One year ago today: December 26, 2023, millennial marketing.
Five years ago today: December 26, 2019, stopped to loot.
Nine years ago today: December 26, 2015, a smart or dumb move . . . .
Random years ago today: December 26, 2002, my “zero hours” report.
This morning I choose to review the year. Why? Because it has been the worst in ten years. I had rough times recovering from my wipeout of 2003 – 2010, but I thrived during that spell. Many features of my daily life now emerged from the productivity of those years of limited mobility and cash. You are reading one of them. But it would be naïve to conclude anything else was at a standstill. Since 2016, I’ve been a homeowner and the Reb has re-entered my life. That so many things went wrong this year means time for a reassessment. Work with me here, I can barely begin to cover it all. This picture only looks like a clock, it is a container.
During the time since I bought the cabin, I have truly retired in my many senses of the word. Do I feel accomplished? Only partially, I have been held back my entire life by lack of resources to do a fraction of what I wanted. It’s the same old story, to get the resources, I had to work, but work took so much time and effort, there still were never enough resources. And you wonder why I hate income tax. You think I don’t know the difference between what happens if you hand me or a welfare case some money? In the big picture, some might say that between us, the Reb & I have achieved one hell of a lot in our time, but it was not a co-ordinated mutual effort. She does not read this blog and I could not name you her movies or her albums. We’d both have to stop and go on-line. This is the end of a year that brought a lot of focus on a future that is not likely to exist for me or for us together. Simple as that.
Adding up the big events, I got the wind knocked out of me by events this round. The big ones you know, court cases, auto insurance delays, broken vehicles, medical issues, and even my most successful duo did not really get off the ground. And inflation really walloped my budget this year. You can pile $21,320 in surprise expenses on top of that. I can accentuate the positive, but that’s as helpful as it sounds like, it did not help with the taxes or the electric bill. I’m maybe not as bad off as those who did not plan ahead, but that is consolation, not income.
The tentative plan is to get work done on this cabin while I still can. No way I’ll be fixing fences or shingles even another five years from now. I already get more satisfaction building a wooden box than a robot. I’ll discuss changes with the Reb more as a head’s up that I may not be building her that carport. One thing we share is a disinterest in each other’s friends and co-workers, an indirect result of my perspective on the recording industry. I know it just takes one hit album, but I could not trade the years that now takes from just getting out there and gigging. Here’s some totals for history to quote some day, some of my total expenditures from 2017 to 2024. While I moved here in mid-2016, there was no proper budget until the following January.
Total major expenses have been food, entertainment, gasoline, and household, a total of $71,600.These are the bulk of my expenses and don’t account for auto insurance and repairs or smaller budget items like utilities. Healthwise, I’ve been on borrowed time for twenty years now and after seeing JeePee’s end, I may decide to build my own funeral box, which I might put inside the clock shown above. It is dimensioned for an urn, but I’m not fussy about that. It’s a $475 clock, but hey, at least then I would be of some use to somebody instead of sitting for eternity on a mantel somewhere. Sadly, it is a quartz clock and I would prefer one that ticks and would stop when nobody bothers to wind it. Hey again, it’s meant to be a memorial.
Food per year averaged $2,245.
Entertainment average is $3,100.
Gasoline annually was $2,045.
Household yearly was $1,202.
This led me to a site of mechanical clock movements, which I must find time to peruse. I would have to disable the chime. I recall 30-day clocks when I was young, but all I see now are pendulum units. Then again, that might be an incentive to keep it wound. It [the clock urn casing] is not very roomy and may not accommodate a mechanical movement. Just so you know, the urn cannot be opened once sealed, it fits into the back of the box, just the clock part opens. Strange they would not make the key wind it from the exterior.
Now I’m interested, look at all the clock material out there. Makes sense, clocks have been a major deal for hundreds of years in the societies that got civilized. Reasoning that the schools were embarrassed when so many graduates could not tell time on a dial clock, I looked up printable faces. Neat, over 40 sites with all the same material. That means nothing new in the same hundreds of years. The 400-day anniversary clocks would not be adaptable to this concept.
