Whatever term Trump did or did not use, his point stands. Some countries are shitholes. That doesn't mean that every single person living there is a shithole, but before allowing them into our country, we should take a much closer look at them than we would someone from a non-shithole country like Norway. Of course, most of the shitholes in the world were created by the US, like both of Trump's examples (El Salvador and Haiti). And soon it won't matter, because the same people going nuts over whatever it was that Trump did or did not say, are busy turning the US into yet-another shithole. Once we are as big a shithole as Somolia, what motivation would anyone have to come here anyway?
Problem solved.
In yet-another example of Florida as the Land of Stupid, a couple walk up to a hotel valet stand, demand the keys to a Ferrari 458 Italia Spider and drive off. Problem: it wasn't their Ferrari. When they were stopped by police, the guy claimed that a) he didn't steal anything because the valet gave him the keys, and anyway, he was planning on taking it back; and b) he didn't have a clue how all that cocaine got on the center console. The real owner is now suing the hotel for unspecified damages. I'm assuming the valet was fired, but I'm pretty sure that would have happened no matter what he did. He reported that the guy was acting like a douche, and nothing screams Ferrari-owner like being an insufferable douche. I mean, who else other than a complete douche would spend $300,000 on a frackin' car. If the valet had refused to give him the keys and it turns out that the guy was the owner and really had left his valet ticket in the car, what do you think would have happened to the valet? Exactly. A classic no-win situation.
It looks like Michigan is trying to catch up with Florida in the Land of Stupid competition. A guy gets arrested for murder, then asks about the status of his "other murder case" during his arraignment. Right before that question would have been a great time for Rodriques-Ortiz to shut up. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for society), he did not. Wasn't it Mark Twain (or maybe Lincoln; or maybe Proverbs) who said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt"?
It appears that the medical-industrial complex isn't done with us yet. Now it's my dad who is being sent off for a battery of tests. For some reason, the only place on planet earth these tests can be done is down in Tampa, where my father is not allowed to drive. The day of his appointment is normally one of my days off, so my parents thought they were all set. But alas, it is on the one Wednesday of the month that I work due to the monthly physical inventory being taken. So now we are scrambling to find transportation. What makes it more difficult that it ought to be is that they won't even give a time for the test; they'll call the night before and let us know when he is supposed to be there. What in bloody hell? Have I mentioned lately how much I hate doctors?
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate working?
Anyway, we have most of our tax forms, so I need to go make a first cut at our taxes.
We got word that my Uncle Ron passed Sunday morning. The MRI had shown damage to the brain stem, so it was already decided that there would be no "heroic" measures taken. My mom isn't well enough to travel, so she won't be there for the funeral. She was instructed not to come by both her sister (Ron's wife) and her nephew (Ron's son), so it looks like we won't need to figure out how to get my parents up to Michigan.
And I'm becoming weary of typing those three letters in post titles.
Bob has been seriously ill for quite some time. It seemed he was recently making some progress, but I read a post on his site by Barbara (his wife) that he died during the night on Saturday. Bob's blog is another link that has been on this site since day one. He will be sorely missed.
In other medical news: Debbie's mom seems to be doing better. She is more alert and has been responding to yes/no questions. They are supposed to be changing out her trach for something that will allow her to talk. She is moving her right arm and leg more as well.
My mom is home and stable. She seems to be fully recovered other than some slight aphasia. She will be talking along just fine, then the completely wrong word will come out or she will simply blank out on the name of something or someone. No one is saying whether this is a permanent thing or what, so I guess it's just wait and see.
So that's the good news.
We got word on Saturday that my Uncle Ron, who was already in the hospital for a triple by-pass, had a massive stroke and was completely non-responsive. Late yesterday, he was scheduled for an MRI to see if there was any reason to continue to treat him. No word yet on the outcome of that. His son had just died in November at 41 years of age. Nothing like piling it on.
We got word yesterday that my Uncle Jimmy's mom passed away. It was not unexpected, but that really doesn't mean much. No matter how "expected", death is never... well... expected.
So yea, 2018 ain't lookin' any brighter from here.
Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone up in Michigan.
Tuesday evening, I get a phone call from my mother. Something is wrong; can I come down. Every question is answered with, "I don't know." I get down there and she's in full-blown aphasia. I grab the phone, call 911 and give them the house address. After a brief hesitation, the guy says something about how we're in Crawford county and to hold while he transfers us. After some back-and-forth, I think to ask what county I'm speaking with. Antrim County. In Michigan. At that point I just tell them to forget it and shove everyone in the van and head to the ER.
Now, please do not interpret anything that follows as a criticism of Antrim County 911. They were not at fault and even went as far as somehow tracking us down and sending an ambulance to my parents' place all the way down here in Florida. At that point, we were already in the ER, but still some serious effort on their part.
No, what follows is squarely aimed at Verizon.
How the hell can it be that I can get a restaurant's daily specials sent to my phone because I happen to be driving by it, and yet Verizon with its incredible network and unlimited technology from the whole universe cannot locate a 911 call to less than a 1,000-mile radius? Shame on you, Verizon. No; I'm going much further than that. Fuck you, Verizon.
