One year ago today: April 4, 2016, classic batbike & camper pic.
Five years ago today: April 4, 2012, a pattern of bad decisions.
Nine years ago today: April 4, 2008, beyond his experience.
Random years ago today: April 4, 2014, the automobile “EMP” chip.
I took the morning off and finished more of the tarpaper and prep for drywall. I think I’ll leave it until Monday or so of next week so I can do it in one stretch. Agt. R has one of those drywall cutting T-rulers and the room should take ten sheets. When I total my hours, that one room has taken close to 100 hours. That includes a lot of phases, from removing the floor and old drywall, repairing the joists, leveling the foundation, vapor barrier, wiring, insulating the walls and floor, it adds up. I was in the real estate office this morning and prices have indeed been surging. There is nothing decent left in town for less than $45,000. And this is Nowheresville, USA.
Easily seen is the new double-window setup, these are not yet fixed in place. The double shaft down the middle is there to accommodate the window weights. These panes of glass have also been reversed to the correct configuration. They had been put together wrongly by whoever installed the window-mounted air conditioners. Note the yellowish tinge to the left window, this is wood preservative. These will be painted over to a consistent white later.
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Some sandblasting is scheduled for tomorrow. We’ve determined how much of the grit or media is required and examined the used grit. It must be emptied and dried each use, which means the way to operate the contraption is to line up a lot of work per session. Shown here is the cabinet being cleaned at day’s end, with the gloves inverted. Note the orange air hose, robot club issue. Brand new, it never was used because we didn’t have a big enough compressor.
The object I have is a small brass pull from the trunk lid. These are very well made and expertly fitted. For example, this one has a number indented on the back, C1069. These characters are hammer stamped with individual hand dies. Since it is on the back, it was not meant to be seen, ever. We’ve tried several methods to polish these up, but the tarnish is not lifting to chemicals or rubbing. We are not talking an ordinary patina here, but a layer of grime from usage. This is why I am the one pushing for pricing these items as collector’s items. The labor alone on this one would by now exceed $70.
I’m still learning about smelting, sort of, and I believe this brass ornament is drop forged. Did I mention we found a neat mold I thought was for making arrowheads, but it was a lead mold for making those sinker weights that fishermen, or I mean anglers, use.
“I once dated a weather girl to see what it was like
to be with a woman who wasn’t right all the time.”
There were quite a number of ornate jewelry boxes with little hand-fitted wooden drawers. They’ll need work, but unless we can find something that identifies them as American made, they too closely resemble the lacquered boxes sold in Chinatown. I finished reading last month’s Smithsonian and overall, the magazine is slipping. It doesn’t have anything like the impact from back when they tended to research projects with a tech or science background, where now they mess with social issues. I know what you are thinking, how I always read the ads in that magazine. They reflect the changes in moods and tastes better than any other publication I read regularly. The cruises to South America have changed to Alaska and the Northwest Passage.
Okay, okay, I’ll leave it alone. I would not be caught dead wearing something that dippy. And I mean, I have not owned a turtleneck since before my college days. I am trying to find my copy of the movie “Broken Arrow”. My favorite line from the movie? When they ask Travolta if he is surprised a bomb is missing, his reply is no, but he is surprised it happens so often they have a code for it. Like I’m surprised how, in this day and age, they still make banks of staples too long to fit into your staple gun.
Here's a still from the movie so you can get some idea of what I like. Well, a man can dream, can’t he? At least for me, it was once a reality. It ain’t braggin’ if you done it. Oh, I have the pics, but you can’t see them. Last week, there was a fire drill at the local high school. How sad, I drove past and there was not one, not even one, good-looking and proportionate teen gal on that entire school ground to even look at. Just frumpy little plump ones. My god, can you imagine what these butterballs are going to look like by the time they hit 20? It’s got to be their diet.
[Author’s note: if you must know, the babe in the picture was 37 years old when this picture was taken in 2002. My attraction with her is that she is just four months older than my ex-wife, a natural blonde--and I still desire my ex-wife.]
ADDENDUM
I’ve got another novel in hand, a story from the early and mid 1900s, an era of which I know very little. Yes, I’ve seen the movies and read the papers, but once you learn the facts, you know very little. It was the transition period from a Victorian and capitalist society to one of decadence, income taxation, and welfare. This sound like a collapse, but it did result in the average man being better off, and brought in a more casual approach to almost every part of life except organized conventional warfare. Just like today, the government had so much tied up in armaments, war was the last to change, and then only when a smaller and nimbler attacker gained the upper hand.
It also marks the onset of the rot that accompanies every nation that institutes income tax, namely the professional politician. That class of people who know what is better for you than you do. The book is called “Peaches and Daddy”. It concerns the marriage of a wealthy 51-year-old socialite (some say 61, there were no birth certificates) to a 16-year-old. The book was published in 2008, so you have to overlook all the politically correct, self-centered, and “modern” views of sex that intrude into the plot. One example is how the author fanatically keeps pointing out Peaches was “only 15” when they met.
Yet there was nothing unusual about that in 1926 just like there would be nothing unusual about it today if the government kept its nose out of the nation’s bedrooms. Or as I like to put it, no matter how many men they throw in jail, they will never stop teenage girls from sleeping with whomever they please. Another needless moral curve that keeps appearing is sniping at the rich. The continual implication that Daddy is a sick and lonely lunatic. That’s a time-worn ploy so those people who didn’t make it big won’t feel so bad. And trust me, in 2017, we are on the verge of and entire era where most people will land flat on their asses. A few dot-coms will make billions, but the rest? What about the rest?
The book further chronicles the rise of the tabloid press. That wacky American affinity for papers that influence public opinion rather than obey freedom of the press laws and just report it. There was a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that tried to stop the marriage. Just like today, they plainly felt a life of drudgery married to some loser “her own age” was somehow less cruel on the average woman. Ladies, it is okay to dream of attracting a millionaire, but not okay to actually do it unless you are so old you need a Society to prevent him from marrying your daughter. (That includes a law society passing “age of consent” rules.) Just stop and think for a moment what sort of person would support a system that limits the access of older men to younger women. Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
Okay guys, once you get rich, it is okay to hire all the teenage prostitutes you want, but you cannot pick one and marry her. Too may authors think that people who have what it takes to get rich in New York should still think and act like the rest of us. So you’ll know, some say Daddy was the real Gatsby. Daddy kept every letter and newspaper clipping, some 2 million of them, locked in cases inside his residence. Yet you never heard of this guy because the press collectively chose to ignore him the day he died. Only 200 people, mostly lawyers, attended his funeral. Again, this sort of thing is accented throughout the book, but not the fact that he gave away millions in Xmas toys to poor children.
The rise of the tabloids centered on these celebrity issues, back when sex outside of marriage was shocking, or at least they would have you believe it. It’s neat, as you can easily imagine forward to the way that today’s socialist press is treating Trump. On and on about the Russians rigging the election. A really massive upsurge in the number of false news releases. It’s all old hand to these editors, who just cannot figure out why it hasn’t worked on Trump.
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