The good news is that I have today off. The bad news is that it starts out with a trip to the vet for two of the varmints, and continues tomorrow with the other one. The last trip was 3 weeks ago and it set me back $300, as Peggy tested positive for Lyme and therefore required not only the $30 yes/no test, but the more expensive $80 test that gets sent to the lab. Bud was already positive and still is, so he got his first lime vaccine, and gets his booster today, while Peggy gets her first one and her other vaccines, after having had 3 weeks of antibiotics. The it’ll be back to the vet in three weeks for her booster. Fritzi goes tomorrow, and I have no doubt that he’ll test positive as well, so I recon we’ll do it all again with him. I’m diligent with the FrontLine Plus and I check for ticks all the time but I guess that’s not good enough. I really hate ticks. We never used to have this problem up here, but I guess it’s just the way things are gonna be now that Al Gore has perpetrated the whole climate change myth on us.

Now that we’re fully into graduation season (because there’s a dearth of actual news around here, the lo-cal paper website is filled with prom photos – I guess I’m getting pretty old, because they look like a bunch of little kids playing dress up, except I don’t remember the girls looking like that when I was in high school. Must be the hormones in the beef), I would like to impart one simple word of wisdom to our new high school and college graduates:

FROM

From, as in “I graduated FROM college.” It’s not “I graduated college.” You don’t graduate college, the college graduates you. I’m not sure why this irritates me as much as it does, but for some reason the words “graduate college” are like fingernails on the blackboard (do they actually have blackboards in school anymore?). If they include this in the common core test, then the test is 100% worthwhile. In fact, I don’t don’t think you should be allowed to graduate from high school (let alone college) if you don’t understand this.

Two things: it’s “NEW-CLEE-UR” and “graduated FROM college.” That’s it – everything else is just extraneous information.

Oh well, time to go check the skimmer basket for frogs, I guess.

Oh, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY VERNON!