One year ago today: March 20, 2017, I was at the Olga Mall.
Five years ago today: March 20, 2013, on-line dating opinion.
Nine years ago today: March 20, 2009, what happened to teabag day?
Random years ago today: March 20, 2005, an early Internet sting op.
The annual drought is over and for me it was a day in the library. This photo shows a Florida lightning bolt, which is in the correct position for hitting the Inspector’s office, but we can only hope. You know, I should be ashamed how little I know about running a hot dog stand. The more research I do the worse it gets. The gap between theory and practice grows each day despite the hot dog stand being the most-studied case example of my accounting school. If it was as easy as the pundits say, everyone would be doing it. Who would not give up $5,000 and a week to be self-employed for $100,000 per year. I’m leery of the statistics, since there are glaring gaps in the narrative.
I found out what a commissary was, and wonder if it is required in Florida. Probably. It’s a commercial kitchen that prepares the food, often it is not allowed to cook anything at home. Presumably the kitchens are inspected. It’s that is heating up hotdogs in a steamer considered cooking? The 425 children under ten years of age who die each year from choking are mainly those who eat while walking or running, it says. Still, I priced out the $1 million in liability at around a dollar a day. You will also need an EIN to buy supplies tax free. Once again, the emphasis of the authorities is not public health. It is getting your identity on file. It must be easier to press charges than to try to enforce good standards.
Those, I pored over and tend toward the higher priced ingredients. The original study I did was the lowest for product that looked edible. But I’m not so sure that would sell. The hot dog I had at the Orlando Maker Faire tasted cheap. Building a better hot dog cranks the price up close to over twice the minimum I first looked at, which came to around 23¢. My guess is now 65¢ to 70¢ cents. I’ve made up a spreadsheet that categorizes the actual activity of getting the hot dog ready at the site. I was close maybe half the time, and I found out they don’t want you to store leftovers in a freezer where you live. If you do, they cannot be sold commercially. Here is what I cam up with for the spreadsheet.
Hot dogs (all beef), @ 24¢ ea.
Buns, 11¢ ea.
Relish 3¢ per serving
Ketchup 2¢ per serving
Mustard 3¢ per serving
Onions 1¢ per serving
Chips 22¢ per bag
Candy 43¢ per container
Drinks: this one I know by heart. 28¢ per can.
Napkins (two per customer) 2¢ each.
Foil Sheets 2¢ each
Propane, another easy calculation for me, 2¢ per hot dog.
The rest of the cost is run up by gasoline, bribes, repairs, labor, and sundry items of concern only to those who bother to work them out. Just be aware, I will bother so competition is futile. I read another stat that says 40% of businesses who slump for any reason never re-open. And this is hurricane territory, peeps. A lot of the advertising is hype. If you make $100k a year at this, you will have bloody well earned it. Enough hot dogs for today, but if you see the abbreviation HDV again, that’s Hot Dog Vendor. Examine this unusual photo.
The 24 LEDs all work through a single resistor, so they cannot be individually controlled without rewiring. Mind you, the circuit is as simple as it gets, so give me time to apply a little imagination. Without individual resistors, the individual LEDs can’t be controlled. (Each one that came on would cause the others to dim a bit.) I wonder if I’ve found a solution to the terrible headlighting system on the red scooter. I’ll be checking in on that tomorrow at rehearsal time.
Last, here is that mounting bracket that had the rotten instructions. I think I figured it out. There are two separate brackets. One where the crossbrace straddles the outlet box, as shown here, and the other is a single piece that is supported by a stem down that hole in the center. I was trying to use all three pieces, since the chandelier weighs close to twenty pounds. I didn’t know if a proper installation required all three pieces. Still, there is no excuse for unclear directions in this day and age. Maybe I was “supposed to know” again? Like I do this every day.
These land grants made the estates somewhat independent, witnessed by how many times some baron or noble decided to take on the king. In other words, the king was relatively weak. And he soon began manipulating affairs so ever more power was concentrated under his authority. The king became less of a leader and more of a politician seeking to build up centralized power, that is, he strove to become el supremo. That is precisely what is going on with the Feds in the US today. The Constitution meant the central government to be weak, but that also meant they were vulnerable to takeover by outside interests. Like religions that have specialized in taking over the middle management of many governments in the past, but rarely so successfully as in America.
