The State of the World as it is on Monday, 11/16/09

News from Iowa is that Uncle Tony will be undergoing open-heart surgery tomorrow. He will have a new valve put in and if necessary, a bypass will also be performed. He is 87 years old and it must be scary for him and for his family to be undergoing this.

I can't help but wonder what would have been happening to Tony if Obamacare were under effect right now. I think some bureaucrat would have concluded that Tony is too old for this surgery, so why waste a surgeon's skill on him? Never mind that Tony was off fighting the Nazis in his younger years. Never mind him raising three talented children, who all are working in various areas of the dental field. Never mind that he was a good husband to my aunt Marge and helped my dad out on something more than half a century ago (I don't know the details of that; very likely a private matter).

Enough about politics.

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I had my first post-Kathleen date over the weekend. This chain of events was set in motion about three, maybe four weeks ago when I "unhid" my profile on Match and snuck in a clue about how I could be reached by email. Within a day or two of doing that, I was contacted by a lady that I will only identify as Debbie (I don't disclose last names here except on very rare occasions or if the person is famous.) There was an email exchange of about three weeks or so. We spoke on the phone Friday. We met at an Italian restaurant on Saturday.

I really liked her. I found her to be very attractive and she was very good company. Thing of it is, is that it was really hard to tell if the chemistry was really there. I was really hoping that she would have wanted to adjourn to a dance floor that was up the road by a few miles, but I didn't think that I would get away with that suggestion, so we said goodbye in the parking lot.

I haven't heard from her since then. I'm not sure that I should write or call. My own thinking is that more time would have been needed to really know, but experience tells me she would have been another Dyanna.......great company, attractive, and fun.........but no special magic.

Since unhiding my profile on Match, I have gotten lots of email from them encouraging me to become a paid member. I get told about how someone looked at my profile and was checking me out. Well, just because someone was looking at your profile doesn't mean that they're really interested. I've checked out plenty of profiles myself. Some of them just flat out remind me of an April Wine song......"looks good from far.....but it's far from good".

Anyway, with Debbie, I'm taking no further action. Now that this is a closed chapter, I'm making it public here.

Maybe it's time to see if this one chick up in Phoenix who's on eHarmony is interested.

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I am really wishing that I had bought more gold when it was $300 an ounce. As the present administration is continuing the work of the previous administration in destroying the dollar, gold is reaching for record highs these days. It's in the mid 1100s right now.

Is it really going to reach $2000 an ounce?

I'm thinking of buying two ounces, and selling one of those ounces in case it does reach $2K.

Then again, it might be wiser to hold on to it. In trying to determine what the money supply is by reading the Fed's website, they have three different definitions.....as if they really don't want you to know how much money is out there.

But no matter which set of numbers you look at, with the multitrillion dollar debt and deficits in front of us, they'll just print more even if the dollar goes the way of the Italian lira.

I'll never forget handing over 4000 lira to buy a soda when I was in Rome in 1995. I'll have to check, but I think a century ago there was a 20 lira coin that contained 0.1867 ounces of gold.

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Last night I checked out the remake of "The Prisoner" on the AMC channel. I've long been a fan of the original series that Patrick McGoohan starred in. This remake? Well, I was only able to last twenty minutes.

The original series is just fine. It shouldn't be messed with.

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Time now for some supper.

Trying Again with the Online Dating Thing

I don't like to admit it. I mean, I really don't like to admit it. I don't like to admit that I have in the past, used online dating services and have started using them now. Like a lot of things that emerge, it has some plusses and it has some minusses but there are some days when it's hard to tell which one of those is ahead.

I first tried the online dating thing back in 2002 sometime. That was match.com. I think what inspired that was a friend and co-worker having some success in meeting dateable women, and I thought what the hey, I'll give this a try too. I signed up for match.com for three months, and at the end I couldn't wait for the subscription to expire. I was finding that participating in local singles events and going to the Sunday Singles dances (which we haven't had now for years) was plenty of fun and was enabling me to meet women.

Sometime around early 2004, I decided to give match.com another try. What happened then was that I wasn't impressed with the "selection" that the singles groups had. Oh, there was never any problem meeting women. The problem was meeting dateworthy women. Let's face it. There are a lot weirdos out there, and yes, we have them on my side too.

