I'm A Certified Amphotographer

More Amphibian Photos...

We were wandering around outside at noon today and noticed this guy hanging out on the trunk of a shrub that our groundskeeper, Ozzy, had recently pruned:

Here he/she is in a side profile view...notice the racing stripes...

And the view from above...

And finally, a nice view smiling for the camera...

Can you say Cheese???

There’s A Right Way, And A Wrong Way...

To Do Things

I’m a BIG supporter of SMALL government.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of people out there that are quick to utter the words “there aught to be a law restricting blaa, blaa, blaa (pick your topic.)”

I say that they’re WRONG, and that we already have plenty of laws—many of them quite unnecessary. The government has no business involving itself in at least half the things they’re involved in today. Besides, the government is so prone to doing a crappy job—no matter how much cash they confiscate from our wallets to fund their endeavors.

For instance, take this latest brouhaha over some “offensive” T-shirts produced by Abercrombie & Fitch:

With a few words on their T-shirts, Abercrombie & Fitch lets young women send a message: "Who needs a brain when you have these?"

A group of female high school students have a message for A&F: Stop degrading us.

The Allegheny County (Pa.) Girls have started a boycott--or girlcott, as they're calling it--of the retailer. The campaign, conceived three weeks ago during the group's monthly meeting, went national Tuesday morning on NBC's "Today" show.

"We're telling [girls] to think about the fact that they're being degraded," Emma Blackman-Mathis, the 16-year-old co-chair of the group, told RedEye on Tuesday. "We're all going to come together in this one effort to fight this message that we're getting from pop culture."

Abercrombie has become famous for their poor taste in their product lines and advertising, their target market being mainly teenagers. The important thing to remember here is that the teens, and more importantly, their parents, have the opportunity to make a DECISION to not buy the products if they have a problem with them. They don’t need to be protected from the products by the government.

Of course there are idiots running around out there in public that will wear anything, no matter how offensive. There are even bigger idiots wandering around that believe that they have a government guaranteed “right” to not ever be offended.

Protection from “offence” is not written into the constitution…YET.

I’m offended by the appearance of an overweight woman wandering around the grocery store in a flowered spandex body suit. I’m offended by the 300 pound guy with a hairy back wearing a tank top sitting in the adjacent seat on an airplane, but I don’t expect the government to step in next year and remedy these situations.

Unfortunately there is an Indiana state Senator that thinks the government should be involved in this T-Shirt issue:

State Senator Steve Rauschenberger says he plans to introduce a resolution in the state Senate this week, calling on trendy retailer Abercrombie and Fitch to stop selling a line of racy t-shirts.

The Republican, who is a GOP candidate for governor, says the $24.50 t-shirts are "offensive" and "degrading." He says if the Senate resolution doesn't stop Abercrombie from selling its shirts - he'll lead a boycott of the stores.

No Senator Rauschenberger, you’ve got the process backwards in your pointy little graying political head. Busybody politicians like you should step out of the way and let the citizens take care of themselves. You should only step into the process if someone or something threatens our life, our liberty, or our pursuit of happiness.

Protecting our private property rights would be a pretty good idea too.

You Got That, Sir?

Mar Del Plata Argentina Is Full Of Idiots Too

We lived through the 2004 G-8 Summit here two summers ago in the Golden Isles. During the meetings between European leaders, Japan, and President Bush, a bunch of "activists" and protesters decided to "protest."

What did they do?

They marched, and they marched, and they protested, and many of them laid down on the asphalt roads in the middle of June.

At that time I said "let them lay down in the road for as long as they want to."

"Sprinkle some hot sauce and salt on them...and wash them off a little before they finish cooking..."

Have you ever walked on an asphalt road in Georgia in the middle of June? Needless to say they didn't protest for very long laying down...

Now I present for your consideration the current bunch of idiots at the America's Summit in Argentina, that believe that rioting and burning down buildings will somehow change their plight in life.

Proof positive that stupidity is an international problem...

I Don’t Understand Why I Attract Losers Like Shit Attracts Flies

More Boring Personal Stuff—Please Bear With Me

In the past I’ve owned and operated two companies that ended up producing multi-million dollar revenue streams over a period of a few years. In the process I learned what it meant to work 60-80 hour weeks and the cost of throwing everything I had financially at starting and growing my business.

I made exclusive use of specialty subcontractors and free-lance contract employees—I never had an hourly or salary payroll employee other than myself. Things worked well in feast or famine times because I didn’t have to provide work and pay anyone unless I had work that I needed to have done.

