One year ago today: October 15, 2016, birds, fudge, squirrels.
Five years ago today: October 15, 2012, Solidoodle.
Nine years ago today: October 15, 2008, playing with numbers.
Random years ago today: October 15, 2011, the opera, boxing ring, or backstage?
Here’s another mystery object from the back shed over at Agt. R’s. No waiting period, I’ll tell you right away that it is an “Old Pal”, a brand of fishing equipment. This happens to be a cricket bait holder. On the back, not shown, there are belt hooks. You catch your live crickets and keep them in this aluminum box. You can just make out the little breathy-holes in the open lid. These are rare items no longer made or no longer made of class materials. Today, it would be plastic. Let’s get to the part about price.
Another cool morning, almost till noon, please let this be an early winter. I’ve got so much work to do you don’t know. I finished another two shelves for the pantry over at Agt. R’s, this light duty is the max I can handle but things go swell when you have the right tools. The shed has a situation with humidity, but no more so than anything else, still, I wonder if anything can be done about that. Wait, I tell myself, wait to see how things fare over the winter. Don’t judge by the last summer, which started with a drought and was unusually hot. No, Theresa, I’m not writing about the weather, I’m writing about the shed. The neighbor was over to socialize and he almost didn’t recognize the place.
I’ve spent my entire entertainment budget for the month already. Here’s a few other year-to-date figures from the budget. Since January 1, I’ve spent $1,330 on groceries, $687 on gasoline ($200 of it in the last month), $509 on household expenses, and a whopping $482 on maintaining the office. That last expense includes the monthly telephone bill and the outrageous prices for printer ink. That’s not my entire expense, just selected items. I’m over budget on many other categories, but that was due to startup costs. This year alone I did not spend almost $6,000 in rent so far, I'll soon be way ahead in this game.
The numbers above came as I continue my investigation into normal costs in the vicinity. This entire year I’ve only spent $625 on electricity and I don’t skimp. (Does that make me a ‘power user’?) That would last the others barely two months. I’d like to know the reason, even if it turns out my meter is wrong. You know what they say, inflation is a pressure cooker, the longer you leave it, the bigger the explosion. We all know inflation has doubled prices in the past few years despite the efforts to clamp int down. Craving the challenge, I re-read my book on power transformers, sort of wondering if I could actually build one.
Most DC powered equipment has a transformer simply because DC generators are not practical. Mind you, I would like to know why they are impractical. Noise? Expense? Or is the reason lost in antiquity? None of my electronics projects use AC. What’s that word for an AC generator, oh yeah, an alternator. I know little of AC beyond basic lab class in grade school, but I get the idea.
Amish barn-moving.
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Here’s the latest addition to Agt. R’s pantry shelves. He has an unused door that was paneled over on the other side, so he’s installed six shelves. He doesn’t have a table saw to make these cuts. Actually, neither do I. My rig is that $40 contraption I bought at the Frenchie flea market near the Mardis Gras. Maybe this activity will goad me into finally getting something decent.
What’s happening here is the final board, which goes on the bottom of the pantry was too short. Thus, the small different-colored piece on the near end is glued and clamped. It is reinforced with dowels. I think it all looks pretty neat but that could be because I’ve never done it before. I also presumed he’d be painting these planks, but not so. However, they are cut to 1/64th inch tolerance, the minimum robot club standard.
We are taking the easy way out to test the water, seeing if we can sell locally for cash and they come pick up the article. I’ve got a template worked out and Agt. R says he may have a pro grade shadow box in storage. And he’s probably getting the computer for free. It is a situation where each individual at the management level has to be able to run the whole show by himself. This is not as easy as it seems at first. You can’t have some article getting sold twice or a system subject to delays.
Hashing out everything we need to start next week, we got to talking about Germany’s army of sergeants, a period of history he knows absolutely nothing about. Well, that’s the school system. He did not know that Poland had taken large chunks of German territory away after World War I. Germany, although she was not defeated and came close on several occasions of defeating the entire world, was limited to an armed force of only 100,000 mean. Basically meaning they couldn’t do a thing when the Allies carved away slices of their territory and gave them to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France. (Thus, it was the Allies, not Hitler’s Germany, that were first to break the treaty, as they had promised to disarm as well but never did.
