Debbie just called a little while ago. Her mom died peacefully May 12, 2018 around 11pm.
God Bless You, Mom.
You will live forever in our hearts.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Marge Wiklanski/Boris, RIP
Debbie just called a little while ago. Her mom died peacefully May 12, 2018 around 11pm.
God Bless You, Mom.
You will live forever in our hearts.
Thursday, May 03, 2018
Good Bye, Dozer
As Jon Katz says, you did what you came to do and it was time for you to go help someone else.
Love you always, buddy.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Rain, Rain, Go Away!
I don't really mean that; things are pretty dry around here, but they are a whole lot less dry than they were 48 hours ago. We've had two days of everything from light sprinkles to thunder-lightning-horizontal-rain-OMG-it's-TEOTWAWKI! It looks like it is finally over, so maybe I'll get some clean-up done on my couple days off.
Speaking of a couple days off, on my last couple of couple of days off, we got this done:
Not sure what we are going to do about the gaping hole. No combination of standard blinds matched the odd size of our RV-plus-extension-plus-Florida-room-width porch (one reason it took us the better part of six years to make this simple improvement). I'd like to build something free-standing that would fill the gape (is that English?), but the company that makes the blinds doesn't sell the fabric in bulk. I have some shade fabric we bought like six years ago, but it really looks ugly next to the grey:
The company that we bought the brown stuff from now has grey fabric, but it's a lot darker than the blinds, so I'm not sure it would be much of an improvement. But for now, another project checked off the list; only 7,429 to go.
One of which is to get this site away from Google. I have a solid possibility. It costs money, but not very much (less than $50/year). It will likely be somewhat painful to move all the accumulated crap to something else, which is exactly why Google thinks they can get away with anything. At this point, I'm just ready to be done. I started this thing with a paid web host, then moved it to Blogger (before it was Borg'ed by Google) to save the pittance I was paying the host. One of those decisions that seemed to make sense at the time, but was probably not a great move in retrospect. TANSTAAFL. Now it's looking like I'll be taking this thing full circle back to a paid web host. The difference will be the physical location; my original host was in Alaska and the one I'm considering is in Iceland. So the latitude will be similar, but the longitude certainly will not be.
So now I have to figure out how to migrate everything and how much disk space that's going to take and how much monthly data gets burped up, etc. I'm sure Google will be very helpful....
Not much else going on. We still have no clue what we are doing about our parents, both of our jobs still suck dead bunnies, and all the news media can do is scream RussiaRussiaRussia!!! and BombAssadBombAssadBombAssad!!! (sigh) I can't even force myself to care enough to criticize all the stupid.
Other than to say this: If we continue in the direction that things seem to be heading, the US government will wish it never stopped hiding all those flag-draped coffins.
Well, the sun is out and it is just now getting up over 70 degrees, so I should go outside and wash some siding.
Speaking of a couple days off, on my last couple of couple of days off, we got this done:
 |
| Our Fortress of Solitude (with gaping hole) |
 | ||
| Inside our Fortress of Solitude (with gaping hole) |
Not sure what we are going to do about the gaping hole. No combination of standard blinds matched the odd size of our RV-plus-extension-plus-Florida-room-width porch (one reason it took us the better part of six years to make this simple improvement). I'd like to build something free-standing that would fill the gape (is that English?), but the company that makes the blinds doesn't sell the fabric in bulk. I have some shade fabric we bought like six years ago, but it really looks ugly next to the grey:
 |
| Ugh.... |
The company that we bought the brown stuff from now has grey fabric, but it's a lot darker than the blinds, so I'm not sure it would be much of an improvement. But for now, another project checked off the list; only 7,429 to go.
One of which is to get this site away from Google. I have a solid possibility. It costs money, but not very much (less than $50/year). It will likely be somewhat painful to move all the accumulated crap to something else, which is exactly why Google thinks they can get away with anything. At this point, I'm just ready to be done. I started this thing with a paid web host, then moved it to Blogger (before it was Borg'ed by Google) to save the pittance I was paying the host. One of those decisions that seemed to make sense at the time, but was probably not a great move in retrospect. TANSTAAFL. Now it's looking like I'll be taking this thing full circle back to a paid web host. The difference will be the physical location; my original host was in Alaska and the one I'm considering is in Iceland. So the latitude will be similar, but the longitude certainly will not be.