So anyway, she did have a small stroke, probably caused by a blood clot. She was supposed to be released this morning, but of course, Florida Hospital Zephyrhills screwed up and she sat in a chair for nine hours waiting to get cut loose because some shit dick "forgot". And for this, the US taxpayers will be paying bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every encounter I have with the medical industrial complex gives me a deeper understanding into why these united States has the absolutely worst health care in the first world while spending an order of magnitude more than any other country.
Meanwhile, in Michigan nothing has really changed with Debbie's mom. Some movement in hands and feet, but she is still unresponsive to verbal commands. They are working on getting her transferred to the hospital that one of Debbie's brothers works at so she will be close to somebody in the family. The hospital she is at now is a four-hour drive from the closest one of her kids. Debbie is staying another week to make sure everything is settled as it can be before she comes back down here.
And tomorrow, I get to go back to work for another week.
I'm not sure what happened to 2017, but I'm not really sad to see it gone. I can't think of much of anything we managed to accomplish in the last year other than enrich of bunch of doctors, PA's, labs and all the other flora and fauna of the Medical Industrial Complex. About the only good thing that happened is that we no longer have to pay thousands of dollars in penalties because we cannot afford health insurance. That has to be one of the most monumentally stupid... well... I've covered all that before. So I guess 2017 wasn't a total loss.
In keeping with the rest of the suck-fest called 2017, it ended with Debbie's mom having a brain aneurysm that burst. Debbie has been up in Michigan with her for the last week. At this point, everything that can be done has been done. Now it's just waiting to see if she wakes up, then it will be up to a year in various stages of recovery, with the definition of "recovery" being... um... "flexible" is probably the nicest word for it.
I didn't do my usual Christmas post because I just wasn't feeling all that Joyeux this Noel. I worked both Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas, and Christmas day was taken up with the park dinner and being with my parents. New Years wasn't any big deal either, between Debbie being in Michigan and me having to work both New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Have I mentioned lately that working really sucks?
For the new year, I made another blog tweak. Up to now, the books in the current and past reading lists over there on the right were Amazon Affiliate links. In theory if someone were to click on one of them, then buy something from Amazon, I was supposed to get some fraction of a cent. Well, in the nine years I've been doing that, I've gotten about $4, which Amazon will not let me do anything with. I'm supposed to be able to use it towards stuff I buy on Amazon, but all I get is some error that something isn't set up and to click here. Which I do and then spend the next hour filling out all sorts of crap. Then the next time I go to use my four bucks, I get the same error message. This has been going on for years. I'm done. The lists will still be there, but that's all it will be: a plain-text list. Amazon can take its Affiliate crap, fold it 'till it's all points, then shove it. Deep. And on a slant.
What else? Oh, yeah. I checked our site stats today and it seems we are a big hit in Russia. In the last week, we've had more site traffic from Russia than from the US. If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll let you in on a secret: Uncle Vlad pays really well! I can see why Trump, being a savvy business dude, jumped in bed with the guy. I'd have linked to RTyears ago if I had only known!
[Dear NSA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, et al.: English does not have "sarcasm" punctuation, which makes it difficult to be clear when one is writing sarcastically. I am. If I were truly in the employ of Putin, neither of us would be working our crappy jobs, nor would we be living in this dump.
Likewise, if Trump were in the employ of Putin, he wouldn't need his current crappy job as POTUS, nor would he live in the antiquated dump known as the White House.
Thank you.]
Everyone who knows me knows that I don't really see much point in the whole "smart" "phone" thing. (The scare quotes are because based on all the problems I see people having with them, neither the phones nor the people using them seem all that smart. And I never see anyone use the things as a phone.) In fact, they probably annoy me in a way nothing else can. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I'm not the only one:
I attended the carol service of my niece’s nursery school. Upon each carved pew, the screens of the iPhones of proud parents, their heads respectfully bowed, displayed pages from Facebook and Twitter, and twinkled throughout the ancient religious ritual like the stars that led the wise men to the very cradle of Christ.
As the lights dimmed and the candles flared up for a beautiful choral arrangement of the Coventry Carol, the assembled infant singers could look up and see that many of the grownups in the room, their lowered faces lit beatifically from below by the Caravaggio glow of their iPhone screens, were not the slightest fucking bit interested in them or their stupid fucking song.
This is of course a valuable preparation for adult life, where dreams are crushed and hope and pride are trampled in the dirt. Nothing says “Christmas” like orchestrated mass indifference to the creative efforts of small children, I always think.
Which is pretty much what goes through my head anytime I see someone poking at a screen during a meeting or a church service or a wedding or dinner or a funeral. But what really floored me was this bit:
My own Christmas sounds a note of doom. So far, I have escaped ownership of a smartphone or a tablet. With a deserved sense of superiority, I have watched the rest of you degenerate into being no-attention-span zombie scum, fixated on trivial fruit-based games and the capture of invisible Japanese imps, entirely unaware of the geography of your own surroundings, info-pigs gobbling bites of fake news headfirst from shiny troughs 24 hours a day, while our decaying planet performs its last few million fatal, and yet still beautiful, rotations before you.
