Good Friday before a holiday morning to you all. Hope you have fun plans. We are going to my sister's cookout. We took advantage of the cool and dry weather yesterday to clean the carpet downstairs. It needed the cleaning. Today I am going to gather up all of the candle holders that we have burned to their limits and get them cleaned out so I can refill them. I reuse wax because I absolutely hate the idea of throwing the remainder after a candle is spent. That remainder can be as much as half the original candle. I don't do anything terribly complicated with it--just pour wax around a wick in a glass of some kind.

The first thing I saw on my morning stroll through the internet was this HuffingtonPost story. It exemplifies so much of what I think is wrong about our current political situation. My first reaction (to the headline) was "Of course, the bastards can always come up with a few billion for a useless war but can't figure out how to help individuals here at home." Then reading further I discovered that the $30Billion was only half of the monies provided for in the bill. The other half goes to various other projects none of which I necessarily disagree with (I don't know enough about them to disagree with them). But, and here is the crux of what I think is so 'bass ackwards' about the whole mess, the Democrats wouldn't pass the military appropriations bill without the 'sweeteners' that they hope will preserve or create jobs and provide funds for college students, and the Republicans won't pass the jobs/education programs without the military funding. Each side is held hostage and nothing real gets done. Or gets done half-assed. And there is no guarantee this thing will ever get to the President's desk--they still have to reconcile the House version with the Senate version.