February 12, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: February 12, 2018, "no evidence." Again.
Five years ago today: February 12, 2014, top (or bottom?) nine GMOs.
Nine years ago today: February 12, 2010, Wallace gets antsy.
Random years ago today: February 12, 2003, Coeur d'Alene Lake, 1993.

           Down time. That’s today, but not like it was much-needed or overdue. The time just slid by while I was taking it easy. It’s the situation where the roots of this blog as a daily journal show through. Years ago, I would write about a day just so I could compare it to what my future would be like. The important word was to compare. Would my life be better, the same, or worse? Things have changed so much that there is no comparison. So instead, compare my nothing day to whatever you have to compare it to. Here is today’s activity log.

           I grabbed a coffee in the kitchen, then came back here to read a bit. But I couldn’t find anything that holds my interest, so I threw on a DVD “Saving Sarah Cain”, about a newspaper columnist who gains custody of five Amish children. For a Hollywood production, it got a lot of the details right, though I do not agree with the policy of raising children “plain” unless the child’s wishes are respected. Who was it that said morality isn’t moral unless it is voluntary? To this day I hate it when anybody tells other people what they are “supposed to like”.

           Here are the high points of February 12, 2019. This is a random picture of a highway flag. Many American towns have a big flag, this one is in Lake Placid, Florida. On the left is a big truck roaring past. I took ten pounds of chicken quarters out to thaw y’day and they are still frozen, so much for global warming. For the first time this year, I had to use the house air conditioners. I never made it to morning coffee. Before I got underway, it was mid-afternoon. I drove out to the Thrift to pick up my sliding arm compound radial saw, and the redhead was there. She isn’t really red, more like dark brunette. Sigh, her most redeeming qualities are that she has the perfect figure and personality match for me, but not the other way around. She’s wasting her charms on some small town greaser who will dump her the minute she grows old. Double sigh,

Picture of the day.

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           The saw is here and as Florida luck would have it, won’t fit in the white shed. It is bolted to a base plate than over-balances it everywhere I set it except on the ground. So I had to leave it on the wagon outside, covered with my shower curtain. Because, sure enough we got us a Florida overnight downpour because Florida know I had to leave the unit outside. The only thing to do was to cook up the ten pounds of chicken. It’s on the stove now, and in it. Half is boiled, half is baked, and you know why? Because that represents the biggest cooking utensils that I own. If you don’t think that is big fun, you could help me figure out what beast some of these animal cookies are supposed to be.

           Now hold on, maybe something of interest did happen. I’ve detailed how I lived in a generation that, except for the rare bird like myself, skidded through life on a credit binge. They may be the boomers, but they bankrupted the country. That’s both through personal over-borrowing and by electing politicians who did the same. There is nobody my own age who shares my academic interests. Even the robot club managed four or five members total, mostly half my age. People my own age, forget it. They’d rather buy a TV on time payments, use a credit card to buy some batteries for the remote, and go watch subscription programming. But today, I met a kid who is going to wind up like I did. But first find the picture on this page of the transplanted loquat tree, as the brown leaves are slowly starting to turn green again, from the top down. I do not know if this is normal. Anyway, the new kid.
           I think he may be the kid brother or eldest son of the lady who runs the Thrift. Oh, for the record, they close early on Mondays and I just arrived late. Anyway, he gave me a hand lifting the saw into my car and we got to talking. He’s got an unusually wide area of interests and has the same personality about it as I did. He makes his own arrowheads from lamp glass, has various collections, and knows how everything in the store works. He’s sharp, knows some Morse code and took instantly to my way of noting things to look up later. Anyway, that’s the big story, meeting someone who reminded me of myself at that age. And like myself, he will get the hell out of that small town the moment he is able.

           An example would be the fan. It’s a 1940 Emerson sitting on the highest shelf. It looked too elaborate so we hauled in down. Going over it revealed no model, but there was a type number stamped on a small metal tag. Looking it up, these fans in working condition sell for $200. It’s called a hassock floor fan and has a vertically mounted upward facing fan that gets deflected in a circular pattern by an funnel shaped cone. Total overkill for a fan and I would have got it but I’ve enough such things around here already. I advised him to also look into the Arduino and how to pick a hobby that feeds back as much as it takes.
           I returned home, not even stopping for the customary coffee in Mulberry. The chicken was still not thawed. Basically, I ate three small bowls of cereal with milk, for a total daily intake of 900 calories. I looked up that surge protector I got for a dollar. It sells for $29.00. Industrial quality. Oh, and I looked at the area in Tennessee called Pigeon Forge to find a holiday cabin, possibly for the summer. Talk about bastardized web sites. My criteria of one bedroom with a view should be an easy search, but enter the millennials. Site after site when I hit search, it took me to the most expensive 7 bedroom cabins and demanded I specify booking dates before allowing me to see the photos. How stupid can they get?

           Wait, there’s more. The pages came up so full of ads that I could not navigate the menus. The screens were full of hotspots and invariably disabled the back button. I gave up after a half hour. Finally I viewed the code elements and see that coders are real no-brains. You don’t need malware on your computer because the next crop of apps themselves will behave like viruses.
           And for the nth time, I took out my acoustic guitar and ran through the tunes on my list suitable for what I can strum. Guitar playing lacks the surge of bass playing. I’m weak on guitar solo, so I hooked up my Alesis drum machine. The combined sound is not bad at all but would depend on my stage personality to keep the show interesting. But it was okay, I can do this if I apply myself. I intend to not get distracted this time. To not stop until I can strum a full four-hour show. For me that means 42 strong tunes.

ADDENDUM

           Here’s the best picture I could get of the radial arm saw. I noticed after I bought it, they removed the combination blade, but hey, that was not necessarily part of the sale, I admit. That’s my shower curtain, since thanks to City Hall who will not let me build my own shed, I have no indoor place to keep it. Mind you, I’ve noticed a loophole that says I can build tool storage lean-tos, of less than 32 square feet of which the longest dimension can be only eight feet. But it does not specify how many I can build, as long as it is one per building. Another loophole might be that it does not limit the length the eave an over hang the longest side of the structure.
           The rain has kept up all night and into the morning, so I just might haul this saw indoors and see how far I get repairing and trimming the windows. One of my next acquisitions simply has to be a sawdust collection system

Last Laugh