One year ago today: August 6, 2016, I decide to insulate.
Five years ago today: August 6, 2012, 43 years overdue.
Nine years ago today: August 6, 2008, terabytes, only $200.
Random years ago today: August 6, 2010, I read Ayn Rand.
Good morning, it is computer maintenance day. One of the checks takes hours, the duplicate file and duplicate folder routine. Strange, with all the years available, so few operating systems will scan for duplicates. With music, I always have a lot. I don’t scan by title, rather a combination of size and cyclic redundancy sums. Otherwise, my duplicates would have passed the terabyte level years ago. And I don’t download a lot of videos, in case you are wondering.
It is also yard maintenance day, but just a bit. She’s too blazing hot out there. Picking up supplies, I snapped this picture of the display outside of Home Depot. This is a sign of how well America’s immigration policies are working. In my day, there was no need to lock up sidewalk displays like shown here. Now even in semi-rural America, these precautions have to be taken against this petty crime. Is it caused by immigration? I didn’t say that.
I’m saying something quite different. And that is how I did not see this type of thing in my youth, when there were few third world immigrants. Then I traveled a lot and saw how things had to be chained up in the third world. Then I came back to America and now see the place now behaving like the third world wherever I see a lot of immigrants from those areas. So, really, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions, but make sure your facts are as first-hand solid as seen with your own eyes and not some baloney from that Ramos guy who claims immigrant crime exists only as racist fiction.
I’m also saying I grew up in an area where you didn’t have to lock your doors, and it did not at all look the same as Florida looks today. Nope, you can’t fool me on that one.
Meet Joelle.
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I framed in the cutout for the new bedroom (old living room) A/C unit while listening to NPR. That station either gives me a laugh or gets my dander up. It managed both this time, since they aired some “experts” on the economy. It was really more of the liberal hype everything’s rosy and it would be better if we got rid of Trump nonsense. As usual, these people can only talk in circles and use the stats as propaganda. My favorite is when they talk about devaluing the currency, how that won’t work because it only benefits a small number of companies.
How can a company, other than donating money to the party, be pro-liberal? Stick around, I’ll tell you my opinion, but first take a look at this A/C work in progress. The black rectangle on the wall is markings for the new, smaller, 110V thermostat controlled unit. The framing is not done, but you can see the wiring going in and also the old window mount. I don’t like these. They are the lazy man’s installation. It blocks the window view and the moisture often rots the frames away. That 220V unit is going into the kitchen area.
Visible also is the inside face of the exterior siding. This will be tarpapered and insulated, which has more than proven its worth in the guest bedroom. A second layer of tarpaper on the interior has been adequate for soundproofing. Um, the back room was so quiet, I did not hear the mice getting into my bird chow. I would have easily been awakened if I’d still been crashing in the front area.
Here’s another lesson I learned. Depending on the size of your walls, in my case 3-1/2” deep by the dimension of the studs, use the biggest electrical boxes that will fit. Shown here are boxes that have around 31 cubic inches inside. They cost a few pennies more, but pay it. The extra room to work and stuff your wiring inside the box more than offsets trying to cram things into place. I got these boxes for 39 cents each, so it is impractical to save a few pennies and have your wiring work its way loose over time because it is strained into place.
For years I’ve pointed out the senseless claims of the media that the recession is over. Nope, the economy here is based on real estate prices and the average American worker does not earn enough to qualify for the mortgage necessary to buy the average American house. This process is similar to how 'pro-liberal' American business has adapted. They work almost entirely on credit, showing accounts receivable an asset. This is like your neighbor claiming he is rich because people have promised to pay him a ton of money, but could he borrow twenty bucks till they pay up?
Worse, when this hot air catches up, the neighbor will be first to vote for increased state power to “restore law and order”. He’s playing both ends against the middle, hoping the people who owe him money will pay up before he has to pay his own bills. That, if you ask me (or read me I suppose) is my estimation of how most business is run these days. The idea is to show a dollar profit, you know, let the stock market hit record highs. But meanwhile nobody has been investing in new plant and equipment for the past thirty or forty years.
All that Yankee know-how and spirit has been shipped to China. The entire infrastructure built from 1860 to 1960 has been sold out from under us. Any new investment is paralyzed by regulation, except of course the whimsical on-line viral companies that have no bricks-and-mortar storefronts or inventory that can be attacked by the bureaucrats. Look at Facebook, worth billions, but as far as permanent assets, do they even have any? What, a few leased computers at their headquarters? What do they have that you could pick up in your hands?
And the banks continue to hand out printed up money. Not for long-term investment, for American has sold away the lead they once had, but for shoring up existing but failing businesses that can’t stand on their own. It’s all inflationary money, which benefits only those who get to spend it first. You and I are not on that Xmas list, Chumley. Everything is fine, they tell us, recovery is underway, as they just keep turning that crank.
“Every home’s a castle
when the King and Queen are in love.”
