If it were a person who was waking me...

at five in the morning, I'd let them know my displeasure vocally.  But it isn't someone else.  It's something internal.  Fortunately, I was able to go back to sleep this morning and sleep until 7.

It's the first morning since this past Monday that I will be able to relax and enjoy breakfast in the dining room. Assuming of course my protracted absence doesn't result in everyone coming over to my table to voice their latest complaint.  Perhaps I should make a sign "the president is not available until after breakfast."

I'm grateful that the movie I will see today, if I decide I'm up to seeing a movie, is not playing adjacent to a shopping mall.  The parking for movies that play at or next to shopping malls is a nightmare at this time of year. 

Among this morning's ponderings is the way people ignore the anti-gridlock law.  I saw people blocking the intersections on several streets yesterday and then going into panic mode when they realized the light was turning red and they were trapped in the intersection.  I always stay out of the intersection until I can definitely get all the way across.  That's a ticket I don't want to receive, although I can't remember seeing anyone get that ticket for a long time.

Another is that people are such lemmings while driving.  One place I was driving yesterday had a traffic light out on a major thoroughfare.  I saw the long lines waiting to get across this one intersection and immediately used side streets to get around the jam.  There were no other cars using this technique to get around the waiting in long lines of cars.  Why don't people think "gee, I can turn right, go left and then come back to my street below where the light is out"?

There's an island between Maine and New Brunswick that is at the center of a dispute between the U.S. and Canada over who owns it.  Will we go to war over an island with no permanent residents, solely because the waters near it are great for lobster fishing?

Now that I know there is a Diaper of the Month club, a Bacon of the Month club, a Moss of the Month club, a Sock of the Month club, and a JustFab Shoe Club, I'm pondering what will become the next odd item to have a monthly club.  Virus of the Month club?  Cancelled TV Series of the Month DVD club?

I'm wondering if what I'm watching on TV ever happened in real life.  On this episode of "Law and Order", a doctor is under fire because he acted as the only sperm donor in his fertility clinic.  Their cases are usually "ripped from the headlines".  So I'm guessing that somewhere, some doctor actually did this.

Someday, someone's going to get really, really rich by devising a way to stop what I'm dealing with at this moment.  I'm a Netflix subscriber.  In fact I have streaming and DVD service.  There isn't anything else for them to sell me.  Yet I continue to be innundated with ads selling their services.  If someone were able to develop software or modify existing browsers so that services you are already using wouldn't waste their advertising dollars on you, people would buy that process.

How much longer will the period between the end of the commercials/pre-show entertainment, and the start of the movie get in coming years?  On Friday I saw a movie and there were 21 minutes worth of trailers and "silence your phone" messages.  That's a record.  What can make those 15 - 20 minutes seem longer is when you see a few movies in the same genre within a short period is that you'll see the same trailers over and over.

This Date in History:

On this date in 484, Humeric dies and his nephew succeeds him as King of the Vandals.  During his reign Catholics are largely free from persecution.
On this date in 1783, General George Washington resigns as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.
On this date in 1823, "A Visit from St. Nicholas", which we know as "The Night Before Christmas" was published anonymously.
On this date in 1893, the opera "Hansel and Gretel" by Engelbert Humperdinck was first performed.
On this date in 1913, President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, creating the Federal Reserve System.
On this date in 1938, the first modern coelacanth was discovered. 
On this date in 1968, the 82 sailors who were the crew of the USS Pueblo were released after 11 months of captivity in North Korea.
On this date in 1972, the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes were rescued.  They had only been able to survive because they chose to practice Anthropophagy.
On this date in 2002, a MQ-1 Predator drone was shot down by an Iraqi MIG-25, marking the first ever aerial combat engagement between a drone and a piloted aircraft.
And on this date in 1946, soap opera star Susan Lucci was born.