Click images for desktop size: "DNA" by Krabban Still sick. The infection is going down well enough to avoid a trip to the doctors. Pricey things: doctors. Pricey things: Meds.
My friend doesn't know how to tell a joke . . .
We we're talking about how the giant dog sometimes feels lost. My puppy is my dog and the gentle dog is my friend's. Both dogs are comfortable in the relationship, comfortable enough to share time with each of us.
The giant dog is insecure. He's special to us but that's not enough for him. Like an acne scarred teen he wants to be the most special in the world to someone. He searches and interferes and often goes for bad attention if for any scant second he feels he's been forgotten.
He's silly enough and goofy enough not to become morbid about it. He also loves the other two and would be lost without them.
So we were talking about the giant dog's desperate need for a codependent relationship. My friend thought it was funny to say that we would have to find a home for the giant dog where he could be lavished with the attention he craves.
I didn't realize she was joking and said something about he'd have to go with me if that time ever came. The giant dog looks to me as pack leader. He sometimes feels the instinctive need to challenge me and is relieved when he loses. (He has issues with his instincts to be in charge and his natural goofy disposition and his problem with being large enough to reach any shelf in any house.)
This prompted my friend to joke that I was in love with the giant dog. Which is probably true enough in its way. She thought the joke funny enough to email my puppy's aunt. She left out the background and simply wrote that we had to find a new home for the giant dog . . . My puppy's aunt, being a kind and sweet pro-active sort, wrote back immediately about her search for a new home for the giant dog!
And then I remembered that all the way through high school and college at least 80% of the fist fights and 70% of the :feuds" all started because of a joke that someone didn't get.
Here I'm sure my friend didn't understand that other people might not realize that the giant dog could never live without us or we without him.
My friend doesn't know how to tell a joke . . .
This is day four of the great Sears ransom story . . . They didn't show up yesterday. I got a call about mid-day telling me that it would have to be rescheduled till today.
I pointed the obvious things out. I hate having to core dump on poor employees who empathize but are powerless.
The saga continues. What makes it bearable is that the new washer and dryer work well . . . so far.
We're getting Vonage here. Cutting monthly expenses to the bone while, hopefully, not noticing much of a change to our Spartan lifestyle.

Click images for desktop size: "1960 Corvette" We got a cool deal on the Vonage. I resent that they still use hard MAC coded phone modems and the world's cruddiest routers, but the deal had the router for only 9 bucks, one month free and no activation fee.
I was pretty happy with Vonage before. Happy is the wrong word. It worked okay and was only occasionally annoying and sporadically infuriating. I guess that counts as happy in the world of telecommunications. It is cheap.
To celebrate the savings we spent the money on a new wireless router. It wouldn't have started to cover the price of doctors and penicillin (what a country . . .) My old linksys was giving me fits. I could keep it going with so alchemy and constant reflashing. It was serviceable enough. Got a linksys draft-N router. We don't have any draft-N wifi cards in any of the computers (maybe my friends work laptop?) so don't notice any speed bumps. Haven't tried to see if there's any improvement in distance reception. It hasn't crashed yet.
I was amazed with myself. I'd been nursing the old router along for so long that it took me less than 5 minutes to get the new one up and in place with the same WEP security and my own personal configuration quirks. In the Windows world that makes me an expert I guess . . . doing something meaningless so many times that you can cope with the inane requirements . . .
I'm glad its working well. I would have missed a lot of laughs without the internet. The colossal story about Bush suddenly becoming a hard core socialist. How uncanny. The government is taking over a company and "loaning" them $85 BILLION dollars! I'd guess that's as large as the gross national product of 2/3rds of the world's nations.
So much for the lie about deregulating banks and insurance companies . . . I like that they are charging AIG interest on the 85 billion. Calculating this in my head i think that's about 1 and 1/2 billion a month in SIMPLE interest. What bank charges simple interest? I haven't read any other terms of the loan, just Bush being hard core about charging them interest.
I do wonder where we're getting the money to loan them. And, of course, how the heck we can ever expect a company that is so mismanaged will ever be able to come up with an extra 1.5 billion a month to pay the interest.
I'm a bit stunned that the balm that Bush puts on this outrageous "loan" is that AIG was simply going to default on all those little annuities and money market accounts that little people had rested their entire life's futures to. Why are there never any jail sentences for bankers stealing from the people?

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown Its stuff like this that made Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde national heroes. They robbed banks. Banks have always been the enemies of the people. Its almost a natural thing. Banks hate people. Its fair to hate them back.
I still thank that bankers should face jail sentences when behaving this badly.
It also amusing that McCain and his cronies have spent their careers dismantling the protections that Franklin Roosevelt (in retrospect he may have been our greatest president) slaved so hard to build to protect us from predatory banks. And now they claim to have a solution to fix what they broke. Sadly, none of the fixes seem to involve admitting that letting banks feast on each other was not the smartest thing going.
I always like it when a guy who inherited a hundred million dollar fortunes pretends to understand my problems . . .
I have to admit though that I am impressed by the fact that no matter how many lies McCain & co. get caught in they just bray the lies louder and watch as their poll numbers shoot up.
Same way that Palin keeps nasally twanging about how she wants a transparent government but then decides that her own legislature should be ignored. The "troopergate" mess reminds me of Spiro Agnew. Nixon was so corrupt and started McCain's lying to procure office mess. Nixon was such a corrupt jerk that people forget that Agnew, his vice president was even more corrupt. He plead nolo contendre to taking bribes when he was Governor of Maryland and was forced out of office. Nixon was able to pardon him to keep him out of prison.
Now, Palin is breaking the law and contradicting herself (lying is an apt word here) about why she fired a good public servant, contradicting herself about her honesty and willingness to cooperate with her own government.
So now the campaign just spouts out more irrational lies but I notice that they keep gaining in the polls.
This stuff would make me ashamed of being American but the fact that the American people appear to demand poverty and a banana style group of despots just makes me laugh. I only weep for the children.