In fact, about a fourth of Americans now say they have no one they can tell their personal troubles to. That figure has doubled since 1985.

American adults say their closest circle of confidantes now has dropped to just two people.

See, in 2004 about half the people in America said that their spouse was the only person they could confide in. But if that relationship gets into trouble, or if the spouse gets sick, our society is left with more and more people who have no one to turn to.

That’s not to say that people have no one to talk to – I could be e-mailing 25 people a day but that doesn’t mean I’m sharing things that are really important to me.

People who used to count on a neighbor – 19% – to confide in has also dropped – to 8%.

The study (General Social Survey) was recently completed by the National Science Foundation. It was a high-quality random survey of 1,500 Americans.

We’re losing our connectedness, folks.

We’ve committed to increased professional responsibilities – sometimes working two or more jobs to make ends meet – and commutes are getting longer. By the time we get home, we’re just too tuckered out to do much more than rest – not bounce the ball and shoot hoops, or spend an evening with our daughter’s scout troop, or coach a softball or baseball or football or soccer team.

We don’t go on picnics as much – down 60%.

We don’t eat dinners together as a family – down 40%.

Americans need to get re-connected. With each other. No doubt about it.

Like five season tickets to the New Orleans Saints, a tropical vacation in the Dominican Republic resort of Punta Cana, a sex change operation, and Dom Perigon and other alcoholic beverages in San Antonio.

FEMA funds were also used to pay for divorce attorney fees.

I, for one, agree with Representative Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the post-hurricane aid investigation. He said this is an "assault on the American taxpayer."

Another cute little trick that the investigative committee discovered was that victims were paid twice – they got rental assistance at the same time that FEMA was paying for their hotel bills.

One individual received $2,358 in rental assistance while – at the same time mind you – FEMA paid $8,000 for a 70-night stay in a Hawaii hotel that charged $100 a night.

The investigation also found that FEMA paid millions of dollars to more than 1,000 registrants who used names and Social Security numbers belonging to state and federal prisoners for "expedited housing assistance." And this was at the same time that the inmates were already "guests" of the states of Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Some $5.3 million in payments were made to people who used a post office box as their damaged residence address.

Don’t you think that just maybe the government bureaucracy is too burdensome to pay for?

Maybe we ought to just let people in their community churches help their poor. You can bet that pastors and church workers know who their hungry folks are.

But first I’d like to see a proportionately decreased reduction in the federal taxes that funds these boondoggles.

People who go to a salad bar and load up on a salad – with about 1500 calories on a plate – are kidding themselves. Yep, you can rack up the calories with creamy blue cheese dressing, lots of shredded cheddar and other caloric intense green things.

So, don’t lie to yourself. Count the calories. That’s the only way you’ll know just what the truth is.

Out of four kiddos born to my mother and father, I’m the only one who had a weight problem. Instead, I got to be the chubby one. Mind you, not real real fat – just chubby.

And I’ve tried a lot of diets – all the way up to the time my thyroid was removed in 1988. Then, losing weight really got to be a challenge. My daily weight chart looked like a zigzag line.

If Quint and I didn’t work out or watch what we eat, I’d probably weigh more than three hundred pounds.

Then I remembered the endocrinologist trying to explain to me that Graves Disease – something he said I’d apparently had since mid-adolescence – is a dysfunction in the way protein is metabolized.

That piece of information, coupled with Quint’s remembrance of a family doctor once telling him that if he wanted to lose weight, he had to stop eating bread.

Aha!

So bread is made from wheat. And wheat contains a protein substance called gluten. I think I’ve discovered nirvana. Gluten is in wheat, rye and barley.

When I made my life as gluten-free as I could, the weight started peeling off. So I took another look at some of the wonder diets that are printed in the weekly magazines. Lo and behold, there’s hardly any gluten in the daily menus. (Did you know that you can even buy gluten-free pasta?) I think I’m onto something.

In some instances, a little stress can be a good thing.

It’s a Psych 101 basic tool – the Yerkes-Dodson Law. This theory shows that stress (often called arousal) motivates people to try harder.

There are two major differences where test-taking and stress are concerned.

