Ed Icionsub

Funny how I was just talking earlier tonight about a special trip taken back in junior high school and it came up again tonight. The family took a two week drive down the East Coast to look at colleges for my oldest brother. My other brother and I got to go along for the ride.

We started out in Virginia and the first stop was Columbia, South Carolina. We stopped in Columbia because we had an aunt who lived there and we stayed in her huge antebellum house for a night and a nice visit.

I’ve been back to Columbia several times since then, although my aunt passed away many years ago. One of the best parts of Columbia is the big lake, created by the Lake Murray Dam. On the west side of Columbia and across the lake is a whole new community called Lexington, where a lot of very nice, upscale homes are located. Lexington SC Real Estate is the first place I would look for a new home if I was able to relocate to South Carolina.

Letterman had Madonna on his show tonight. It was a bizarre interview, but then again, Madonna is a whack job anyway. Letterman  tried hard to be a good host and ask some unusual questions. But she couldn’t seem to handle a serious conversation. I think she was doped up and she admitted that last time she was on the show she was high from smoking dope in the green room before coming out on stage.

The interesting part is that her entrance was unique. Letterman had a handful of NHL players for the NY Rangers team carry Madonna on their shoulders/sticks from the back of the theater and down the aisle then up onto the stage. She was not the least bit gracious toward the Rangers players and complained to Dave that the stick pinched her and she didn’t like it.

I’m thinking she should change her name from Ma-donna to Prima-donna.

At my house there are lights installed on each corner of the house, plus a light at the front door, a light over the garage, and a light beside the back door. All of these work off of independent switches. There is no one switch to turn on all of them at the same time. I think if I was building this house today, that I would have like a master switch for all of the exterior lights, along with a few other minor changes.

I was thinking about that today as I was climbing my ladder and replacing the Par38 Halogen lights on the house corners. These lightbulbs are great – they last a very long time and put a lot of light onto the yard. It is mostly for safety and security, but it comes in handy when I want to take the dogs out before bed, too.

There have only been a few girls that I can think of that I’ve known in any fashion who were named Cassandra. I don’t think it was popular with the mother’s of my generation, and the next generation of children didn’t have much impact on my life.

The two Cassandras that come to mind now are both in their late 20’s and they both use the nickname, Cassie. I wonder if their parents had the use of the nickname in mind when they gave their babies the name Cassandra?

Reading a New York Times article I came across an unfamiliar term. The writer called the worsening climate and the propensity to ignore the dire warnings of Al Gore and the world’s scientists, “The Cassandra Effect.”

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.

None of us can argue that the weather has been getting more severe and more weird over the past several years. At first the climate experts were blaming “El Nino” but I think it has become apparent that it is much more than that.

It was painful to watch the Tennessee Titans loss last night. They played hard and keep throwing away chances to win. They should have won that game.

I don’t envy Jeff Fisher in trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with the team since last year. They had such a great winning season last year and now they can’t win a game to save their hides. Starting out 0 – 3 is down right embarrassing.

We were talking about how people all have different symptoms of OCD, most to a small degree and some, like the character played in Monk on TV, have them at a very high level. I do feel bad for people who have to deal with high levels of OCD on a daily basis. They must have a difficult time finding contentment or peace in their lives.

One of the things that I do compulsively is to collect coupons. I must feel like throwing away a coupon is throwing away money. But I don’t have a good system for keeping track of the coupons and I rarely have them with me when I have the opportunity to use them.

Today I went through a stack of coupons that have been coming in the mail and in the Sunday newspaper. Some of them expired way back in June and even May of this year. It bothered me greatly to crumple up the expired ones and toss them away. I feel like they were lost opportunities.

So many companies are cutting back on benefits, that I decided to look very closely at my own benefits package and see if I am covered as well as I hoped when I accepted this job. The one thing that seems to be lacking is the life insurance part of the package. The life insurance is only my annual salary doubled. That is not much money to leave your spouse and dependents. And the policy through my employer will terminate if I am laid off or leave the company for any reason.

That got me interested in buying a separate term life insurance policy to take care of my family if anything happens to me. These days, we can’t count on our employers for more than the next paycheck. So to take care of my family, I need to think outside of the box.

The front page of Yahoo has an alert that Johnson and Johnson  is recalling their Tylenol for infants and children. It is just about every flavor and every type of the Tylenol, including the multi symptom and allergy products.

The sad thing is that American had a huge let down on the Tylenol brand years ago when there was tampering. Now they are facing a big recall on the infants and children’s products due to manufacturing problems. It will be hard for Americans to trust this brand if there are any reported illnesses or deaths as a result of the tainted products being used. I hope that does not happen, for the sake of American families and for the sake of the brand.

Just found out that Willie Nelson will be here in Nashville in November. That is pretty far off for me to make plans, but I would really like to see Willie in a live concert again. I might buy a couple of tickets if I can get good seats, and if something comes up that I can’t make it, then I’m sure that I will be able to sell them at the office to someone who wants to go.

One of the coolest things about the iPhone is that there are thousands of applications being developed and released for the phone that are easy to use, easy to find, and very affordable. For example, this very cool game that I heard about called, Parablox, was designed by a guy named Wolfgang Bartelme, and you can download the game for just 99 cents. The game is bright and colorful, easy to learn but challenging to master. It is very addictive and a great way to de-stress when you are stuck waiting in line for the drive up bank window, or sitting in a doctors office waiting room, or any of another dozen situations where you have a few minutes to wait and can distract yourself with a quick game or two on your iPhone.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to compete for high score against friends, like I do with other games in social media sites. Or maybe I could come up with a fun game myself and get someone who knows how to do the programming work with me to design a multiplayer iPhone game platform and make it available for download like Bartelme did with his game. I would like the satisfaction of knowing that people were having a little break from their waiting times with a game that I designed.