I once had one of those paper clock kits, but I moved and lost some of the parts. There are metal kits but the price tags are staggering. I found some dials that are metal on a square mounting plate. Maybe. The ones I liked had Arabic instead of Roman numbers. There’s something uncharming about digital clocks and one of them has been beeping randomly somewhere in my room between 8:00 and 11:00AM. It’s one directionless beep and then a series of fading beeps that’s gone by the time get near locating it. Today I found it. And old stopwatch with a near dead battery. It’s history.
3D house printing.
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Here’s the deer camera in action. You’ll have to return later for the good stuff. It works a bit too well. The water drip in the birdbath and this feeder in the wind can trigger the cameral Thus, in 48 hours, I got 530 files and that takes time to edit. The good news is I know there are finally some angles of that beige-breasted bird that moves much too fast for me to even reach for my glasses. We also have some nocturnal shots of this rather popular birdbath, but they are not birds. That amount of footage may take some time to review, but we want you back. Readership has been slow lately.
Thus, I recognized how broke I am this month and reverted to a long-forgotten but also long-remembered conservation style of getting things done that don’t cost a lot. One was buying two fence posts half price. I must make some hurricane repairs and put it off when posts went up to $8 each. I got chatting with the checkout clerk, who I recognized has a son in the army. She knows everybody so I mention my band is out of work. Um, she also said her husband, who I don’t know, has serious cancer. I don’t know the different stages, but I know once they talk about stages, it is pretty serious.
I loaded some supplies in the van and made my big purchase of the day, a small tray of staples for the pneumatic nailer. The ease of making that last box cannot be overlooked but it is not ideal. Example, the boxes are made whole, then the lid is sliced off. The best places to maximize the strength of the fasteners is right in the path of that cut. I viewed several sources comparing nails and staples to find there is no definite answer. It depends on the material being fastened and the spacing of the fasteners. I was able to conclude that staples work better for the wood I use. Superior to both is using screws, but that gets expensive and the need of pilot holes slows the process considerably.
Next, I ran into George, the guy who has an interest in robotics. He’s working a dead-end job, but intends to stay there since locally even those are hard to find. His situation is similar to Agent M when it comes to finances. One of the advantages of club membership is you get a plan that gets you eventually well-to-do using all the skills they don’t teach you in school. I’ve mentioned some of these, such as knowing what makes a proper report, the transfer-in formula, and how to avoid killer bank fees. It takes a couple years for most to learn the ropes, but this guy is a potential club associate, he certainly has the potential.
Then time to write three letters. It took hours. By late afternoon, I remember on the way home, the local pub was open, but nobody was there. Good, I walked in and had the entire place to myself. Cathy was on duty, so she was able to leave me there alone without worry, and I wound up staying a couple of hours, writing. And you can’t write without thinking, with the possible exception of chat lines.
Back home I read up on tests if the latest “active denial” testing. This includes devices that microwave the outer layer of your skin or ultra sound. One thing is clear, they are meant to be used against America citizens and not at the borders. No mention is made of whether these can be countered by mirrors or earmuffs.
ADDENDUM
Can’t say I didn’t warn about the importation of overseas doctors and engineers. Now we have an outcry against the H-1B program. It is not getting us highly-skilled workers, it is replacing Americans with cheaper and less qualified personnel. My standing boycott of Hershey products was over abuse of that visa loophole. The Demtards call them motivated, their only motivation is to get the hell out of India and Pakistan. I’ve been there, I’ve seen the conditions, and have little patience with those who have not. It seems Musk must have put in a good word for the Hindu workers. Everybody makes mistakes but old Elon shot himself in the foot this time. The reason you can’t get help is not because there are no American workers. It’s because you don’t pay a decent wage. This is modern America, a welfare state, not medieval England where you can starve workers out.
