My wife and I have lived in our present condominium for a little over two years now and we have observed (or not observed) some strange things going on mostly in the last year. The complex is over ten years old and we bought our unit from a young couple who were moving to Shanghai for a few years. We never thought to ask them any questions other than the usual things you want to check on when you are buying a new home.

I want to describe the events but I am not going to posit an explanation as I will leave it up to you, dear reader, to come up with your own rationales for what has happened. I only ask that you not automatically apply Occam's Razor as that would pre-suppose insanity or dementia for my wife and I and we have not exhibited any such symptoms.

The first "happening" occurred to me last year with my wife as a peripheral participant. My wife had fixed a pot of chili which we both love and we were each getting a bowl before heading to our lost to watch TV. We like to sprinkle some mozzarella cheese on our chili to add to the taste so I usually buy some pre-shredded cheese in a plastic bag which can then be zip-locked after it has been opened. We had a new bag. My wife prepared her bowl first and headed to TV land. I then prepared my bowl and took out a handful of the shredded cheese to sprinkle on my chili. I was pretty hungry and knew that I would probably be coming back for a second helping so after zipping the bag up I just left it there on the counter next to the stove.

I watched TV while eating my chili and during a commercial break I headed down to get my second helping. After ladling in about half a bowl, I looked for the bag of shredded cheese. It wasn't there. I figured I had probably absent-mindedly put it back in the refrigerator so I looked there on the shelves. Not there. I looked in the drawer where we usually keep the cheese. Not there. Puzzled, I then thought maybe I had pulled a real stupid move and perhaps dumped the cheese in the garbage bag we hang from a knob on one of the drawers in our island block in the kitchen. Not there. I dumped the contents of the bag on the floor. Not there. A little unsettled, I then asked my wife a dumb question. Even though I knew she had never left the TV room, I called up to her to ask if she had come down and gotten the bag of cheese. Of course, she answered no. She then asked why I was asking. When I told her she immediately scoffed and said I must have made a mistake and advised me to look again. Irritated, I looked again in the same places and called up to her again that I couldn't find it. She knows I am pretty thorough
so she said she would come down to help me find it.

To make a long story short, we took the kitchen apart by not only repeating what I had done but opening all other drawers and cabinets in the kitchen. Feeling silly we then checked all other drawers, shelves and cabinets in the entire condominium. We even checked behind and to the sides of the refrigerator. Nothing.

When I related this story to my friends they scoffed and said that it would turn up and I would know it by the odor and/or collection of ants or roaches. Well it has now been months and the bag has never turned up. We have seen no sign of roaches or ants and we don't have mice. You tell me.

Second story: My wife works at a big upscale department store. A few months ago she won an I-Pod at an employees' raffle during a meeting and brought it home. My wife and I don't really use things like that very much so we put it on a tray on the kitchen counter in a corner to give to one of my daughters when either one came by. We don't have a maid or maid service and at the present time we don't entertain much so we did not have any visitors to our condo during that time frame. One day we noticed that the I-Pod was missing. Gone. I had not touched it and neither had my wife. We looked all over the condo for it but had no success in finding it. You tell me.

Third story: We have a master bathroom and a second bathroom located near another bedroom. My wife keeps all of her "stuff" in the master bathroom and uses all the available drawers. In the mornings when I don't go work out, I will shower in the master bathroom but will then walk to the second bathroom where all my toiletries are located. I brush my teeth and take care of all other necessities there including drying my hair. I use a hair dryer, a red one, given to me by my wife when the hair dryer I had been using quit working. One morning, the hair dryer was gone. I ALWAYS put it in the second drawer because that is where there is an open spot for it and that is where I put my hairbrush. It was not there. My wife was still asleep so I quietly walked back to the master bathroom thinking maybe she had borrowed it to use for her hair if her own hair dryer had possible quit. Not there. I went back and looked in the other drawers and under the sink. Again not there. I didn't want to wake my wife so I ended up using the purple hairdryer located in my workout bag. Later that day, I called and asked my wife about it and she said she had not taken it as her dryer was working fine. She said she would also look for it. When I got home, she said she could not find it. The next morning it was still missing. Resigned to its loss I once again used my gym dryer. The next morning as I was getting ready to go work out I checked and it was still missing. That evening I was brushing my teeth in that bathroom and for the hell of it decided to check again. It was there. I called out to my wife and asked her if she had found it and put it back. She was as surprised as I was and said that she had not done anything. However it was back in its usual place. You tell me.

