NOTE: This started out as a blog entry and wound up as a long-winded rant that I had to move over to my word processor.

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Well, it's the day after Thanksgiving. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. Just an observation. I'm backing up my external hard drive on DVDs. Mama's in the living room, talking on the phone to Lynn (Short, my cousing Chris' wife). Among other things, they're talking about Mark (Chris' brother). Anyone who's poked around in my blog knows that we've given Mark a lot of money in the past couple of months. Mama coaxed us into paying him to paint her bedrooms and do some other work. He's in pretty bad physical shape. COPD. Bad hips. He has to pop pills constantly for the pain, etc. I won't bore you with details. The point of mentioning this is that he going to be going into the hospital for hip surgery next week. That's one of the reasons he was a topic of discussion.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about how Mara and I are perceived in "the Short compound" (as Mara calls it - Mark and his boys, Chris and his family, and the parents, Loyd and Sherry, all live within a block of one another). In my opinion we've been very generous to Mark. We've given him around $1,000 in the past couple of months for working for us up here. Now, when you consider that this is for painting 2 rooms and finishing my project of removing the paint from the walls in the bathroom, that's being handsomely paid. Mark hasn't worked 8 hours a day for 2 months or anything. Mark come up here and piddles for an hour or two and then goes home. There are times that Mama doesn't see him for days at a time.
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If you care to read the rest of this, you can find it at;
- http://www.wicasta.com/rants/rant20041126.html