Gator Country

good morning, ladies and gents....

its 2:52 a.m. central time, i am wide awake, there is nothing really watchable on the morass of channels available to me, they don't really account for nightowls, do they? or night workers...people that are awake at odd hours, as they certainly don't appear to be attempting to get anyone's attention much less nielsen rating.
lots and lots of exciting informercials!
even the news channels..every time i've flipped past cnn, larry king...

well we survived that ice storm fairly well intact. a few large branches are down, some are the size of small trees. but they missed our house, thankfully.
on the other hand, 35 miles up the road, good ol' dependable 'future home of the I-69 corridor' (which i continue to find amusing, what can i say, it doesn't take much)anyway, back to the highway..
35 miles of deccimated forests. they look like big forests of toothpicks. because the tops came down, jagged, and pointy...and the...

well actually the ice storm is gone now, today it got sunny and up to the low forties and it all melted. the ground feels (and smells) like a stale wet sponge.
we, it turns out, were lucky. we were on the very edge of the storm's boundary of ice and rain...and snakelike, it would shift back and forth, just enough to cause the heavy ice to turn to heavy rain, late tuesday night. so i thought, meh, i guess i will be going to work tomorrow, did a quick work out on my gazelle, had a bath, set...

welcome to the new year! hope its a better year than last year, the year that so many things seemed to go 'wrong' in. i'm sure there are some folks out there that didn't experience anything out of the ordinary in 2008, but i'm not one of them.
so we did all of the 'good luck' superstitious nonsense we could think of on new years eve.
spent some $$$ on my favorite champagne to do it right, also, so i was warmly fuzzy when the clock struck 12 here in the central time zone.
this...

before anyone laughs, or pokes fun at my (deliberate) misuse of the word 'internets' ....it is a democrat's joke. president bush (who i have newfound respect for as far as athletic talents i was not aware that he had, in ducking the thrown shoes) referred to the internet, as...'the internets'. plural.
(some people do not understand the difference between plural and singular, present and past tense, i have discovered).
back to the serious bizness of the internets:
this is the...