This is my ex sister-in-law Janice Cusack.
Janice is fighting what appears to be a losing battle with cancer and may soon enter hospice.
She was my first wife’s youngest sister. She lives in California and I last saw her at my son Sean’s wedding in Portland, Ore. in September, 2004, which is when this photo was taken.
She and her husband Pat have a son, Colin.
If you’re the praying type, please take a moment to offer a prayer for Janice and her family.
Thanks.
Regular gas is going for $3.37.9 a gallon at Sam’s Club in Jonesboro today, but there are a couple of stations in Little Rock selling it for $3.15.9!
At this rate, we may get back into the $2 range by the end of summer. But I doubt it.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed the occasional Amazon.com ad embedded in my blogposts.
They represent an effort to monetize my blogging and generate a little income. To date, I have yet to see a dime from the referral ads. And thanks to Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe and a dull-witted majority of state legislators, I never will. They caved in to Walmart and other big-box retailers and are imposing a tax on such referrals, forcing Amazon.com to terminate the Amazon Associates Program for those of us in Arkansas, effective July 24. (If you want to help me make a couple of bucks, scan the blog for something you were going to buy anyway and buy it through me.)
Here’s the email from Amazon.com:
Subject: Notice of Upcoming Contract Termination Due to New Arkansas Law
Hello,
For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with a large number of Arkansas residents. Unfortunately, a new state tax law signed by Governor Beebe compels us to terminate this program for Arkansas-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers - including but not limited to those referred by Arkansas-based affiliates like you - even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.
We opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It was supported by big-box retailers that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action. The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on Arkansas residents like you were explained to the legislature, including Senate and House leadership, as well as to the Governor's staff.
As a result of the new law, contracts with all Arkansas residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program will be terminated on July 24, 2011. Those Arkansas residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.comPlease be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned on or before July 24, 2011 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule.
You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of Arkansas. If you are not currently a resident of Arkansas, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here. And if you relocate to another state after July 24, 2011, please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.
To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to continue to offer the Associates Program to Arkansas residents and will not affect their ability to purchase from www.amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/ ].
We have enjoyed working with you and other Arkansas-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to Arkansas residents.
Regards,
The Amazon Associates Team
The Monument Fire appears to have been stamped out in the flatlands east and north of U.S. 92 and fire fighting is concentrating on the mountains and canyons.
We’ve been following the Monument Fire south of Sierra Vista, Ariz. closely for the past 10 days, largely through the online presence of the Sierra Vista Herald.
As a guy who’s been associated with newspapers all of his adult life, I know good work when I see it and the Herald staff of writers, photographers and editors have done their community a huge service through their persistence and hard work on this story of vital importance.
Their home page at svherald.com and their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Sierra-Vista-Herald/105994446122855 kept residents and those of us far away informed about the heroic fire fighting effort to save lives and property.
I know journalism awards are the farthest thing from the minds of the Herald staff as they do their work through this crisis, but surely they’ve earned an honored place in Arizona journalism.
These metal and glass bottle trees are popping up around here. This one is in front of the new yogurt place and I saw one Saturday at the Farmers Market.
Some otherwise rational people are going apeshit over these things. Just for the record, I think they look stupid.
The Olympia gel palm hot weather riding gloves I bought through Amazon.com a week or so ago failed last Friday.
Specifically, the elasticized fabric ripped away from the leather of the right palm as I pulled the glove on Friday morning. You can see the rip in the photo above.
I went to the Amazon.com “returns” page and told them of my problem, noting that I would happily accept a replacement pair now that I know you have to grip the leather when pulling on the gloves.
They immediately emailed me the paperwork for returning the gloves, including a prepaid UPS shipping label.
The replacement gloves arrived before noon today and I’m using their box to ship the damaged pair back to Amazon.com this afternoon.
That’s the kind of customer service that impresses me and keeps me shopping at Amazon.com.
As of last night, the fire is 27 percent contained and has been kept south of Hereford Road. Forecast for today is hot and windy.
Somehow I found myself the recipient of a Camera Strap Buddy from photojojo.com. It’s a device that screws into the tripod mounting hole on the base of an SLR for use as a strap attachment point. It makes it possible to hang the camera diagonally over your shoulder for easy access, but eliminates the annoying swinging and bobbing you get when you wear it around your neck. I didn’t order it. It just showed up in my mailbox last week.
I finally got around to visiting the photojojo.com web site this evening and was stunned to see these insanely cool coffee mugs made to look like Nikon and Canon lenses. The longer Nikon is $30 and the Canon is $24. Looks like the ultimate coffee mug for a photographer. Click on the image to see the details.
