So where is all the noise coming from? My neighbors below are rebuilding their decks (double decks, one above the other). Saws are screeching, hammers are pounding, and the smell of varnish is making me swoon.

On the other side, workman are pounding on the side of my house (so hard, in fact, that the dishes crashed into the sink) and everything is rattling, including my brain. I'm going to have to give up on writing until the construction finishes. I can't even edit with all this noise!

Humans are phenomenally noisy. Not only do we create enough noise to damage our own hearing, we create enough noise to damage the environment, as well. A big sound wave can knock a moth right out of the air. Even whales, who used to be able to communicate with one another almost half-way around the globe have lost their ability to keep in touch because of shipping noise and military tests. --- Mya

I guess I should be grateful it didn't fail when there were 150 pictures or so on the card---I only lost three pictures---but it's annoying that a device that has no moving parts would fail after only a year and one month of use (the warranty expired a month ago). So, I bought two more cards from a different manufacturer, Kingston this time. The Kingston cards come with a lifetime warranty and they have a better reputation overall. They cost 50 percent more, but with my bad experience with the Magicstor card, I think I'll be happier with having paid the extra money for Kingston. Performance on the Kingston is good too, almost right up there with Sandisk. Yay. Now I have my "eyes" back. --- Mya

For example, whose idea was the sign on this car? If you look closely, you'll see that it says, "U.S. MAIL    WATCH FOR STOP." Seems reasonable, right? Wrong. The only reason you can read it is because I jumped out of the car and held my arms above my head as high as they could go while standing in front of my bumper.

From inside my car (even if I put my head on the "ceiling") I couldn't read the sign. I couldn't even tell it was a sign---it looked like the narrow end of a strip of white tape. Only my curiosity about the "strip of tape" (and a red light so I could hop out of the car) resulted in the sign being legible in this picture. Actually, I wish I'd taken two photos. You can't really tell how dumb it is without a shot of the car from eye level. But trust me on this, from a normal passenger-sized vehicle, it wasn't legible.

So just who is supposed to be able to read this? Is it a coded message for a spy standing on top of a double-decker bus or hovering above in emergency helicopter? Maybe the sign is intended for seagulls looking for a target or for drivers of jacked-up-beyond-reason SUVs? I have no idea, but I figured I'd upload it for your amusement and amazement. --- Mya

Did you notice, some of the produce is now booby-trapped? Have you ever peeled the sticker off an apple, bitten into it, then discovered there was a stealth sticker on the other side which is now stuck between your teeth or worse yet, sliding down your esophagus because you were so surprised you accidentally swallowed it? Yuck.

Not only do I not want to have to peel extra stickers off my food, but I don't want glue on my food, either. Who needs more chemicals in their diet? Not me. So, lately, I've been protesting the stickers by peeling them off and sticking them on the display stands in the store. Let the store personnel deal with them. If I ever win a lottery, I'll genetically engineer a sticker-resistant apple and cross-pollinate it with all the commercial apples.

But on happier subjects, it suddenly dawned on me that summer is over, long over (the weather changed pretty dramatically two weeks ago) and I never looked at any roses this year. How can nine months just fly by so quickly?! So I made a point of walking around today (fortunately the weather was nice) to find some flowers that were still blooming and was rewarded for my effort (not that it was much effort) with this wonderful sight of a butterfly stopping to smell the roses. --- Mya