If you are one of those people who enjoys a very low level of stress and you’re taking a test, chances are the errors you make will be errors of omission, such as not completely answering all the questions.

On the other hand, if you are too stressed, your errors will most likely be errors of commission, such as picking the wrong answer or hitting the wrong computer keys.

There are generally a couple of causes for too much stress – having not enough personal resources for the demand of the situation – or feeling like you don’t have options.

If you fall victim to the first choice, you’re going to have to increase your resources. Either learn new skills or practice the test until you get yourself up to speed.

Another choice is to somehow decrease the demands that are made on you. If possible, simplify the test somehow.

If you want to read more about stress and the value/plague it plays in your life, pick up a copy of The Owner’s Manual for the Brain. It’s written by Pierce J. Howard, PhD, who is an adjunct professor of organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Howard has spent a lifetime career conducting research into cognitive sciences.

He also has some tips on how to reduce afternoon nap cravings. It has to do with the order of food you eat at lunch. His suggestion is to eat protein first during lunch, then the carbohydrates.

The proteins contain lots of an amino acids called L-tyrosine while the carbohydrates have an abundance of L-tryptophan. It’s this latter substance that makes you drowsy and sleepy and in a huge mood for a nap.

The tyrosine makes you alert and energized. So I guess the idea is to eat the fish or meats first, then the carbs in the salad. Or if you have a salad, make sure it has some shredded cheese on it to bump up the protein content. By eating the protein rich foods first, you let the tyrosine reach the brain first. So your energy level after lunch will depend on which of these two amino acids gets to your brain first.

It looks like almonds may improve memory.

Neelima Chauhan, PhD., assistant professor of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, says that mice with a disease similar to Alzheimer’s that were fed an almond-rich diet fared better on memory tests than mice fed a diet without almonds. Almonds, it appears, contain substances similar to those found in drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s.

So what else can you get almonds in besides just plain old nuts in the tin?

I run a bunch of almonds through my little old food processor and make a course mixture that is a substitute for graham cracker crumbs. This makes a good "almond cracker pie crust" for a sugar free cheesecake for diabetic husband Quint. And it’s gluten free too. I like that.

Since 1960, when seat belts became quite the rave – over 329,000 lives have been saved that are directly attributed to added safety features, says Eric Bolton at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Other safety features include anti-lock brake systems (ABS); electronic stability control (ESC); tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS); daytime running lights (DRL); frontal air bags; side air bags, and rollover air bags.

If you have a safety problem with your vehicle, report it to 888-327-4236. That’s the Vehicle Safety Hotline. Each year, about 3/4 of all safety defects are based on consumer reports to the hotline, or e-mail complaints, or just plain old letters to the National High Traffic Safety Administration.

Or some forgetful, or just plain too-much-in-a-hurry cab rider left a sack of $10,000 in the back seat of a cab.

So here’s a few tips on how to remember where you put some of your stuff.

First of all, put things in the same place every time. Have a designated spot for things that tend to go AWOL – like your keys. A little dish on a shelf, or the corner of a book shelf, will keep your key available to you and you won’t have to dig down in the cavern of your purse, or run around the house at the last minute searching for keys.

Encourage your family members to also have a designated spot where they can leave belongings in the same place every time.

It’s also a good idea to have spares on hand of things that do tend to wander off. Like nail clippers, gloves and mittens, scissors, even eyeglasses.

Now you don’t have to buy doubles of the eyeglasses. Just hang onto your most recent outdated prescription. It ought to be at least okay to use until your get a replacement pair of glasses if yours are truly lost or broken. Or if they decide to turn up again.

It has to do with the Nobel prizes. The August committee in Stockholm announced that American Edmund S. Phelps won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences because he developed a theory on the trade-offs between inflation and its effects on unemployment.

So far, six Americans have walked off with the coveted prizes.

Actually, only six have been announced. There are only eight Nobel prizes and the other two – Literature and Peace – have yet to be announced.

Novel Laureate Phelps showed how low inflation today leads to the expectation of low inflation in the future. This expectation influences policies and decision making by corporate and government leaders. Isn’t that kind of like saying, "If I think I’m poor, I’ll probably never be rich?"