Meet Hermon Raju, a 20-something woman who blew up when a conductor on the Metro North rail line asked her to stop audibly cursing on her cell phone.
Raju, who attended plain old New York University, goes on at length about how well educated she is and the prestigious(?) schools she’s attended.
The result: Google her name and you’ll see more than 21,000 items containing her name posted in the past four days. None of them are complementary.
People who claim to know her say she’s an insufferable arrogant twit who is generally disliked at NYU and elsewhere.
And, based on this performance, I don’t like her either.
The latest report on the wildfire south of Sierra Vista, Ariz. (where my stepdaughter Morgan and her husband Andrew live) has the fire still raging out of control in the mountains of the Coronado National Forest south of town.
The fire jumped U.S. 92 yesterday and has consumed more than 16,000 acres of mostly forested mountain terrain – bad news for the folks with homes and property in the canyons.
Here’s a map from the Sierra Vista Herald, showing the growth of the burn area from Wednesday to yesterday, the evacuation zone and the pre-evacuation zone:
Ramsey Canyon Road marks the northern boundary of the pre-evacuation zone and it’s about 5 miles south of Morgan and Andrew’s place and maybe 4 miles south of Andrew’s parents’ house. From my uneducated perspective, much of the terrain between the burn zone and the south edge of Sierra Vista is flat and more easily accessible to fire fighters than are the canyons.
The Sierra Vista Herald is doing a splendid job of keeping on top of things. You can follow the fire fighters’ progress at the paper’s web site here.
As I mentioned before, most of my blog hits in the past several months have been the result of searches for information on Suzi Barrett, the actress/comedienne/writer who plays the sarcastic girl in the Esurance insurance commercials.
There is a web site - “Who is that Hot Ad Girl?” – dedicated to identifying all of the attractive women who appear in TV commercials and they include Suzi in their listings.
Cregeen’s, the faux Irish pub at the north end of the downtown entertainment district, has one of the best Reuben sandwiches in town.
That is, if you don’t mind a few flies with your food.
I started out at the table nearest the window, but got tired of shooing away 3-4 flies. Asked for a fly swatter, the waitress returned empty-handed.
“We don’t have one. Would you like to move to another table? They seem to like the light from the window.”
But they also seem to like food at the table farthest from the window.
I managed to shield my Reuben from them long enough to wolf the sandwich down, but gave up on the potato salad after one broke through my defensive screen and settled on the plate (see photo above).
The waitress didn’t seem interested enough in the fly problem to send the manager over or offer to reduce the bill – things that should have happened without prompting from the customer.
So I’m done with Cregeen’s, at least until winter when the flies are all dead.
BMW friend Charlie and his wife Deb are riding their R1200GSs to Alaska next week.
Charlie wants to write a blog on travelblog.org and asked me to recommend a computer for the job. He wondered about using a tablet, but I argued against it because typing on a touch pad is a pain in the ass. I told him I have yet to find a solution better than the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook I’ve been using since March 2009.
The Mini 9 was soon replaced by the Mini 10 which has a larger, more user friendly keyboard, but its big advantage was its Solid State Hard Drive (SSHD) – no moving parts and thus far less vulnerable to vibration and dust. The Mini 9 is out of production, but you can find used Mini 9s on Ebay.
And that’s exactly what Charlie did. He scored a Mini 9 with a black case with the same tweaks – upgraded to 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSHD – as mine. (Dell originally shipped the Mini 9 with 1GB of RAM and an 8GB SSHD.) Charlie’s computer arrived yesterday and he brought it over last night for a tutorial and some software installation with my stand-alone CD/DVD drive.
The previous owner had removed the antivirus software, so I gave Charlie the third installation of the review copy of BitDefender Internet Security 2010 that I got through the Amazon.com Vine Program. I also downloaded and installed Irfanview as a lightweight, simple image management program, and the Google Chrome browser. I like Chrome on the Mini 9 because it has less menu crap at the top of the frame than do Firefox and Internet Explorer. He brought along a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips, so we loaded that too.
I suggested he get a 32GB or larger SD card to live in the SD car slot and serve as a D: drive. I keep all of my images on an installed 32GB SD card so as not to load up the SSHD.
Now, he just needs to spend a little time with the Mini 9 to get used to the keyboard and also to do some dummy blog posts for practice before they hit the road on Saturday morning.
Maria’s K75S and a Harley-Davidson in two of the four Fuel Efficient Vehicles Only parking spaces at Best Buy yesterday morning.
I woke up this morning to discover, through the process of elimination, that my D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router had died.
So, after picking up the mail at the post office, I continued my ride down to Best Buy where I inspected their wireless routers and settled on a Linksys E2000 Advanced Wireless-N Router that was on clearance.
