As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been out and about a ton lately. I spent the week of December 4 away from the office, on a rather dull work trip. It was four straight days of meetings, and through almost all of it, I was talking or people were paying attention to me. (That might seem natural to you if you don't do a lot of meetings in corporate America. In reality, most meetings require you to only pay about 35-40 percent of your attention.)

This is just a note to test whether the "Submit Post" button on my site still works.

A description of my post.

One day, right before Thanksgiving, we rode down to Best Buy during lunch. He put in an order for something boring, and while we were waiting for the paperwork to be completed, he started to talk to the sales girl. Somehow, it came up that he had some sort of surgery scheduled for his eyeballs. I would screw up the specifics, but it wasn't an elective, corrective type of thing that people have become familiar and comfortable about.

Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I went camping with the Sharples a couple of weekends ago. We pitched our tents, walked the dogs, built a fire, had some chow, and drank whiskey.

As you probably know, I have a beagle (Lily) and a basset hound (Blossom). What you might not know is that they -- especially the beagle -- have hundreds of years of breeding telling them that they want to take off. They sit in the yard and ache at the thought of all of the squirrels and cats in the neighborhood that they can chase noisily in lieu of deer and rabbits.

I feel like I'm walking around with a shard of glass in the bottom of my right foot. Each of the last two nights, I've dug around as much as I could with every needle or knife in my house, but I can't find any glass or a splinter. Now, it might be that every step hurts because of all of the cutting that I did, or there might still be a shard of glass. I can't tell.

This post is an unorganized mess of links, graphics, and junk. Hopefully, the busy screen will distract you from the fact that I don't have anything to say.

Last weekend, we got to New Orleans on Saturday afternoon. Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I sat in a bar talking to the tourists from Baltimore and keeping an eye on the football games while we waited for our friends to arrive. We walked around the French Quarter in the evening, and once it was dark, went on one of those haunted house walking tours.

On Sunday, we went to the Voodoo Fest (or, officially, I think it's the "Voodoo Music Experience") in city park. I may tell you what I thought about the festival itself later in the week, but more importantly, I need to tell you about where we went afterwards.

On my quest to listen to all of my music alphabetically, I'm up to the songs that start with "Heart." You might not be surprised to hear that there's a lot of country music in this section. Lots of country music writers out there with heartache. So how do I make sure that I listen to all of the songs?

This week, I did my first stint as a Junior Achievement volunteer. I was assigned a class of 7th graders at a school right down the street from my house. All of the junior high stereotypes were in full play: the boys who were too cool to participate, the class clowns, the smart pretty girl who kissed my butt. From what I saw, very little has changed in the junior high classroom in the last 20 years.