But now I must become one of you. Having abandoned paper letters, and now declaring even email obsolete, my nine-year-old daughter’s school has told me I need an iPhone to receive any administrative communication.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Wait.What? I'm really hoping that this guy is sending his kid off to some snooty British prep school. Please do not tell me regular schools are doing this crap! It's bad enough that corporate shit-dicks like Dollar General require that their minimum-wage, 15-hour-a-week employees have smartphones for things like obtaining a copy of their W-2 so they can file a tax return. But schools? You have got to be fracking kidding me!
Speaking of RT, I was reading about some hit piece that NPR ran on Lee Camp and his show on RT called Redacted Tonight. I had never heard of such a thing and would have likely died at a ripe old age blissfully unaware that any such person or show had ever existed. But if it was so anti-American and pro-Russian that the mighty NPR had to try to put an end to it, then I was definitely going to watch it.
And I did.
It's basically another faux-news program like The Daily Show that somehow manages to do a better job covering the news while making jokes about it than nearly all "serious" news sources can manage these days. One interesting thing is that I can't watch it on the RT website. The video just craps out about halfway through. But I can watch it no problem on YouTube. I can't prove it, but I'm betting that somewhere along the line, the RT site is being throttled. Nice.
Although Camp is not in Jon Stewart's league by any means, Redacted Tonight is funny and clever enough to spend 20 minutes or so once a week watching it. Camp's Christmas rant alone is worth the price of admission.
Lessee... what else? Oh, yeah. Because I'm on my own and, as everyone is aware, I'm such a raging party animal, I've been binge-watching the original X-Files series. Other than all the computers looking like TRS80's and cell phones the size of Volkswagen's, it holds up pretty well. Sure there are plot holes you could toss Donald Trump through and entire episodes that would be over in five minutes if either of the protagonists had the IQ of pond scum, but I can say that of every dramatic show on TV, past and present (and I'll even go way out on a limb and say, "and future").
Speaking of the future, it's that time of year to look back at what I expected for last year and what I expect for this year. I have to say that I'm really surprised that we made it all the way through 2017 without some sort of crash, bust, implosion, etc. I have to give credit to the Masters of the Universe at the Fed, ECB, BOJ, PBOC, etc. for keeping all the plates spinning for another twelve months. Not that the real economy is in any better shape now than a year ago. The opposite, in fact. But all the modern-day tulip bulb bubbles keep going up; stocks, bonds, real estate. And of course the grand-daddy of all bubbles, Bit-coin and all its crypto-clones. As anyone with memories that go back further than the Tuesday before last Friday knows, that just means the inevitable crash will be even bigger. Maybe 2018? Dunno. The delusions of the masses have outstripped my ability to comprehend. So still-more of the same in 2018 with a high probability of something serious that will give everyone a good, hard shot to the 'nads.
On a personal level, we are both still working. We are not homeless (in spite of the best efforts of the medical industrial complex) nor in prison, so in all a good year. We're still waiting for the Lotto people to give us a call, but no joy yet. I still haven't really recovered from all the medical crap, but I am determined to complete at least one project around this place over the next year. I may have to hire it done, but regardless, it will happen. I feel stupid having to hire things that I know I can do myself (and in fact have done for myself in the past), but I just don't have the energy yet. We'll see what happens.
A week ago, I finally found a replacement valve that looked like it would work in our toilet. It took me until yesterday to have the time and energy to actually put the thing in. The longest part of the job was mopping all the water out of the tank so I didn't flood the bathroom. The actual replacement part of the job took all of five minutes. So no more screaming toilet valve at 3am.
And someone still needs to start up a punk band called The Screaming Toilet Valves.
We barely survived the weekend. Saturday was the Toys for Tots Band Marathon. We put in a 17-hour day for that. We didn't raise as much as last year, but more than the year before, so not too shabby overall. Sunday was another insane day because of a big jackpot that was guaranteed to drop. It was also the one Sunday a month that I need to be at work at 6:30am instead of 8am, so another 12 hours in the can. So yea, my butt was seriously draggin' by the time I crawled out of that place on Tuesday. When I was in my twenties, a 60-hour week was no big deal. I ain't in my twenties no mo. I had big plans for yesterday, but that whole toilet valve thing and taking the clothes off the line was about all I could manage.
Next weekend will be more of the same with two Toys for Tots events on Saturday (because one just isn't enough). Then we wrap up the Toys for Tots fundraising with the Christmas Ball on December 9th. After that, the crazy turns into simply busy until the St. Paddy's Day event we have every March (natch...). Once that day of insanity is over, the snowbirds start flying north and we go into summer mode.
I did a little long-overdue site cleaning over there on the right. For some historical reason I don't even recall, the list of links was separated into two chunks. The reason for a link being in one list vs. the other seemed increasingly arbitrary, so now it's just one list.