An insightful columnist, Paul B. Farrell, who shares his opinions with MarketWatch, says that another Nobel economics theory was advanced by Dilbert in 2002. That was the year that Daniel Kahneman got his Nobel in economics for the notion that Wall Street is not inhabited by rational investors at all.

Dilbert, who is the brainchild of cartoonist Scott Adams, has a nine point theory that reads like this:

1. Make a will.

2. Pay off your credit cards.

3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.

4. Fund your 401k to the maximum.

5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.

6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.

7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account.

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broken and never touch it until retirement.

9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

You can get information about any airport in the world – like a list of all the restaurants in an airport and the hours the restaurants are open – and the cuisine if you’re looking for preferences.

Even airport maps and shops.

I went to the web site to see if it really had anything worthwhile, or if it was one of those sites that was trying to sell something, or a site that didn’t even work.

I like to give a site a test drive before putting its address in the newsletter. So I tried the airports that I know about and was really pleasantly surprised. Just getting an idea of which shops and restaurants are available can save you a lot of time. Especially if you’re traveling with kiddos.

Another thing I like to do when I’m traveling is check with the hotel or motel to make a reservation. I want to talk to the front desk and see what kind of deal they can give me. Almost always, I get a better rate than if I let a conglomerate umbrella travel company make a reservation.

It’s always better to have a reservation. If you just stop in where you see a "vacancy" sign, you’re probably going to pay the top rate. But if you’re on the road and you think you want to stop in about a hundred miles, call earlier in the day and make a reservation. It’ll usually save you some moolah.

If you’re not much into advance planning and you don’t know which hotels are even in a town that’s a hundred miles down the road, you can get on the internet at one of those WI-FI places. Those are places that have free wireless internet connections.

Just go to google.com or ask.com and type in the name (city and state) business directory or motel listings and you ought to get a list of the places where you can stay.

Kahneman outlined their theory in a recent issue of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

They found that people tend to overrate the happiness-bringing effect of whatever they’re thinking about at the time – could be amount of money they have – could be the number of dates they had last week.

The truth is, increases in the amount of income have a brief impact on what we call life satisfaction.

However, if a country starts to do better, life satisfaction does increase if per capita income increases. But only if the per capital income goes above $12,000 a year.

So how do we figure out if a country starts to do better financially? Well, if unemployment improves – more people working – more people making money. When more people are making money, they’re also paying more into taxes. Better roads. Better schools. Better better.

If you get richer than your friends or neighbors, you’ll probably feel better off than they are. At least for a while. Pretty soon, though, you’ll make richer new friends, so your relative wealth won’t be any better.

It doesn’t take that long, either, to get used to all your new stuff. That 42" flat screen TV doesn’t look so special anymore. I mean, after all, shouldn’t a rich person be able to afford a big fancy plasma TV that just hangs on the wall?

Then all of a sudden the amount of money people think they need starts to increase along with their income.

Not only that but when you’re making more money, you spend more time getting it. Leisure time tends to decrease because of this. Less leisure time usually means more tension and stress.

If you focus on this myth that money makes you happy, it could make you change your lifestyle – like driving longer to get to work – one of life’s not-so-pleasant activities. This causes a decrease in socializing – one of life’s more pleasant activities.

This photo was taken from the space shuttle when Hurricane Gordon was becoming a threat to the east coast.

Gray and his fellow weather researcher Philip Klotzbach are from Quint’s alma mater, Colorado State University. That’s why you always see Ft. Collins cited when Gray is quoted.

Gray is now saying there will only be one more hurricane in the Atlantic basic and two more named storms.

The hurricane season starts June 1^st and ends November 30.

September is traditionally one of the busiest months of the season. This year, it was kind of blah blah blah.

Gray also says that El Nino is setting up in the Pacific Ocean again this year. That means a wetter California than usual and a rather dry, moderate Midwest. Not good for the farmers, though.

Oh, people never just outright stole staplers, or pencils, or paper clip holders. They just "borrowed" them and when they got around to it, and if they remembered, they’d bring the stuff back. Or not.