A deal was a deal, if you worked, you got paid--it was just that simple.

I've also learned how it felt to lose practically everything I had when couple of my customers decided to go out of business and take me and my company with them in the process. I like to say that I have earned a “street” MBA degree (A Masters in Business Administration,) although I’ve recently abandoned the engineering profession due to health considerations—both physical and mental.

In addition to my blogs, I’ve started writing a couple of books and began writing local interest news articles, some of which have been published as letters to the editor in the local newspaper. In late July I contacted a local magazine publisher about producing an article about the opening of the new passenger terminal here at the Brunswick Golden Isles Airport, a happening that was greeted with much fanfare by the local media.

He (the editor/publisher) loved the idea—so he said—especially since I was willing to work for free and was willing to actually do some investigative reporting rather than just a cut and paste job of the standard mish-mash media material issued by the airport authority.

I had previously developed a relationship with an employee in the Airport Director’s office while in the process of getting our airport listed on the FAA Air Traffic Control Command Center Website, so I had no problem gaining access to the non-public spaces and getting a nice tour guided by my contact there at the airport terminal.

I immediately scheduled the tour, developed my story outline, and within one week of notification to proceed with the story I had the copy written, proof read, and submitted as a Microsoft Word document to the editor via e-mail. I beat the copy deadline by 6 days.

Then disaster struck and I had my little brush with death in the hospital, and when I moved out of the intensive care ward I was greeted with an E-mail from the editor demanding to know the status of my story. Funny thing, I had copied myself, my mother, my girlfriend, and my sister with the same submittal and received comments from EVERYONE complementing my work, so I know that my submittal went through and I didn’t receive any “daemon-failure notices” indicating a problem.

Since I’ve learned that this gentleman generally refuses to answer his telephone or return voice mail messages, I immediately forwarded a copy of my previous submittal including the story attachment a second time, and yet a third time later that week just to be sure that the copy was available for the next issue.

The next issue came out in October, and my article was yet again absent from its pages. I was somewhat crushed personally, but I think that the message was loud and clear. Thanks, but no thanks—the guy just didn’t have the guts to say so personally.

I have absolutely no respect for people who are insolent enough as to waste another person’s time, allow them to make a fool of themselves on their behalf in front of public officials, and not admit their inadequacy or stupidity or error in favor of seclusion and silence. I’m a reasonable adult, and as a minimum all I would have expected was a statement that the publication had changed their mind or didn’t have room for the article or that my writing didn’t meet their standards. SOMETHING, is infinitely better than NOTHING, which is what I have in the way of an explanation to date.

I don’t care who you are, how much money you or your parents have, how good looking you are, or what your feet smell like (or if you smell like dirty feet), all I ask is that you follow through with your agreements with me.

All I wanted to do was get some of my writing published, I was willing to work for free, and after all, a DEAL is still a DEAL, isn’t it?

Who Died And Made Him A General?

More sKerry Stupidity

There is an old adage that says something like “keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer…”

In an effort to adhere to that philosophy, earlier this year I signed up on the John Kerry Website to receive their “supporter” E-mails.

Needless to say the resulting weekly correspondence has been the source of many minutes of entertainment. Actually, most of it is so STUPID that I haven’t even bothered to write about it here on my blog.

His latest E-Mail is titled: Help bring 20,000 troops home over the holidays. Here are the opening tidbits:

No more shell games. No more false reports of progress. No more misleading rhetoric about "staying as long as it takes."

It's time for the American people to demand that George W. Bush put forward a clear understandable plan for achieving America's goals in Iraq and bringing the vast majority of our troops home by the end of 2006.

The time is overdue for a plan with a clarity and vision equal to the valor and sacrifices of America's brave armed forces. Help make that kind of plan a reality by supporting our "20,000 troops home over the holidays" campaign. We're kicking off this vitally important initiative with a clear goal - collecting 20,000 signatures a day each and every day until Thanksgiving.

Last time I was paying attention to Senator sKerry’s blitherings, he was claiming that we didn’t have enough “boots on the ground” in Iraq. So now he wants to REDUCE the existing troop strength by 20,000 by CHRISTMAS?

Like Jesse Jackson's campaign to return a zillion bus loads of residents to New Orleans, let's wait and see if sKerry gets his 20,000 signatures each day, and if he doesn't, if the media bothers to report on his failure.

I think that I'll start a running report...stay tuned to this channel...