I’m embarrassed to say that I never bothered to secure my old D-Link, so our wireless network was wide open to anyone who cared to sniff out the signal. I wasn’t particularly worried, though, since we live in a rather remote spot and anyone close enough to the house to steal our signal would be immediately noticeable.
The E2000 automatically creates two signals – one a heavily encrypted secure access point for authorized network members and the other a password-protected guest access point – so we’re locked down tight, or at least tighter than we have been for the past six years.
The signal seems much more stable than the old router and preliminary tests suggest our Wifi-enabled Blu-ray player may not have the infuriating signal drop-outs with this new router.
I was absolutely stunned at how much cooling air gets through the mesh. Wearing these on a hot day is like riding in shorts. They have padding and armor in all the right places, but it doesn't seem to interfere with the air flow. I can see right now that this will be a good summer. In fact, these pants may be downright chilly on a cool morning. I have some nylon warmup pants that may provide a windstopper barrier when worn under the riding pants.
I'm used to riding in cargo style riding pants, so I noticed the reduced pocket space right away. There are two zippered front pockets with horizontal openings at the waistband and another zippered pocket just above the right knee. I can get my wallet into the thigh pocket, but the two front pockets don't seem particularly useful.
The overall fit is good. I normally take a 30-inch inseam, but the 33-inch inseam on these pants works out just fine with my knees bent and my feet on the pegs.
If you shop around, you can find these for less than $60, which is an absolutely killer deal.
My stepdaughter Morgan and her husband live in Arizona, which is going through the worst wildfire outbreak in its history.
So far, the fires have been far away from their home in Sierra Vista.
Until last night when she looked out her front door last night and saw this.
Maria just spoke with her and she reports it looks like the fire may be out, but there’s a lot of smoke.
Our Internet connection is down this morning and I can’t be sure whether it’s us or the cable tv/internet provider.
I’ve reset the modem and router twice and now can’t even see the router’s Wifi signal, although I can see the signal from a neighbor’s wireless router. The cable tv is working, so I know the cable is physically intact. I tried calling the cable/internet provider, but their number is busy, suggesting other people are having a problem too.
Our router is at least six years old, maybe older, so it may be time to replace it. Happily, the way technology works, a replacement will cost less and be more powerful. Hell, I may just replace the router regardless of where the problem is.
In the meantime, I’m using my Sprint netcard to connect.
BMW friend Gail Hatch, who lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, is selling her Blue 2003 BMW K1200GT on Ebay.
It’s the same year, color and model as mine and it only has 35,600 miles on it, compared with the 59k on mine.
The bidding starts at $4,500 and the auction runs for another 6 days and 22 hours.
I drove Maria to work this morning in anticipation of car-shuffling later today when we hope to pick up my del Sol from the shop where its air conditioning is undergoing surgery.
Now I’m sipping coffee at Seattle Grind where the grassy strip along Stadium Avenue is covered with a flock of pink plastic flamingos, placed there to attract attention to the new yogurt shop next door.
of the actress who plays the sarcastic girl in the Esurance insurance commercials. Originally from Michigan, Suzi got her degree in theatre at Western Michigan University, then moved to Chicago where she studied improv at The Second City and io. From there, she headed to Amsterdam, and spent 3 years performing with Boom Chicago-- or as the Dutch often call it-- "De Chicago Boom Boom." A member of the UCBTLA community since 2006, Suzi has studied with Matt Besser and Ian Roberts, and makes frequent appearances in "Worst Laid Plans,""Soundtrack," and "the line in the bathroom at Birds." She also tours the country with the UCB tourco, and plays weekly with the greatest improv team in the universe: Sentimental Lady.
Hometown: Rochester Hills, MIShe has a helluva following and I hereby nominate her for inclusion in next season’s Saturday Night Live cast.
Bill Revard and his brothers Jimmy and Charlie opened their dealership on the city’s northeastside, just northeast of the I-465 – I-69 interchange, in the summer of 2000.
The Revard brothers were guests of the Indianapolis BMW Club at our February, 2000, awards banquet and I had the pleasure of giving Bill his first business dollar that evening.
Sadly, Revard BMW went out of business in December, 2004 for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was BMW Motorrad’s bizarre business model.
Bill was a good friend and a great supporter of the club.
If the current Indianapolis BMW motorcycle dealer is even half as good as Bill, the Indianapolis BMW community is very well served.
falling to pieces, so I took a chance on these gloves.
I’m enjoying a rare White Castle lunch along I-55 in Cape Girardeau, Mo. after getting my ABS warning light issue sorted out at Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles.
I decided to make this a three-state ride by taking the bridge over the still-swollen Mississippi River to East Cape Girardeau, Ill. and back.
