One year ago today: October 30, 2015, Mr. Trump, kick some rump.
Five years ago today: October 30, 2011, Facebook sucks / the Buchanan Study
Nine years ago today: October 30, 2007, on fake carton labels.
Random years ago today: October 30, 1982, serious jet lag.
MORNING
It dropped to 55°F overnight so waking up was like on a camping trip. As a non-believer in “breakfast” food, I had perogies with bacon-onion sauce and hot tea. Listening to gospel radio and, it now seems, gospel news reporting. Listening to gospel does not go back to my childhood, it doesn’t even go back one year. It is simply the only station here that carries the Lone Ranger and Twilight Zone while I’m working in the kitchen or shop.
The gospel news is anti-Trump. This morning’s message was that if he gets in, the country is in “danger” of undoing years of Liberal progress. That’s a quirk, because that would be the only area that the US could claim progress in the past 30 years. Everything else has gone down the tubes. You cannot be a Liberal without dreaming of impoverishing your neighbor.
Which reminds me of the book on Left-wing America. I set it aside at the chapter where the Liberals shifted their attacks from religion, then from businesses, then finally to infiltrating the government. That’s where we stand today, the Liberals are entrenched in key government positions from the schools right up to the Supreme Court. It is understandable why they don’t want a profit-oriented person in charge.
Today’s gospel was on the evils of sex and drink. I can see their point. If I was a nagging, gossipy, sexually-unadventuresome housewife, I too would be against saloons. It’s easier to shut those down and tell other people how to behave than to become an interesting fun-to-be-with person. Isn’t that right, Theresa? Whoa, there, lady. I wanted just a nod, not a demonstration.
The grey squirrel, who I have dubbed Zeke, ignores the feed tray. Instead, he shows up in the morning shadow and combs the area beneath the birdfeeder. There must e enough there to constitute a meal every other day. He ate the small green sprouts from the seed that had germinated. And I barely missed some footage of another squirrel trying to get around the pizza plate to the birdfeeder.
Like Zeke, I’ll do a little work in the morning but otherwise, I’ll have another day off. Last day was enough. I spend $370 on trees and you can kiss the Smithsonian goodbye for another season. Many of you already had that figured out.
The original picture here was a repeat. Rather than just delete it, here is a nice replacement. I call it an intersection on the Great Wall. What's that in the background? The not so Great Wall?
I quit for the day at 11:00 AM. Here are some of the log piles arranged so the city bucket can lift them easily. Because I don’t know if there is a limit to how much the city will pick up in one week. This is less [volume] than the nine bags of leaves, but many times the weight. Quit yard work, that is. I moved the temporary bedroom partition back another two feet to give any guests that much more room. And I make a furring stick frame for the third bedroom, also temporary. The wall material is called plastic tarp from Wal*mart.
Tarp? That’s tacky, sure, but the reality is I hope these renovations take forever. If you get my implication.
Svalbard.
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NOON
This is the guest bedroom. The décor is early wallpaper with some classic insulation backing. To the left is the window that is being removed. It’s actually a lot like the attic I lived in my first year of university. While other kids drove convertible sports cars to campus from their condos. I rode the city bus and listened to old people tell me I was “sensible”.
I also got the ladder into the hallway and put six large (24”) batts of insulation into the attic. They are not placed yet, but one cool day I’ll crawl in there. Not today, I’ve already put in six hours light duty. Time for a siesta or I’ll be out of action for the next week.
The attic is small, not enough to do any more than lie prone and push the insulation into place with a stick. There is room for a piece of plywood to place over the rafters and worm around, which is not going to be fun.
Still feeling the money bite from that tree expense right at month’s end, I got out the bass and rand through my Dwight Yoakum repertoire. Top of that list is a song I can’t sing, “Guitars, Cadillacs”. That one has sentimental value, so I play it. It’s not only the first song completely learned for the gal that would become my wife, it was also the first song where I learned the lead break on bass. Think of the intro, that sequence of notes. It is also the instrumental break and the outro.
