One year ago today: December 28, 2015, the final 60W sellout.
Five years ago today: December 28, 2011, chopsticks, $8.99.
Nine years ago today: December 28, 2007, $29.00 per hour in 1987.
Random years ago today: December 28, 2013, everything is under control.
MORNING
This is not a reflection or trick photo. I’m holding up my home-made speedometer lens replacement in front of an on-screen projection of the existing arrangement. The new lens in installed in the now-trimmed wooden retaining ring. Clear, or what. If you look into the photo, you can see the old lens is so old and yellowed it is impossible to read the fuel gauge, which is the real motive for this repair. The speedometer hasn’t worked since the middle of last year. And now the rear brake is acting up.
And hungry. Yep, something about the morning country air makes you wake up that way, particularly so some days. Time to mention food. I think there is a law somewhere that says every blog has to have the occasional article on food. And in this one, the two top draw are breakfast and, lately, the baked pies. There is also a rule about cats, but before I’d write on that daily, I’d rather do hard time.
It’s further known here that non-conventional morning meals attract hits. Today, it was stir fry chicken with curry sauce on fresh hot biscuits with a side of buckwheat. Two cups of tea. The mere mention of chicken over here generates a guaranteed 23 extra hits. And I just know you want to see the model mentioned from last evening. It is an 8’x12’ shed getting a repaired roof. That is the object in the lower center of the picture.
The other two pieces shown are the bedroom and bathroom, detached from the main house. Normally, that bedroom would be resting on top of the blocks. You can see the three windows in the middle of the walls, so there is go great place to set the bed. One window is getting moved once I figure out how to do that. The large plate with the blocks is the foundation of the house. These are the 16” cylinder blocks or cinder blocks, whatever, that are under the sill plates.
Two of the sill plates are shown, they are already level. The remaining row is the segment that sank 1” into the salt-n-pepper soil over the decades. That’s where I’m still waiting on the 30T hydraulic jack. I should be getting a load of lumber dropped off here in a few days. Until that shed roof is repaired, there is little sense proceeding with the rest. This is to be a work shed, not a storage shed.
I heard a new (to me) term this morning. “Cyber-meddling”, as applied to Russian “interference” with the US voting system. Whoa, stop right there. Unless I hear a precise explanation of exactly how they managed this, I reject the concept as Liberal cry-babyism. I’ve repaired software problems often enough to know the dumber the customer, the faster they are to see problems that aren’t there when things don’t go their way.
Another bunch I wish would pack up are the ones to go to the library to get their resumé “on the computer”. They have been woefully ignorant of computers all along, but won’t admit it. the library has a dozen books on how to accomplish the task, but they won’t read them. No time to read, the game is on in an hour or got to phone mother for the daily gossip. Instead, they sit at one of the computers and start cussing under their breath because the stupid thing won’t do what they want.
The plan is to keep this up until the library staff comes over and basically does the resume for you. Free lessons, and you came blame it on the computer.
The Cottesloe beach pylon.
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NOON
Off to the south part of town, maybe a little thrift shopping. It’s another hot day, which I have little choice but to take off. It’s become rare enough to make the noon headlines so I must say I finally ate in a restaurant. It was a pizza parlor downtown and it was so good I’m suspicious. You know this is me because who else would read a book called “Out of Antarctica” with pizza and a diet soda?
Take a good look at this pizza. You can see it is puffy crust with the thinnest layer of toppings. There ain’t a person alive that doesn’t know when you find something tasty, the more the better. Unless, unless . . . they do something artificial to spice it up. That’s impression I got from that pizza. It was astonishingly delicious, but was light as marshmallow and did not fill me up. Like dining on cotton candy. There were two el gordo Mexican 20-something women at the next table working through about eight times as much food as I could tuck away in my prime. It was unnatural to witness.
The same station with the CBS news also has these investment programs that keep dispensing advice along with advice that they are no qualified to dish out any such thing. Always consult a professional, they say, and then keep on talking. The newest hype? Investing in a Muslim dominated market. Wasn’t it Khadaffi that said he didn’t care for terrorist, that the 50 million Muslims in Europe would be taking over the country in a few years anyway. CBS can be trusted to ignore these factors. They forget the middle east was largely Christian before being converted at knife-point.
They also push standard investments, staunch defenders of long-term bonds. That may have been okay back in the days when these documents were dispersed in private vaults all over the land. Any attempt to grab them would quickly set off a panic long before they knocked over the first few. But these days, every bond can be electronically confiscated and only a fool does not take that into account.
Recently we’ve talked about what is “rich”. The statistics consider only income, but saner councils take into account accumulated wealth. We live in a society where other than the fiction of a house being a store of value, very few people accumulate anything of worth during their entire lives. Once more, credit is at the peak of the pyramid. It still costs a million after-tax dollars to pay off a $300,000 mortgage. Nobody can win against these odds.