In the second half of 2004, match.com was actually starting to "work". I dated this one lady named Jennifer for about 2 1/2 months. I liked her, but not to the point of wanting to get serious with her. Then Kathleen came along after I told Jennifer we weren't going to make it, and my sense then was that "hey, this can actually work!". Two months later Kathleen ended it because of medical issues (hers), and it was back online again. Match.com didn't seem to "work" for the rest of the year though it did introduce me to Dyanna in 2006. I always liked Dyanna and thought she was quite the babe, but for some reason we couldn't seem to have an intimate conversation.

Now I'm back on the market, and I'm using eHarmony now. I have heard this come highly recommended by a friend and co-worker, and after going through their lengthy battery of questions I was initially impressed. Some of that shine may be wearing off, but then again maybe it's also the process of getting used to how it works. The jury is still out on this one, but here's what I've learned so far.

One, for some reason eHarmony likes to crash the browser. I know that I haven't got the latest and greatest Internet Explorer version installed, but I'm not going to use IE8 until we're using IE8 at work. Even if I were to be using IE8, some of your super slick websites may ferret out some glitches with the browser. Regardless, it's a bit frustrating trying to review your matches when the browser keeps crashing.

Two, eHarmony does real good at finding you matches some 500 miles away from you. OK, maybe their matching criteria is so strict that I've already managed to exhaust the Tucson-area matches in two days. I'm getting a lot of matches from southern California, and I'm "closing" them as that I'm not sure the distance thing will work in the first place. Yeah, I like to get in the truck and visit San Diego from time to time....there's some interesting rock formations near the Imperial County line and San Diego is a neat city. I considered relocating there about twenty years ago. But I think that's out as far as driving to meet someone goes. I don't even like to go to Phoenix to meet someone, but at least I can get to Phoenix and back in the same day.

Three: I'm now going to say something good about eHarmony: I get the sense that they really want to see their customers succeed in finding a match. I wrote in a question about whether or not it was possible to talk to a "live" person rather than email, and within 24 hours they got back to me on that one. Yes, it is possible, there's an 800 number available 24/7. And they're responsive in another way. A lady in Capistrano Beach that I turned down wrote in to them to ask them if I would reconsider....and a customer service rep advised me of that. If I want to re-open the match, let him know and they'll take care of that.

Four: Something else good to say about eHarmony: their screening process weeds out the scammers. I've been contacted by Nigerian scammers on Match and on another site. Although they are taken care of quickly by Match, the scammers won't have the patience to wade through the questionnaires that eHarmony throws at you. eHarmony also offers an identity verification service that's "free" with their higher-priced package (which I've signed up for). No scammer would go in that far.

Five: eHarmony also has some other bells and whistles that I haven't yet taken the time to explore, such a s a secure two-way anonymous phone call setup. You can talk to your match without having your phone number revealed to that match. Since I've got some cellphone minutes to burn I might do that if I am talking to someone outside of Tucson (big "if"). I haven't had any problems though with women misusing my phone number.

It is way too early to rule on whether or not signing up on eHarmony was the right thing to do. All I can tell you is that I don't have buyer's remorse on it yet. But I also don't know if I'm going to continue if no match is found when my term expires.

I just wish that there were more "eligible" (by their standards) women in Tucson to choose from.

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Kerry Livgren, who got a mention in my last post is recovering from a stroke. From what I can tell his family is encouraged by his progress thus far. There is no way to contact him, (he's got a lot of irons in the fire anyway), but I hope that he'll be making some more music. I have some of his post-Kansas CDs and I recommend them. I should get some of his other CDs.

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My cousin Kathy is visiting her brother Todd up in Phoenix. She and her husband came down to Tucson on Friday along with Todd's family, Amber and Annette. We hiked Sabino Canyon after sundown, and we were down in Tombstone for most of yesterday. Coming back, there was a really nasty storm that included hail. We had supper at the TTT truck stop off I-10 in Tucson before they headed back to Phoenix.

This was the first time that I really had time to "visit" with Dan. He's a good guy; the kind of guy you would want with you if you were to go out deer hunting. At one point in Tombstone yesterday him, Todd and I were solving the world's problems while the women were shopping.

After the previous weekend, their visit was therapeutic. I needed it.