One year ago today: September 27, 2021, the van acts up.
Five years ago today: September 27, 2017, the “other” Taurus.
Nine years ago today: September 27, 2013, now that was a rig.
Random years ago today: September 27, 2008, truly horrid Hawaiian shirts.
Day 3, no wind, 78ºF, 100% cloud cover, plus the cover I built for the thermometer, neat, huh? Are we in for it? That needle floating right there says yes we are, and the wind has shifted to the southeast. Which only happens when it is severely disturbed. Note the “grandfather clock effect of this gauge, I designed that in my brain, y’know. I got some fan mail today. I’m surprised how my outgoing mail surprises people who know me. In this case, riding in the “bombadeers”. They forget how often I moved around, I suppose. By next year, this cabin will be the longest I’ve ever lived at one address and let’s not forget that was interspersed with months at a time in Tennessee.
I left the Chinese hat in place both for shade and dryness. I’ll watch if the squirrels try to use it. Hopefully no, as the spiced seed seems to really deter them. And we have a new generation of cardinals, I believer Junior Red has found himself a girlfriend. And she is another perfect beauty of a specimen. I’ve seen her looking at the feeder but not yet dining. That’s why I left the design temporary, it is not enough to deter the rodents, it must still attract the birdies. Moments later, both Junior and his gal showed up together, they are a breeding pair. But foiled by Sony. The camcorder takes several motions to bring into action and any one of them scares the wildlife. Moments later, I saw Mrs. Downey has an identical twin. Both females, they won’t share a feeder.
The hatches are battened and ready for Tropical Depression #9, if one can say it is possible to outdo Mother Nature. The neighbors across the street are all sandbagged in. In some spots, my yard is 9 inches higher that their driveway. That’s a lot of work if the hurricane decides to change course. AOC says if everybody had electric cars, they would not have to rush filling up their takes. If the power is out for a week, she asks, how are they going to get gas. And this person was elected, mind you in a district with Dominion machines. I made a few anonymous enemies implying that all the kid sex-change docters were millennials. Well, it’s true.
The Obama-appointed Judge continues to hand out severe sentences to the J6 prisoners. Today she sentenced a man to seven years for grabbing a cop’s wrist. The system is creating its own anarchists. Some leftist says the Constitution must be re-written to stop Trump. The FBI has changed the number of documents they stay they stole from Mar-a-Lago. That’s correct, stole, because they misled the Judge who signed the warrant. Justin Trudeau has expressed concern that Iran is brutally cracking down on women protestors, ahem. Another mass shooting that does not mention race, so we know how that goes.
This looks interesting, some advice on saving money. I have only one suggestion. Spend less than you make, but I’m only too aware that does not work when one is living below subsistence level, which is not some 2/3 of this country. Joe just announced getting vaxxed is part of hurricane preparation because it you don’t, things “get complicated”. And the illegal alien who bombed the hotel in 2007 has just escaped from a Nevada maximum security prison.
Dining room, DiCaprio’s rented yacht.
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The old laundry room is only closed in on three sides, plus I’ve raided lumber from there. I measured it out enough to know that if I get rid of the tree stump as planned, there is just enough space in there to put the saws. In a way that a full sheet of plywood can be cut once again with the long pieces feeding out through a slot in the wall. Only one saw at a time could be used but that’s still quite an advantage over walking between the shed and the lumber storage for now. That’s where this picture comes in. To quickly seal a gap without destroying any pieces along enough for the shed, I put the slats vertical.
The available instructions all use longer pieces than I have in mind and I wish there was some filter online that got rid of all Pinterest matches. I do not support Pinterest. I looked at other models of pallet wrecker bars but there’s a limit on how small you can go, that is, the last board or two is more likely to lift off the ground rather than pry apart. See below for how I’m dealing with that. The videos also suffer from millennial bloat. One fat boy stretches his five minute how-to for 40 minutes by including footage of him loading the pallets on his truck and scenes of his wife and kids going inside to put on warmer jackets. Yep, he’s a mouth-breather.
