There are a lot of countries

45

This is interesting, especially because it requires that you be able to SPELL all of them!!

Road Rage cards

This is a great idea. Of course, I came up with it years ago! It's a bit of overkill, though. You really only need three:

GET OFF YOUR PHONE
USE YOUR TURN SIGNAL
LEARN HOW TO DRIVE

Buh-bye, Merc

Well, we finally did it. After almost nine years of continuous subscription -- and about two of me agitating to dump it -- we finally canceled the Mercury News. I convinced Nathan to let me do it a couple weeks ago, and I finally got around to calling yesterday. Finally, we're free from the tyranny of all those ad inserts and crappy Dennis Rockstrah columns!

Seriously, with the MediaNews buy-out and preceeding and resulting cuts, it was becoming a lousy newspaper. Yesterday's new version of the real estate section just reaffirmed our decision. Now, the only thing we'll really miss is the Fry's section.

TGIED

Now that the day has finally arrived, my phone will stop ringing! My husband's "independent" status has elicited at least a dozen phone calls over the last two weeks from everyone from Barrack Obama to Bradley Whitford (couldn't they get Martin Sheen?), but mostly Obama volunteers, telling him he can request a Democratic (their word, Pete) ballot and vote in the primary. (Yesterday's two calls from Hillary Clinton are what I believe woke my son up from his nap.)

I think I'm going to turn my phone off in mid-October and tell our friends and family to call our cell phones or send us an email instead.