We had real trouble with guitar players back then. I had grown up in an era where if you wanted to play in a band, you had to learn the band material. This was the beginning of the current period where the guitarists began to think the band was there to follow them. It was true to a degree during the amplified fuzz-box seventies, but had worn thin by 1986. T
That’s correct, “Guitars, Cadillacs” came along in 1986, thirty years ago. So, we learned to dispense with the lead player and just chug along to rhythm, faking the lead breaks on the bass. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Trivia, hidden in the last paragraph: did you know that attending college, even for one day, decreases your chances of getting divorced. (Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Who, by and large, attends college for just one day? It only takes them one lecture to clue in what men have to go through to get a job that pays enough to raise a family. The lesson stays with them.)
AFTERNOON
Nix the nap, I decided to build some real sawhorses. These are from a plan in Mechanics Illustrated so many years ago I won’t say. They use scrap lumber, but I don’t have any yet so these are constructed of fresh 2x4”s. As you see they are a sturdy design and stackable. The slight overhang on the “I-beams” is for a clamp. The first publication called for 12 nails, where these have 16 framing screws each. I don’t care for those metal sawhorse brackets, there is something rickety about them.
If enacted, you would not be able to dress like anyone committed to an insane asylum now or in the past or as any current political figure. It’s apparently insensitive to imply anyone in the loony bin is creepy or scary.
Or how about that police scandal in California? A nineteen year old prostitute is claiming that she slept with police department for protection against arrest. According to NPR, the very idea is so outrageous, nobody is going to believe something like that could ever happen. Not with America’s fine, outstanding, public-serving cops. These evening patrolmen have nothing but concern for these girls safety, everybody knows that.
Best is the standard radio servings of anti-Trump pro-Hillary rhetoric. Hillary, the expert mudslinger, is now saying she’ll “never give up” no matter what is thrown at her. What a brave little fighter. That’s still less obsequious than the earlier “are you brave enough” to vote for the first lady president. Forget the fake issues and the rotten candidate, this election is about “bravery”.
In another surprise announcement, a survey of Democrats reveals that up to 40% of them feel that the focus on Hillary’s deleted e-mails is “unnecessarily harsh”. I nearly fell off my ladder laughing. That can be interpreted to mean 60% of her party faithful don’t think the investigation is harsh enough. The entire Libtard left is deep in panic mode. Heil Trumpp! Not a typo.
NIGHT
It turned out to be a pretty full day after all, which I attribute to a lot to the milder weather. The mornings are great for that and while it still warms up, just move the work indoors by evening. That’s where that shed is taking on such importance. A 10’ x 18’ in the space behind the tree that used to be there. This is a good example of not planning too far ahead on this place. It’s all new to me and I don’t know a single person who lives up here that could give advice in advance. Agt. R has be incredibly helpful, but that’s not in advance.
My plan has an 8’x8’ parking area and a 10’x8’ workshop. The shop has a slot in the wall that would allow work on much longer pieces of lumber. Did someone back there say they thought I said I just finished putting in a workshop in the back room? Yes, but if a stranger walked in there expecting a workshop, she’d say, “What are you building, dollhouses?”
And I’d reply, “No. Robots, actually.”
Then she’d say something to the effect of, “Get outta here.”
"Seriously, babe", I mean it, here, let me demonstrate how a drill press works if it were horizontal... ."
Yes, there is a workshop, but it would remind you of the back room of a tailor, or shoemaker, maybe a watchmaker. Every square inch crammed full of miniature tools and jigs. Thousands of tiny pieces from washers to bolts to eentsy drill bits. I need a real workshop, where I can cut full sheets of plywood, and even 10’x8’ is pushing it.
Then I watched “Fast Food Nation”, a stab at the American food industry that employs Mexicans and gets into the hardships of jumping the border. Gee, we need to make breaking the law a little easier on these folks. What stuck in my craw was the emphasis that the pretty girls in the slaughterhouse had to sleep with the Cuban foreman to get a job. This is precisely the way it has always been in Latino society and I don’t appreciate the implication that this is a problem that suddenly becomes America’s duty to correct the moment these other cultures arrive here uninvited.