I finally removed the link to Jerry Pournelle's site. Today is the first time in 20 years that I am maintaining a site without a link to Chaos Manor. I also removed the link to the Non-Sequitur comic as they now refuse to show content if you run an ad blocker. Sorry, but you're not that funny. I also removed a site run by a very nice gentleman in upstate New York because the things he wrote about were so far out there, they make Uncle Charlie seem mainstream.
Matt Taibbi came close to getting deleted. His recent articles just seemed to have lost some of the edge that his GFC articles had. But he redeemed himself with this excellent bit on the student loan racket. If you have a child thinking about attending college or you yourself are considering doing so, you really need to read it. The conclusion:
It's a multiparty affair, what shakedown artists call a "big store scheme," like in the movie The Sting: a complex deception requiring a big cast to string the mark along every step of the way. In higher education, every party you meet, from the moment you first set foot on campus, is in on the game.
There is no way to win this game other than simply not to play.
I added links to RT (pretty bad that a citizen of the land of the free and home of the brave has to depend on a Russian site for objective news), and Condemned to Debt. If spending five minutes on that site doesn't convince you to stay far away from student debt, nothing will.
And I'm off to the laundry room and down to the 'rents to help them get settled.
It's been cra-cra-crazy around here the last few weeks. My work has more or less gone completely off the rails lately. We are going into the busiest part of the year with a half-dozen large, public special events coming up and all is chaos. We had decided that Debbie would bring my parents down some time back, and it's a good thing we did, because there is no way I can disappear for the better part of a week. I'm not sure how it will all turn out, but right now it ain't lookin' good.
Ah well. Two years is about average for me to keep a job....
We still have our screaming toilet valve, but it's screaming a lot less frequently thanks to the overall drop in water pressure in the park now that all the snowbirds are flocking in. I was hoping to get over to Home Depot and see if I could scare up the right pieces-parts but I'm not sure that's going to happen anytime soon (see above).
At least we finally got the hot water heater situation sorted. I got a little snippy when I called our propane company to tell them it was leaking yet-again and got some clueless BS about how there was no record of us having any problems. So we were pissed before the repair guy even showed up. Fortunately for him, I was at work and Debbie was on the phone with a client, which saved him from getting his fracking ears burned off. Of course, they never have the parts on hand even when I tell them exactly what the problem is and to not bother coming out without a replacement valve in hand, so he declared that the valve was indeed bad, shut the gas off to the hot water heater and left. That was Monday.
We also needed another tank of propane, so I had ordered that up while I was on the phone with the propane company. He came Wednesday and swapped out the empty for a full tank. Understand, this has been done every couple months for the five-plus years we've lived here without a problem. I don't know what happened, but Debbie called me at work gagging and coughing because the trailer was filling up with propane. I flew home and shut everything down.
Now we have no hot water and no stove. And I was shopping for a new propane company.
Thursday, Debbie called me at work to tell me that I need to call someone at the propane company to "discuss the water heater situation." There really wasn't much to "discuss" in my book; just fix my damn hot water heater already. After some phone tag, it turns out the company that made our hot water heater wasn't going to honor their warrantee and in any case, couldn't ship the replacement valve for several days. That was unacceptable, so we now have a bright new shiny hot water heater installed at absolutely no cost to us at all. Not even the usual $100 service fee we've had to pay all the previous times.
So as of right this minute, I cannot smell mercaptan for the first time in five years. I let you know in a few months if that holds.
I guess I should get off my butt and go do some sweeping, weeding, power-washing, etc. around my parents' place before they get here. I spent a good chunk of yesterday doing all the interior cleaning and plugging everything back in. It's all done other than I need to take a bunch of batteries over there and get all the clocks running again. It's weird. We have battery clocks here, both inside and out. We replace the batteries in them maybe once every couple years. But batteries in their place don't even last through the summer. It can't be the heat, because as I said, we have a battery clock outside that gets direct afternoon sun for several hours a day, and I've changed the batteries maybe twice in the four years we've had it. Besides, we talked them into leaving the AC on over the summer instead of shutting everything down, so it never got above 80. And it isn't just my parents' place; for the last month all you hear walking around the park is everyone's smoke detectors chirping. I've replaced the battery in ours twice in five years; the day we moved in and about a year ago. Why can't batteries sitting in empty trailers not even make it through six months? Do batteries die of loneliness sitting by themselves with no people around?
Things that make you go, "Hmmmm...."
(And before anyone has a burning desire to lecture me about it, yes I am aware that I'm "supposed" to change our smoke detector battery every time I have to reset all the clocks for the semi-annual stupidity called Daylight Savings, but that's just dumb. Every smoke detector sold in the last, oh, twenty or thirty years or so will tell you when the battery is low. Replacing it on some arbitrary schedule is simply wasteful and stupid. That entire campaign had to have been thought up by the dry cell industry.)
About a year ago, our toilet started making a loud, high-pitched screaming sound after it was done filing, or at completely random times. Like 2:03am. Then again at 2:37am. Then again at 2:46am. Then again at 3:09am. Etc., etc., etc.
Fun times.
