One year ago today: April 17, 2024, expensive car parts.
Five years ago today: April 17, 2020, zero survivors.
Nine years ago today: April 17, 2016, at the bakery.
Random years ago today: April 17, 2023, this, before the deer camera!
Pancakes and coffee, today we get the hallway circuits working and after that, how far we get is a blank. Wake-up time Granny Raccoon, who has taken up residence under the laundry deck. I’ve decided on an $800 budget for the van tires, which is tougher than meets the eye. Why not just take it out of the $2,600 saved over the transmission? Simple, that money was partially stripped from other budget items that are now restored—less seven months of lost returns. Money and peaches do not grow on the trees around here. The topic link here is Trumps proposed strategic reserve. It parallels my operation, of which I’ll now hand the outside world a glimpse. (We are waiting for some neighbor to make the first loud noise of the morning.)
First, nobody would be given $110,000 to squander and hold their fingers out for more. Instead, for 44 years beginning age 20, they would have $5 per day put away in their name, but not their pocket. You cannot trust the average person with more than that. Like the reserve, they can see it but not touch it until they turn 65. This creates a pleasure in the torture most people would experience—the torture of their own bad attitudes because they are forced to invest it. I can attest to the agony of poor people watching that unspent money pot grow. There are a few other rules that say if you screw up, you don’t get your money.
That’s right. If you die from drugs, booze, and a host of poor-people diseases, you don’t get your share. It is divided up by the people who don’t do such things and it does not matter how you cuss that out. Money protected from grubby hands is 80% of your incentive right there. Because the money is not just put aside, it is invested . It is in their faces, reminding them like it or not, they have a stake in the system. It's clean up your act or you will never see it. Church attendance may plummet. This is only putting a face on a problem that has existed throughout history.
Computers make these individual accounts possible. What’s more, you can add to your account as much as you like, and also withdraw it, but never more than you put in less any income. The income stays invested, you can hear the AOLs screaming already. That would wake up a lot of people right there. Over time, it would make a full 20% of people into millionaires. The rest would still be a burden, but on themselves, not society. You see, there would be no social security, just their account. And that is how my budget and the proposed reserve have parallels. The $5 income per day would be there and protected no matter what. The longer you behave yourself, the more it piles up.
Finally, we get to this morning’s picture. The video clip [from y'day] does not show the effect of the stain very well. This photo is ordinary pine lumber showing work in progress. The two pieces to the left have a single layer of stain, rubbed and left overnight. It’s nice but does not add a richness to the grain. The piece on the far right has the second layer, also rubbed. The red takes on a brown. I find these reddish tones less pretty but they sure are popular. Ah, I just heard some prick start up a chain saw and it is just 9:00AM in the morning.*
This could be a challenge. Setting the camera close enough to record the small birds, but no so close the wind trips the motion sensor, which cannot be adjusted. Here is a picture that shows the camera and the relative distance to a bird feeder. Closer than this, the camera will run almost constantly and eat batteries.
Later, I did get in several hours, mostly on the wiring. One particular outlet too, over two hours and it is not done right yet. I would like to cattle prod the people who make that brand of GFCI with the screws that fall into the casing. You have to wire them holding the upside down or the wire won’t fit. Fine, if you have three hands. But, I got all the channel holes drilled and wirre pulled up to the center of the old kitchen where the spider wiring begins. There appear to be three circuits. One is the hallway lights, one is the old back bedroom outlets, and one is an enigma to be unraveled in the future, I suppose.
The radio said Trump signed an order that hospitals must post exact prices. There was a rule before but they got around it by posting estimates and then zapping patients with hidden fees. This could be a game changer. Hundred of billions of dollars here. I was overcharged around $36,000 back in 2003-2005. Lost my Cadillac and every bit of cash I had in the bank. I was saved because I don’t trust banks.
The former Dixie Chicks, I think.
