My brother sent me some more photos from his X-Men Mansion in Ohio. You may remember the plastivorous squirrels that had defeated the “squirrel-proof” bird feeder by eating the plastic cover? Well, they are now apparently mutating into some sort of X-Men (so to speak) iron eating squirrels. Those are squirrel teeth markings on that chair (don’t ask me how I know, just trust me on this one). Is it a chemical deficiency? Or do we blame this on either global warming or Al Gore, depending on your politics?

I really wasn’t referring to the surreal comic strip in that headline, as that only occured to me after I wrote it. But maybe that fits. The political season is heating up again with midterm elections on their way. I live in a predominantly democratic district, California’s 6th Congressional District. We have been represented by Lynn Woolsey for many years. She is currently in her seventh term representing this district that encompasses parts of Marin and Sonoma counties, north of San Francisco. She was the first former welfare mother to be elected to Congress according to her website.

SAN FRANCISCO–The Apple fan community was run off the road this week by the announcement that Steve Jobs will change his shoe allegiance after 20 years of success. The announcement by Jobs coincided with some sort of product announcement by Apple and Nike. Steve wore his traditional jeans and black turtleneck, but the famed New Balance 991’s were nowhere in sight.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I have several partner links listed on LostinaFog.com to help connect you readers with cool products or services. You can use me to purchase from Amazon, sign up for NetFlix, buy songs from iTunes, or connect to a bazillion google ad buyers. But the most successful of my partner links is with MagsForLess.

I use Technorati constantly to search the blogosphere. I have several RSS feeds set up of keyword searched for the things I’m interested in and check them multiple times each day to see what the latest word from the blogs are. Now, some of these feeds used to work just dandy, but have become useless over the last few months. For instance, one RSS bookmark for me was for the keyword blogging. I used to be able to find posts there about different blogging platforms, or new tools available and more. Then it started filling up with mindless blathering from myspace posts about, well, nothing. I guess they were tagging it as blogging, because, you know, like that’s what they were doing, ok? Worthless unless you’re researching teen angst.

I have made a living for a great deal of my life as a writer. Not the sexy I just hit the NYT Bestseller List stuff, but more mundane things. I wrote and published newsletters for book collectors for about ten years, wrote for several financial newsletters for several years, did some freelance research writing for some Wall Street firms, and most recently have been writing about SPACs (you’ll just have to look it up if you care) for another specialty financial publication. But over the last several months I’ve moved from a regular job back into the project world. I’ve stacked myself up pretty heavily for the next several months with a nearly fulltime gig for the summer and another 10 hour/week consulting job on top of that. And I’ve committed to a couple of more articles on those SPACs.

OK, its already proven that you geek freaks out there prefer to get your geeky news from the likes of Amanda and Cali and Amber. I guess that’s not too surprising since this geek demographic is skewed a bit toward the young guy logging more time on the keyboard than dating. Not you guys, of course. I mean you guys are cool. Its the other guys that need to see those rosy lips saying things like “motherboard” and “hack” to get them through the day.

I posted earlier that using a discount magazine subscription to ESPN the Magazine was by far the cheapest way to get access to the Insider content on the ESPN website. And if you read ESPN online, you know that all the stuff you really want to read is behind that wall. You can click on the magazine cover in this post to hop over to MagsForLess and pick up the cheapest subscriptions on the net.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

After leaving a real job for the world of consulting and freelance work I found myself sometimes craving the workplace. It wasn’t the work or the watercooler or the constant interaction that I missed really, but more the complete change in rituals.

At the office I had dropped into several habits for my workday. Each day I arrived about the same time, dropped into my teams’ offices to check for issues or see if help was needed. Grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down and started through my email…you know, what you might call the rut. But I missed that stuff nonetheless.

I have dated just a couple of true redheads in my life, and reading about this study explains soooooo much for me. It seems that there is something about being a redheaded female that allows for a higher tolerance for pain. Maybe this explains that reputation for kinky fun.

Redheaded women can tolerate more pain than anyone else, including men with red hair and men and women who do not have red hair. The others all had a similar and much lower tolerance to pain than flame-haired females.

At my last fulltime gig I had an office girlfriend….a MARRIED office girlfriend. Actually I had several of them over the couple of years I served my time there. But I’ve moved on and my office girlfriend is gone. But while we were together, it was wonderful. We sat together at lunch meetings and served on committees together. We snuck out for ice cream cones on insane days when the temptation of looking out the window at the bay on a sunny warm day was too much for us. We were there for each other. Oh no, wait. I see what you’re thinking! Get your mind out of the gutter. We kept each other sane while all around us, assholes reigned. That’s what office girl and boyfriends do for each other.