Last night, we played host to a group of people that could potentially be a college-age group at the church. There were a couple other people that I had hoped would show up, but overall it went well. I didn't blow up the house or kill anyone with food poisoning, so I guess it was a success. We didn't actually talk about the new group much as a group, but I talked for quite a bit with one of them after everyone else left. He is willing to take the lead and try to bootstrap this, which is great. It was a late night; I didn't even hear my alarm this morning. Tonight is going to be a night for relaxing.

The inverter is still humming along nicely. We are getting a couple days out of a charge by turning off the breaker to the well when we are not home and at night when we are in bed. It even held up to two days of vacuuming and having every light in the place going last night while we had company. If I can get the solar panels hooked up, I don't think we would even need the generator in the summer. Running the generator less will certainly help us with our monthly budget. We were burning over $300 a month in gas. Our current usage rate is less than half. We should be able to halve that again by working on some efficiencies with the lighting and the well. I'm confident that the solar panels will eliminate the need for the generator in the summer. We will still need to run it routinely in the winter until we can add more solar panels or get a couple of the windmills up. Anyway, so far so good.

On a completely unrelated note, the Blue Angels are in town. They are doing shows here in Traverse City on Saturday and Sunday. It's been several years since I've seen them, but the Sunday show is definitely out and the Saturday one isn't looking too good either. In any case, the last couple of days haven't been real productive here while the Angels practice. Munson employees have spent most of Thursday and Friday afternoon running from window to window or standing in the parking lot watching them. Of course they are very hard to ignore when you are on the fifth floor and they fly by at about the level of the third floor fast enough to nearly blow the windows out the building. Impressive mo-chines. And the lucky stiffs get paid to play with them. That's the incredible part to me. My most exciting moment at work over the last year was the time that the cafeteria had Hot Dog Bar twice in one week.

Science:

Cassini is in orbit around Saturn; the first man-made object to ever circle what has to be the most fascinating planet in our neighborhood. The images so far are mind-blowing. And the best part is that you ain't seen nothing yet.

Politics:

Bill Cosby continues to hammer away on "black culture." Go Mr. Cosby. He is a very brave man; the push-back is building.

And I need to wrap things up here and get out of town before the worst of the fudgies descend on Traverse City.