Cha- Cha- Cha- Changes (Part Deux)

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

Well, just ran into my first big gotcha on Live Journal. An entire entry just went away somehow. Not sure what I did, but about two hours of work is just gone. Anyway, what follows is a bad recreation:

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Monday night, right in the middle of the House Committee meeting, I told the board of Zephyrhills Moose Lodge 2276 to go fuck itself. I'd taken all the bullshit I was going to take. I'd been telling these jackasses not to make me the lodge Administrator, but it was easier for these lazy assholes to have me slide in by default rather than do the fucking job they were elected to do. It would have been different if it was some kind of emergency situation, but they've known for over 18 months that we needed a new Admin as the old one had taken a full-time job somewhere else and was doing the Admin work on nights and weekends. If we were a more-typical lodge of 40 members up in Elk Anus, Montana, that would have been OK. But we're a $1.3 million-a-year business with over 2,200 members just on the men's side of the lodge. When the old Admin decided it just wasn't working, everything should have already been set. Instead, it all landed on me.

We moved to the sweaty dick of North America for one reason only; keep track of my 80+ year old parents when they were down here in the winter and drive them back and forth to Michigan. All that was the first thing to go out the window. In fact, my parents felt compelled to buy memberships just so they could have fish dinner with me on Friday's. Otherwise, they never laid eyes on me. I never had any time for Debbie. All the work on the house came to a screaching halt. Hell, I couldn't even keep the grass mowed. It was just work and sleep.

Then my health started to go: Massive headaches that no over-the-counter med would touch. Eating was out of the question. Then the chest pains, shortness of breath and swelling legs. The best part was that I really couldn't do anything about it. I didn't have the time to go to a doctor, and the lodge doesn't provide health insurance for its employees, so I've been simply putting up with it. I'm sure that will end well....

A few weeks ago, it finally became offically-offical that I was the Administrator and the real fun began. There is a cabal on the board made up of the Governor Richard Riddling, Treasurer Dan Morgan and Jr. Past Governor Larry Robertson that is bent on revenge against the former Admin and his wife. Like cowards everywhere, they wanted someone else to do the dirty work for them; namely, me. At my first House Committee meeting I was too stunned by the unadulterated juvenile stupidity of the entire exercise to do anything. At the second one, I pushed back. Things got ugly very fast and I decided enough was enough.

So now I'm sitting on the sidelines laughing my ass off watching these fools scrambling around like ants whose anthill just got kicked over. I'm especially enjoying all the cries of, "Come back! Come back!" Yea. Right. It could happen, but only under my terms: One, the three people named above are off the board. That's non-negotiable. Two, I come back as temporary Admin while the remainder of the board gets off its fat ass and hires an Aministrator. Three, once the new Admin is in place, I go back to being the Admin Assistant.

None of that will ever happen, of course, so my feet are up while I enjoy the shit show.

Election Hangover

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

I stopped bothering to vote a long time ago, but I still get a kick out of watching the circus every couple years. Fortunately, I'm not alone. First up; Dmitry Orlov on Russian meddling:


and then some old-school George Carlin:


Look, it really is quite simple. Nothing you do can possibly matter. It used to be that local governments had some control, but Federalism is a long time dead. Any city mayor or state legislater who dares to defy DC will find themselves quickly brought to heel or squashed like a bug. Even at the federal level, we all saw what happened to Trump when he tried to end our pointless wars, normalize relations with Russia and slow illegal immigration. He was quickly set straight by the unelected bureaucracy.

So lower your stress level. Stop voting. Stop caring. Realize that in a thousand years, no one will know or care who was elected mayor of Miami in 2018.

Recycling to Armageddon

[Originally posted at LiveJournal]

While we were in Michigan for Debbie's family reunion, I noticed certain of her family members digging through the trash pulling out "recyclables". I tried to explain that since China, in retaliation for Trump's tariffs, had stopped taking imports of American garbage, and that as a result, the nation's "recyclable" garbage was piling up in port cities and "recycling" facilities. A great deal of it is going into landfills. The rest is being shipped to other Asian destinations who don't even pretend to recycle it; they just burn the stuff in open pits. But at least we get to feel good about buying water in little teeny plastic bottles instead of just installing a water filter.

