One year ago today: December 29, 2022, peaceful tribes, my eye.
Five years ago today: December 29, 2018, like a jolt.
Nine years ago today: December 29, 2014, no handy skills.
Random years ago today: December 29, 2015, increased my dislike.
A splendid day, up at dawn and still at coffee by 11:00AM. Hey, it’s too cold out there for a while yet. I didn’t move to Florida to wear mitts and long sleeves. Silly me, I went on-line again this morning trying to find a trade school site that posted its courses and prices. One joint (MAIT College of Technology) had in the fine print that if I hit enter, my consent was “not required to apply, enroll or make any purchase”. It is worded to make you think they mean consent to contact you, but that’s not what it says. Why the college interest?
On-line I see courses called CNC milling and turning. Milling is any part that does not require exact cylindrical dimensions. The machines appear to differ by whether the stock or tha drill bit stays in place. Using this info, I looked for price and top of the list is Valencia College in Orlando. What a bitch it was getting their address out of them, turns out they have eight locations in the city. Nobody knows which one has the classrooms. I would commute to the south end, but nobody wants to drive through Orlando even on the freeways. So for now I’m only looking.
One category that has gone downhill is Continuing Education. I had great success at this part time until the company put us back on rotating shift work. Back in the day, the school would schedule pretty much any course which could sign up eight or more people. You could take excellent courses in anything from dog training to pilot lessons. (I took the pilot lessons, not for me, no sir, boring, actually, except for take-off and landing.) Now it is reduced to GED classes and food service training. They call it career training a lot, but I see their graduate pharmacy techs make only $13 per hour. My first job in Florida in 2000 paid that. An energy tech reads the meters. Let’s try this from the top wage downward.
Top paying (according to them) is $22 per hour for A/C technicians. The course outline say 750 hours, but I’m not looking for a trade license. Just how to repair valves, controls, and compressors. How do you know the college won’t teach you just that? You know that strange college on the left as you drive back from Winter Haven? Polk State. Here’s course called CNC operator, Part 1. Part 2 is the programming, but I can pick that up by osmosis. It says 320 hours but no price. That’s eight weeks full time. I’m thinking.
There is a tab saying the college want $124 per credit hour. Another says program fees are $395. Polk State has around 60 different pages on their web site, almost impossible to navigate with misleading titles. I’m not in it for outreach, honors, student aid, or athletics. It’s a pity if I have to pay for any of that. Same with disability programs, and I was put off by the requirement that if enrolled, you cannot decline to associate with “at risk” students. All Polk says is the need “ongoing intervention.” What the hell is that.
Does that mean emotional or behavioral? You pay me for that crap, I’m not your social worker. But it depends on what she looks like, okay? No, we are not “all in this together”. To me that means some idiot gets the right to drag you down to his level and I’ve already retired from the workplace phone company.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
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Methinks Wilford’s computer is going in the shop. Get that maxed out with the latest, maybe those nifty memory sticks, I forget w hat they’re called. They are solid state and plug into a sort of power bar and reputedly blast regular drives or memory out of the water. I should really spend some money at that computer store and they only seem to sell refurbished bad brands. This unit already works but I don’t know what Wilford did when he deleted all his gaming software. He disabled many of the more basic functions though I can see they are the ones that relate to gaming.
Forget outdoor work today, I went out there and it is cold. I hate to waste a day but I’ve got other indoor tasks and on was to weigh the cost of the course to buying a CNC mill kit and learning on my own. I see part of the market is millennialized. Machines that do not work unless they are on-line, others that require a monthly subscription for upgrades (right) and a variety of other Big Brother type conditions. All were limited by having to import stock designs or your ability to draw. That might explain the 2D look and chunky designs I’ve seen. Without a real talent at drawing designs on a monitor, the end products have a definite look about them. Most guitar bodies are cut with these. I’m looking at the FoxAlien 3020-PRO MAX, priced at $549 as a kit.
Many year-end totals are in, for example I won’t be buying any more lumber or telephones this year and my gas tank is full. Hmmm, in only one month, August, did I come in under budget. The figures are not directly comparable because of budget changes. For example, no longer have a separate category for coffee, which I don’t buy outside much any more. I spent over $1,030 in 2019 on daily coffees. That dropped to $188 by 2021, at which time I included it as groceries. The four major expenses here are groceries, entertainment, gasoline, and household. Groceries in 2017 were $1,670 which climbed to $3,820 in 2022 when I put on the brakes. Thid year down to $2.540. I’ve even begun to prepare meals for the doggies.
Entertainment has stayed fairly consistent at $270 per month. With the Reb in the picture, there’s no need to go out more often than she wants. The most expensive year was 2018, when JZ and I went on a scrunt hunt in the Keys, chased college babes at the Titanic, and hit the Last Chance at least six times. I picked the entire tab that year for $4,900. Oddly, JZ, who has never bought, remembers that he was the one who paid. Ah, but I can tell you how much.
Gas bills have averaged $2000 per year, but declining with fewer trips to Tennessee. Each round trip nowadays costs $340 compared to $180 during Trump. General household expenses are around $100 per month not counting utilities and taxes. Overall, the slump and inflation have not impacted too badly, but this is not the case everywhere. People are hurting and nobody is fooled by the media or the declarations coming out of DC. They know who destroyed the dollar.
It was dumb, but I put on gloves and filled in most of the trench, leaving just the section where I’ll plug the hole. It got dark on me, I’m back inside but the cold got right through my fingers. It’s one sensation I just can’t take, on the motorcycle I had heated gloves inside mitts. Maybe bass players don’t like arthritis things. The lady raccoon is still living in the neighbor’s big tree, she came down while I was raking dirt. The cat and her get along, I see. I found another pry bar in the yard, getting the tools collected up just before dark. The neighbor, whose name I never remember looks like Clark Kent, so I may call him Kent.
He lived in New York as a college student. I have no doubt it was, in the distant past, as safe and even exciting place to live—if you had money. I’ve been at the airport in New York and a job interview, but have no recollection of the place forty years later. I view the entire northeast as a festering sore on the back of America. Colorado’s stab at getting Trump off the ballots failed, now Maine is trying it. TMOR, the way it works is that anybody who takes part in an insurrection is barred from running for office, the Democrats put that rule in place long ago. The problem is, they had to manufacture an insurrection to use it.
Trump is now so popular they are shitting their pants. While I don’t think Trump planned this in detail, he certainly knew he was giving the bad guys enough rope to hang themselves. He now campaigns with complete confidence and it shows. He knows he's got the enemy on the run.
ADDENDUM
Sporadically reading my booklet on 1900’s German history, a name, Freidrich Ebert, has become familiar. He’s a minor character with a remarkable life that I may look into. He was a union member with good attention to detail. While not the head honcho, he seems to have put together a chain of command from the shop floor up to the highest politicians. He didn’t like it, so he bough a saloon and was so bad at it his wife said he drank vinegar or something. Yet, people found his organizational merits enough to keep him doing quite well for the day. I can identify with all this.
