I was to Home Depot, Pep Boys, and Big Lots gathering materials. The gel battery is designed for ATVs and is rated as shock-resistant. Okay by me. I’m can see hard times ahead for everyone if these prices keep cascading. A pound of axle grease cost me $5, the smallest size, which should last me till I’m two hundred years old. I’m going to forego the cost of a spare tire and mount until after November. My thinking is I will take the chance I won’t get a flat on brand new tires until past that time. Otherwise, don’t worry, you’d hear about it.
Things I didn’t anticipate which further cause delays. If you know where I live, swinging over 40 feet off the main road you can look between the buildings and see if I am at home. Then you can pull over for twenty minutes of yakking while I’m working and explaining that I don’t keep any beer in the house. My next place, I swear, is going to have one of them there hidden driveways. The wagon project lags because there was not a single person in the universe to tell me about that problem of weak Honda electronics.
I also priced out the plywood for the wagon deck. I’ve decided to use ¾” heavy duty sheathing. This allows the camper to be made much lighter as it would not have anything to do with the structure. The shell will also be plywood so I don’t have to get into much framing. These sheets cost around $35 each and I’ll need at least four of them. The joints will be angle iron, which is now $9 per four foot length. The only real “frame” I have planned is arranging the trailer stakes with a metal bar across the “ceiling” that holds the sides rigid. Remember, this wagon is only for shelter, not for heavy duty haulage.
You know what infuriates and saddens me? Things like this report where a New York librarian got on a kid’s case for reading too much. Seems the kid won the reading contest five consecutive years when she concluded (point duly noted) that this was discouraging other students, said the librarian.
Such thinking is beneath contempt. Children cannot learn soon enough that life is not fair (although it should be as fair as possible within each household so that the child always has a refuge). I do, however, wonder what other possibly non-competitive circumstances allowed the 9-year-old to read 63 books during the summer. I would have been severely punished if I’d tried that, so I know this kid wasn’t exactly on his own.
My point is, I consistently lost to the other kids with opportunity, but I did not quit. I agree with the many comments that said each book read should earn the student a ticket that goes into a raffle. The more books read, the better the odds. But I could never condone the communistic attitude that fairness means it eventually becomes somebody else’s turn to win. Anyone who gets “discouraged” over it is a damn loser for whom nothing is ever going to help. I am a rather slow reader at about 60 - 80 wpm. (I could read faster in a contest, but in real life, I never read past what I don’t understand so re-reading passages slows me down.) Yet, slow reading, according to some, gives me the right to quit trying and complain. Hmmmmm.
Milestone. Today I passed from obese into merely overweight. That’s based on the body mass index available anywhere on-line. This involved losing 10% of my total weight, all of which was related to my heart attack. Put another way, none of it was due to “over-eating, over-drinking, or under-excercising”. I supposed the most discouraging part of the process to be long stretches where the diet has no apparent effect on pounds or inches. I just came out of one that lasted a week. In partial celebration, I went for bakery coffee with my shirt tucked in. My injection program ends tomorrow.
There, I find out that a European plumbing company is planning on opening a $20 million site nearby which is to include a Hungarian bakery. They sent a lawyer over to inform Kiss about this, though that doesn’t make much sense. The largest population of Eastern Europeans in Florida has become Hallandale Beach. Word on the street is that this will form an excellent barrier preventing Latino immigration northward. It would a lot of fun to watch a Cuban play his race card on a Russian after ramming his car in the parking lot.
What I can’t discern is why the bakery even got a visit. I’m no expert on how millionaires canvas a neighborhood. But I know when a society allows people like my family to operate, you never announce your intentions in advance. The only way you will ever get anything accomplished before they shaft you is to stick to short, immediate goals that are done deals before their slug-brains can react. There are two types of people, those who disagree with what I just said and those who can get things done in this life.
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