New Shoes in the Rain

Well, folks, we had about ten inches of snow here in central Kentucky Friday, give or take, and most all of it is gone now.  Good riddance, I was sore for three days from shoveling! I'm posting at an unusual time (for me, anyway) because a system I access for work purposes is not responding right now.  Done about everything else that does not require that system, so here we are. Monday I was out of town for meetings and when I arrived in a very small town for one of those meetings, I spied a car wash.  Good, I thought, I'll wash all of this salt off.  At that moment the outside temperature was in the high 40s.  So I got the least expensive wash and congratulated myself on my good fortune. Then I drove home.  The snow melt created lots of nice puddling on the road, puddles which were filled with road gunk and, of course, salt.  So no better.  I'll wait a while next time. There are still pillars of shoveled, packed snow flanking the entrance...

Good early Tuesday morning from COLD central Kentucky! It's a balmy 11 degrees as I write this (outside; thankfully, it's a little warmer inside our house!) and there's talk of snow for tomorrow and again at week's end.  Oh, boy. I was very surprised and saddened to hear of the death of founding Eagle Glenn Frey yesterday.  He was still a relatively young man, 67 at his passing.  His group's music is a part of the soundtrack of my life, honestly, and while I really liked most all of the Eagles' work, I probably gravitated more to the songs where Frey handled the vocals than those performed by his cowriter and the group's drummer, Don Henley.  Won't name them all here, but I'd bet that if you're close to me in age that you can at least hum several of the songs sung by Glenn Frey. I've always told my wife that when my favorite ballplayers, musicians and actors begin to pass away that I'll begin to feel my own mortality just a bit more...

Happy second-week-of-the-new-year to all.  Busy day yesterday kept me from this space, but found some time this morning. I watched most of the Golden Globes with my wife Sunday night, and my primary comment (other than to say that Ricky Gervais is pretty funny while being fearless and unconcerned with reaction to his jokes, which is a rare gift in show business today) is to ask "who's watching some of the shows that were recognized with awards?"  I watch a fair amount of TV, and while I don't have every pay channel and streaming service, I have enough awareness of current culture to know about some of these shows.  But I had honestly never heard of "Mr. Robot," "Mozart in the Jungle," "Wolf Hall" or "Show Me a Hero."  Who's watching these shows, aside from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? I did not see Sylvester Stallone's acceptance speech live, but was touched that he's finally getting some recognition ...

Well, friends, the holidays are over.  We put away our Christmas decorations over the weekend, and now everyone in the family is back to work and school.  Sigh..... But it's a new year, and with it comes some new circumstances.  For instance, here in central Kentucky, we've experienced a lengthy period of unseasonably warm weather.  Last week the temperature dipped to what one would expect for late December, finally, and this morning I awoke to see some snow flurries out our living room window.  Not a lot of snow, of course, but snow nonetheless.  I recall going out for lunch Christmas Eve and trying to decide whether to wear pants or shorts, if that tells you anything. At least it's not raining.  Our area had more than enough rain during November and December, thank you very much.  We didn't experience any flooding in our area, but I know of areas that did. So, today we round the corner, turn over a new leaf, start a new chapter, whatever y...