One year ago today: February 5, 2015, flumtwattle.
Five years ago today: February 5, 2011, awww, they were “offended”.
Nine years ago today: February 5, 2007, ask for Chester.
Random years ago today: February 5, 2008, all banks equally bad.
MORNING
Sure enough, another cold snap for the weekend arrived overnight. Cancel both the motorcycle trip and working on the cPod. Instead, time to review some budget items. This could be of interest to anyone who wonders what they leave out of those magazine articles on retirement. Put another way, what I write here tends to be more based on actual facts and experience than redacted statistics. An example of redacted statistics is the “official” unemployment rate of 5%. If you count the people who are out of work, the true rate is 34%.
Budget. The first thing I can assure anyone retired who isn’t doing so, write down what you spend. Just writing it down will cause an apparent 40% increase in your “spending experience”. It’s like getting an instant raise. I think it works by causing you to pay attention. Don’t overdo it, because some money will always melt away. Keep reading.
You should still know how much of your money seems to disappear. I know to maintain my lifestyle, every month on average $383.83 evaporates. Pffft, gone into thin air. Yet, that is about right. $12.50 per day is completely reasonable to call petty cash. If you don’t have that, chances are you found this blog by mistake and should move on. Seriously. The self-help section is at your local library.
Now be certain of what I’m saying, I’m not saying your total budget is $12.50 per day. I mean that, in the long run, that’s how much slips through the cracks. My point is not that it happens, but that I know to roughly the penny how much of it happens. That’s an important distinction, that money that "disappears" is just another budget category. But if it just disappears, that’s when you should worry. I could tell you where most of it went, it’s that I don’t keep individual score. Curious?
Okay, this month already $50 went poof! I bought 9V batteries on sale $1.94. There was that licorice $2.82, and don’t forget the biodetergent spray $3.48. Used books, $2.20 and four replacement clips for my motorcycle tarp. Things of that nature that are not mandatory for survival, but again, don’t miss the point. I know to allow for $12.50 per day above and beyond what is scheduled. Notice, no food items, gasoline, or entertainment appears on the list. Those are budget items. And that is how it works.
And if JZ doesn’t get his act together, I’m leaving without him next week. I think what happened is last trip he asked me for $5 to buy the barmaid a drink. I fell out of my chair laughing. That’s the one kind of question you do not ask me. Remember my teenage “non-re-exporting pact” with RofR. We do not do anything that assists other men getting laid. We rarely hinder them either, but the line is drawn at money.
If you wonder about the “exporting” part, it also means we would not do something such as give or lend money to a lady whose shackup slash boyfriend thereby got off the hook for it. It’s a thing of principle. Once you pair off lady, it is you and him against the world and you should not be seeking money from other men. Right or wrong, this attitude has saved me endless grief over the years. It also explains why all the women I chum around with (rarely mentioned here) always have their own money. (What I can't tolerate is women who want to be friends only but your treat. Not bloody likely.)
Now your green article. Americans grow 30 million acres of grass. Make that healthy green lawn grass. Except, it isn’t so healthy. With the pesticides and fertilizers dumped on it, your yard is actually toxic. When your pet rolls in the grass and you pat them, some of that poison winds up in you and your kids. On average, if you use native plants in your yard, they require only half as much water.
Question, how much water do plants need? One inch a week. So put an empty cat food can in the yard. If it fills up in a week, you don’t need to water. Of course, native plants don’t need any watering. Note green roofs on buildings are not meant to be fertilized, although they often are.
Navy vacationeers.
NOON
I’m indoors with the heater and big vat of decaf tea. Brrr, that’s cold. So I’m stuck telling you what goes on at my place. The idea is you compare it to what happens at your place. Of course, I’m the original party animal, but there is nobody left to party with. You want to party in Hollywood, Florida, you either pay for it yourself or stay home. That’s why I make sure there is always plenty to do around here.
This is the first day after mid-winter according to the Almanac. And you know, it is difficult to find a copy of the 2016 Nautical Almanac. Thanks to GPS and on-line sources, many former outlets no longer stock the book. I just use my 2014 copy to practice the math. Wouldn’t it be a comeuppance if some calamity knocked out the electronic versions.
In reality, I don’t do the calculations as often as I should any more, often having to relearn the process. But that can be done in record time once you’ve got some hands-on with it. And that weird frequency that kept broadcasting PARIS is now sending long, as in three-hour, messages about dry antenna performance statistics.