If I can find a replacement valve, I may be able to fix it, but given all the other weirdness with this stupid toilet, it probably has some sort of custom valve that has to be shipped special from Indonesia and will take two years to get here. Seriously; this thing is really starting to piss me off. Under the lid, it looks like part of a Saturn V main engine instead of a toilet, and it's been nothing but a giant pain in the ass since it was new. I'm ready to yank it out and replace it with some cheap Home Depot piece of crap from China.
Speaking of things pissing me off. We have a hot water heater that has done nothing but leak propane since the day it was installed. We are on something like the fourth or fifth valve and I constantly smell mercaptan. The propane company insists that it's all in my head, probably because it's close to being out of warrantee. Given that we had to pay $100 every time the valve blew out bad enough that they couldn't deny that it was leaking, I'd hate to think what it will cost once the repair isn't "covered". I can guarantee one thing; once this hunk of junk is out of warrantee, it will be replaced, and not by the ass-clowns who installed this one.
Did I mention that we paid top dollar for the toilet and the hot water heater because we bought and had them installed by small, locally owned businesses?
That will teach me to deal with a local company instead of a multinational big-box corporation. Their crappy merchandise likely would have failed as fast as what we have, but it would have cost a hell of a lot less.
And yes, I saw the update where the county tries to walk back its profound stupidity. There is no possible excuse for hassling people who are standing outside their destroyed home trying to find missing relatives about a damaged pool fence. As far as damaged electric and gas meters, there is nothing a resident could do about it even if Home Depot happened to be opened. Those are the property and responsibility of the utility. So again, why are you hassling someone more concerned with where they are going to live and what they are going to eat because their gas meter isn't properly attached to their destroyed house?
Whenever a stupid man is doing something that even he knows is stupid, he will always use the excuse that he was just following orders.
Lost in all this hurricane nonsense was the news that Dr. Pournelle passed Friday afternoon (September 8th). I never met him in person, but we did communicate via e-mail on occasion. Thinking about it the past few days, I realized just how much Dr. Pournelle influenced the path of my life; from his monthly column in Byte magazine, to his daynotes website (the world's first blog, although he hated the term), to his books, one of which (Oath of Fealty) is directly responsible for us landing at Arcosanti.
In 1977 Jerry paid $12,000 to have a state-of-the-art personal computer assembled for him, supposedly to boost his productivity. By 1980 that led to his long-running “Chaos Manor” column in Byte magazine in which he would document his troubles on the bleeding edge of PC technology. As fellow word-processing aficionado Dave Barry explained jealously, Jerry got paid to mess around with his computers when he should be writing:
Every month, his column has basically the same plot, which is:
1. Jerry tries to make some seemingly simple change to one of his computers, such as connect it to a new printer.
2. Everything goes hideously wrong…. Sometimes there are massive power outages all over the West Coast. Poor Jerry spends days trying to get everything straightened out.
3. Finally…Jerry gets his computer working again approximately the way it used to, and he writes several thousand words about it for ‘Byte.’
I swear it’s virtually the same plot, month after month, and yet it’s a popular column in a magazine that appeals primarily to knowledgeable computer people.
I like to imagine Steve Jobs circulating “Chaos Manor” columns to his executives with scribbled annotations suggesting that some people would pay good money to not have to go through all this.
Sailor doesn't mention it, but Dr. Pournelle always named his computers. His first one was christened Ezekiel, or Zeke for short. He frequently referred to it as his "friend Ezekiel, who happens to be a computer." Zeke now resides in the Smithsonian.
I tried to remove the link to his website from my list over there on the right, but I just... can't. That link has existed on every website I have ever maintained. Someday it will disappear. Today is not that day.
She jigged, she jagged, she was all over the place. But in the end, we were on the "good" side of Irma. Debbie was working up until sometime Friday afternoon when the mandatory evacuation order was first announced. I had to work Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so we just sat tight and had the car all packed up with what we would need for a few days of camping out. Debbie came with me to work on Sunday and we stayed there until Monday morning.
Sounds simple, right?
Heh.
Sunday morning, we shut down everything at the house, loaded up in the Durango and instead of starting, it was just, "click-click-click". Dead battery. Seriously?
We found someone in the park, got a jump and headed out about two hours later than we planned. We were still in pretty good shape, but the weather was starting to turn ugly by the time we got to my work and threw everything into the building.
All was good until around 9pm when parts of the building started losing power. However the place is wired, some of the building can be out, but other parts will stay up. Kinda weird. Anyway, little by little, things stopped working until around 1am Monday, we were completely in the dark with no phone, TV or internet. Cell phones were still working, so we could call and reassure nervous relatives that we were fine. By sun-up it was all over, so we headed for whatever was left of our home. (It only took two jump-starts to get the three-tenths of a mile from my work to the house. THANKS CHUCK!!!)
Our place had no damage, just a lot of debris. My parent's place didn't fare so well. The new roof over the porch detached from the main roof and collapsed. That's part of today's job; see about getting that the rest of the way on the ground before it goes flying around the park.