That's all I am going to write about tonight but there have been some other things which have happened and which have upset my wife and I even more. I have to think about it before I talk about those events.

Stay tuned......

As I write this in the early evening it looks like Obama has soundly won in North Carolina and Hillary has won by a good margin in Indiana. Obama has kept up his run of winning southern states with significant black populations while Hillary is winning states with heavier blue collar demographics. We don't know for sure how much Rush Limbaugh's entreaties to his Dittoheads to cross party lines to vote for Hillary has affected the vote but some polls have shown it has convinced some to do so.

Their incentive of course is to ensure Hillary's victory so that all conservatives and Libertarians and some moderates will come out of the woodwork and unite to vote against Hillary in the general election and enable John Boy to win the Big Salami.

We'll leave Rush's strategy alone for now as I want to comment on the fact that Hillary and her people have finally admitted openly that they will try to exercise the Nuclear Option. By that it is meant that she will fight to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations even she agreed "way back when" with the Democratic National Committee to deny the delegates a place at the Convention because those states held their primaries early in defiance of the party's wishes. Now she wants to change the rules because she needs the votes. Neither she not Obama campaigned in Florida although both were on the ballot while in Michigan only Hillary's name was on the ballot as a result of the DNC's decision.

If the DNC is somehow rigged to re-change the rules and Hillary gets those votes which help to push her over the top then the Democratic Party is toast. If Obama retains the popular vote majority but the Super Delegates overturn that vote, the Democratic Party is toast again. I don't know if Obama can beat McCain for sure in the general election but I believe he has won the right to try. If all the new people Obama has brought into the Party and the black voters believe that he was cheated out of his fair chance by the Dem establishment those voters will desert the Dems in drove. They might not vote for McCain but they will simply sit out the vote and McCain will win and he might even develop some coattails from the situation.

It seems that Hillary doesn't care in her quest for power. It seems that she would be okay if the Dems lost this election because then she would get to try again in four years without having to fight a Democratic sitting President. She has certainly run a scorched-earth campaign to make sure Obama will be considered damaged goods by the electorate even if he should win the Dem nod.

I can watch the ego of someone who could do that but I don't think I will ever truly understand the depth of that ambition. Is it evil which causes actions like hers or is it simply some kind of amorality which overlooks any "petty" obstacles on the way to her goal? I'm sure everyone would have an opinion on that but I haven't made my mind up yet. What I do know is that her actions have made me mad. Mad enough to cause me to cut off my nose to spite my face by voting for McCain??? Not hardly but would I cast a throwaway vote? Actually since I'm in Georgia my Presidential vote is probably moot anyway as Georgia is pretty much in the Republican so I might have a bit of personal leeway. That's kind of discouraging in itself but that's also a topic for another post.

Stay tuned....

I went to see Iron Man this Friday and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm a big comic book action film fan anyway and I had been looking forward to this for quite some time.

Robert Downey, Jr. was very, very good in his role of Tony Stark, multi-billionaire weapons producer, who undergoes a change of thinking about his position in the world after being captured and threatened with death via his own weapons. Downey has a magnetism which projects exceedingly well on the big screen and the dialogue is both smart and witty. Gwyneth Paltrow as his Girl Friday, Pepper Potts (I love that name), carries her part very well and Jeff Bridges is wonderful as the back-stabbing villain with his shaved head and close-cropped beard.

I won't spoil the story for any who intend to see it but it is paced well with some genuinely funny moments to spice up the picture. The action itself is appropriately complex enough for the big screen and even though the ending is a bit trite it still carries it off and there is promise of more to come.

