Weekend review, gas prices

I'm finally caught up on work and thought I'd sneak over here for a quick post. Can't believe how far behind everything gets in 1 day!! It wouldn't have to but the other 2 won't do my work while I'm off even though they did it before I was hired.
The rummage sale went pretty good. We sold a total of about $400.00. My share of that was quite small since all I put in this year was books. Most of which went to Goodwill :( Oh well, at least someone else will enjoy them instead of just sitting in my basement. We did sign a pact to never have another rummage sale again! It's just too much work for so little return. Sat. it stormed all morning and into the afternoon. We had decided to close it down for the day about 8am but 'lo and behold, we had customers!! I don't like shopping and there's no way I'd be out rummaging in the rain. Evidently I'm in a small minority! lol Overall, it was a good weekend. Had a lot of quality time with Mom and sisters. Amanda and the kids were there 2 of the days. Some Aunts and Uncles stopped by to say 'Hi' so, like I said, a good weekend.
Kitties are well and growing. The peacock only has about 4 feathers left. Lately he has been sitting atop our 2 story house a plucking the heck out of himself. Have collected a lot of them and took a handful to my sister so she can give them to a friend of hers that makes floral arrangements to use. (Note to self: stick a few in some arrangements I have!) He really looks pretty pathetic and we can't help laughing at how scrawny he looks without the train.
On the news front: I saw 2 more earthquakes occurred. One in Taiwan and one in Greece. I'm afraid I've slacked off my earthquake and volcano watching this weekend. Due to the rummage sale, I don't have a clue as to what all has been going on in the rest of the world. I did see on my way in to work yesterday that gas prices are all over the place here. Of the stations I drove by their prices were: $4.03, $4.19, $4.11 and $4.09.....Today they are $4.02, $4.06, $4.09 and $4.18.
The station that yesterday had $4.03 went up to $4.18....the station that had $4.06 went down to $4.02!?! Tell me someone isn't gouging the prices!!! Normally, they are all about the same price, maybe a penny or 2 difference but today it's crazy!! When I started driving gas was around $.55 cents a gallon! My how times change!! Of course, that was 1974! That's the year Nixon resigns as President. The National speed limit was set at 55 MPH, US Postage rate rose to $.10 and 'Streaking' became popular...them were the days....

This Day in History:

July 15, 1888

Volcano buries victims in fiery mud

The Bandai volcano erupts on the Japanese island of Honshu on this day in 1888, killing hundreds and burying many nearby villages in ash.

Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago, is in an area of intense geological activity, where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are relatively common. The Bandai volcano is a mountain in northern Honshu with a very steep slope. It had erupted four times in the 1,000 years prior to the 1888 eruption, but none of these had been particularly deadly.

At just after 7 a.m. on July 15, rumblings were heard from Bandai. Only 30 minutes after that, an explosion on the north side of the mountain caused powerful tremors. Fifteen minutes later, there was another explosion and, in the next two hours, dozens followed. The explosive eruptions sent debris thousands of feet into the air. The resulting cloud of ash and steam was estimated at 21,000 feet wide.

The giant cloud sent a dangerous rain of burning mud down over the area. Several villages in the Bandai area were buried by a combination of the fiery mud and landslides caused by the tremors. At the Kawakami spa, 100-foot-deep debris covered the ground. Although 100 bodies were recovered there, many were never found.

The best estimate is that 461 people were killed and hundreds more were seriously injured, suffering broken bones and skulls from the rain or flying debris, as a result of the eruption. More than one hundred people were critically burned. The eruption left an 8,000-foot crater in the earth. In the aftermath, the ash from Bandai dimmed the sun slightly worldwide for months.

July 15, 1941

Garbo makes an appearance

On this day in 1941, master spy Juan Pujol Garcia, nicknamed "Garbo," sends his first communique to Germany from Britain. The question was: Who was he spying for?

Juan Garcia, a Spaniard, ran an elaborate multi ethnic spy network that included a Dutch airline steward, a British censor for the Ministry of Information, a Cabinet office clerk, a U.S. soldier in England, and a Welshman sympathetic to fascism. All were engaged in gathering secret information on the British-Allied war effort, which was then transmitted back to Berlin. Garcia was in the pay of the Nazis. The Germans knew him as "Arabel," whereas the English knew him as Garbo. The English knew a lot more about him, in fact, than the Germans, as Garcia was a British double agent.

None of Garcia's spies were real, and the disinformation he transmitted to Germany was fabricated--phony military "secrets" that the British wanted planted with the Germans to divert them from genuine military preparations and plans.

Among the most effective of Garcia's deceptions took place in June 1944, when he managed to convince Hitler that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was just a "diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make a decisive attack in another place"--playing right into the mindset of German intelligence, which had already suspected that this might be the case. (Of course, it wasn't.) Among the "agents" that Garcia employed in gathering this "intelligence" was Donny, leader of the World Aryan Order; Dick, an "Indian fanatic"; and Dorick, a civilian who lived at a North Sea port. All these men were inventions of Garcia's imagination, but they lent authenticity to his reports back to Berlin--so much so that Hitler, while visiting occupied France, awarded Garcia the Iron Cross for his service to the fatherland.

That same year, 1944, Garcia received his true reward, the title of MBE—Member of the British Empire--for his service to the England and the Allied cause. This ingenious Spaniard had proved to be one of the Allies' most successful counterintelligence tools.

That's all the time I have today. Take care...until next post.