Jimmy Carter—Former President

And Current Doddering Old Fool…

Just in case you didn’t see it, for some reason I was watching NBC’s Today Show this morning and former Socialist Dictator Appeaser-In-Chief Jimmy Carter was at it again, blithering and second guessing the Bush White House. The Associated Press managed to print this part of his statement:

“The Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were "manipulated, at least" to mislead the American people, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday.

The decision to go to war was the culmination of a long-term plan to attack Iraq that resulted from the first President Bush not taking out Saddam, Carter said on NBC's "Today" show.”

Having actually watched the show, I have a problem with the reporting in this part of the AP story. I’ve looked for the transcript online and it isn’t posted yet, but what I heard Carter actually saying was that the “intelligence data was manipulated, at least…or mistaken…” and the result was that of “misleading the American people. I distinctly recall the basic wording of his statement because I sat up and thought about writing about it.

Carter did say that the data could have been "mistaken," but I don't expect to hear Carter complaining about the omission in the story.

Do you see the difference here between what he actually said and how it ended up being reported by the AP? The AP only printed what they needed out of his statement to support their headline that read:

“Carter: White House Mislead US On Iraq”

That’s not ALL of what he said. He also said that the data could have just simply been WRONG. It’s subtle, but by omitting the balance of the quote, the AP gets their point across—“Bush lied, people died.

As I understand it, you LIE when you make statements that you KNOW are not true when you make them. You are MISTAKEN when you make statements that you believe at the time to be correct, but are later proven to be FALSE.

Am I missing something here?

I’d like to blame President Carter’s continued opposition to the war on Alzheimer’s or just plain old age, but I think that ole' Jimmy, like the balance of the liberal media and the Democratic Party, just has a bad case of convenient memory.

Here is what he was quoted as saying in February of 2003:

"There has been a virtual declaration of war but a case for pre-emptive action against Iraq has not been made. We want Saddam Hussein to disarm but we want to achieve this through peaceful means.

"He obviously has the capability and desire to build prohibited weapons and probably has some hidden in his country.

"A sustained and enlarged UN inspection team is required."

Could not the case be made using the same criteria being used on President Bush that, by making these statements, Jimmy Carter LIED to the American people?

After all, the UN has since been proven to be a feckless, obtuse, duplicitous, corrupt bunch of ineffective diplomats representing despots and dictators that were using the UN Oil for Food program to allow Saddam to continue to fund his weapons program?

Yes Jimmy, the UN was the solution.

And yes Jimmy there is a Santa Clause (and an Easter Bunny and a Tooth Fairy and a Great Pumpkin too.)

Breaking & Entering

We have a pretty sizeable deer population here in Georgia. As a result, I always pay a good deal of attention when I'm driving around on the island at night--looking for deer attempting to become an unwelcome hood ornament.

With the elimination of their natural predators like mountain lions and wolves, the deer are over grazing places like Redtop Mountain State Park and are nearly starving to death as a result. In the past few years they’ve actually started having special doe and “spike” hunting seasons to cull the deer population to lower levels.

I’d say that the citizens of Arkansas might consider taking similar measures because their deer population is also becoming a bit of a nuisance:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- It looked like a crime scene, but no charges will be filed after Wayne Goldsberry killed a buck with his bare hands in his daughter's bedroom.

The engagement lasted an exhausting 40 minutes, but Goldsberry finally subdued the five-point whitetail deer that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter's home Friday.

When it was over, blood splattered the walls and the deer lay on the bedroom floor, its neck broken.

Goldsberry was at his daughter's home when he heard glass breaking. He went back to check on the noise and found the deer.

"I was standing about like this peeking around the corner when the deer came out of the bedroom," said Goldsberry, demonstrating while peering around his kitchen wall. The deer ran down the hall and into the master bedroom - "jumping back and forth across the bed."

Goldsberry entered the bedroom to confront the deer and, after a brief struggle, emerged to tell his wife to call police. After returning to the bedroom, the fight continued. Goldsberry finally was able to grip the animal and twist its neck, killing it.

"He was trying to get up a corner wall and I just came in behind him and grabbed him by the horns and just started pushing down," said Goldsberry.

Goldsberry, sore from the struggle, dragged the dead animal out of the house.

Benton County Sheriff Keith Ferguson said that when he arrived he found the deer dead in the front yard. Goldsberry intended to have the deer processed for its meat.

I want to ask a question of all of the anti-gun activists out there.

"How much more simply could this situation have been resolved if the guy had just picked up his 9 mm pistol and SHOT the deer once in the head, instead of risking his own life WRESTLING with a DEER?"

