Strange days indeed

Hello, friends.  It's Monday, or at least it will be for a little while longer....

This post is gonna be an assortment of things, some of some importance and some not.  As always, bear with me, I'm going as fast as my 64 year old brain will allow!

If you're a sports fan and enjoy a professional football game broadcast once in a while, you've probably heard former quarterback Tom Brady as a game analyst on Fox Sports.  He's paired with the excellent play-by-play man Kevin Burkhardt, who is among my favorites.  I'd rate Burkhardt second only to Mike Tirico and Ian Eagle these days.

Anyway, Burkhardt and his former partner Greg Olson has become Fox's top booth team after Joe Buck and Troy Aikman departed for ESPN and Monday Night Football.  They had developed a great chemistry over the years they worked together.

And now that's gone.  I have not heard Olson work a game since Brady was added to the "national" game squad with Burkhardt, Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi.  I'd guess he's still really good, regardless of the play by play partner he now has.  Brady, on the other hand, averages one or two original and honest statements per broadcast that I've heard.  He's OK, but for the investment they made, Fox should expect more.  Brady doesn't sound all that prepared, but he's technically new to this, and had to take a full year off from playing before entering the booth.  As we say, time will tell.

My wife and I had a long conversation recently about our yard, as we have some overgrown plants and bushes that we are going to have to deal with.  I'm resigned to having to manually aerate the lawn to then seed and fertilize and grow some new grass, especially in the front, where the heavy equipment used in the demolition of our old driveway installation of its replacement had left a lot of bare placed in the lawn.  Plus we had a tree removed several years ago, and over time it looks like there's a dimple in the yard that's several inches deep from there the tree used to be.  Think good thoughts for me, please.

Then there's a mystery I've been trying to solve for a while.  When I met my wife, I inherited some tools that formerly belonged to her late husband, so I incorporated them into a single set.  I eventually bought a new, bigger composite tool box but in the past few years I've noticed a nauseating scent emanating from inside the tool box, even after getting a new one.

A few months ago I had had enough and on a rainy Saturday morning brought the tool box inside, cleaned every single tool by hand and soaked many of them in a mixture of hot water and Dawn dish soap, in an effort to curb that awful smell.  It was better for a time, but reappeared recently.  Probably due to hot weather.  I even bought a new tool box and that didn't help, either.

Anyway, I did some checking and found that Craftsman brand screwdrivers from Sears (which is long gone now, of course) with certain acetate-blend handles were known to decompose and emit a gas that made them permanently stinky.  A mixture of vomit and parmesan cheese was how one online commenter described the smell.  You get the idea.

So I took the five screwdrivers that appeared to be the culprits from the took box and ordered new ones of a different brand from Amazon.  Disposed of the Craftsman tools and the smell was still there, so I dropped a Bounce dryer sheet into the box and left the lid up for a couple of days.  Much better now.

I will not offer any specific comments about the presidential campaign, regular visitors here know my position on that, but suffice it to say that I'm not all that concerned with sharks, electric boats, Hannibal Lector and so on.  Mass media continues to report that the race is "tight" or "razor thin" or "a toss-up."  It probably is, but in this day and age of people without home phones, I honestly don't know how polls are even conducted at present.  

Finally, our "new" car is now three years and 84,000 miles old, so I bought tires for it last week.  Splurged and got Michelins, as they came with an 80,000 mile life expectancy.  The car drives as it did when new, so that's a nice outcome.

I could keep going, but that's a pretty good idea of what's been top of mind lately.