Things will likely be sparse here this week. This Thursday is the last week of my college class and I have a personal 6-page paper due and a 12-page paper from my learning team. I also found out that the person that was going to teach for me this Wednesday was called out of town for his job. Now I have to scramble and come up with something to teach to the kiddies. At least some of the pressure is off; we won't be doing music this week.

I was able to make some good progress on the power shed Saturday. We may be running off the inverter before too much longer. There is a one-week break between this class and the next, so I will have some uninterrupted time to work on things. Sunday was typical. We didn't have anything after church, so we were able to come straight home and chill out. Well, I had homework, but what's new. At least we didn't have to be anywhere. Yesterday was just work and homework until around midnight. As usual for me, writing papers is slow work. The biggest problem is the need to hit a certain page count instead of just saying what I have to say and ending. I was taught to be concise. If something could be said in a sentence, don't write a paragraph; if something could be said in a paragraph, don't write a page; etc. Because of that teaching, I have a hard time "fluffing up" a paper to hit the required page count. Gotta love modern education.

Politics:

I heard a good one on NPR's Marketplace this morning. Some British guy was preaching how great the world will be when everyone has an ID chip, RFID tags track everything we own, etc. While admitting that Big Brother would be watching our every move, his conclusion was "Relax! It's good for business!" Great philosophy; it's OK to turn the world into a police state as long as the stock market keeps going up. Like a brainless, former coworker once told me, "I don't care what happens as long as my 401K keeps going up." Maybe we deserve the current transformation from citizens into subjects.

Granholm continues to make a complete pain in the arse of herself. A couple weeks before the filing deadline, she decided to save money by requiring 1099's to be submitted on magnetic media instead of paper. Great idea, but dumping that on people in the middle of January when the filing deadline is January 31 is just plain stupid. Now she's doing the same thing for the Michigan 1040's, again only a couple weeks before the filing deadline. All tax preparers that do more than 200 tax returns are required to file their clients' Michigan tax returns electronically. This is all to save money, of course. Expect to see an audit about five years from now stating that millions of dollars were lost because of computer errors, media problems, and the staff being overwhelmed. Good job Jenny! That giant sucking sound you hear is Michigan going down the toilet!

Science:

Another interesting article on what is and isn't life. And the search is on for the source of methane on Mars. Either possibility is interesting. We could learn a great deal from a lander sitting on fresh lava. The second possibility is, of course, dynamite. But I've talked about that before. The next five years could prove interesting for evangelicals.