That Snows the Goat

While we’re here at home with our families and friends, enjoying the holidays, men and women in our armed services will be overseas risking their lives. How about taking a minute and letting them know you appreciate their service and sacrifice.

If you go to the website LetsSayThanks.com you can pick out a thank you card that Xerox will print and send to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq. You can’t choose who gets it, but postcards sent through LetsSayThanks.com will be delivered to men and women from all military branches deployed on active duty. If you would like to mail a postcard to a relative or personal friend, downloadable files are available for each design once a card is selected off the homepage of this Web site.

When I was six years old, my family lived in Admiral Roads Apartments in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s difficult to describe locations relative to the buildings because of their strange placement. They were two-story buildings, placed so the small ends of the buildings faced the street. A rusty metal door centered on the end of our building was the entrance to the janitor’s apartment and the furnace room. It was always securely padlocked, unless the janitor was inside. I don’t know if it was because he was big, black, or both, but all the children were afraid of the janitor. In front of the janitor’s door was a concrete pad as wide as the building and about ten feet deep. The on the end closest to the street sat the garbage cans that were shared by the building’s tenants. A short three-sided picket fence, with its peeling white paint covered by a gray patina of spilled garbage and coal dust, shielded the view from passersby. Nearby was a large propane tank, used for the apartment stoves.

Google likes it when you have a site index, and I’m now using Google sitemap generator plugin v3, and version 1.4 formatting from sourceforge.net and put it together as a zip. If you want version 1.5a, which only has 2 files to worry over, get it here.
You can see how it looks at my sitemap. Thanks to Arne Brachhold for his plugin.

Driving home from Anne Arundel Community College, I made the last few turns before I parked my old Opel Kadette on the street. Paying as much attention to driving as anyone does when they are in their own neighborhood, I was on auto-pilot. I drove along, with my window down, not because it was hot, but just to enjoy the feeling of the air as I drove. My mind was busily planning my evening; what to eat, what shows were on TV, and would I have time to go over to my friend’s house to listen to the new Rolling Stones album he had bought at The Music House last night.