Oh, those summers of years past. They were golden hazy days of pure freedom and indulgence. Escapes, adventures, and fun of all sorts, mainly of the sort of fun I would deny in public, if you know what I mean. Wow, it was really great. I wouldn't say I didn't have a care in the world those days, because I had various summer jobs since I turned 14, but still... Until I entered the full-time workforce, my summers were amazing. Later in life, my summers morphed into something different but, overall, summers still had a more laid back character than the rest of the year. This past summer of 2011, though, was completely MIA. Missing in action. I have no clue what happened to it or how...
[More...]

Meanwhile, time moves on and the Sweet Sweetheart is about to turn nine. She's extremely excited about her birthday and, actually, it's a little misleading to call it a birthDAY celebration. You see, in our family, the birthday process can span over a period of, literally, months. There are discussions, plans made, early gift acquisitions, online gift research, haggling over gifts, creating gift "wish-lists," ordering the gifts, waiting for the arrival of the gifts, wrapping the gifts, preparing the kitchen with posters, decorations and, of course, the presentation of the gifts. Then, there's at least one more after-birthday celebration, for some unexpected reason, not to mention that we have birthday weekends or birthday weeks, not just birthday days like normal people have. Ah... These...
[More...]

Well, I guess that I should start off by saying that I never personally met or spent time with Bob Dylan. But that didn't stop me from spending what seemed like a million hours wearing headphones listening intently to his words and songs as if they held all the secrets of the cosmos. All I needed to do to gain this miraculous knowledge was to decipher the deeper meaning of Bob Dylan's lyrics. "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief. "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth." "No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke. "There are many...
[More...]