Where’s Fall?

This is NOT Texas

Fall.

Autumn.

My favorite time of year.

The weather is getting pleasantly cool, the nights are getting longer, the Fall foliage is in full colorful display………..

Except I live in Texas.

It was 103 here yesterday.

ONE HUNDRED and THREE freaking degrees on October 7th! It’s October………mere weeks from Halloween, and my damn air conditioning is still running ALL NIGHT LONG!!

The grass is still growing..

The trees are still just as full as they were months ago….

The bugs are still everywhere.

And the cars and grass are still soaking wet every morning………from the humidity.

I hate the weather here in Texas.

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Uh oh.

The kid got called into the Managers office at his job at the grocery store last night. The manager basically told the kid that he was one of their best employees, had a great work ethic, and since he had been there over a year, he deserved a raise. The kid was expecting the manager to give him the usual .25 cents per hour raise that everyone usually gets. Nope.

The kid got a $1.00 per hour raise!

And he fully deserves it. He just put in working 7 straight days, has been putting in 30 hour weeks while still going to school during the week, has been getting himself up and off to school in the mornings, and is on the A/B Honor Roll at school.

Well done Kid!

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Well…… I think it’s cute……….

I sit with the baby sitting on my belly, facing me, and have taught her to talk to me and stick her tongue out at me. It’s the cutest thing. Two months old and she sits there inches from my face, with us making little baby noises back and forth, as we stick out our tongues at each other.

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“My opponent is secretly a member of ISIS and actually participated in the gruesome beheading of an innocent westerner”

That is about the ONLY thing I have not yet heard or read on any of the hundreds of negative political ads burying us voters here in Texas this election season. I stress “yet”………. cause the ads have gotten nearly to that point…….with many weeks to go yet.

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It costs up to $75 PER VEHICLE to park at the Cowboys Football stadium in Arlington. Even $40 per car if you want to walk a mile to the stadium. Then, you get to the stadium and tickets for two might cost you another $200, along with another $100 for food and drinks. Some of the many reasons why I have yet to attend a single NFL football game. The kid and I are going to another MLS soccer game in a few weeks, watching FC Dallas play the Portland Timbers. Our tickets were $10 each and parking is free. And there is only one level of seating at the stadium, so there is not a bad seat in the place.

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NHL Hockey starts tonight.

Ice Hockey.

Did I mention it was 103 here yesterday???

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Bryan Cranston and my Gerbil

I am still slowly but surely making my way through watching all the seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. I had read about Anthony Hopkins, you know, the Academy Award-winning actor, sending Bryan Cranston a hand-written note in which he told Cranston that his work on “Breaking Bad” was the best acting he had ever seen, from anyone.

I can see how he would say that. It’s hard to believe you are watching “Hal” from “Malcolm in the Middle” portraying Walter White.

His is one of my favorite autographs in my collection, from his “Hal” days, because he wrote a personal message to me regarding the emails I had been sending him, in which I spelled out some gibberish about my pet gerbil being in peril if Cranston did not send me an autograph.

He’s still the second-friendliest celebrity I dealt with during my autograph-collecting days…

behind Martin Sheen.

Still the nicest guy on the planet, hands down.

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On a serious note…

The Liberian gentleman with Ebola in Dallas passed away this morning.

If any good can come from this tragedy, it is that the handling of the case in Dallas was so inept on so many levels that it has surely given a blueprint to the rest of the country on what NOT to do when facing an Ebola crisis.

Things here might get worse before they get better.

Last week, I wrote about the county sent five sheriff’s deputies to the infected apartment in order to serve quarantine orders on the four people still living there, who all had close contact with the victim. The deputies all entered the apartment, in which the Ebola patient had lived while sick, without any kind of protective clothing whatsoever. While the four people living the apartment were not showing any signs of sickness themselves, there were still lots of contaminated items that had come into contact with the victim still in the apartment. After news got out about the deputies, they were immediately placed on paid leave and sent home to be monitored. Their uniforms were all confiscated and bagged, and their patrol cars were taken out of service, even though they and their families were told that there was nothing to worry about.

This might be a false alarm, but this afternoon, a sick man has turned up at a clinic in a Dallas suburb. The Police have now taped off the mans SUV in the parking lot and word is out that this man may have Ebola-like symptoms. This man had “indirect contact” with the Ebola victim. How?

The man at the clinic is rumored to be one of the sheriff’s deputies that entered the apartment last week, according to the tweets of a local TV reporter.

If that’s true, this is just another sad chapter in the total mishandling and ineptitude of the local authorities in relation to how they handled the Ebola patient.