So now I have to figure out how to migrate everything and how much disk space that's going to take and how much monthly data gets burped up, etc. I'm sure Google will be very helpful....
Not much else going on. We still have no clue what we are doing about our parents, both of our jobs still suck dead bunnies, and all the news media can do is scream RussiaRussiaRussia!!! and BombAssadBombAssadBombAssad!!! (sigh) I can't even force myself to care enough to criticize all the stupid.
Other than to say this: If we continue in the direction that things seem to be heading, the US government will wish it never stopped hiding all those flag-draped coffins.
Well, the sun is out and it is just now getting up over 70 degrees, so I should go outside and wash some siding.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Kill Moose and Squirrel!
[Well, there was a Youtube video of Boris and Natasha right here, but apparently Google has a problem with someone using Google to link to Google. This is why I am currently shopping for someplace else to have this blog.]
So now the evilly evillest of all evils, those Rascally Russians are poisoning aging double-agents who were pardoned and exiled from Russia in a spy swap nearly a decade ago. Like all the other blame-the-Russians stories, this one is really hard to swallow.
First, unless the UK has Abby Sciuto working for them, there is no way they had evidence pointing to Russia a day or two after the "poisoning". As any cop, detective, prosecutor, etc. can tell you, even in a high-profile case, you are talking weeks if not months. Only on TV can a complex chemical analysis be run in the time it takes to air two boner pill ads and a weather update. That goes double if the unknown substance is suspected of being a lethal Cold War-era nerve agent. Not to mention that there is a treaty that both Russia and Britain are signatories of that details how this exact situation is supposed to be handled. Rule number one is evidence must be turned over to an international body, which the Brits refuse to do. One suspects that the reason for doing so has a great deal to do them not having any.
Then let us consider the minor fact that Russia destroyed all its stockpiles of such chemical weapons which was verified by international observers. The formula for Novichok is public domain and could be made anywhere by anyone. So we are to believe that the Russian government went to the trouble of secretly synthesizing a known Soviet nerve agent that was sure to be tracked directly back to them, then smuggled it into the UK so they could poison a double-agent who knew nothing of value about Russia, mere days before the Russian presidential elections.
Riiiiiiiiight.
In terms of pure stupid, this ranks right up there with "Russians hacked the DNC!" and "Russians hacked voting machines that aren't even connected to the internet!"
And then we have the Mueller investigation and the completely off-the-rails idea that a few planted Facebook jpegs from a Russian troll farm gave the presidential election to Trump. I love how the windbags in the MSM are trying to play this thing both ways. One minute they are mocking Internet Research Agency for only getting around 19,000 hits on the Hilltendo video game while also claiming that the only reason Hillary lost was because of IRA ads. Sorry guys; you can't have it both ways. Either Jesus arm-wrestling Satan, or Muscle-Bound Bernie in a banana hammock were just so much internet flotsam, or they were part of one of the most successful psy ops in human history.
And if it is the latter, then we need to just pack it in now and give up, because we've already lost. Look; if our "democracy" is so fragile that it can be completely undone by a silly Flash-based video game, then what could it possibly matter who sits in the Oval Office (or Congress, or the Supreme Court, or any Governor's Mansion, or state legislature)? Just run up the white flag already, and pass the Drambuie; 'cause this sucker is goin' down.
Meanwhile, back in the reality-based world, on top of everything else we have to deal with, both of us are having serious work issues. We are considering lawyers. Yea. It's that bad. At this point, I could give a flying sack of hippo dung about my job. I'm already past my average length of stay with any given employer, but Debbie has a different attitude towards work. And it really may not matter given that how things are going with Debbie's mom and my parents, I'm not all that sure we're even going to be living here much longer.
Gotta go work on taxes.
So now the evilly evillest of all evils, those Rascally Russians are poisoning aging double-agents who were pardoned and exiled from Russia in a spy swap nearly a decade ago. Like all the other blame-the-Russians stories, this one is really hard to swallow.
