One year ago today: April 24, 2019, but $39,000 is chicken feed.
Five years ago today: April 24, 2015, no house this year.
Nine years ago today: April 24, 2011, a five-Saturday month.
Random years ago today: April 24, 2010, this blog’s most popular post.
My day off. That’s Florida style. It’s raining and my rear scooter tire has a slow leak. Grateful for the down time, I think I’ll drive out to the Thrift again. I also want to pick up some materials. The new shed rafters have hurricane straps. I’m now buying fence panels 20 at a time, they are the latest rage in raw materials around here. Boxes, siding, birdhouses, feeders, and occasionally, actual fences. Blog rules, you still get the highlights. I found my green slime, scooter size but not in the rain. I got under the tarp and raked for an hour, planning where to put things. I was out there a couple hours.
There are now 18 posts in my yard from Tennessee. Some are short, forming the bases for the vacuum and thermal chimney, but the others made a huge difference in getting the place organized and set up. The reason you haven’t heard more about the planters is, well, once I got the first one framed, it became the handiest work bench in the back yard. I’ll get around to it but it turned out too handy as a work space. That’s why if the 4x4s are still in Tennessee next trip, I’m loading it all up. I’ve saved $150 on the fence posts alone and that more than pays for my trip there and back. Plus, my 10” chop saw will slice posts in one pass.
The ground temperature in the shade of the back yard is 72°F, much warmer than I thought. That’s at two feet. (The thermometer shown here is two feet long, it is designed for measuring compost.) Going to three feet is significantly more work and usually that doesn’t result in much improvement. While the temperature is down twenty degrees from average summertime days, I wonder if it will work sufficiently well. Only one way to find out. Whoa, did you hear that? The wind just kicked in like 35 mph and the humidity is up in the 90s. Is this like an El Nińo event or something?
European market, American goods.
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Forex trading. The meeting was rescheduled from tonight to this morning, so I totally missed it. It’s the NOVA sequence again. Give a jerkface the ability to change a weekly schedule at the last moment, and the sumbitch will. You can’t tell the guy off (it is always a guy) because he’ll say he sent the memo, implying you are not up with the times unless you are one of the countless morons who gave away their identities. You can’t tell them his chat space is not secure because he’ll hand that paranoid bullshit. But that’s okay, there are several people taking note that the Reb & I are catching on ten times faster than they ever did. Remember NOVA, the Artificial Intelligence club? It folded when the Russian guy and I quit when the lardass “president” would not knock it off with the last minute cancellations. I drove across town at least four times to find just myself and the Russian guy at the locked door.
And while I’m bitchin’, there’s the matter of the trading program itself and Zoom. It seems every time you go in there, something has changed. No, not improvements, just changes. This is the primary problem with C+, it gives anybody who comes along the power to make arbitrary changes. Tonight was the third time I had to call the office in Tennessee about how to log in. They’d get the same problem and start calling around. I suggested the solution was termination for any programmer who changed the log-on sequence without written permission. A month ago, the moderators sometimes shrugged when I made recommendations. They aren’t doing that any more.
However, I repeated run into that snarky attitude from dunces that the screens constantly changing is a sign of progress. No, progress is when the system works better. Spending ten minutes figuring out what has changed about the log-on since last day isn’t improvement.
So, I watched videos. I get a laugh out of the depictions of college life. Yeah, it is one big party, at least for the men. I never was part of a frat for the simple reason I didn’t care much for hanging around with drunks who never got any. In the movies, the parties with any females present at all are heavily dependent on hired help. I went to a few frat parties with Snake, the professional student. No pretty women, but let me say something about that. College women have really gone downhill in the looks department. I’m not one to be fooled by fashions or foundation garments. And college women these days are shorter, fatter, and dumpier. There are probably reasons, but who cares?
The reality of fraternities is they are dominated by jocks and their parties are ten to one male to female—and usually the female has been dragged there by her boyfriend to show off. I’ve also noticed the age of third year students is higher. I consider this a sign that they are having to repeat courses. When Harvard admits that 21% of their students who graduate with honors have below average marks, you know it is endowments pulling the strings.
