One year ago today: December 25, 2015, Dade City crime map.
Five years ago today: December 25, 2011, not the Hawaiian state flower . . .
Nine years ago today: December 25, 2007, doing the wild thing.
Random years ago today: December 25, 2003, the day after . . .
MORNING
It’s an Xmas to remember, in my own house for the first time since I moved to Florida. Myself and the cardinals. You get filler editorial today, as by plan, nothing happened. Breakfast was turkey on toast with Swiss cheese and hot tea. Here’s a slightly better view of the swampland south of Monroe Station. A lot of this land was owned by JZ’s family before the government ruled they could not develop it. They bought it back for what the families paid, then went on to develop at least some of it themselves.
Looking out the kitchen window I saw the some new cats sleeping on the relatively warm seat of the Honda. I did not even turn the radio on today, preferring to read and write. Up to this point in life, I never considered myself old, but that is changing rapidly. Hey, at least I got old by living, not by vegetating. The neat part of keeping a blog is, I don’t have to some day sit back and look at it all.
Okay, how small is the community I live in now? Well, the Burger King, McDonald’s, and the Winn/Dixies were all closed. I actually made coffee at home. Don’t go thinking these businesses are observing a religious holiday. They are just too cheap to pay overtime. If anything had been open, I would have gone out at least for that coffee today. Those heathens in Miami stay open 24 hours no matter what. There are fewer successful businesses down there than there are survivors.
I should have got something done today, that’s another tradition. I read a lot, I will never forget that destitute time when I was 17 to 20 and could not even get to the library. I usually read the paper, back when they sort of reported the news instead of slanting it. I read when I could, but did not begin reading intently every day until I was close to 23. Then, I read all the classics I could stand. When I returned to college at 27, my reading intensified on every count. I was reading heavy duty textbooks, you may recall, often taking three courses at once part time. But I did graduate in one year. The second degree, my Senior Certificate, was to take another four years.
By then, I was used to extreme reading. Nothing interested me but the complex and the difficult. I learned to dislike MicroSoft books and avoid school texts. The latter contains often more brainwashing than information. My estimate is I’ve read 600 text books, but I don’t recall more than a fraction of them. My favorites were “Voyage of the Beagle”, “The Peninsular War”, and a macro economics text whose title slips me, but I’ve got it around somewhere. Had it since the 1980s. I remember groups of books, like the ones on robotics, and navigation, and Spanish (which I learned well enough to read newspapers and more textbooks).
Over time, I found it relaxing to read detective and spy novels, pure fiction only. I’ve read others that claimed to be factual, but nothing compares with a well-written crime novel. All such books are now bought second-hand after being totally, more than totally, disappointed by my plan to read the bestsellers some 20 years back. I actually bought a Daniel Steele paperback. Couldn’t even give that thing away.
Meanwhile in Siberia . . .
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NOON
Here is the Miami drug kingpin parking lot. It’s the Porsche dealership on Dixie Hwy. Unless you can think of anyone in Miami that has a legit job that pays enough to market these cars by the score. Not even the post office pays that much. If the authorities were doing their jobs, all they’d have to do is follow up on who is buying these cars. But no. It is better to just treat everybody as a suspect of some sort. Then you can get good at creating cases against the innocent as well as the guilty. As the establishment can verify, you really never know when that skill will come in handy.
JZ called from the Xmas party, it sounded like wall-to-wall screaming kids. When I was that age, you screamed once and quickly learned that wasn’t such a good idea. Japan got telephone service in 1877. My family did the same in 1962. By then, we moved to town, but that wasn’t the cause, because every farm in the county had service. Did you know they almost had it disconnected in 1963 because nobody ever called? The first time the phone rang, the kids went berserk and the dog wouldn’t stop barking.
I worked every Xmas day from 1982 to 1993. Double time and a half, which I regular took as banked time off. The same question should be asked by more people today. What good is big money if there is no time off to enjoy it? I was unionized at that time, and worked a ten day shift back to back which so I got most New Year’s Days as well. Those were fat paychecks back then, before the tax got so high it was no longer worth it. By 1993, the company was hiring Yuppie types anyway, and they quarreled over the good shifts. That’s when I seriously planned my escape. For the record, I got out just in time.
I’d always worked for a union when possible. People who don’t seriously have some of the weirdest brainwaves I’ve ever heard. What good is your right to work when you can’t feed your family without a credit card? If unions don’t make sense in today’s world, then the working class has undermined itself. Never forget welfare and food stamps are a form of communism. They help you only if you live as they say.
