Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin'... into the future.

Since my last post, the weather warmed up and melted the foot of snow we got last week, rained for two days, then got cold and is trying to snow. A major storm should be rolling in just in time for us to drive down state for Thanksgiving with Debbie's family. Sweet. Seriously, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. I must be getting too old, or just too lazy to deal with it.

Friday was my birthday, so we had dinner at my parents' place. Nothing elaborate; it's just another birthday. Saturday was a work day, getting things ready for winter. Sunday was just Sunday with some food tossed in after morning service. Yesterday, the three of us had a quiet evening together watching movies and playing board games. I expect about the same level of excitement tonight as we finish up a "short" game of Monopoly.

A while back, I wrote about an 18-year-old high school senior who was elected Mayor on a write-in campaign. I assumed the party machine would find some irregularity and throw the election to the incumbent, but he was sworn in on Monday night. This could get interesting.

I grew up in Flint and lived there long enough to watch it decline from a vibrant, blue-collar city to a vast slum due to General Motors closing numerous plants and sending the work over-seas. Oh sure, they "retrained" the laid-off workers to all be computer programmers. I sat in college classes with many of these future Bill Gate's; watching them struggle with high-school-level math problems, and consume all the computer language instructors' time with questions about how to log on to the network and the difference between writing code and building a spreadsheet. All these 50-something retrained factory workers then moved to California and created the .com bubble. Or something like that. In any case, it looks like more of the same. Many of the Michigan workers being laid off spend a fair chunk of their checks here in the Traverse City area. How and how much that will effect us up here is hard to tell. The business Nestina works at seems to be hanging by a thread. Debbie's employer is showing signs of instability. My job is probably safe, but I'm not sure how much longer I can take sitting in this grey freakin' box banging on 30-year-old COBOL code. Maybe we will get lucky and all lose our jobs at the same time so we can just leave and go someplace warm.

That's it.