Good to meet up with you today. Let's see if we can find something to talk about.

I believe the song says, "Ain't it good to be back home again." And, for all intents and purposes, my little cubby-hole here at my workplace, well, it's where I spend some 55 to 60 waking hours each week, so, that qualifies as home-like to me. Especially when I lost Friday to the street flooding in our area, was off on Saturday and Sunday, and then had the Memorial Day holiday on Monday. Good morning and welcome to the start up of this short back to work week, here on this Tuesday, May 31, 2016. The upcoming battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is nothing less than unique in so many different ways. The first and most prominent is how disliked both candidates continue to be in national polling.  An NBC poll from last week showed that Hillary is disliked by 46% of those polled with The Donald very close, pulling an unfavorable rating of 43%. Never in our history, since polling began, have we had these kinds of unpopular candidates running for the highest office in the land. Why is this significant? I think we already see some of the impact in how the campaigns are framing the issue. They are focusing on building themselves up as the lesser of the two evils. Can you believe that? It goes like this: I know you don't like me but try to not like her even more, and vice versus. This will be about as dirty as it gets. In fact, when I think of the looming campaign, the image that comes to my mind is the late great local news personality Marvin Zindler. When he reported on food violations he would lead into it by loudly proclaiming, "Slime in the ice machine!" I think you get my meaning. If not, stick around, I think you will see it all too clearly, played out in high definition, or HD, for my techie friends.

The other day I was perusing our actual hotel bill from the first night of our honeymoon from back in December 1964. It was the Holiday Inn in Alexandria, Louisiana, Room 547. We ordered room service for our dinner. It was $3.62. The next morning we ordered in breakfast. It was $2.50. When we checked out, the bill for the room was $9.00 plus $0.18 tax. Our total for the room and two meals: $15.30. That same room accommodation today runs around $105.00 per day. Those lower costs were a long time ago. We've been many miles since then. Here's an example. Last Thursday I arranged to leave early from work to come home and get ready to drive about 45 minutes for our great granddaughter's kindergarten graduation. I made it home. I got cleaned up. The wife and I were both dressed and ready to leave. The weather reports were not cooperating with our plans. We had a huge rain storm headed our way. It was imminent. We ended up cancelling our trip. And, the skies opened up and for the next four or five hours it rained so hard it was hard to see our street out in front of our house. We are so thankful for the journey we've had, thus far. While we hated to miss our Madelyn Joy's special night, we are so thankful for her, our three sons, their wives, our 8 granddaughters, our 3 grandsons, and our brand new great grand first grader. We are blessed. Amen.

Last Saturday we had planned on running over to Louisiana to visit mom and dad. The flooding was widespread, therefore, early Saturday morning I put in to checking all the various weather reports, road closings, and other details for our area and especially for all the highways on our route. They either failed to post one or I missed it. It turned out to be the mother of all detours. They had US59 completely shutdown at Cleveland, Texas. All traffic had to exit and go through the little town. All traffic had to wait to turn left at a traffic signal that was allowing maybe 4 or 5 vehicles through at the most. We lost about 45 minutes there. We did see the local police at work there. They were writing people tickets. For what we didn't know, but they seemed oblivious to the horrendous back up in traffic. We did finally make it to Louisiana and it turned out to be a most wonderful visit. My sisters Fran and JoAnn were there. And, one of Fran's grandsons was having a big Memorial Day fish fry out in the country and we were able to see all her clan, some 35 or more gathered together. Mom is doing well. On our way out of the area we met up with the wife's sister, Dorothy, and Glenda, the widow of Bro. Milton. We enjoyed a catfish dinner with them and then we returned home. We didn't dare even think about thinking about going back towards Cleveland, but made our way across the fruited plains to Huntsville, hitting I-45 so we could get back to where so many are dealing with flood related issues. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them all. Have a great rest of the day and may God bless each one. Amen. ....More later.