I bought a mini CD boombox today at Rite Aid and the girl at the checkout asked me if I had any plans for the weekend. We have never had a personal conversation before except I did wish her a happy new year last December. It was a good way to start the day.

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I got a shout out on TV this morning. First one since January.

For a couple of years the top of the water heater was starting to rust out. Yesterday I noticed a small puddle on top and it kept coming back everytime I wiped it up so I figured it was time to replace it. The water heater was 11 years old and cost $625. The same plumber put in a new one today for about $1,000. In the big scheme of things that's not very expensive.

Sometimes when I am driving instead of taking my usual route I will drive down roads I have never been before just to see where they go. A lot of streets here are not just north/south and east/west so you don't know exactly where they go. I think it is a good way of getting your brain out of a rut and creating new pathways of thinking that go beyond just driving.

This is big news in NY. A girl attending Hofstra was held hostage and then killed by a cop when he shot the perp. I got my MBA from Hofstra, so I like to think of better memories of the place.

I had dragged out my stay at Hofstra because I liked going there. But most of the people I was friends with had already graduated by the time I graduated. I went to the ceremony anyway and brought some neighbors and family. There was a reception for the MBA students right after the ceremony and I decided to go even though I didn't expect to see anyone I knew. I was wrong. There was this girl Susan who I had taken a single summer class with four years before graduation. We were part of a group project in that class and as a group we spent many hours working together on the project. I wasn't really that close with Susan and had not seen her on campus in those four years since. But when we saw each other at the reception we hugged like long lost lovers. She was now married and her husband was there and I have no idea what he thought. We had never hugged before but we did that day for a long time. That was the last time I saw her.

My graduation day from Hofstra was one of the top days in my life. It was a beautiful day, I had people cheering for me when I got my diploma, and expecting to see no one I knew at the graduation ran into someone who was part of a great summer four years before. Oh and our group got the highest grade in the class.

That afternoon on TV they showed this movie, and I sort of thought our group was like the Breakfast Club. We had two girls and three guys and we all had different backgrounds. But we worked together great.

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So I got these people who moved in next door with the 90 year old woman with dementia. Supposedly they are related to the woman's Jamaican caretaker. They are mainly young, about 20, with a few others. I really have no idea how many are living there. They stay indoors most of the time but sometimes hang out in the backyard. Recently they have been cleaning up the front lawn and backyard. That's strange because during the winter nobody came out to shovel and I did it for them. At the time I didn't know who was living there.

Yesterday they spent all day trimming the bushes and hedges. After they were done I saw they piled up about 8 garbage bags and actually put them on my property where there is a space between the hedges and the backyard fence. The hedges separate the houses in the front, and the chainlink fence separates the houses in the backyard and side. There is about five feet that is an open space between the fence and the hedges. They stored the full garbage bags completely on my property under my tree. When I saw that I was like wtf? That kind of thing bugs me because it is an act of disrespect and trespass. It is possible and probably likely they had no bad intent but you can't do things like that.

I thought about it overnight and considered looking for them the next day and asking them to move them, or calling the elderly woman's son and telling him. But this morning I thought the heck with that and I walked over and moved them off my property and into their driveway. Now maybe they won't like that but I didn't like them piling their garbage on my property.

"Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."

- William James