This project is also dependent of the new saw. It has enough power to cut the long slats needed under the shingles as I have no intention of buying them at $4 each. The crosscut sled has to be the most planned and least built jig for this tool, but I would not attempt to cut shingles without some way to standardize the pieces and cut them quickly. It’s now late afternoon, let me see what’s left in the budget. Even after buying things I don’t need, there’s still $29 and it is all slated for entertainment. So, I should go downtown, don’t you think? I have not had a cold one since Friday.
I’ll price out the pallets and use as siding. Not all the wood is suitable. I have the whole north side of the cabin to practice on, plus the east side of the bedroom. The walls are insulated from the inside, this is a concession to modernity in a way. The hollow walls, I’m told, were to draw cool air up and into the attic. Well, all I can tell you is that didn’t work worth a damn. Electric A/C is the way to go and I would put more insulation if it would fit. Since the pallet lumber is essentially free, the budget is for time and for hardware. Ordinary exterior screws are now almost five cents each, so I already re-use them wherever I can.
So you know, we are getting a bit better at dismantling the pallets. I want to build a small ledge to slide one end of the pallet under. This will hold the other end of the pallet down while I work the prying tool. This allow me to hold a small piece of scrap under the slat ends to stop the nails from splitting the wood. Also, I’ve seen a guy using a small hand held nail driver, though he was counting on the nails prying out nice and straight. This still means using a hammer to pull out any stubborn nails one by one. Is there such an invention as a multiple nail puller? Where you slide a board under it and it comes out clean no matter how many nails. Nope, I could not find anything. Even the most expensive unit ($220) was one nail at a time, and that one depended on enough of the head showing.
What’s this, Blackrock may file bankruptcy? Ha, we mentioned something funny was going on there, but I was wrong thinking they stopped buying because they anticipated a price drop. Seems like they were using their trillion only for down payments, thinking they could flip at a profit by owning so many houses they could dictate the market. No info on the reasons yet. The satellite-meteor collision went as planned but no other data or coverage is easily found. My favorite radio station these days is being crowded out. Every winter, the easy listening rock station fades slightly. And the new AFC controls don’t work the same. Automatic Fine Tuning used to find the best spot for the station you had tuned. The newer type seems to glom onto the strongest station.
That’s only half of it. There are four newly arrived stations that crowd the same spot on the dial, 98-dot something. Radio listeners know crappy stations always come in clear. One is this droll bible station with one person singing to just a piano. You know your tax dollars are in there somewhere. Worst is this new country station that drifts in and out from now until spring. It really fades, not the same as Raleigh Fading. That’s where signals around 100 kHz come in clear when you are near the radio, but got to static when you move away. It has to do with your body being actually a good conductor of the signals. Look it up on your own since the explanation can get technical.
ADDENDUM
Finishing watching that documentary on Rommel, I’ve concluded this is the result of more recent research. Many of the clichés are explained or avoided entirely. One is that most of Rommel’s supplies were intercepted and sunk on the 60 mile trip from Italy. I’ve doubted this since day one, as the armored divisions could never have been that reliably operated without stead supplies in good order. The claim of sinkings has thus swung from 90% to a more reasonable 10%. What’s more, Rommel himself had learned not to trust any British reports including those he was told were secret interceptions. In any case, any more than 10% sinkings and Rommel would know their codes had been broken.
He knew the tiny force and Malta was not capable of inflicting the damages reported and the Royal Navy would not leave Gibraltar or Alexandria in force without massive antisubmarine support. Much is made of how Rommel outflanked the British, but in fact the coastal area in Africa is quite narrow. The video says 60 miles, but that’s maybe how far it was theoretically possible to travel. My conclusion is the British prefer to blame outflanking rather than outthinking.
Other clues that the archives are being read are reports of German effectiveness, not a topic found in most Allied accounts. When the panzers arrived in European color schemes, the Germans, lacking paint, simply sprayed oil on the armor and threw sand on it.
