Spring is here—cold, warm, dry, wet, overcast, and sunshine. Good morning all:

Wisdom of the Week

“We can be sure that the greatest hope for maintaining equilibrium in the face of any situation rests within ourselves” — Francis J. Braceland

True, whether paddling my kayak or seeing companies such as Caterpillar, AT&T, 3M scrambling to quickly restate their earnings massively downward; we’re all the ones that need to work to stay in balance. The earnings restatement is the other shoe dropping and points directly to the economic wreckage of congress’ shoddy, jerry-rigged (aka—doing a MacGyver) piece of legislation called the healthcare bill; Mr. Braceland hit the nail.

One more snipped on healthcare. What we just witnessed is the most perfect example of the proverbial “boiling frog” allegory. We’ll all be so hooked by the time the final deciphering of all that was jammed into 2500 pages that we won’t be able to jump out of the pot. Forty years ago the Federal government first stuck its finger into the student loan tub. Last week, sneaked in as a part of the Healthcare bill, the Feds have completely taken over student loans and taken any cost containment incentives out of the marketplace. It is not unreasonable to calculate that within the next forty years all of our healthcare will be run by government functionaries and edict. Anyone care to guess what’s next?

Regarding my weekly postings; my forced move to a new WordPress platform and migrating from my private domain onto Blogger via FTP is an utter disaster. As Blogger stated: “Bloggers who rely on our FTP service to publish their blog to their own domain had a rough week last week. In fact, it’s been a bumpy month or two. Let’s start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we’re sorry.” Currently I am ready to differ with Mr. Braceland and start screaming for some help. I’ll give it one more day as a do-it-yourself project.

I was sitting for Vaioleti on Tuesday. After watching Sid the Science Kid we hit the toy corner. I was reading various letters carved on each side of some wooden blocks. This led to lining them up so that we could read and do a sing-songy ABC. At some point we came across a block that had a picture of an apple. I pointed and said “apple”, then found a couple of other apple examples. It was then that I realized that, very softly, Vai was also saying “ah-pel;” her very first two-syllable word. It was a thrilling moment!

Next week will be an exciting one. Tuesday some travel to Ocoee, FL starts. While Kirstin and Vince spend a long weekend in New York, Derek and Kellen will strive hard to give me back my youth. That last bit I got from a never ending stream of TV commercials dealing with something called “Natural Hormone Replacement.” I believe that my Derek and Kellen method will be infinitely more natural. We’ll have a blast!

Now, I best jump into the blog migration abyss.

Make it a great week everyone.

Cheers,

Dirk