Major Mike’s Musings

Mrs. Major had her family doctor’s appointment to ensure she’s in good enough health for her knee surgery. She passed. Now all she has left is giving more blood on Thursday, a pre-op meeting at the hospital on Monday, May 12 (her birthday) and the surgery on the 15th. Counting the days.

Chicago Tribune April 6, 2008 sec. 1 p. 6:

Over the last few decades, single gender dorms have become hard to find on a college campus.  Many moved to coed floors, coed suites, and coed bathrooms.  Now a number of schools have instituted coed rooms.  Approximately 30 campuses now have rooms that are officially shared by male and female roommates.   Schools who have made the switch say that gender-blind dorm rooms are more inclusive and acknowledge modern realities.  Most of the schools discourage romantically involved students from rooming together, but maintain that such choices are up to the students.  Critics say coed rooms are one more indicator of the eroding morals on the college campus.  

So do I.

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” -Abraham Lincoln

A bevy of truckers are trying to clog up Washington DC traffic in protest of high diesel prices. One of the things they want lawmakers to do is to cap diesel, gas, and natural gas prices. Noooooooooooooo!

Don’t they remember what happened in the 70s when that happened? Prices got capped. Supplies dwindled. Gas pump lines got long, really long.

What good is cheap gas when you can’t get any?

The Villages Daily Sun quoted the New York Post regarding global warming and beer prices:

High beer prices are on tap, and global warming could be to blame.

The environmental crisis has hit suds-lovers where it hurts most–at the bar and in the wallet–as prices of grains and hops soar, activists say.

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Mrs. Major gave blood for the very first time in her life today. In preparation for the bilateral knee replacement she’s scheduled for next month, she needed to donate two pints of her own blood in case they’re needed during the surgery. She has awful veins for the vampires. In fact, when she gives samples for blood tests, they have to use butterfly needles and get the blood from her hand. Today, the expert from Ocala was in town at the blood center and she drew Mrs. Major’s blood. She had to fish around a little to find the vein in her arm, but she found it. One pint down. One to go.

Back in the 1980s in Indianapolis we had Comcast as our TV provider. When we bought the house, it had already been wired for cable in a couple of spots and the TV reception was bad so we ordered Comcast, which was the only cable provider available. (more…)

I got bored again so I changed the theme of Musings. I had to modify it a little because I didn’t like the way some stuff was displayed and it didn’t accommodate all of the plugins I have installed.

I’d also love to do a countdown for Mrs. Major’s knee replacement and for Son Major and The Major’s trip to California to work at the U.S. Open Golf Championship, but the plugin that handles that doesn’t work with this version of Wordpress. I guess I’ll keep looking for a compatible one.

 The Congressional Budget Office released the following figures:¹

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1. Historical Effective Tax Rates: 1979-2005. Released December 2007 [↩]
2. Many in the category will get money “back” even though they paid no taxes. [↩]

Frustrated with the pain and inability to get around as much as she wants, Mrs. Major decided to go ahead with knee replacement surgery–on both knees at the same time. She’s scheduled for replacement on May 15, one month from now. “Bravo!” I say. (more…)

I added a plugin to Major Mike’s Musings that requires that anyone making comments must be a real human. You’ve seen this on other sites. This feature displays two words from a book which you will be required to enter in order to comment. One of the works a computer can’t read.

I’m getting tired of reviewing spam posts. I’ve had over 17,000 of them. 

UPDATE: It looks like the feature wasn’t working and people couldn’t post comments. So I disabled it. It worked fine on my home server test system. Hmmmm.