OK so my puppy Buddy seemed like he was finally gonna start being good. He's super friendly, great with the kids, and one of these days he's gonna be a good dog. But night before last he peed on the floor at night and then last night he pooped three SEPARATE piles in my living room, peed on the floor AGAIN, and tore up one of my friends' books. I wouldn't be quite so mad, but I put the dogs out right before I went to bed and I'd picked up everything on the floor. Well, everything that wasn't papers or belonged to the kids (is that wrong? I tell them to pick their stuff up ALL the time!) He knocked the book off the table and chewed it up. Destroyed it! And of course my friend, when I told her, just said not to worry about it. Hello, hasn't she read the name of my blog? So I'm pretty sure there's a gift card in her future!
Not much of a commercial watcher (thank you Dish Network DVR!) but I keep seeing commercials for a new daytime show on CBS called The Talk. Sharon Osborne, Holly Robinson-Peete, Leah Remimi, a couple of other women I can't remember. Hmmm, the concept sounds familiar...oh yeah, The View! Except I think maybe the Talk girls are nicer than the View girls. I used to watch The View when I was a stay-at-home mom with NumberOneSon back in the late 90s. Now I pick up periodic snip-its on The Soup or when someone tweets about some asinine thing Joy Behar says. I'm glad Elisabeth Hasselbeck is on there to be a conservative voice of reason. However, that doesn't mean I'm gonna watch The View. I may set the DVR to pick up an episode or two of The Talk just out of curiosity.
Today will be a quiet day at home I think. Poor BabyBoy is sick and it's rainy and cold so I don't think it's gonna be a family fun day. Sadness! I do have some Pillsbury cookie dough in the fridge...maybe we'll make some cookies later. Cookies and hot chocolate, family movie maybe...that could be a family fun day! May even bust out the Connect Four!
I have a short list of errands to run and I gotta vote today! Still trying to decide whether to vote Libertarian or Constitution party for Senate...I sure as hell ain't voting for Carnahan or Blunt! I am no longer choosing between the lesser of two evils. And if someone wants to say I'm throwing my vote away or taking votes away from the "conservative," well, they can think whatever they want. Bill Clinton is more conservative than Roy Blunt! OK not really, but I'm so sick of politicians wearing the "conservative" hat and then voting to expand entitlements, increase regulation, and raise taxes. How much money can they really throw at the unemployment problem? Obviously what they've been doing has not been working. Unemployment is still rising and the only reason "statistics" show it isn't is because some people have fallen off the rolls or taken part-time work or a huge cut in pay just to get back to work. Or like me, they were fired and their unemployment was contested by the employer (for breaking a policy that wasn't in existence until after I was fired) therefore I'm not on unemployment and hence not unemployed. Or my friends who are self employed in construction who don't have any projects lined up. Or my friends who've finished school but don't have a job yet. The federal government would have been better off giving all the bailout money to THE PEOPLE so they would spend it. Think of all the extra money you'd have if they paid $100,000 of your mortgage and you could refinance the rest and lower your mortgage payment. What would you do with that extra money? You could put part of it in a retirement account, eat out a couple more times a week, take a vacation, pay down your credit cards. The possibilities are endless. THAT would stimulate the economy much better than funding government pork projects. Instead, they gave banks money to pay off bad debt assuming the banks would then turn around and lend money. Nope, they've sat on the money. The banks are continuing to foreclose on houses rather than working with people to keep them in their homes. Home ownership is continuing to drop. And how did all this get started? Government regulation forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. Home ownership is not for everyone. And when you walk into the bank and they look at your finances and tell you you can afford a lot more of a mortgage payment than you actually can, it will not take that many months before you are struggling. I know that from experience. When we bought our first house the lady at the bank told us we could afford a huge payment! We ended up buying a house that didn't have quite so high a payment, but it was still about 50% more than our rent was. And for the first few months we struggled until I graduated from nursing school and we added my second income. I can only imagine how bad it would have been if we'd listened to the bank lady. And don't even get me started on the "reinvestment" money the feds gave to states. On my way back from visiting DH in August, every rest area on I-55 in Mississippi was closed for remodeling. Every one of them had a sign singing the praises of the "reinvestment" act. Really? Remodeling rest areas? Who even uses rest areas anymore? DH travels a lot for work. He always stops at gas stations and restaurants. Why would I pay $2 for a can of Coke out of a machine and have to struggle to reach through the bars to keep people from breaking into it or stealing it when I can stop at a Love's Travel Center and buy a 32 oz Diet Dr Pepper in a cup with ice for a buck and pee in a bathroom that gets cleaned a couple of times a day instead of once a week? Mississippi continually competes with Arkansas and Louisiana for the number 48-50 spots on the best education systems in the US. Wouldn't that money be better spent on remodeling schools or hiring more teachers or paying teachers more?
I'm probably on my soapbox today because I started the day listening to Neal Boortz (streaming on the Internet since they play him on tape delay here in Podunk) and today is election day. So get out and vote...but only if you take the time to research the issues and candidates. If you're just voting because someone told you to or because you like the way someone looks or what they've promised to do (they usually don't keep their promises, by the way), don't bother.
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