So what the Germans did was train each man in the army to take over the job of his immediate superior officer. The lowest rank became sergeant, so when Hitler did what all the Allies did, which was expand their armies, Germany had a standing corps of 100,000 trained officers. Germany had a reputation for outstanding officers. Rommel, Guderian, Manstein, Kesselring, these military commanders had no equivalents on the Allied side. Not even close.
[Author’s note: Nearly 10% of Germany’s upper military echelons were Jews, for as we know, the Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany in the First World War and their families were treated as full German citizens and never bothered. But some of the Jews living in Germany did not fight, maintaining it was a German war, not a Jewish war. Ever since they did that, there have been some really wicked stories circulating about how they were treated. Kind of makes you wonder if there was any connection. Just don’t wonder out loud, because it is apparently illegal.]
Thus, I was referring how at first, we will be our army of sergeants because it will be the lowest rank. If we do this thing, it looks as though one of us will have to be actively in charge at any given time. Let’s see how this pans out.
“I don’t have an attitude problem.
You have a problem with my attitude.
And that’s not my problem.”
~ wish it had been me.
Guess who I was talking to just now? My old number one fan from the days on Dixie Highway. Debs, the apartment heiress that bought the spread out near Lake Placid. I’ve got to commute back to Arcadia soon and the plan is to drop in for a visit. Her boyfriend is quite the character, he’s the stone mason guy. The trip, of course, will be made in the Taurus. I stopped for coffee and noticed the odometer reading of exactly 45,000 miles. That was not planned.
Nothing got done on the house today. My hip is still sore from where I hit the pavement, so I occupied the time with some planning and reading. And routine testing of equipment. I’m going to rig up some way to create a rust removal pan. I was using a pail, but you have to fill it too full to cover some parts and the expensive as hell fluid evaporates pretty quickly. I dunno, maybe some Tupperware with a lid? Can anybody out there steer me in the right direction with this? Other than that, all I did was recharge batteries and listen to the radio, some honky station, hang on, I’ll get you the call sign next announcement.
A bit of good news with hard drives. There has been some kind of breakthrough with what I think are optical memory. I didn’t wake up until the announcement was half over, but did he say Western Digital? What I did hear was a 3.5 inch drive (that enduring size) apparently can save 4 terabytes. I’m afraid to ask the price, but that would most definitely solve my storage problem. My habit of backing up the entire drive once a year means I’ve got countless duplicates.
ADDENDUM
This booklet is typical of the boxes full in the back. We have almost a complete set of Craftsman woodworking magazines from the 1990s, the most remarkable thing is the prices. Could you really buy a shop-grade table saw for $39.95? Or a complete 8’ by 8’ precut shed kit less the paint and shingles for $329.00? I think these days the nails alone would set you back that amount. Just so we are clear on this, the problem is the government simply prints up the money needed to pay its bills. That means more money chasing the same amount of goods and services and up go the prices.
The sister had an 8-track stereo installed. She was a Neil Diamond fan and that car almost made one out of me. Almost. It had a puny 6-cyclinder motor but it was still a dream car for a farm kid like me, who would wind up walking for the next seven years. I wanted the Mustang 428 “Boss Hoss” with hood scoop and fat tires. Instead, my first car was a 4-door Maverick. I had to drop out of university to pay for it. That’s the car I lost in a court case some 17 years later. I won, but the bastard judge gave the mechanic my car.
That’s another tale from the trailer court somewhere in these extensive pages. That’s where I found out the hard way that civil court Judges try to “balance” their verdicts, so even though I completely won the battle, I lost my car. The Judge tries to make both parties get something, even if the one side deserves nothing and you prove it. Judge Baker, worst old coot of a dumb fart I ever saw on a bench. But I got all my money back plus a settlement for damages and used it to buy my Cadillac. Fanciest car I’ve ever owned.
Last Laugh
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