Vacation = Work, Work = Rest

When I finally give up for the night and go to bed my "vacation" will be at it's end. I go back to work tomorrow - to rest! These past two weeks and the weekends for a month and a half before that were spent moving one of my 10x30 storage bins to my barn in New Hampshire. Single handed. With a retired phone company Astro Van.

The one remaining bin I hope to be able to move in better weather come spring. With my checkbook.

As mentioned over on FaceBook:

I just got done removing about 10" of global warming from my driveway. Thankfully the global-warming-blower I bought at a yard sale last summer works and works well! What we need to do is invent a kind of global warming that only lands on things that don't need to be shoveled...

BTW: My driveway is now about three feet longer than it was thanks to the big global-warming-mover not getting anywhere near the actual edge of the road. Thanks! I think...

A couple of items written for elsewhere

This one was written as a comment on a friend’s wall timeline over on Facebook.  He was saying how he was waiting for the snow to start:

We're waiting on it here now. Since Galileo is 'under the weather,' this afternoon we put a set of studded snows on the flea van that I'm driving full time now. On the ride home Mum and I agreed that the old summer tires are NOT going back on the van come spring. What a difference! My Vanagon Westy had under-rated car tires on it when we first bought it. That set up was actually white-knuckle driving dangerous! This van just felt a bit "squishy." With the right tires it feels like a different van! Stay warm Al! And Happy Boxing Day!

I think I wrote about the Westy’s tires at length at the time.  But I’ll be dinged if I can find it now…  Aha!  Not a blog post but rather a in a thread over at The Samba!

This one was written as a comment for JayG in a post about a botched oil delivery:

I look for disconnected fill pipes when viewing a property. That's one thing on my list that the home owner needs to fix before we have a signed P&S.

I'm having problems with my propane supplier. (To the point that I keep wanting to spell it ProPain...)

About three weeks ago we scheduled a delivery of 50gal. to tide us over since both tanks were about out and at the same time we arranged for the replacement of one of our tanks that was at the end of it's service life. When I got home from work the day of the delivery I found that both tanks were full to the gills.

I called to cancel the tank swap, but they decided to proceed anyway even though the full tanks would make it much more of a hassle for the technician. That was done two weeks ago. I'm still waiting for the credit for the fuel that went away with the tank.

Monday I watched the delivery guy out my back window fill the tanks at my neighbors house. He was also supposed to fill mine. Apparently he decided that he didn't need to follow that order either since he'd just filled both of my tanks three weeks ago.

I'll be calling the office to complain tomorrow. I didn't today because I was busy cooling my heals at Sears for three and a half hours getting snow tires. But that's a story for another day...

And just a moment ago I wrote this for another friend I’m chatting with at FB who mentioned all the craziness in the media about wanting new gun laws:

I've been following it.  I even yelled at the radio this morning when the news pointed out that the nutbag that killed the firefighters "had the same Bushmaster rifle as" the Connecticut shooter.  When they mentioned that he was a convicted felon and "shouldn't have had the guns" I couldn't help pointing out (at some volume) that adding more laws won't stop guys like him so leave us the <expletive deleted> alone!

On the Newtown massacre

Originally written as a comment for this post over at Tam’s:

1. Because the problem isn’t going away (and the media has only been encouraging copycat behavior) the first thing we need to do is to treat the infection with an effective antibiotic (anti-psychotic?):

Institute the Israeli model of allowing the school staff to actually protect our kids instead of hiding under their desks!  That would be an effective deterrent for some and would stop those not deterred in their tracks.

2. To prevent re-infection I would prescribe the following:

As has been said by others, if more in the media would follow Paul Harvey's lead in not giving the killer the (in)fame they crave there might be fewer seeking their (in)fame this way.

Hmm…  Are they misunderstanding infamy as a contraction of instant fame?

As to the root cause:

I can only surmise that a lot of it has to do with lack of respect.

