Monday this and Monday that.

--Car adverts are certainly different than they used to be. Try reading the ad copy for the Pierce Arrow Motor Cars, from 1919. It just zings off the page, doesn't it?

--I bought a riding lawn mower yesterday for $160. It runs really well. This is my first riding lawn mower, since using the tired old Montgomery Ward model that my parents bought when I was about 9. This one is a Murray.

--It won't fit into the shed. I'm going to have to build a little shed for it, with a wide enough door. 

--I finally cleared my desk of the huge number of cases that I had on it. Maybe now I can get some good patrol done.

--My elder daughter is hassling me about going shooting. I think that I'll make that happen.

--My younger daughter got a ridiculous device for Christmas that allows her to make miniature pies on lolly pop sticks. She makes and rolls out the dough, and then cuts out little discs of it, and puts in pie filling (she sometimes makes it herself out of berries), and then cooks them, 6 at a time, with a waffle-iron-like apparatus. They're called "Pie Pops." They're silly. They're tasty.

--My father got a new truck, in which we brought home the riding mower. That's one of the nicest vehicles that I've ever been in.

--We detailed my old Saturn on Saturday. It looks pretty good. I need to get a new tire for it, so that it will pass inspection, so that I can more easily sell it. I couldn't believe how expensive even the cheapest tires are. $50 for the cheapest that I found, plus $28 in balancing, mounting, tax, tire disposal. $78 for a tire that's going on a car that I won't keep a week. I walked out. Maybe I'll actually buy a used tire. I haven't done than since I was a teenager, and even then, I knew that it was not a good idea. This old car has a salvage title, and I reckon it'll bring about $1000. It served us pretty well, actually. We bought it in 2003 for $5200 out the door. It was two years old then.

--I wish that all my guns had finishes as shiny and well-preserved as those in Django: Unchained.

--Remember that we still have troops in Afghanistan, for no reason that I can ascertain. This is over four years after our current President took office, and nearly four years after he won a Nobel Prize for peace. Why is he getting a pass on this?

--My elder daughter read the above over my shoulder, and said, "There's never a reason to go to war!" That stopped me down. I limited my response to 15 minutes. I hope she thinks about what I told her. She's a very smart kid, but I had no idea how sheltered she was.

--The news is full of stuff about a Notre Dame football player named Manti Te'o, who was this past fall a sensation because he played splendidly, despite his girlfriend passing away. Now we find out that she was not a real person, and he claims to have been pranked. There is rampant speculation as to how much he really knew.   Yet none of the newsies are openly addressing the issue of what motivation a single guy in an uber-masculine male-dominated sport would have had, to invent a mysterious long-distance relationship with a fake girlfriend.  It seems to me that the most likely answer is also a tragic story, too.