In any case, I thought of that little episode while catching up on my Lee Camp viewing and stumbling across this sweet little bit:



Being an old fart from when all this was called "ecology", I actually know what that little triangle/arrow thingy with the number in the middle means. A triangle was used because it was supposed to represent a three-step process: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. In other words, step one is quit buying so much useless crap. Step two, when you do buy stuff, think about what it could be repurposed for at end of life. Then as a last ditch effort to keep it out of a landfill, find a way to recycle it. But being Americans, we were quick to realize that there is no profit in buying less shit or reusing our shit. Recycling, however, could be a multi-billion dollar corporate business that is only profitable because the entire population is guilt-tripped into being unpaid labor and most collection is taxpayer-subsidized. The new triangle/arrow thingy now means: Buy! Buy!! Buy!!! Buy!!!! (but only at eco-friendly stores) - Reuse? Are you nuts? What will my hipster friends think? - Carefully sort the result into the proper bins and tell ourselves what wonderful people we are.

The irony in all this is, as Lee Camp points out, we are using more resources and more energy with all this "recycling" than if everyone just went back to tossing everything into a trash can.

Taking the Plunge

Well, I did it. I paid the $20 bucks to see just what I can do with this thing. The first thing was adding the rest of my links over there on the right. The problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the Customize Journal Style without going into Help and searching on "link list". That seems like a cumbersome way to navigate, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how else to get to that page.

I'll get it eventually, I suppose. If nothing else, I'll have to ask the support types how to do it.

Anyway; the reasons we've been incognito for four months.

The first kick in the teeth was, of course, the death of Debbie's mom. We're still trying to get our feet back under us from that one. We do a lot of sitting and staring at nothing, not really interested in much of anything. So we were starting off from a pretty low baseline.

Then we had Debbie's family reunion the first part of August (her mom's family, natch). The drive up nearly killed us, then on the drive home, we ended up stranded with a dead car in the big booming town of Pioneer, Tennessee. We scrambled trying to get the car fixed and/or replaced, but we broke down on a Friday around 10pm and couldn't even get a tow until Monday morning. Meanwhile, Debbie's asshat boss was making threats about how she better get back to work ASAP. (More on those shitdicks in a bit.) We finally got the car running and managed to limp home, but we were both now so far behind at work and at home that it all seemed hopeless.

The next bit of fun was my boss announcing that he was stepping down as Administrator and was leaving the job to me. Understand that this has been the assumption among the members and the board, but I've been consistently saying that me as Administrator would be a disaster for the lodge and for Debbie and I personally. So naturally, everyone thinks I'm just being modest. No, I'm being honest, but to no avail. The process moves ahead with the inevitability of a freight train. If you see a mushroom cloud rising up from Zephyrhills, Florida, you'll know what it is. I'm not even officially official in the job yet and I already have a couple dozen people who refuse to speak to me. No big deal; they're mostly whiny pains-in-my-ass, but probably not a good sign about my future in this job.

Meanwhile, the prick owners of Debbie's place of employment, Cruises-n-More, refused to give her the time off she needed to go back up to Michigan to clean up her mom's affairs. Understand that this is a family-owned business. These people think nothing of taking off for months at a time to go take care of precious daddy when he gets a sniffle. (He lives in Hawaii; what a massive burden it must be for them....) Debbie told them back in May that she was going to need some time around the end of October or first of November. Once plans were final, Debbie gave them exact dates. They dicked around for three weeks before telling her, "No." So she quit without notice.

Personally, I wish Debbie had told them to piss off years ago. They've always treated her like shit, especially the sadistic spic bitch floor manager. And because Karma, Debbie already has a line on something making nearly twice what she was making that also includes health insurance.

So Debbie is up in Michigan sorting through her mom's stuff while I'm batchin' it here in Florida working 60-70 hours a week. Which pretty much brings us up to the present. Back to messing around with LiveJournal.

We Are Gone

Part of the reason for the long gap in posting is that what little free time I have has been spent looking into Blogger alternatives.

The short answer is that there are none that do everything as easily as they can be done here. The somewhat longer (and far less depressing) answer is that there are several that come close. One in particular, LiveJournal, seems to do enough of what we need to be able to shove off from this place.

The irony is that I'm going to a Russian site so I can say whatever the hell I like without having to worry if the sensitivity gods at google are going to screw with my post.

Anyway, just in case there are any readers left after my four-month hiatus, you can find us here.