I HAVE RECORDED A FANTASTIC PODCAST FOR YOU TO LISTEN TO!

Click here to listen to my new podcast called THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH! You
can also right click and do that "save target" thing and download it to your
ipod thing.

Thing thing thing. Thing.

I DON'T KNOW HOW WE DID IT, BUT WE DROVE FROM CA TO AL

In 2007 we embarked on my first ever cross country journey. My wife had
done it going from Texas to California, but not this direction and on this
route. Route 40 following ever so close to the famous Route 66.

We ended up leaving LA early Sunday morning and ended up in Flagstaff Sunday
night. Then we ended up getting up really early the next morning and
hitting the road for Amarillo. That's what I hate about cross country road
trips, all the getting up early, driving all day, and then getting to bed
late just to turn around and do it again the next day. You don't even get
to really enjoy the amazing things your seeing.

The picture above is from when we drove through New Mexico just after
Albuquerque. We hit this huge sudden downpour of hail and lightning and all
kinds of stuff we don't usually see in Southern Cal. We had just left an
AWFUL Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque, by the way. It was so bad, I
didn't even tip, and I ALWAYS TIP!

So finally at the end of the day we reached Amarillo where we stayed the
night and the next morning I began hearing accents! As I ate a waffle
shaped like Texas in the hotel lobby, I heard all around me words and
pronunciations I seldom heard in my coastal California town. This
only increased as we flew through Oklahoma and then Arkansas where we stayed
the night just inside the city limits of Little Rock one of the worst
hotels I have ever stayed at!

The entrance to our hotel room was a few feet away from an indoor swimming
pool. The room smelled of chlorine. Not to mention the hotel had people
staying there who were "permanent." Just a bizarre place. The next morning
I went out to get Starbucks for my wife who was putting on her make-up and
the barista told me she too was from California in the general area that I
was from . That made me feel good and let me know the finger prints of my
state could be seen everywhere.

That day saw us go through Memphis, Tennessee, into Mississippi, then
through Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The history I was passing through! In
Muscle Shoals some of my favorite tunes had been recorded. Then it was an
hour to Huntsville and green, green grass and trees and lovely humidity.
Then the beginning of our new life that would last EXACTLY two years!

More on that on the way as well as a new crazy podcast! Check back soon!

McMANSIONS ARE DEAD! YAYYYYYY!

Living in Huntsville, Alabama, all you see are McMansions. When you are
first surrounded by them, after living in Ventura, California, the land of
the 1500 square foot homes, you think, "Wow, look at all these beautiful
homes! There's places for kids to play. This is paradise!"

But if you've ever lived in a 2000 plus square foot home you start to
realize, YOU'VE GOT A LOT OF SPACE TO FILL!

I went into several McMansions in the South and noticed...people fill them
up with crap! Superfluous stuff. At some point you can't hold on to junk,
that's what they invented garage sales for. Oh, and that's another thing:
nobody has garage sales! Saturday mornings people are squeezing in that
extra visit to their favorite mega-church.

The real estate site Trulia and several developers across the nation say
that the era of the McMansion is over. I can't believe that in the 1960's
the average home size was 1200 square feet, in the 1980's it was 1710 square
feet, and by the 2000's it was 2330 square feet!

No wonder we are getting so heavy as a nation, we've had room to grow!

So now people are scaling back. Square footage is going back down under
2000. People need to downsize and hopefully this will continue so we stop
being so wasteful. We Americans have a natural tendency to be wasteful.
Actually, it's more of a human trait. You go to countries that don't
monitor this stuff and it's shocking what they waste, what goes into their
water systems, what goes into their air. I live in a town now where you
have 3 trash cans: one that goes to the landfill and the other 2 go to
recycling and green waste. AND THEY CLOSELY MONITOR IT! If you mess up and
put green waste in the recycling can you get fined at least 80 bucks! But
that's the kind of self-monitoring we need to do. Mother Nature doesn't
take too kindly to wasteful humans. She'll shake us off like a dog after a
bath.

Relocating from Alabama to Alameda (county) I have seen a lot of differences
that make sense to me now, and I'm glad for one that the McMansions are
disappearing. Next blog I'll tell you more about the trip my wife and I
made cross-country in her car as we moved to Alabama almost three years ago.

In 2007 I moved to Huntsville, Alabama.

Along with my amazing wife we moved our furniture that covered a not quite
500 square foot duplex unit in Ventura, California.

That's Southern California.

Thinking maybe being in the south part of one of the largest states and
economies in the world I thought I might be prepared for "The South." Well
that was a bit of an assumption on my part.

I will tell you I am known for my assumptions. My wife points them out to
me, "Just because person X does that sometimes does not mean he or she does
that ALL the time!"

The South is known for it's hospitality. One of the first things I noticed
was when I drove on two lane country roads, EVERYBODY WAVED TO ME! Some
people did the "one finger wave." In California, that means you just got
flipped off. In the South it's your pointing finger raising ever so
slightly off your steering wheel, and it's quite friendly.

I still am amazed by that. Now that I live in Alameda County in California
I don't see it as much. Yes, I do get a friendly wave now and then though
it's entirely when driving in the suburban parts, never the cities.

Oh, and the HUMIDITY! Yes, that was very different than from where I was
from. The "h's," hospitality and humidity. Those were the biggest
changes. With humidity comes unpredictable, sometimes violent weather. We
saw our share of that.

It was a chore to become adapted to the South, much more than I thought it
would.

What was even crazier was the drive there.

I AM SO SICK OF MEG BRAINWASHING AND BUY HER WAY INTO CALIFORNIA! HERE IS the Truth About Jerry | Jerry Brown for Governor http://ping.fm/TK2FC

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM RUNS RAMPANT IN TEA PARTY!!! Creationists, racists, calling-everybody-socialists...how can I support this group? They want "change" &drknss

POLITICAL DEBATE IS A FUN FUN THING

So I was reading a friend of mine's post on facebook the other day and he said congratulations to Elena Kagan being sworn in as new Supreme Court justice. One of the comments below from one of his friends had a problem with Ms. Kagan not being entirely "investigated" before she was nominated and that Obama is just ramrodding her down our collective throats.

I went back and forth with this guy over the topic in the comments I left below his on this thread, yet he always returned to his point that Elena Kagan was never completely dissected in public for all the world to see.

Though I agree all this needs to be transparent, something Obama promised on the campaign trail, what irks me is this facebook commenter would probably not give a dang if the new justice had been nominated by a Republican president.

I am soooo sick of the johnny-come-lately's. I'm sick of people protesting taxes, when the last president was just as bad and none of their teetotaling buddies cared back then. It's just when a new president, who isn't their party or their color comes along, they decide to bust out their folding chairs and igloos and make a holler.

The facebook guy was causing the same trouble. And though one of his white palin-lovin' gay-hatin' friends came to his defense to go after me, it was obvious I was not going to change his mind in that I am not some private investigator who can tell you everything Elena is about.

Quite frankly, none of my friends can.

That's how we Americans are. There's so much that the government does that we never see. But why all the attention, all of a sudden? Obama is giving us much more transparency than the last administration: remember the darth lord Cheney? Yet all those people that supported the last administration are now coming out of the woodwork to protest the new one. How seriously can you take them when they're just jumping on a rickety band wagon?

I bring this argument up about how Fox and talk radio fires against the President every day, yet the Dixie Chicks become practically lynched because of one 15 word sentence they said at a completely obscure concert no one over here cared about.

Smell hypocrisy? If you don't you'll probably be voting for a bespectacled moose-hunter in 2 years.