I know American law forbids the practice, but who is breaking the law? The foreman or the women? And don’t be to hasty with an answer, it shows you are not thinking. These women knew in advance what they were doing. Or does premeditation also have a double standard?
ADDENDUM
Income disparity. Both political parties make a big deal of it, but I would point out that those numbers are just statistics. They cannot be trusted any more than other numbers. It is simply not true that nobody in America has had a raise in 30 years. Look at those acres of monster housing with attached garages springing up. I’d say the rate is slowing down, but not that anybody in America is getting poorer except of their own doing. Getting poor is usually a problem of attitude.
And attitude gets into realms that can’t be quantified. I personally have no mercy for poor people who think and act differently than I do. Serves them right, you can’t support amnesty and open borders and expect to get a good job when the market is flooded with immigrants who’ll work for peanuts. Then twist it around and say, “Look, they do jobs no American wants”. Because the job pays bloody peanuts, you idiots. Quit thinking in circles.
But let’s take a closer look at that income statistic. It is based on personal income tax returns, a set of documents not legendary for truth and honesty. Not everybody’s pay is in cash and the fact has always been that those who are born rich have a better chance of staying rich throughout life, no matter how stupid they are. This just makes sense because it takes more than a lifetime to create many of the corporations and industries that are pretty much required for our way of life. The same thing happened in England a hundred years before their empire collapsed from war debt.
The reality is I don’t know anybody who is making less money now than long ago. The lesson taught in most families is that if you don’t make it to the top, it is because the system is evil. Not so, the answer is that you have to play the game by their rules. And people do it all the time. What is evil is how they try to do it by cheating. Remember the old saying about not climbing the ladder because there are so many idiots blocking the way at the bottom. Wealth can be quite dependent on how you define it.
Most people born poor stay poor—but if you look more closely, Ann Coulter points out that almost the exact same people are born into single parent families. Which came first? I was born poor in the sense that my parents never spent a penny more than necessary to keep the authorities away, but I retired at age 41. That is not to be mistaken for me saying I retired a millionaire. I didn’t. I simply defined retirement as no longer being obligated to get up and go to work every day. I still worked, but I didn’t have to. Even a crippling series of heart attacks could not bankrupt my system. (Though it came awfully close.)
I am part of that 54% of Americans adults who hold no credit card debt. And did you know if you get married and stay married, you will almost certainly become four times wealthier than if you stay single. However, that can be attributable to favorable tax treatment for the nearly-fictitious nuclear family. I’m saying there are factors that count both ways, meaning it comes back to attitude. Think about it. Because I did not make it into the top 1% of wage-earners, does that make me poor? Of course not.
Let’s pare the statistic a bit more. The 54% with no credit card debt would include a (small) number of responsible people who pay their balances on time. It would include people who have cards but never use them, a more common practice than you think. But also in that statistic are people who have no debt because they want but cannot get a credit card. This narrows it down to people who intentionally do not have or use credit. That makes my group far more exclusive, that is, only 17% of Americans reject the whole credit system by choice.
Now careful what I’m writing here. Even “rich” people with five times my income do not have an untroubled existence. I witnessed this strange infrastructure close up when I worked at the corporation. I was on a wage, not a salary, yet I was the one driving a Cadillac and taking twelve holidays every year. I never worried about my bills because I know how to budget. I could not tell you what a gallon of gas costs because I don’t really care. The biggest “worry” was always the rent, but even that has been eliminated recently.
My life may not be carefree, but whose is? I’m talking about the colossal difference between a person who has few worries because he has a lot of money, and one who has few worries because, well, because he has few worries. It is instantly obvious which one of these parties has sold out to the system. (Just you watch, I still have a year left on my plan to get back on my feet. Money is only the barometer.)
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