One year ago today: October 19, 2014, more dumb Germans.
Five years ago today: October 19, 2010, when 49cc isn’t enough.
Six years ago today: October 19, 2009, 1.4 million defaults.
MORNING
The bad news. All the nice little cuttings I planted in so many hand-painted tin cups are gone. Although I am a sound sleeper, the tiniest odd noise will wake me. But a howling windstorm is not odd, here or in Texas. My plants are normally set outside on the porch overnight, safe from the rain. But not the wind. And how many times they gotta tell us, most storm damage is from wind, not rain.
Why censored? See addendum, but otherwise censored because they show a change. The good news is Arnold is safe.
Arnold the avocado is not showing signs of life, so he was kept inside in a climate controlled window sill. And the this means more work with Hayley, who is my number one fan of my domesticated ways. She painted a lot of those pots. I encourage that by supplying her with bargain amounts of glitter fingernail polish from the Frenchie Flea Market.
Which reminds me, yet another outfit has taken over the old Rendezvous. If I hear entertainment, I’ll drop in, but the place has traded hands so many times it has gotten too expensive for the locals. That leaves dependence on the tourists, and this is not the times to be counting on that. Like Hawaii, this is a former great tourist place. Youth does not often replace the ranks of oldsters when the rush is over, because the place has adapted to the crowd with money. When they die off, the prices don’t come down again.
Then I get a report from a dude who is the type to attend city hall meetings. He’s Russian, that’s maybe why. The city, riding on the heels of scoring the big Margaritaville complex, has decided to okay three massive new hotels on the beachfront. Ah, so that’s why they’ve been taxing the old businesses to death for the past five years. And, they are to be gambling establishments. And the town council, who so recently vehemently opposed gaming, have had their appetites whetted by the Mardis Gras. This time, they’ll be in on the real action.
And that, dear reader, is all the proof you need that this blog has evolved from a coffee-shop scandal sheet.
One, it is on the wrong side of the mountains, the wrong side meaning they get a nasty winter. Two, the nearest big city is not a place I would normally want to visit. Not with the preponderance of coincidences that have dogged me all my life. However, the price tag of only $49,000 was very tempting. It is also kind of far from the nearest university and the bedrooms are on the second floor. Remember, I plan to get old in the place I buy.
NOON
The wind really did a number on the town. I had to thread the scooter around tree branches and debris to go buy potatoes this morning. What? Oh, I should say, I rarely buy potatoes by the bag any more. They are, like rice, no longer a staple. I buy it one or two spuds when I can’t go without any longer. Here’s a photo of my “drill sculpture”. Remember when it started? Just the one drill bit in the center, that was what, a year ago. Well, since I’ve begun using the drill press on metal, I’ve, ahem, gotten much, much, faster at acquiring raw material.
Next project, I swiped another piece of music from the Internet. It’s an old piece and I’ll tell you why I stole a copy. Because the artist doesn’t get a penny is only part of it. It’s because those creep Millennials have “monetized” all the copies that used to be free. I don’t mind if the artist gets a cut, and it is not that I would buy the music if I could not pirate it. But Millennials plaster ads all over stuff that isn’t their own? That’s real stealing. So I copied it. Let them spend deficits. Sure, their parents borrowed away their future, but the next generation benefited in some ways. A bad investment most of the time.
It is also a comment on the fact that just because something doesn’t get mentioned, there is still activity in the background. Note how compact the base towing unit is. For fun, I managed to cut a long panel for the “roof” an inch to short. That’s a “duh”. As said, this is the base plate from the old camper, probably twice as thick (and heavy) as needed. But it also lowers the center of gravity. I don’t like towing lively arrangements.
The wind kept me hopping, as I was test fitting the side panels. You can spot the newly sanded edges of the base panel getting a coat of pale-colored primer. That's the strips where I removed the waterproofing gunk. In most areas, it took off the old paint with it. I'll have to cut you short here, the wind is really picking up and if I don't batten things down, my camper panels will be in Miami-Dade.