First, unless the UK has Abby Sciuto working for them, there is no way they had evidence pointing to Russia a day or two after the "poisoning". As any cop, detective, prosecutor, etc. can tell you, even in a high-profile case, you are talking weeks if not months. Only on TV can a complex chemical analysis be run in the time it takes to air two boner pill ads and a weather update. That goes double if the unknown substance is suspected of being a lethal Cold War-era nerve agent. Not to mention that there is a treaty that both Russia and Britain are signatories of that details how this exact situation is supposed to be handled. Rule number one is evidence must be turned over to an international body, which the Brits refuse to do. One suspects that the reason for doing so has a great deal to do them not having any.
Then let us consider the minor fact that Russia destroyed all its stockpiles of such chemical weapons which was verified by international observers. The formula for Novichok is public domain and could be made anywhere by anyone. So we are to believe that the Russian government went to the trouble of secretly synthesizing a known Soviet nerve agent that was sure to be tracked directly back to them, then smuggled it into the UK so they could poison a double-agent who knew nothing of value about Russia, mere days before the Russian presidential elections.
Riiiiiiiiight.
In terms of pure stupid, this ranks right up there with "Russians hacked the DNC!" and "Russians hacked voting machines that aren't even connected to the internet!"
And then we have the Mueller investigation and the completely off-the-rails idea that a few planted Facebook jpegs from a Russian troll farm gave the presidential election to Trump. I love how the windbags in the MSM are trying to play this thing both ways. One minute they are mocking Internet Research Agency for only getting around 19,000 hits on the Hilltendo video game while also claiming that the only reason Hillary lost was because of IRA ads. Sorry guys; you can't have it both ways. Either Jesus arm-wrestling Satan, or Muscle-Bound Bernie in a banana hammock were just so much internet flotsam, or they were part of one of the most successful psy ops in human history.
And if it is the latter, then we need to just pack it in now and give up, because we've already lost. Look; if our "democracy" is so fragile that it can be completely undone by a silly Flash-based video game, then what could it possibly matter who sits in the Oval Office (or Congress, or the Supreme Court, or any Governor's Mansion, or state legislature)? Just run up the white flag already, and pass the Drambuie; 'cause this sucker is goin' down.
Meanwhile, back in the reality-based world, on top of everything else we have to deal with, both of us are having serious work issues. We are considering lawyers. Yea. It's that bad. At this point, I could give a flying sack of hippo dung about my job. I'm already past my average length of stay with any given employer, but Debbie has a different attitude towards work. And it really may not matter given that how things are going with Debbie's mom and my parents, I'm not all that sure we're even going to be living here much longer.
Gotta go work on taxes.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Frack Yourself with a Rusty Walmart
Sorry; I've been catching up on my Lee Camp.
So this post has nothing to do with fracking. Or rusty Walmarts.
Nope. I figured I need to say something about school shootings.
First: those who are claiming that the terrified kids running out of the Stoneman Douglas High School are "crisis actors", you can go frack yourself with a rusty Walmart. I sincerely hope there really is a hell so you can slow-roast in it for all eternity.
Second: I am a life-member of the NRA. I will never hide that fact, nor will I ever apologize for it. You think the NRA is the evilest evil that ever eviled an evil? That's fine. I happen to think that is a spot-on description of Hillary Clinton, whom you likely worship as a goddess, but it really doesn't matter to me what you think. (And I'm 100% positive that the inverse is also true.) Where I begin to care is the point where you think that your political opinions are Holy Writ and mine are a heresy worthy of having me burned at the stake.
Does that mean that I agree with every word that has ever fallen from the lips of Wayne LaPierre? Absolutely not. I think he has said some monumentally stupid things in his time as the executive VP of the NRA. Just like every other human that has ever lived. If you agree with everything that another person or organization has ever said or done, then you are a corpse. It really is that simple. Hell, I don't even agree with things I've written in the past on this very blog.
But the fact remains that at crucial points over the last several decades, the NRA, sometimes alone, has stood athwart the mainstream political flow shouting, "Stop!" For that and for that alone, they will always have my support. Of course, the US political process often makes them seem lunatic when they are simply giving themselves negotiating room. For example, if we are talking tax rates, me saying the top tax rate should be 5% and you saying it should be 95% is viewed by the press and the public for what it is: an opening bid in a process that will end up somewhere that may not be perfect, but perfect will at least be somewhere within sight. Both initial positions are absurd, but no one questions the sanity of those proposing them. When the subject is, say, bump stocks, taking an absurd starting position can make you sound... well... absurd. Especially when the absurdity is amplified by a press corp mostly made up of those on the ban-everything-more-lethal-than-a-paring-knife end of the political spectrum.
