Amy Currioman

I love how the Internet has made so many of us “global citizens.”  I can remember when I had to work really hard to get information about things that were happening out of town!  If you wanted information on a particular town, you had to contact the local chamber of commerce and try to get copies of the local newspapers.  If you wanted to buy something specific to that town, like Georgia Dome tickets, or United Center Tickets or even Tournament of Roses Parade Tickets you had to use the long distance operator to try to help you find telephone numbers and then make a seemingly never-ending series of long distance telephone calls to try to find out how to get tickets!

But now, with the advent of the Internet, and the increasing access it has made possible to the consumer, you can get all of those things just with the click of a mouse and a credit card or paypal account!  The ease in which this can be done is almost unimaginable to those of us who were adults before the Internet was invented.  It truly is a modern marvel!

One of my biggest gripes about people is that so many people are dishonest. I would like to be able to trust everyone to be forthright and say what they mean. There are just so many out there that don’t say what they mean, and it leaves me guessing what they REALLY meant by that! And there are also too many people who don’t mean what they say. An insincere apology is worse than no apology at all.

I think that may be one reason why I prefer the company of animals to people (for the most part.) At least with an animal, you can trust them to be that animal. You know where you stand with it. You know that a snake is a snake, and that they can be trusted to be a snake. It’s much harder with people; there are a lot of people that are really snakes in disguise. I’m always dismayed when I discover a human snake.

My hubby has been talking about buying a new car next year.  If everything goes right, we should be able to trade in our scion on a new vehicle.  The biggest problem (besides the money!) is picking out which new car we would like to get.  My hubby says that he really wants either a saab 9-5 or a 2010 vw golf.  He’s never owned a saab before, and he is really impressed with the history of the company.

The saab company is a Swedish company, and they got their start making air plane engines.  When I was very young my parents bought a saab.  It ran a very long time and they ended up giving it to my older sister for her high school graduation present.  I always thought it was a funny looking little car, and it only had three cylinders, which made it sound funny.  My parents loved it though, and it served the family well.  When they gave it to my sister they bought a new one for themselves.  I remember learning how to drive in that car – it had a feature in it that my father called “free wheeling” which meant that even though it was a manual transmission if it was put in “free wheeling” mode it would not stall out if the driver wasn’t using the clutch properly.  Looking back, I think that was a fantastic car to learn to drive in!  I wonder if all the saabs still have that feature!

I’ve always been partial to suvs, though.  The biggest drawback to them is that so many of them don’t get good gas mileage.  I think that the reason I’ve liked them is that they are roomy, like the station wagons we had when we were growing up.

I was reading an article on the Yahoo news that the mayor of Moscow is planning to make sure that the big snow storms that plague Moscow in the winter dump all of Moscow’s snow on the outlying suburbs. He plans to do that by having their air force seed the approaching storm clouds so that they dump their snow before they can reach the city. Although it sounds like a good plan (for the city of Moscow!) I can only imagine how terrible that would be for the suburbs of Moscow – they would get all of their own snow, and all of Moscow’s snow too! They will be buried!

I’m glad I don’t live in a suburb of Moscow!