It’s only about 11:30 a.m., so the serious heat of the day isn’t upon us yet. I must be off.
about staying hydrated on the bike and off. It also got me wondering if CamelBak makes a hydration system to color match my Fieldsheer Hi-Viz mesh riding jacket.My man Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels at the ABATE of Indiana Miracle Ride.
Sorry he’s not running for president, but I hope he stays in public service. The country desperately needs his unique skills set.
I really must do something about the clutter in our upstairs office. It looks like I’m sitting in front of a trash heap. The cup, by the way, is from St. Bernards Healthcare. St. Bernard seems to follow us wherever we go. It was St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Crawfordsville, Ind. But the local pronunciation is always counterintuitive. In C’ville, it was St. BERnard. Here, it’s St. B’nard. The t-shirt was a gift from my son Sean.I could never vote for Mitt Romney anyway, but this statement told me all I needed to know about how stupid the guy can be:
I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe that the world is getting warmer, and No. 2, I believe that humans contribute to that. And so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.
I went first to Charlie and Deb’s place and then headed for Main Street with Charlie, who was riding his R1200GS. Deb followed later on her 1975 R75/6, which she entered in the bike show. I assume she would have called by now if she won.
One of these things is not like the others.My son Steve alerted me to an insanely cool free app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod 
Dragon Dictation by Nuance Communications is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® that lets you easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages. They claim it’s up to five times faster than typing on the keyboard.
It takes up 5.3 MB of memory on my 64GB iPod Touch.
Press “Done” when you’re done dictating and you’ll see your words in text. I’ve only spent a few minutes with it and send a couple of emails and a couple of Facebook posts, but it’s got every one of my words correct. (It does have a sense of decorum, though. It renders “fuck” and “fucking” as “f*ck” and “f*cking.”)
When you’re satisfied with your text you move to the options screen and do with it what you will.
It accesses your address book for emailing. The developers claim the software “learns” your speech characteristics and gets more accurate over time.
Pretty cool for a free app.
But you don’t have to spend much time on Google to discover a lot of people have a looser definition that embraces renting KOA Kamper Kabins (austere bunkhouses for the price of a motel room) or even motor home travel with a car in tow.
A woman whose blog I visit occasionally is, with her husband, a devotee of motor home “camping.” In their case, it’s a 36-foot 10 mpg diesel powered motor coach, dragging a VW beetle behind it.
They’re currently ensconced in a remote Army Corps of Engineers campground near the Pennsylvania-New York border, where they signed on as “work campers,” that is they work the gatehouse and do other campground labor – four days on and four days off - to park and use the facilities free. They’ve signed on to stay there through the summer, although they’ve been forced to flee because of flooding and the area was recently raked by tornados.
I have other friends who have done work camping, but when I hear “work” and “camp” in the same sentence, I think of the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free) over the front gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Being tethered to a campsite and a job all summer sounds like a cruel joke to me and calls to mind the gate sign at the Buchenwald concentration camp: “Jedem das Seine”
Literally, it means “to each, his own,” but colloquially it translates to “you get what you deserve.”
We’ve been worried about Pete the Aussie lately, especially since he had another seizure one morning last week while I was making my mocha 
Dr. Jon Huff, our vet, suggested a liver function test to see if his deteriorating liver was the cause of the seizures, so I took Pete in to get blood drawn yesterday.
Dr. Huff called a few minutes ago to say the test shows Pete has excellent liver function - the liver function of a healthy dog.
It does not tell us how much liver he has left, but what he has is functioning fine. The main purpose of the test was to see if loss of liver function was causing the seizures. It is not.
He isn't showing any signs of a brain tumor and Dr. Huff suspects it may be epilepsy. As long as the seizures are only one a month or so and are as mild as they have been so far, he doesn't think any seizure meds are indicated because they could put a strain on his liver.
He recommends getting another in-house liver check early next month.
In the meantime, we should maintain the medication he's getting and try to relax.
That’s a huge relief.
There is nothing to indicate that he has lost any liver function or that his liver will quit before any other vital organ.
I was all set to ride up to the BMW dealer at Cape Girardeau, Mo., this morning.
I suited up and threw three Ebay items into my saddlebag to mail from the post office.
But when I pulled onto U.S. 49B, heading north, I realized the two previously flashing lights were dark.
WTF?
So I rode around awhile to see if they would come on again. I’m at Seattle Grind in Jonesboro now, having abandoned my trip plan –at least for today.
BMW friend Charlie called yesterday to ask if I could pick up a part for him from the Cape dealer, but it may turn out that I don’t need to make the trip if the lights stay dark.
