I'm Not Sure I Know Where This Balloon Lands

There are so many things up in the air right now. School Openings, Corona Virus, Economy, Health Care, and Government Handouts that found the lawmakers leaving Washington with plenty on the table while they take their August leave. I made a T-shirt that reads: My hobby is watching Congress. There are  little eyes in some letters. It really does seem that congress does take advantage of the American people by not really doing their job.

Doing as much research as I can while the summer heat and no car has me pretty much landlocked in the house while the Corona has its way with the world. There is some good to that.  I have discovered why my Walgreens runs out of meds more often and seems to have some problems with certain merchandise that never was a problem before.

When I started ordering on line it was between me and my retail store. When I switched to  online ordering with free shipping, I found out that I was talking to Boots Alliance. Boots Alliance is the Holding Company. Now, by reason of common sense, it must be another pharmacy in the picture some where. Well, as it would end up, yes, there is one.

Boots is the largest pharmacy in Great Britian. To make a long story shorter, The leverage buyout private equity firm known as KKR or Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, love to acquire businesses and toss the enormous debt onto one of the companies. In this case, it was Boots. Such is the case with Boots when KKR structured the deal between Boots and Walgreens with Rite Aid in the mix. Rite Aid bought out all the Lane Drugs in the Great Lakes.  I don't even want to know any more about how Rite Aid got there but it was through a buyout somewhere else. Not to mention the Eckerds (a subsidiary of J.C. Penny's ) buy out of their 1269 stores in Florida, Louisiana and Texas by CVS. Eckerds was the 4th largest pharmacy in the US at the time of the deal which also included Eckerds 1.3 Billion mail order business. The original company was worth $4.3Billion.

Yes, Rite Aid worked out a deal with Walgreens as a alternative to a merger by allowing Walgreens to purchase their 1900 stores except 8 states for a cool $4.4 billion that included 3 distribution centers.

Now, enter Amazon and Albertsons. Because of a government break up, Amazon bought on-line Pill Pak giving Rite Aid to grow its left over pickings it still owns. Albertsons is working with Amazon.com in the deal, it seems. This is, of course, old new...very old news, like two years ago.

What is even more surprising is that Blackstone and Carlyle and Bain Capital and Silver Lake Partners are all like KKR now. I can remember when KKR took Owens-Illinois, the glass maker, private and wrecked the company that was Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio. A lot of the employees have less to live on today as a result. But, as they say in mid-town New York, "You'll have that from time-to-time".  Yes, you will, I guess. Yes, you will.

Some still call this American capitalization. I call it pure greed and greed never wins in the end.

What Kids Really Think T-Shirt
by sam6372

Where Its Gonna Land Is Still Up In The Air!!!

Men's Large T-shirt
by sam6372

The Pop-Up Store Treasure Truck at Amazon Rolling Through Town

It looked like a carnival in the parking lot of the old Buckingham Mall at N.Plano Road and Belt Line Road. It took going through the light, changing lanes, turning into the strip shopping center, coming out at the light on N. Plano a block farther down, crossing into the parameter road that goes around what is left of the Buckingham Mall, where I could come back into the part of the parking lot where the Treasure Truck was parked. It took a lots of maneuvering to get there, but it was well worth the effort.

Visibility was at 2 miles and the rain had just begun

The setup

The product of the day! Thanks!

The Treasure Truck .  Text "Truck" to 24193 to get offer-Day Notifications. # treasuretruck

Click on anyone of the images to enlarge all three images. Then, chlicking on the image will adance to the next image.  

Just an Observation Mind You

A little bit of observation on how things have changed. 

In years past, while making my rounds I would see a UPS guy here and a Fed Ex guy there. Sometimes they would be in their trucks with the door open. Other times, they would be walking up to a business or house with 'a' package. 

Now, in comparison, I see individuals walking up to businesses or houses with 'a' package, which I must assume is a contract carrier for Amazon or one of the other online retailers. Sometimes, the trucks are rental. Sometimes, they are just plain white, while at other times, they are  just individual autos. 

In contrast to that, I now see the UPS guy or the Fed Ex guy walking up to a home or a business and they have armloads of packages. Not 'the' single package as in times past. Their work load has increased for sure. 

Now, when you take into account that this Black Friday brought in the insane amount of multi- billions of dollars in a single day no one should be surprised that Sears, Toys R Us are either out of business or on the threshold of being out of business with many more to follow, or so it seems.

