One year ago today: June 18, 2021, June is mushroom month.
Five years ago today: June 18, 2017, the Fender & the Rebel.
Nine years ago today: June 18, 2013, pond scum, anyone?
Random years ago today: June 18, 2016, at the Palmdale Cracker.
Has the first shot been fired? Up in Maryland a man was shot for refusing to turn in his gun under a “red flag” law. These are laws that say anybody who know you can report that you are dangerous and send the cops to take away your guns. Now it is only a matter of time until somebody shoots back. There’s trouble brewing. Biden fell off his bicycle, America hopes the bike is okay. There’s a rumor the cows are dying from being fed genetically modified grain. Makes sense.
What say I go for it? It’s a 30 mile round trip and thanks to the scooter, the van tank is still half full. These top-tier management decisions are made in the proper way, that is, after another cup of coffee. Except for that air compressor, which works fine, my $100 per month tool budget has not been touched in a while. This October, that amount is dropping because we already have a lot of tools. My conclusion is a compromise. It will rain soon and I’ve never gotten over my aversion to driving in the rain, though I have no problem with it even on the motorcycle. It’s the way the road gets slippery, much more noticeable than in a car.
Yeah, tomorrow is soon enough, as I want to test the new equipment in the sunshine. And third Sunday of the month is Apple Sunday. Eat anything you want, except what’s on the no-no list. No beef, no pork, no tuna, sounds good to me. Since the recent Tennessee era, I have never been back to the fancy hotel downtown. Nothing compares to dining out with the Reb. What’s with the pallet picture? It’s top story because I slept in. It’s enough [lumber] now to finish the west wall when I get motivated. Here’s a shot of the latest wasp nest in the doorway. One of three, these are now dead.
But plastic degrades in heat or cold and around here, who knows what solvent materials could get in or on such piping. I need just two ten foot lengths, one of which is already stored useless on the laundry shed roofing. With the extra storage space in the silo, I’m uncovering all kinds of gear from the move six years ago—and I know there is a bag of copper fittings in there somewhere from the solar heater idea I tinkered with before deciding on the ambient tank.
There are few things more useless than these bozos who post “how-to” videos on youTube with no commentary. Here’s one about using sawhorse brackets. The moron shows things like marking lumber twice, then says cut without specifying which mark—and you can’t get it from the video because he cuts a different piece of lumber. I know what he means because I’ve used the brackets before and only wanted a reminder of the lengths. So get to the brackets, who needs to see a picture of him cutting the 2x4”s anyway? Beware, the brackets are nearing ten bucks a pair.
Not that the stores selling these in pairs are any better. They call two brackets a “set”, probably for customers who only need one sawhorse. For those interested, the correct way is to cut all the pieces 32” long, including the cross bar. These brackets eventually wobble, particularly if you fix only one side of the cross bar so the unit will fold up for storage. This is how I use them but without extra pieces they never make a sturdy table.
Having said that, I do have a use for one sawhorse, but it is modified to be a base for cutting long pieces on the chop saw. Using the old hardware from the original camper trailer, I use wing nuts to make the height adjustable. I’ll never understand how I went so long without a chop saw. Well, I can understand in a way, , other than that I would not dare have something so valuable near my family and after I left, you would need something to haul it around in. By throwing everything I had into what I knew was my only hope of finishing college in my youth, I walked until the summer before I turned 22.
Another annoyance with Windows 7. In the word processor, I use the insert picture command a lot. There seems no way to set the thumbnail size large enough to see the picture. Yes, I know about right-click and view, which every a-hole on the Internet posts, but I want to set the default size to large. I found a menu, but that option is greyed out. The funny part is by the time these millennials finally grow up and realize they need things that get actual work done, the wrong way will be the entrenched standard, too expensive to reverse.
Photographing the Big Red Spot.
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The sort of day retirement is supposed to be about, I would suppose. I don’t get many of them. This photo is the deck lumber for the ambient tank seeing the sunshine in who knows how many years. Let’s see, last month on the 23rd, I’ve been retired something like 26 years and I’ve have maybe that many days off. I fixed a huge portion of rice, onions, celery, and chicken with peanuts, enough for a few meals and did not get hungry again all day.
She wants to see the cabin and knows I’ve canceled my summer trip. At the present 21 mpg average in the van, the trip of 7,600 miles would require over 360 gallons of gas. Even if it is only $8 per gallon average across all those states, that’s close to $3,000. Twice what I had budgeted for the original trip. Now, I may be required to take the trip in 2023 and it may be wiser to see what happens by then. Oh, and house prices continue to drop, mostly on the lower priced units, but still.
The Reb advises one of those head pads you put in the microwave. I had one and the mice ate the rice inside while I was out of town. She means a larger design that covers both shoulders, but does not recall the brand name. Mine was “Bed Buddy” so I’ll search on that, for all I know they are twenty bucks over at CVS. I’m in luck, it’s a fairly common item and there is one model with electric heat (with auto-shut off).
Months after we said so right here, the media is picking up that the radical left has to do something fast. It’s also getting more violent, which is shredding the remaining faith in their characters. It’s over, but they are not going to just step down. The fight still remains unequal in that one side wants to dominate and the other side wants to be left alone. This has allowed the bad guys, over time, to become more powerful than any of their disunited enemies, the old divide and conquer plan. But the left is pushing too hard and too fast, which is having the opposite effect, it is uniting the groups. And mark my old, old words, a leader will emerge.
ADDENDUM
Turns out that Telsa from last Monday is still on fire, or at least the junkyard where they towed the wreck says it keeps flaring up. The grandmother cardinal has learned at least some connection between chirping and the water, so an extra coffee found me in reading. And watching a most peculiar movie called the “Tale of the Weeping Camel”. It’s set in the Gobi desert and so far it seems about a family in a yurt that cooks everything in one big bowl and a kid who ride a two-hump camel around in a circle all day drawing water from a well. Everybody speaks Mongolian and the subtitles are stuck on French, no wait, I just got English. Whew!
The old guy is telling why camels always face the western horizon. He’s waiting for the deer who borrowed his antlers and never came back. Hey, it’s a better story than saying that’s the direction good things arrive from. (I say the camel is facing the direction of the prevailing winds, but what do I know?) And I think we are about to see a camel giving birth. I guess things have not changed all that much since old Genghis was around, everything is done by hand, the mark of empires that never achieve civilization. Why automate when human labor is cheaper?
It’s not a documentary and the plot is scenes of how this family lives. How to trim camel beards. The two-hump kind with mullets. The kids play this game with what looks like old camel teeth. Yep, they are going to deliver that camel calf. If you don’t mind, I’ll watch this some other day. I just had supper.
