I hope all of you have your wrapping done, boxes mailed, all edible gift baskets sent, buckets of popcorn (three flavors) delivered here and yon. Guess what? Most of my house was decorated by the end of November including outdoor lights. It seems like yesterday we were stuffing ourselves with turkey and all the trimmings and sprawled on the sofa watching football in a stupor.

What a glorious month. The weather here is perfect, which means, alas, we really need a good soaking, so please perform your most graceful rain dance, chanting to your district weather minions to fountain say a million or so gallons of rain into No. Cal.

To boldly go where no one has gone before – I’m so completely jazzed that Captain James Tiberius Kirk went into space – again, only this time for real. William Shatner, 90, went up into space at Jeff Bezos’s invitation, the Jeff Bezos who will rule the world within seven years, no doubt in my mind.

Happy Gorgeous September: FIRST THING you do BEFORE reading on: Drink a glass of wine or beer, or partake of any other enjoyable substance in your drawer. Are you ready? Okay -- GO: It’s nearly the Autumn Equinox -- when day and night are equal, but beginning Thursday the 23rd, the day is a hair shorter and so days continue losing time until you’re bald when you most need your hair since it’s getting really nippy.

Time is NOT relative, no matter what the wild-haired dude postulated. Time knows no limits, no restraints, time is anxious to find a finish line and cross it first. But where exactly is the finish line? And is there anything or anyone to come in second? I only wish the Powers That Be would slow time down just a little bit, say make it less fleeting, as it were. If you watch The Big Bang Theory, you'll remember the episode when Leonard, Raj and Howard get stoned and Leonard tells Raj the Earth is moving too fast and to slow it down. Raj does exactly that. I need a Raj. It's hard to believe September is just around the corner

Did you chow down on BBQ and potato salad on the Fourth of July? Did you play hoops and watch kids go shrieking with laughter down the plastic water slides, and then night came and the clouds parted (except here in San Francisco) and you saw amazing fireworks? Here, I've got to say the chowing down was vigorous and loads of fun, and at least we had a lot of firework noise, blasting bangs seemingly out of the fog that probably drove a lot of human and animal critters wild. You remember what Mark Twain said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It's certainly true this summer. Sigh

It's Outer Banks time with 40 plus members of both sides of the family -- first time traveling (and in an airplane!) for what, two years? It seems like longer since we had to cancel out last summer.

Vol. 50 No. 007

Let me get the shameless advertising out of the way so by the time you've read the newsletter, it'll be embedded in your brain and you won't even realize you've had the sneaky implant. VORTEX -- incredible cover shown below -- is the 25^th FBI thriller out August 10^th. There, painless, done, be sure to pre-order because that makes the publisher very happy and, well, it makes me sing a bit of opera (not from Aida).

Happy St. Patrick's Day Green beer? Excuse me? Who does that? I mean, could you be convinced that to properly celebrate this lovely Irish day, you are required to pour GREEN beer down your gullet? Hey, can you get GREEN beer Light? Would the color be a lighter green?