Today is Sunday, January 8 and there are only 37 days until Valentines Day.  Shop for a gift now while the sales are still going on.  Today we remember the birthdays of Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf, Johannesburg Kneppelhout and Shirley Bassey.  On this day in 1675 the first American commercial corporation, New York Fishing Co., was chartered, in 1806 Lewis and Clark found the skeleton of a 105’ blue whale in Oregon and in 1992 President George Bush got ill and vomited on the Japanese prime minister’s lap.  In Louisiana it is Old Hickory Day/ Jackson Day, in Switzerland it is Meitlisunntig Festival-Woman in Villmergen War and in the US it is National Argyle Day, National Bubble Bath Day and National English Toffee Day.

Let me start out by saying that I still hate glitter.  I am still finding it everywhere.  I spot it in the grout on the kitchen floor, it is on my computer keyboard, on paperwork that I need to file, on my iPad, everywhere.  The other day I was doing laundry and found it on my underwear!  I have found it in every room in the house, in the garage and in my car.  I think that whoever invented this stuff should be made to go to houses and clean the glitter up.  There is nothing more disconcerting than to look in the mirror and see glitter on your ear and have to wonder where it came from and how it got there.  Two names have been eliminated from my card list because they sent cards with glitter.  It’s too bad because they were nice people.  Oh well (sigh).

But enough about that.  We have just completed the first week of January and the Valentines Day candy is out on the shelves.  I have also seen Easter candy in some stores.  One has to wonder if this is left over from last year and brought out to get ahead of the game or if it is new (made in November) and being put out to get moving on the next seasons.  After all, Christmas and New Year’s Day are long gone.  Unplug the lights and get into the next season.  Don’t take the lights down, just unplug them.  They will be going back up in a couple months as we move into the Christmas season again.

I made a trip to the mall recently for some coffee and people watching and noticed that stores are starting to show spring and summer clothing.  Give me a break!  It is January and we haven’t even had our first decent snowfall yet!  The last thing we should be thinking about is buying shorts.  Of course, if we don’t get them now, we won’t be able to find them when we need them.  Stores are rushing the seasons more and more and then they wonder why they have to close locations.  There was an article recently that said that one retail giant was closing 68 stores.  Has it occurred to any of the people running these stores that if they had items available when people actually needed them, they might do better?  People would not have to shop on-line to get things if they were actually available in the stores.  I cannot believe that I am the only one that this has ever thought of this.  Of course I am just a retired person with nothing to do but drink coffee and watch people run around the mall without actually buying anything.

On my most recent trip, I made a point of noticing several sets of people and paying attention to them.  The place I like to sit is near an entrance.  I figured that if I watched long enough, I would see the same people coming out that I saw coming in.  I thought it would be interesting to see how many bags they were carrying on the way out.  This was, after all, when sales were still going on.  I selected a group of three women I judged to be in their 30’s, a man and a woman I assumed were married based on the look of excitement he had on his face because he was shopping in  the middle of the day and not home taking a nap, a man who came in with the attitude that he knew where he was going and what he wanted and a gaggle of young girls who were talking about the gift cards they had to use.

The first person to come back on the way out was the man with the attitude.  He was empty handed and his attitude had changed.  He was clearly unhappy.  I guess he was looking for something seasonal.  If that was the case, he should have been here back in September.  It took a while, but the next group was the three women.  One was carrying a bag and the other two were not.  They had that look that said they were disappointed.  All these stores, all the sales and they found nothing to buy.  The young girls drifted by complaining about the junk the stores had on sale.  The married couple were apparently still wandering the mall when I decided to leave.  I hope the husband at least got a new shirt out of the deal.

This week our fact tells us that the moon weighs 81 billion tons!  Prove it!  I have decided that this will be my response to these types of statements from now on.  The moon weighs 81 billion tons.  Show me proof.  How did you come to that conclusion?  What if the moon is hollow?  What if it is made of a substance like styrofoam and covered with a layer of dirt and rocks?  They claim that fingerprints are all different.  Prove it!  Has every single person on earth been printed and their prints compared to everyone else?  No.  So how do we know that someone in Addis a baba doesn’t have prints matching the guy living across the street from me?  We don’t.  So from now on, when someone tells me no two snowflakes are alike, I will simply say prove it!