TV offered a package that included the fast Internet and her friend said no it did not! I was so surprised to hear that! I am used to hearing companies that provide services like Direct T V also had Internet! I wonder why they don’t offer that!
For many years I have been plagued by the tendency to make errors when writing with a pen. I have been interested in seeing the evolution of products geared towards helping people to deal with that problem. I can remember trying to use the old fashioned ink erasers that were little hard rubber wheels with little brushes on them. I never seemed to have good luck with them! They just seemed to smudge the ink around and tear holes in the paper!
Then along came the liquid “white out” products. They worked pretty well, but seemed to get clumpy quickly! And then you had to wait for it to dry before you could make the correction. I can remember blowing on the paper, and waving it around in the air trying to dry it so I could proceed with the work I needed to do.
Not too long ago, correction tape products appeared. I like them because they go on dry! But sometimes they don’t apply smoothly and leave big holes in the tape so you can see the error showing anyway. So you apply the tape again and again, and not too long before you have a big mess!
My personal favorite is erasable ink – you can write all you want with the pen, and if you make a mistake you simply erase it with the eraser on the end of the pen. It works great! It comes in several colors. The only thing about that is that you don’t want to write a check with it!
It seems to me that the “War on Drugs” that the country declared many years ago is not being won. As the economy worsens, and people are losing their jobs and homes, more people are turning to some form of substance abuse to relieve their anxiety. Many people who have lost their jobs and are unable to find new ones are turning to crime to help pay for their house payments! This is an intolerable situation, and I sure hope that relief arrives soon! Fortunately, for those individuals who are lucky enough to realize that they have become addicted to their “recreational” drink or snort, there is a lot of addiction resource information on the Internet, as well as through Free Clinics and family physicians.
A plethora of alcohol rehab programs and cocaine rehab centers are cropping up everywhere. Some are designed and cater for the financially affluent. Sure must be nice to be able to recover in a luxurious spa-like surrounding! Other centers are provided at low-cost, or no-cost to the financially struggling. These centers do the best that they can, but with limited funding available I have to wonder how effective they can possibly be. Once the addict leaves the building, the addict needs a lot of support. That support may not always be easily accessible to those with limited funding, largely due to the inability of the addict with limited funding to be able to change their external surroundings! One thing is for sure, it is a struggle for the addict to get clean and stay clean.
I’ve been rather busy lately, but it seems to me that the news is telling me some scary things lately. I’m not sure that I WANT to know what they are saying! The elections in Iran are being contested, rallies are being held where masses of people are chanting “death to America” and “death to England.” And North Korea is imprisoning women reporters to hard labor prison camps and threatening the world with nuclear weapons if we impose sanctions on them! These are scary times, indeed! It is scary to realize that it is possible for so many lunatics to rise to power and threaten the security of the rest of the world! Makes one want to not turn on the news!
My mother asked me to arrange to have some Birthday Flowers sent to my Aunt Lydia. Normally my mother would have asked my sister to take care of that for her, but my sister has come down with the flu and my mother doesn’t want to bother her. And Aunt Lydia’s birthday is coming right up! So I took my laptop over to my mother’s house and went online to show her the London’s Flower Boutique website so she could choose for herself what arrangement she would like to send. My mother was delighted because she is not used to being able to see pictures of the arrangement that she is ordering. She’s used to simply saying “oh, send her a bouquet of something.” It meant a lot to her to be able to see for herself just how pretty the flowers are going to be.
The London Ontario Flower Delivery service will be taking Aunt Lydia a very pretty pink hydrangea planter. Aunt Lydia loves pink, and we thought that by sending her a pink hydrangea planter that she would enjoy it longer because it isn’t just cut flowers, it is a nice little plant that should last longer than a few days! I don’t know if she will be brave enough to try to plant it outside or not; I suspect that it is not hardy enough for her hardiness zone to survive the winter up there.
Yesterday I was out in the garage, working on my pickup truck. I kept noticing a couple of birds flying in the garage, but didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. After a while I realized that they were building a nest in the corner of the garage! Now I’m faced with the dilemma about what to do. Should I destroy the nest, or leave it alone? If I allow the birds to nest there and raise their family, I’ll need to leave the garage door open all of the time. I’m not real keen on that idea, since I have a lot of expensive tools in there. And I’m not real keen on the idea of bird droppings in my garage, on my motorcycle, truck, or tools. But I’m a softie at heart, and can’t quite seem to be able to bring myself to destroy the nest! I wonder how long it will take from the nest building stage to the completion of the baby birds being raised! I don’t even know what kind of birds they are. Maybe I’ll pull out the bird book and see if I can Identify them.
My Dad loves to vacation at Myrtle Beach. He’s been going there every winter for a couple of weeks for the past five years. He loves to play golf, and he says that Myrtle Beach is a golfer’s paradise! He says that Mom enjoys going to the different Myrtle Beach Resorts; there are so many there to choose from! He says that they have tried going to a different Myrtle Beach Resort each time they go because they like to “mix it up” a little bit. Sometimes they stay in one of the Myrtle Beach Hotels near a golf course, and sometimes they stay in one near the beach.
This winter they want my wife and I to join them on their Myrtle Beach vacation. It’s tempting because they’re offering to pay the whole way! I know that there are a lot of great amusement parks and shows that we’d enjoy seeing! And I know my wife would enjoy a round of golf or two with my Dad. So, we just might take them up on their offer and go for it! We could use an all-expenses paid vacation!
My Dad is an avid hunter and fisherman. It really doesn’t much matter WHAT season it is, he loves to tromp around the woods hunting, or lazing around the pond fishing. It was a family tradition in his family for generations. He says he’s been hunting and fishing since he could walk! He started out with his grandfather and father, and now he does it with my brothers. He doesn’t usually come home with anything; I think he just enjoys being outdoors communing with nature and being with the “men folk.”
Ceiling fans are a great way to lower energy expenditures. When my wife and I bought this house we are living in, there were no ceiling fans in it at all. We didn’t have a lot of money to spend right off, so we have been trying to install one ceiling fan every summer in the different rooms. My wife has done a lot of research on the topic and found a lot of good advice on what size fan to get for what size room. She’s also tried to explain to me how and why we should get reversible fans.
Last year we put a fan at the top of the stairway between the two levels of the house, in an attempt to help keep the warm air pushed down the stairs to help reduce the cost of heating the house. I thought my wife was crazy when she suggested it, but I have to admit that I think it did actually help! So now my wife has been shopping around for what fan to buy this year. She found the Hansen Wholesale ceiling fans website today and has told me that she thinks we should order a low profile fan from them for the master bedroom. She said that the prices are really reasonable. I’ve told her that I want to get a Hunter fan if possible because they have a good reputation for being quiet, and I like quiet fans.
As Independence Day approaches, I find myself driving past a lot of fireworks stands. This always amazes me because I was under the impression that fireworks are illegal. Is it possible that they are legal to sell, just not legal to shoot them off? What kind of logic lies behind that premise? I’m always tempted to stop in and buy some fireworks. I enjoy shooting them off after dark at my place. My wife gets very nervous that I’m going to hurt myself, or set the woods or house on fire, but so far that hasn’t happened. I can tell every year that she is just waiting for something bad to happen so she can say “I told you so!”
Fun, General life, Home and Garden, Relationships, Shopping | Dean | 
June 26, 2009 5:02 pm | 
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