Odd...I don't see myself mellowing that much.

Actually, I did pretty good on taxes this year, since last year I was knocked back to 20 percent pay for a number of months when a contract ran out. Not exactly a great trade-off. Income is better now, but I will be taking it in the shorts from the IRS next year. So it goes. I can live with that.

Work here tends to be cyclical, with sudden jobs coming in that occupy most of my time. When the workload is low, I'm supposed to be writing my book, but that's way too easy to put off and requires a lot of discipline.

I'm reasonably happy with how the Republicans are doing. I could see a lot of improvement in certain areas, like spending, border control, and a few others. Also, they have a tendency to wet themselves when the NYT says "boo!" which is not great. But I expect the next election to shock the Democrats as badly as the last one.

It actually doesn't take much time to do these posts. It's when I have to look something up or assemble statistics that I use up about half and hour. Comments like this? A couple of minutes.

Also, sometimes I wander off to poke a stick into the monkey cages. A favorite lately has been Kevin Drum's site. Kevin is intelligent and reasonable, but like many liberal sites, his commenters tend to be Bowser clones, and it's fun to poke them with the stick until they hang from the bars screeching.