Tony Brewer

My whole family is always talking about football.  Who’s playing who, who’s won this game or that.  My father is the biggest NFL sports fan I’ve ever met!  I’ve been a little bit busy lately, to be honest, to keep up to date with all of the latest news, but whenever I know I’m going to be chatting with my father, I know that I need to “brush up” and get ready to talk sports, almost non-stop!  It just isn’t a “big” family dinner without a good chunk of time taken up by the men gathering around the television to watch a game, and cheer on the favorite team!

So, in order to brush up on who’s playing, winning, losing, I trust the Comcast.net’s website to give me the information that I need.  It covers every major sport, including college basketball and college football.  It has great highlight reels you can watch.  In the NFL section it has scoreboards, schedules, standings, statistics, forums, and videos that I can use to keep up with the action. 

The website even has a great sports trivia game that you can play.  I think the next time my father comes over here I’m going to challenge him to play it and see how well he does!

I was reading an article on the Yahoo news that there has been a problem with invasive animal species threatening the existence of a particular type of bird on an Australian island called Macquarie island.  One of the invasive species was feral cats.  Well, the experts decided that if they killed all of the feral cats, then the birds wouldn’t be threatened.  So they killed off all of the cats.  Well, that backfired because then the rabbit population exploded and they ate up most of the vegetation that the birds needed.  So now they have a problem with rabbits.  They also apparently have a problem with mice and rats. 

So now they’ve decided to poison all of the rabbits, mice and rats by dropping poison bait all over the island, which should kill all of them.  I can’t imagine that the poison won’t also harm the birds!  I also happen to be fond of rabbits, and I hate the thought of thousands of them being poisoned!  Now, if anyone had bothered to ask me for MY advice, I would have suggested that they drop some kind of bait that would prevent rodents from reproducing, so that they would become sterile and just die of old age.  I don’t know if that would also sterilize the birds or not….. but that goes along the same vein of poisoning them!

As people consider what jobs they should be seeking in this rotten economy, the experts keep talking about how jobs in health care will continue to rise in demand.  The baby boomer generation is aging and is going to be needing a lot of health care.  Because of advances in science and medicine, people are living longer.  However, living longer does not mean that they will be in perfect health!  Our bodies were not designed to live forever!  So parts start to wear out, and we need extra medications and special accommodations to  help us to do the things we need to do.  Things like chairs that you can ride up and down stairs when your knees are too weak to climb stairs.

Things like an electric scooter to help you get around stores, and in some cases even around the house.  Aren’t those scooters that the stores provide a wonderful thing?  I know that last year when Teri had a sprained ankle, those scooters were a godsend!  And for those among us who have a semi-permanent condition that requires that type of mobility assistance full time, there are options now to buy them and have medical insurance policies pay for them in some cases.  I think that is a great way to empower many people who are mobility challenged!

Over the past week or so I’ve noticed when I drive past the local fire department that they have a new very large trailer parked in their parking lot. I haven’t been able to read the printing on the trailer to figure out what it actually says until today. It says that it is live fire training! Now I think that is a really great thing for our town to have. I learned about live fire training a few months ago, it is equipment that really trains the fire fighters to really fight real fires! In a controlled environment, so they are as safe as possible. I don’t know how expensive this equipment is, but I’m sure it cost plenty of money! So I’m very impressed that our fire department managed to swing buying it! I’m sure it actually belongs to the fire department because it has the town’s name painted right on it, so they didn’t rent it for a short term period – I think that is awesome!