I’m just a little bit tired of hearing/reading that the SEC is down this year. Don’t we have three teams in the top 10, including two teams that are clearly better than everyone except each other? Isn’t the current national champion trying to hang on to fourth place in their division? Oregon is certainly in the top tier of teams, and they got clobbered by LSU. Alabama handled Penn State with similar ease. Just because Georgia and Florida are down doesn’t mean that the conference is down.

V goes to one of the only schools around that sends Kindergarteners home with homework. One of the things we do each night is to work through sheets of reading words. One night recently, he was sounding out the word “pit.”

“Puh – Ih – Tuh”

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Wrong number this morning.

“May I speak to Mary?”

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”

“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.” It was 8:00 AM on a weekday.

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Perhaps you heard (or maybe you caught it two posts ago) that we were recently in Russia. You can probably guess what we were doing, but unlike 2007, when we did something similar, we’ve been asked not to publicly share stories, details, or pictures.

Still, our friends know what they know, and it would be nice to be able to post some news when there’s news to post. So Ive added some info pages here, but I put them behind a password wall. If you’re a legit friend, let me know that your interested (text, email, whatever), and I’ll be happy to share.

Hopefully, in a few months everything will be done and will have gone smoothly. If that’s the case, I’ll get rid of the password wall.

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The story of our trip has to revolve around Balls Alley. The spot where we stayed in Nassau had a road that runs from West to East, right along the coast. If you want to get from West to East, you take a parallel road a bit farther inland. Every quarter mile or so, there are roads perpendicular to the coast that let you go between the two directional streets.

Balls Alley looks like it’s one of these pass through roads. But it isn’t. Early in the week, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny, Brent, and I turned down Balls Alley to make the jump. but instead of going through, it got more and more narrow, and finally, it ended in a jumble of shacks and wrecked cars.

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Wrong number this morning.

“May I speak to Mary?”

“I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.”

“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.” It was 8:00 AM on a weekday.

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This afternoon, I stepped outside to make a phone call. Not because I needed to have a private conversation. I was the only one home. I went outside, because AT&T can’t find a way to provide a wireless signal that reaches into my house. I couldn’t live in a more central, busy part of town, by the way.

When I came back in, there was 50 lbs of Basset Hound in my chair. I knew I could walk over, yell at her to get down, and it would take her a full, sad 30 seconds to climb out. Or I could try to drag her dead weight out of the chair by her collar. That wouldn’t have been good for either of us.

Then, I had a stroke of genius. I shut the door and hit the doorbell. She ran to the door barking at the perceived visitor, even though she had just seen me shut the door.

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I don’t know why this is the case, but it’s certainly true.

If you break glass on the floor, you can make many passes over the same area with the broom. You can then get down on hands and knees and eye every square inch of space to make sure you haven’t missed any. You can make another pass with a damp rag to get tiny tiny pieces that you might have missed.

No matter what, after a day or so passes, you will find a big giant piece, at least an inch long, sitting right in the middle of the floor where someone is likely to step.

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I guess I’ll fess up and admit that I’ve been blog cheating on you guys, but so far, I’ve only been doing it a little bit. I’ve got two new blogs up, and neither of them is really meant to shed any insight on my life, or even to entertain. So if you’re a regular reader here, you won’t be interested. But still.

The MyTechPurse blog is a technical commentary inteded for the non-technical reader.

My blog at Concordbusinessserviesllc.com is also technical, but it gets super-geeky.

The idea is that to some extent, the two play off of each other. For example, if the TechPurse blog talks about something that small businesses should have on their website, a reader can pass along a related link to the Concord blog. The Concord blog would go into details about how to implement and have code samples that could be copied and pasted into their developers’ projects.

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