To combat such frivolous disregard for my desk stuff, I took to buying my own things since the corporate supplies all looked alike. My stapler never did disappear since it was something I picked up from the Concordia University bookstore. It had the school’s insignia on it and since I was the only employee (out of 1,300) that graduated from Concordia, I could identify it if I saw it sitting on someone else’s desk.

Most of the time I locked all my supplies away since I couldn’t lock the office door – what with the company having an "open door policy" and all.

I can imagine the frustration, though, with people who live out their company workdays in cubicles. Do people ever just wander over to your cubicle and raid your supplies?

That would seem like a really good rule. Keep your mits off! How can you say that politely?

Another good rule, it would seem to me, is the "library voice" volume. Especially nowadays when cubicles are the norm. There are those who just naturally have big, booming outdoor voices and you can hear them from one end of a football field to the other. And no matter how soundproof those little cubicles are, it’s noise pollution.

As is the music. I once sat between a person who liked Country & Western music while the person on my other side liked something smoother, like elevator music. They spent quite a bit of their "worry energy" trying to drown each other out and I was in the middle.

Since Human Resources was spineless and wouldn’t say anything to either of them because they each worked for a different vice president, I spent a lot of my time plotting how to get myself moved. Far away from them.

That was probably my biggest motivation to jump at the paralegal training when it was offered to me.

A private office beckoned to me. Full walls all the way up to the ceiling. And a door that closed. Yay! And it was quiet and I could concentrate.

Be a well-mannered guest. Pretend that each cubicle has a front door. Before you enter, do the same thing you would do if you approached their front door at home. Knock knock. If they are on the phone or tied up with a really important project and don’t give you a signal to come in, just keep right on going.

I think it’s a good rule to remember that your job success rides pretty much on your being productive. If someone shadows you for a day, would you be credited with working the full eight hours you are paid for?

The water cooler can gobble up a lot of time. Sure, everyone wants to be friendly. But that’s one of the reasons why employers provide a mid-morning and mid-afternoon break. Social connecting is a great idea – just do it on your own time. Besides, nobody really cares what you had for breakfast or what you and your date did over the weekend.

Well, maybe they do. Just share the details over lunch – don’t stretch your fifteen minute break out to an hour or more.

We figured out, at one company, that we were lucky if we got six hours out of most employees – nowhere near the eight that they got paid for. That’s 75% work – 100% money. So when times got tough and people had to be laid off, who do you think got the pink slips?

Remember – your paycheck is not a gift. You’re supposed to earn that money by doing pretty much what you promised to do in your hiring interview.

Don’t forget to say hello when you pass people in the hall. It’s a fast-paced world out there when you get out of your cubicle. Kind of like getting back out into the maze if you think someone moved your cheese.

So if you see someone who isn’t smiling, give ‘em one of your smiles.

And more than a century ago, Martha Washington offered up this advice: I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.

Okay – so here’s my point. Go vote.

Election day will be here before you know it. You’ll soon recognize the season because alllllllll you are going to see between now and election day – in Illinois that will be November 7 – are commercials from people running for office.

The United States of America was founded on rock solid Christian values. Who would ever guess that with a weasel of a congressman pornfully chasing pages around the hallowed halls of the Capitol Building?!!!

You’d never guess that with a Tennessee representative who claimed to be a lawyer while he’s making his bid for the senate. He lied. He never passed the bar.

There’s lots more. Scandals follow scandals. And somewhere in the halls of congress, closets get stuffed with dirty little secrets. Just like one congressman who stuffed his office refrigerator with ill-gotten cash and became highly incensed when the FBI raided the place. Of all the nerve, where did all that cocaine come from. And just like Rocket Man, he stood there and said, "I did not do that."

We have lots of reasons to go to the polls. I’d be glad to stay home if someone could explain to me why 94% of the incumbents somehow manage to get re-elected. It’s time to take out the trash, folks.

80% of the voters went to the polls in Iraq. And many of them had to dodge bullets to get there. In an off-year election, we may get half our voters out. Are we just too lazy? Or don’t we see the connection between our apathy and the corruption that’s blooming in the Cesspool on the Potomac. Go vote! – Jane Reinheimer