Things have been a little quiet on the BJ Bloggers front. You guys keep bloggin’ away, but since the “blog boom” (wonder if that’s an original term?) fizzled out, there haven’t been many new additions to report. I would, however, like to post up four new bloggers to the list, only one of which is a recent addition. For some reason, the emailing feature that (is supposed to) email whenever someone adds a name half the time doesn’t, so when I logged in to approve one today I found three others going back to April. So, without further ado, here they are:

1. Title: It’s a Jungle Out There
   • URL: http://ajungleoutthere.blogspot.com
   • Author: Melissa Hays
2. Title: Here today and gone tomorrow
   • URL: http://heretodayandgonetomorrow.blogspot.com/
   • Author: Michael Schmid
3. Title: Have Your Fill
   • URL: http://www.haveyourfill.net
   • Author: Jon Eckert
4. Title: Keeping Up with the Joneses
   • URL: http://withthejoneses.blogspot.com
   • Author: Suzanne Jones

Stop by, enjoy the good times, etc. While you’re doing that, I’m going to eat dinner and go to bed.

I had something stellar I was going to blog. I thought to myself at work this afternoon, “Man, wait until the internet gets this. They’ll love it!” But as usually happens with such flashes of genius, the mundane got in between genius imagined and genius fulfilled. Things like waiting for a clean XP SP2 install to finish; ordering a washer and dryer for the apartment (my usual laundromat is under the mistaken impression that less washer capacity that costs more and takes longer is an improvement, and in the same vein they just changed the one quarter’s worth of dry time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes); making iced tea (not sweet tea, per se, though it’s got enough sugar to work…in the Mount family tradition I add puckering amounts of lemon juice); preparing for a Greenville Chorale audition tomorrow…those kinds of things. Things like trying to explain to an Atlanta security consultant that we haven’t actually gotten around to installing their 30-day trial after 25 days. Or better yet, drawing a complete blank when he said his company name, trying not to sound like a blithering idiot while I frantically hunt internal documentation just to find out what his product is actually supposed to do. (See what 10 days of vacation does to someone??) Things like wondering why being pulled onto a support call and logging into one website suddenly means that I now have to watch a training video about Secretary’s Day, enforced by, of all departments, the safety crew. (I can see it now - April 23rd of next year rolls around and I walk into work to find that all the “administrative assistants,” or whatever the politically correct term is nowadays, have armed themselves with assault rifles, flash grenades, and flak jackets. Then I’ll wish I had watched the safety coordinator’s video on Secretary’s Day. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, “When your secretary comes in, she is going to shoot you in the face with a bazooka!” Those who have not seen Bill Cosby: Himself may leave the room now. Thank you.)
Click for more…

First day back to work after a 10-day “vacation.” Came in late because (after coming into Greenville late) I got four hours of sleep. No sooner (literally less than five seconds) had I sat down in my chair for the first time in who knows how long and the phone rings - it’s one of our security consultants in Atlanta wanting to go over his software that I was supposed to have been testing for the last three weeks. Let’s back up, shall we?
Click for more…

Before we pull out of Moncton this morning I thought I’d take time out to write about yesterday.

I slept.
Click for more…

After pulling out of Saint John yesterday afternoon for more sightseeing (let me say that the Bay of Fundy is one of the most picturesque places I’ve ever seen) we headed up to Fredericton (2 hours north [nord]) for a church service, then east (est) an hour and a half to Moncton, where we’ve got two days here. The service last night was great - lots of folks came out and (I think) were blessed by the music. Apparently folks up here just don’t get traveling groups from anywhere that we’re familiar with in the States. Whether it’s because they can’t “afford” these groups (though we don’t actually charge anything to come up) or because they’re too remote for most groups to make it worth their while, I’m not sure. But I do know that everywhere we’ve gone we’ve been gratefully received, and that’s really cool. Thanks, Canada!
Click for more…

I just realized today how…well, pedantic the French language appears to be. Take English: you’ve got a noun (lane) and an adjective (right). Put them together and you have “the right lane.” The article is usually unnecessary, so we have an economy of words - two ideas, two words, off you go.

Then there’s these signs around New Brunswick: “Fin de la voite de droit.” As far as my limited understanding goes, that is the title of this post in French. “Right lane ends” as opposed to “the end of the lane of the right.” Why??
Click for more…

It has been one day and a half here in the Maratimes. Not only did the Calvary Quartet sing to two packed out churches, but the Phillies set a new MLB record by losing their 10,000th game. In 126 years of franchise play, no team before this afternoon had lost that many games. Now the Phillies are in the record books…not for winning (or anything else positive, for that matter) but for losing. Appropriately enough, the Phils are the losingest team in major league sports. How’s that for fame?

So yeah, Maratimes, singing, boating, etc. etc. etc. It was a long day. Fun, but still long. The alarm is not going to be set for tomorrow morning. Sightseeing for a few hours, sure, but not before lunch. So now I can’t really keep my eyes open, and I keep typing very strange things while I’m writing this post. Not just typos, but completely different words. Very annoying. I’m going to stop now…before I type something embarrassing…

So this is it - day one (two?) of the Calvary Quartet World Tour…otherwise known as the “Canada trip.” It started Friday at 4 (eastern) with the promise of 24 hours straight driving. It was smooth skies all the way to the St. Stephen, NB, border crossing…where we met…HER.
Click for more…

Today’s Independence Day! Unless you’re not from the USA, in which case you’re probably a smidge annoyed by the fact that we get to take the day off, shove pig parts cooked a dozen different ways down our throats all day, then watch enough explosions to turn the Swiss Alps into The Flattest Place on Earth go off overhead, then go home and blow our neighbor’s lawns up, all because we’re American and we can! This, by the way, is a somewhat disturbing trend in this country, doing things because we can. But I’ll leave the nepotism out of it if you promise not to start a political flame war in the comments. Please do not feed the trolls.
Click for more…