Michigan weather is just surreal this time of year. Saturday morning it was in the 50's, then around 2pm the temps started to drop. It snowed during the night and has been in the 20's and 30's since then. It isn't supposed to warm up any time soon with snow and rain/snow mix predicted on several days. You gotta love this stuff.

I ran the house off the inverter for the first time Saturday. It works ok, except that the batteries are so weak that they only last an hour or so. The generator we are using right now can't handle the house loads and bulk charging the batteries at the same time, so in order to do any further testing, I need to find a time I can shut down all the power in the house. I can't do that now that it's cold again because I don't like the house getting cold. It takes forever to recover with the hot water heat. So things are on hold for the time being.

After that little experiment, I spent the rest of the day doing odds and ends. The bathroom is one step closer to being complete after I hung the towel rod and toilet paper holder, tightened down outlets and switches and put on the covers, etc. None of that sounds like a big deal, but it is surprising the amount of time it can consume. I did get one other big job started: we have a giant transformer that allows us to run the well pump off the inverter. I got that puppy mounted on the wall in the mechanical room. No little deal given that I did it myself and it weighs over 100 pounds. I was all ready to hook it up to the power panel when I realized I had picked up the wrong style circuit breaker. (Sigh) Always something. Of course, by that time, everything was closed for the weekend. With some luck, I will get a replacement sometime this week and can finish up the job. We continue to spiral into a solution to our power dilemma; maybe by the time we retire and sell the place everything will be squared away.

Politics:

I see our troops have surrounded Fallujah. That's step one to my solution I posted Friday. I suspect that we will send our troops into Fallujah instead of cutting off utilities and food until the residents of the town surrender those we want. That means that 1) our guys will get killed in the process and 2) the rest of the world will blame us for every Iraqi with a hangnail because we used excessive force in a civilian area. But there may still be hope that there are at least a few un-castrated males in our military command structure.

And Rudyard Kipling had something to say about the situation. For some reason, we think we can have the benefits of empire without the hard work.

On a different topic, I've been saying for some time that the reason that girls as young as 8 or 9 years old are dressing like prostitutes is because either their fathers have been castrated by their feminazi wives, or the divorce courts have removed them from their daughters lives, or they just disappear. In any case, I've argued that no self-respecting father would allow his 8-year-old daughter to parade around like a miniature Brittany Spears. Well, it seems I'm not alone. It' always nice to know that I'm not completely off the wall.

Medicine:

Certain recent events in my personal life have given me the opportunity to take a close peek at the pseudo-science of psychiatry. I've never had much respect for it in the past and nothing I've seen so far does anything to improve that opinion. There is now a 17-year-old girl labeled for life for being involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital, not because of something that was actually wrong with her, but because of the side effects of massive doses of psycho-active drugs prescribed by a "licensed" psychiatrist. The mind boggles at the doors that are now slammed shut for the rest of her life because she has been officially labeled as "mentally ill". I hope for his sake I never meet this "doctor;" he was essentially running an uncontrolled experiment on the brain of a 17-year-old girl.

And I need to get some work done.