Yeah, I thought so…

That reminds me, I've got to go clean my guns now...

Stupid Word Of The Day

I have An Idea…

Have I mentioned that I’m an aspiring artist and photographer?

No?

Well, I am.

I know, I know, I know, the pay isn’t much, but when you’re sitting around with a camera in one hand and the other hand on a computer keyboard, something is bound to leak out and—if anyone is getting paid for it—I AM.

Right now I’m attempting to compete in the Coastal Heritage Exhibition sponsored by the Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association.

They want pictures of local “stuff,” and they want written justification of it's "historical or cultural" significance .

So good, so far.

Unfortunately, the pickin’s is pretty slim out here because practically everything worth mentioning (and photographing) is OLD NEWS and most of it wasn’t taken care of as modern times developed in the region. Vacant fields and crumbling footings just aren’t very interesting, if you will excuse me for saying so.

In addition to our own island, we have a number of other little islands nearby that don’t have roads connecting them to the mainland. Places like Cumberland Island, and Blackbeard’s Island, and Sapelo Island—all owned by the state of Georgia.

I’m hopeful that one of these places will yield something worth presenting, something that hasn’t appeared in every magazine and art show over the past fifty years.

I’m doing a little Internet research before visiting the local library, and I ran into this article that at first glance looked pretty interesting. Then I got to the last word of the first paragraph and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the writer, Mr. R. T. Kneib, PHD, was an overeducated idiot with a political agenda.

Why?

Because the last word in that paragraph was the word “Ameliorate.”

I’m sorry, but I had to look up the meaning of the word to be sure—and I was right. Here is what the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary says about the word:

Ameliorate

transitive senses : to make better or more tolerable
intransitive senses : to grow better

Besides having an out of date website with less than 800 “hits”, Dr. Kneib suffers from a horrible disease. Dr. Kneib uses big, crappy, multi-syllable words like “ameliorate” rather than just coming out and saying what he really means:

"I already have MY house at the beach, and I don’t want YOU to buy one and crowd up the area."

Idiots…

I’m A VoIP Fool

Can You Hear Me Now?

Today our household took the final step in the technology race to enter the 21st century, but it wasn’t without a certain amount of trepidation. We signed up with Vonage’s VoIP (voice over internet protocol) service.

We decided this summer that we HAD to get our information and communication technology services costs under control—we were spending over $250 per month for only TWO PEOPLE. In addition to paying Adelphia for cable TV and broadband, we had two Cingular cell phones with more minutes than we could use each month and Bellsouth was charging us an arm/leg for local phone service with unlimited domestic long distance.

Last month we carved the Cingular rate plan down to something more realistic based on our actual usage since we moved to the island. Cellular service here could sometimes be likened to two coconuts connected by a string, but we hated to give up the Atlanta cell phone numbers we’ve both had for many years, so we stayed with Cingular. People got to be able to find you, you know?

Today I tackled the “landline” issue. Vonage has a pricing special running at the “big box” electronics retailers like Circuit City where they sell you the RJ-11 adapter box that connects to your router or cable modem, then they rebate the entire cost of the hardware by mail.

Such a deal.

I also came home with two new 2.4 Ghz portable telephones and within an hour of opening the boxes on my new purchases I had a dial tone coming out of my cable TV connection.

Gee whizzzz….(or in the words of Gomer Pyle…Shazam)

Next we contacted Bellsouth and gave them the bad news. We cancelled our unlimited long distance plan and reduced the local plan to the very minimum –a $53 monthly savings. We decided to maintain minimum “standard” phone service to keep the phone number continuity and as a backup service in the event that the hurricanes aren’t so kind to us next year.

Do you have any idea how pissed off I’m going to be if I can’t make a phone call after a storm—having THREE different phone technologies and FOUR different phone numbers?

If things work out well we may dump the Bellsouth service in the future. If you have broadband internet (cable or DSL) and haven’t looked into VoIP technology, you need to consider the possibility in the future. It’s CHEEP.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep you informed of our progress…

The Pot Calling The Kettle Black

More Government Hypocracy…

To hear the media and the politicians tell the story, the mean old oil companies are really putting the screws to all of us consumers these days.

The only evidence they need to demonstrate their hypothesis is to direct our attention to the “record 3rd quarter profits” recently announced by the oil companies. The demagogues are pouring out of the woodwork screaming “PRICE GOUGING” and “it just ain’t fair for a company to be making that much money.”

Even the normally fiscally conservative Republicans are getting in on the act:

CONCORD, N.H. --Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire's fiscal conservative and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is calling for a tax on excess oil profits to help fund a federal heating assistance program.

