I know the City is just trying to improve our streets and make things better, but why does it feel like they are just roaming from corner to corner, street to street, making more messes? I have to drive through that crap to and from work every day, as I'm sure many of you do. I don't know a whole lot about how this sort of "improvement" should be done, but I would think, just based on common sense, you could work on one street corner, finish it and move on to another one, rather than leaving various cones, tape, potholes, mud holes, dirt piles, asphalt piles for us to drive through, around and over. I can't imagine what a horrible mess this is going to be through Mountain Festival weekend. The streets are bad enough then without all this kind of confusion. Why did the City schedule this kind of project to coincide not only with the Mountain Festival, but also the beginning of the school year? Will the mess and blinking stoplight on Curry still be there on Aug. 21 when school goes back into session? I can just see the traffic backing up now...

I read an AP article the other day about friendships in the United States. It seems that among the general population, our circles of friends are getting smaller. I find in my own life that this is definitely true. As the article pointed out, even with technologies such as email, webphones, chat and pc cameras, people still aren't making the connections.

For one thing, people just seem to be too busy. How many times have I made a lunch date or playday for my child, only to have someone tell me they were too busy and forgot or something came up. Between church activities, family get-togethers, extracurricular activities for the kids and holidays, when is there time to sit down and have a cup of coffee with a friend?

Living in a household where my husband and I both work, I can completely understand a world where there simply is no time. But I have the lure of technology when I'm not doing what "needs" to be done. It's easy to go sit at the computer and write an email. It's easy to go play a game on Pogo and chat with a faceless, fake-named entity.

But then what happens to our friendships? They can be formed or even maintained via the internet, but what has happened to the human side of it? I cannot see my friend laugh through an email. I can't hug my sister who may or may not be crying - I would never know.

My circle of friends primarily consists of those in my home and though this can be seen as a very good thing, it's also scary. What about when my kids go away? What if I lost my best-friend, husband?

This is a great reminder for me to widen my circle of friends... to decide the laundry could wait one more day if it meant I could sit with a friend and laugh... to leave the keyboard behind a few times and feel human... to let my friends know they are precious to me.

Ok, Sesame Street is in a serious decline as far as I'm concerned. Whatever happened to such favorites as "Ladybug's Picnic" or the 123-45-678910-1112 pinball thing that I so loved from when I was a child. Do you know what's on there now? Vegetables. Fruits. What's up with that? Hey, these days, I can completely understand wanting to get kids excited about eating healthy and getting off their butts to do something, but come on, this is Sesame Street! The land of muppets and numbers and counting. It's difficult enough for enough of them to learn their numbers and letters, which should be what the bulk of this show is about. This is too young to be pushing a concept of good nutrition at such a fanatic level. My 7-year-old daughter said it best - "Mom, why are those vegetables dancing?"