One year ago today: March 3, 2023, “after the game”, my eye.
Five years ago today: March 3, 2019, Then I made coffee.
Nine years ago today: March 3, 2015, Florida road art.
Random years ago today: March 3, 2004, my first Calle Ocho.
No links here, but you can view the empty roads into New York everywhere. The estimate is that only 20% of the truck drivers are participating in the boycott. Since it is supply and demand, the others still making the run are reputedly getting up to $3,000 bonus per load—and incurring the disdain of their confreres. This cost is passed on to the consumers, which in New York is a huge number of welfare cases who can’t afford it. Let’s see if that makes them vote for somebody with a brain. Sometimes, on March 1, I randomly buy a lotto ticket. Let me check the Powerball. Only $460 million, hardly worth it. See Addendum.
Here’s my sob story from this morning. Years ago, Keith the Tampa guitar player, clued me in that this cinnamon drink “Fireball” made excellent mouthwash. It’s customary for people who buy the house a round as shooters, so I keep mine and take them home. I also use it as flavoring in the odd recipe, but this morning without thinking I swallowed a mouthful. Hard liquor has never agreed with me and now I’m doubled over. It will pass, but I’m down for the count. First, another Tennessee property has dipped below the $100k margin. This is at the edge of my search radius (Smithville, too far to commute).
Yes, it’s a mobile home, but after my nine or ten years in the trailercourt, I have no objections to living in one. Smithville is nice, a rolling farming community with lots of forest cover. The list was $95k. I put in a low-ball offer which was immediately rejected, but since I offered cash, we shall soon find out if they’ll panic. TMOR (to my overseas readers), I’d like a moment to explain this is not bottom-feeding or shafting the sellers. It should be made clear it is the people who buy houses on credit that are the greedy ones.
It works like this. House prices keep going up because they are purchased with borrowed money. If these people had to pay cash, house prices would stablize at once. Borrowers are all planning to profit by rising prices and in the process are supporting a system that leaves others out of that loop. Problem, most of those others are now millennials and XYZers, most of whom can never buy these $500,000 properties—and they are the majority of renters out there right now. The borrowers thus create an us-versus-them scenario for their own benefit and no way do the rest of us feel sorry for them when they lose because of it. What about the families, the children, blah, blah. The rest of us have those as well. And nobody starves in America, so losing money is their own tough luck, not somebody else’s as they not-so-innocently planned. There is another sharp division between those who own property and those who don’t. Chances are, they never will.
According to Condé Nast, a growing number of seniors are purchasing annual cruises that cost up to $300 per day and stay there most of the year. It is also possible to rent furnished apartments on ships starting at $400k per year. That includes all the food and services, but not the excursions on land or the extra small boat tours. They even have a homeowner’s association, the one thing many of us prefer to avoid. Who wants a non-billioniaire deciding on tonight’s movie? Some of these cruises feature lectures by Nobel Prize speakers. No links, since they are rejected by my spyware, but tryThe World.
I’ll pass. I’ve seen the passengers disembarking the cruise ships in Florida. No sir, some of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen. The only time I’ve seen good-looking women was on a student nurse cruise, which turned out to be a unique event. Membership on The World requires a certified net worth of at least $10 million USD. It’s a bit like treasure hunting.
Luck is rarely with you in Florida, I’ll provide an example. Due to priorities, I’ve never wired in the attic fan pilot light. Why? Because where the switch is located, you can hear the faint hum when the fan is on. Except today, when you have something boiling on the stove. I mean, what could go wrong? At the instant, and I mean the very instand I plug in that fan, some jerk flies overhead in his airplane. That’s not enough. He sticks around flying in circles for ten minutes. To make sure I have to go to the kitchen, then walk back later. How do they know?
What’s more, there are no airports in this town, this is not in any flight path, and there is no real reason to roar around over an obviously residential area on Sunday except ot bother people. It’s the same principle as Miami, where old farts time their sailing to maximize traffic delays during morniing rush hours by using the drawbridge channels one by one. Even though they are running on motors, you can watch each one waiting for the bridge to close before making his move.
Corporate farming in Oklahoma.
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How goes the tube counting. I say again, the tubes are not rare. Of the 20 large Sylvania brand, only 2 were priced more than $10. If they sold for full price, in the last hour, I’ve made only $53. I have faith I’ll hit a batch of goodies somewhere in here. It doesn’t take long to spot the valuable tubes have a 4 prefix; we have but one small box of those. Along the way I’m learning to really hate LibreOffice. In most cases, it would work better if they had not tried to mess with it. When you add new rows, they have be formatted every time. I can’t help thinking of that “accredited” instructor last week, “Wow, you can do that?” and “I wondered what that was for.”
