Myrtle Beach Day 6 2012

Good morning! Yes, it's morning. Early for me. I had breakfast yesterday & then texted Josh again to check on the pets & then house. No reply as usual. I'm done with this. He's living in my house & doesn't even have the common courtesy to reply to my text messages. It's been 6 days. For all I know I don't even HAVE pets anymore. I am SO doing housecleaning when I get home ... if you know what I mean. I checked eBay & then had lunch (there was a lot of chatting with family in between, it's not like I had breakfast followed by lunch half an hour later. Nope, they were 7 hours apart.) That's vacation ... 6 hours of chatting between things. :) I checked Twitter & then loaded up Sims which just sat there for 6 hours. I never had an opportunity to actually play it after I opened it. Oops. Kinda like this blog, I started it an hour & a half ago & I'm only this far down. One thing I've learned about South Carolina is that you can't buy lighter fluid here! They sell Zippo lighters, but they don't sell lighter fluid anywhere! What good is a Zippo lighter if you can't by lighter fluid anywhere in the state?! I ended up buying a pack of Bic lighters. Uncle Bill's lighter died & I was trying to buy him lighter fluid, that ended up not happening. I feel so bad. LOL! Logan really liked all his Christmas presents. :) Even I ended up getting a few. I got a beautiful sweater, scarf, earrings, & flashlight. Eve crocheted the scarf for me & it's beautiful. I'm so proud! I've tried to teach her to crochet in the past, but she was never really interested. I guess moving out here, where there's REALLY nothing to do, finally got her interested. HA! I brought my knitting with me but haven't been bored enough to pull it out. Pete said we'd be bored, I said there was no way we were going to have a chance to be bored. I was right. HA! Phhhbbt! Another plus is not having to cook anything. Everyone else gets to breakfast, lunch, & dinner LONG before I do, so I'm eating 3 meals a day, just much earlier than I normally would have & I don't have to cook any of it. Even today, I took a break from blogging to eat breakfast. Normally I would have eaten breakfast AFTER I finished my blog & then chosen something I was in the mood for. Even the stuff I bought for myself that they don't sell in Texas (stuff I remember from Jersey) either gets eaten or cooked long before I have a chance. Vacation is so relaxing! Nothing to do ... I mean NOTHING to do but sit on the front porch & chat. We need to do this a lot more often! When we leave to head back to Texas in a few days, I'm going to drive so I can stop at 2 restaurants on the way out. There are 2 places here that we don't have in Texas & who knows how many years it'll be before I'm back here again. There's no way I'm leaving until I go to these places at least once. I wanted to go a lot more often, but it never happened. That's why we're going on the way out ... before we hit the highway. I'll cry for months if we leave here & I don't get to stop at the 2 places we don't have within a thousand miles of us in Texas. In fact, I'm also going to stop at some of the tourist places ... we didn't do that either this trip. The day we leave is going to be hard. Instead of leaving early & driving straight shot home, we're leaving early, eating, shopping, eating, THEN hitting the highway, then being forced to stop & sleep on the side of the road on the way home like we did on the way here. Very rough on an old body & back, but no choice because we couldn't get out to these places while we were here. Family 1st. :)

Don't prepay your mortgage is you're still paying off your debt. Work your debt snowball 1st. Get rid of your consumer debt, & then move up the Baby Steps.

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If you've missed sending someone a Christmas card, send them a New Year's card instead ... get it in the mail today!

In 2008, PETA proposed that Ben & Jerry's ice cream contain what instead of cow's milk?

A. Breast milk

B. Goat's milk

C. Horse's milk

D. Soy milk

Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto assassinated (2007):

On this day in 2007, Benazir Bhutto, a former Pakistani prime minister and the first democratically elected female leader of a Muslim country, is assassinated at age 54 in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. A polarizing figure at home and abroad, Bhutto had spent three decades struggling to stay afloat in the murky waters of Pakistani politics. To many of her supporters, she represented the strongest hope for democratic and egalitarian leadership in a country unhinged by political corruption and Islamic extremism.

Born in 1953 to a wealthy landowning family, Bhutto grew up in the privileged world of Pakistan’s political elite, receiving degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded the populist-leaning Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in 1967. He then served as president and prime minister from 1971 to 1977, when he was ousted in a bloodless military coup led by General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and charged with authorizing a political opponent’s murder.

Her father’s overthrow and subsequent execution in April 1979 thrust a young Benazir Bhutto into the political spotlight. She and her mother, Nusrat, whom she succeeded in 1982 as the PPP’s chairperson, spent several years in and out of detention for protesting his arrest and campaigning against General Zia. In August 1988, Zia died in a plane crash; three months later, Bhutto won the general election and formed a government, becoming the first woman—and, at 35, the youngest person—to head a Muslim state in modern times. Dismissed in 1990 after less than half a term as prime minister, she was reelected in 1993 and served again until 1996. Both times, she was removed from office by the sitting president—Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1990 and Farooq Leghari in 1996—amid charges of corruption and incompetent governance.

After her second dismissal from office, Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, faced allegations of various forms of financial misconduct, including accepting multimillion-dollar kickbacks and laundering money through Swiss banks. Zardari spent eight years in prison, while Bhutto lived in exile in London and Dubai with the couple’s three children. In 2007, under pressure from Bhutto’s supporters within the U.S. government, President Pervez Musharraf granted amnesty to Bhutto, Zardari and other Pakistani politicians with pending graft charges. On October 18 of that year, despite a spate of death threats from Islamic militants, Bhutto returned to Pakistan with plans to participate in the 2008 general election. On the day of her arrival, she narrowly escaped a suicide bomb attack on her convoy that killed at least 136 people and injured more than 450.

On December 27, 2007, as Bhutto was waving to a crowd at a PPP rally in Rawalpindi, a gunman opened fire on her bulletproof vehicle. A bomb then exploded near the car, killing more than 20 people and wounding 100 others, including Bhutto. She was pronounced dead later that night and buried the next day in her hometown of Gardi Khuda Bakhsh, next to her father's grave. The exact cause of her death remains in dispute: A subsequent investigation by Britain's Scotland Yard ruled that Bhutto died of head injuries caused by the force of the explosion, while the PPP maintained that she died from gunshot wounds.

Bhutto’s death sparked widespread violence across Pakistan, with riots and demonstrations leading to violent police crackdowns. The political turmoil caused international fears of instability in a nuclear-armed nation already embroiled in a fight against Islamic extremists. In the weeks and months following Bhutto's death, Pakistani moderates and Western leaders waited anxiously to see who would emerge as her successor. Zardari, who had taken the helm of the PPP after his wife’s assassination, was elected president of Pakistan in September 2008.

In the month following Bhutto’s murder, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistani officials named Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani militant with links to al-Qaeda, as the mastermind behind the assassination. Mehsud, who denied the charge, was killed in a U.S. drone attack in August 2009.

What animal’s den is known as a holt or a couch?

The otter’s. The holt is its main lair; the couch is a temporary resting place.

What legendary rock musician has an international airport that bears his name?

Which character was created 1st?

A. Batman

B. Superman

C. Bugs Bunny

BAC. Superman was born in 1938 on - as every kid knows - the planet Krypton.

Which continent is the biggest?

A. North America

B. Africa

C. Asia

Which of these U.S. states are designated as commonwealths?

Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Missouri, Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Nebraska.

Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, & Virginia.

Your boss always gives you a gift at the holidays. Should you give him one, too?

Generally, no. It could be perceived as trying to curry a favor. However, a joint gift from you & other employees that isn't too expensive or personal is OK. Or, if you've been working with your boss for a long time, it's okay to give a small present.