In Memoriam

Tony Boris: February 9, 1944 to May 20, 1992

Leo Boris: April 11, 1938 to May 25, 1992

It's hard to believe it has been over 20 years; it still seems like yesterday. The pictures of Dad and Uncle Leo are of them doing what they always loved to do more than anything else: Dancing with all the pretty girls.

First Fruits

Not technically the very first, but Debbie grabbed and ate the first one before I had a chance to get the camera:

Fresh from the garden and still warm from the sun.

Turns out that tomatoes are difficult to photograph. At least with our camera. The stupid thing refused to focus for some reason. Out of a dozen shots, this was the best of the lot. It worked fine the last time we had it out, so I likely need to take an hour or so and check every button, knob, switch and menu setting to see what the deal is. In any case, we have our first-ever home-grown tomato for Debbie to munch on.

When I'm not pouring gallons of water on our tomato plant in an attempt to keep it alive, I've been working on the insulation in the Florida room. I had to pull out the old, moldy, insect-infested open cell foam, clean up the black mold, seal up the hundred-and-one places I could just look outside through the wall, and remove most of the electrical wiring. But it's all in and already making a big different. I'll be putting in some wood so I have something to hang drywall from, then adding another inch-and-a-half of polyisocyanurate in the wall cavities. That will give me R-14 walls. Then some plywood in key spots to increase the odds that the place won't fall over in a wind storm, level up the rest of the wall with still more polyiso, then the fun stuff: Drywall. Ugh. Might hire that done....

Here is what it looks like so far:

The worst part was working around the hot water heater. I told the installers to leave me some room, but they were a bunch of skinny kids. I should have specified that I needed old, fat guy room. It took a lot of gruntin', sweatin' and cussin' to get that foam back there.

Oh, and if you wonder what happened, I've already deleted my Facebook account. It took about a week for me to remember all the reasons why I got off the worthless thing in the first place. The kicker was when it wouldn't let me log on until I retracted friend requests that had been out there "too long". I know this may come as a shock to a monomaniacal douche-nozzle like Mark Zuckerberg, but not everyone lives on Facebook 24/7. It could take two or even (gasp!) three days for someone to acknowledge a friend request.

In any case, I'm done with it. Again. Movin' on.

And those of us that are considered outcasts in our park have formed ourselves a little club. This should be fun. Most of what will be at that site will only make sense to the half-dozen year-rounders that live in the Evil Corner, but feel free to take a look.

We made a quick trip over to Epcot today to trade in our old-school paper-with-mag-strip annual passes for the ultra-modern, high-tech plastic-with-proximity-chip cards. Now we can get in line with the cool kids. It was about 90° when we got to the park, so after a couple trips through the single-rider line on Test Track: Tronitized Version, we decided we were done and headed for home. Now its nap time.

...and the Drama Continues

I think I started something. It needed to be started. The kerfuffle now involves about a dozen of us back here in the Sweetwater Evil Corner (SEC). Dale continues to pile lie on top of lie trying to cover his ass. The SEC Club had a meeting this morning going through e-mails and such to much hilarity. Good times.

We had our own bit of adventure yesterday trying to get building materials from Home Depot to our house. When we pulled into to parking lot, the rental truck was there. Being a Sunday, there was a pretty good chance that it wouldn't be, so we did a little happy dance, ran into the store and proceeded to buy $550 of building materials, none of which would fit in my stupid soccer-mom "SUV". When I went to rent the truck, I was informed that the truck was broke down. Crap. I asked about the van, which was also in the lot when we got there. Someone had just rented it and wasn't going to be back for at least 4 hours. Double crap. We had some other running to do, so we took what we could with us and left the rest at the store as a will-call. After we were done with our other running, we swung back by on the off-chance that the van had been returned early. Not only was the van not back, but the "broken-down" truck had been rented out. WTF?!?!?

