One year ago today: April 24, 2018, begin painting the scooter.
Five years ago today: April 24, 2014, the thinking part.
Nine years ago today: April 24, 2010, most popular post, ever.
Random years ago today: April 24, 2009, bankrupt in a month.
Event of the day? We’re a step closer to civilization over here. Not that I have any aversion to laundromats, maybe because I owned one when I was 24, but going downtown to have dry socks is all a motorcyclist can often take. Here is my new Kenmore 90 series. I’ll price it this afternoon. It’s got around 30 minutes on the motor. Now it is mine for $21.40. Agt. R was again out of town, so I hauled it home in the Taurus breaking not less than six motor vehicle laws. Enjoy the view, it’s top story this morning. That’s the vent hose coiled up inside. Calm down, I’ll tell you this tale from the trailer court.
It’s considered large capacity but it looks like any other dryer to me. Humping it in and out of the car put me into energy deficit. These photos are in the yard afterward. You see, nothing lasts forever and nobody like to remind you of that more than Sony. Turns out the camcorder won’t work and the battery won’t charge without that 2-cent plastic latch over the battery. When it snaps in place, it puts pressure on the battery pack onto the interior prongs. I got it working with some rubber bands, so that’s me 1, Sony 0.
Check back, I want this unit operating asap. I have the option to put it in the corner of my ells or locate it back in the shade of the white shed. Both spots have adequate power, but if you want anything to day, the wiring is more complete on the house. Ha, what a find.
The sharp gal at the donut shop, the one who likes me. She was in today off duty. I swooped right in. She is half again as old as I took her for, but I was right about other things. One is that the work uniform did nothing for her. In jeans and a tank top, she has one dynamite figure. Sadly, there is no way something that juicy is unattached. However, she has talked to her co-worker, the guy interested in guitar. She knows his wife, and the guy is scheduled for his first lesson this weekend. All I can say for now is forget her shape, she is one sharp lady and I knew that just laying eyes on her.
What I really like is the news of more crackdowns on telemarketing. They are closing in, and I never told you about the running battle I’ve had over the years with Paki-Waki. That’s what I call him, although he introduces himself as “Winston”. I know all twelve Urdu swear words and how to apply them, and I can get the guy to go ballistic. For months now I’ve been warning him the feds are closing in. His problem is that he is a racist. He hates white men. Which is all I need to know to put the screws to him. All he needs to do to stop it is quit, I mean, it isn’t me who is calling him.
But what riles me is how the US government keeps making claims of how difficult it is to catch these guys. Lies. Have one agent sit around till his phone rings, have him find out who the caller is, follow the money, and round the bastards up. Instead, we get year after year of how the bad guys are using “advanced technology”. Maybe so, but money is pretty primitive and easy to track. What I see is job protectionism at work. It’s like the Homeland people at the airport. The only thing they are securing are their own paychecks. It’s a simple formula: go looking for the bombs instead of the bombers. You don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings—not as long as you can pass the cost of all that fake politeness onto the taxpayer.
Amazon warehouse.
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We have the dryer in place, but it cost me a six-hour day. It place means in the blind corner of the house behind the kitchen. It is outdoors and I found all the parts for the 240V receptacle. Everything is in place except mounting the old dryer receptacle in a new location. It looks like it will swing with around eight feet of cable to spare. This way, the dryer pays for itself in ten loads, and in thirty-one loads, the entire assembly breaks even, including the sub-panel, breaker, and installation. Technically, the only new section is the sub-panel, and that was done by an electrician. This represents a massive savings over the city permit, which would involve at least a $1,350 outlay before they would approve anything.
This explains why a lot of small city populations have stayed the same for the past 30 years. This “big city” government has spread to the towns and in effect is behaving like a hostile HOA. Now, I agree with Home Owner’s Associations to a minor degree. They should only stop you from doing anything that decreases the value of your neighbor’s property, but nothing else. Instead, they have become a bloody nuisance, an encroaching bureaucracy that seems to take root when nobody is watching. I have never met a person yet who asked for a city code enforcement department—except the people who make their living at it.
