Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be. It is just past 4:00 a.m. in "The City", where the local temperature is 54° as we drop to the overnight low of 47°. Later today, after the sun rises at 7:46 a.m., the temperature will rise to 58° with a 60% chance of rain. Wednesday promises to be sunny and windy with a high of 56°. In fact the balance of the work-week plus Saturday, looks about the same.

I heard the southbound train pass through about 12:00 a.m., but I didn't get up to look. It seemed as though the less manic engineer was at the throttles. However, when the northbound train passed by at 3:30 a.m., the horn-happy engineer had taken over. He was at the throttle of the two EMD GP 38 locomotives, #3885 in the old livery, and #2057 in the newer livery. 51 covered hopper cars, one old enough to be sporting N. Y. Central livery, along with two white tank cars, one lone box car, and three of those dreaded black tank cars followed those locomotives. A long train to say the least.

My son asked yesterday in an e-mail why I have sworn off watching pro-football?  Well, I flippantly told him that it was due to a limited amount of time. However, it goes a bit deeper. Before I retired, I had a limited number of free hours to myself. I figured out one weekend, that the teams won or lost without me watching, and I got about three free hours in the bargain. So while I love to watch sports, in my pecking order, baseball will always come first, because as every right thinking person knows. "Baseball is life!"

College football is still mostly pure, although the money is starting to creep into that game too. I stopped watching basketball about the time that Michael Jordan left the Bulls. I like hockey, but somehow there is no pressing need to watch. In fact, one of the reasons that I got cable TV years ago, was to watch Blackhawks games. Did I mention that "Baseball is life?"

So the best way to describe my eschewing of pro-football, is that I save a few precious hours of an ever dwindling amount of hours in my life, you know those hours that you can never get back, that I can devote to other pursuits. So there you have it Adam.

Today, I plan to use some of my hours to play with the girls, read more, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Selfish? Probably. But that's one of the things that happens to someone like me, someone who has had his share of issues over the past several years. In short, life's too short.

The sun will still set at 7:15 p.m., Mary will still have work to do, and Sugar the Weather Dog will still want to go for her daily constitutional. She has accepted that she and I go on one walk most days, but I think that she might like two. Again, only so many hours in a day. Ciao.