One year ago today: September 8, 2023, crackling knob anniversary coincidence.
Five years ago today: September 8, 2019, 36 years since we played.
Nine years ago today: September 8, 2015, refugees, my eye.
Random years ago today: September 8, 2008, that housewife crap.
A morning with the Dell computers, once again showing they are not real Windows compatible. Quirky as hell, left it running overnight to grab the drivers and it never got them all, leaving a “loading drivers” box on my home screen that cannot be deleted even by rebooting. Now the disk drive will not pick up many of my pirate disks, but I’ll work around that. We are aiming at a basic working unit, which is little more than a word processor, a spreadsheet, a music player, a movie editor, and the ability to burn disks as backup copies. Disk copies? Yes, because they remain the easiest to store and rarely require and all computers of the era have a reader.
I’ve been out to the shed several times already, checking on that Dell. As ever, it will take hours to get the machine to do anything useful. My precious install disk has all the basics just mentioned but don’t wonder away. The software is full of idiot defaults. At least, unlike today’s on-line installs, you could avoid these. What’s about to occur is placing, for the first time, these installs on a disk image. This follows the advice of the guy I told you about last week. He’s been using IMG Burn and has never had a problem. We did. Back in the shop days, we had a standard set of anti-virus programs (they were only beginning to call them “apps”) to install on every Win XP unit.
These had to be carefully matched so they would not spot each other as viruses. I have the distinct feeling some of you know what I’m talking about, and good for you. And when we tried to install IMG Burn, it would either set of alarms or clobber the anti-virus suite. The new tech assures me that has been cured. As for optical disks, they remain the backup of choice, which I will explain. We had been told by salesmen in the 90s that these disks would last a hundred years but had no way of proving they were lying. So why still use disks.
They are easy to store in the containers they arrive in. Most computer products don’t sport that luxury. They do last quite a spell and don’t mind getting wet once or twice. Easy and convenient to mail, and cheaper by the dozen. They don’t get lost as easily as a flash drive or land in the washing machine as often. But as for leaving them in the tray at the library, I can’t help you there, which is why my all my disks are encoded with a 13-character passphrase, chosen because it has the unique feature that I have never seen it in print and is rarely imagined much less spoken. If you try to guess it, you are already moving in the wrong direction.
By past noon, I’m still installing and those Dell disk drives are strange. I could almost conclude they have a DVD reader that won’t read CDs. I doubt such a device was ever made because the only difference is density, a DVD can read sectors seven times smaller. So it should easily pick up a CD. Instead, I had to crawl over junk in the spare room and find my old LG player (see pic above) which always works. Once more, I will have to run parallel systems until the new rig proves itself.
Haystack Rock, Oregon.
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Eight long hours on the Dell computer with time off for lunch & coffee only. We’ve got most of it, the final test is if it will pick up Internet signals. I installed the trusty old RALink hardware and software. I can see the local churches (“PrayDay”, etc.) so that’s encouraging. I’m inside to grab a DVD movie, I’m stumped why those DVDs won’t read CDs. I once saw a similar case where the mouse right-click button was seized but I’ve even checked for that. My productivity was always high because I line up other work to do whenever there is a lengthy install and in this case I test the two-slice toaster.
Honestly, I’m not feeling well, but we’ll carry on. I forgot to pay the phone bill downtown last day, but one does not pay the Boost bill in advance or they will find some method to raid it. I still have tubes to count but we are near the finish line. I have now logged 2,999 tubes with a suggested wholesale price of $13,260. They will never bring in that much money. We now have the information on which to base a decision and if I cannot sell in bulk on eBay, my proposition is that we sell to another wholesaler for what we can.
Meanwhile, my cabin continues to show signs of neglect over the years. The attic lights have quit working. And we have another super-rat, this one able to gnaw through the Homer buckets I use to seal items like birdseed and rice. He’s ignoring the live trap and we know what that means. The nearby photo shows the extent of damage in a few hours. I keep extra lids and this one was replace y’day. Why don’t I switch to metal containers. It’s Florida, those that don’t rust impart an unpleasant flavor to your food. The correct storage containers cost beaucoup bucks.
It’s now late evening and I brought the LG player inside to watch a movie. I’m at really low ebb, though I would point out it’s not to the level where I’ll do zilch all day. I get many times the exercise of a couch potato and I move around a lot more than some people exercise. The last time I handled a remote control was last March or something like that. I’ve been on a healthy diet for 21 years, my staples being rice and chicken, and the Reb’s influence means I’m half-vegetarian. So you tell me why the blazes I am so tired and so hungry.
My fingertips are healing and I was able to play a full set, mostly tunes that I’ve never played on guitar before. There is barely time to get familiar with the patterns. No, if you play bass properly, there is no one-on-one relationship to the chords. For all the times I’ve played the Eagle’s “Take It Easy”, until tonight I’ve never played it on guitar. I’m really having to dig back to find material. Try “Okie from Muskogee” and “Singing The Blues”. Easy enough to sing or strum, but put them together and my left hand does not always know the correct next chord. Too many times I play a C and the next chord is an E because I don’t have the muscle memory to make it a G. But no way I’m turning down $50 plus half the tips plus two free beers just because of a mistake or two.
ADDENDUM
That cactus stem that I cut down has been repurposed. Where the old back fence was removed, the corner post remains solidly embedded in deep concrete. I’m too lazy to dig it out, so I stuffed the stem into the pipe to provide a framework for the kudzu, which is rampant in that part of the yard. It would have an interesting time lapse, shown here the vines cover only the pipe, the stem is still bare. But not for long. Shall we have a blog contest. How long before the kudzu reaches the top. My entry is two months. Mark your calendar and we’ll see who wins. Might as well play along, there are no other big parties planned between now and then.
