One year ago today: November 13, 2020, a day in Smithville.
Five years ago today: November 13, 2016, I’m a bassman.
Nine years ago today: November 13, 2012, on the Qattara Depression.
Random years ago today: November 13, 2013, it isn’t a sin.
What a commotion. I finally turned the radio off, and I’m a big radio consumer. Rittenhouse is innocent so for most Americans the real trial is whether or not you have the right to defend yourself. The radical left Democrats have to keep forcing trials like this in the hopes of one day winning one, for they cannot complete their plans unless the citizens are disarmed. I was up early and applied the Blue Devil, leaving the van to idle for at hour. It did not overheat which it used to do even at long red lights. That’s why I have the fan bypass switch on the dash. The van now has to cool down completely, so I’m going back to bed.
The hillbilly has worked over here daily close to a month. He’s picked up a few good habits. The one in mentioned is how to spend five minutes planning the next day, so even if it is a day off, you have something to do. Usually, though, the trick is to plan the next day as if nothing is going to happen and you are tasked with finding something useful or entertaining to do by default. I’ve done this since I was a kid and have never been stuck with a nothing day. Some people thrive on that situation, the hillbilly no longer has the slightest doubt that is a dead-end existence.
The van goes out for a test run later, see how it behaves. The dealership I’ve chosen is in Clearwater and I’m not taking the van that far untested. But cut me some slack, I’ve been working more than four hours a day for a month now. That’s cause for celebration in my world. On top of that, when I do tire, recover is rapid. I would remind the reader, this still leaves me at a fraction of my former energy levels. Still, five years ago I would have had to strain where these days I don’t notice any exertion for the most part.
And remind me to get all my gear out of the van. I have a cooler, some tools, a mattress and lots of camp gear. One item I’ve bee putting off is cataloging my computer disks. When I set this computer up, I had to chase around for the installation disks, only to discover I cannot find any of my copies of Nero, the disk burning software.
It’s a year since the election steal and the country is a mess. The Democrats are going to get their butts kicked and they know it. At least Trump exposed them for what they are. We might see a real upset long before then, as very few Democrat incumbents are winning against Trump-endorsed opponents. And the dislike of the thirteen RINOs is almost universal. One major difference is they are generally being named rather than job titles, which is encouraging. I’ve insisted on names for years. You want to tell me what the governor did, you’d best have his name handy.
Bidenflation, the stimulus-driven nightmare that is approaching fast, has impacted my budget. I can survive most anything but there are telltale signs when something deeper is wrong. One of those is my daily spending average. It has dropped several times since January and common sense says this is not reality. A tank of gas has gone from $40 to $56. A trip to the grocery store needs a pile of twenties.
It is overdue for news from Perserverance, the Mars probe. The biggest obstacle is NASA, who bleed off documentary time to push their “diversification” agenda. From the videos, you think the majority of the staff are dark-skinned females or accentless Asians, it’s disgusting really. The probe, with the helicopter, should have passed all the test phases by now, so where are the results of the on-going mission? The probe was to drill soil samples. NASA worded their pressers so you’d think the probe was sending samples back to Earth.
Not so, that is the task of another mission that isn’t even past the planning stage. In truth, if Perserverance finds life, as we were led to believe, it will be by luck. It is not that much a step up over previous landers.
Tight staricase.
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The van is behaving and the water leak is undetectable. I was only out there a half hour, but that was long enough to check for 90% of the symptoms. Except for an unfamiliar clicking near the fan best, the only outstanding problem is brake pads. I had a similar problem with my first car, a Ford Maverick. The shop kept telling me I needed rotors or turn the drums or something. Naw, I kept replacing the brake pads and the car lasted twelve years. If I forgot to say, my plan is to get the van running to the point I get $2500 for it on a trade-in.
This got me thinking. This isn’t any special foam, it’s a shelf item from Wal*Mart. The Reb says they make pet beds already, so am I missing something? So far these are all house dogs used to mattresses, so it isn’t like they just like as soft place to curl up. They lie flat on the mattress, a position I call sphynxing. I’ll pay more attention, for example when you do call them to get off the foam, they try to sink down further into it. Hmmm.
I gave up waiting for stereo AM long ago, it was a muddle of different standards. But I see more and more stations on my digitalized displays that specify stereo AM. I’ve never actually heard it. I’d like to try because electronically, it is a better medium for stereo broadcasting. It was prevented from doing so around 1960 to give FM stations a competitive edge. I read some confusing specs on stereo AM that have never let go, one is that the signal works by two waves on the same frequency but 90° from each other. The receivers look bulky, like full size home stereo amps.
The accompanying picture is a transmitter. Apparently the far longer range of AM at night, and the superior specs for the product make excellent marine transmitters. I don’t care for the price tags, either. Still, if the claims are true, these tuners have come a long way and I’d like to test one. And how come regular AM receivers don’t pick up half the signal? My thinking was that the AM signal was “digitalized” and a special decoder chip is required at the receiver. That will get hacked in no time.
ADDENDUM
My Chinese, like my German, or dancing, or Morse code, suffers in the long run because I can’t find anybody to practice with. I was reminded of a class I took years ago to see if I could read Chinese, being the language is all symbols instead of letters. I noticed how many words belong to related groups. A little house with a big window mean “school”, a house with a tree mean “garden”, or a house with a doggie tail meant “lunch”. I found myself in an [otherwise] all Chinese attendance in north Seattle.
They could read the symbols, but generally could not talk to each other, the emphasis was on learning the Cantonese pronunciation. Cantonese, the language of Hong Kong, was the rage back then. I’m aware these days there are many Anglos who can speak it, but back then I was rather unique. What surprised me was how easily they were collectively stumped by a new word that had no symbol. It appears to me they broke into to sides and began lengthy “negotiations” on what to call a something like a then-new CD.
The format of all the talk is what got me. It had little to do with the object being named, rather one side wanted technology to prevail, the other wanted tradition on top. During this almost insane process (only half in English I could understand), the terms “ocean”, “ginger”, and “stepsister” seemed quite important.