“Am I Double Parked by the Curbstone of Your Heart?”
NIGHT
You’re not supposed to see what’s in this photo. It is half-taken through the new windscreen deflector. Now, just watch me try to keep it this clean. It was bug-splattered by the time I got to Carneston. This is a view of the gravel part of the Loop Road. It only gets graded once every other year, so the jungle is right up to the tire marks. Paying for this luxury screen drained the pot over here, so it’s quiet time until year end.
The seat is less comfortable and you cannot shift around much. While it can be driven with one hand, not for an hour out on the highway like the batbike. There is no place to shift your feet, so I’m considering raised footpegs. The shop says this bike will require a bar welded across the front of the engine mount.
Furthermore, I’ve decided to go ahead with new tires because the one believable sign on the old bike is the tires are around ten years old. I have no doubt they will last longer than batbike tires, but at $380 a set, they damn well better.
ADDENDUM
The day gave me time to look into the foreclosure process. Par usual, foreclosure is more complicated than it needs to be. I found it to be roughly parallel to a divorce proceeding, the bank being the wife. No, that isn’t a joke. Look at what actually happens—but it is a vague comparison. I’m watching now for 2020, the year in which 2/3 of American adults will be of retirement age. Why? Because there is every reason to expect they’ll be as terrible at that as with managing the rest of their lives.
Here’s trivia, unless it happens in your neighborhood. The houses surrounding a foreclosure typically lose 1%-2% of their value. I followed the development of the housing crisis. It takes two to tango, and there is a huge correlation between bankers lending to the irresponsible and the irresponsible going on the credit binge. That is what I mean by terrible at it. I won’t go into detail on that, as do most of the sources I’m trying to study, because it distracts from my purpose.
In a nutshell, the credit companies preached instant gratification to four generations of Americans, insinuating success had to do with a wallet full of credit cards. And people who are not like me, who don’t think like me, or who don’t like me, fell for that scam by the millions. Who remembers my critics at the phone place who argued I could “buy a color TV” on hire purchase if I quite putting that extra $19.34 into my pension fund? Yeah, that pack of losers.
I’m not near formulating a strategy, but I now know a lot about the mechanics of the housing bubble. The credit companies pushed through new bankruptcy legislation designed to punish consumers who defaulted, despite the fact it was often the lenders who pushed loans on to individuals who should never have had them. You know who you are. I was aware of the moves by the banks to make bankruptcy harder, but was not aware of how predictable and systematically they pulled that off.
Also, I chose the wrong topic if I want to garner one of these houses. Yes, folks, we are looking to buy again. It is not the foreclosure process, but the auction process, that I need to further investigate. I sort of knew that. Trivia, auctions are held on the first Tuesday of every month, even if it is a national holiday. The wholesale bargains of 2012-2013 are gone, but everyone at street level knows the dead cat ain’t finished bouncing. The real enemy still remains inflation, which has been artificially curbed for years. Should it return with a vengeance, it will gut any real gains made by the economy over the past decade. Again, I refer to the prices of things real people buy, not the grossly manipulated Consumer Price Index.
However, should that inflation arrive, it brings some advantages to those who are prepared. Gee, how do you prepare without going and getting more money, duh? Most people think of borrowing at today’s rate under that idiotic theory that inflation makes fixed-rate loans easier to repay. It’s been tried and it could potentially be done by those with enough discipline, but I’ve never met such a person. Well, except myself, but I won’t borrow money.
The best hedge is to own some form of inflation-proof assets-slash-investments. That rules out stock and bonds, but highlights rental property, metals, and foreign income. It’s a hedge-fund-like proposition. True, one cannot simply raise the rent to cover costs, but focus on those costs. They cannot be allowed to get so out of hand that people are turned out in huge numbers. The system won’t allow it. Now, this hinges on the rental property not having a mortgage. Can we get a show of hands how many have bought their house for cash? That’s what I thought. Read this.
I am dumbfounded by these firms that advise people to invest in bonds. It takes one stroke of the government pen to wipe out the entire return on the highest paying bonds and don’t think that legislation isn’t looming. Look at Greece. They outright declared that everyone with enough bonds to be “material” was “rich” and confiscated the goods. Don’t forget my report of some years back that, according to some studies, I’m rich because I own a vehicle and eat three meals a day. The same applies to you.
Last Laugh
Xmas in Ireland
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