Today was a belated Easter brunch with my family in Washington Crossing (where, as I've probably mentioned before, I went to elementary school, my great aunt was postmistress, and we were taught that George Washington crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day to fight the Battle of Trenton and defeat the godless Hessians. I kid you not). Part of the drive is spent on the PA turnpike. Over the past few years they've changed all the exit numbers from the original sequential numbers to numbers based on the mile markers. This is one more piece of evidence that the patterns in the brain harden over time - it's going to take years to convince my mind that the Philadelphia exit is anything other than exit 28 and the Valley Forge exit will always be exit 24. These numbers in the 300s (and *why* weren't the exits numbered from east to west, which is, I believe, the direction the turnpike grew?) will take a long time to sink in.

On the way home we stopped at the house I grew up in and took a few pictures. The house itself looks much the same, although the house next door, which was my grandparents has been damaged beyond recognition. The people who bought it (they can't be called a family because there's no known familial connection between any of them) have torn up the entire yard and left gigantic piles of dirt scattered about, put in hideously ugly landscaping, parked multiple vehicles in the front yard, ripped shingles off the house, started to add a new foundation around the house to expand it, torn the front porch off, allowed parts of the wood trim to rot away, and dumped a load of gravel down the driveway and over the plants that lined the driveway. If this was a work-in-progress, some short-term project that would be complete in weeks or months, that would be understandable. It is not. This has gone on for years, with repeated calls to the township and the health department falling on deaf ears. My sister and her family finally got so disguted they moved and now can't sell their house because of the abomination next door. There is apparently no basis for a lawsuit, so they put up a fence to try to screen out the filth and decay and revolting conditions. I can only hope that my grandparents aren't twirling in their graves over this desecration of their prior home.

Watching some piece of undoubtedly highly educational material on TV last night, I didn't hit the mute button fast enough and was entertained by an ad for the Lysol Ready Brush. Does anyone else see the striking resemblance to a part of the male anatomy in the design, or is it just me? The women in the ad were fondling the brush, not able to take their hands off it as it shot its "powerful thick foam" into their bowls. Maybe I'm just spending too much time with bad, bad TV.