It is worth the money and time to go to the theater to see this. Buy some popcorn and get a cold soda and just enjoy.

I find it very interesting that Obama is still supposedly fighting the stigma of elitism as thrown at him by first Hillary and then McCain. I say supposedly because although I read this from the national media, I have yet to come across anyone I know who is denouncing Obama for it.

Maybe it's because what he said actually made some sense. In hard times a lot of people do turn to religion and to guns both of which can make them feel more comfortable with their lack of control of the world around them.

Also is it just possible that people who make modest amounts of money and are affected much more by variances in the cost of living and the availability of good jobs would have a little bitterness toward those they might feel are responsible for their plight? DOH? What do you think?

Then you have his political opponents who are trying to throw that charge at Obama. First you have Clinton who with her husband has earned around $100 million since Bill left the Oval Office and have left the realm of true empathy with the middle class. Secondly, you have McCain who after divorcing his first wife in a less than moralistic situation married his paramour who happens to be the heiress of a beer brewery fortune. Yeah, he sure has a lot of understanding and empathy for for us peons out here. Give me a break.

Obama and his wife had a $4.5 million one-time blip (from his book and some extra work she did) on their regular combined annual income of $258,000 so while they are not paupers for sure, they are certainly more in tune with people who are trying to work for a living.

Why is America so seemingly hell-bent on not electing someone who has a very high degree of intelligence and self-control and tries to address issues like an adult instead of with sound-bite platitudes? Obama's speech on the racial situation after the Rev. Wright entered the scene was so incredibly smart and reasonable without any pandering that I almost found it impossible to believe that a Presidential candidate in this time had made it. Yet the media wants to continue giving multiple breaks to McCain (whose vitriolic temper tantrums are legendary) because the public would want more to have a beer with him than the other candidates. Or wants to give Hillary some breaks from criticism of her scorched earth policy (if not me then no Democrat is going to win) because she is such a fighter. Crap!

Hillary is going to give us Bush III and it doesn't bother her a bit. She's even pandering to Bill "Dirty Phonecall" O'Reilly and it's just plain sad both for her and the Democratic Party. What is she going to do next? Visit Rush and then Sean???? It wouldn't surprise me.

Stay tuned.....

Have you ever had writer's block? I don't mean the kind of block where you simply cannot think of what to write but the kind where you have too much to write about and you can't make a choice for all the ideas you want to get out of your head.

I feel like I'm in that kind of block right now and have been for the past couple of days. I have so many things I want to say about our politics and our government and all the campaigns leading to this upcoming election that I don't know where to start. I also want to comment on our lifestyles and our religions and our history and our sports and our TV/web entertainment and our movies and our sexual habits and on and on ad infinitum. I want to talk about the simple beauty of a baby sleeping and a puppy playing and a mountain brook bubbling and the sound of the ocean tide coming in and the wonderful aroma of a delicious meal cooking and the first biting sip of an ice cold carbonated soda on a hot day and the warm feeling that a soft kiss from one's mate arouses and the classic feeling one gets from sitting in an Italian restaurant drinking a great burgundy and hearing Frank Sinatra singing in the background. I want to talk about all the smells of a baseball game and the nostalgia it brings to a surge within me. I want to talk about the incredible excitement a great punt return stirs up in a crowd. My God, I want to talk about the fun of tailgating. I want to talk about the memories of past lovers while knowing it does not impugn the relationship I have with my mate. I want to talk about the awe I feel toward my daughters as they continue their growth as human beings and the trouble I have sometimes in letting them make their own mistakes because of the pain I know they will go through. I want to talk about the value of good friends and the comfort one feels when with them.

I want to talk about the how I feel when I see a wonderful work of art and how much of an inspiration it is to see nature both in majestic grandeur such as the Grand Canyon and its simplest manifestation such as a spider spinning a web.

There has to be something else out there....more than just primordial mud. I want to talk about that also.....what permutations of spirituality may be around us.....if I can just get rid of this writer's block maybe I can do all of the above.

Stay tuned.....