Who's this guy?

The Channel 8 StormWatch guy says it has cooled down to the upper 80s. Must be fall. But that proves my point, I think. I am tropical. What I am not, however, is topical.

I am aware that we have a new Supreme Court Justice, a woman nominated for the other position that is vacant and that the Iraqi's (suprisingly....NOT!) still haven't decided on a constitution or something. Oh, and the suicide bombings continue unabated. Oh my goodness, I am now officially the uninformed, self-absorbed American.

There are some things I do know. I know that both country stations in the area play the twang equivilent of "classic rock". Except for this one Montgomery-Gentry song, 28 of 30 songs are old hits. While I do like them, I'd like some new stuff.

There was this one station in, I think, Dinwiddie, VA that played Album Oriented Country. Those of you who were teens and young adults in the seventies remember AOR stations, Album Oriented Rock. They played the good stuff and the long stuff off the records instead of sticking to a Top Forty playlist. I liked that Dinwiddie station. It played some stuff that was out there. But how often are you passing through Dinwiddie?

I met this kind of cute girl day before yesterday when I rear-ended her on Falkenburg Road. Hit her pretty hard, too. Her car was old and beat up anyway, so she was not particularly excited. I was very suprised, in light of how hard we hit, that I was able to get a right decent repair on my car with a wet towel and some touch up paint. I think you won't notice the touch up paint unless you are looking right at the place we hit. The spots, about eight of them, are all about the size of your pinky nail. Dang, I never would have expected such a strong bumper out of a Pontiac.

Although you couldn't tell, because I move at a speed imperceptible to the human eye, I just went and took the inside measurements of the dining room and living room windows for blinds. We have this store that's pretty cool, called Blinds To Go. Neat idea, but has me wondering. Don't you normally buy your blinds to go, anyway?

I like good smells. I think one of my favorites is the Magnolia tree. I would love to dig one up out of the right of way on a Mississippi Highway, where they grow wild and relatively unmolested, and bring it home. But, the kicker to that... besides the jail time... is that the sucker sheds those magnolia cobs all over the place. They are large, hard, and neverending. A better idea would be to steal it and plant it in the neighbors yard. Then I'd get all of the smell and none of the cob. Orange blossoms on a soft breeze are a close second in the good smell department.

Mississippi has a road sign that says NO CUTTING TREES IN THE ROW. So I'm thinking, what's the significance of trees growing in a row that would make it necessary to pass a law about them? That is exactly the kind of thing that I go through life perplexed about. Eventually, I snapped off that ROW just might stand for right of way, and in rural Jackson County, Mississippi somebody just might need to be told not to fell trees in the middle of a busy highway. Like the sign I saw, and photographed, in West By God Virginia that stated matter of factly, NO HUNTING IN THE REST AREA.

I do not like to buy scented candles although women, the species from which my wife derives, are biologically programmed to buy them no matter how ridiculously high they are priced. So, as in so many things where I have had to choose a stand that will not be completely ignored as being too, shall we say, not what she's gonna do, I made a hard and fast, not to be broken rule concerning scented candles. The rule is simple, yet the rule is unbending. No "Cotton", "Linen", "Ocean Breeze", etc. No subtle scents whatsoever. If $14-$23 of my hard(ly) earned cash is going to go into a jar of wax that I am going to burn off into nothing, then the scent had better be overpowering. Berries. Flowers. Even cookie smells are OK. If I can smell them from across the room then they're OK. If I have to stand beside the candle and wonder if I smell it or not, then it is a scent on the bad candle list.

I have a gumball machine beside my computer. It takes a coin, any coin*, to get a gumball. I sit here and try to think of ways to get a gumball without paying.

I was listening to LUMP by The Presidents of the USA yesterday. That song is so-o-o cool:

Lump was limp and lonely and needed a shove
Lump slipped on a kiss and tumbled into love
She spent her twenties between the sheets
Life limped along at subsonic speeds

Out
Ramblin' Ed

* Well, not a fifty cent piece, but who carries those anyway?