"We're overpaying him, but he's worth it." - Samuel Goldwyn

We left my brother's place in Seattle about 4:30 this morning, stopped south of Olympia for breakfast, north of Vancouver for a nap, and got home about 11:00. The car has been emptied, the barn has been mucked, the goats fed, dinner has been ate, and I'm ... done.

I must have used more emotional energy at dad's service than I realized. I think it went well but I'm not sure how those things are measured. I saw cousins I haven't seen since I was a teenager and had good conversations with a number of people from my way-back. I don't usually enjoy gatherings of larger groups and wasn't looking forward to that reception but I enjoyed it. As an added bonus, a couple of the people I talked with are serious car guys, including one of my nephews.

< brothers & wives with mom

Mom did GREAT both physically and emotionally. She spent the better part of two hours at the reception sitting in a chair while people came to talk to her. Then about 14 of us went to Spiro's for pizza and she did fine there, too. I don't know how she's doing today but she has every right to be exhausted.



I've had a very gratifying and humbling response to the GoFundMe campaign for getting the book published. I'm now just $150 shy of the goal. Yeah, humbling.

I sometimes get the impression the media thinks of Americans in a binary way. They seem to view some (most) Americans as thinking President Trump is an embarrassment, incompetent, bad for the country, devoid of virtue, and very possibly certifiably crazy. The rest of the voters think he's wonderful, has policies that will return America to greatness, and is getting a bad rap by the press.
I think there's a third category. I think a very large portion of the electorate thinks he's an embarrassment, seriously lacking virtue, and likely has some significant personality pathologies. In one of our country's more bizarre twists, however, he may just be doing some things that have needed doing for a long time. While those actions may not return America to greatness they bring some common sense to bear on national politics.
So just maybe the crazy guy is bringing some sanity to the Oval Office.

When we switched from AT&T to Verizon we dropped our monthly bill from $125 for two lines to $90 for two lines with the same data level (2g shared). We also got the cheapest phones they had - free. Ever heard of Asus? Me either, but as soon as I heard "free" I knew they were the phones for us.
Asus is apparently not the most commonly sold phone in America and it's all but impossible to find cases on the shelf of any store so I ordered two on Amazon for $7.95 each.
Yeah, cheap cases for cheap phones.
What seemed odd is that Amazon said they'd arrive sometime between February 20 and March 9. This morning I learned why.
"Your order has shipped!" with the same date range.
The cases have been delivered to the shipper in China.