As my aches subside, took a seven mile bike ride downtown. I picked up some more marigolds and prettied up the emerging little flowerbed by my kitchen door. What a tone of work left to do, I may never have my hobby back. You’ll know I’m officially an homeowner when I break down and buy one of those pump sprayers and start mixing my own concoctions. Those poinsettias from Harbor Heights have rooted but the pretty red leaves were munchies for the bugs and beetles before I noticed anything.
That’s the day, other than having to start using the air conditioners again, it’s routine. Hardly the laid back existence they said it would be. Because Nashville brought everything here to a standstill, I may finish this month under budget. That’s a first in years. And if I didn’t have so much to do, I’d fire up that hotdog cart.
ADDENDUM
Student loans, now our second biggest debt crisis. The average student is graduating $39,000 in debt. The quirky thing is that this is nothing new. It was accepted practice back in my day. I graduated $8,000 in debt. However, the difference was that the degree got you a job with enough increased earnings to pay the debt off in a few years. That was the theory, it took me 12 years to pay off my debt, and even then I resorted to signing over my income tax refund. A lot of students back then just never paid them back, I wish I’d known how they managed that.
My point is that those jobs have disappeared. Nobody (except this blog) has, in a big way, long-term connected the dots about illegal immigration and the lack of good jobs. You see, it’s not direct enough for the lumpen proletariate [to see the link] because we are not talking about the same jobs. I’m referring instead to the fact that over time the economy itself adjusts to a third-world manner where unskilled labor (the lower class) becomes the primary manner of making profit. It’s not just the American worker who gets dumbed down, but also the quality of the jobs available. This blog talked about the danger of hiring skilled labor long before this crisis, as in don’t do it unless you have to.
I was familiar with the spectacle of no middle class because I’d traveled. This blog is replete with examples of how, when overseas, I saw doctors driving taxis. It paid more than doctoring. And that is the work environment that has overtaken America. I also put forward that the colleges and universities deliberately encouraged borrowing because government loan guarantees ensured them of a steady supply of recruits. They no longer needed to produce a quality graduate—and their faked hiring statistics years later seconded that. In my day, it was usually doctors and lawyers who graduated in such debt, which partially explained their exorbitant fees. It was a short step to extend that kind of financing to plumbers and architects (again think of who charges too damn much).
In fact, if you look closer, you’ll spot this type of government “mortgage” is also what caused the big housing collapse that resulted in me getting this house for $18,000. Around the 1990s, the government also started guaranteeing house mortgages in the same manner. Prior to the crisis, banks had so much paperwork around mortgages it was considered an ordeal to apply. That’s because the bank itself had to eat any bad loans. Then, as today, the primary indicator of ability to pay has always been past performance. But if Fanny or Freddie will buy the loan, it opens the floodgates. People who couldn’t pay their phone bill on time were being approved a quarter million loan in 20 minutes. Theresa knows.
The catch is often that the backlash doesn’t appear until years later. By 1998, businesses were complaining about applicants with formerly advanced degrees showing up who could neither read nor write. I’ve seen resumes that were too embarrassing to read and I experienced the downslide in interview quality. People began showing up who had professional coaching on what to say but little actual education. This coincided with the era of grade schools over-pushing the concept that you could become anything you wanted if you just tried hard enough. Alas, the result was not people who tried harder, but people who tried too hard.
Don’t poo-poo the consequences of that last point. It became common practice to lie on resumes and apply for impossible jobs. The challenge was no longer the career, but getting hired. One of the earliest casualties was what could have become the noble field of computer programming. That field was so new there were no standards and the rot set in to produce the situation of today, where I’d be ashamed to work for an outfit like MicroSoft.
And I can personally attest to the futility of trying hard. In America it is simply your odds that are better than elsewhere, but those odds are so heavily stacked the primary determinant of success remains pure luck and a head start. It’s curious to hear so many people state they want to come to America to become something. They aren’t asking what happened to all the people who already live here. Did they aspire to become mall cops and pizza drivers?
For that matter, let me speculate. I know rather precisely how hard I try compared to average. It’s easy since the average person has long since given up trying. They don’t read or write or play music for hours each day, whereas the majority of this blog occurred while I was still working full time. Don’t talk to me about trying. I’ll compare my work load to Donald Trump any day. Right now, it is 5:36 AM, it is pitch dark outside, and I’m riding my bicycle three miles to post you this blog.
I’ll let you know how many people I pass along the way.
