One year ago today: March 15, 2024, shower time.
Five years ago today: March 15, 2020, Frump City.
Nine years ago today: March 15, 2016, I hate NASA.
Random years ago today: March 15, 1997, remember mobile ATMs?
You’re up early. By 9:00AM the sun was over the neighbor’s barn and warning my shoulder blades as I help myself to coffee. And wonder why my blog readership y’day was eight times higher than normal. But, we know these events happen randomly and don’t wonder for long. I see the navigational item was popular, this is something you can do yourself. It is a simple calculation of glancing at your clock and recording the time. You use an on-line almanac to find the Sun’s position on the even hour, then add for the minutes and seconds after. The result is that single spot above the Earth’s surface where the Sun was at that moment in time. (You can do this for any time in the past or future.)
The red 30-ton jack is visible here, with a plank across the top to bolster the crumbling sill plate. The presence of the plumbing pipes betrays this as the source of the dry rot and termite damage. It looks bad now, as I did a hasty repair in the early days. There is a budget now to do a property job. There were some wooden blocks where a previous repair had been made, but they were useless once the plate warped and I’ve already knocked most of them away.
This is the view from the exterior, the damage is fairly extensive. I could use a jack-all if they still make them. Most of the wood seen here is not doing any good. Note the zig-zag plumbing job I had to do back in 2019. I knew this would come back to haunt me. Chances are, now that I have money and experience, I will replace the whole shebang.
And all this while NPR was on another one of their asinine propaganda blitzes. That’s where every few minutes of every broadcast they slip in a comment pretending that some controversial issue is an established fact. This morning it was the COVID hoax again.
They must be the only station left that accepts money for this; others have smartened up. “Climate experts are unsure how badly today’s weather has hampered the Biden administration’s efforts to distribute COVID vaccines.” Worst are the constant “now that the COVID pandemic is under control” twenty times an hour, the way even the announcers are annoyed. The John Deere tractor is gone. Some guy offered Tex (we’re still working on his nickname) $100, I said take it. Now to get rid of the Town & Country, I lost money on that one. But now I got $100.
By noon I had moved those eight large planks and wore myself out. I sat down and went over some of the sites selling wood boxes. If you watched the Bearded Viking videos, do not be influenced by the prices quoted, I just point them out for effect. I doubt if most of that stuff sells for half the list, but you don’t have to sell many at full price to make your day. Tex does not sell on-line for the same reason as most—they make it too much of a runaround and the sales are never cash.
Trump is talking about eliminating all tax on incomes of less than $150,000. I wonder how that will affect taxes. It would seem Biden was implementing departments to do nothing but track ever smaller businesses. It looks to me like the business community has now recovered from the 2020 shutdowns of most cash flow operations, that was a disaster but this is the USA. If there is a dollar to be made, something is chasing it since last week.
Is the stock market crashing? Or adjusting to its true value? And why don’t space landers have some mechanism to stand back up if the lander tips? It would only have to be used once or so. As many as six Presidential decrees appear to have been signed by autopen while Biden was out of town, casting huge aspersions on his administration. But so far, zero arrests. Democrats have flipped from mandating electric vehicles to vandalizing them. Shameless hypocrites.
I also went over the alternative sight reduction procedure used for navigation. Nope, too finicky, I’ll stick with the air navigation method.
Street carpets, Sensuntepeque.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
That last picture should give you a good idea of the dirty, dusty work this entails. Here ia a picture of the first joist almost in place. It’s the new piece of wood diagonal top left to botton right with the clamp holding it in place. You are looking at nearly three hours of work and this is the easiest joist. I think the best thing I could do to speed up this job is to put my coffee maker in the van and drive it out to Bartow, then donate it to that Thrift that always closes before I get there.
And so you know I’m not all work, here is another box that will shortly be completed. Where did I put that laminate router that would be good for hinges? My work is beginning t match what I view on-line better, these panel boxes are now easy to run off in a few minutes. I make two models of these, one with the panels, you can see the slots here. The other is solid wood on all sides, these are meant for valuable items. My plan for this evening it to stay at home, drink hot chocolate, and find a good old war movie.
Back inside, the wind is picking up, so I read and studied a bit more about Sight Reduction tables. They represented a giant leap forward in ease. I must admire the task of early navigators who did this by hand, it must have been a days work indeed. Up to now, I’ve used the tables without that much understanding, which is probably the way 95% of navigators use them. The confusing part is a little number called “d”, which I think of as distance. It is the adjustment done for the slight change of position of your coordinates when your readings are not taken on the exact hour.
Now I understand why it is important to know if your GP (position of the Sun) and your AP (assumed position) are in the same hemisphere, or “contrary” as the Almanac calls it.
ADDENDUM
I was amused to find a complaint by a major Gab influencer. The background here is that somebody had posted that she’d had a major breast enlargement. Normally, fakery is considered entirely normal by today’s generations but in this instance it was considered wrong due to her constant posts about telling the truth. Here’s her beef, and it is not what you think. There is a billion-dollar industry for women to look younger and you can read into this [that] the motive is to attract better men. Hold that thought and continue.
This gal posted a picture of herself at 26, and yes, she really does look 16. Her complaint? That she was attracting creepy men who thought she was 16. So there must be some arbitrary age at which women must not look or their plan to get more men collapses. Or, you might say, even women who get what they want will always find something to crab about. What a thought-provoking eye-opener on human nature.
Mind you, it works both ways. Saying she could have used that situation to find the perfect man is reflected by the how men try to find a young, pretty women. It would appear when men succeed at that, they are happy. Women, not so much. I relegate my status to just observing, but yes, I have issues with age. It is hard-wired by evolution, that most men would rather put up with a little immaturity than with what most women turn into. I spent a lifetime looking for an exception. But that’s another tale from the trailer court.
