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Change Your Clocks Tonight

clock

Helps to remember this little saying, Spring forward and Fall back. That means the clocks change tonight and since we have to move the time ahead by an hour that we all lose that hour of sleep. I always find it interesting that they decided to make the change happen on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Why not do it on Sunday night and have that lost hour disappear before Monday’s start of the week? I don’t think its fair to cut short my Saturday night partying by an hour when you could just as easily take away an hour from Sunday instead.

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Mud and More Mud

With all this rain we are getting I am pretty sure that this area won’t have any issues with drought later in the summer. We have had so much rain my yard is nothing but mud.

The mud is becoming a big problem for a lot of people. For one thing, we can’t till the gardens or fields. This is the week that most of us gardeners like to get out the tillers and turn the soil to get ready for planting. But it won’t turn if it is mud.

I saw on the news last night that a fire truck responding to a fire down in Nolensville got stuck in the mud. The house was burning on top of a hill and had a dirt driveway, which is pretty common for houses out in the country. So the firetruck tried to get up the hill to put out the fire and ended up getting stuck in the mud. The home burned to the ground because the driveway was blocked by that stuck fire truck. What a shame, but at least no lives were lost.

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Extra days are nice

Yesterday was like a bonus day. Usually February only has 28 days and once the schoolkids get that firmly implanted in their minds, they just accept that. Except that every four years February gets an extra day tacked on the end of the month. So that happens to be this year and it was kinda nice to have that extra day. It gave me a little breathing room to get some things done around the house and an extra day to get the bills paid.

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Missing Keith Whitley

Keith Whitley was a country singer who had a knack for picking songs that everyone could relate to. He sang in an easy going style, and sang about love, the frustrations of life and the daily struggles of trying to be a good person.

Sadly, he also had a drinking problem and died from alcohol poisoning. At the time he was married to Lorrie Morgan and I know a lot of people say that she killed him, even though she was not home at the time of his death. I think that she was just such a demanding and difficult person to be around that Keith couldn’t handle it. She is a huge diva and spoiled rotten. So maybe she did.

Every song that Keith recorded was a good one and I miss his music making talents. RIP Keith. I still listen to your music often and we miss you.

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Chocolate eclairs

eclairs

Once in a while, maybe every 3 months or so, my mother would drive across town to the little Italian bakery and buy some fresh bakery goods. She claimed to go their for their homebaked breads for my dad, but I think she just wanted to buy pastries. If us kids were lucky enough to ride along with her, she would let each of us pick out a treat from the bakery case. I always picked a jelly donut and my mom always bought two of the chocolate eclairs for herself.

As soon as we got home and put away our bounty from the shopping trip, she would make a big deal about pouring a small glass of cold milk for us all and then serving up the bakery treats for an afternoon snack. Thinking back on it, she never did buy a dessert treat for my dad. They were just for us kids and her. An I believe she served the treats that same afternoon so that they were eaten before my dad got home from work and found out about them.

Every time I see chocolate eclairs, I think back on how my mom would buy her two eclairs and hide them from my dad. They were her secret indulgence and I’m glad she was able to have a few guilty pleasures in her life.

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Music Downloads

If you’ve shopped for music CDs lately, you might have noticed that they are creeping up in price. I know about 15 years ago the new music CDs were selling for about $16 each in the big stores. If you wanted to listen to the latest songs at home, you had no choice but to buy the CDs and the music business had no incentive to lower the prices.

Now today I can go to Amazon and several other websites and get the one song that I like for just 99 cents. So if there is all this competition now and there are avenues for buying just one song for a buck, why hasn’t the price of CDs come down at all? In fact, just the opposite is true – they are now $18 and $19 dollars for the new releases. That is just crazy. Not only do I object to spending almost $20 on a CD, I object to having to buy 9 or 10 more songs that I don’t even want just to get to hear the one song on that CD that I do like.

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Too Many Remotes

One of the dogs lost his ball under the sofa, so I had to get up and move the furniture around in the living room to find his ball. That dog would give me no peace while his ball was unreachable.

When I moved the sofa, the cushion fell off and that’s when I decided to give up watching the TV and just clean up the living room and the sofa. I don’t usually worry too much about the sofa, but for some reason there was a lot of loose change and weird things accumulating under that sofa cushion, so I decided to deal with it on the spot.

By the time I was done, I had found over $4.00 in loose change, a Bic lighter, a pair of sunglasses, a AA battery, three white socks and four remote controls. I had no idea I needed four remote controls in my living room until I rounded them up and laid them out on the coffee table.

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Don’t Trust the Groundhog

My grandfather used to take his shotgun with him when he plowed the fields on his big farm up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I asked him why he needed the gun and he told me that if he was plowing and saw a groundhog that he had to stop the tractor and kill the pest. He said the groundhogs did more damage to his crops than anything except a hail storm.

Not really sure why anyone wants to celebrate groundhogs and give them magical weather forecasting powers. I think like my grandfather, the critters should just be shot. Spring will get here is its ready and there’s a groundhog can do about it, one way or the other.

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Oatmeal Cookies

I have a box of oatmeal and decided that cookies would be nice. There is a recipe for “Vanishing Oatmeal Cookies” under the lid – and that sounded easy enough. I checked the cupboards and pantry and actually had all the ingredients on hand. So I made a batch and they are awesome! To be honest, I’ve never baked cookies in my life but these were easy – I can do this!

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Top Hits

As I’ve been building my play lists on Spotify, I have been trying to think of all the great songs that I used to listen to on the radio as a teen. There is not much about music on most of the regular start pages like Yahoo.com with links to everything else under the sun. But I did find a list of Hot Hits on the Billboard.com web site and it did bring up a lot of memories.

I am not in agreement with their ranking of the top hits of all time, but I’m sure they had a particular method to determine them. Sadly, I don’t agree with any of their top 10 hits of all time list. Who in their right mind would pick Chubby checker’s “The Twist” as the number one top hit of all time? Seriously?