So we got back here to the trailer and called up a fellow member of the SEC Club to see if he had time to run me up there in his truck so I could get my stuff home before Home Depot closed. He did, so we did, then a couple other SEC'ers came back and helped to unload everything. So it all worked out and now I have everything I need to get the Florida room ready for drywall. Today I had to take a break from inside work to mow the lawn around our place and the neighbors, but I should still be able to make some major progress over the next week.

That's it. Once I've done something visible, I'll post a couple pictures.

Tried to Meet the New Park Manager...

We've been without a park manager since the last one disposed of her replacement, then retired and left the state on vacation. Carefree found someone to take over and they showed up sometime this week. One of our neighbors went up to the office to say, "Hi," and found out that there was a meet-and-greet with free food yesterday at 4:30. The person, lets just call him "Dale" for now, who was supposed to tell us about it had failed to, which is part of a pattern. See, we live in the "evil corner" of Sweetwater RV Park, according to Dale, so we didn't think much about not being invited. As we had been invited by the park manager herself, we went anyway. Well, this is what Dale posted on the park's Facebook page this morning:

81 carefree bingo players from Zephyrhills welcome our new manager at bingo night May 9th,2013. Despite an additional 14 non players (95 total) there was still plenty of food and drink. We welcome Kate Pierce to our park.

First of all, only about five of the bingo players were from any of the three Carefree parks (notice the capitalization, Dale), of which Sweetwater is one. Everyone else comes in from all over the county just to play bingo. They pay, so that's not a problem, but why would the park manager of Sweetwater want to meet a bunch of bingo players from outside the park? And why are the "14 non players" (guess they haven't invented the hyphen yet where you're from, eh Dale?), every last one of whom was actually from Sweetwater, being treated like a gang of gate-crashers when we paid for the damn food?

Here is my response on FB. I'm sure by the time you read this, Dale will have deleted it:

Sorry we crashed your little private bingo party, Dale. We thought as it was a meet-and-greet for Sweetwater's new park manager that it would be nice if there were at least a few people that, ya know, lived in the park? That and the insignificant fact that Kate herself invited us. But if we were soooooo much of a problem for you and your little bingo clique, I guess you can take it up with Kate.

If all this sounds like middle-school drama, you're not far off. Some people seem to regress mentally and emotionally as they age. Good times.

Northern Michigan Time Lapse

Spock v. Spock

For any nerds out there:


Neither of us have felt well this week, so it's been a bit slow around here. Debbie is at the doctor today, and I'm supposed to be running electrical in the Florida room. Instead, I'm watching internet videos....

Yep

Living in Florida, you deal with this multiple times every day:

Men are generally stubborn and it only gets worse with age.

Edited to add:

Updated Pics

I haven't posted a picture of our Simon and Garfunkel herb garden (plus tomato plant) in a while:

Looks good except I planted waaaay too much parsley.

So far, everything is doing well in the Florida climate. Summer may be a different story.

And a couple pics of the inside of the Florida room, which still looks like a construction site:

Finishing up on the inside so we have something to hang drywall from.

Cutting and fitting all those little bits of wood is a real pain; it takes forever and doesn't look like you've accomplished anything. But it's finally done. I still need to sort the electrical out; it should only take a day, but I'm sure there will be surprises. Big, ugly, nasty surprises.

We'll get settled some day. Maybe.

From the if-there-is-any-doubt-the-universe-has-a-sick-sense-of-humor department: Just because I was whinging about how dry it has been here, it has been raining pretty much since I posted that. Not a bad thing for the garden, but I need to mow the lawn again after just mowing it on Sunday. I'll be happy when there are more beds and less lawn.

