Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been over a week since we've managed to make it out on to the lake. Between jobs, meetings, and weather, we haven't been able to pull it off. Even today is iffy due to the high winds that started late yesterday. We do have plans to make it out on the lake tomorrow, the one day that Deb, BeezleBub and I all have a day off. (Yeah, I'm on my summer work schedule, with every Monday off between now and September.)

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Fellow New Hampshire blogger Bruce of No Looking Backwards is already preparing for the upcoming heating season, having procured a woodstove insert for his home. Yours truly commented, giving him a little advice about what needs to be done before he starts using it to heat his home.

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Speaking of woodstoves, we start prepping the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove next month, with a visit by the chimney sweep and the replacement of the gasket on the stove door.

We begin hauling firewood from the WP In-Laws in September...all seven cords of it. We'll make two trips in the fall, not wishing to repeat the experience we had last March.

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Watching this morning's edition of Good Morning America I was surprised to see a report about how the so-called recession is more in the minds of people rather than a fact. Another surprise: they placed a lot of the blame on the media for making a weakened economy even worse by stoking consumers' fears about a recession, making many people dial back their spending. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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At least US exports have reached record levels.

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Will the trend towards four day school weeks/work weeks continue as energy prices continue their climb? I dare say it will. There's a lot of money to be saved by reducing the number of days kids must be bussed to and from school or workers must commute to and from their jobs. With schools, it also reduces the number of days the thermostats must be turned up during the heating season.

As I've mentioned before, my employer is considering doing something along these lines, at least as far as reducing the number of commuting days. Unfortunately sales and technical support require 5 days per week coverage, though there may be ways of working around that with call forwarding and remote access to the corporate network.

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It looks like Paul Campos has got it all figured out: The Elitists will fix everything.

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The shockwaves from the Supreme Court's Heller decision still reverberate among the anti-gun MSM and politicians. Some still haven't quite clued in that legally owned guns aren't the problem and never have been. Others aren't willing to believe the Framers of the Constitution meant exactly what they wrote or that the Bill of Rights didn't grant rights to the people, but enumerated them as a natural rights that cannot be infringed. John Stossel tries to set them right.

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Here's yet another example of politically correct idiocy.

At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork.

Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, "Excuse me!" That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a "white hole."

Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy," in the words of the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog.

You have got to be kidding me! Making reference to an astronomic phenomenon is a “racially insensitive analogy”? Somebody needs to be taken out behind the woodshed to have this politically correct BS beaten out of them. This is the most asinine thing I've ever heard.

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Coyote has some interesting links, thoughts, and comments about taxes and their effect on the economy. One commenter proves he didn't pay attention during his Econ 101 classes, assuming he even took an economy course.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer vacation is in full swing, gas prices are still going up, and where I don't have to get up Monday morning!