Face it, Morse is too slow to have any racy bulletin boards. I wish there was some organization (other than the ARRL) that would set up just a practice transmission of material that is at least of more general interest. It gets boring to hear the words “dipole” and “insulator” fifty times a week.
Next, I’ve chosen another potential tune as a bass solo. If you listen closely to old Ventures instrumentals, you may hear what I hear. It would seem this music was written in the days before the “Supreme Guitarist Attitude” came along. Both instruments are playing complimentary parts, or in the alternative, play the same notes. They could be faked on either instrument. See, I’m thinking. Well, let me arbitrarily choose “Walk Don’t Run” and see what it sounds like with the melody on bass and the guitar playing accompaniment.
As for today’s project, I’ve decided to build a mount for that belt sander I picked up for a song last week. Not only are the belts far cheaper than the small desktop sander, if you put like an 80-grit on there, it erodes away the crap at warp speed. It will even refurbish your whetstones. The idea is to set it sideways leaving the power switch, power cable and exhaust port exposed. Then lock the trigger and run the device through a footswitch, of which I have a dozen spares.
So there. How was your afternoon. Really? Sorry to hear that. That means a warning is due to my overseas readers. Hello to, in this order today, Russia, France, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Portugal, Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. This blog does not, repeat DOES NOT, represent the typical lifestyle of your average American or Canadian resident. Not even remotely close.
The biggest factor of which you should be aware is that I do not watch television. This is exceedingly rare in the Americas where your typical citizen is absolutely addicted to it. This obsession with television takes on grotesque proportions, shaping most people’s everyday life, their political opinions, and like all addicts, the dull-brained attitude that those who are not hooked are “missing out”.
Most of you cannot imagine how bad the situation is unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Cable TV is considered by most as necessary as water and electric service and the welfare offices treat it as a necessity of life. And these type of people who think that way are a huge majority over here. Now you know. At the other extreme, I cannot name you even on current television show, just a few of the older classics, and even then because they have become household words. Cheers.
NIGHT
I’m going to talk about Iowa, but first here is a picture of the belt sander. Well, hey, if I had pictures of some total babes around here, that would be nice. I totally agree. But meanwhile, you get the same fare I do. There comes a time in every man’s life when a new tool is, indeed, the momentous occurrence of the day. Kind of like when older housewives get a new hose for the vacuum cleaner. There, is that sexist enough for you?
Trump has destroyed any reputation that place will ever have again concerning the presidency. Except for the old fogies who still believe in Santa Claus. Trumps summation was accurate, he was not “beaten”, he was outnumbered.
My opinion is the State of Iowa is so entrenched in the political minds of the feeble that the snake-oil contingent spent a fortune to manipulate the outcome, hoping the news would stampede the herd. No dice, Trump came in second without even showing up. His rallies continue to dominate every landscape and he has already clobbered the establishment at their own game.
Back to Iowa, I have a theory as to why the appearance of political “pull” developed there. Put simply, it is because that statistically had to happen somewhere and Iowa was it. I’ll explain why I think that. Polling is subject to error if the sample taken is too small. You’ll often hear of polls that took a large random sample to avoid that problem, but hold on. There is another type of error that can destroy the validity of the larger sample.
I do not know the proper term, but I compare it to genetic drift, a complicated concept. So, I’ll describe what genetic drift is and you can apply it back to politics probably better than I can. The usual example is the family that has ten kids. If they live in New York City, so what? But that same family in a small enough town will, after just two or three generations, certainly five generations, have an effect on the entire community. Don’t conclude anything yet, there is still another step involved.
Anyone conducting an identical sized sample in both places (city and town) is going to encounter conformities in the smaller place, even if those are not remotely connected to the study. Now, the simplest of human social settings is infinitely more complex than the best possible sampling technique. Without even realizing it, somebody somewhere will always find a correlation in the data of the smaller environment. Example, both Trump and my ex-wife both have the same number of vowels in their names. And there is something equally meaningless in Iowa that can be applied to federal elections.
So why Iowa? Because there are only a limited number of places the media has time for, and they are likely to stop looking the instant the find a spot that is right often enough to make headlines. As soon as a few stations glom onto the hype, you have another sort of Groundhog Day and as long as it sells newspapers, the legend is reborn every cycle.
Last Laugh
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