OK, it has been a couple weeks since I have posted. I have been real busy with work and then with the end of my class, the final project, yadda yadda yadda. But now I am back and will start posting once again weekly.

I am sure everyone is thrilled about this.

Some thoughts I have had the past week. One, it is hot. It is too hot for me anymore here. Maybe it is because I now have too much insulation on my body so any heat is saved inside of me. Kind of like my own little “Stephen-Warming” problem that Al Gore seems to be ignoring. I blame Little Debbie. She makes all these wonderful treats that are so good and when you eat one, you can not stop at that, and need to keep eating more and more.

Two, I really feel bad I was unable to take my family on vacation this year. They got to go to Page to visit Emily, but we were going to Portland and I was unable to take them due to changing plans at work. I really like Portland, and I was even going to look at rental homes while we were there. I was very serious about moving there permanently. But I was unable to go. Maybe a little later we can do it.

Three, I am tired of school. Just tired of it. I know I said that once I got my Bachelor’s Degree, I was done. But I was talked into taking a Master program, and got in, so I took it. Thankfully, I will be done by May, but that still seems so far away. Maybe I can teach a few classes after I graduate, but maybe not. I do not know. I am not sure what I will do after this. But it has to count for something, right?

Fourth, I am either a very popular guy on the web, or I am getting a ton of spam. And I think it has to be the latter, as all the “Greeting Cards” I get and “offers” seem to always come from me. I am just so thoughtful of myself, to send myself e-cards and acai offers all the time. I really think that when I get these, I ought to open every link they send. Or what I should do, is see if I can’t write a program thgat does a route trace on the email path, and then send a shutdown command to the sending server. I am sure I would get into plenty of trouble for that, but dang it all, I do not need 300 emails a day telling me that a greeting card exists for me, or that “account” I have with some bank I have never banked with needs my info again.

Finally, I like listening to music. It is so calming at times, and I listen to it while I do my work, so it helps me to keep focused and helps my thought process. I am sure that it also affects my volume when I speak, or when I am thinking out loud, but since school starts on Monday for my kids, I will be all alone during the day once again.

Today is the 4th of July. A day we celebrate the founding of our country. I think back to the funny Simpsons line where Homer goes into a Kwik-E-Mart and asks to buy some illegal fireworks. After the back and forth, he is finally led into the back room where he purchases this awesome firework, and the Apu-like clerk exclaims
“Celebrate the birth of your country by blowing up a little piece of it”.

How true is that today. This is not going to be one of those rants or “try to be funny tongue in cheek that ends up being more of a foot in mouth”. This is going to be about something that this country, especially its leaders seems to have lost: Common Sense. That is right. It is going to be about Common Sense. One of the things that I think ought to be required reading every year in school from 8th grade thru a Senior in High School is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Everyone should read this every year. It is not long, and it is not hard. Paine provides some really good ideas, ones that basically led to the rest of the colonies realizing that they needed to break free from the Crown. And now we are in a very, eerily similar situation. We are not going against the Crown this time, we are going against the elite. We do not need violence, because the Founders gave us a more powerful tool than any weapon, this Republic.

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