I paid $1.94 a gallon for gas this week. Since I spent a few earlier posts complaining about the high prices of fuel, it’s only fair to report this latest, unexpected development. Never did I even dream that we’d be able to buy gas for under $2 a gallon again. Can it last? Will it go lower? My guess would be that the answer is no for both of those questions. But in the meantime, people are smiling at the pumps again.
Well, it’s been a while, so I’ll offer an apology and an excuse. The apology is for allowing more than two weeks to slip by without a new blog. The excuse is that I was out of the country for 10 days (as if they don’t have internet access there). Anyway, with your permission, I’ll comment on some things that happened over the past 19 days.
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot to say today, but since I’ll be away for the next week and a half, it seemed like I should put something out here for anyone that might happen to read it. So I’ll provide a potpourri for you, a few quick thoughts that may have no connection to each other at all.
Today is one of those days when we have what the locals like to call “Chamber of Commerce weather.” The temperatures are comfortable, the humidity is down, the sun is shining … if you came to visit Jacksonville today, you’d want to stay. In fact, when I came to Jacksonville for the first time, for an APPX conference nine years ago this month, this was exactly how the weather was. It helped to make the ensuing job offer that much easier to accept, compared to facing the beginning of another long, cold, snowy winter in Syracuse.
I admit it … I watched the presidential debate on Tuesday night. And I feel somewhat dirty about it. I probably didn’t scream at the TV as much as I did during last Sunday’s football game, but the frustration and the rant were similar: “Can’t anyone tackle that guy?” “Can’t anyone tackle that subject?”
Time and money. Two things that we would probably all agree we don’t have enough of, right? But what is the relationship between the two? Can we just say, “Time is money,” and leave it at that? No, that wouldn’t make for much of a blog. Pink Floyd had a song called Time and another called Money, the latter being mostly in 7/4 time, which is a very unusual time signature, and I’m sure they made a lot of money on both. But I’d like to examine both, and perhaps question the logic behind some very basic assumptions. After all, it’s never satisfactory to leave well enough alone, is it?
The end of summer isn’t as dramatic a threshhold in Florida as it is up north. For one thing, schools here re-open in mid-August, making Labor Day a lot less significant as a calendar landmark. For another, the weather gets better after the autumnal equinox, as we start having those “Chamber of Commerce Days” on a regular basis. But I did see one sign of summer last week, which may be disappearing everywhere, and it brought back some childhood memories. What I saw was an ice cream truck.
These are rough times for the economy. Everyone realizes that, except perhaps for John McCain … and a couple of local businesses that incredibly decided they didn’t want my money last week. Let me tell you about them. But first, a little background.
Can you read the writing on the wall? What do you think it might mene?
No, that’s not a misspelling. In fact, the last word of the second sentence is directly related to the first sentence. When you’re a crossword puzzle fan, like Gary and I are, you learn many rarely-used words that puzzle constructors rely on to complete their grids. But when we came across mene last week, neither one of us had heard of it before. And, between us, I’m sure we’ve done thousands of puzzles. So, of course, we had to find out what this new word, um, means.
When our family first made the decision to move to Florida, almost nine years ago, we were warned that we should expect a steady stream of visitors from the north, especially in the winter months. Well, those potential visitors haven’t exactly overwhelmed us, but this summer, we’ve been impacted by and preparing for visits by some others: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Josephine …