Major Mike’s Musings

Mauri and Dee Rice, Terry and Jerry Crawford

Friday we were blessed to have a visit from some long-time friends from Indianapolis. Mauri and Dee Rice come to central Florida each winter for about three months. Jerry and Terry Crawford are down for about a week.

Mauri, Jerry, and I played golf while Mrs. Major, Dee, and Terry visited. Fortunately, I didn’t embarrass myself. Neither did Mauri or Jerry.

Later we went to dinner at one of the local clubs, El Santiago. It specializes in fish with a Caribbean flavor. Yummy.

All in all it was a fun afternoon and evening. Friends are great! These are no exception.

When somebody did something very well, my mom said, “They did it up brown.” At the time I didn’t know where the phrase came from, but I now suspect it had cooking roots.

Anyway, The Villages, announced a trash recycling program that they’ve been working on for three years. Three years, you say? This required careful coordination with several trash companies and two of the three affected local county governments. They have also coordinated with local merchants like Publix, Wal-Mart, Lowes, Ace Hardware, and Home Depot, to make sure there will be enough supply of the required trash bags.¹

Here’s the plan:Homeowners collect recyclables into 13 gallon clear drawstring trash bags. Pretty much everything that is recyclable is eligible: plastic, newspaper, magazines, phone books, aluminum and steel cans, glass, etc. (See the reprint on the left) Then they leave the recycling bags at curbside on one of the two “trash pickup days” each week. Simple as that. No sorting. On top of that it’s only $1.47 per month added to the trash bill and the first month, March, is free.

Some folks are complaining about the $1.47 and that the system’s too complex. I guess there’s no pleasing some folks. For me, it’s a painless way to be a little bit green…and do it up brown.

1. That they’ve all sold out is not The Villages fault [↩]

Mrs. Major has bad knees. She’s been taking cortisone shots every three months in them for almost a year in order to reduce the pain she constantly feels. Convinced that she was ready for surgery, she went to see the surgeon to set up the surgery…hoping to have both knees done within the next three months. He talked her out of it. He told her it was her decision, but when she pressed him for his opinion, he said, “Wait.” So she’s waiting.

With the shots she can make it from the car to the store, or the golf cart to the swimming pool, but forget about a day at the mall or the museum or the gardens. We recently went on a cruise and just the walking on the ship was painful. She’s going to tough it out until she can’t stand it.

One of the reasons she decided to wait is the doctor told her she’s too young to have the surgery.  :grin:

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” — John Kenneth Galbraith

From the Daily Sun, February 6, 2008:

Confused Florida voters try to cast ballots

Florida voters got so caught up in the excitement of Super Tuesday many tried to cast ballots for the presidential primaries — again.

Election officials across the state said they fielded hundreds of phone calls from confused voters asking where they could vote Tuesday, apparently unaware that Florida’s presidential primary was last week.

“We’ve had over 100 calls at least over the last two days,” said Kathy Adams, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor.

“Caught up in the excitement” is a complete mis characterization of the ignorance of these Florida voters. It’s not that we had early polling for two solid weeks before a week ago Tuesday’s election complete with campaign visits and ads from all the Republican candidates. One would have to living in a cave to miss all that.

Maybe we should yield to the stereotype of Florida and chalk it up to a “senior moment”.

Maybe since the Dems side of the primary was essentially marching in place due to the decision by the DNC to not count Florida’s votes at the convention for having the primary on Jan 29, many Dems weren’t paying attention to the election.¹ Or since Hillary came to Florida after the primary vote, perhaps voters got confused as to when the election was.²

Maybe some voters just figured that they were entitled to vote twice during each election.³

I don’t know.

1. It wasn’t reported, by the way, how many of the callers were Republicans or Democrats [↩]
2. Palm Beach County is the next county north of the infamous Broward and Miami-Date counties made famous by the 2000 presidential election [↩]
3. We do have migrants from Chicago and New York, don’tchaknow [↩]