Yesterday was kind of a crappy day off. Nothing wrong with the weather or anything, though, in a sign that global warming is for real, the deer flies were out in force at the park. They normally aren’t this annoying until July. The bigger problem was with my 1998 Chevy Astro van. Turns out another brake line blew out, and the fact that it doesn’t get driven much caused the brakes to rust all to hell, and one caliper is frozen. Plus, turns out they added leaky gas tanks to the list of things that make it fail inspection. So, it’s big bucks for me, at a time when I really would just as soon not have to shell out big bucks. Then, even worse, I get an e-mail this morning from AARP (which is bad enough in and of itself) with a subject of “Your Sex & Relationship Questions Answered!” I don’t actually have any questions on those fronts, and even if I did, AARP wouldn’t my first choice for advice. I didn’t read it, but I can only imagine it has tips for how to have an active sex life with a catheter, and ads for a new line of thong Depends®.

Other sad news yesterday, as Himan Brown passed away about a month and half short of his 100th birthday. My condolences to Melina and her family. As a fan of old time radio, Hi’s shows have brought me a lot of enjoyment. Especially the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which ran from Jan 1974 through the end of 1982 – taking me from 8th grade through dropping out of my second college. Hi and company managed to crank out something like 1,400 original episodes over those nine years, which is pretty amazing.

Then we had thunderstorms go through in the middle of the night last night. They don’t bother me, but they scare the hell out of the dogs, and when the dogs are scared, there’s no sleep for me. And there’s a big Frisbee – oh, excuse me – Disc golf tournament going on at the park today (yeah, they take this shit really seriously), so I can’t take the dogs there, and I can’t take them to visit their country cousins this week, either.

Well, let’s hope this weekend starts getting better from here on out.