Okay, it is official. Today, at approximately 1:09pm Eastern Time, on the radio, I heard my first ad for a presidential candidate for November ’08 .

21 more months of this to go…

…meaning two of ours for one of theirs. Zoinks.

Sorry, this one is a bit tricky to see. Look for the shiny Oscar gold in the bottom left hand corner. It says “Recycle.” Global Warming is real now, it has the seal of approved causes from those good folks in Hollywood!!

Try this teeny tiny baby step towards making the world a better place….

• Take canvas bags to the grocery store instead of using plastic bags. It annoys the hell out of the people who work at the grocery store, but the Publix baggers will get back at you by putting your white flesh peaches and raspberries underneath your leg of lamb. Oh–wait, they do that anyway.

All of my dollars got together over the weekend and played nice. They appeared as part of an open studio exhibition in the fibers building on the Savannah College of Art and Design campus.

Hello Kids,

Todays word for the day is Jingoist. Have you ever heard the word before? It sounds like a fun and happy word, like jangle, doesn’t it? Click here or here to see what it means.

Actually, 11 minutes and approximately  38 seconds is how long it takes a person working at Georgia’s minimum wage to earn this dollar.

With  new $1 coins (they are really going to push the ones with men on them), and the two dollar bill languishing in near obscurity, maybe it is time to  change some of our denominations. What about a four dollar note?

Or a two dollar coin? The one dollar one has not been popular (mostly with the vending machine lobby), but a two dollar piece of metal, if it is good enough for our neighbors to the North, why not us?

I stiched this while watching softball practice in the park today, an insanely beautiful day, sunny and not cold. So, today’s dollar is a pat on the back for the little things: for the balls nicely hit, nicely fielded; the people who remembered to send me birthday cards; Kendall, who just cut all of her hair off on the spur of the moment for Locks of Love (http://www.locksoflove.org); Michelle, the world’s best mail carrier; Karin and Sally, giving up their afternoon to putting together a quilt for charity and Napolean, who watched practice with us and dispensed free advice.

It really is the little things that count.

Before I became a graduate student renovating a house, a used to read a lot more than I do now. Now, I read art theory and magazines on home remodeling. In my past life, I was a voracious reader. According to my “Book Book”, which I started in 2002, these are some of the best books i have read in the past five years (in no particular order):

• Perfume, by Patrick Suskind
• The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen
• Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
• Cruddy, by Lynda Barry (anything by her will leave you laughing outloud)
• Blue River, by Ethan Canin
• Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter
• Sandman (anything) by Neil Gaiman
• Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
• David Sedaris
• Cod, by Mark Kurlansky

This is just a small sampling of mostly fiction, but I highly recommend all of these books. Now step away from your computer screen and open a book.