Power here came back on around 5pm [Debbie says, "Nuh uh, it was 7:24pm." OK, 5pm-ish], so we didn't have to throw away everything in the fridge and freezer. My work is still out (I'm typing this Tuesday, noon-ish), which means that it's starting to get iffy on all the food in the various fridges and freezers there. That would be a big bill. I hope we have insurance to cover the loss.
Our first priority today was getting a working vehicle. It would start with a jump, but it would die a couple tenths of a mile down the road. Today so far was spent trying to find a place with power that I could buy a new battery from and then somehow getting there. Someone at the lodge was out and about and knew that we were stranded. She got all the specs over the phone, bought us a battery and delivered it here to the house. THANKS TERRI!!! So we have a car that runs, but I don't think we are out of the woods yet. Because of how it was acting, I think there may be a problem with the alternator as well. As far as I can tell from what it was doing, the alternator could not have been putting out much for the car to keep stalling out. (I couldn't tell for sure because it's a soccer-mom car with no gauges, just idiot lights.) But the battery needed replacing regardless; when I tried to remember the last time I had bought a battery, I had no recollection of ever doing so. When I pulled the battery, the date was November 2004. Oooooookay. Maybe I should call Interstate about buying my dead battery to use in an ad: Six-Year Battery Lasts 13 Years!!!
Yeah. Probably not.
So we have transportation, power, internet and the landline phone working. Cell phone coverage is still hit-or-miss. I assume it is a capacity issue. We get various error messages; "Network Unavailable", "Emergency Calls Only", etc. All we have is a Tracfone, so I assume we are last on the priority list to connect to the local towers.
More later, but I better get at cleaning things up.
I was going to post something about the cruise, but I bumped into this instead:
The Roof Korean Option will recognize that this life is “nasty, brutish, and short” and there is little time to sit and chat with Rod [Dreher] about the merits of gay civil unions while getting a $75 haircut when your home is being broken into or your daughter didn’t get into Notre Dame because she checked “white” on the entrance application.
You really need to read the entire essay. I've been sayin' much the same thing pretty much for the life of this blog, but Jesse Russell says it much better (and funnier) than I ever could.
We are home recovering from our cruise. I've been working ten-hour days every day since we made landfall. I figured everyone worked extra hours to cover for me, so now I'm giving everyone else as much of a break as I can. I may have overestimated my abilities....
The cruise was a blast, as all cruises are (other than the occasional diarrhea cruise, which thank God we have avoided so far). We drove over to Miami a couple days early and booked a hotel in Brickell that was basically walking distance from the port. Our first day there (Thursday), we ventured out to find some food. The front desk guy basically told us to just start walking straight down the road until we found whatever we were looking for. We ended up in a Brazilian restaurant where no one spoke English. (If you ever find yourself in a "foreign" restaurant where the entire staff and clientele are Americans, RUN!) As is standard these days, there were TV's everywhere. I'm not sure when people became so addicted to screens that there has to be a TV hanging on every available inch of wall in every building, but I've accepted that the battle is already lost.
And get off my lawn!
Ahem. What was on the TV's had us cracking up the entire time we were there. It was some bizarre telenovela that combined Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Pirates of the Caribbean with some Mayan Vampires thrown in. I'm pretty sure that even if we spoke Portuguese or Spanish or whatever language it was in, it still would have made absolutely no sense to us. But it was still fun watching the crazy jump-cuts between a 16th-century British country house, a pirate ship, and Mayan human sacrifice while eating dinner.
The next day (Friday), we jumped on a van that took us to a bus that dropped us on an air boat that did a lot of this:
We were in the front of the boat, which steers from the rear, so it was like riding on a bar of soap. I was holding the camera pointed straight ahead the entire time (except when I had to throw it behind me to keep it from getting drenched with the water coming in over the side). So yea, the parts where it looks like I'm pointing the camera out the side of the boat? That was when the boat was going sideways. Which was most of the time. We only saw a couple small alligators because it was too hot out even for cold-blooded reptiles. The park has some captive breeding going on, so we wandered around a bit checking that out. At one point, we both felt the hair on our necks stand up. We turned around to this:
It's an odd feeling to have something sizing you up for lunch....
When we got back to Miami, the bus dumped us off right outside Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, so we headed in for dinner where I got revenge on that croc by munching on some of his cousins. We wandered the waterfront a bit, listened to some jazz, then hopped on the people-mover-thingy to our hotel and crashed. It sucks not being able to handle the sun and living in Florida of all places. Maybe we should move to Seattle.
Saturday was All Aboard!! the Carnival Vista for fun and frolics. This is our first mega-ship, the flagship of the Carnival line. The upside was that I had the best mac-n-cheese EVAAAAAR! Unfortunately, there was a lot to be disappointed in, like a lack of staff and too many people in too small of a space. There were the same number of stairwells and elevators as there are in ships half the size, so getting anywhere was a royal pain. Room stewards only hit the rooms once a day instead of twice. Takes forever to get food in some areas. The buffet had limited selection. Even main dining was a disappointment unless you wanted to pay an upcharge for the "specialty meals". All of which is supposed to entice (force?) people into the "specialty dining restaurants" that cost extra. I know it's a first-world problem, but it just isn't what I expect from a cruise. And the ship is just over a year old, and some of the public areas are already looking tired. I realize that sea air is hard on everything, and that people, especially the low-brow types that are drawn to Carnival, are even harder on things. But, as we were reminded 50 times a day, we were on the Flagship of the Fleet. I would expect a little extra effort from the maintenance department.
