I know the kid is almost walking before I printed this, but it’s Jay’s fault. She knows I can’t be trusted, yet she handed me this information on the back of a “guest check” from the Swinging Door. Michaela is already back at work at the restaurant.

It’s hard to believe we’ve all become grandparents. Louis and Dru Gravin have a two-year-old grandson in Austin so they burn up the road getting up there every other weekend. Kolbe Curtice was telling me just yesterday how crazy they are about their grandchild, and Rob Roy announced that he and his wife are looking forward to their first grandchild.

Boy, we used to get together and party. Now we get together and compare grandchildren.

More cleaning.......I got a letter some months ago that’s been crumpled up in my purse awaiting my call to Sheriff Milton Wright. It was from the Sheriff’s Association of Texas and it solicited $25 in dues to belong as an associate member. For my money, I got the quarterly publication “Texas Lawman, “ a 20% discount at LaQuinta, two decals for my car windows (you can see where this is going, can’t you), and a membership card for my wallet (placed no doubt next to my driver’s license). However, one membership advantage intrigued me. It would grant me eligibility to become a member of the Texas DPS Credit Union.

So I called the sheriff and asked him about the whole program. He told me that the money does not come back to Fort Bend County but is kept at the state and used for local and regional education whereby the state sponsored additional training for the department.

Sheriff Wright agreed with me that the phone calls we occasionally get from the State Troopers Association are bothersome as 80% of the money collected on that goes to a phone room in Chicago. But he assured me that the Sheriff’s Association of Texas never makes phone calls and all of its solicitation are handled in house with no money split with some boiler room.

As far as the DPS credit union, the sheriff said that he had bought personal cars before and found that the credit union interest rate was usually about 1/2 cent lower that prevailing rates.

I told the sheriff I just wanted to be sure the money didn’t go into his campaign fund!

Politics....... Shelley Sekula Gibbs is embarrassing us in Washington. Oh, wait, that’s nothing new. Tom DeLay embarrassed us for many years in Washington.

But Shelley has different problems. DeLay’s former staff members, who had been holding down the fort after his resignation, walked out en masse a few days after Shelley arrived. I would think that perhaps the staff was a little miffed because she came it bossing orders and they were used to working on their own.

However, from some of her other actions, such as claiming she was going to take care of tax cuts, immigration reform, and “to make sure we have a good solution for the war in Iraq,” its obvious that Sekula Gibbs thinks she can get more done than in possible in the few short weeks she will be there--not counting holiday recesses. She has a lot of energy. Witness her write-in votes that she got against long odds. But someone needs to counsel her about what “lame duck” means because I fear she has hurt her chances for 2008.

Well, more power to her but whatever she did to cause the staff walk-out, she shouldn’t have called for an investigation into why the computers were scrubbed clean of files. She should have found out that it is a law that the files be deleted when changing congressional members.

I hate it when women politicians make fools of themselves.

And now, the post office......I can’t tell you how frustrated I am with the Sugar Land post office. We mail two magazines a month through the Sugar Land post office and they are delivered about two weeks late. Yet the other post offices in Fort Bend seem to be able to deliver them timely.

I’ve talked to the postmaster and offered to help him if it’s a question of space or employees for that fast growing area. But he has pulled some tricks on me that makes me think he’s not concerned about improving the service.

When one mails something third class, the post office has three days to distribute the mailing. When we’ve complained, he’s told us the mailing has gone out. However, when we drive by, we can see the mailing still on the dock.

Then I got word from one of my spies that he told the carriers to pull the magazines off the dock and to deliver to our particular homes timely. This seems very duplicitous to me.

So, I’ve had it. If you will write me a SIGNED letter to the editor about your experience with the mail, I will forward it to the proper authorities. I will forward them good or bad.