No thank you, not today

If I wanted a longer or stronger penis, I sure would not have far to go to get one -- many, many people send me emails each day just begging me to try their remedy. Or if I wanted pirated software, there are almost as many friendly souls offering great bargains. I also have a fair number of offers of herbal and other remedies, and lots of chances to help honest souls retrieve their money. I must have been to a lot of the wrong web sites, I guess. I do dump cookies, but I get tired of reentering data to get back to the sites where I do want to be, so I don't do so indiscriminately. Every one and a while my Norton icon starts winking its evil little red eye at me and eventually I get fed up and run the damn system scan, which takes a long time and is boring, and up come the little messages about the cookies, with the comment that they're sort of harmless. Norton the nanny nag. Easier to dump the penile promises.

If I don't get a batch of emails, I can always enjoy the phone calls of even friendlier souls who really, really want to know how I am today. Or open all the letters from charities, national, regional and local, who want a minute of my time. The only advertisements I pay heed to, in truth, are the ones in the little local paper from our nearest town. It has a thriving environment of theatre and we try to get to a lot of them. Amateur, sure, but fun. We also have a pretty rich local visual arts community and they do open studio tours and exhibits with fair frequency. I normally do my charitable giving close to home because I know where it is needed locally and I can find out the proportion of the collected donations that actually go to where they are needed rather than into sending me address tags, greeting cards and other pieces of nonsense.

Right now I am up to my yin yang in a fundraising campaign for our local Community Health Centre. It is run by a community based board, and we had the temerity not to wait up to eight years for the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (this is Ontario) to fund an expansion we desperately needed. We went ahead and built it and are just over two thirds of the way to paying for it. It's hard slogging because we are neither a rich nor a populous community and because in Ontario everyone expects the province to pay for health care. This in the face of every hospital around running lotteries is hard to believe, but that's the attitude. So far we have resisted sending out a barrage of begging letters, but we may have to do so. Or I may have to phone all my neighbours and ask them how they are today. What a horrible thought.


On another topic, the ongoing battle with Blogger continues, and I am going to make another try at getting an identifying picture into my profile. I found this dear little guy, who was drawn by Thackeray, the author from whom my title quote is drawn, and I am going to paste him in here and leave him for a while, despite the Help column that says I can delete him once he is saved in the profile. Hasn't worked yet. But I can get stubborn about more than refusing to give to Heart and Stroke. Again. And. Again.

Edit note: Did it! Yes! Huge thanks to Peter Chen of Blogger Tips and Tricks. You made me very happy.