All that to say that my leanings are strongly libertarian and that I tend to be allergic to the words "government ban", whether the object being banned is marijuana or 15-round magazines. Over the last several decades, there has been a tendency to remove human agency when a person commits some horrific act. It can't possibly be that someone's son or daughter is broken in some fundamental way. No, no!! It's the demon weed, or internet porn, or violent video games, or comic books. Or ugly guns.
Another thing that makes me break out in hives are "easy" answers. In this most recent instance, we have a clear case of undiagnosed, and thus untreated, mental illness. Easy answer: anyone with a mental illness is banned for life from ever owning any kind of firearm. Perfect, right?
Except.
Did you miss that "undiagnosed" part? Nothing in any of the half-assed mental-health-related proposals I've seen flying around the internet would have changed what happened on February 14 for the simple reason that a very broken human being slipped through the cracks. So the first way that such an idea fails is the problem of false negatives.
The flip-side is, of course, the problem of false positives. Anyone who has spent five minutes perusing the DSM (Everyone does this, right? Not just me, right? Hello? Anyone? damn...) knows that every single person at some point in their life meets the criteria of a mental illness of one sort or another. The problem is that, unlike biological diseases, there is no definitive test that can be run on a patient to reliably determine that they have, for example, clinical depression. I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I know this because of various blood test that were run, including something called a FISH test. No such test or tests exist for clinical depression. A few quotes from the above-linked Wikipedia entry (hey, it's on the internet, so it must be true...):
(Emphasis is mine.)
Does that really sound like something that can be used as a basis for banning someone from gun ownership? And if you think it is, then why not use it to also ban people from driving semi's? Do we really want the mentally ill piloting 80,000-pound vehicles through our cities? Or voting? I mean, obviously only a mental patient would vote for Trump, right?
Is this really a direction we want to head?
One problem with something like a school shooting is that because it is so horrific, it tends to be viewed in isolation. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Who is to blame for this? It's hard to do because it involves kids, but we really need to step back and look at the bigger picture. Not just one barely-adult deliberately killing 17 school kids at a particular school, but all the school shootings (seven so far in 2018, not the commonly-reported 15). Then take another step (or two or three) back and look at all gun murders so far in 2018 (589, counting the latest in Orlando just a few hours ago). We can blame the number of guns or the types of guns all we want, but the bottom line is that there have always been large numbers of every kind of gun available in the US. Everyone I grew up with had guns in the house and we all knew where they were and how to use them. Yet we would never have dreamed of shooting someone with one. Well, there was this one kid, but he was widely recognized as being seriously broken and, last I knew, was permanently institutionalized. And even he never managed to kill anyone.
No, something has changed, and I don't think gun laws will help. If a person is serious about killing another person, they will. Humans are just too damn easy to kill; shoot, stab, bludgeon, strangle, punch. If we can't even stop people from killing each other in our prisons, then just what sort of laws do you think would make any difference "on the outside"? I know it's the worst sort of cliche to say that guns don't kill people, people kill people, but it's true, hackneyed or not.
Look, when I was in school, everyone with a small game license brought a shotgun to school. After soccer practice, several of us, including the soccer coach and several of the teachers, would head out to the field behind the school to see if we could bag a pheasant or rabbit for dinner. (This was during the Volcker recession; many families in my school subsisted mostly on home-grown veggies and wild game.) I hated some of those guys, a feeling they reciprocated, yet it would have never occurred to any of us to take a shot at each other. Not because we were soooo much more mature than high school kids these days or any of that crap. Thinking back on some of the ass-hattery we routinely got into, we were probably bigger dipshits than average. But shoot each other? That was so far out there the concept didn't exist. And this was in Flint, in the early 80's when we held the national championship for murders for several consecutive years until Washington DC finally beat us out for the title.