Gregg says he is infuriated by recent profit reports from oil companies -- he wants those profits to be taxed and the money used to fund heating aid for the poor and reduce the deficit.

"Some might call this a novel approach for me, but I cannot sit back in good conscience while those in our society struggling to heat their homes are being left in the cold by oil companies," Gregg said in a statement from Washington…

“It's an inexcusable act by the oil companies to be profiting at the expense of the American people as we go through these extraordinarily high energy prices, $3 a gallon for gasoline, up to $2.50 for home heating oil," Gregg said.

I don't believe that the oil companies can be honestly accused of price gouging based on only their record profits as evidence. If you make 10% profit on oil when it costs $10 per barrel in 1990, you would only earn one dollar per barrel in profit.

Today, with oil at $60 per barrel, your same profit margin, 10 percent, would yield a 6 dollar profit on each barrel, a FIVE HUNDRED PERCENT increase. If the profit margin on a percentage basis remains constant, you can't scream "price gouging." Price gouging could only be claimed if the oil companies increased their profit margins ABOVE what they have traditionally charged, and as far as i can determine they haven't done that.

By the way, I believe that a publicly or privately owned company should be allowed to let market conditions determine their profit margins, not the media and the government. If you want to tell a company how much they should charge for their product and how much profit they should earn, you should BUY STOCK IN THE COMPANY and then VOTE at the shareholders meeting.

It's a known fact that the oil companies were losing their shirts financially when oil was selling at the $10 per barrel figure, and I didn't hear the media and the politicians screaming for incentives and financial bailouts to help the oil executives and stockholders. The oil companys were forced by the market conditions to merge, and many smaller oil exploration companies--the so called "wild cats"--were forced out of business.

And what Gregg and his fellow bullshit artists in the US Congress are failing to tell you is that the Federal and state governments have collected TAXES on gasoline at a rate nearly DOUBLE the PROFITS that the oil companies have EARNED. Remember that the oil companies are doing all of the work and taking all of the risk?

If you don’t believe me, just look at this chart from the Tax Foundation:



















In actual figures, the oil companies have earned $643.0 billion in profit between 1977 and 2004, where the federal and state governments collected over $1.343 trillion in taxes over that same period.

One trillion, three hundred forty three billion dollars...think about that number for a minute.

Or put it this way: $1,343,000,000,000.00.

Do you understand?

THE TAXES ARE NEARLY DOUBLE THE PROFITS EARNED.

Where is the outrage in the media?

Where are the admissions of government's shared responsibility for high gas prices?

Why doesn't the government return some of THEIR windfall taxes to the people that paid the money in the first place--the taxpayers?

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting if I were you...

And here is the true irony in this situation. Rather than offering to REDUCE the taxes to help people afford gasoline and heating oil, Gregg and his band of merry men want to RAISE additional taxes so that they can then distribute the new revenues to “working families” and the “poor” to help pay heating bills. Of course it would be a pretty good guess to assume that the upper "middle class" and "wealthy Americans" wouldn't see a dime of help heating their mansions this winter.

TAX and SPEND, TAX and SPEND, I want to go somewhere and throw up. Better yet, I think that it's time to send my Senator, Saxby Chambliss, another E-mail. We're practically on a first name basis now, you know?

Only in America...

This is insanity...

Weekly News Prediction

Here's a prediction of what we'll hear on the news this week:

1. Scooter Libby

2. Carl Rove

3. Bush's Supreme Court nominee

(I almost forgot--the latest bombing in Iraq.)

Are you bored like I am yet?

Put A Tiger In Your Tank

Remember Those Old ESSO/EXXON Commercials?

I was sitting here watching the NASCAR race in Atlanta this afternoon and a Sunoco commercial came on bragging about them being the official fuel supplier for NASCAR.

I though to myself…”gosh, I wish that my Suburban could accelerate from 0 to 35 MPH in about a half second, and maybe Pat’s Mustang GT’s V-8 engine would like a nice high octane cocktail for a change, instead of the rancid, tree hugger friendly eco-crap low sulphur, lead-free soup we’re forced to buy here in Georgia."

We definitely need some Sunoco “racin’ fuel,” and it can’t hurt to look and see, you kinow?

Sure enough, on the Sunoco web site I found that they offer a variety of gasoline blends designed to make your motor race and your heart flutter.

