Well, after a long hard week at work, I’m glad the weekend is here! We’re going to go eat out at the local Ruby Tuesday for supper tonight. It will be a real treat because we don’t eat out very often. Money is tight, and the price of gas makes us think really hard about going anywhere. But, we are going to see a movie after the meal, so that makes me feel a little less guilty about going out “just to eat.”
We are joining a few friends that we haven’t seen for a while; it will be good to catch up with them. I hate that we get so busy that we don’t get together as often as we used to. We need to try harder to keep in touch with them. Friends and family are what make life worth living!

I’ve been hearing on CNN that there has been some controversy in Michigan about a high ranked Republican official who was mis-quoted as saying that he was going to try to prevent people who lost their homes to foreclosure from voting. That has caused quite an uproar, as you can imagine! When I heard the news at first I missed part of the story, so I wasn’t sure where this was happening. But today I heard more of the story and apparently it was in Michigan. After all of the brouhaha had settled down, the gist of the story is that if someone has lost their home to foreclosure and no longer lives in the same precinct as he did when he registered, then he can’t vote. But that really has nothing to do with foreclosure, it has to do with voting in the precinct in which you actually live!

So this is one story that may have been blown out of proportion (imagine that!)

I’ve been watching with quite a bit of concern the attempts to fix the financial mess our country is finding itself in.  I was not happy with the bail out bill package, but I felt that it needed to be passed to keep our economy from collapsing completely.  So I was very discouraged to hear that it had not passed.  This scares me; I’m concerned that people are going to be losing their jobs and their homes.  I hope that they come up with a workable solution to fix this mess!

I understand that the DOW fell 340 points yesterday, largely due to the news of rising unemployment and loss of retail sales.  I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the stock market – I bought some stock a long time ago and just put it away, hoping to maybe make a little bit of money on it “in the long run.”  I’ve always been told to buy stock when the market is down, so this would be a good time to buy – if I had money to invest!

But money is too tight right now to put anything into investments, it is hard just paying the bills.  The economy of the US is in trouble though, and I think it is going to get worse before it gets better.

I heard that the state is holding a tax holiday this weekend on school supplies and clothes under $100!  That’s good news for families who need to buy those things for their kids to get ready for back to school!  It’s hard to even think of back to school at this point – it seems to me that summer has just begun, and we are thinking about back to school sales already!  I guess it really is true that the older you get the faster time seems to fly right by!