One year ago today: June 24, 2024, fixing that Tennessee door.
Five years ago today: June 24, 2020, a squirrel war day.
Nine years ago today: June 24, 2016, a closer look.
Random years ago today: June 24, 2018, yes, but not a good show.
That wire woodpecker feeder has a large diameter (3-1/4”) that the peanuts are up to three layers deep inside. Watching the Downeys, they have to really peck to get the goods on that inner later. My plan is to dismantle the top part of the feeder and place a surplus plumbing pipe down the center, experimenting to see which size displaces the peanuts best into a single layer. The rest of the design is fine, the squirrel snouts cannot defeat the fine 1/4” mesh.
While measuring the shelf boards, I did a close inspection of the area where the house is settling. I had extended the laundry deck to keep the roof runoff away from the corner. It appeared to work but now I’m not so sure. This cabin does not have eavestrough, and I have enough new pieces lying around to attach then to that part of the roof, directing the runoff onto the laundry roof rather than the deck.
So downtown I went but what a difference. I can walk and at normal speed for several hundred fee before any pain. This might not make sense, but in a large store, I would get weak enough that rather than walk to another section, I would walk the usually shorter distance to my vehicle and come back another day to park closer to the other store entrance. Totally inefficient. Today, different. I got groceries, lumber, household goods, more groceries and a bad deal. You see, I bought the recommended six brackets for the eavestrough.
This morning’s pick shows me standing near where the damage appears to be. The clue is the blistering paint, but the whole building as a bit of that. There is some spray foam filler, but even closer inspection shows the siding is misaligned by uncannily the same amount as the interior finish. My plan is to jack it back into place. What if the water runoff was still finding some way under the foundation? Actually, I hope that’s what I find because I now have years of experience fixing this brand of problem once and for all.
I record all prices from years ago and the gutters were $7 per 10-foot section. The brackets today were $18. Like plumbing, the big expense is the pieces that join the rails. Rip-off. t was a short single efficient trip and I had the detective audiobook CD running. Other than what I don’t like, it is a well-written story and all the vague loose ends are tying up. And it is an excellent revelation of two groups I detest because of their “us-you” mentality. Cops and feminists. To cap the morning, I need a siesta but I’ll bring you up to speed on the plot.
The cop is shacked up with a lady detective, who of course has kept her figure past age thirty. The lady cop is set to investigate a series of unrelated deaths except that 7 of the150 victims were released convicted sex offenders. He is given a different case of missing persons cold cases including a fisherman on a lake near Mt. St. Helens when it blew in 1981. (I was in the area, but missed it.) It’s political, the candidate wants people to think their cases have not been forgotten. Our cop winds up infuriating relatives all over the place who wanted the matter to just go away.
One case is recent, a black guy convicted of rape was released a year ago on DNA evidence from the Innocence Project, but gunned down anyway. The link seems to be a nun seen near two of the incidents. Now, the lady cop is a board member of a women’s Sexual Assault Group. Her college roommate had committed suicide after being molested by her father. She talks our cop into attending the Group’s annual fundraiser. He gets a taste of his own us-you medicine as the entire membership is arch-feminist men-haters. But then something happens.
After talking with Mel (the lady cop he’s poinking) he spots that the entire group leadership of seven women have something in common. They were not personal victims, but rather were all related to a sister, friend, granddaughter, etc who had been raped and murdered. Remember the roommate? After she died, the evil father quickly cut off paying for her mothers medical support until she wasted away. He promptly sold the house and remarried in Mexico.
Many years later, the seven women in the Group took a charted plane to, where else, Cancun. Not far away was the evil father, who disappeared at the same time. The Federales treated it as a missing person until some months later a body washed up with the correct dental implants and a bullet wound in his back. By this time, Mel was a police officer and had been allowed to take her gun along on the trip.
However, we are on disk 6 of 9, so Mel isn’t really our suspect. Our cop is taking a closer look at the profiles of those other six women on the board. The arch-feminists. Meanwhile, witnesses, suspects, more relatives some former employees from the Boeing plant where the fisherman had worked begin either disappearing or killing each other. And it turns out the original dead guy never even liked fishing and was afraid of boats.
Before I take a well-earned siesta, I glanced at real estate. It’s a 2006 again by all outward appearances. Very few new guys and what sales take place are buyers average 58 years age. Prices are falling but not fast enough. And this time, there is no juggling the Fannie Mae books to disguise anything. One more difference. This time I have $50,000 to wave under their noses and can get my hands on another $50,000. I found the author Glenn Beck’s perspective amusing. He points out asking why homeowners are generally more stable and richer than renters is the same as asking criminals how they got into jail.
2025 G Wagon
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Jugging. The media is reporting this as a new crime, but it isn’t. A bank stoolie cell phones her home boy when a customer makes a large cash withdrawal. They follow his car and rob him at gun point. Jugging because mugging is taken and everybody in the ghetto knows a jug holds more than a mug. Probably the easiest crime to set up by a couple undercover cops, but the cops would want more money to set up a special operations task force and you know the rest.
That is plotting a course across the ocean. It involves a series of waypoints that use the great circle routing and avoids islands and reefs. And it involves using a magnetic compass unless you totally trust GPS. A chart tells the ship what direction and bearing to sail, then change course for the next leg. It was looking at this process that I spotted the similarity to picking two positions, which is what the sight reduction tables are all about. Now knowing what to expect, I went on-line and saw a guy doing just that, plotting a course using said tables. So it may have been some ordinary guy back in 1920 who thought, what if I had a list of all these bearings that may have changed navigation forever by working backwards to invent the sight reduction tables. He’s still be a genius, just now as out of the blue as I once thought.
ADDENDUM
If you’ve noticed slight variation in my posts as to indents and other paragraph markings, allow me to explain. First, I spell the date out long-hand. When I get busy, which has been know to happened around here, I miss some indents and presentation features like line breaks. The reason is I usually allow a maximum of 20 minutes to upload/post a given journal entry, which get composed off-line during the day when other people, well, what to they do? Watch TV? Waste time? Feed their cats? Work the on-line wordfinder? You tell me.
Ah, some say, but it does not take 20 minutes to blog a pre-written article. Um, yes it does of you do it right. Each indent, line break, and picture padding is painstakingly done by hand. Why? Because since Google swallowed up BlogSpot, the cranks over there have made some 30 unnecessary changes to the HTML code. (I might add they have foolishly tried to copy some features of this blog, like the indents, using Cascading Style Sheets, a trap I got out of twenty years ago.)
And put in your own date AND put it in the title field in a format you understand and can sort and find again. NEVER trust Google not to muck around with date fields. Do that, and you WILL lose your place as well as potentially some of your hard work. Only low-grade coders work at Google, you done been told.
Instead, knowing even Google is not imbecilic enough to deprecate (disable) original HTML text formatting, I add my own tags to override anything they try to pull, and they have pulled a lot of fast ones. Google is popular because it caters to idiots. And I do not always get it all my way, they have changed the picture padding format a few months back, meaning when they figure out that does not work and change it back, months of my uploaded pics may look off-center.
And 20 minutes is fast work considering this is officially an old-school text blog. Each picture requires a minimum of eight mouse clicks opening at least four different windows, and even that assumes your pictures for each post are neatly stored in a top layer folder. This 20 minutes does not include the time required to take the pictures (most you see are less than 24 hours old) and the whacked out procedures, cables, adapters, and download window boxes needed to get them off each different camera or phone.
