When Chuck Norris does pushups the earth goes down.

The second Woot shirt arrived today. Here's the design:
I like it!

Our neighbor two doors down is a widower named Lloyd. Or Floyd. I can never remember which. Which got me to thinking today about the similarity between those two names, part of the reason I can never remember which one is his. There's just one consonant's difference, at least as far as sound is concerned. You drop one of the L's and add an F.
So, as I was driving into town I tried to think of other names like that - names that sound the same except for the addition of a consonant at the front. My ADD got the best of me, so I only spent a couple of blocks working on it, but I came up with one other name. Interestingly, it also involves the dropping of one in a pair of consonants in addition to sticking a consonant on the front.
Can you tell me that second name? Can you come up with others?

Beautiful day today. Temps in the high 80's, a slight breeze. I should have gone for a bike ride but instead I went and played the Par 3 course near our house. Did OK on the front and pretty well on the back. I walk and carry my clubs so it did count for some exercise.

Tomorrow I'm doing drywall repair at the house where the water heater burst. I went in this morning to borrow Josh's truck and get the drywall over there, so tomorrow I can get right to work first thing.

Of course tonight's news is all about the election. It looks like a big night for the Republicans, but we'll have to wait and see if it makes any real difference in the way the govt. does its business.

One of the things the pundits seem to be talking about is why things have swung so far to the right in just two years. They're saying it's all about the economy and the unemployment problem in the country. I guess they know what they're talking about; they're on TV and I'm in my living room. But at least for me it's not about unemployment and the economy.

The economy went in the tank because of greed, primarily in the housing market. Banks, local governments, home buyers...they all got drunk on the promise of quick and easy money. As a result they all did things that were stupid, illegal and in some cases immoral. When that housing bubble burst, as it was sure to do, the outcome was predictable and unavoidable. But the U.S. economy will recover. It may never be the same (perhaps that's a good thing, eh?) but we've survived bubbles before, learned a narrow lesson, and lived to make the same mistakes again in a decade or two, just in another segment of the economy.

For me it's about government overreach. It's about the federal govt. assuming a role it should not, and imposing its will on the people. The federal govt. presumed to take over companies, interfere with free market dynamics and set up systems that demand every citizen's participation. In the last two years it seems, IMHO, the federal government has become ravenous in its appetite to swallow up way too many areas of the people's lives. The President and his party seem to have a goal and a strategy to increase federal power, and that's what has my undies in a knot.