I'm just gonna say it again for this year: I'm not a big fan of 4th of July. It's too hot for a holiday where the main event is outside. And what's so great about fireworks anyway? The lights are okay, but they are accompanied by the most ungodly racket. Who needs that? (and happy 85th birthday to me. I'll go trim my nose hair now.)

My sister's kid and my kid are about the same age, but hers is a hoss, and mine is a pipsqueak. So earlier this week, I opened a box of no-longer-fitting clothes that she sent me. On top of the clothes, she had this stuffed rabbit. I immediately exclaimed, "Where the hell did Softy come from?"

Last week, I needed to get my pocket knife sharpened. It's serrated, so I didn't have anything that would get it sharp myself. It just happens that there are two and only two hardware stores in town that I know will bother with a serrated blade. One is close to my house, but it burned down last year and hasn't reopened. So I made the longer drive to Highland Ace Hardware.

Having spent close to a month in Russia, mostly without TV and almost entirely without newspapers, magazines, or internet, I got a lot of book reading done. Here are my thoughts.

"For God's sake, get rid of the plug!" That was pretty much the first thing that a friend of mine said when I picked up the ringing phone yesterday evening.

One time back in February or March, I pulled the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, and its plug looked like this:

Mrs. theskinnyonbenny often complains that we don't get invited anywhere. This isn't true, but it's a complaint that she likes to fall back on when we hit a Friday or Saturday night with nothing to do. The weekend before we left for Russia (two weekends ago, now) was especially busy. Not with getting ready to travel, but with stuff that we were invited to do.

When we were at the French Quarter Festival a few weekends ago, we went into a couple of those galleries on Royal St. In one, we happened to meet an artist who had a lot of cool little paintings of a cartoonish dark blue cat. There were some pictures of the little cat (Pete, his name turns out to be) doing cat-like things, but there were also some of the cat in places of local interest. For example, there's one of the cat sitting on the statue in Jackson Square.

Last weekend, I was driving home from Jazz Fest, and I turned the radio to the Sirius 80s channel. They had a show of 80s pop music where Martha Quinn would pop in every couple of songs and give us quirky little anecdotes.

It seems a little like we had a three day weekend. Not bad. What stretched the weekend out was a busy Friday night, that made it seem like two nights. I got home around 6:00, which is super-late for a Friday, but then we grilled steaks with a few others. That seemed like the Friday night activity.

A description of my post.

Just so you know, there's going to be some vulgar language in this post. There's not a lot, but there's one really bad word used in a really offensive way. If you're offended by such things, move along now.