Stupid stimulus, manic mario

I felt too blah to do a 300 yesterday at the gym.  Luckily my gym buddy wasn’t there.

 I added a Bush countdown widget to the blog, in case you are too blind to see it.  It counts down the remaining days of madness we have left.

Speaking of Mr Bush, I keep forgetting to talk about the “stimulus” package he has been pushing so hard for.  I think that it is in a word, stupid.  It seems like just more simple political posturing that has only one true purpose, to garner votes for republicans.  That being said, I don’t understand why it apparently has democratic support as well, albeit a slightly different version.  Let me get this straight, we are facing the largest deficit in US history, W just submitted the largest budget in US history and we are going to pile on top by sending out rebate checks to US taxpayers???  I mean where is the logic in this?  Sending people a rebate check for five or six hundred bucks isn’t going to change their life in any significant manner whatsoever.  It will however cost the US government billions of dollars that they already don’t have.  It is like the government is patterning it’s spending after the typical US consumer that is buried in credit card debt.  Buy now, pay later, and dearly.  Keep my 600 bucks and use it towards the social security fund or to help lop dollars off our astronomical debt.  It seems that the government is targeting idiots that think no deeper than “Um me get check, me like money…”  Argh it’s so frustrating.

I was playing Super Mario galaxy last night on the Wii.  The game is downright frantic at times., enough to freak me out.  There was a zone I was in where you rode a manta ray along strips of water suspended in space.  If you went off the edge of the water you fell to your death.  For the life of me I could not stay on the course, it was driving me mad.    Then I gave up on that and went to another zone that was worse.  You know those things you give babies that have various cut out shapes that you insert into holes of the same shape, like triangle, square circle?  Well in this zone imagine you have these holes on a flat sheet and they are moving in various directions.  Mario has to walk across these sheets and avoid all the open spaces which are everywhere. If you fall into a space, you die. It was maddening.  It stressed me out.  I said to Ali several times “How in the world do little kids do this…”  Ali commented it was no wonder most kids today seem to be hyper with ADD.  I was glad when I died the final time, it was just too much.

Our next door neighbors whom we have become good friends with over the years have a For Sale sign in front of their house.  They are going their separate ways.  It is very depressing for us.  We loved having neighbors we got a long with plus since Nicki knows and loves them, they were able to come over and attend to her if we needed it.  It’s going to really suck when they go.  The only perverse hope we have is because of the down housing market, it may be awhile until they can sell the place. Oh well, I guess all things change, sooner or later.