One year ago today: February 13, 2024, see explanation below!!!!!
Five years ago today: February 13, 2020, see explanation below!!!!!
Nine years ago today: February 13, 2016, I list the steps.
Random years ago today: February 13, 2007, become?
STAND BY FOR PHOTOS. GOOGLE IS MUCKING AROUND AGAIN. If you see photos, I'm hacking in from Venezuela.
There. Can you see anything?
The hack involves logging on from America, then logging on a second time to the same account from elsewhere.
Scratch my plans to sleep in this morning. Some bastard-rat named Scotty decided he wanted to send God’s message at 8:30AM. Gave me an early start on some tube-related e-mails. The usual is a smart-ass wanting to know if the tubes are tested. Duh, testing is for used tubes, not sealed boxes like ours, which are stamped “Factory tested”. Still, I understand there is concern over long-term storage, so my standard reply is I’ll test them—if they’ll commit to buying at list price if it passes. Good morning. Two coffees already. And I’m tired already. Let’s go do some yard work and build a box or something.
[Author’s note: EXPLANATION: I am flabbergasted. I did not know until tomorrow that exactly one year had passed on this lumber. Another anniversary coincidence that I cannot explain. There is no ulterior motive and no way I could even have subconsciously remembered these two events. I had walked over to look at some flowers when I snapped this photo, thinking only that I should check inventory. What adds to the mystery is I don’t see these coincidences until the following day. That picture was taken y’day, but I did not post it until today and same with the link to a year ago. Never looked at it until this morning (which is the 14th).
Then, five minutes later, it’s another pie, this time five years ago. What in blazes? This is impossible and you know it. February 13 holds no special significance to me. I have not looked at 2016 yet, this coincidence is still sinking in. Not just text of the lumber and pie, but pictures. Okay, let’s look at nine years ago.
Whew, 2016 was a day of study. These coincidences are exceedingly unlikely to be subliminal, as I don’t even become aware of them until roughly 24 hours later. By then, all conscious recognition has moved on, the more so in a life like mine.]
Enough projects are completed to have taught me not to hard-wire repairs like this, and as far as possible, make it easy to repair the repair. Those spades were nice enough to attach in the shop bench. Not so in the fading light of a wet and windy day, prime time for wires to go bad. I’m going to make up a crash kit of ten or so varying lengths, made up so they can be daisy chained in a pinch.
Are you wondering about the aroma? I’m making Texas chicken pie, this time with biscuit instead of pie crust. That’s the vegetables boiling in a little nutmeg and ginger. Don’t get hungry now, it will not ready until noon, and I left out the garlic. I have some you can sprinkle on later.
How about some replies to that “member” Schakowsky(?) who thinks women don’t apply for manufacturing jobs because the word contains “man”, apparently unaware it is Latin for “hand”.
1) no wonder we have a predicamentThe news out of California is that 57% want Kamala to run for Governor in ’26. The question is 57% of what? Nobody believes California polls any more.
2) this is what circling the drain looks like
3) and they wonder why they never get taken seriously
4) this is why women belong in the kitchen
5) they just get dumber every day
6) the small-hat community always finds something to kvetch about
7) everything worthwhile has the word “man” in it
8) then let them pick vegetables
US cities by number of strip clubs.
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Putting in a permanent starter switch took way longer than planned. Seems that is a given these days. It seems to be working without a glitch so I’ll crawl under there and put the heat shield back in place. A heat shield that faces the ground, it doesn’t make sense. The weather was perfect, later I got some things done in the shed. A few more boxes in the making and time to rig the deer camera again. Tracks indicate I have something under the house. It’s a raccoon, but we’ll call it a something for now. There have been foxes reported lately, but this is smaller.
Staying in for the evening, I took a closer look at loading coils. This is a component that is not covered well in the texts or on-line. Lots about how they work, but very little on how to measure them or use them It’s frustrating to see some neat circuit, then spotting that it calls for a 330mH coil and there is no easy way to find one. I’ve read about LCR meters and now might be the time to find out what they are.
