One year ago today: May 31, 2025, fun-with-boxes day?
Five years ago today: May 31, 2021, show me the contract.
Nine years ago today: May 31, 2017, $2,000 in “extras”.
Random years ago today: May 31, 2018, the noisy nail.
Up late last evening, I ran the numbers I described for my changed situation. While I had the spreadsheets ready, I made up a 50-year plan for a small retirement nest-egg for Agt. M’s eldest. This would be under my protection and shoot for whatever the equivalent of today’s $500 per month might be in on June 1, 2076. See addendum. That will be 60 years since I paid for this place. By the way, since I paid cash, every extra fee tacked on became an arguable point. In the end, this place cost me $20,021 before I moved in. Still, the last bargain in America but a revelation of how corrupt the industry has become. 10% of the house price is “fees” of some sort.
It stayed cool enough to work from noon and here is my output, three spice boxes. There are stained 245 Golden Pecan. I’ve discovered one tin of this free stain can coat six boxes, economical only if it is free. The oil has to be daubed on, you can’t get even with a brush and I do not spray paint. There is a fourth box, to the lower left not stained, it is a reject. The smaller wood is harder to work with. A 7/8” brad will not hold, a 1” brad has to be exactly positioned or it pokes through.
It’s wise to document what else went wrong, as this design is the most likely to get any attention for now. Exactly two boxes can be made from a single picket. These have to be 11% moisture and hand-picked at the lumber yard. Using the chop saw means the smallest pieces often must be cut first or they won’t span the throat of the saw. The boxes as seen here have odd optics, they are all the same color.
Here are some wildflowers after a short rain at midday. They bloom rapidly and die, never long enough for me to get attached or memorize names. I think these are a primrose and morning glories, see, I do not even know if they are proper nouns or hyphenated. Yes folks, a stapler. A bloomin' stapler. Get it, flowers, bloom, brain damage. No wait, that was my heart. Least that is what the after-staff told me.
Her Majesty.
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Here’s a closeup of the most-used took in the construction of these boxes. I now have the radio for company, but on Sundays the only reception I get is sports and religion. Today was car racing, a game I totally do not understand. One car gets ahead and stops the others until he runs out of gas. Some sport.
It seems the authorities ran into some well-armed rioters in New Jersey. Billing themselves as anti-ICE, they were equipped with brand new body armor, gas masks, and pepper spray—but when I returned moments later with coffee to capture pics, every picture was gone. There was a warehouse of gear to arm the protestors. Later arrest reports showed 84% of the agitators were from out of State. They were trained to pick up barricades and shove them at police, who had not been issued riot gear. Nobody expected the left to give up their power without a fight. Is this it?
Here is a small experiment that has an unorthodox impact on my appreciation of technology. This would seem just an everyday time lapse of clouds out my side door. For me, it is far from ordinary. The concept, time lapse, has been around for a century but not my capability to produce this little video. In fact, even ten or fifteen years ago it would have bogged down my equipment. This gif is from a video that ran the camera battery dead after 71,000 KB. It’s off my tiny Vivitar DVR 906, which did not exist until ten years ago. Nor did I have any memory that could deal with a file that size.
The camera is the size of a matchbox, if anyone remembers what that is. I left it on low-res to max it out and am happy the battery died before the memory, I mean 71 Gigabytes was more than the accumulated spreadsheets in my lifetime. The file format is AVI, meaning the audio and video are interlaced, which lets you cut and splice the footage in one step. MicroSoft editware is crappy, so played the file back at slow speed using VLC player to capture 1,016 stills. These 1200x1600 pictures were still immense, so I used MicroSoft Picture Manager (one of their few good products) to resize down to “web small” which is 448 x 336.
That is not the smallest, but is the smallest size you can easily see to edit further. I also cropped out the bottom third, which just showed a pathway. When a gif was generated, the resulting file was still over 50 MB. Thus, one final step, I reduced to the smallest “e-mail” size of 160 x 160, which produced the 12.7 MB file you see here. I sat back for a long look. Here is a novelty video that when I started this blog (around 2006), the richest man on Earth could not have created and displayed anything like this. And other than two or three people who can sort of work their digital cameras, I don’t know of any other person who, for the life of them, could generate what we just looked at.
Yet at noon, when I picked up the old Vivitar (too small for convenient everyday use) and deftly set it into the correct mode to produce this end result nine hours later, I never doubted or hesitated over a successful outcome because (at my age) I’ve learned every step. Sure, others could likely use a single software pack to rattle this off, but I draw the line at understanding—could they have done so with the varying systems I stepped through? Maybe, but I’d sure like to meet the person who could, nomsayn?
Again, I did not invent this procedure. But nor did I learn it from anyone else, and that earned me another cup of coffee while I stared at it. Seven major brands of gear or software to produce that pseudo-video in less than 20 minutes to upload something probably less than a thousand people will ever see. But that close to a thousand more than will see anything stuck on those mega-pixel cameras out there. Since the Vivitar proved it can deal with larger projects, I will see how well it performs in hi-res shortly. Those clouds were more picturesque than today’s resolution, so they are a good candidate for a repeat trial.
ADDENDUM
The 50-year spreadsheet revisits the two standing problems I’ve seen most in people’s long-term failure. One, they don’t know how to keep their plan and money separate from a greedy and desperate world. And two, they do not know along the way how well they are doing. You spend two years saving up $10,000 but have no idea how well that is performing. Prior to my hospital stay, I was about to write a lot of this down. In case you are wondering, if you have $10,000 saved up you should expect to make $43.41 per month. Go for CD interest, because below that amount you are losing, above that amount you are taking an unnecessary risk. I could have been writing the manual, then, ahem, decided to take a year off.
There is another sad-but-true factor. If you have $10,000 the other issue is your age.