Sorry, I don't have answers, easy or otherwise, other than to say that something is causing a record number of broken people. We owe it to ourselves... we owe it to our kids, to get past the political posturing and easy answers (Ban AR-15's! Arm teachers! Metal detectors! Barb wire! Lock up [fill in the blank]!) and try to figure out why the US is the world leader in building psychopaths.
Sorry this went on so long, but this is kinda important.
[Update: you have to see Lee Camp's interview with a teacher from Stoneman Douglas High School]
So this post has nothing to do with fracking. Or rusty Walmarts.
Nope. I figured I need to say something about school shootings.
First: those who are claiming that the terrified kids running out of the Stoneman Douglas High School are "crisis actors", you can go frack yourself with a rusty Walmart. I sincerely hope there really is a hell so you can slow-roast in it for all eternity.
Second: I am a life-member of the NRA. I will never hide that fact, nor will I ever apologize for it. You think the NRA is the evilest evil that ever eviled an evil? That's fine. I happen to think that is a spot-on description of Hillary Clinton, whom you likely worship as a goddess, but it really doesn't matter to me what you think. (And I'm 100% positive that the inverse is also true.) Where I begin to care is the point where you think that your political opinions are Holy Writ and mine are a heresy worthy of having me burned at the stake.
Does that mean that I agree with every word that has ever fallen from the lips of Wayne LaPierre? Absolutely not. I think he has said some monumentally stupid things in his time as the executive VP of the NRA. Just like every other human that has ever lived. If you agree with everything that another person or organization has ever said or done, then you are a corpse. It really is that simple. Hell, I don't even agree with things I've written in the past on this very blog.
But the fact remains that at crucial points over the last several decades, the NRA, sometimes alone, has stood athwart the mainstream political flow shouting, "Stop!" For that and for that alone, they will always have my support. Of course, the US political process often makes them seem lunatic when they are simply giving themselves negotiating room. For example, if we are talking tax rates, me saying the top tax rate should be 5% and you saying it should be 95% is viewed by the press and the public for what it is: an opening bid in a process that will end up somewhere that may not be perfect, but perfect will at least be somewhere within sight. Both initial positions are absurd, but no one questions the sanity of those proposing them. When the subject is, say, bump stocks, taking an absurd starting position can make you sound... well... absurd. Especially when the absurdity is amplified by a press corp mostly made up of those on the ban-everything-more-lethal-than-a-paring-knife end of the political spectrum.
All that to say that my leanings are strongly libertarian and that I tend to be allergic to the words "government ban", whether the object being banned is marijuana or 15-round magazines. Over the last several decades, there has been a tendency to remove human agency when a person commits some horrific act. It can't possibly be that someone's son or daughter is broken in some fundamental way. No, no!! It's the demon weed, or internet porn, or violent video games, or comic books. Or ugly guns.
Another thing that makes me break out in hives are "easy" answers. In this most recent instance, we have a clear case of undiagnosed, and thus untreated, mental illness. Easy answer: anyone with a mental illness is banned for life from ever owning any kind of firearm. Perfect, right?
Except.
Did you miss that "undiagnosed" part? Nothing in any of the half-assed mental-health-related proposals I've seen flying around the internet would have changed what happened on February 14 for the simple reason that a very broken human being slipped through the cracks. So the first way that such an idea fails is the problem of false negatives.
The flip-side is, of course, the problem of false positives. Anyone who has spent five minutes perusing the DSM (Everyone does this, right? Not just me, right? Hello? Anyone? damn...) knows that every single person at some point in their life meets the criteria of a mental illness of one sort or another. The problem is that, unlike biological diseases, there is no definitive test that can be run on a patient to reliably determine that they have, for example, clinical depression. I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I know this because of various blood test that were run, including something called a FISH test. No such test or tests exist for clinical depression. A few quotes from the above-linked Wikipedia entry (hey, it's on the internet, so it must be true...):
Despite caveats in the introduction to the DSM, it has long been argued that its system of classification makes unjustified categorical distinctions between disorders and uses arbitrary cut-offs between normal and abnormal.
...
It has also been alleged that the way the categories of the DSM are structured, as well as the substantial expansion of the number of categories, are representative of an increasing medicalization of human nature, which may be attributed to disease mongering by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, the power and influence of the latter having grown dramatically in recent decades.
...