We are getting quite a series of clear, cloudless nights and Mars is a nice bright dot. I imagined if there was travel to Mars in my lifetime, I would have been one of the first to volunteer. I don’t fear danger or death, but I am quite afraid of useless danger and needless death. I’ll explore the unknown but let somebody else join the army. I spent an hour on the budget, this is the new budget that allows for inflation. Like many, I’m hardest hit with gasoline, utilities, and food. Overall, things cost $181 more each month than a year ago. Of that $40 is gas, $41 utilities, and $51 food. The remainder is gobbled up by small but cumulative costs. Postage, reading material, household maintenance, and my phone bills have shot from $24 per month to $102. My $30 Internet service is now $64. Silver climbed just past $33.
I was reminded of this trip due to a few recent dreams of sleeping in the desert. Maybe five times total in my life, I’ve slept in open desert. Always comfortable, remember I could just fit ins the back of my Cadillac from so long ago. Other than once finding it too cold, it was not that bad. Not as cold as some civil servants will soon be, as Trump announces the layoff of thousands. Nobody significant is sorry for them, they’ve run roughshod over the taxpayer for decades. What’s hurting the most is they thought the Deep State would keep them safe. That they could passively resist Trump again. But they’ve been outsmarted. Trump turned the tables, cutting off their life support. So now foot-dragging just makes things harder on themselves.
“Tank Force”, a 1958 movie with Victor Mature. First time I saw the guy, but I know the name. A corny movie with a weak plot, it is a study on how not to fight a war with tanks. The two glaring errors are mass tank attacks firing on the move. This is the way some people imagine tanks fight, but you do not bunch your tanks up and drive toward the enemy. Tanks of the day were not designed to fight other tanks, that was the artillery’s job. And firing on the move, while great for morale, was wasting ammunition.
The movie kept me up late enough to see silver hit $33.99. A 15 year high.
ADDENDUM
Although on the first tune I ever played on bass, “Last Train To Clarkesville” was the first one I learned note for note from scratch, there were other firsts. I got to playing it this morning for a while. I was reminded the first tune I played and sang was “Spiders and Snakes”. This reminded me when I was 14, with the second “rock” band I started. That’s the one where I got to the Campbell brothers before the small town rot set in. It could be noted that this was the only thing those two guys ever did out of the ordinary, but anyway the memory that came back was from that summer.
There were two guys from a town 35 miles away who had heard of us and wanted to hear us play. When they stopped laughing, they asked to play something and it was what then to us seemed like a perfect rendition of Jimmy Hendrix’s slow version of “Hey Joe”. My band sounded like a group of untutored rubes to these guys because that is what we were. I realize now that the difference was they had somebody show them how to do it right—something I could not have imagined at the time.
What got me was not the music, but the way the two instruments played totally different parts. This was my first exposure to this, the only live bands I’d heard before were all playing at once and I could not hear the two parts in isolation. I had trained my bass player, John Campbell, to the best I knew how at the time, in other words, barely adequate. But let’s not forget I had created this working band out of thin air. Be reminded I not only got zero help, I had to fight a town full of do-nothings whose attitude was that I was out to them look lazy—why the hell else would anybody to what I was doing?
Funny that memory came back. I realize now that standing ovation for the “Last Train” song was really the pinnacle of my musical career. I’ve had moments since then but they were bit parts compared to that auditorium. For John Campbell, hearing that city-slicker play bass was a game-changer. It took his bass playing to the next level. He dealt with it funny, however. Because it was beyond what I could play at the time, he got to thinking he was the kingpin and, oddly, that he was the one who taught me to play bass. One more thing—that next level was as far as he ever got with it, I heard him six years alter and he had not improved a bit. I ran into my old singer 15 years later who confirmed that.