While these are not final figures, they vary little. Food remains my largest expense, followed by entertainment at $232, half of that being movies with the Reb. Operating my home office is $203 each month, half of that is media expense. Other cost categories are less than $100 per month each. And this year I spend an average of $295 more than on budget items, which is not bad at all, plus I don’t care about such overspending because it’s gravy to me. If there are surprises as I close the books, I’ll pass them on.
If November forces this country to put on the brakes, I am confident I can run my household for $950 per month, not counting the property tax. What good is luxury if you have to work so hard for it that it isn’t funny? Or like me toward the end at my cubicle job. After the initial ten years when my investments began to pay off and my student loans were done with, I found I had no time off to really enjoy what I could afford. So all I did for ten years was travel to Venezuela. Got to know the place. (That’s the gap in my blogs, 1991-2001.)
Lastly, way down here I bury the next instance of my own decline. This may seem morbid to some, but hey, I’m listening to a CD about a woman talking about pregnancy, should she tell her husband or wait until past the point of no return? My impression is she is going to talk the full nine months. Part of this blog was dedicated to mark the changes of retirement and that includes mentioning symptoms. Here’s an unknown instance. Years ago, as in 40 years anyway, I had a passing condition where my arms or wiping my brow produced a faint aroma of caramel. It’s back and it is not going away. If I pick up a hammer or reposition my ball cap, there it is. I can’t recall what caused it before, but it was something I later learned can become serious.
Most noticeable is from working with the computers, where I repeatedly pick up the same hard drive or tap the same keyboard. Again, it is not strong and not annoying, but it is there, lasting several hours. Figure that one out. The biggest change since retirement is my attitude toward money. Yes, I now think more like rich kids but that is tempered by the fact I worked for my money. This hints it is not entirely the rich kids fault, they just don’t know any better.. One thing I guessed right about is if you can set your affairs to just past where your basics are covered, it is then a good option to get out of the wage-slave lifestyle and take your chances.
I temporarily achieved this for ten years by renting at the trailer court, where I paid a fraction of what others paid in rent. It was this period I began to perceive changes in the way I operated. Not working every day freed up time to wheel & deal, as the outdated expression goes. As long as you get out of the constant struggle of paying overdue bills, you’ll find--if you have a modicum of gumption--your income actually goes up. It was living in the trailer court where I honed my skills at cooking real food, buying newer motorcycles, traveling more, saving up to buy this house, and generally living better than I ever had. But that hinged on having my basics covered, something most people I knew were equipped for by their families and thus took for granted. I mean, good parents don’t leave their kids empty-handed.. That also created a social gap that, despite recently converging behaviors, will always get wider. We may now act and think more alike now than ever, but don’t ever suggest we each rode here in daddy’s fancy car.
And it works well enough if you are willing to cut corners and mend your own clothes at times. Not working gave me time to develop my music show and a dozen other money-making or money-conserving stances. Musician or not, I would never have thought it possible to present a solo act before 2005 – 2006. I had done it at times, but not as a systematic plan. Remember, between 1996 and 2005 I still had money tucked away from my days at the corporation—you may also recall these were the only funds that survived the events of 2003 to 2005, cash money which I had hidden away from all prying eyes, but that is a different tale from the trailer court.
That chain of bad luck smacked me into the reality that I may never work again, which was very much a likelihood (and my only back-up plan) prior to late 2003. You can read this blog for the couched details of how I had to conserve, how I turned [having to] ride a bicycle into a positive thing, and still managed to go out every weekend and never bought myself a beer in almost ten years, over half of it as a house entertainer. Um, that includes my long stint as a bingo caller, and I gladly point out to the reader that this was some ten years BEFORE I took a penny in pension or retirement funds, which is a good chunk of what I live on today. You may recall the hours I spent calculating my options, that if I had touched my retirement plans early, I would be in rough shape today. It’s the final ten years before you retire that your plans pay themselves the most.
At this point, I should add the comment that don’t go out and try this yourself. Each circumstance is different. Can you cook your own meals? Do you have a calculated and tracked gasoline budget? You know what I mean. Remembering what the system did to me after 2005 means I no longer had a penny invested, so had zero income from that source. Don’t ignore this factor, as I am a very good investor and it was confiscation* (in its various forms) that meant I did not begin investing again (in financial instruments) until late 2022. I had tried small on-line ventures like the tax overage business and the publishing, both of which turned out to be buying a job.
I’m referring to negotiable instruments, like CDs (certificates of deposit) and Caltier, which rest purely on what you have, not what you do. And don’t be thinking the money for those came out of thin air. I’ve needed a new fridge myself for the past 8 years and so on.
* Confiscation, what do I mean? No government office actually took any of my money. They merely enabled others to do so. The DMV told them I had a Cadillac, the Bank of America told them I had investments, and so on. Within 24 months, I no longer had those things, so is that confiscation by any other name? You will get no help from the government without fighting for it. . You only think there is a government safety net to make sure you are never destitute. Wrong. You are due nothing just because you paid a slice of your paycheck into the system all your life.
In fact, the ability to pay in itself can and will disqualify you, ask somebody living in a tent these days. You cannot get government assistance if you have more than $2,000 in assets. If you need help now, it means you’ll have to liquidate everything at fire sale prices before you see a penny. Stop now and rethink what I mean by confiscation. You are allowed one house and one car, so you get the same amount as the millionaire who has hidden all his assets and who drives a Lamborgini. Ah, but would they not snag him when he goes to buy a new one? Nope, he drives the old one to New York City and leaves it running. Auto theft insurance payouts are not counted as income. While you are at it, see if you can figure out why the most stolen vehicles are Ford Rangers and Jeeps.
