New Shoes in the Rain

Friends, I hope you're ready for a good non-Black Friday and an even better weekend! Have been compiling this morning's post for a while but only now had the opportunity to complete and post it.  As I think I mentioned a while back, I'm again traveling frequently for business, and that means hotels.  Lots and lots of hotels!  I'm not going to lavishly praise or freely bash any particular brand or chain of hotels.  In my experience they all have their pluses and minuses, as one would expect. The first, and nowadays for me, most important component of a hotel room is a comfortable bed.  Not too firm, not too soft.  For me this is made worse by the fact that at home I sleep on a TempurPedic bed.  Don't see those in hotels too frequently.  So the right firmness will determine how soundly I'm able to sleep, but also how many aches and pains will be with me when I wake up. The number of comfortable beds has been small over the past three months. ...

Happy Monday-after-Thanksgiving to all! I hope that if you had to travel home from visiting with family and friends over the long holiday weekend that you made it home in one piece!  I didn't travel over the weekend, but am leaving on a business trip later this morning, so wish me luck! My wife and I had an interesting Thanksgiving this year.  Our son and his family traveled out of state to spend time with our daughter-in-law's family.  We tentatively planned to visit with my mother-in-law on Thanksgiving but for a variety of reasons did not travel to see her.  So, for the first time in many years, it was just my wife and me for the holiday. We inquired of one restaurant that had endlessly promoted their Thanksgiving dinner and found that seating was very limited.  So we resigned ourselves to visiting another restaurant that was open for their regular hours and serving a meal especially for the holiday.  Not a bad option, but not quite the special occ...

Friends, did you vote this time last week?  If you did, you were part of a very large turnout nationally, one of the largest volumes of mid-term election voters in quite some time. I'm not going to replay what happened, or tout who won because of what reason, but this will make things in Washington very interesting come January.  I read somewhere that when current Congresswoman and former/likely future Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi first arrived in Washington that she was among something like twelve women serving.  Now she will be among more than 90 women in both houses of Congress. That's great, but that's still disproportionate to our population. There are Muslims who won the right to represent others in the House.  There are openly gay and bisexual persons who won the right to serve.  And there are many others with uncommon traits who will be in the next Congress.  And that's great, and better represents the population of this country. But le...

Friends, unless you've been living on a desert island, you know that tomorrow is election day.  And while you likely have a number of local and/or state races for which you can vote, you also have the opportunity to vote for your preferred candidate for Congress. You should be sure to do so. According to some information I've read, the last time we had a mid-term election (that is, at the mid-point of a given presidential term), approximately 35 percent of registered voters made their way to the polls to cast ballots. That's appalling. Here we are, in a country founded on democracy and freedom of choice, and that large a percentage doesn't feel it worth the time to vote. I somehow think this time it will be different. I don't know yet how I feel about last year's tax bill, as 2018 will be the first year where our returns are subject to the new terms.  I'm unhappy with the number of people and groups whose rights are being deliberately and systema...