[Psychiatrist Allen] Frances warned that if this DSM version is issued unamended by the APA, "it will medicalize normality and result in a glut of unnecessary and harmful drug prescription."
(Emphasis is mine.)
Does that really sound like something that can be used as a basis for banning someone from gun ownership? And if you think it is, then why not use it to also ban people from driving semi's? Do we really want the mentally ill piloting 80,000-pound vehicles through our cities? Or voting? I mean, obviously only a mental patient would vote for Trump, right?
Is this really a direction we want to head?
One problem with something like a school shooting is that because it is so horrific, it tends to be viewed in isolation. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Who is to blame for this? It's hard to do because it involves kids, but we really need to step back and look at the bigger picture. Not just one barely-adult deliberately killing 17 school kids at a particular school, but all the school shootings (seven so far in 2018, not the commonly-reported 15). Then take another step (or two or three) back and look at all gun murders so far in 2018 (589, counting the latest in Orlando just a few hours ago). We can blame the number of guns or the types of guns all we want, but the bottom line is that there have always been large numbers of every kind of gun available in the US. Everyone I grew up with had guns in the house and we all knew where they were and how to use them. Yet we would never have dreamed of shooting someone with one. Well, there was this one kid, but he was widely recognized as being seriously broken and, last I knew, was permanently institutionalized. And even he never managed to kill anyone.
No, something has changed, and I don't think gun laws will help. If a person is serious about killing another person, they will. Humans are just too damn easy to kill; shoot, stab, bludgeon, strangle, punch. If we can't even stop people from killing each other in our prisons, then just what sort of laws do you think would make any difference "on the outside"? I know it's the worst sort of cliche to say that guns don't kill people, people kill people, but it's true, hackneyed or not.
Look, when I was in school, everyone with a small game license brought a shotgun to school. After soccer practice, several of us, including the soccer coach and several of the teachers, would head out to the field behind the school to see if we could bag a pheasant or rabbit for dinner. (This was during the Volcker recession; many families in my school subsisted mostly on home-grown veggies and wild game.) I hated some of those guys, a feeling they reciprocated, yet it would have never occurred to any of us to take a shot at each other. Not because we were soooo much more mature than high school kids these days or any of that crap. Thinking back on some of the ass-hattery we routinely got into, we were probably bigger dipshits than average. But shoot each other? That was so far out there the concept didn't exist. And this was in Flint, in the early 80's when we held the national championship for murders for several consecutive years until Washington DC finally beat us out for the title.
Sorry, I don't have answers, easy or otherwise, other than to say that something is causing a record number of broken people. We owe it to ourselves... we owe it to our kids, to get past the political posturing and easy answers (Ban AR-15's! Arm teachers! Metal detectors! Barb wire! Lock up [fill in the blank]!) and try to figure out why the US is the world leader in building psychopaths.
Sorry this went on so long, but this is kinda important.
[Update: you have to see Lee Camp's interview with a teacher from Stoneman Douglas High School]
Thursday, February 15, 2018
If a Tree Falls in a Forest...
...what are the odds that it will hit our car?
100%.
Luckily, no broken glass. In fact, other than some dirt and a few small scuff marks, no real damage to the car at all. However, what we park the car under didn't fare so well.
The park guys came back here with chains saws and got rid of the big stuff. I spent my days off cleaning up the rest.
100%.
Luckily, no broken glass. In fact, other than some dirt and a few small scuff marks, no real damage to the car at all. However, what we park the car under didn't fare so well.
The park guys came back here with chains saws and got rid of the big stuff. I spent my days off cleaning up the rest.
We're not sure what we're going to do now. I don't like the idea of our car sitting under old trees without some kind of protection from falling debris, but technically, that ain't part of our lot. The only reason we've been able to use it is because everything was already there when we bought into the park. The new management was rumored to be instituting a park-wide ban on all new free-standing structures, but as is usual, nothing official. There is also a rumor that all the dead-end roads like ours will have turn-around's installed so people don't have to back out. I need to find time to run over to the park next door and talk to the Corporate Head Cheese and get the real 411.
