Back in the day I worked for a telecommunications giant and AT&T was our biggest competitor. In fact, we considered them our arch enemy. I still do. It kills me that we have little choice in who provides our home phone and cable service. I would much rather pay any phone company for my obsolete land line than AT&T but there are no options and I’m required to have a land line for the archaic company that now writes my paycheck.

I would love to see AT&T and all the megalopolistic companies fold up and crawl back under whichever rock they emerged from years ago to wreak their havoc on the world. But I suspect this latest announcement of layoffs is them just laying the groundwork to be the next in line at the Government’s bailout trough.

One of the momentos I have of my late grandfather is his pair of binoculars that he used every year while hunting. The binoculars were an important part of his hunting gear and something he treasured, and now I treasure them.

It occurred to me that a good pair of binoculars would make a really nice Christmas gift for a man who hunts or has a boat. Nikon has a special deal on top of great prices on all their ATB Binoculars. Check out the Nikon Hunting Christmas Promotion on the Nikon Promo.com web site and read the special gift offer of gift cards with every purchase!

My email account with Yahoo has been invaluable to me over the years. I think I got my first account with Yahoo about 16 years ago. It’s been one of the best bargains in town. I’ve had other email accounts over the years, some of them free and some of them for a monthly fee, but I’ve kept my Yahoo account active all these years for personal use. Of course, I am on every list of spam and scam out there and I delete over 100 crap emails every day. But I still use it and count on Yahoo.

So it freaked me out today when I went online to check my email and the entire Yahoo site was down. I checked my own computer and internet connections to make sure it wasn’t something I did on this end, but it was Yahoo. An hour later and I still didn’t have the web site loaded. OMG!

Eventually it came back up with no explanation or apologies. I wonder if it was a regional outage or if the wizard behind Yahoo’s curtain of mystique figure they can ignore it and no one will make an issue of it?

With the Wall Street stock market still volatile and people’s fortunes changing by the day, I was curious about the Nouveau Riche on Fortune Magazine’s list of the wealthiest people in the world and how they are making out.

I found an article on the CNN Money web site with a ranking by Fortune Magazine of the world’s wealthiest people back in 1991 and read about the Nouveau Riche of that point in time. Numbers one and three were Arabs with their oil holdings and number 2 was the Sam Walton of Wal Mart fame. Number four was a Canadian family of real estate investors and developers, and number 5 was the MARS candy family.

Nouveau Riche is a French-based term for “newly wealthy.” All of the 1991 billionaires were technically in that category as they all were first generation wealthy. So then I looked up this year’s ranking and compared the lists to see if the newly rich had staying power. What a huge difference! The Walton family has slipped from number 2 to number 26. The Mars family slipped from number 5 to number 46.

The number 1 spot is now Warren Buffet. But will he keep that spot at the end of this year with all the Wall Street losses? It will be interesting to see what kinds of dramatic changes happen to this list after the first of the year, and especially if Wall Street continues to dive.

This morning we were talking about our experiences with having to eat food that we didn’t like.

My own story went along the lines of being invited over to a friend’s house to work on a junior high school project of some sort. While over there for several hours on a Saturday, the mom fixed lunch for us and the whole family sat down with total proper manners to eat in their dining room. This in itself was a vast difference from a lunch experience at my own home. But that’s a nother story!

Each of us had a sandwich on a plate in front of us and slices of apple on the side with a glass of milk. The sandwich was made of 2 slices of white bread and a thick slice of luncheon meat of some sort in the middle. There was no lettuce, cheese, mayo or anything else offered to go on the sandwich. So after the father said grace and began to eat (I did have some good manners as a kid!) I picked up half of the sandwich and took a bite, expecting maybe bologna. It wasn’t.

I had never had liverwurst before in my life and I will NEVER EVER IN A MILLION YEARS willingly or knowingly eat liverwurst again EVER!

I HAD to eat it to be polite but I hated every agonizing mouthful and I never went over to their house again.