The rarest tube in common use lists as 4-1000A. I know we don’t have any because of the box sizes. This tube is a specialty used by radio transmitters. They are over nine inches long and require a seperate cooling system involving a finned heat sink all mounted inside a pressurized cabinet. The cheaper knock-offs run you around $550, the model shown here retails for $995. There is even a market for the old tubes once they burn out. Steampunkers like them.
I’ll take a break and batten all the hatches, since the weather report says windy. Here, that also means rain and stormy, so I’’ll take no chances. But you know, what I need is a break from people. Counting tubes is solitary and I’m so tired of people I look forward to it. Maybe I should buy a cabin in some little town up country and wait, I already tried that. I’ve been here 8 years in September and have not met any women of merit, much less any talent or money of their own. Nobody in my demographic to hang out with, either, even my prized coffee trips. At the museum in Plant City, the only other place on the itinerary was a coffee shop.
The rub is that I’m in nearly constant contact with people and they are not bad people. I just need a break. It’s not just child-like behavior, but that one can hit a raw nerve. Over 50? No, you can’t borrow my car. You can’t help yourself to my shit. You can’t cut nails with my saw. You have to call when you can’t make it, and don’t play mind games with me. I used to just drive. Fire up the sidecar and drive a hundred miles. I’ve stopped for coffee in a hundred small towns in Florida and southern Georgia. I think after August this year, I will plan trips like that again. The COVID hoax caused me to stop many budget items and there will again be a surplus by September. What do you think?
Just a long drive away from home. Starting from Tennessee, I had a plan for last year, remember? If I had my way, I’d do it by motorcycle, but the van is more likely now. I’ve noticed a decline in some areas and unlike even five years ago, I would have trouble today pushing the motorcycle out of bog-down or in reverse. Ker-pow, I guessed right about the storm. Light winds, my eye. From balmy to near tropical storm in three minutes. That means grab a diet soda and make up some fried rice. Them northerners can keep the hot chocolate and marshmallows. Except for hurricanes, the storms always blow from the west. You can open the back picture window into BirdieLand and enjoy the show. The woodpeckers have no hesitation feeding in short lulls. Neither do I.
The trips to Tennessee don’t count. In one day, it is go-go-go for twelve hours. In two days, I’ve already seen most of the routes. It’s become routine. I lost count, but it’s been around twenty trips. Recently, each has doubled in cost. Up to $400 just in gasoline. Hmmm, lots of traffic noise, let me check. Yep, the streets to the east are flooded again. This is a bad one. Put on the coffee and call the birds. Most of them know my whistle means no cats or squirrels.
Here’s some fake statistics. Independent polls show Trump as high as 73% of the committed votes. Yet this MSM blurb presents the race in these “swing states” as being relatively narrow. The reason for it is the Democrat cheating system needs a close race for their mail-in ballot fraud to work. They can cheat be a few hundred thousand votes at most and they have to know the Republican count to know when to stop. This time around, they will need millions upon millions of fake votes and must do it with everybody watching.
Up in Idaho, Trump takes the primary with 21,000 votes against Poon’s (Nimrata Haley) 3,000. TMOR, a primary is where registered Republicans vote on who they want as their candidate. The fact that Poon got even that many votes raises suspicion that Democrats have registered as Republicans to cast votes for her. America does not like East Indian politicians.
ADDENDUM
How about a peek at the last Powerball results? Nobody won the big prize, which entails choosing five number plus paying a dollar more for the Powerball. Two people picked four out of five. One paid the extra dollar and won $50,000. The other did not pay and won $100. Similarly, three out of five with the Powerball paid 135 people $100 and 3,191 who did not pay got a lousy $7 bucks. Guess what they did with their winnings. By the way, if you picked zero out of five, but guessed the Powerball Number, you got a default win against nothing of $4.00. Locally this is called doing a “Nikki Haley”
I’ve mapped out another short chapter in my pending booklet. Some people, it seems, use a weird excuse to explain their lack of investments. They say it complicates their taxes. They lie, since every firm these days is required to send you a year-end tax slip that even tells you what line to enter the data into. It’s still a discincentive, so I’m explaining two options. If you are computer literate, I have a spreadsheet you can set up. If not, hire H&R Block to do your return the first investment year and follow that pattern forever after.
This is the chapter where I explain that tax rates are misleading. When planning what to invest in, some people look at the tax rate. In reality, you don’t pay that much. The real amount you pay is calculated by doing your taxes twice, one before and one after you add the investment income. You’ll find your actual tax increase is much lower than what the book says. On the other hand, if your tax is higher, you are so rich you don’t need my advice.