In yet another interesting observation concerning millennial. There has been numerous articles that they are lazy, eat their meals in restaurants, hate cereal because you have to wash the bowl, and now---they don't sleep with or find a need to make a proper bed with a top sheet. So much in fact, that the mills are now considering selling a fitted sheet and two pillowcases as a set and charging YOU for that top sheet now, if you so want to request one.

My out-of-the-way parking spot at Kroger's has now been taken over by "order on line and pick up here". Yep, most of the orders being picked up when I was there were none other than the M's or the Z's.

I have been eager to support change most of my life. To go forward, one must accept change. But, now, the habits of the M's and the "Zs" have so disturbed the peace and dignity of old age that I  would support loading them all on 747s and sending them to Alaska---let them come home for Christmas.

Sometimes, Best Waits For The Last Minute

Here it is the end of another year! Where does that time go? Well, from a scientific point of view, it only moves forward so at least we know what direction to look for it each year. There is always a rush to finish projects or start looking for tax information,too. It's also a time to reflect and to make those New Years resolutions. A year in review seems to be the moniker that hangs for this kind of stuff. Although, for me, my annual review is always in July. That's when I sit down and comb through all the services that I use and figure out if I am getting my value out of them. If not, then they are cut or terminated. I've already got a heads up on one for July 2017. AT&T forced me to go to U-Verse and now since they purchased Direct TV, they have figured out that it cost them $17 more per customer to stay on U-Verse and are planning to switch customers  (I call it forced) to Direct TV. So, 2016 hasn't settled in the dust and a dust bowl is on the horizon for 2017 already.

Image Creators have that "forever stamp" in their indexes. Using a picture taken 5-years ago is just as timely as using that same image taken yesterday. There are exceptions, of course, but generally, stock images don't need to be updated as much as some think that they do. When bottom-line economics first appeared as a game-changer, I wasn't all that impressed. Now, today, all I hear is that no one listens to them anymore when they shop and certainly don't listen to them if they have an issue with something from a retailer to a bank to the phone company or even at times--- health care providers.

The big new thing that is really going to be the icing on the cake is all the talk about AI (artificial intelligence). Just  yesterday the police want  Amazon to turn over information from their Echo device in a murder investigation in Arkansas. It appears that even when not in use, the AI is still listening and recording that information. In my own home, why would I ever want something like that?

When I voted this past election, I ask my precinct foreman if my voting machine left a paper trail. He didn't know. But after I voted he came up to me and said, " no it doesn't." I had been observing each time that I voted for a few years that the election volunteer after checking the information inserted a smart drive into the machine before turning it over to me. I had already assumed that he was down loading the last persons vote and that after I left the machine, my vote remained in the machine until the next person voted, repeating what he had done before I used the machine. So when the Donald said that there was a great potential for voter fraud, I was not surprised. Now, this morning, the voter machines that I have been using have been declared not fit for election use because of the fraud issue. Why am I not surprised about that, either?

Yesterday, I started going back through my images from the first of 2016 and reviewing those that I have submitted, those that have been sold, and those that have been used by magazines, newspapers and as still shots on television. That is one class. The second class are those that have a WOW factor. They fulfill my mission statement : "A project to enhance the mind, stir the emotions and  quench a thirsty soul." All the others I begin to delete. According to my camera numbering system, 2016 will be a bit off. As with the images from yesterday, 2016 saw the shutter click shut just shy of 50,000 clicks. That's about one tenth of one percent that end up earmarked as keepers. A good shot can still be good but for submission purposes, someone's arm or elbo in the shot pretty much marks that image for the delete button. It's the old adage: you create the beast, the beast wants fed. In this case, my beast is eating about 50,000 shots a year. As long as I am still having fun doing it, then the beast doesn't get hunger pains. When I have to put the camera down, for me, it's going to be a sad day.

So, in this last week of the year 2016, the unusual appeared. In searching back, my most amazing image came from a pigeon earlier in the year. Both were of animals. I'm thankful for that. Their brains may be smaller than ours, but they have more intelligence than we give them credit and their hearts beat just like our, too.

Layla--a pure white German Shepard from Germany.

Muscle is still Muscle

Dragon Boat on White Rock Lake. One team trains here.The annual race is at Las Colinas in May each year.