"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.

I clicked a link to read a news article this morning, and the page that came up had a few advertisements, including this one.

First of all -- and this is WAY overdue -- a sincere public thanks for everyone who called, emailed, or told one of us in passing some sort of congratulations in the past few weeks. I won't get too sentimental, but we have great friends, none of whom has ever received a Christmas card from us.

A description of my post.

A bunch of work correspondence getting made fun of.