Why is it when you get some time off you can never get anything done?

The weather keeps teasing us. Just when oil prices go through the roof, with the situation in Venezuela and the Middle East, we have on of the coldest winters on record. As Grandpa said, "It never rains but it pours." Today the sun came out, and tomorrow it is supposed to snow.

I've found a new game to play: It's called backing up your files on your home server to your hard drive at work, which is underutilized anyway. With the huge drives that have been around now for a couple of years, it's a wonder anyone can utilize them fully unless they're downloading every possible piece of music and video on the internet.

They're already discussing a "post Sadaam Hussein Iraq" on the news. Sadaam is still in power and the war (if there's going to be a war) hasn't even started. The news boys are chomping at the bit. It's hard to say who is more interested in having a war: the career officers who need it to get promoted or the news guys who need it for the same purpose.

My father is 85 years old today.

My son played baritone in the county band concert today. I was amazed at how good the band is. All that practicing seems to have paid off.

President Bush is given a lot of credit for sticking to his guns over Iraq, but who's paying attention to Venezuela? Oil prices have taken their biggest jump in years, adding this most significant factor to the economies downturn, and Venequelan oil, or the lack thereof, is the most significant factor in the jump. So much for Bush's Latin American link so much ballyhoo'd in his first weeks in power. How many of us now remember the big deal made out of the fact that the first foreign country Bush turned to after his election was Mexico and not Canada as has been tradition for so many years.

Those of us thinking about regime change in Iraq, about the time needed to keep troops in the country to help establish a true democracy (something resembling American capitalism ala Germany and Japan) should think in terms of how long we kept troops in Europe and Asia. Ooops! did I use past tense? Don't we still have troops in Germany and Japan? Wasn't part of the equation that we provide the military might for those two countries so that their economies could focus on rebuilding? Didn't we even go so far as to pay those countries for the right to defend them? Lots of questions, and it isn't clear at all how the analogy is to be played out.