One year ago today: January 2, 2019, the wild west again.
Five years ago today: January 2, 2015, so do I, Gwyneth.
Nine years ago today: January 2, 2011, windstorm trash.
Random years ago today: January 2, 2010, remembering Pudding-Tat.
Here’s the gate I decided on. Total lumber is $10.08 as opposed to the PVC gate where the tee fittings alone got up near $50. I will have to find some hinges but this excellent gate should come in at less than $20 in total. I marked one of the measurement wrong in my notebook and now it’s another trip to the lumber yard. I plan to assemble this in the back porch since tomorrow’s forecast is light rain all day. Please, check back. This will be the first gate I’ve ever built. Yes, I’m aware the diagonal shown in this diagram is slanted the wrong way. It was designed by an Internet expert, you see. If he gets “offended”, just tell him he’s standing on the wrong side of the gate.
Two days in [the new year] and already I’ve got another peeve on the Internet. When you search for a distance between cities site, the page from GlobeFeed “US Driving Distance Calculator” usually comes to the top. Totally inefficient C+ bad coding. It’s a typical demonstration of how the millennial mind-set is obsessed with ideas on ton how you clean up their mess. The two text boxes appear but now you got to work. The cursor does not land on the first box, duh there, Joshua. Why should the coder add that single command when he can get everybody else who uses the page to do the work for him? And that’s my point.
You have to execute a mouse click to activate it. When you get the right location entered, it just sits there. Another mouse action is needed to select the second box. Get that entered, and again it just sits there. Reach for your mouse yet again to click on the orange button to make ithe stupid thing work. Oh, and if you go back to try another search, the boxes are cleared. Even if one location stays the same, the usual search pattern, you have to start completely over again. Now, is that millennial or is that millennial?
The Shiites storm the US embassy in Iraq. Yeah, I know, what the hell does the US have an embassy there for? Wait, I just remembered. There isn’t a person alive who’s seen Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, or Jason Bourne who doesn’t know all embassies are CIA fronts. If I was President, I’d shut down the whole operation, and as for the employees? They rank right up there with the FBI, and didn’t the President just call them a bunch of slimeballs? My guess is those two will never will never kiss and make up. I think the embassy staff, knowing they are unwelcome, should pack up and leave on their own. But that wouldn’t be very “diplomatic”, now would it? They are intensely loyal people. To their government paychecks.
Half the news services are asking the question of how we got the gig economy. For once, they didn’t blame the Boomers, at least not directly. I follow their journalistic logic, it’s about the mental equivalent of repeating the third grade. They suggest it was an outcome of the 2008 recession. Many people took second and third jobs that established a trend toward part time. Others say it is a consequence of the Internet, which showed it was possible to freelance without top-heavy asset and employee costs. Some even blame Uber for its creative definition of sub-contractor. I have a more plausible explanation.
Give me a room full of people whose biggest concerns are minority rights, climate change, and legalizing immigration, and you can put anything over on them. A room full of people who don’t care zip about whether their degree is marketable, think they are the greatest, and are more sensitive about spotted owls than the taxpayer, and you can fool all of them all of the time. I’ve yet to hear anyone name a right they don’t already have. Most species alive today have survived several climate cycles. Kick out the illegals and there will be plenty of work. As long as they think they exist on some higher plane than consevatives, they’ll think they can vote themselves a job. Welcome to 2020.and a rude awakening this November.
Bicycle escalator.
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Here’s photo of my poinsettias before any red showed up. They are late bloomers. And the pic is here just because I think these section of the blog needs one. These plants were not expected to survive the transplant. Hmmm, I don’t know if I like the ring of that. Anyway, there were two tiny spots turning red when I left two weeks ago. I wonder what we’ll find on returning next week. (Probably chickens.)
You’re getting lots of reading because of that rain. I ran through another set of the guitar music chosen for solo work, if I ever get that far. I have a distinct style and two surprises to report. First, I was afraid I would comp due to my lack of guitar skills. Nope, the videos show that I strum most tunes based a variety of elements from each song. Second, I’m able to breeze through songs that would have given me struggles not that long ago. I admit to using my piano background to avoid playing certain chords and to get around tough spots. Artistic license?