I still recommend that you put away $10,000 in precious metals. I prefer silver to gold, because the quantities of gold that are “spendable” on a daily basis are too tiny for convenience. And I prefer it to all other metals because it has the only ready market. Silver is showing another slump as the stock market heads for the sky. History shows that the final stage when the market crashes will wipe out nearly all the gains made since the previous crash. How do you like them apples? My opinion is that in such a climate, it is better to speculate than invest.
AFTERNOON
The Rebel gears are sticking. I am this close to sending the Sheriff over to talk to the seller. You know how I love to get amateurs into small claims court, especially the type who deny the cause of action. I’ve never lost a case like that and even in the few cases that ended in a draw, it cost the defendant so much they would have been better off settling.
Remember the Hal Hamill case that dragged on seven years? Cost him his marriage, his tow-truck, $12,000 (around twice that today) and when he tried to get his teenage daughter to testify against me, shall we say certain other things got uncovered that put him away for a long time. The lady cops questioned me for hours on that topic, but alas, I had never seen a thing. All over a $600 repair job on a 1974 Ford.
Who remembers my baby Cadillac? I bought that with Hal’s money, you know. Finest car I’ve ever owned, which I in turn lost to medical expenses. It was neat how the system tried to pressure me into paying but could not use the credit system against me.
Next, I drove to the library in the east end, the one with 30 computers with a waiting list and the rest of the building empty. Their coffee tastes better. Just remember, keep the lid on or they go bananas. I got the surgical masks and found my noise arrestors. The good ones from my days in the Montana lumber mills. The trip to the bank is 18 miles round trip but I always manage to average 46 miles. Got to stop at the Thrift and for reasons.
It’s scary how I spent $53.21 just there and back. I got a pair of riding boots in new condition for $13.00, but otherwise, just books, gas, batteries, pizza, and a used DVD. I’ve never seen “Oceans Twelve”, so let’s slate that for this evening after I boil up some corn on the cob. No more cherry pie for a while, the last one lasted less than two days. I use the filling mix, but it has HFCS and I’m going to try making my own. What else is there to do? It’s not like all the rich widows get met shopping at Wal*Mart.
Nobody is getting any more out of me today. It’s going to be me. The coffee pot. And a good book. Did you know on weekdays I can hear church bells ringing at 6:00PM?
(My favorite)
“Off the table Mabel, the two bucks is for the beer.”
NIGHT
Nobody told me “Oceans Twelve” was a two-hour movie. It’s great they can produce a movie where everybody is a double-crosser without losing the audience. The movie is cops and robbers with the underlying principle that if you put up a few million, you can steal anything for the cops are looking for poor criminals. This is sort of how Wall Street and the drug cartels operate. I had to pause the movie at the part where they find out the bombshell Interpol lady has the bad guy’s cell phone.
There is no doubt, however, that all accounts on the Allied side are very slanted. Even where there is tiny snatches of truth, each is buried so deep in hogwash that gaining an accurate picture requires far more reading than the average person is used to. Take the characteristic story of the Bismarck. It was not the biggest or fastest ship and it was not a gallant fight. If you include the Hood and Prince of Wales, it took the British 44 ships (including two aircraft carriers) hours of pounding the Bismarck before she keeled over.
Nobody objects to the victors embellishing the truth, but for publications that originate seventy years later, you’d expect a more balanced report. Instead, every account points out Churchill had been “First Lord of the Admiralty”, where Hitler had “a schoolboy fascination” with battleships. British leader eye-color is rarely cited unless blue, but the German eyes were regularly “piercing grey”.
Nor is there mention that the direct cause of the really big wars was the British insistence of using its navy to “protect” trade routes, which in turn existed because of an English propensity to occupy and subjugate the sources of raw materials as colonies. Anyone who tried to horn in on this monopoly became the enemy. Not only that, his pupils turned grey.
ADDENDUM
The new book, “Out of Antarctica” is excellently researched. The catch is that it offers (so far) no explanations or new theories. It is a typical university-level homework assignment, hours of reading to get at a few seconds of fact. It’s not the lightest reading, I’ve making around nine pages per hour. Most captivating are a series of overlaid maps. The Ancients repeatedly refer to the continent in realistic terms as the place where the Sun “no longer shines” and the place men “no longer live”. The implication is that these things once happened.
To any northern cardinal lovers reading, I replaced the birdfeeder contents with 100% black oil sunflower seeds. This got rid of the ants and has attracted back the entire family, mom, pop, and the two now fully grown juveniles. Their colors are still not as bright. The squirrels have finally given up trying to descend the rope, now feeding on the ground spillover. The birds are messy feeders and are finally slower to scatter when I pass a window or round the corner.
Last Laugh
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