And the rocking. A ship can only be so wide and so long and still be able to use standard port facilities, so they keep making them taller. Any wind or swells whatsoever and it's rocky-rock, rocky-rock, rocky-rock. Kinda makes you wonder about the stability of the thing if it ever encounters serious weather. I know the cruise lines are very good about ducking and dodging around storms, but stuff happens.
And even the cruise director was making jokes about how crappy the theater was. Flat seating on the main floor? How many fractions of a percent did that brilliant move save on the construction costs? And don't even get me started on the stupid little drink tables screwed into the arms of the seats. They are right where your arm goes, which means that every last one of them is bent, making them completely useless as drink tables. But some ass-hat in management won't allow the maintenance guys to just get rid of the useless things. And thanks to giant pillars all over the place, about half the seats have no view of the stage. The cruise director offered to meet us there at midnight with sledge hammers for a little "repair party". I'm not sure he was actually joking.
The crew was great. They ran themselves half to death trying to get everything done without enough staff, always smiling, knew us by name after the first day, etc. And our favorite place on the ship was listening to Elizabeth in the piano bar. In our comments to the cruise line, we told them that "Elizabeth is a goddess and should be allowed to drive the ship." I'm not sure that's going to happen, but if it does and you're reading this, Elizabeth, give us a couple short blasts on the horn, K? And the Debbie Frost Whip dance craze will live forever. (Sometime when my post isn't already tl;dr, I'll explain that.)
The first day was taken up with boarding and getting settled, then a full day of sailing. We woke up Monday morning in Grand Turks. We didn't bother getting off the ship because a) we've been there before, and b) other than sitting on the beach or sitting in the bar/restaurant at the end of the pier, there really wasn't much to see. So we stayed on board and enjoyed short lines for things like the buffet and the SkyRide.
Next on the itinerary was La Romana in the Dominican Republic. We went through the Cueva de las Maravillas National Park. As is now typical, no photos are allowed in the cave due to concerns about blinding the bats and damaging the cave paintings. Of course, the Googles has 'em. The description of the shore excursion had some blah-blah-blah about steps. What we should have noticed was the number of steps. During the entire cave tour, you are going deeper and deeper in. When you exit, you are greeted by a single staircase of some 200+ steps. We stopped about two-thirds the way to the top to try to breathe. Some young snot with his LL Bean Hiking Shorts (tm) and his LL Bean Hiking Stick (tm) and his LL Bean Hiking Boots (tm) that still had the tags attached says, "Oh, we're taking a break?" Yea, ya little shit, 'cause as soon as I can stop panting, I'm gonna toss your scrawny ass back down to the bottom of the stairs. Which I totally would have said to him, except I was busy trying to get enough oxygen to my brain so I could see.
After that we headed up to Altos de Chavon, a replication of a 16th Mediterranean village. It had steps. Not as many as the cave, but too many.
Debbie wanted me to climb down to the bottom of the amphitheater for a photo. I told her, "You first!"
Nice place to just hang out, but other than a gift shop and a guy charging to have your picture taken with his donkey, I'm not sure what really goes on there.
Next up: Aruba. The short version; Central Arizona with iguanas. After the whole Stairmaster routine the day before, we were looking for something easy, so we took an island bus tour. The first stop wasn't bad, just some uneven ground. And no steps.
Then the second stop was a giant boulder with these:
Not just steps, but irregular, uneven, crooked, stone steps.
And then this:
And this:
And then back to the ship.
In Curacao, we did another cave. This one was privately owned rather than a national park, but they had done a good job developing the cave. It was a much smaller and younger cave system than the one in the Dominican Republic. Very few full columns, but still a very nice cave. The best part was the guide shutting off all the lights when we were in the back of the cave. Always a good time for anyone who hadn't been in a cave before. Which included Debbie. I thought that she had been in a cave when she was a kid, but that must have been one of my other wives.... Again, no photos allowed and, likely because it's a private cave, I can't find any online. I do have a picture of (you guessed it) stairs!
The next stop was an ostrich farm. This little guy is the only chick that survived this year. They don't know what happened. Probably some sort of virus. Blood and tissue went out to various labs with the hope that they can come up with some sort of vaccine that can be given to the adult birds which will give immunity to next year's brood.
The babies are cute. The adults... well....
So after all that, it was two days at sea that consisted mostly of sleeping, eating and hanging out with the Goddess Elizabeth in the piano bar.
I think this is like the dozenth post with that title, but what can I say? We are.
I have a new job at the lodge. The administrator went back to his old job outside the lodge. He is still the administrator, but now I'm the Office/Social Quarters Manager. I also have a new assistant so I don't have to be there 7 days a week. More pay, longer hours and more headaches, mostly people bitching about the administrator not being at the lodge basically 24/7. I've already had to tell several people (in varying degrees of my not-nice voice) that they can either tell me what they want or they can just suck it up. Sheesh. Old people.