Another Week Slips By

I'm not sure what we did last week. My entire to-do list is still sitting here with all the same stuff on it. I spent some of the week at work digging out from the mess of tax season. There is a ton of work to do, and I could work pretty much as many hours as I want to, but I think the boss-man doesn't want to pay me to do it. When I left Friday, he just said he would "call me and let me know." I hope he doesn't think I'm just going to be sitting here in my office clothes waiting by the phone five days a week for him to call and tell me someone wants a tax return done. (I've already had several such calls since the 15th. Sorry dude; I have a life.) He mentioned something to me about working for a percentage of the returns I do in the off-season. Sounds good as long as when I'm there, he isn't expecting me to stick around all day doing his filing and dealing with pissed-off customers. Anyway; it will probably all come to a big nothing like most other things. Everyone is very excited to have you work for them. Their enthusiasm noticeably wanes when you make it clear you expect to get paid. Which would be fine; I could use the time to keep working on the Money Pit we live in.

I did manage to get all the stud work scabbed in on Thursday. At this point, there isn't anything that needs to be done before the siding goes up. Other than hitting the Lotto so we can pay for it; that whole people-expect-to-be-paid-for-the-work-they-do thing again. So it's only financial roadblocks at this point rather than logistical roadblocks. And our bathroom carpet sporting a permanent wet spot for the last three or four days probably isn't going to help rid us of that financial roadblock. The bright spot is that I've been looking for an excuse to rip the carpet out of the bathroom since we moved here. I hate carpet in a bathroom. That has to be the most disgusting thing a person can do in a house. Understand, I lived for several years with a composting toilet; I know disgusting. That isn't even in the same ballpark as carpet on a bathroom floor. So first thing tomorrow, out goes the carpet so I can a) find where the water is coming from and b) stop getting sick to my stomach every time I walk in there.

I should probably take some photos of the planting bed out front. The herbs all seem to be doing well so far. We'll see how much Florida heat it takes to burn them down to the ground. It ain't helping that we're in the middle of a Phase III Extreme Water Shortage. So far, the "wet" season has produced a single rain storm while the temps are spiking up to 90 every day. We're only allowed to water with the hose on Friday's before 8am or after 6pm. Other days, we have to use a watering can, which takes over an hour. We added a single tomato plant last weekend to see if I can make fresh tomatoes for Debbie. It's still alive and has a half-dozen-plus green tomatoes hanging on it. We'll see if they ripen up, if animals/bugs will leave 'em alone, if they taste like something other than cardboard, etc.  If I can get some yard work done this summer, we may try tomatoes again at a somewhat larger scale in the fall.

Well, Debbie wants to go for a bike ride now that the heat's died down a bit.

Nailed It Again

Scott Meyer has been on a roll lately:

Still trying to catch up from tax season. I've been either on the road or sitting in various waiting rooms all last week. Except when I was working; I got more hours last week than I did for the last week of tax season. As of right now, our bikes are fixed, our car is fixed, I've been lab'ed and doctor'ed until I look like a pin cushion and our bank account wiped out. Today was the first time in over a week when I didn't have an alarm set for some ungodly butt-crack-of-dawn time. I celebrated by sleeping for more than twelve hours.

Today is more catch-up: planting Debbie's poor tomato plant that's still in its plastic pot, mowing the grass, trimming, raking (if it will stop raining long enough to accomplish any of those), and continuing to pick away at getting all the stud work done in the Florida room so we're ready for siding. If I can slow down my work schedule, I may actually start feeling somewhat caught up sometime next week. Assuming nothing else breaks or goes sideways either here or at work.

And I'm off to make bread.

Paolo Soleri, RIP

Paolo died on April 9th at the age of 93. He was the designer of Arcosanti, where we lived for a year after completing the workshop program. While we were there, Paolo could still be occasionally seen on the end of a shovel, but a while back, we heard that he had been ill and had stopped all involvement with the project to "focus on his writing." I assumed then that his passing couldn't be far off. I couldn't imagine Paolo hanging around for any length of time as a semi-invalid.

We had the chance to talk to Paolo several times during our stay at Arcosanti, but we can't really say that we knew him or much about him. I'm not sure anyone really did outside of a very small circle. But I can say that he was certainly a unique human being with a gift for pissing people off. I haven't met many people I would label "genius"; Paolo was certainly one of them.

