One year ago today: January 26, 2017, Barney Buckle.
Five years ago today: January 26, 2013, the mindless pursuit of wealth.
Nine years ago today: January 26, 2009, Mars, the next Antarctica?
Random years ago today: January 26, 2014, friends only?
You’ll not find me happy when I have to spend unnecessary money. That would be today. I shelled out $800 for the design on the porch. This was a totally contrived expense. I will still build it the same way by myself, so there was no net benefit from spending all that money. This was the city requirement for a building permit, with their stance that they require a CAD drawing and will not approve any permit otherwise. Yet, there is no body of law that states such a drawing is required. That is entirely their own invention.
If he is a competent engineer, why the need for a CAD drawing?
If he is not a competent engineer, why the need for a CAD drawing?
This adds nearly $40 cost to each piece of lumber that goes into the project. There is no increase in safety, no gain in utility or anything measurable from this extra expenditure. Right-thinking people don’t impose this kind of needless hardship on the population. My stance is simple. When I asked around, there was nobody who could explain in any worthwhile manner how the system works and how it doesn’t work. So I got the best deal I could with the blueprints, as follows.
The drawing must be scalable and easily adaptable to future additions, with a universal and similar design. Example, 2x6” joists 24” O.C., etc. The schematic covers only the exterior of the structure. Right? After that everything else becomes interior and exempt from inspections. This, and a number of smaller considerations, lessens the hit. And I will find out precisely how things work. As with everything else in my life, I finally wind up doing and learning the whole process myself. No useful advice came from anyone. Although the babe at the engineering desk was quite the little hottie.
And watched my $800 spin down the drain that doesn’t even exist yet.
You first.
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Feeling that there is satisfactory headway with the new band, I scheduled a bonus practice for this Sunday. The idea is to go over the guitar parts in some detail. Lady Nik is doing fine, but she is now duplicating some of the work I’ve already completed. The guitar parts must be noticeably different for each song, it is part of the way I train my audiences. The strum does not have to be complicated by any standard, but should be unique enough to keep the arrangement distinctive. That’s a fancy way of saying, “No comping.”
We’re not done talking about money here. Somehow, my cell phone ass-dialed itself into roaming mode. I did not notice it for two days. That ate up my account balance and I could not find the setting to turn it off. I finally drove to the phone store to find they couldn’t reset it either. The solution was to reboot the phone, which I now know how to do. That was a $42 lesson. By now, it was getting dark, so Bradford and I headed to the nearest saloon, which happened to be the Fun Bar. Ha, we were the only singers in the place so we got the first hour to ourselves. Why, if there had been any women in the room, we probably would have impressed the hell out of them.
Now Bradford still has his heart and sights set on getting the perfect band together. That would be defined as one that expertly backs up his personal favorite guitar tunes while he fronts the show. This magical beast will arise out of his weekly jam sessions. It pretty much would have to, since if you want that kind of band, you’ll have to either develop masterful and uncommon new management skills, or depend on dumb luck. So it still amazes me how he hopes one day I’ll see the light and join up. He can’t hear me when I tell him such bands are, for me, a thing of the past. It didn’t work then and won’t work now. Further, he plays guitar exactly one way, where I am, as he puts it himself, “bass royalty”. Sometimes he says, “The Duke of Bass”. I’m okay with that comparison.
That Rendezvous, the Civil War games, has emptied the surrounding territory. Everybody who knows what a musket looks like is camping out in the cold over near Wachaula. That would include Agt. R, who lives for that part of the year. Ah, I have some good news, and lordy knows the guy can use some. Remember that savings plan I put him on last August? Well, talk about one smart frigging move, Chumley. That’s the one where I explained how the money was already spent before he got it, so he would have to learn to live without it. (I control the account so the records show an impressive pattern of dedicated saving.) Next, let’s couple that with housing society I coached him to sign up for, the one I suspect is funded by grant money.
Guess what? They sent an application form that, I believe, will shunt him to the head of their lineup. It could very well be that he is the ideal candidate and, though I’m guessing here, the only one with a perfect banking history (since last August anyway). I examined the form, and page seven is the clincher. Alas, I can’t show you the goods, but the form was designed to show a hodge-podge of messy banking transactions, asking for an explanation of every deposit over $100 in the past six months.
Ha, what this unintentionally accomplished was to emphasize his flawless series of identical deposits precisely one week apart. (They filled out that column themselves and must have yelled for the boss.) I’ll bet you ten bucks they’ve never seen that before. Plus, if he’s called on it, which I deem will happen, he has a folder with a complete accounting of the savings plan, based on a series of mortgage payments to end on his 65th birthday. Each deposit slip is scanned and recorded in a separate log, with the transaction number, ink-stamped, and initialed with a cross-reference number to the line in the computer ledger where the amount appears. He could wind up becoming their poster child.
Somebody around here knows what the hell they are doing.
This photo is the NASA release saying it is the surface of Mars before and after a dust storm. I say it is before and during.
ADDENDUM
What’s this, a consortium is actually funding a space elevator? I came across several articles from England, but judging by the poor spelling (‘renound’, ‘Jupiter’, etc.) these could be a hoax. But the technical parts were accurate, such as the practicality of a Moon settlement now that they know there is water there. It arrived via meteorites, Ken. In the neighborhood of $10 billion, such a device would at least halve the cost of getting into orbit. Speculation is a site in the Amazon (wait for the shouting to die down) because it is the only safe place on the equator that is reasonably near to the sorts of people who like sending objects into outer space.
This photo shows NASA photos of a Mars dust storm before and after. I’m not buying that. I say it is before and during. For all the increased chatter about a mission to Mars lately, I’ve seen no progress toward it. The only part half-interesting is the group of people who volunteered to make the trip one way. They contend that NASA is hamstrung by the requirement that whoever they send to Mars must come back. The equipment to do this return leg does not exist. On the other hand, the rockets to send people outbound only has been on the shelves for decades.
Then I read the bios on people who signed up for the journey. I picked five women, as listed in PopSci (Nov. 2014), being curious what sort of gals would like to get off this planet. In order of these clips, here is what they had to say.
1. Dianne. Dianne would like to go skiing on Mars. Should she encounter any alien life forms, she’s banking they’ll recognize the haircut. Quick, Dianne, spell “scientist”.
2. Anastasiya. What a sweetie. Mar’s gain is Earth’s loss. She would like to be a part of human evolution. A send-off party at my place would be an excellent start.
3. Leila. Leila talked mostly about her husband. A sure sign of impending divorce. Leila’s odds of finding another husband are significantly improved by arriving on Mars.
4. Bea. She says she’ll miss the Cheesecake Factory. Duh, okay.
5. Karen. She would like to do the laundry, she says. Karen, I think we can find something for you.
The spaceship leaves in 2025. There are 1,058 volunteers. It seems it is mostly Americans who want to be on it. The rest of the world only wants America. The way things are going, they can have it. There was a sixth applicant, Kellie. She wants to ‘democratize’ space. I rejected her candidacy because that kind of talk could get her thrown out the porthole half-way.
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