Todays entry has four seperate parts:

1. An open letter to residents in Ohio and Florida:

Today on CURRENT ELECTORAL VOTE [ http://www.electoral-vote.com/ ], the electoral college vote seems headed toward Bush because of two new polls of voters in Ohio and Florida who are leaning slightly towards Bush. Please... all of you in Ohio and Florida... please reconsider your vote and give it to Kerry. The idea of another four years of "W" makes my soul weary and my mind feel curdled.


2. In thinking the other night as I was enjoying a last pipe before bed, I began to imagine how nice it could be if our lives could be akin to a deck of cards.... meaning that given there is a sequential order to our lives.... birth through death, just like cards have the ace through the king... it would be wonderful to be able to shuffle the days of our lives much like one can shuffle a deck of cards. In my mind I envision having the cards represent the days of our lives so we could have different days at different times. It would be fun to be able to have a day back when I was eight or ten to experience that time fresh and new, and likewise it would be enjoyable to jump ahead a few years for a day to see what is in store.

Undoubtly this is not a new idea, and probably numerous science fiction books have been written with this idea in mind, but it would be entertaining to be able to pick an age to live at each day instead of having it be sequential in experience.

3. As I was stepping out onto my front porch yesterday morning at ~6:00am to wait for the paper boy to bring me the Sunday paper, I decided to sit in my pajamas and robe with a large mug of coffee as I had my first pipe of the day. As always, the pipe was the purest form of mental nourishment for my neurons and likewise my coffee was harsh and deeply satisfying to my corporeal being. As I gazed into the distance (the paper boy was a tad slow yesterday), I could see the first tendrels of light filter through above the horizon in the distance and I saw some of the light strike a beautiful poplar tree and its leaves shimmered the most vivid and robust yellow I have seen in quite some time. Its pure beauty brought a tear to my eye. I then thought a bit more about color and again wondered why it was that in most surveys people identify red as their "favorite" color with blue being a close second in terms of favorites followed a bit further back by green. Why is it that my two favorite colors... yellow and orange... typically never make it even into the top five prefered colors in any survey I have seen? A world without yellow and without orange would be drab and dull and listless in my opinion.

4. The Grumpy "Old" Man site is down... does anyone know what is happening with the site? It has been down on Sunday and today. I hope everything is ok.

PipeTobacco