I have been feeling gloomy lately; I wonder why?  Everything runs in cycles, but our congress it seems, so hopefully my outlook will swing back to something more normal soon. There are not many in Washington that I look up to anymore but Olympia Snowe was one of them.  Those two ladies from Maine always given me hope that there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel. Senator Snowe usually put the country above party when it came to  the many partisan votes of recent years. She has become a rare breed in that respect. She was … Continue reading Olympia Snowe leaving the Senate….

I got the above title from one of my blogging friends over at Living Richly in Retirement.  It was a rather innocuous  sentence embedded in a post about selling her house. But it did strike me as part of my philosophy of life. Since I have no kids the following could be coming from total ignorance but I don’t think any of us should leave anything but a pittance to our heirs when we leave this earth. It would just spoil them anyway.  Let them take care of themselves as they expect us to take care of ourselves.

This is very contrary to all the latest trends going on in this country now but I am a contrarian so you should have seen this coming. We want to eliminate the inheritance taxes entirely in this country so that all the wealth can pass from one generation to another unscathed.  We say a couple million bucks is just not enough for our kids. They need it all. Being that if nothing changes we will be a plutocracy in a couple more generations this makes sense.

Continue reading “Take Care of Yourself, and Let Your Kids Do the Same…..”

  At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.   —  Albert Schweitzer I must admit that in some ways I am not a very creative person. I have often times in my life needed a spark from another person to get me headed down a path.  So, I certainly appreciated the quote above from Albert Schweitzer.  I have deep gratitude for those who have lighted the flame within me. I am a … Continue reading Rekindled By A Spark….

  Yeah that’s me a few days ago. We had a dusting of three inches of snow that I removed from our 150 foot circular driveway. This one I could handle with my trusty Craftsman tractor. Continue reading Oh the Snow….

Source:  Ahead of “milk cliff,” McConnell piecing together new farm bill – Political Eye – CBS News. and would extend at the post-August 2012 level the USDA’s Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program, which compensates dairy producers when domestic milk prices fall below a specific level. I’m just a simple guy but I don’t understand how milk would go to $8/gallon if the farm bill is not passed.  Everyone knows that part of this legislation is for the government to buy large quantities of milk and cheese to prevent a glut in the market place. This seems like reverse supply/demand … Continue reading Ahead of “milk cliff”……

  Since this is a first day of the year post it has to be about the resolutions I have made for 2013. Being a list maker you might think that my list is quite long but you would be mistaken. We are all the slaves to the calendar so when we turn from one year to the next it seems a nature time for changes. I am no stranger to changes; in fact I most often embrace them! This year my list of changes is quite short. I don’t know if that is because I am starting to see … Continue reading New Years Resolutions…..

“A happy New Year! Grant that I May bring no tear to any eye When this New Year in time shall end Let it be said I’ve played the friend, Have lived and loved and labored here, And made of it a happy year.” – Edgar Guest I am a quotes guy so you think I could easily find a quote to start off this New Year. But that proved to be more difficult than I imagined. Even my hero Will Rogers let me down; he just didn’t seem to have much to say about New Years day.  But I … Continue reading Plain and Simple….

Source: In Memoriam: 9 Tech Titans Who Died in 2012 | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com. He was just one of several tech titans who died over the past year. None had the name recognition of a Steve Jobs — who passed in 2011 — but they may have moved our world in bigger ways. Among those that passed in 2013 are the IBMer who invented the bar code and the Zenith engineer who devised the first wireless TV remote — not to mention one of the physicist who helped built the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Click on the images above … Continue reading Techie Titans …

Dexter, our cat has been chasing a mouse around the house for the last few winter days. When he does he gets Beulah our sixty pound basset hound all excited and involved in the chase. It is funny to see Beulah with her tail wagging a mile a minute sitting next to Dexter staring at the bottom of the refrigerator where a mouse is currently hiding.  When I started this post that picture came to mind but that is really not the topic at hand. Instead it is about giving up my computer mouse.

I started out my computer life with a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in the 1980s. It had no mouse or graphical user interface (GUI for all you techies). Everything had to be typed in on a keyboard and I spent hundreds of hours on doing just that.  I was hooked from the very beginning.

Continue reading “Giving Up the Mouse…..”

  Some time ago I came across a blog from a Romanian blogger named Cristian Mihai that got my attention. On many of his posts he seems much too mature for his twenty-two years.  But then other times he seems to fit right in to that bracket.  He is an ambitious young man who has totally conquered English as his second language. He is also a self-published author. Below is one of the posts that seems almost profound to me. He is talking about what it means to be a writer: Source: You either write or live « Cristian Mihai. You … Continue reading You Either Write or Live

  You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger. Let a person overcome anger by love. Hate is never ended by hatred but by love. — Buddha — These words could just as easily come from the mouth of Jesus as from Buddha. But in reality Buddha lived on this earth several hundred years before Jesus. It amazes me how similar the reported lives of Jesus and Buddha are. Here are some of those similarities as found at Wikipedia and other sources:  Buddha is actually a title which means “the awakened one”, his … Continue reading You Are Punished By Your Anger, Not For Your Anger…