I just went to Amazon to see if I could scare up a copy of his book, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. No new copies available, but a used one in paperback is a mere $438.19. That didn't take long. I hope they do a reprint of the hardcover edition (the paperback was crap and fell apart the first time you opened the cover). I wanted to get a copy while we were at Arcosanti and never got a round tuit. It would be nice to have a copy, but not for the price of a used car.

Paolo was buried next to his wife on the Arcosanti property. I remember one of the times Debbie and I were wandering around when we were there for the workshop. We had crossed the Agua Fria River and climbed to the top of the mesa next to the one Arcosanti is built on, when we came across a small, fenced-in area with a padlocked gate. Inside was a bench and a badly-neglected garden. Everything was long dead other than native pioneer weeds that had reclaimed the spot. By then we had gotten used to stumbling across odd bits that someone had invested time and money into only to have it abandoned to the elements. We found out later that it was Paolo's wife's grave, the closest thing to a sacred site at a militantly atheist project. I assume it was spruced up a bit for Paolo's arrival. Or possibly not; he was never had much use for formalities.

One of the reoccurring conversations we had as residents of Arcosanti (and something I was asked about on every site tour I gave), was if the project would survive the death of its creator. On paper at least, there should be no problem. Paolo has not had an active role in Arcosanti or the Cosanti Foundation that supports it for many years. The day-to-day operation has been run entirely by others, and there is no logical reason for there to be the slightest hiccup with Paolo's passing. And yet I can't help but wonder if interest will wane in continuing to build out the site, with what is already there becoming a Monument to a Visionary, preserved in amber like Taliesin West. I may not have known Paolo all that well, but I'm pretty sure he would have hated the very idea.

I will close with this: Our lives were certainly made richer by Paolo's little experiment out in the central highlands of Arizona. In fact, Arcosanti probably saved our marriage. Thanks, ol' man, and Godspeed.

Latest Work

The latest bits we've sunk into the money pit:

We moved the slider that was originally between the trailer and the Florida room onto the front of the Florida room. The original door didn't fit right and the screens and plastic "windows" were in pretty bad shape. In other words, the whole thing was pretty much for show and didn't keep out wind, rain, bugs, stray cats....

The Beast. The $4,500 Beast. The good news is that we'll make that back in no time with all the money we'll save having a new, more-efficient AC. The salesman said it, so it must be true.

The Florida room more or less ready for siding and some new skirting. Maybe in May or June.

Only four days left to tax season. I think I'll take a couple days after April 15th to just sleep.

Pizza!!

In my role as kitchen goddess, I made a pizza for dinner:

The crust has been pre-baked for about 20 minutes with a good slathering of butter and garlic. Then sauce, a couple pounds of various meats (pepperoni, sausage, ham and bacon), all topped off with a pound of mozzarella cheese. Heart-healthy it ain't, but ask me if I care.

Deep dish pizza without the deep dish.

Fresh from the oven. The cheese could have stood a bit more time to brown, but we were hungry.

I've been experimenting with the crust for a while; wetter or drier dough, pre-baking the crust, seasoning the crust, etc. I think this one was just about perfect. Now if I can just remember what I did....

And a bit of geekiness:

That's one of a couple dozen computers that made up the SAGE system back in the 1950's and 60's. SAGE was a computer network that linked radar installations, interceptors and missile batteries. Data was displayed on GUI workstations that even had a sort of touch screen interface. Each computer ran dual 32-bit CPU's (not in parallel; they ran the second as a redundant backup) with 256K RAM. The computer hardware weighed 300 tons and burned 3 megawatts of juice. All that to crank out 75,000 operations per second. For comparison, an iPad can do something like 1.5 billion operations per second. If you care, you can read more here.

Well, the sun is up, so I need to get my butt outside and do some work.

