The images in this post are less than 24 hours old and one-hundred percent original. We took them on Tuesday. Yes, we encountered a bear cub in the wild.

He looked right at us

I apologize for the image quality. It was not a planned meeting and we did the best we could. I have  enhanced the images as best as I possibly can but these still represent the cream of the crop. (Another deliberate pun.) No, the image at the left wasn’t taken at night but this particular enhancement seemed to be the best possible view I could extract. In the original image the bear was barely discernible.

We were about 100 yards away when my wife first noticed the bear cub. I quickly scanned for momma bear as my wife tried to snap a few shots. Unfortunately the bear no doubt heard us first and wasted no time in scampering away. It was only a few short moments before he was up a hill and disappeared out of sight.

We quickly got the hell out of there as we were not particularly interesting in finding out if mom wanted to meet Cubby’s new friends.

For the first time since 2001 when I moved to this small little town on a quest for “voluntary simplicity” I am enjoying a vacation with actual paid days off work. Yes, these are my first paid days off work since the year 2000. My wife, who has a real job, scheduled hers at the same time. That’s nine glorious days without work that we get to spend together.

This wasn’t the best time to vacate but when my boss told me I’d somehow earned a week off I decided to take it because I hope to dump that job soon and don’t want to take the chance of being screwed out of it while it still exists.

In other news…

Every once in a while I’ll have a positive thought in a fit of what can only be described as naivete. I’m going to dub these rare moments P.O.P.T.A.R.T. which stands for the Power Of Positivity in The Abyss with Reality Transference. In other words, no positive thought goes unpunished.

After waiting for over a year since it broke, Monday we took our Panasonic Viera 42″ flat screen plasma TV to the local electronics shop to get a repair estimate.

I had done a bit of troubleshooting research and had pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem must be the power supply. I was optimistic that was the diagnosis we’d hear, and that it would be affordable to fix and that my wife and I would be enjoying movies on the thing – in our actual living room – before this week was out.

Boy, was I wrong.

We carted the thing out to the car, hauled it across town and paid a non-refundable fee of $40 for the luxury of having them take a look. Over three years years ago we bought the thing new from Sears for $2,400. (The money we used was a gift.) It was nice to watch movies on while it lasted, which turned out to be about 14 months. For those of you with calculators, yes, that works out to be about $171 a month for the privilege of using their product. And yes again, that’s about two months after the warranty expired. The cost to fix? Five hundred and fifty dollars! Apparently that is for the power supply and one other part. Yep, $550 is just about the cost of a new 42″ television these days. Fuck PANASONIC. I will never the rest of my life buy anything with the name Panasonic on it. E-V-A-R.

Based on a bit of research on the net, it seems I’m not the only one to have a problem with a Panasonic tv. I can find lots of similar stories. Panasonic is now the newest entry on the long list known as “eat my ass.”

In conclusion…

I’m still trying to blog daily from vacation land and I apologize for the quality of my posts of late and my lack of comments on your blogs. Things will return to normal soon and then it will be another decade before my next paid day off work, I’m sure. Miss you all, hugs and kisses, XOXOXO. Yuck!

🙂

And now a home movie from my vacation so far: