Time to take a look around...

Can we all just hold it for a moment? Take a slow, deep breath, and... relax... Good. Now then - where are we? It's the 1st of May, 2018. Wow, but it's been a busy time for everyone. I mean, look at the USA - solving a long-standing squabble between the Korea's, sorting out tax breaks, upsetting a whole load of lefty-types, but still cementing the position of the President even more...one to watch. Canada has seemingly got an idiot in charge, but hopefully that will change (when are their next elections...?). Europe has seemingly got an idiot in charge of most of the countries - Germany, France, UK, and more. A few country leaders have decided that the EU 'policy' of open borders, lunatic immigration levels, etc, is simply not going to work, so they have, quite rightly, set their line in the sand - Hungary and Austria, mainly, but others are murmuring... Oh yes...immigration. What most people don't seem to understand is that most countries around the world have always had a form of immigration. It's not something new. The USA only exists because of immigration (although the original population would probably call that an invasion...let's not go on about the near-genocide that happened...). What we have seen around the globe (well, around certain parts of the globe...some parts are refusing to join in with this mass-psychosis) is a massive repositioning of huge numbers of people. It started out, just a few years back, as Syrian refugees. The mess that was, and still is, Syria caused insane amounts of people to be forced from their homes. Many went into Turkey (and in spite of their crazy leadership, all credit to them for taking them in). The problem is that a lot of these people then continued from Turkey, and started into mainland Europe. They didn't stop at the first country, but kept going. We now have an impossible situation, where literally hundreds of thousands of people, that we know nothing about, have vanished off everyone's radar. They are untraceable. The problem was originally that terrorist groups were instigating this, and then using it to move into countries, with the sole intention of causing mayhem (the deaths and injuries - well, that's just collateral damage. All part of living in big cities...in the 21st century). And to add to this, we now have an untold number coming over to Europe directly from North Africa. So we have the original Syrian conflict being overshadowed by a completely impossible-to-identify number of people - we don't even know what countries most of them are starting from! They deliberately arrive with no paperwork, and plead refugee status. But a lot seem to have their mobile phones...not sure how they managed that...

Well, that time is upon me.......

Don't panic - I'm not. At some time in ones life, one (me!) is supposed to be able to look forward to that 'old persons' thing called retirement. Well, it's here - I am now officially retired (yeah, baby, I am THAT OLD!) I was working for the last couple of months, trying to cope with the day to day operation, and it proved a little too much (I am only 25 after all...) so we had to agree to part company. And I had to get realistic! I have had some pensions kick in, so financially we are semi-solvent (we'll see...) and it did cross my mind that the salary I had coming in was playing hell with my tax code. So, here I am, at home, trying to think of things to do....apart from Twitter, FB, the music (2 choirs), creating sound files, using SongWriter, the garden, the house, the shopping, the....oh, yes. The wife. She'll cope, apart from thinking that I will be bored! She knows me so...well....little! I am now planning all of those things that I wanted to do, but just couldn't get around to, as I was spending weekends recovering from a hard graft of Mon-Fri, 9-5. I am not going to be bored! I have already designed an Events/Resources calendar, that display a month, and you scroll through, looking at next month, last month, whatever. It works! I will be adding some reporting, and fine-tuning things over the next few weeks, but it's there - the bulk of it. I am now adding a Category filter, for Event types. There is so much that can be packed in to this - oh, yes, it's in VB.Net, using MS SQL, for anyone who cares.