EVENING
Not so much later that drill sculpture is a big hit (see picture above). People turning it over to see how it was done. Did I glue the 11 layers of wood together? Where were the holes on the bottom? This is similar to how I thought about those fancy boxes mentioned the other day. The fall windstorm is picking up full force, meaning the nice weather is about to arrive. Along with the Quebecois.
[Author's note: the sculpture gets double mention because the topic came up via different paths. I have always felt short-changed that I did not have access to the basic tools to build things like this when I was younger. So I find my output to be crude and simple. Thus, I'm amazed when others think they are really seeing something. This one Russian guy looked at it for ten minutes, and finally handed it back saying he could not figure out how I did it. Rewind back to my attitude that all other men had shop training and didn't build this kind of thing for no other reason than they could not be bothered. Being wrong about this is, as I just said, amazing.]
On another tangent, the kitchen area of my place is rigged to record any motion when I’m absent. This is what tips me off the moment a mouse or rodent starts foraging. I’m against any spray or area chemicals, so imagine my surprise to see a roach, the size of a small mouse, emerge in broad daylight. Then, it ignored some cucumber peelings to go eat, of all things, paint flecks.
I leave latex brushes to dry out after rinsing on a small rack near my stove. There it is, brazen as anything. Munching away on whatever nutrients if must find so nutritious by comparison. It was a big roach, the size of a mouse, so it recently moved in. There are two types of roaches in Florida. The kind you see and the kind you don’t. Every house has roaches. This new one had simply not found my bait yet.
Why would a roach prefer to eat paint?
ADDENDUM
Whoa, talk about a major hit with my ratings, did you read my section on “social camouflage” last day. What a hit! Okay, since we are talking only beginner’s level tactics, at least compared to what can be done without expense or much effort, how would you like a little strategy to go with that? Yes? Good, you’re lucky I don’t send you the bill. Seriously, this is obvious stuff that people overlook, and thus makes a fortune for those who write it down.
What I described before is natural things you should do mainly to combat the casual, but nosy types from using your own information against you. I draw the line between information and intelligence at the point where you know enough to presume somebody is watching you, and usually for reasons they are not stating. I got news for the naysayers. The government has stepped over that line long, long ago.
So how does one protect oneself from any consequences, even if those consequences are entirely potential? It is by the realization of the difference between information and intelligence. Information is static, and change is what attracts attention. This is where you focus—on controlling the appearance of what changes. And here is why.
Intelligence is different. It still spots the change in routine, but works by comparing the new information to the old information. This is the weak spot in people’s minds, without special training, they will impart their own motives into a situation. Even the most intelligent of opponents still acts on very simple motives, almost by instinct. That is where you feed him, that is where lie 99% of your opportunities to spoof the guy.
[Author’s note: there is a gender difference. Most of the time, it is a man who conducts unwarranted observations. The motive always seems to be that if anything goes wrong, he wants to be the one holding an advantage. When women do it, it is most frequently written off as “gossip”. Hence, there is a characteristic of “male-ness” about your government. Men snoop with evil intentions. Women snoop mainly to talk and “see what happens”.
Both are vulnerable to countermeasures.]
The game is to cause woe to those working you over with their ulterior motives. Once you know that it is the change of routine that attracts attention, control those changes, at least to the point of realizing most people will interpret the changes in predictable ways. The strategy is never to conceal, as that itself can be misinterpreted. The discovery of a single hidden item nearly always triggers an intense search for more.
What you don’t have is knowledge of who is watching. You don’t live on a desert island where suddenly the only other inhabitant starts monitoring your every move and shrieking “paranoid” every time you want some privacy. But what you can do is lock your door. The idea is to expose the enemy. And this is not done by concealment, but by deception. You can’t hide your door and the deception is that the lock is only to see who complains about it. (Or put axle grease on the lock and see who complains that their hands are dirty.)
I grew up in an atmosphere where to get anything done, the cost of deception added another 35% to any project. Concealment is not useless, but it must be used right. You use concealment only to conceal the act or the fact that something is being concealed. You give them what they expect at once and thereafter never any cause to look at it again. I’ve moved nine times since arriving in Florida, but my vehicle registrations are the same as day one.
There was a reason the other property was left in Wallace’s name.
Last Laugh
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