I always enjoy you all's this and that posts, so I better take my own turn.

Here is a tidbit from today's Las Vegas Review Journal:
'DURING THE RECENT TRIAL OF THE MAN ACCUSED of shooting police officers during a 2007 stand-off, an attorney listed the drugs defendant Terry Dixon was under the influence of at the time: crack, cocaine, marijuana and possibly heroin.

To calm him down, Dixon's mother went to the store and bought him a bottle of vodka.

"Probably not the best idea," said Nadine Morton, Dixon's attorney.

Dixon injured three police officers.'

This time of year we are hot in the middle of tax preparation, primarily gathering the backup documentation in the form of 1099s and all that. It is a time for making sure all the bank statements are reconciled and I scan everything into Adobe Acrobat documents so I have a portable copy of all my files.

Mr. Troutbend is in the doghouse because if I'm not here to snatch up any business correspondence that comes in, it just disappears here in the house. He doesn't automatically throw it away, but can't produce it. We just had a four-day run-in over a missing bank deposit that he denied any knowledge of until I finally let the people who sent the check that we'd need a new check and I'd pay the stop payment fees. The email had barely left my out box when here he comes with the check stub and documentation that he'd had in his little crap pile of casino junk mail all along; he'd received the check and mailed in the deposit without telling me. Somehow it got delayed so didn't hit the December bank deposit, which is why I thought it was missing. I like reading mystery stories, not living them.

Last night I stayed up late going through his checkbook to try and reconstruct all the bank statements we are missing and today I asked him if he could look for them one more time. Come to find out, there is not only the little pile of junk mail on the dining room table, but a whole rather large box in which were three bank statements and a Certificate of Insurance I had requested from the fishing club many months ago. The COI is to prove that the fishing club has adequate coverage in case one of the members is injured on our property and sues us, and we need one for every year, not hit or miss. I was starting to feel put out with them, and here it was all this time cooling its heels in the chasm of forgotten mail. I just know there has to be another box 'o mail somewhere so I'll keep looking.

You are probably wondering why we don't have some kind of a system to prevent this. We do. We have an In-Box for the business mail, but all that ends up there is bowling league information.

On the subject of weather, it rained steadily all day yesterday, and instead of the usual two one-hundredths of an inch a storm will bring, we got at least half an inch. Now that front is in western Colorado. They probably need it because most of the storms this winter have been to the north of Colorado.

I was going to watch the Pro Bowl, but got side-tracked by a PBS show about a French couple who walked the whole length of Africa, visiting with the various people along the way. What I saw was day 570 or so, Mount Kilimanjaro. I can't imagine being away from home that long, and presume they must have taken some breaks. Did you ever see Michael Palin's shows where he went all around the Pacific Rim or from pole to pole? Towards the end he was so sick of it and homesick I felt really sorry for him.

Hope you all are having a great day.