Nailed It

The Universe Hates Us

Yea, it's been one of those couple weeks. First it was car trouble, although I can't really complain about the Durango. Since I bought the thing used back in 2005, I've done absolutely nothing other than change the oil, tires and brakes. Not bad for a ten-year-old vehicle with over 150K miles. It was more to do with the timing, being in the middle of tax season and all. It wasn't even a major breakdown; the water pump crapped out. No big, right? A couple hours in the shop and back on the road.

Not.

See, Dodge has a special kind of water pump that doesn't just start leaking like every other water pump on every other car ever made. No, the Dodge water pump fails catastrophically and takes out everything on the front of the engine block and usually the radiator as well with flying debris. We actually got lucky and only had to replace the fan and fan clutch in addition to the water pump. Of course, we had to wait for parts, which meant bumming a ride to work for a week from my daddy like I was 15 working my first job at Burger King. The good news is that it's fixed and it didn't cost us our life savings.

That cannot be said of the second little problem. But first, I have to talk about the weather. It's been just plain weird with several days of 80 degree highs, then several days where it barely creeps up into the 60's. On one of the 80-degree days, I decided to flip on the AC just to make sure it was working after sitting unused since the end of September. As you probably have guessed, it wasn't. No big deal; we have a maintenance contract left over from the previous owners and the temps were due to swing back into the 60's. I called and scheduled a dude to come out and look at things figuring it will just be a bit of Freon and we'll be good to go. Then I get The Call at work. The system is completely empty. Just finding the leak and refilling the Freon (the old banned kind that costs several hundred dollars a gallon) will cost $1,000. If the leak is in the coil (which it most likely is), add another $2,000. And after all that, you will have a system that maybe will last another year or so.

I've been around the block once or twice, so I know where this conversation is heading. Me: "Cut to the chase, Dude. What's a new system going to cost?" Dude: "$4,500." Me: "When?" Dude: "Today." Me: "Do it." I do have to say that I was impressed at how fast these guys moved. Debbie handed Dude our credit card around 2:45PM. We had a new system installed along with a new thermostat, all new duct work, new electrical with lightning protection, and all the old stuff cleaned up and gone by 5:30PM. It was almost too fast; for $4,500 (which was our life savings) I would expect there to be enough work to keep a crew busy for at least an eight-hour day. The silver lining in all this is that now that the temperatures have cycled back into the 60's during the day and the 40's at night, we have heat. The old system was just an AC, so we've been relying on electric heaters to keep us warm on those cold, frosty Florida winter nights. Now it stays all warm and toasty by magic.

Work continues on the Florida room. Last weekend, my dad and I tore the front off and installed the sliding glass door that had been between the Florida room and the trailer. I have everything more or less sealed up at this point. This weekend, we'll be working on more of the detail work like insulating around the new windows, getting the stud work done so we can get the siding up on the outside and insulate the walls and hang drywall on the inside, and going nuts with the caulking gun to try to seal up all the places where you can look outside that you shouldn't be able to look outside. We're not sure where the money for the siding is going to come from now that our entire life savings went to a new central air unit, but at this point, we need to get that done, probably shortly after tax season is over.

And that's our life. And it's 57 days until Towel Day. Don't panic.

Quicky

Just to let people know that I'm still kicking, I thought I'd post some photos:

I finished up the back corner connecting the two new planting beds. I may do more with this in the future, but for now, I'm calling it done.

We started final prep for new siding by replacing half of the plastic windows with dual pane glass windows and eliminating the other half.

I had some unexpected work when I realized that I couldn't take out the window I wanted to get rid of without taking out the small one on the porch. That was supposed to be a later project, but now it's done. The rest of the wall will be replaced with a sliding glass door.

Sorry for the short updates, but I need to head off and get ready for work.

Happy Anniversary, Baby

With apologies to the Little River Band. And a few days late. My first post here was actually March 3rd, 2004, but tax season keeps getting in the way of... well... everything.

I have managed to get a few things done in spite of all the tax season chaos:

We did the same trick to the window in our new back door that we used at Arcosanti to block out the sun and nosy neighbors.

