Now it’s time for shopping

By now you should know just how much I love shopping online.  Especially when I’m looking for something for outdoor entertaining.  I love having outdoor parties on a warm summer night.  Of course if you are going to entertain outdoors, you will need to make sure you have decorated your yard with garden accents like bird feeders and bird baths.  I have all kinds of things for my friends to enjoy out in my yard.

In fact, I get most of my home and garden needs online.  I really hate going from store to store trying to find what I want so I let my fingers do the walking on my keyboard.  I even buy my garden hoses and things like that online.  I save money by not running to one store and then another for what I want plus, I happen to like shopping from the comforts of home instead of getting in and out of a hot car.

I’ve been on vacation

Did you guys miss me?  Well I went on vacation and left my laptop at home.  I knew that if I had brought it with me, I would spend half of my time on the computer instead of having fun.  That’s what vacations are for after all, having fun.  Well I had a blast and so did everyone else.

Mom decided to take all of us on a Caribbean cruise and it was a dream come true for all of us.  It wasn’t one of those short ones either.  All I can say is “Now I know where I want to go on my honeymoon if I ever get married!!”

That’s the way it goes!!

My cousin sent me this and the bad thing about it is I could see that happening here!!!!

Two union guys working for the parks department. One would dig a hole and the other would come along and fill it in. This went on all day.  Dig, fill in Dig , fill in. I finally had to ask them what they were doing.

They told me that normally there are three of them but the guy who puts the tree in the hole called in sick.

This is the coolest thing I have ever seen

Animals absolutely amaze me.  The Cameleon is one of the strangest creatures God ever created.  I knew they changed colors to camouflage themselves to their surroundings but I had no idea just how fast they could change colors or the extent of the colors they could adapt to.  You have to watch this video.  It will blow your mind.  I know it did mine.

Ben Stein’s Final Column

Worth repeating:    How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?

As I begin to write this, I ‘slug’ it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is ‘FINAL’, and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to.
It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.Beyond that, a bigger change has happened? I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated.

But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a ‘star’ we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsche’s or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But, I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

Don’t ever forget to “Seize the Moment”!

I thought this was just too funny

A friend of mine sent me this and I just had to share it with you.  As soon as I read it, I thought “Now I have an excuse!!!”  I bet a lot of women who see this will think the same thing too.  I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.  Well poo!!!!!!!!!!  I changed my theme and lost the picture.  I’m sorry because it really was cute.  Maybe I’ll find it in my email later and add it back in.  How’s that sound?

I keep telling everyone about this

I have told so many people about how pleased I am with Direct TV.   I almost sound like a walking advertiser for them.  But I am so very pleased with it that I want to share it with everyone I care about or is family.  You know what I mean?  Directv offers everything you could possibly want in satellite service.

A good friend of mine just moved to Texas and found out just how easy it was to get Direct TV in Texas too.  She was so afraid she would have to get a different satellite service or worse yet, cable.  It’s nice to know that you can move somewhere like Texas or just about any other state and still get your Direct TV service there too.

Well darn it’s raining again

This is sure to put a damper on some peoples cookouts they had planned today unless it stops raining before they had their cookout planned.  I love the way everything smells after it has rained but I am so very tired of rain.  I don’t think I have ever seen it rain so much in May before.

Well at least we’re getting ahead of what we need for the year so maybe we wont’ have another drought year.  Besides, rain always makes the grass grow and turn a beautiful green.  But then there’s all of the extra mowing so I guess you just can’t win either way.

You have got to be kidding me!

My sister had me stop by after work so she could show me the American Idol finale.  I just knew Adam would win.  Did you see it?  I thought he out sang the lead singer of Kiss!!!  He was great.  Then when they announce the winner, it was Kris?  The judges thought for sure Adam would win and even Kris said that Adam should have won.  That’s okay, he’ll make it huge, you just wait and see.  In fact, I bet Slash will have him as the lead singer of his new group since he doesn’t have a lead singer yet.  I just had to share Adam with Kiss with you.  Enjoy!!!

Thinking about going to Myrtle Beach this summer

Even though my mother has a beach house on the Virginia coast, I have been thinking about going to Myrtle Beach this summer with a couple of my friends.  We were checking out Myrtle Beach Resorts online and man there are some really nice ones down there.  If the three of us go and split the cost, it won’t cost us that much each to have a blast.  Even the Myrtel Beach Hotels are beautiful.  There are some that have great views of the beach and are high rise at that.  Some have jacuzzi tubs and all the extras you would ever want.

We haven’t decided just where we want to stay right now but we are all leaning more towards a Myrtle Beach Resort rather than a hotel.  The resort we were looking at is really close to all of the hot entertainment sites too.  I am so excited about going to Myrtle Beach.  At least it’s not the same old beach I have been going to since I was a kid.