the frig blig

Welcome to my commute. Notice when you can transport hazardous waste on the viaduct, and when you can’t. Do truckers plan their schedules around this? How many other highways have hazardous waste hours? I feel safer already…not.

My neighbor N had a problem with her PC, and when I volunteered to make a house call, she gave me this garnet sweet-potato pie fresh out of the oven. Golly, sometimes it pays to be nice to people! BTW that’s sugar on them there leaves, not ice crystals.

Sunday morning S and I went to market — the Ballard farmers’ market, that is. It couldn’t have been a prettier day, and I took this photo just for the halibut.

I was disappointed to hear that Senator McCain declined to participate in tonight’s scheduled debate since the debates are my favorite part of the campaign. But I figured, maybe the senator feels so guilty about his past role in deregulating the banking and financial industry (which led to the current “crisis”) that he decided helping to fix it was the least he could do. And citizens will have plenty of opportunities to hear his views once he’s elected in November, anyway.

But no — after failing to help congress negotiate a bailout plan, the Senator announced he’ll be flying to the University of Mississippi to debate his opponent after all.

We’ll probably never know the real reason, but I hope it’s not because he’s scared of looking like he’s scared to debate. Contributing to real policy decisions is more important, like he said…regardless of my personal pleasure at seeing the debate take place.

And while we’re on the subject, isn’t it ironic how the Republicans are all of a sudden standing up for the little guys? It’s refreshing, and I hope their words are not forgotten.

I was a late adopter of Vista, so the following tips may be well-known to many. However they’re new to me and I find them useful, so in case someone else is dealing with these issues, then here you go:

HTH; BFN.

Last month Suzan and I drove to Silver Creek Falls State Park, and while hiking part of the northern loop trail looking at all the waterfalls, an archetypical northwest moment occurred: it started raining. I love watching raindrops falling on water, and when I realized I had a camera I captured these 17 seconds.

Citizens are taxpayers — the primary income source of the federal government. Citizens provide free money to bail out big banking companies who do stupid things like lend billions of dollars to people who can’t pay it back. But the banks don’t worry — government will buy up all those bad loans and they can go on with business as usual, and continue paying their smart guys seven-figure salaries. The government may have to cut services to pay for the bailout, but hey, those services are just for people who aren’t smart enough to make seven-figure salaries.

Listen to the investors whine: government is bad when it tells them they can’t do risky things with other people’s money, but government is good when it bails them out of the consequences of those risky activities.

Oh yes, citizens also are useful to send overseas to spill their guts for cheap access to oil.

With the spectacular bankruptcy declaration of Lehman Brothers following on the heels of the feds buyout of Freddy & Fannie, I’m wondering if someone was to perform a detailed comparison of the effects of the subprime mortgage loan fallout vs the effects of 9/11/01, which one affects more lives, jobs and dollars?

I installed Tesuji Made Easy software from Yutopian on Wine running in my Fedora Core 8 laptop. It installed in about ten seconds and runs without a hitch. Then I installed the same software on my Vista machine, and it still hasn’t run…I keep getting errors related to mscomct2.ocx, even after downloading a copy from Microsoft’s website and registering it. It’s so ironic that Windows software runs better on linux rather than Windows! FYI this app is only available in a Windows version, there are no linux or Mac versions … LOL!

DFW erased his own map yesterday. Happily, he used rope and not a microwave. He was 46 years old. The world is a poorer place today.