– For authority (parents, teachers, employers or any others /deserving/ of respect (IMHO: respect has to be earned.  I generally give a measure as a matter of course when first meeting someone.  Then it depends on the individual if that measure increases or decreases.  In some cases it can be extinguished entirely.  Even then that would not be an excuse for the kind of behavior we’re talking about here.  But that’s me.  YMMV…))

– For property (It seems that I can’t have reflectors at the end of my driveway without someone stealing and/or smashing them, and one of the homes down the street was ‘tagged’ with graffiti the other day)

– For self (have you seen the way these kids dress these days?!? [/curmudgeon voice]).  Seriously, though, it seems to me that so many people, not just kids, these days really do not respect themselves.  Many see their own lives as more of a PITA than they want to bother with and a select few choose the permanent solution to the temporary problem.  Thankfully only a very few of those chose to take others along on their way out. 

Clinical depression can be an overwhelming soul-crushing burden.  It can make it seem as if there is no other way out and that one’s own life has no value.  If one’s own live is without value how much less that of someone else?  Based on what the media presents it would seem that much of our society is based on fame as a source of value.  Some may believe the primary source of value.  With the media giving instant fame to deceased mass killers with 24/7 coverage in the first days after a ‘suicide-by-major-press-event’ some may believe they can (pardon the phrase) kill two birds with one stone.  They end their own lives as the culmination of the event or have it ended for them through suicide-by-cop if they can’t do the deed themselves and they posthumously get the fame they mistakenly believe will give their life meaning.  By taking away the fame it eliminates a large part of the incentive.  By actually defending our public places and especially our schools even if they still opt for suicide by cop or by armed citizen the number of innocents harmed will almost certainly be greatly reduced.

Or we, as a society, can go on doing what we’ve been doing for the past several decades and hope for different results…

Happy Labor Day!

In honor of Labor Day I nuked a couple of hotdogs.  Sorry, I didn’t photograph them for you.  I chose to eat them while they were still warm instead.  You know how things cool down so fast when nuked.

Enjoy and be safe out there!

A comment I posted at Yahoo! News:

Regarding this story The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why? I had this to say:

Why don't we buy it?  Well, there are glacial erratics all over my neighborhood.  Huge boulders that were deposited by the retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age.  Frankly, I'd rather you DON'T roll back global warming to the point that my house is under 200 feet of ice.  Thank you very much.

Climate is not static.  It doesn't matter that it would be more convenient for some people (scientists in this case) if it were.  And while I am all for breathing clean air I am NOT for a return to some hippies utopian idea of stone(d) age bliss.

So far the vast majority of comments (well over four thousand when last I checked) were on the side of 'we don't buy it because it's junk science.' 

I suspect this is part of the reason the Legacy Media is so afraid of the free expression of ideas and instant world-wide reach of the internet.  It's really hard to control the dialogue when others who may disagree with you have an equal voice.

All the other kids are doin' it...

There's a meme running around the intertubes this evening along the lines of

'what (knife) has it got in its pocketses, my Precious?'  

Well, the little Victorinox MiniChamp rides in my custom cell phone case and the Boker COP Tool rides in its sheath on my belt.  I switched to the fixed blade COP Tool after I messed up my trigger finger and was having a problem opening my Camilus Heat even with the spring assist.

BTW: The fob on the Boker came with the knife.  I made the one on the SAK myself.  Gutted 550 paracord and instructions from the web.

Who in their right mind would think this is a good idea?

CNN is reporting that the President’s jobs plan may create as many as 1 million jobs.  They go on to add that ‘economists gave generally positive reviews’ to the President’s plan.

Um, FYI, the President gave a speech.  He hasn’t actually given us the plan.  The actual plan hasn’t even been written yet!

OK.  Now let’s look at the numbers.

1,000,000 Jobs created

$447,000,000,000.00 Estimated cost of Obama’s “plan” 

      (that $447 billion dollars!)

