Here we are again, Hump Day, the middle of the week, Wednesday. I’m sitting here in front of this writing implement of mine wondering what is shaking me up today. Believe it or not, having Gator Wife around all the time while she’s on a mini-vacation is taking up all my “thinking” time. So I don’t spend a couple hours each day getting worked up over things happening in my world. Not much to say about baseball last night; only one team showed up.
I’ve always liked to think I did my best thinking between three and five A.M., but since last Friday, my wife has kept me so busy I’m still sleeping during those hours trying to keep rested. Other times that various things have jumped into my head are during the hours she’s at work, but that’s not happening until Friday. She’s going back to her part time job Friday. I have no idea why she didn’t take all three days off. When I ask her, the only response I get is, “I don’t know. I just didn’t.”
We had nothing special planned for this week. The company for which she works has this little rule, especially for part timers: Take it during the calendar year or lose it. So she scheduled some of her PTO (Personal Time Off) for this week. She has more coming up later this year. In years past, she’s taken all her time during July when we have taken a two to three week vacation somewhere. Economics kept us home this year. She’s now working on ways to use up that time.
Three. That’s a magic number. It seems like this election season started three years ago. And now we’re down to the last three weeks. Well, three weeks less a day. You’ve seen here my ranting on negative campaign ads, which I swear is 80 percent of them, but I either read or heard somewhere that positive ads don’t get results and that it’s the negative ones that bring victory. Come to think of it, I think it was the Ken half of the Ken and Mike team on the WGAN morning show yesterday who made that comment.
I have no idea what the basis of his statement is, but the more I think of it the more I think he may be on to something. Of course there really aren’t any negative ads for one party. Members of the party or supporters of the candidate using ads applaud their truth about the other side. The “other side” then presents its version of the “truth.” But I’m sick of them anyway. And having already cast my vote, I hate all political advertising even more.
Alaska Governor and Republican vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will spend a brief moment in Maine tomorrow. She’s going to be a “ticket only” event in Bangor. I don’t know if there are any of the free tickets left, but they were available in most major Republican campaign headquarters around the state. I got an e-mail yesterday saying that a bus would be leaving Portland, round trip only $22, in time to get people from around here to the mid-morning event. I hope it’s full, but I won’t be making the trip.
I had said in a post several weeks ago that it didn’t matter to me which party was involved, if a Presidential candidate should come to Portland, I’d love to be in the viewing area. We don’t get many opportunities to see the most powerful person in the world. Being a Republican, I’d especially like to see Sarah Palin, but she’s not coming to Portland.
I complained one day last week about the number of phone calls I had been getting. I said the next day that I had voted and the calls could end. To my surprise, they did. Until yesterday when one came in. I told the caller I had already voted and she thanked me and hung up. On the other hand, I got a call from Time Warner Cable with a survey about a service call I had made last week. One of the questions involved how easy it was to navigate the automatic answering system. I gave it a zero on a scale of one to ten.
The poor questioner, a non-local person incidentally, was caught off guard and wanted an explanation. I told him I absolutely hated automated answering machines that routed calls. I should mention I had to work with two numbers on the TW call I made. Press 1 for business service or press 2 for home service. I believe that if my call is “important to “ them, they’ll have a real person answering my call on the opening ring. Besides, think of all the employment doing away with automated call answering systems could create.
How did we ever get along “back in the day?”
GiM
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