The back of the trailer was just weeds and dirt. The walk will eventually be widened all the way across to the trailer behind us, eliminating a major maintenance nightmare I had to deal with all last summer.

New bed along the side of the trailer. The maintenance guys last year did us a "favor" and sprayed Roundup all along the trailer so I wouldn't have to trim it. More bare dirt, dust and a few weeks after it was sprayed, weeds that I had to trim anyway. Thanks, guys!

We finally got a solar-powered clothes dryer (old people call it a "clothesline") so we can stop making the coin laundry people rich.

It was close to sunset, so the lighting is bad, but this is supposed to show that the walk in front of the shed has been straightened up and expanded slightly. We will eventually expand it out under the clothesli... er... solar-powered clothes dryer.

That's all I have time for this morning.

Sleepless in Zephyrhills

We both had yesterday off work, so we slept late, then fell asleep last night around 9pm. (We live such adventuresome lives....) So here it is 3:30 in the morning and I'm wide awake. This ought to make for an interesting day at work. At least I have the weekend off.

Anyway, not much going on for either of us other than work, work, work. Things seem to be slowing a bit at Debbie's job, but tax season is still going strong for me. We're not getting the walk-in's like we were the first few weeks; now it's the returning clients with rental properties, schedule C businesses, sub-S corporations, etc. The great thing about tax season is that for better or worse, it's mostly over on April 15th. Then you have nine months for forget how much tax season sucks so you'll be stupid enough to do it again the next year.

Because we've both been working like crazy, we haven't really done much. But as I mentioned, we both managed to finagle a day off together yesterday to go see a bunch of people from the church I grew up in. It was fun catching up with everyone. I managed to figure out who most of the people were in the four hours or so that we were there. All in all, a better way to pass a day than getting bitched at on the phone by people desperate for their tax refunds because they've managed to wreck their lives in some way.

That's pretty much all I have. Between work and trying to plow through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (1,800 extremely dense pages), I've barely even been on the computer for over a week. I have no idea if the world ended or the stock market crashed or what new country we've decided to go to war against. And don't really care. I have a to-be-read pile that is out-growing the space I have set aside for my to-be-read pile, so I'll likely be updating this place even less frequently than I am now.

We have managed to make some progress on the outside of this place, so I may snap a few pictures to post here when I get a minute this weekend. Other than that, don't expect much.

Checking In

I'm still slogging away at tax season. The crazy rush seems to be mostly over; now it's dealing with the aftermath. Being typical Americans, our clients only have one demand: I want it NOW!!! Meaning their refunds, of course. Because of all the problems the IRS is dealing with, we've been telling everyone to not expect their refund for three weeks. Two days after they file, they start calling every half hour asking if they have their money yet because some friend-of-a-friend got their refund already. I only filed one tax return today; the rest of the day was on the phone answering the same damn question over and over and over again. The worst of that should be over by the end of the week. Then the rest of the tax season will be the longer, more complex returns for somewhat rational people.

I never got to use one as they were a little before my time, but someone dug up a photo of one of the first hard disk arrays. The platters were over three feet in diameter and held a whopping 8 megabytes each. Sweet.

Gotta love that Laura Petrie in geek glasses look-alike.

One of the big debates among renewable energy geeks is if solar panels are really all that "green". Usually, the talk is about net energy, or the number of years a panel has to sit in the sun generating electricity before it "pays back" the energy (mostly fossil fuel) used to mine and refine the raw materials and then use those to build the thing. I've seen paybacks ranging from 7 to 20 years with the larger numbers being more credible from what I can see. But something I've not heard discussed is the toxic waste generated in the manufacturing process. Combine that with the net energy issue and solar looks more and more like an expensive way to generate electricity that is as bad or worse than burning coal. There is certainly a case to be made for solar electric in certain circumstances, but they are not the solution to all our problems.

Well, before I fall asleep sitting in front of the computer, I should head off to bed.

