One year ago today: March 24, 2014, my first memory?
Five years ago today: March 24, 2010, mostly business.
Ten years ago today: March 24, 2005, I look at mini-ATMs.
MORNING
Another ideal morning and here are a few of the other small objects I’ve been building with the saws. On the left is the original tank bogies on a test track. On the right is the “Zippo” 3 volt battery case. These are not mockups, they are fully functional. The gears rotate, the batteries deliver. These emphasize my progress toward the ever smaller and finer, where Agt. M moves toward larger manufactures. I spent the morning on the porch, painting my wooden ladder again, not that it needed it.
What have we here? For two years running, the Miami Herald has been trumpeting the glory of the return of real estate prices. House prices up 12.9%, happy days are here again. Except for what you’ll find buried deep in section D of the Sun, Florida’s worst newspaper. In February alone, prices fell 9% on Palm Springs, the traditional bellwether. The reported selling price of single-family dwellings is still reported to be $285,000.
This is ridiculous, as there are no jobs in the state of Florida that pay enough to buy something like that unless you work for the government. And anybody who can’t see what’s coming on that one probably deserves what they’ll get. Some say the retirement money entering Florida is underpinning the prices. Wrong. Florida has now dropped to 28th place as a good destination. Top is Wyoming, godforsaken Wyoming. Ever been there? It’s hard to remember if you have or not. No trees, nothing. I’ve seen it in the summertime, that’s enough for me.
NOON
“Bad water: too thin to plow, too thick to drink.” (Farm wisdom)
Methinks the old girlfriend doesn’t get this jewelry box. It turns out I do have a collection of small, valuable items that fit inside it quite nicely. Gold? Diamonds? Nope. Router bits. I’ve got the beginner’s set and they are barely used. I only have the cheap ones without the roller bearing thing for following edge trim, but I’ve made do on starter sets before.
The gas price drop? Think about it. Just another shakedown of the industry by the big players. Too many small guys and startups, so drop the price till the wannabes go under. It worked for the railroads and newspapers. And that pesky tar sands thing with the Keystone pipeline, that has to go. The Canucks have so much free natural gas, they can burn the equivalent of three gallons to produce one gallon of oil. Can’t have that, you know.
And the sooner the Yankee monopolies bankrupt these bloated tax-subsidized foreign outfits like Petro-Canada, the sooner things will bounce back to a respectable $300 per barrel. And just below is the lazy man’s method of making sure the feet of my ladder get properly painted. Soaks the paint in real good. The job took a quarter gallon of paint and nearly two gallons of peach tea. I told you summer was early.
And anyone who tells you inflation has not been 35% since 2012 has not gone out to buy a loaf of bread lately or grabbed a snack at Burger King. The kid’s cheeseburger meal is pushing five bucks. Anyone on a fixed income has just been robbed of over a third of their purchasing power. But, they voted it into place, so let them spend cake. I’m doing fine, and so is everybody who listened and kept their promises to me.
You want some trivia? Okay, did you know the original concept for the Suez Canal was the French and Dutch who wanted to break the British domination of the spice trade route around the tip of Africa. And in navigation, a “pilot” is the person who fixes the position of a ship by the use of natural and artificial landmarks. He does not navigate. And celestial navigation, if one wishes to be technical, fixes the position of the sextant, not the ship.
By the way, I’ve completed the preliminary measurements and calculations for my theory of locating an artificial horizon. The further away you view a ruler, the “smaller” the inches appear. And for me, the height of the horizon always appears to be 57-5/8”. I know this can’t be original, but what I want is data to practice my navigation without buying a ship or boat. Whatever error I find, my next task is to see if that error is consistent. Right now, let’s just see how close I can come without paying for parking at the beach.
AFTERNOON
Here’s a phenomenon. If you ask people to estimate the height of the horizon when they cannot see it, they err a lot by placing it too low. I marked my door post and asked curious passersby to point to the height they thought the horizon would be if all the buildings were not in the way. All of them were far off. In reality the height is “a third” of the way up the sky.
Which brings me to another topic. I’m reading the latest edition of the heart foundation magazine to see that I’m not as bad off as I thought. There is one person I’d like to see marched off at dawn and that is the tard who keeps writing in diet books that “1/2 cup” is a serving of rice. Where, in famine-land?
The mag also says small amounts of chocolate are okay again. Apparently it helps the blood, I’ll read it again to see what they are trying to say. Now that is chocolate, not cocoa, which I drink several times monthly. So this morning I had a square of chocolate. Oh, man, that was glorious. I’m sorry, but cocoa and chocolate milk are nowhere near the supreme jolt of a good bite of a chocolate bar. You can’t fool me.
It is cooling down for the evening now, so check back later. I took my work out on the porch and made lots of small repairs. Painted the things that needed it, put a new handle on my soldering station, dunked the wooden gears in stain, generally kept busy in a town where the majority of people seem to have an acute inability to do just that.
Also, it is a ghost town again. There was no traffic on the roads, I thought I might have forgotten another useless unpaid Florida “holiday”. It was just the vacancy left by the departing tourists. My guess is 2/3 of them have lit out already. Like I plan to this summer.
NIGHT
Drat, I really wanted to take my first planet readings. But just before dusk (from civilian to nautical twilight), a cloud cover blocked the entire southern horizon from east to west. Not even the Moon or Venus were present. But that got me to thinking. If I’m faking the horizon anyway, why rely on twilight? I’m thinking of making a folding stick with a small LED at the correct height. Conceptually, there is no reason this should not work well in complete darkness if the stars are present.
While coating all my woodwork with polycrylic, I had autoplay documentaries in the background. Again, that hare-brained Montgomery was puffed up by the British. The fact is, he fought World War I, and the 1940-era Germans in Africa and Normandy had no capacity for such drawn-out conflicts. But from what I see, Monty was adequate, not great. Other generals won or lost battles, but Montgomery never lost. Instead, when he got a bloody nose, which was every time he attacked, that was all part of his “secret plan”.
The secret plan seemed to be that no matter how the enemy reacted, it was always “just what Monty had been waiting for.” Pretty damn convenient, I’d say. A trap so secret, his allies and officers never knew what it was. To hear tell, by D-Day, old Monty had the bloody Germans trained.
His most annoying habit was claiming his stalled attacks were to "tie down" Germans while the other armies "swung around". Except he forgot to tell the other armies. As for Antwerp, the Germans never got the memo. Having no idea they were supposed to be tied down, they went ahead and launched the Battle of the Bulge.
Last Laugh
The view from my friend’s house.
Return Home
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