~ Unknown
By late afternoon, I’ve run only another 18 feet of electric wire (NM cable). Some of it was dusty prep work, knocking out drywall and drilling through studs, so only three boxes were roughed in. It was hot and despite being indoors on the north side of the building with the A/C on turbo, this was muggy, unpleasant going. By 5:00PM I’m caked with debris, or how do they say it, I’ve got more plaster on my face and neck than Tammy Faye Baker on a pledge tour. The good news is there were none of the lengthy delays like last time. You see, now I have five years experience, ahem. There were problems but I knew exactly how to handle each one.
Once again, I’m finding I sort of enjoy this brand of electrical work. I know from accompanying my former employer on inspections that I’m doing TQ grade work. Plus, in some ways I tend to purposely do extras to make it look nicer, such as carefully tucking the wires into the boxes in a swirl and making sure wire bends have a consistent radius. I’ll never know, sadly, if this was a career for me.
It rained, but shortly after, I took the Rebel and the Dreadnaught up to the Sunday jam. Being a jam, there was a guitarist who knew no country and drummer who was obsessed by one country song. Which I’d never heard of. The session was okay except this drummer was also obsessed by one speed. Too slow. Since I have no timing problems, I kept playing the right speed, which made a mess of certain passages. As for the crowd, it depends on if you prefer a drummer dragging things down or a guitarist speeding things up. That’s what jams are all about.
Ah, so later it turns out the drummer was a guitarist, of about the same caliber. I learned a lot including many of my songs are in too low a key. I’ll change that pronto, I seem to be a D and A vocalist. This is a rock jam, which I can play if the tunes are familiar but in the opposite direction, none of the others can seem to play even the simplest of country progressions. I can’t criticize, though, because I can’t play jazz or reggae. I picked six of the house band tunes and maybe next week I’ll show up with my bass.
They have a lady bassist and our styles are polar opposites. She’s totally into the bass as a guitar-support apparatus, kind of the guitar player’s dream come true. There’s nothing wrong with that, I just don’t personally happen to like it. The place emptied out fast when the music quit, except for this guy putting the squeeze on the barmaid. Since I got there late, I hung around for a Budweiser and went over my performance. Here’s my conclusions:
Most OP (other people’s) PA systems are on full bass and reverb.
Around 20% of my tunes need to be transposed to a higher range.
I’m a considerably better rhythm guitarist than I set out to be.
Time to memorize all my lyrics.
The whole jam was, by and large, fun. But I’d rather have sat around the back yard with Trent playing Johnny Cash and drinking tea. The yahoo hustling the barmaid kept asking me to play “the oldest song I knew” or if I knew this or that obscure song, in a “why not” tone of voice. I went along with it once I realized he wanted to show off the speakers on his smart phone. The surprise was how well my rhythm playing sharpened up those old rock tunes. I was not ready for that and had not prepared anything.
[Author’s note: to myself, the sound was rather marvelous, actually, but I’ve made up my mind to never play in a big band again. I think what happened is my strumming provided an anchor that was otherwise not present. I mean, not many 1970s bands had an acoustic accompanist. What’s the lesson in all this?
Also, remind me to pay attention to that small group who came in the back door. Evidently one was the bar owner, but who were the two ladies with him? They had been talking between themselves until I commenced. My pickup only has a twelve foot chord, so I was standing a good twenty feet to the side of the rest of the band. That made things conspicuous when they walked right up to the stage and recorded what I was doing. Hmmm.]
ADDENDUM
“Bones”. It was the lawyer, but it was two other things about the book that I found surprising. One, that I’ve seen a play or movie about this somewhere, but not quite. A production that follows the same plot, but yet was not this same work. I’ll have to shove that into the background and hope later it answers itself. I can recall the scenes in black and white, but this book, written in 1985, is too recent for that.
Second, near the ending, I saw for the first time in my life a word that I thought I had invented. “Whyn’t.” It’s par of the lyrics I wrote for “The Debbie I Knew” and was a word I independently came up with to fit a tricky accent in the lyrics, certainly not based on any contraction I was ever aware of. Not a cryptognition in any way because I recall the entire deductive process whereby I came upon it. And I’ve got a good sense of words I’ve never seen before.
Later, the book was not the one I was mis-remembering. Why? Because I would have remembered the ingenious way the lawyer pulled off the crime. The author had apparently committed suicide in a locked room. The wife, who the lawyer was after, saw the lawyer kick open the door and found the body. It really went like this. The lawyer arranged to meet the wife at the house, but he arrived early. He shot the victim and put dropped the gun on the desk, then left the room, closing it and locking it from the outside with the key.
Next, he kicked the door open and put the key on the inside lock, carefully pulling the door shut again. When the wife arrived, he pretended to just be getting there. He grabbed the knob like it was solid, then kicked the door open a second time. Pretty smooth, actually.
Last Laugh
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