To add to the fun and games, the Annual Moose International Convention was held in Tampa this year. Someone had the bright idea of running four vans between the convention center and our lodge from noon to midnight Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Yea. That turned out just about how you would expect. Actually, it was a nice financial shot in the arm for the lodge in the midst of our summer doldrums, and given the amount of alcohol consumed, it didn't go too badly. Trying to train a new guy while learning a new job myself with sheer bedlam right outside the door and even right at my desk was... interesting. I think I got about 10 hours of sleep over the three days. Nearly two weeks later, we are still cleaning up the last of the debris.
On the CLL front, my white cell count is going the wrong way, but my hemo guy insists that all is well and other numbers indicate the drug is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. If you say so, dude. It's not like you have a Plan B, so what else are you going to say? Physically, I'm the same; tired all the damn time, open sores and rashes popping up at random (mostly on the right side of my body, which is really odd...). I've gotten outside to take a wack at the six months of junk piled up all over the place, but I just can't be out there for very long without feeling like I'm gong to black out. Of course the 90-100 degree heat may have something to do with that.
Oh, and because we don't have enough other stuff going on, we finally got the plumber and tile guys out here and completely ripped out the bathroom and all the plumbing and replaced everything:
While we were at it, we had the old kitchen sink taken out and replaced with a deeper one, a new faucet and a water filter.
Bathroom floor.
New sink top to replace the 1970's gold marble (that "matched" the original green shag carpet).
Front of the shower stall.
Back of the shower stall. The seat is more of a perch; one cheek at a time ONLY please.
We only had to spend one night down at my parents and only had to use the park bathhouse for showers a couple times. The tile people and the plumber dude did a good job of leaving the place livable at the end of the day. We still have to replace the 1970's antique brass faux-Gothic towel rod, hand towel hanger and toilet paper holder. We are also replacing the light fixture and the mirror and medicine cabinet. Then the last step will be to peel off the old-people wallpaper boarder around the top of the room and painting the room something other than old-people beige.
First Gene Cernan and now Batman. Are there any heroes left?
Adam West died on Friday, June 9th. I realize West did a great deal more than just play Batman for a couple years. I was only three or four years old on the the show's first run, so I probably remember them when they were reruns on Channel 50, when it was operated by Kaiser Broadcasting. It was pretty cheesy stuff, even back then, but I was hooked. It doesn't matter how many posers have tried to play Batman since, Adam West will always be THE BATMAN.
I love this:
I assume this was West's idea. Someone who played himself on such shows as The Simpsons and Family Guy probably didn't take himself very seriously.
This past Thursday the New York Times vomited up a hit piece on little ol’ me – a guy who has been doing stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years and thought maybe that comedy could be used to inform and inspire audiences, rather than just make fun of the differences between men and women.
At first when you’re the center of a smear job, you’re annoyed and frustrated. But as I read further through the piece, I realized it was a master class in how to write propaganda for one of the most “respected” news outlets in our country. I’m actually grateful it was written about me because now I can see with my own eyes exactly how the glorious chicanery is done. I count no less than 15 lies, manipulations, and false implications in this short article, a score that even our fearless prevaricator-in-chief Donald Trump would envy.
So here now is a “How To” for writing propaganda for the New York Times – using the smear piece against me as an example.
It really is worth it to take five minutes and read the entire article.
Personal update:
I'm back to a sort-of normal. I cannot do any real physical activity for more than a few minutes, and I can't take direct sun at all. But I'm able to get to work and make it back home to watch TV, so that makes me better off than most of our neighbors. I'm on some drug that Johnson & Johnson thinks is worth $110 a pill wholesale. (At three pills a day, that comes to $10,000/month.) Of course, I'm not paying that. In fact, I'm not paying anything. J&J has a program for poor sots like me so I can get it for free. When I read up on the drug's side effects, I wondered if I would even be able to continue working. But so far, they've been mild to the point of non-existent. In fact, I'm wondering if the stuff is even working as many of the side effects are the result of the destruction and flushing of all the defective white blood cells floating around in my bloodstream. My last round of blood work was inconclusive; the blood work I had done today will show if I'm one of the lucky few who will not experience any of the common side effects, or if I'm one of the unlucky few for whom the drug does nothing. I have no idea what happens if it's the latter. Everyone seems to have placed all my eggs in one basket.
Central Florida had one of the worst droughts ever over the winter. The wet season seemed like it would never get here. Most of our plants were dead or nearly so; even some of the trees in the woods behind us died completely. About two weeks ago, we finally got some rain. Now we wish we were back in the drought. So far, flooding has been minimal because the ground is so dry, most of the water is soaking in as fast as it can come down. But that won't last forever. The good news is that most of our plants came back. We lost a few and I will likely replace a couple others that are so beat down and deformed that even if they recover, they will never be anything but ugly. I'll do a little trimming and give them one last chance, then if they don't shape up it's off to the compost bin.
