Ouch.....

Explaining that the undertaking could take up to 20 years, members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a major initiative Friday to begin mapping the massive layer of garbage on the ocean floor. 

“With roughly 110 million square miles of oceanic trash remaining completely unexplored, we hope that next year we can start producing bathymetric maps of the rugged detritus ranges and vast refuse flats at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,” said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco, who explained that topographers will use multibeam echosounders to create a digital terrain model displaying the many trash formations suspected to exist on the seafloor, including deep trenches in tire piles, countless scrap metal ridges, and detergent bottle shelves. 

“It may be ambitious, but we hope to eventually define the contours of every square inch of the plastic and metal debris at the bottom of the world’s oceans. Unfortunately, almost all of the data we currently have is limited to the junk features within five miles of our coastlines—frankly, we know more about the garbage in our solar system than our own deep-sea litter.” 

Lubchenco added that the maps could be extremely beneficial to marine biologists hoping to study the sea life that have evolved to live in and around the waste bed.

It rained last night.

It's the same every year, the first rain and people forget the basic laws of mechanical physics and vector quantities. 

The roads are slick and vehicles skid, often into one another.

This area had jackknifed trucks, cars in ditches and all manner of traffic this morning. Wanda left for work, got eight blocks from the house and was stuck. The freeway entrance is about a mile and a half from here. She turned around, came home and sat out the morning craziness.

I stayed in bed.

I got a flu shot yesterday and guess what....I have the flu.

I know there are people who think flu shots are dangerous and putting a strain of the virus inside your body is a bad idea. I even heard a friend say they knew someone who got a flu shot and died the next day. Well, I've had the flu and spending several days in bed, sweating and shaking, maybe barfing in a bucket is not  my idea of a day at the beach.

I've been getting shots for years now and aside from a day or two of minor discomfort I've never been sick.

So my arm hurts and I'm a little icky. I think I'm going to sit on a the couch and catch up with my recorded television programs.