Saturday

No good excuse for the last couple of days. Just a continuation of the irregularities of the season.

We had the biggest snow of the season yesterday. I'm guessing that the official total was in the 6-8" range. I had to use my snow blower to make my driveway passable. Looks like most of it will be staying with us for a while as the forecast has cool temperatures through most of next week.

About the only news in Iowa these days is politics. It would be hard to describe that topic as interesting. At this point, it's the equivalent of a five day weekend in Vegas: no ground has not been covered, and everybody's tired of everybody.

The college football bowl season is in full swing. Rah-rah for the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Charlotte! Wish I were there. Not! The college presidents must be looking at themselves in trick mirrors to defend a position that a playoff system wouldn't work because of academic integrity. The rationale behind everything is spelled M-O-N-E-Y. If they have a Golden Goose in the NCAA b-ball tourney, why wouldn't they work to make a clone in a f-ball playoff? Some argue that the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade are the primary impediments to making a move to a new system.

I am so disinterested in the bowl season that I haven't even gone to Wikipedia to investigate the facts. And I go to Wikipedia to look up information on some of the most obscure topics on earth.

The latest news on my laptop is that the mystery of the out-of-service cordless-mouse has been solved. Our IT guy was through the office this week and, just as he was leaving, I remembered to ask him about my mouse problem. His first question was, "Did you try the reset button?" Since I didn't even know that the thing had a reset button, it was an easy answer. And I had actually looked for something like a switch on the underside of the thing, but hadn't detected anything. Sure enough. There's a little recessed dot, the size of a ballpoint pen point on the bottom. Hit that with a pen point, and waallah! A functioning mouse. I am an idiot.

This is the weekend of the annual office clean-out. Files that haven't moved in months go to the cabinets. Unread "Read" piles go to the recycling bin. Miscellaneous "junk" goes to the dumpster. This is just like any other New Year's Resolution program, whether it be for weight, personal enrichment, or fitness. I hope I do better than my "No Pile Left Behind" program of last year.

There was a story in the local paper this morning about the Inventory Reduction Sale going on with the big NASCAR teams. The older style of cars will not be used in 2008 as The Car of Tomorrow (COT) will be the only car run in the new season. The big teams have dozens of the older cars that have essentially become obsolete. $50K (or less) can get you a real hotrod. I told my Pal Roy that we ought to keep our eyes open for the right deal.

I was going to do a top ten list of New Year's Eve stories, but with no serious additions to the list since my 25th birthday, it's a fruitless effort. This year will be more of the same.

Included in my traditional gifts to the girls were several of the current weekly Hollywood trash magazines. In the course of my afternoon ennui on Christmas Day, I paged through two or three of them and was amazed at how few names and pictures of the "stars" that I recognized. There are now probably at least two generations of starlets and hunks to which I am totally oblivious. (The girls' near-naked pictures not with-standing.) When you watch mostly sports shows on the tube, don't go to movies, don't have an ear for anything approaching modern music, and stay close to ESPN and MarketWatch on the Internet, you don't keep much contact with the current "in" set.

So tomorrow will be a SB's morning. See you then.

Have a great weekend.

BCOT