That’s $447,000.00 per job!

If you take that cost for each job and broke it down for one year’s paycheck for one person that’s:

$447,000.00 cost per job

divided by 52 weeks in a year

divided by 40 hours in a week

That pay rate would be $214.90 an hour!

Unless it’s the economist that’s getting paid that call it $215 an hour, how can they possibly consider this a good investment?  The President doesn’t care.  He’s spending our money on this lame brained idea, not his own!  And he’ll be out of office before the bill comes due.

Should Congress pass a cockamamie scheme like this?  With those numbers?  Where the ROI is only a million jobs?  And probably the vast majority of them will be bureaucrats overseeing the new Centralized Federal Workers Administration?  Lord help us! 

Well, I suppose the - still to be proposed - Federal Works Planning Kommittee vill need verkers…

“Und if you don’t like verre ve assigned you to verk you vill be reassigned instead to a kamp to be reeducated!”

America was nice while it lasted.

In the comments of the local CBL

Had this to say over at the Lowell Sun this afternoon when someone suggested a never ending "gun buy back" as a way to reduce the violence in the city:

River Raven, gun buy backs don't work.  (I won't even go into the logical disconnect of “buying back” something they didn't sell in the first place!)

The far more effective solution is to learn to defend yourself and that includes arming yourself. It is not the police's job to be your personal body guard! Their job is to investigate crimes after the fact. If enough of the good guys (that’s us, btw) can defend ourselves – with lethal force if necessary – then the bad guys will look for easier targets somewhere else. If, on the other hand, as here in Massachusetts, the bad guys know that the vast majority of their potential victims have been conveniently rendered defenseless for them by our own government, they will be emboldened to commit more numerous and ever more brutal crimes. Evidence of that simple fact can be found in the pages of this very newspaper every single day.

The only way we can stop the cycle of violence is by the good guys being able to meet violence with equal or greater violence against the violent criminals. If we choose to be passive and continue to be unable to defend ourselves those violent criminals will continue to victimize us. It is up to each and every one of us not to let them.

You know, it’s amazing how fast three or four gangbangers will turn tail and run when they find themselves staring down the barrel of a .38 snubby in the hands of someone they thought was a frail defenseless senior citizen!

CBL: Cat Box Liner.   What the publishers of same would like us to call a Newspaper.  I wish I could recall which of the numerous blogs I read on a fairly regular basis I absconded with that phrase from so I could give credit (blame?) where due.

On Political Correctness

I just posted this comment on Cam Edwards’ status over at FaceBook.  Last night he interviewed Leo Laurence who is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists Diversity Committee.  It seems that Mr. Laurence wants to abolish the term “Illegal Alien” and replace it with “Undocumented Worker.”  He claims the former ‘offends’ Latinos and that Professional Journalists should be more sensitive.  His arguments on-air were nothing short of preposterous!

OK.  Having listened to last night’s interview, would Mr. PC Police accept this variation?  (Almost certainly not!)

“Foreign National accused of committing Criminal Trespass on Sovereign US soil.”

I’m all for the principal of Innocent until Proven Guilty in a Court of Law.  But at the same time I am staunchly opposed to the whole notion of Political Correctness.  Not only because it makes meaningful dialogue impossible (which is the whole point after all), but in large part because Political Correctness was invented by Mao Tse-Tung.  It was through the implementation of Political Correctness – with extreme sanction for violating “the party line” – that a comparatively small group was able to gain a choke-hold on power in one of the worlds most populous nations.

BTW, Cam, have a (forgive the expression) Happy New Year!  {TeeHee on Nina!}

To listen to Cam’s interview with Leo Laurence follow this link to NRAnews.com then click the link to Program Archives and look for Dec 30, 2010.  Scroll down to the bottom of the list (it was the last segment on Thursday's show...) and have a listen.  I would suggest not having liquid consumables in the vicinity whilst doing so...