My mom had a second "event" back on Sunday, February 4th. Given our problems with 911 the first time around, I just stuffed her in the car and didn't even bother with it. This time seemed much worse. The aphasia was much worse and was combined with a lot of confusion. She asked me about halfway to the hospital if I was a friend of her son, Ric. She took much longer to come out of it as well. She's home, but still struggling with the aphasia, especially when she is tired or upset. She is also having a lot of trouble with numbers. Again, no word on if any of this is permanent, if these "events" will continue or if there is anything that can be done to prevent them. But I'm sure the hospital is being paid well by the US taxpayers for keeping her in there for several days so twenty different people could come in and ask her what her name is, where she is, her address, phone number, who my dad is, who the president is, etc.
Debbie's mom is now back to where she was a couple weeks after her initial surgery. She was doing well, trying to talk, recognizing people both in person and on the phone, etc. Then her surgery site became infected (MRSA, natch; she is in a hospital) and was transferred back up to Saginaw to take care of that. Everyone was so focused on the infection they "forgot" to pay attention to her lungs. After getting transferred back down to Pontiac, she stopped breathing. Ever since, she has been in a deep sleep and is not really responsive. Debbie will be heading back up in a couple weeks to give her brother and sister-in-law a break from bedside care.
[Update for 02/18/2018: Debbie's mom is awake, seems to recognize people both in person and on the phone.]
I got through a first-draft run of our taxes. We're still getting hit with the $1,000 nigger ta... er... Obamacare tax. At least that goes away next year for a little while. (All of Trump's tax cuts for working stiffs expire the year he leaves his presumptive second term. The tax cuts for his corporate buddies are permanent.) But thanks to the massive medical bills we had to pay last year, we're still getting at least something back. It will likely all go into car repairs; we had planned on replacing the Durango this year, but then we had to give all the money we had saved to the fracking doctors. If we are going to be driving the thing up to Michigan again this summer, I need to get it to the garage and get some major work done on it. That will likely eat our entire tax refund plus a bunch more. Yaaay!!!
2018. The Year of Suck.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Shit Houses, Shitholes, and Other Shit
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.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Ronald Kellaway, RIP
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.
2018? Still suckin'.
And I'm becoming weary of typing those three letters in post titles.
2018? Still suckin'.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Robert Thompson, RIP
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.
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.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
So Far, 2018? You Suck.
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.
Fuck. You.
Deep.
And on a slant.
With sand in the Vaseline.
[Aside: A good collection of Talking Heads, FYI.]
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.
Woo.
Hoo.
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.
Fuck. You.
Deep.
And on a slant.
With sand in the Vaseline.
[Aside: A good collection of Talking Heads, FYI.]
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.
Woo.
Hoo.
Thursday, January 04, 2018
So It's 2018...
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 RT years 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:
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:
(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.
Well, enough. The X-Files is calling my name....
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 RT years 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.
Well, enough. The X-Files is calling my name....
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Thursday, November 23, 2017
No More Screaming
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.
Or maybe a death metal band.
Either way, someone needs to get on that.
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.
And what a blessed day that will be.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!!
And someone still needs to start up a punk band called The Screaming Toilet Valves.
Or maybe a death metal band.
Either way, someone needs to get on that.
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.
And what a blessed day that will be.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!!
Thursday, November 09, 2017
A Little Site Maintenance
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, November 05, 2017
Another Quick Update
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
The Screaming Toilet Valves...
...is not the name of a punk rock band.
It really needs to be.
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 pass the beer nuts.
It really needs to be.
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 pass the beer nuts.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Life in Florida
Woman arrested while trying to yank out another woman's hair and uterus.
Pasco man arrested for driving into person who set bananas on his car.
Hours after Hurricane Irma, Miami-Dade County tickets residents for code violations.
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.
Pasco man arrested for driving into person who set bananas on his car.
Hours after Hurricane Irma, Miami-Dade County tickets residents for code violations.
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.
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Dr. Nefario's Snowplow
We sooooo needed this when we lived in our little log house:
Those are MiG-15 jet engines. Leave it to Russians to invent a snow removal device that looks like a doomsday machine from a Bond flick.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Dr. Jerry Pournelle, RIP
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.
Steve Sailor over at Taki's Magazine has a memorial article on Dr. Pournelle:
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.
Steve Sailor over at Taki's Magazine has a memorial article on Dr. Pournelle:
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.
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