One year ago today: April 22, 2018, 20 minutes on eBay.
Five years ago today: April 22, 2014, the parent’s responsibility, not mine.
Nine years ago today: April 22, 2010, Amierica is doomed.
Random years ago today: April 22, 2007, spoiled by Florida.
There are rescue pets and this is a rescue pot. Get it, flower pot. Hey, if I resort to low humor to get my point across, it's politics. Biking this morning took me past a pile of root-bound plastic pots and this little guy was the sole survivor. It’s another of those common flowers I don’t know the name for. Scratch that, it’s a marigold. I was downtown and back for supplies and not a moment longer. Why all the traffic? The latest guitar hopeful seems able to keep interested, but that can be a number of influences. He’s 28, married, two kids, and working a the donut shop. If it turns out he needs the money, that’s fine by me. I found out about the kids because he asked if this would help with getting them interested in music. I told him this was a golden opportunity that would never pass his way again.
Still shaking my achy shoulders, I turned over the flower garden area of the front yard. I raked away a layer of Florida dead leaves and used a spade to slice down eight inches into the dirt. Hmmm, and it is dirt, not the sand from last year. This is the area I mixed in some humus and manure two summers ago to see if it would start. I’d say it sort of worked fine. That area is, however, deeply shaded by the untrimmed camphor trees and the flowers I liked all specified full sun. The trees cannot be left much longer. I don’t have a ladder half the height to get where I need to be. And I’ve given up waiting for Agt. R to buy the new blade for his pole saw. I’m investing in my own saw in May.
This picture isn’t the best, but you can see the shovel handle and some of the darker dirt being turned. This is the equivalent of plowing and I’m glad I sliced the roots in 2017. I ran a long sawzall blade in a 4” grid over this area. You can see how sparse the sunlight it. This is the location for the planned turtle retreat. If you look very closely, you can make out the mist spray near the upper left corner over the birdbath.
Another episode of Have Gun Will Travel has convinced me there were really no good female actors before Sigourney Weaver. I think the women on that show were studio extras and the bad parts and bad lines were written into the script. I doubt any of us kids ever called him “Paladin” because that just wasn’t his name. A good guy dressed in black had to have a tough title. By comparison, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers were sissies. Have Gun Will Travel didn’t sing songs about cows or wear seriously lame disguises that might fool Barnie Fife.
My solution was to pause the video and go make chicken mushroom shepherd’s pie. The kind with extra carrots and mushrooms, in this case a double recipe. Hey, it’s still Easter, well close enough, and all the ingredients are on my diet. Return tomorrow and I’ll see about a picture for you. I took extra care to blend in the egg to the mashed potato topping. I’ve often thought of taking this dish out to Boss Hogg see how they like it. Five ingredients and one spice, paprika. Plus the topping. What? C’mon, salt and pepper aren’t spices, they are a Texas food group. On second thought, maybe next week. You see, they really are hayseeds and this is original-recipe Texas baked chicken. I’m gonna need a way bigger pot.
For today, no pictures yer. The missing battery cover on the Sony camcorder makes the battery drain by itself and it takes five tries to turn the thing on. Way to go, Sony. Make the working part out of flimsy plastic. Let me guess, a replacement part costs 2/3 the price of a new camera. Sony will never intentionally manufacture a camcorder that can survive in a jacket pocket.
Pancake day.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Sneak preview. Here is the latest in turtle retirement. This design warms rapidly in the morning sun, then radiates slowly through the day. You can’t see it, but it has excellent circulation from convection in the sun. In the cool, it should be shade at the right temperature and I’m considering a Bluetooth™ thermostat. This model is a preview, the okay from Nashville has not arrived as of yet. Why yes, off to the left is the little orange flower from this morning.
Kind of like this blog advised everyone to do twenty years ago. It is kind of ironic that the first country to require positive ID to post comments is Austria, but did they have to announce it on Hitler’s birthday? Once more, it is not the ID that represents the danger, it is the concentration of so much power in the hands of a small group of non-elected bureaucrats answerable only to the government. Both of those entities have a platform of built-in deniability and guess who gets the shaft?
Boeing is being hung out to dry. And it’s only right. Over the years they’ve dumbed down their production lines so that the parts are either built overseas or slapped together here with, at best, semi-skilled production line staff. I took a tour of the plant some 30 years ago and saw the decline was already in place. Turn the factory into a sweat shop and the results of that will eventually make their way into the product. Boeing will hunt down the problem because they have a reputation for quality at stake. They’ll find each segment of the process will be able to prove they did their part right. And the planes keep crashing.
The decline in overall worker skills began long ago with the original NAFTA accord. Prior to that, the North American worker was generally the highest paid in the world, with fantastic benefits and virtually any job made you at least the lowest rung of middle-class. No matter how it was packaged, NAFTA was a direct attack at how powerful that part of society had become. I was against free trade from the start, but I was a lonely voice in the wilderness. Prices will go down, they cried, never thinking it was their jobs being negotiated away.
I watched the downfall. Unions got weaker, and they didn’t help much by demanding workplace reforms that had nothing to do with pay and productivity. Insist on maternity leave for single mothers and pretty soon there are no jobs for single mothers. Every person I knew in those days, top to bottom, had forgotten that every Western empire in history was destroyed by opening the borders.
Hell, I didn’t even open my cupboards and my flower supply got destroyed. I had heavy duty plastic containers with snap on lids. But modern mice have learned to nibble along the edges of the lid until it loosens. They can’t eat much of the dry flour, but it is spoiled and out it goes. Or should I bake something with it to feed old Grey, the squirrel now dependent on what scraps I can find him. Let me think on that, since baking requires other expensive ingredients. Tell you what, I’ll look for recipes that don’t need sugar and eggs, presuming such things exist.
And I’m off to the thrift to get some metal storage containers. For sure.
ADDENDUM
Ah-ha, told you I’d experienced these stomach cramps before. I had to leave without one of my prescriptions in March and went without it until last Thursday. Those forty days were enough for my system to drop the immunity to that specific side effect. The connection escapes me but the medication has an effect on kidney function. That’s all you want to hear about it. Now can I get on with things?
I’ve got a few tunes selected to fake on the bass. Stuff you’d not expect from a bassist, at least not the full song. I wonder if it’s possible to play that theme from Hawaii-Five-O, I think that’s the tune with the sliding whistle sound.
For reading this far, you get an update on Agt. R’s stolen truck. That’s where the lady he gave a ride home managed to boost [the truck] a week later. Are you ready for the small-town loop-de-loop? Okay, get out yer dancing shoes. The lady needed a ride because her car was repossessed by a towing company that (it turns out) had sold her the car, a company owned by her relatives. A week later, she steals Agt. R’s truck and it disappears, in itself an oddity. Until a neighbor lady reports having seen the truck parked this afternoon in same said towing lot with a new white stripe painted along the side. I see you smirking already.
Now, who would steal an old truck? Not somebody trying to chop it, but the truck was ideal for towing, say, a hotdog cart, and [thusforth] equally ideal for parts delivery. So the primary suspect is related to the seller, the repo people, to the tow truck driver, to the repo lot, and these are [the same] suspects who would be knowledgeable on how to re-register a Florida vehicle without source papers. We drove past the lot at 12:38AM but could not spot the vehicle. I can’t think of some snappy saying that pulls all this together, so this much coincidence requires a federal commission to declare she acted alone.