I blame it all on Woodrow Wilson, but it was started by Lincoln. The federal power grab entails weakening the individual states by any means, though usually by establishing a central bank (there’s that word central again) and withholding tax money to states that don’t cooperate. It means gradually increasing central DC power over the country, often taking such grotesque forms as banning alcohol, demanding a driver’s license be used as identification, putting chips in passports, and telling people what age they can sleep with each other. These seem small issues to the casual observer, but in the end they are manipulated into strong central control of everything.
I am not against central control in itself. If the system was moving some other direction, I would likely comment on that just as well. But I am against politics, I believe American should have moved on past that stage by now. Just as tribal councils gave way to feudalism gave way to monarchy gave way to nation states, the nations state should have accepted its demise in 1865 and declared itself defunct. Interpreted literally, the Constitution defines a strong federal government as a domestic enemy. But you can take it from there. My people need me.
Before I knew it, it was 9:00 PM. That’s deep reading so I lost track. There are definite parallels to the Federal power-grab that’s been going on and they say each generation has to learn the same lessons over again. The government prevents that by taking over the education system. There are all types of such precedents. Like the King reserves the right to appoint anyone to the Church council, think what’s happened to the Supreme Court since Wilson. Or the King must approve before any high officials can travel out of the country or return, think of controlling interstate commerce.
Basically it is the gradual expansion of small powers given the central government for a specific purpose into exercising complete control over key elements of the way the entire country is run while claiming to preserve and protect the liberties of the smaller political divisions.
Tahiti.
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Net neutrality is hard to understand. Think of it as what stops the big companies from charging you extra for more speed or to access sites they don’t want you to visit. This scheme has been around since the earliest days of public utilities, it was called metered service. I remember English people talking about how they had to put money in their electric meters daily. The utility companies love it. I was reading about bitcoin mining and do not understand why it uses so much electricity. So much that some jurisdictions have banned it. Does not running one application use the same juice as any other, or am I missing something?
Even with the chance of failure, I’m still anticipating this Sunday. I should drop in there tomorrow to re-confirm. Club managers are an eccentric if not peculiar lot. Nor is there any written contract. We show up, we play for tips, we leave again. Who knows, maybe the guitarist will surprise me and have learned another nine songs, it which case we could extend for an hour should things connect. It’s all about crowd rapport.
To that end, I’m going to go over my old blogs for a collection of country song titles. Even with just 22 songs, that means I could space things out an extra 21 minutes in the gaps between numbers. It’s a traditional part of my act and I’ve never had an audience who didn’t react well. I’m going to have to sing out of a lyrics book. For the last few rehearsals, the guitarist has had to shuffle papers around, but on stage I won’t wait. She’s had plenty of time to make up an index. So wait for rehearsal #15 tomorrow and see what I have to say. How I wish, when I started out, there had been a blog like this so I would have known I wasn’t alone.
The spray mister in the front yard is a winner. I rigged it up so it mists the area above the bird bath. The cardinals love it. I’ve watched for a pattern in their behavior. Nothing, they seem entirely unpredictable. I should rig up a little underground line, like for lawn sprinklers. Right now I just leave it on all the time the sun is shining. As for the bird feeder in the back yard, they mostly ignore it. So do all the birds, so I tried different locations. Nope.
The lumber yard has never heard of those clips for installing doors. Hold on, one guy said another customer had asked about them. I’ll find you the ad on-line, they are called something easy like “door clips”. I want them because it lines up the frame or jamb with your drywall on one side, that with that I could finally finish installing my back bedroom windows, which I left thinking I’d get back to them last September, just before the accident. Right now I can hear, but not see, my own back yard.
ADDENDUM
I’m on day 110 of my diet and I assure everyone you do not know what hungry is until you get past 100 days without a meal. I doubt I could have gotten this far without the assistance of a diet prescription. Even with the suppressant, your physiology tries every imaginable impulse to get you to break. Must be something developed through evolution to fight famine or such. When I read the chart, I’m only a third of the way along. I finally weigh less than I did on January 23, despite consuming less than 700 calories per day, most of it at breakfast. And most of it low-calorie low-cholesterol low-carb organics. No eggs, no beef, mostly chicken and fish if at all.
At this rate, I have another 220 days to go. Nearly a year total in which, if successful, I will have eaten only 219,000 calories. Of course, something has to give before then or one could just give up eating altogether and be fine. My question is how did the diet know to disrupt my sleep in the critical week before my first gig since I moved here? There is another question before I forget. I spend one day baking chicken for the entire week ahead. All the spices you want, but nothing else.
Then I accidentally burnt one slice of toast. One lousy slice. The question is, when you walk into the kitchen six days later, which aroma can you still smell?
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