Bite Me, Tony

                                                                         It is Thanksgiving Day and we are sitting in our living room watching the National Dog Show on NBC while our pre-ordered dinners are reheating in the kitchen. We were supposed to be in Wilmington NC today celebrating the holiday with loved ones (and their Frenchie) but if you've followed this blog at all, you know that our excursions out of town don't often turn out well. In this case, we didn't even get the luggage loaded in the car before potential disaster struck, necessitating a last-minute cancellation and two holiday meals hastily ordered from the Publix deli. Of course, when we went to pick up the meals last night, there was no record of them ever being ordered and the lady in charge shrugged and (rather flippantly) said " sorry but you should have placed the order online instead of over the phone, that way there'd be proof you ordered it. " In spite of the fact that I was wearing

The midterm elections happened last night but the votes in some key states are still being counted. We voted by mail weeks ago because we weren't certain we'd be back from the ill-fated road trip in time to cast our ballots. Well.....   Florida, unsurprisingly, went totally RED but, frankly, I've given up on expecting anything better from a state run, and largely populated, by.... Florida Men  (and their obliging womenfolk). The undisputed upside of the election is that we won't have to see any more of those obnoxious campaign ads for another year and a half (give or take a month). So, no matter what happens, there's that, and that is no small blessing.  Also, Dr. Mehmet Fucking Oz--thanks a lot for that , Oprah--got beat by the phenomenal John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate Race, thanks to Fetterman's absolute refusal to be sidelined or distracted by the stroke he suffered last May. Amazing man, Fetterman! Georgia, on the other hand, is headed to a run

This year, Halloween came and went with barely a blip on the radar. It wasn't meant to be this way but my usual month-long festival of horror films was never going to be in the cards since we'd planned on being away the last half of October. Actually, we did go away on an oft-postponed Bucket List Road Trip to view the Autumnal splendor of western New England.  Well, that was our intention, anyway. As sometimes happens with the best intentions, shit backfired and we ended up returning to southeast Florida a mere 9 days after first setting out. There was a cracked windshield along the way, and then a roofing nail found its way into a front tire as we drove around the historic district of Alexandria, VA. After getting the tire repaired, we headed out to Mount Vernon, George Washington's picturesque home on the Potomac River, where we toured the property with hordes--literally, hordes --of high school and middle school students, all of us jammed tightly together in the long,