OK, we've been moved in to the new house for just over a week now.

<> My parents and mother-in-law were a huge help during the move-in. Dad did a lot of the basic handyman stuff around the house, Mom cleaned and unpacked boxes, Mother-in-law did landscaping work. We couldn't have done it without them.

Our city provides us with garbage cans for garbage, recyclables, and yard waste. We haven't received the recycling and yard waste cans yet, so my first lawn mowing wasn't a bag job. It still took about 45 minutes, and the skies opened up and rained on me about 5 minutes before I finished. Mowing and bagging is going to take even longer.

<> Our big purchase for the new home was a 50" LCD HDTV for the family room, where we spend most of our time. Once the DirecTV people got the satellite installed, we got to watch some serious HDTV. For those of you who don't know, HDTV is amazing. I've been watching the HD channels just to see HD programming. We're excited to find out Arrested Development is going to be on HDNet.<> I also can't wait to see the new season of LOST in HD.

<> My big project for the rest of the summer is to tend to the yard. Currently, it's infested with weeds. I learned from my Dad that taking care of a lawn is a big project, but making your lawn beautiful and weed-free is a glorious thing. I'm gonna have to get lots of weed killers to get it up to shape, and it's going to take time, since I refuse to use a lawn-care service. Here in Kentucky, we've got a particular weed called wild violet that is a pain in the butt to kill. It took years to get it out of my last lawn, and when the neighbors don't care to get it out of their lawns, it doesn't make things easier.

OK, we've hopefully gotten past all the mortgage issues. They tried to drop a $1400 addition to our scheduled closing costs, but since I did some research and found this to be an error that shouldn't have been made in the first place, the bank agreed to eat the entire amount out of their fees. It actually lowers our monthly mortgage payments slightly. Hooray!

Closing is on July 21, and we can start moving our stuff in immediately afterwards.

The worst thing is that the weather is predicting temps in the 90s with a chance of thunderstorms. The temps are to be expected for late July, but the chance of precipitation really stinks. 

There’s something here I don’t understand.

It has been reported recently that the hunt for WMDs in Iraq hasn’t turned up any nukes, but it has turned up a number of chemical weapons. However, it has also been reported that these chemical weapons are too weathered to be usable, or something along the lines of the weapons being too harmless to be considered WMDs.

Here in the United States, there is a large cache of chemical weapons not too far away from my home in Lexington, Ky., that have been awaiting destruction for a large number of years. They haven’t been destroyed because every time a method of disposal is proposed, residents of the surrounding communities make a massive stink over the potential threats posed to them by the destruction process.

Why don't we just dispose our our chemical weapons in the same fashion that Iraq's weapons have been deemed useless? Their weapons have been rendered inert without any organized program to get rid of them, or any reported threats to Iraqis, which would save the U.S. taxpayers many millions of dollars, and it would finally get rid of stockpiles of weapons that we have no use for.