Here’s some handy hints. You want to reuse a plastic prescription bottle but the label shreds instead of coming off. Put the bottle in the freezer a couple hours. If you have to buy something you find embarrassing, also buy a gift card along with it.
Allow me describe the new budget system. It retains all the alarms and parameters but now fine tunes a number of categories. Coffee will be tracked separately for coffee shops and home. There is a new category for DVD movies, and just about anything else that I spend more than a few hundred dollars on annually. The system is a series of seven spreadsheets that accumulate the data monthly, plus a cover page that amalgamates the totals. This is brought on by changes since 2016, when rent was no longer a budget item. It seems every time I go out now, whether its for gas, groceries, or grog, it costs $40. Budgets don’t decrease the totals, but they keep expenses on a short leash.
The new budget contains an ominous component: cross-categories. For years, each month was a single “monitor page” I’d glance at and, if necessary, adjust my spending. That was actually a rare event because after a while one develops a sense of restraint. I would only consult detail before big purchases, and extraordinary expenses, like that radiator. Without the budget, the previous trip to Tennessee would have been delayed up to a week. I’ll cover cross-categories in more detail tomorrow.
Did you catch that item that Amazon would not hand over a bottle of booze to the 92 year-old grandmother because she didn’t have ID? Proof again what I said years ago. Amazon does not give a twit about your delivery. They want your ID on file. They don’t just look at your ID, the record it and make you sign. And most Americans comply like sheep. Not me, of course, but most Americans. I had a discussion about biometrics over coffee this week. People just don’t seem concious of how bad profiling has become.
I predicted those new receipt printers at the checkout will soon be biometric. They will record your fingerprint, the pressure you press the button, how long you press, and a thousand other factors. After that, it can track every button, your doorbell, the ATM, elevators, your phone of course, and there is no fooling it. You can try to change things, but it will follow you for life, building an electronic map of everything you do and every place you go. This is not some scary future scenario, the hardware has been on the shelves for years.
ADDENDUM
Real estate is in the news again. More people saying it will crash than say it will continue rising. My primary guage is whether or not there are jobs in a community that pay enough to buy houses there. Generally, there are not. For instance, I live in an area where the average job pays only half the required income to buy event he cheapest house in town.. Yet, prices continue to rise. However, there are many externalities at work. Banks, for instance, have a vested interest in house prices rising, because that is how they sell mortgages. Buy now, even at outrageous prices, they say, because things will only get worse. What a scam.
Another factor is that house prices have been rising far faster than wages. Much has been said about the 2008 collapse to divert attention away from how large groups of people simply stopped buying for a short while. They were not organized or even a majority, and all they did was put a slight dent in the market. That was enough to bring prices crashing down. The American dollar is not backed by anything, so a lot of its perceived value is determined by the steady rise in real estate prices. And let’s not forget how hush-hush banks have kept their huge inventory of foreclosed houses still left over from the last collapse. There are 24 million unsold or empty houses in the USA.
Money and the economy may remain daily topics until I get the spreadsheets programmed for the new budget. I allow for inflation but can still be taken aback by prices. I walked into a Publix this morning to find I’d chosen the only one in Tennessee that doesn’t have a weigh scale. (TMOR, this chain of stores is known for having a complimentary mechanical scale so people can weigh themselves--or their luggage.) So I walked down the coffee aisle to find boxes priced at $9.99 for the identical product you can get a half-mile away at Wal*Mart for $3.89 I also found the only Dollar Tree that doesn’t have any packs of binder clips. No wonder I don’t trust the system, and in a larger sense, most Americans have never trusted the system since Viet Nam.
The town of Clarkesville must have finally sold out, since those ads have disappeared. The replacement is Hopkinsville, in Kentucy. Same massive drop in prices, same general area. $25,000 gets you a fixer-upper that in Nashvile, 2 hours away, would cost you ten times that. This folks, is why recessions appear to hit the cities the worst. They deserve it.
