Another bright and beautiful silvery-shiney night by the pool, and I’m blogging by Christmas tree lights at the Tiki bar, a cold Sam Adams Octoberfest providing the refreshment. Let’s get cracking, shall we?

It’s the final three nights for this incarnation of the swimming pool – it gets drained Monday – so I’m gonna do my best to squeeze in a mini-dip each night. Last night, thanks to the second of three days back in the mid-’90s (who said Summer was gone?); we actually got a mini-heat wave as the water temp got to 67 degrees. No, it didn’t feel appreciably warmer than it did when it was 64. But you take what you can get this time of year.

You know how you can tell it’s mid-October around these parts? You start seeing a lot more cars with license plates from Canada, the Dakotas, and the Midwest and upper-Midwest showing up. I’m sure the businesses around here don’t mind that much. East of the Mississippi, the snowbirds all head to Florida – that “sun-shiney state for shady people”; west of the MR, it’s Arizona. Glad to have them and the contents of their wallets.

My real estate guy tells me the Canadians are bringing their dough-re-mi with them this year and taking advantage of the housing market. Around here there probably won’t be a better time to buy – especially if you don’t mind living way out in the West Valley. It seems like prices have stayed fairly stable here in the East Valley, where there wasn’t the huge run-up on home-building that you saw out on the western side.

While I understand my good friend Jana’s sentiments in her comment the other day about John McCain, I have to respectfully disagree. He’s still on the right side (literally and figuratively) of all the economic and cultural issues I support. Why should I worry about putting someone with PTSD in the Oval Office after we’ve had someone with ADD there the past eight years? And why would I want a budding Socialist like Barack Obama in there, either? Heck, with all his campaign’s actions to quell any form of criticism of “The One”, it won’t be ADD or PTSD behind the Oval Office desk; it’ll be more like KGB.

And count me as one who loves the freshness and brashness of Sarah Palin. The only thing that will cure Washington right now is an influx of outsiders. Lord knows they can’t screw things up any worse than the crowd that’s already in there. The country needs new faces – Democrat and Republican – to bring some fiscal sanity back to the nation’s capitol.

…besides, what other VP candidate can do this?

My vote for worst infomercial running on the the late-night cable networks? That idiot selling The Sham-Wow. My question: why on God’s earth does he need the headset? And what’s up with him saying, “Are you following me, camera guy?” I mean, it’s a studio with nothing but the idiot and a table for demonstrating the product – like, what else is the “camera guy” going to follow?

That Red Sox game last night was unbelievable. The only reason I kept it on was so I would know when the game was thankfully over to switch to NESN to watch Tom Caron’s and Jerry Remy’s post-mortem on the 2008 team and hear what kind of moves they thought the team would make during the off-season. Even after “Big Papi”‘s home run I never thought they could make it all the way back. I still have a hard time believing they did. Of course, the Rays still have the edge, and a win by them tomorrow will make everyone forget about last night pretty quick, but if the Sox were to take Game 6….now THAT would be interesting.

And I still can’t believe those great 10-pitch at-bats by Coco Crisp and Kevin Youkilis; it was post-season baseball at its best. Everyone was talking about that game today…

The other day while at the supermarket I heard Carly Simon’s early hit “Anticipation”. What a great tune! Listening to the interplay between guitar, bass, piano, and drums you can really get a groove on. A very clean-sounding recording – I’d forgotten how good a singer she was back in my high school days.

OK, enough – I’m goin’ in for a dip.