Killer Kats

There is a new study out that attempts to put some numbers on the devastation that cats have on the environment. According to the study, these natural-born killers that people insist on having in their homes, then ditching when they become inconvenient, kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion small mammals every year. I've never thought about this much because we've never lived somewhere with large numbers of feral cats wandering around.

Until now.

We have probably 20-30 cats wandering loose in our park, many descended from cats that have been ditched here when people leave. Six of those cats "belong" to one year-round resident who allows them to wander free. Another six belong to a snow-bird who likewise allows her cats to roam. (We will leave aside the discussion of what sort of sick, crazy cat lady lives in an RV with a half dozen cats.) This being Florida, cats can have litters any time of the year. Several people are now live-trapping cats and taking them to the local humane society. Given these are feral cats and have been for many generations, they will most likely be destroyed. Others have been setting out poison bait or antifreeze. All in a desperate attempt to reduce the number of cats spraying around their trailers and shitting on their cars. (Not sure why cats so enjoy taking a dump on the hood of a car, but every morning you can find a couple old dudes scrubbin' and cussin'.)

The fun part of living in an RV park is that your business is everybody's business. (Don't worry; we'll get back to feral cats in a bit.) Usually it's relatively innocent, like the steady parade of old people on giant tricycles who come by to look at the new porch and other changes we've made since moving here. It seems the previous resident was well-liked and that we're expected to honor his memory in some way by only making changes that meet with the approval of everyone else in the park. So far, that seems to be the case other than the bat-shit crazy lady next door who expressed her disapproval of us by pretending we didn't exist when we tried to introduce ourselves the day we bought the place. But there is a darker side to all this "closeness". A couple that lives nearby that we hang with said that they heard I was trying to scare the cats off by shooting them with a pellet gun. They quickly explained that they were all for it and had no intention of trying to rat me out. I told them that I was raised that it was OK to kill animals when necessary, but you didn't torture them. If I were shooting cats, it would be with a 44 Magnum, not wounding them with a toy gun meant for kids. They wouldn't tell us who the source was, but promised to inform said person of the reality of the situation. We're pretty sure we know the source of the rumor and who was doing the talebearing. We haven't heard any more since, but I'm sure this won't be the last attempt by bat-shit crazy lady to get us out of the park.

Back in the days of old when dinosaurs roamed the earth and credit cards were rare, it was common for retailers to charge a fee for using one. The retailer has to pay a percentage of the purchase to the bank, so it made perfect sense to put the cost on the person using the credit card rather than spreading it out over everyone. Then the Fed opened the floodgates of easy credit and within a few years, anyone capable of holding a pen and making an "X" had a credit card. At the same time, the credit card issuers made not charging a fee for credit purchases a condition for a business to accept their credit card, meaning that everyone was paying the credit price even when paying with cash. Now, thanks to a recent settlement between merchants and the credit card companies, retailers will be allowed to add a surcharge for credit card usage. All the self-appointed consumer watchdogs are outraged, of course. I can't for the life of me figure out why given these very same groups are outraged by the interest and fees credit card companies charge. I would think anything that encourages people to live within their means would be a good thing. Are we not still trying to dig ourselves out of the rubble of the collapse brought on by too much debt? Did I miss a memo?

And just in case anyone thinks The Cloud (tm) is a safe place to store your data:


Any security expert will tell you that there is no such thing as 100% secure data. Any system can be hacked. That combined with the poor habits of users, the bad-joke level of security on most "secure" websites, and the ease of tapping into the constant stream of data being blasted in all directions from smart phones, and you have the above scenario.

Oh, yea. I'm doing taxes again this year. It may lead to something more. Or not. It wasn't my first or even second or third choice for a place to land, but it will fluff up the bank account some. Of course, given the extra money of driving back and forth to work, the extra laundry, the extra eating out, etc., etc., I'll probably lose money on the deal.

Speaking of work, I need to get off the computer and get ready.