All about me

An interesting question: How much would you spend on a sick pet? One school of though might be that a pet becomes a member of the family, so you spend whatever it takes. But another is that it's a little obscene to spend so much on animals when so many people have no or inadequate health care. Or you could put a dollar amount on it:

Happy 235th birthday to the U.S. Army, still out there on the front lines defending Americans' freedom and way of life. You're welcome. No, really, don't mention it.

While my brother and I spent the week with our sister in Indianapolis, she started and nearly finished a long-planned project -- a long hallway wall filled with family pictures. There are three rows of them three or four frames deep, starting with a great-grandfather on our mother's side and ending at near-present time. There are several groups of three featuring my siblings and me at various stages of our life: barely out of infancy, grade school, high school graduation, adulthood.

I may do a post or two next week, but mostly I'll be on vacation. Back full-time on Monday the 14th.

Been there, done that:

Speaking with Meredith Vieira on TODAY Wednesday, People magazine's Washington correspondent Sandra Sobieraj Westfall said she interviewed a dozen Gore family friends in the wake of Tuesday's announcement. And those friends told her they might have seen the writing on the wall if they had looked closely enough.

Anybody want to buy a few hundred cookbooks? I'm not much of a collector, but I began buying cookbooks about 25 years ago when I took a baking class at Ivy Tech and started spending a lot more time in the kitchen. But, as I may have mentioned before, I hardly ever use them. They're still fun to browse through, but it's pain to actually find a recipe you want to make in them. If you want a good bean soup recipe, for example, you can spend a couple of hours looking through the books to find one that interests you.

That confusing "Lost" finale explained, sort of, kind of:

THEY WERE NOT “DEAD THE WHOLE TIME"

I'm one of those 40 percent of all U.S. households with a Kroger "loyalty card," though I didn't know it was called that. You let them scan it everytime you check out, and it usually knocks at least a few bucks off the total. But, wait, there's more:

Millions of Kroger customers across the nation get Loyal Customer Mailings at their homes all over the United States as well

My new hero:

SAN ANTONIO -- When you think of an 87-year-old, do you think of someone running a 100-meter dash? How about making a double play? Can you imagine an 87-year-old pole vaulting? Adolph Hoffman does all that and more.

[. . .]

Hoffman played ball when he was young, but then came World War II.  After that was family and work.

Sometimes we make mistakes for no discernible reason. Then there are the slips with an easily understood origin (at least for the one making the slip).

Last week, I wrote both a blog post and an editorial inviting former City Councilman Dr. John Crawford, who is asking for public input on whether to seek elective office again, to initiate a discussion on what constitutes "small" and "big" government. He has a deserved reputation as a fiscal conservative, but he was also in on some quite activist government, e.g. the smoking ban and Harrison Square.