Tony Brewer View

I have a lot of relatives in New England, and we talk on the phone several times each week.  It’s nice to keep in touch that way, we’re a close-knit family.  It seems that lately every time I talk with one of them they are telling me about how much snow they’ve been getting this winter!  It sure makes me glad that I don’t live in New England right about now!  I can’t imagine having to deal with clearing off windshields and digging out the car that often to get to work or go shopping!  I’d want to hibernate and not even go out!

I’ve noticed since we’ve lived here that the worst storms seem to go right past us.  Yes, there have been a few bad storms that scared Teri a little bit; afraid it might be a tornado in the middle of the night because there were noisy high winds, but for the most part all of the big storms have veered off a few miles to the north or the south.  Very rarely does our particular neighborhood get hit. 

I was commenting on that this morning to Teri because the weatherman kept predicting we were going to get a bad wintry mix storm starting last night and lasting all day, but when we got up this morning the skies were a little bit gray, but there was nothing falling from them.  And now, it is afternoon and the sky is cleared up.  It’s a little bit brisk out, but it IS January after all, and that is to be expected!  I think we picked a pretty good place to live!

One of the biggest problems in today’s economy is the inability for many people and businesses to get the loans that they need in order to survive.  Businesses are closing their doors, laying off people.  I don’t really understand where the money went from the “big bank bail-out” because it doesn’t really look like any of that money is trickling down to where it needs to go in order to help out the folks that really need it.  I wish that the government had forced the banks to be more accountable for where our tax money was actually going to go!

Many people who wanted to start their own businesses have bought into franchises, with the hope that doing so would give them an edge on making a profit.  Many of the franchises offer financing help for their franchisees, but I’ve heard from a few people that I know that have a franchise that the help has pretty much dried up.  It’s important for people to keep their businesses looking fresh and keep upgrading their technology in order to meet the terms of their business.

Franchise Loans are available from other sources, however, such as the onlinecheck.com website.  Getting a franchise loan through that site is easier and faster than going to a traditional bank.

I was reading on the Ananova.com website a “quirkies” story about a lady in Germany who was trying to complete a crossword puzzle and got stumped on the very last clue that she needed to fill in so that the puzzle would be completed. The question had to do with the name of one of the police units. She decided to call “999″ which is the equivalent of the US’s “911″ emergency line and asked the responding dispatcher for the answer to her crossword puzzle clue.

Apparently the dispatcher was not amused and told her to get off the line, and threatened to charge her with wasting the police officer’s time. The woman was surprised at such a hostile reaction.

I’m not an avid crossword puzzle fan, but I can’t imagine calling the police emergency number to help solve a crossword puzzle! Some people just don’t have a lot of common sense, do they?