Fourth of July

Sometimes (actually, lots of times) my state really embarrasses me. Usually, though, Lincoln stands out as a little island of sanity, but not this time. This is just too stupid for words.

Do you know who "Larry the Cable Guy" (Daniel Lawrence Whitney -- "Git-r-done") is? He lives in Lincoln. That's embarrassing enough, but he decided he wants to do a 4th of July show at Memorial Stadium. The University mulled it over for quite a while and finally said okay. As a result, the City of Lincoln decided to do its 4th of July whoop-ti-do on July 3rd -- apparently because they thought so many people would want to go to Larry the Cable Guy's show (stadium holds about 80,000 people).

So, last night, Mother Nature put on her own fireworks display, and we had thunderstorms and pouring rain all night. Must have put a damper on the city's party. Today, I have my curmudgeonly fingers crossed that it rains again tonight so that anyone dumb enough to think Larry the Cable Guy is actually funny gets rained out.

July 4th isn't one of my favorite holidays anyway. I seem to remember liking it when I was a kid, but I think having a dog that would whine and cower for a week or more pretty much cured me. Now fireworks just piss me off (although I still sort of like the big public displays -- from a distance). If it doesn't rain tonight, the whole city will be blanketed with a sulphurous haze. I can't for the life of me figure out how over-priced, polluting, made-in-China fireworks is an appropriate expression of patriotism.

What about MEEEE??

I will probably do a pleasant post (with pictures) later this weekend, but right now I have a curmudgeonly rant.

Stimulus stuff is all well and good, but I'm being left out in the cold AGAIN. All these measures I'm hearing about seem to be for "other" people.

Huge tax credit for first-time home buyers. Fine, but what about those of us who are going through their FOURTH re-finance? Nothing.

"Cash for clunkers" -- Great idea to get people to trade in their old cars. But guess what? The old car has to get less than 18 miles per gallon. We've got an 18-year-old car that is literally falling apart (even though it's only got 65,000 miles on it). Unfortunately, it's a Toyota and gets 25-30 miles per gallon. I suppose we could trade in our 1985 Toyota pickup instead (lousy mileage), but Tom needs a pickup.

Tax credits for people who buy energy-efficient appliances. Wonderful, but you have to buy the appliance in 2009. We bought a new energy-efficient furnace in 2008, so we're just SOL.

Credit card companies and car dealers saying they will make my payments for me for six months if I lose my job. All well and good, but I'm not likely to lose my job. Sheesh, just let me skip one month!

It's just frustrating. For my entire adult life, I've made too much money to qualify for anything, but not enough to PAY for anything. We live in a "target" neighborhood, where there is lots of money available for house projects; but we miss the cut-off by about $2,000 to qualify for any of it, and can't afford to pay for the things we want to do to our house. We're lucky in that Tom is skilled enough to do most of the necessary work (e.g. plumbing), but we certainly can't afford to replace our sewer line from the house to the alley, or build a garage.

I caught some of a program last night about Farrah Fawcett's battle with cancer. Yes, she is very brave, but apparently has limitless funds that enable her to fly to Germany several times a year for treatments that aren't available here. How many people can afford to do that? Cripes, I had a filling fall out a couple weeks ago, but have to wait till I have a couple hundred extra bucks to get it fixed (it's not causing me pain -- I'd find a way if it was).

Enough. I'm just tired of falling through the cracks.

Gotta love this Nebraska weather!

We've been having fabulous spring weather. In fact, we've been having thunderstorms this afternoon and evening, and a lovely warm day. I was cogitating on my window boxes, and what kind of flowers to put in them this year. Tonight, we're in a blizzard warning. Go figure. Below are a few of my spring favorites that may not be in bloom by tomorrow if it snows as much as they're predicting. I actually cut the daffodils and put them in a vase. My lilacs are just about to bloom, too, so I hope they survive (they're my all-time favorites).

Tom's cousin just deposited this lathe on our doorstep a couple days ago. Tom is kind of having fun with it, but doesn't really have any projects for it. He's trying to decide if he's going to keep it or give it to a certain wood sculptor we know, as long as he agrees to turn out little things for us if we need them (drawers pulls and the like).

I just found out that my Italian "brother" reads this blog occasionally, which is exciting to me. I'm being read overseas!!

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night . . .

I love to get mail. It's been pissing me off for months now that our mail doesn't seem to arrive before 4 or 5:00 — I really think it should be here when I get home from work. I was really upset when I heard that not only is the price of first-class postage going up again in May, but they're seriously considering dropping home delivery one or two days a week. Today, though, grim reality smacked me upside the head. What you see in the photo below is the sum total of my mail today.

It's been like that all week. The only non-advertising mail I've received this week is my car insurance bill (don't know why they haven't yet gone online), and my receipt for paying my property tax (which I paid online — why they had to mail my receipt is anyone's guess). So, maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to cut back on home delivery. Consider that every single household in America receives at least this much junk mail EVERY DAY! Does anybody actually look at these ads? Does anybody really like getting them? I'm guessing that that most people just do what I do, which is to fan through it to see if there are any real envelopes, and then throw the rest away. How many trees gave up their lives for this? It's not even good for starting fires because most of it is glossy (and bad for recycling for the same reason).

I work for a state agency that mails a LOT of stuff, and postage is our single biggest expense every year. We've cut our mailings by two-thirds or so by putting things on the Internet, but this is Nebraska and there are still an alarming number of people who don't have and/or want Internet; and the cost of postage keeps going up. Plus, how do we know who they are, and most of our mailings are required by law.

My daughter used to work at a cool card shop (Avant Card), and I would keep a store of funky cards around and made a point to mail birthday, anniversary, etc. cards to people just for fun (and admittedly to amaze them that I remembered these occasions).

Anyway, maybe the U.S. Postal Service really is going the way of the dinosaur. And ecologically, it's probably a good thing.