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By early afternoon it was up in the 90°Fs, so I ducked under the shed roofs and round some space for the tools I plan to move to make room for the planer. This is the red scooter lean to. As you see, it is already wired with plenty of good light. But that is not a wall behind it, just fence panels. The work bench has to be lowered and the roof reinforced, or the next hurricane puts my tools into the next county
The plan is to leave the bench exposed on the saw horses and see if the longer piece are affected. The wood was propertly glued and clamped to spec or better. I find the smaller pieces can be pulled apart, but is it bad glue or wrong glue? Not enough coverage? The experiment will be conducted overnight, I’ll place some weight on the longer plants to see if that stresses the joint. I like that bench and we are not giving up. Adding fasteners increase the weight and I seek the source of the problem, not just a solution.
The contractors on the house up the road are not fooling around. I expect to see that house on the market soon for $265,000. This is where JZ and I would be today if he had stuck with the plan. I can safely place blame how because the race is over and we lost. By now, we would have been flipping six houses per year, all financed out of revenues or cash. The plan was already made and written out, this was no pie in the sky. Plus he’d be living here in a place of his owned and married to some local sweetheart.
It’s an oddball situation, the party with all the money had zero experience managing it, and I had a ton of experience with no money to manage. Well, I mean then, this is now but every penny in my coffers was my own, there is not one communal penny in there. Had we flipped houses as planned, there is likely to have been (I estimate) around $2.2 to $2.3 million by now. Alas, JZ did now see any urgency to the situation and now we are too old.
Now don’t fault the guy, many people who have never learned the ropes are in the same situation. Even if they inherit money or get some swank job, they have never crossed the right bridges. The toughest obstacle is getting over the fear of losing, a fear that is amplified when the money is earned by working at a job. I won’t give details, but it is damn hard to peel money off a small paycheck—and I also blame that on infrastructure. Such people are raised by parents who don’t teach or emphasize the nature of investing.
That’s how the cycle begins, parents who are all talk raise the same sort of children. Thus you get people reaching 30 years of age who know damn well they should have invested. But that is asking them to have faith in a crappy system that has never been good to them so far. My situation was no better, except for one tiny fragment. I planned 40 years ahead at age 28 to have a small investment base. So if all else failed, I’d still have something. Sadly, everything else did flop. I’ll say it again, successful startups since 1975 have generally required more money than you got, or incredibly good luck. That small fund is today the only thing that separates me from the wolf.
ADDENDUM
Here are my top comments concerning the woman who accidentally joined a search party looking for herself:
a) Left me standing beside myself.Apparently nobody recognized her until she complained about the food. You know who else is in the news that I don’t think is great? That Molly Ringwold. I’ve only seen snippets of her roles because she’s not that good-looking nor talented. Nothing against her, I just like my actresses to be total babes so exceptional it hurts. Why not, it’s a fantasy and to me, Ringwold represents the point where Hollywood began shoving these less-than-optimum types upon us. Don’t get me wrong, we know it is not a perfect world blah-blah, but that does not mean we want it shook in our faces. We get enough of that from the queers and gimps.
b) I hate it when that happens.
c) Did she collect the reward?
d) And she still couldn’t find herself.
e) How stupid do you have to be?
It’s same anniversary of her first movie or something and what invites my comparison is that, while she is older than my ex, she looks twenty years older. To me, it means even with the finest cosmetics available, she never had the basics to begin with. I’ve hung out at the malls in Hollywood and never cared for that Valley Girl image that shoved her into the spotlight.
I can now determine GP within a minute and today’s Sun is at N10°40’ by W132°11’, near a truly obscure island called St. Clarion. And it is way out there. Part of Mexico. Just over 7-1/2 square miles, it is uninhabited. There are nine Mexican soldiers stationed there, you charter a live-aboard tour since there is nothing on the island. Two brackish freshwater pools that often dry up will do you no good. Sealife is abundant, especially sharks, and there is a burrowing owl. Feral pigs have extirpated most nesting birdlife. This satellite photo shows the military base.
*some may notice the overkill of time expressions. Like “9:00AM in the morning”. There is a valid reason why this blog uses this method, which I developed myself. But I’ll leave it a mystery for you to solve. Hint, it has to do with bad Google algorithms, the inconsistent way others record time, and a realization of how mistakes and/or excuses are made.
