Not that bad...

Sort of stormy. It‘s not raining at this moment and it’s still warm, but I did wander outside and the clouds and winds are still present and threatening. The rains did come yesterday afternoon while I was working in the garden. I ignored them at first as it was still warm and the drops were few and far between. Finally, I could no longer ignore the rain and called it quits, with my chores still not complete.

Besides rototilling, I was thinning the grapes and the apples. I can’t let them all develop as there are far too many of them. It’s the same with the peaches and the apricots. I’ve already had a couple of small branches collapse on the apricot trees because of the growing weight of the fruit.

Apropos of nothing at all…It was Monday night and we were getting into the car to go out to dinner with friends, a Monday night routine for us, and it suddenly struck me; I like being retired! If I had still been working for PCI on that Monday, I would have been getting into my rental car (mid sized) in some far away city and going out for a lonely (medium priced) dinner and then returning to a lonely (mid range) motel room.

I rarely think about my last job anymore. But, quite often I do think about my earlier career as a drywall carpenter/steel framer. Now that was fun! Older memories are far more selective and so I have forgotten a lot of the pain, mental and physical, that went along with that part of my career.

Again; changing subjects…I read that Dell will be offering computers with Ubuntu pre-installed. Now that ought to shake up Microsoft. But will it? They are such a large corporation now; they are probably in a state of perpetual denial. Sort of like General Motors.

And this; a link to a page detailing the cost of the war for each state. California’s cost is…

• Number of Service-Members Killed in Iraq: 352
• Number of Service-Members Wounded in Iraq: 2,632
• Cost of War to the People of California: $47.9 billion