For instance, there’s the Sunoco Supreme NOS 117 Octane

Sunoco's highest octane racing fuel was developed specifically for competition engines using nitrous oxide injection systems. Supreme NOS is formulated to achieve a significantly higher specific gravity than other high octane fuels, allowing for maximum fuel flow when used with high volume nitrous oxide systems. The dense nature of this fuel helps guard against lean conditions that can lead to catastrophic engine damage. Due to the high tetraethyl lead (TEL) content, it should not be used in applications utilizing oxygen sensors. THIS FUEL CONTAINS LEAD. CANNOT SHIP OVERNIGHT OR 2ND DAY.

It will set you back $83.49 for five gallons, PLUS SHIPPING CHARGES

Then there is Sunoco GT 100, Unleaded 100 fuel.

GT 100, Unleaded 100 octane fuel, 5 gallons in a UN/DOT approved and reusable container. Designed for high performance street cars, muscle cars, classics, street rods, motorcycles, karts and marine applications. With the highest octane rating of any street legal fuel, Sunoco GT 100 will allow significantly increased boost levels in supercharged or turbocharged applications. Sunoco GT 100 contains no metallic compounds to harm catalytic converters or oxygen sensors. It contains a comprehensive additive package for greater engine protection and reduced fuel system deposits as measured by the BMW test. Sunoco GT 100 is also compatible with virtually all two stroke synthetic and mineral based motor oils. $20 HAZ MAT fee is included in price above; shipping charges (Ground Only) are additional. No Sales Tax - Excise Taxes Paid. EXCELLENT FUEL FOR SCCA SOLO OR RALLYX CARS. NO HAZMAT service outside of USA's 48 contiguous states. THIS FUEL IS ACCEPTABLE FOR ON ROAD USE AND IS LEGAL FOR SCCA EVENTS. MEETS EPA REFORMULATED FUEL REGULATIONS.

All in all an excellent vintage, and it will only set you back a modest $62.91 for five gallons.

I was especially encouraged by this little note: SHIP YOUR RACE FUEL AHEAD TO YOUR NEXT RACE DESTINATION. WE DO SHIP TO MOTELS AND RACE TRACKS. THIS IS A LEADED FUEL for off road use only.

A redneck's wet dream--racing fuel delivered to your motel room. If I could just get the delivery lady to wear a garter belt and fishnet stockings...er, um...never mind.

They have a wonderful assortment of other octane blends and prices, but I think that I’ll place an order for a tank full of the 100 octane for the old Subruban, and for 42 gallons it will only set me back $528.44 plus tax and shipping.

Such a deal…

Neighborhood Friends

We've had a hummingbird feeder out on our back patio since early spring, and we're reluctantly anticipating these little guys departure back across the Gulf of Mexico for the winter.

Goodby fellas...have a safe trip...


















Imagine weighing 3 or 4 grams and flying HUNDREDS of miles across open water?

Very late Friday night this little lady showed up on our front porch, having been frightened onto the second floor by the sprinkler system.


















She belonged in her own condo across the street, but she took time out from her busy schedule to help me with some blogging after I dried her off and gave her a drink and a snack.

Whimpering Dogs

Woof...Woof...Whine

Saturday was another glorious fall day here on the Georgia coast. A high in the low 70’s, a light breeze, and most importantly--NO BUGS!

We made the most of the day by leaving the island. In fact, people were leaving the island this morning by the bus load—headed south to Jacksonville for the Georgia-Florida football game.

We went the opposite direction—toward Darien to the north.

You have to understand, the only thing worse than a Georgia Bulldog fan decked out in red and black on game day is an entire island full of Georgia fans, barking and yelling and hooting on game day.

Since Alltel Stadium can only hold eighty thousand or so people, and since Florida fans had half the tickets, that left what seemed like another couple hundred thousand Georgia fans here on St. Simons clamoring into the bars and into private homes to watch the game on TV.

Thus our reasoning for getting the heck out of town for at least part of the day. After doing some sightseeing and having a late lunch, we actually snuck back home to watch the game on TV. Georgia Tech was also playing Clemson in Atlanta, although I didn’t realize that ESPN was telecasting that contest until it was almost over with.

Florida ran all over undefeated Georgia in the first quarter and Georgia, playing without their starting quarterback, managed to lose for the FOURTEENTH TIME in the last SIXTEEN GAMES.

So much for their national championship hopes. Hah!

The Dogs fans came sneaking back home late last night with long faces and crushed spirits, leaving all of us Tech fans (all ten of us) to quietly celebrate Tech’s 10-9 victory over archrival Clemson.

Go Yellow Jackets.