One year ago today: March 10, 2024, idiocy is a right.
Five years ago today: March 10, 2020, I liked that car.
Nine years ago today: March 10, 2016, me being crabby.
Random years ago today: March 10, 2009, best jam of 2009.
We had a weekend to remember, would you not agree? Now the aftermath as I chronicle how I get along. I know as well as you how I’ve slowed down and how thoughts have replaced physical events in this work. Up to 2017, I was more concerned with daily events that stood out but who cares why other than how I dealt with it. Things how take much longer and I don’t like that part of it. The yard is alive with birds who know it’s getting hot and I get to work under a nice cool floor. I’ll record some symptoms in the addendum. Right now it is a cream of wheat breakfast, with cinnamon instead of my usual nutmeg.
But not the women in this photo, from of all places, the university town I visited on Saturday. Last time I was in Melbourne, I never thought to check out the university, as the connection had not clicked on in my brain. I had once looked at this school back in 1984 and quickly forgotten it. This was the school that prompted the book “Coffee, Tea, or Me”, a 1966 exposé on the wild sex life of international fly-girls. It is best remembered as the first program shut down by feminists who did not make the grade.
It’s phone bill time. That’s it, I went downtown, bought some groceries and right back here. Exhausted. As ever, I will try to get something accomplished but I flaked out easy. I’m fine, but at some kind of limit. I made up a big frozen strawberry-banana smoothie (it’s already70°F) and looked up the address from the Palm Beach Maker Faire. It is not a town called Evans, but part of the big laboratory group out of Ohio. This is encouraging. (The Prof referred to the address as DSL, but my age-old training said that meant “Digital Subscriber Service” from my old phone company days.) They call themselves a Digital Scholarship Lab, and as suspected, the design department is wholly separate from the actual printing tech.
The guy did not write down his name, so that’s delay. The offerings of the school are a reflection of the sorry changes that have sunk America so low. Does the lab offer courses on how to 3D print the latest heart valves or aerospace design? Nope. The best selling program today is how to print up sections of a rock-climbing wall. This is part of a larger decline. While the customer was never king as was so often said, 30 years ago a large part of business success was providing what the customer wanted. No not more.
Often these days you can walk into a store and feel the crush. The focus is no longer on quality or service. Those have become empty sales pitches. The emphasis has shifted from what is right for the customer to what is right for the business. A robot answers the help line and empty product guarantees spell the end of the “American Way”. The world today makes fun of that label and it serves America right for not leaving well enough alone. We had it made, but then we let the fat, stupid, ugly, lazy people take it all away.
When the Prof described the lab as “north of Melbourne” I mistook what he meant. Turns out it is part of Florida Tech, the big university in Melbourne. The last time I heard of this school was in the 1980s, when it was known that airline stewardesses, as they were then known, were paid twice what I earned as a satellite technician. Stewardesses (the longest word you can type with your left hand) were like goddesses, they had to be single, slim, childless, and had to retire by age 32. They were also 100% White. This made them, once you got out of high school, the largest and most desirable pool of women anywhere in the world.
Texas ghost town map.
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The owner of the local phone store was on duty today and we talked about the 3D printer. He’s been hit with lots of the woes facing small business as the economy recovers. He has run into the countless barriers I’ve spelled out in this blog, but is the only person I know in his age bracket, his twenties. When he moved here a few years ago, his house rent in Lakeland was $700 per month. Blackrock swooped up the whole neighborhood and raised the rent to $1,600. He is moving to, look out, Ft. Meade, which is the armpit of Polk County, and the last place to find reasonable rent as that town is dying.
Nor has he seen one of the lasers, yet he’s in the age group that you’d expect would have much interest. But I missed out on the same account at the same age,. Dang, I should have took a picture anyway at the show, but they were too watchful. I think it was due to cheerleaders present. Here is the closest picture I can find to the cutting apparatus. This is a toy compared to the unit I saw, which had a bulky attachment the size of a welding machine and a computer graphics setup to control the print nozzle. Here we go again, once more I encounter a technology you’d think was commonplace—until you try to find somebody who knows anything about it.
The display included some cut glass designs and 3D carvings into flat surfaces. The unit I saw was not the laser he said could do the job, which was (I think he said) 150 watts. His undivided attention I did not have, especially once the family of brat kids learned he could sap their name on pencils. Part of the popularity was the machine produced fast results in a room that was otherwise 3D printing. This video showing various laser cutters, while informative, is also the reason I’d rather let somebody else handle that part of it. Each laser has something it won’t do—and we’ve learned how honest the Internet bunch is in that department. Some cannot even cut paper without setting it on fire—but just you try to find out which ones.
Have I missed something big in the news? The Leftoid media has begun a barrage of announcements that Trump and Musk are losing support. That’s nonsense, so it could be fake but such blitzes usually accompany some favorite libtard talking point. Let me check the feeds. Hmmm, Trump has signed an order requiring anybody who files an injunction against a federal order to put up a bond that covers the entire cost of the proceedings if they lose. That’s a big ouch for the Democrats.
ADDENDUM
Reminding you my physical conditions are recorded here solely for my own archives, I have not slowed down as much as my physiology tells me. Over the previous several months my shoulders and upper rib cage have “loosened up”, making me generally more limber. I’ve said how I find myself doing work I should not, and that includes allowing for my bad back. There seems no reason for this improvement now. No other factors have changed, same diet, same coffee, same everything except I now regularly find I’ve worked longer in a day than planned.
Aware that any such gain comes at a price, I’ll describe the sensations, since they are a concern being close to my ancient heart. It’s a feeling as if I’ve been tensed up maybe 10% for years and got used to that being normal. I emphasize, this is a perception only, more like I had to exert slightly more because my torso was operating against pressure. And that pressure was subconscious until it apparently was not there.
There is pain, but a mild sort of muscles that have not been used, which is not the case with me. The pain is also internal, more like how one’s arms might feel after putting down a heavy weight. The worst element is my knees, they don’t like to obey small commands as before. I instinctively grab onto things to stand up or balance myself, but nothing I’ve not seen in others. I never thought how I sit down to pull on my trousers or put on socks as the change was so gradual.
Other symptoms are rare. No heart problems. I get a slight gout-like attack in either foot now and again, lasts maybe 20 seconds but I remember that pain quite well. Same as before, there is nothing in my diet that the medical journals say is associated with gout, but I still got it. I have a couple enlarged skin moles the doc says is harmless and confess I have not seen a dentist in nearly 30 years. They would want to replace all my fillings, for sure.
Admitting that the game is over and while I did not lose entirely, I did not win either. The American dream of a nice house full of grandchildren has been denied to a lot of people, in particular those born too poor before 1965, when America began spending money like a drunken sailor. I took pause this morning to mentally run over everybody I could in this life who owes me anything, and I realize I was mostly foolish for ever expecting much in return. Naturally, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now, to ever get anybody to even do me a good turn there would be two impossible conditions that must be met. We are talking about all the people in the world who owe me favors. They would have to be in a position, both financially and physically to give me a hand. That has never happened. And also, they would have to be still be alive. I’m it folks. When I’m gone, it all ends. I have one last big commitment and it is going to cost a lot.
As I said, I have a Will but this blog needs to serve as my Testament. I mean, what could I ever to do now, after all this, to sum things up enough for a Testament? I grew up in a different world that would have been paradise if it had just been left alone. Now, we’ll be lucky to still be on the radar in another twenty years unless we cull the herd.
