"Garfield" got a big laugh from me today--Odie brings him a birthday card with a gift certificate for a new hip.

I got rained on a bit this afternoon when I left for home. A few drops hit me as I was walking, then I had to have the wipers on for a couple of miles. However, the rain did not come east to Slidell. Tomorrow is looking better for it however. For a while I was thinking that my monitor had run out of green pixels for the weather maps.

I finished the box of nothing but page after page listing donations to Newcomb. "Development" is a full time activity at any college. The next box is mostly letters from hot prospiects--or as they quaintly put it--potential major donors.

The year before Pete retired I talked him into making a largish ($3000, as I recall) donation to the University of New Orleans. His company matched donations up to that amount, and UNO got a really nice one. And we got invited to lunch with the university president. It was a very pleasant lunch, but after he retired the company no longer matched, of course. He wasn't particularly interested in alumni activities, and I was doing graduate work at Tulane.

But after reading some of the letters I can see that raising money has to be an all-consuming passion for colleges and universities. That's not my cup of tea.

The carpenter bought the wood needed for the fence repair. He's hoping it doesn't rain in the morning--or the afternoon and said his take on the weather is that Sunday will likely be better. Whatever.

The other day when I was at WalMart I saw a huge double rotor helicopter flying low nearby. It looked like it was carrying tree trunks. And that's just what it was doing. It's hard to get a ground vehicle into where waterways are filled with downed trees and such, so the workmen go in, cut the trees etc. and tag them with something bright. Then the helicopter comes in at treetop level, lets down a claw hook, grabs the tree, and moves it to a better location.

In the days immediately following Katrina, the dominant noise was helicopters. The National Guard Armory is about three miles from here, and the local airport maybe four miles. It seemd to be non-stop, often with half a dozen copters in the air at a time. I do hope we won't have a repeat of that.

Have you checked the figures for Iraqi dead lately? There's a link on the home page. There's also the AWAD link. It's not the word today that got my attention, but the quote that is totally unrelated to the day's word. However, it is related to yesterday's word.

I've talked about this and I've talked about that.

That's all folks!