One year ago today: January 12, 2019, stools and aprons.
Five years ago today: January 12, 2015, 2.6 totally disappear. Poof!
Nine years ago today: January 12, 2011, the industry corruption built.
Random years ago today: January 12, 2010, the trouble with Wallace.
This is the blog that dares. Am I going to actually feature a “closet”, which is the plumbing term for the crapper. Thomas Crapper, the guy who invented the flush toilet. Yes I am, but not to kill anybody’s appetite, hell no. The good news is that the package weighs 93 pounds and I was able to pick that up by myself and shove it in the car. I could not do that for the last 16 years. What I’ll do is cancel the photo of the unit and just get you a picture of the box before I unpack it. See, I spare no expense or effort you bring you the best.
It didn’t take me long to spend $600. The biggest cost was the “fat arse” closet that JZ was on about. It’s higher and longer than the standard and is supposed to make a difference. Yeah, the difference is it went on sale from $249 to $99, so I went for it. That was over in Winter Haven, where I stopped for the traditional breakfast fries. The ladies remembered me. The portions were somewhat smaller. And I was on the phone for an hour. This morning I would like to talk off the record about wills and estates. In America up until quite recently, it was possible to will your house and property to your kids and die millions in debt. Now, most states put all wills to probate, even if there is an iron-clad will. But, you got it—that means the will is not iron clad. (This is why I spend a lot of money forming a trust.)
Here’s the problem. Probate is warped because it bills people after death. And this applies to heirs as well. In the old days it was often difficult to locate all the creditors and heirs. Thanks to our surveillance society, they system can now track everybody, it would seem, except the illegal telemarketers. (DC loves to ignore the biggest source of consumer complaints year after year. Come on, Mr. Trump, you can get rid of these parasites and be a hero to every good American.) It seems the only way to beat probate is to give away the money while you are still alive, but rumor has it that doesn’t work so well.
Here’s some will information. Most of the wills that go to probate are written up by lawyers, who make a living exploiting technicalities. To avoid this, most states will allow an “unregistered” will if it is hand-written by the person doing the bequeathing. Known as a holographic will, it also bypasses a lot of the mumbo-jumbo and boilerplate clauses. But, estate lawyers are hard at work chipping away at even that. For example, if you have two children and want to leave everything to one and not the other, you have to specifically state that in the hand-writing. Otherwise, the argument will be that you intended to split the estate equally but “forgot” to mention the black sheep.
TMOR, this mess with inheritance is an outcome of the boom years after WWII, the last “popular” war. Most Americans have been against every war since then. Our companies and governments instituted some generous deferred tax retirement plans, thinking to get themselves off the hook for paying it themselves. The idea was that you could take an amount off your paycheck and lower your taxes now. At some time in the future, when you retire, you can withdraw that money and pay the taxes at the then-going and projected higher (it was assumed) rates. Millions of workers socked away a lot of money. Trillions, I’m told. So, what could go wrong?
Two things. One, people started living a lot longer. The government planners assumed they would be taxing these people right at age 65 until they died, on average, six or seven years later. Two, the birth rate declined. Government interference has made it so expensive and so regulated to have children that the middle class is not replacing itself. The government would love to get its grubby hands on those trillions of untaxed dollars and they’ve made inroads via inheritance taxes, allowing a corrupt medical billing syndicate to milk old people who get sick, and now sending most wills to probate. When probate pays the estates bills, it becomes taxable income to the recipient.
I get the funniest feeling that there is a grand scheme behind the direction this played out. Before, it was up to the people extending credit to keep tabs on their borrowers. And if the borrower died, it was practically law that debts were forgiven. But at the same time it was a point of honor that the surviving family pay out at any local businesses. Now, with everything going to probate and everybody’s identity on file, it’s practically impossible to avoid a debt even by death.
When a car was a car . . .
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Here’s the promised video of the mock ducks. This is a little more informative style. The humor here is that it fooled us. The gif video has three segments. First you see the dogs walking ahead of us toward what appears to be a flock of ducks just offshore. Then, we proceed down the ramp to the pier, with us noticing the dogs should be going wild by now. They never ignore those pesky ducks. Well, there you see, those were not the necks of Canada geese. Whatever this is, your guess is as good as mine. If you know, feel free to leave me a comment.
The Reb & I were on the phone a long time, which makes mention because I do not talk on the phone much. Sorry, I can’t give many details, but isn’t it just human nature. Now that her and I have set up a routine where she can take care of the situation out west without worry, other factors and other people are appearing, or more like reappearing. They were not there for the hard work, but somehow almost expect we would take their advice. I glance at my wall calendar which highlights the total time during 2019 that I was occupied with Tennessee. I believe it to be 173 days. Which doesn’t count the recovery time.
My point is, I don’t recall us getting any help. So it pains me to let others have any say in the matters. Or at least until I see some comparable effort put in and money spent. In case you are wondering, Tennessee cost me around $9,000 last year, but that includes everything from the gas to the bank fees. While I pretty much have to go along with whatever happens, make no mistake about it—if I have to choose sides, there can be no question how that would go.
Good news? Clearing out an old desk, I found a money order that had gone missing in 2014. Caught in the slot where the draw bottom fits into the side. I took it over to the Western Union and they took it back and gave me the cash. Now if I could only find that missing $160 money order over the hot dog cart. It will turn up yet. Did I say I found the missing drill? Yep, it was in the shed up in Tennessee.
Bad news, my tablet won’t let me in. I’ll have to get you the updates at the library tomorrow. Somehow it seems to have reset the password. I can’t discount the possibility bumping the case the wrong way could cause that. Worse, as I tried to remedy the problem that retard narrator voice came on. Why, or why, doesn’t that idiotic feature have a kill switch. Um, I was in a coffee shop full of the greatest generation when that happened. And you know, not one of the greatest generation, the ones that were born computer whizzes, had any more of a clue than I how to shut that robot voice off. You could snap back that I drive a car without knowing how to fix one, but with computers that’s not a valid comparison.
Much later, I got home and corrected the problems, but largely by trial and error. What a pity at this stage one should have to resort to that method, but that’s Android. Optimized for touch screen they say. Bullshit. Optimized for selling junk to people who don’t know any better. What a strange bunch, those millennials, they find it much harder than your average person to say they don’t know something. Sadly, every one of the experts from the greatest generation I asked about shutting off that narrator had no clue. This is a throwback to my own early computer days. Around 1985 computers had been newly introduced at the phone company. They were mostly data entry terminals. It soon became obvious I was by far the most experienced computer person present at the employee level. I had a ball cracking all the passwords and getting into the forbidden game modules.
My point is, within a few months, everybody around me had become experts. They knew nothing of the internal workings or parameters, meaning they could never figure out why they always got caught and I didn’t. But I see the same situation all over again. These millennial “experts” simply memorized their log-on and most-used features and called themselves power users. I know how many times people in my own demographic thought I could work magic when I, too, was just using familiar software. But the comparison stops there. I knew how that software worked and could troubleshoot it. I have helped countless people with computer problems, but other than Agt. M, I don’t recall ever getting any help in return from the ass-enders.
At the same time, I was not happy with how I solved the problem. I had to return the computer to my work desk and one-by-one activate the devices in hard-wire mode, then switch them over to Bluetooth™. I doubt any millennial in that room I asked knew how to do this, or he would have said something. This is cumbersome and would not be reliable for use in the field. I know there has to be some more convenient method. What I don’t know is who to ask or where to find it. I can never trust an Android or Bluetooth™ device for stage work until the activation becomes reliable. It has not done so in the first 20 years.
