You Got To Do What You Got To Do...

I'm Not In This For The Fame Or Fortune...


From this morning's edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel... http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/may/07/man-killed-in-hit-and-run-tried-to-stop-dirt/

Virgil Rogers, who lives on Grovedale Drive, said that he and Chris Billington had talked about a recent rash of dirt bikes speeding loudly in the neighborhood.

"Running up and down the hill at very high speeds," said Billington's sister, Sandy Ferguson.

"Usually starting late in the day, for about the past 30 to 45 days," Rogers said. "We have been complaining to (KCSO) for a while."

Rogers said he has seen at least three different bikes and that at least three different youths have been riding each one. He said the bikes are all clean, and have no tags on them. Ferguson and Bonnie Billington said that two and sometimes three bikes have been seen together, but the one that struck Chris Billington was the only one in the street at the time.

"I hope the investigation is pressed to find out who has been providing those bikes to the kids," Rogers said.


That's sort of mis-quoting me because I actually reported to have seen several bikes, but not all at the same time...leading me to believe that the kid was possibly associated with someone who owns a motorcycle dealership because there was also a four wheeler involved in one incident.

But any way, I'm not letting the little bastard get away with a few weeks in Juvenal Detention and some community service and a slap on the wrist while his mama says "He's such a good boy..."

This little SOB jeered at me and taunted me within 50' of my face when I had the audacity to call him out in the last two weeks and now my friend Chris is dead as a direct result of his little "boys will be boys" adventure.

This shit ain't going unpunished in my back yard, and the idiot so called adults living down on the corner better be ready for a industrial strength can of "whoop ass" to be opened up next time they so much as make a farting sound in my direction.

dammit...

Boop Boop Dit-tum Dat-tum Wat-tum... Choo...

And they Swam And The Swam All Over The Dam...


I'm too lazy to blog much of anything worthwhile, but here's what I've been wasting time looking at this morning...




And as a bonus prize I give you this little ditty.."Spring Chickens":





And finally Drum Virtuoso Buddy Rich versus the Muppets Animal...



Good Stuff...all and all I'd say...

Time To Get Down To Business

Reaping The Fruits Of Procrastination...


Oh...I don't know...where do I start writing this morning?

Let me open by saying that I think that life's pretty dang good these days here at the Turbo Pup Compound on the Banks of the Mighty Tennessee River.

Twenty years ago I'd be spazzing out finding things to worry about which today I understand don't really matter in the "big picture", so as it is I'm innately able to focus on the QUALITY rather than the QUANTITY of my daily and weekly life experiences.

Call me stupid or un-reliable or just someone that possess a "devil may care" attitude... whatever... but given my current mental attitude, physical condition, and financial where-with-all I think things are pretty well balanced all in all.

Between now and leaving town Saturday morning heading down to the Farm in Alabama for a weeks long Mother's Day visit I only have to finish packing and build four more pneumatic valves and get them shipped out on Friday after the parts arrive today.

A pretty darned easy schedule I say.

And then with the glorious weather in the mid 80's and clear blue sky each day this week there's probably another cigar and an afternoon spent wallowing in the sun working on darkening the white areas on my giant walrus sized body.

I'm actually practicing moving around laying on my stomach and flopping forward and sideways around the pool deck like scenes you see in the Arctic on National Pornographic Geographic.

I could probably substitute a couple of cigars for tusks in my mouth and the illusion would be complete...with the video soundtrack supplied by another giant Walrus...Rush Lindbaugh...doing his radio show in the background.

OK, I have to go lay down now and take a nap because, re-reading what I just wrote here, I realize I'm getting a little tired and loopie.

Talk to y'all later...

"Kierán Suckling" Says...

Only Liberals Hang Names Like That On Their Children...


According to this Washingtonpost.com story, some idiot named Kierán Suckling tells us:

the federal waiver [from and regarding detailed environmental impact studies] "put BP entirely in control" of the way it conducted its drilling.

No one knows to this day exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, except that eleven souls were lost and a state of the art oil drilling platform worth a zillion dollars collapsed into the water.

Everyone expects all of us Injuneers to be perfect now?

A car accident is when your suspension breaks and your wheel flys off and you crash into the ditch.

An accident isn't when you're an idiot who runs red lights and stop signs and speeds everywhere and doesn't yield at "yield signs" and you end up hitting something.

But unfortunately the lamestream media's primary line...and the eco-nerds line...is that the "accident" was preventable, just like some teenager running a stop sign.

Following me here?

Just guessing...

and believe me I know that I'm going out a limb here being a slightly buzzed self proclaimed Redneck this afternoon...

but I bet you dollars to doughnuts a hunnert a hundred dollars a dinner at Sonic Drive-In that this guy/gal with the name "Kierán Suckling" has never had to hold down a real job and actually earn a living that didn't involve a university masters/doctoral research position or government grants from taxpayer dollars in his entire life.

I bet his/her/gay/lesbian/transgendered little piss shitting snit throwing environmental, tye died, booger eating patchouli stinking, kumbaya singing tree huggin self drives a Prius and proudly wears Birkenstocks and Che Guevera Tee shirts.

People like this are either STUPID, IGNORANT i.e. uneducated and just don't know any better, or more likely brilliant LIARS.

I say we repeal a few laws, stop protecting brain dead liberal weenie wimps full of opinions and good intentions, and go back for just three months to a period of time like the 1870's and let a few people with gun carry permits and some decent biceps go out and do what needs to be done.

Is it just me?

Back On My Deck

Momentary Relapse Ends Productive Streak...


Well...I promised myself that I was going to spend today getting some paying work done.

Hah!

Then I tore into the latest shipment of valves early this morning and found I only had the right materials to rebuild two of the eight...and the parts are back ordered until next week right now so dang it...

This afternoon I find myself smoking yet another Dominican Cigar and working on yet another Crossword and Sudoku puzzle while sitting in the sun surveying my expansive vegetable gardens.

Time to mix another drink and head back outside to "vegetate" I guess.

Somebody might want to stop by and pour some water and fertilizer on me.

...wait I'm so full of BS I'm self fertilizing...

OK, in the words of SNL's Emily Latella..."Never Mind."

I Can't Eat Laying Down

Also Hard To Cook While Horizontal


I'm pleased to report that I finally managed to get up out of bed and off the sofa yesterday long enough to do some work out in my garden.

I also mustered the energy to prune some branches off of our giant Crepe Myrtle Trees and some other stuff along the rear property line which was blocking the sun off a couple of areas I've planted stuff on in the past couple of weeks.

Then I suffered a relapse of lethargy and spent the rest of the afternoon reclining in a deck chair in a pair of denim shorts reading the newspaper, doing the crossword puzzle therein, smoking the first cigar out of a new bundle, and listening to Rush Lindbaugh spray spit on his microphone.

All and all a good afternoon.

As an excuse I offer that I have to enjoy this time being useless while it lasts because I received another shipement of pneumatic valves yesterday afternoon and I have to get at least four of them out the door Thursday or Friday.

So any way...then last night we went out and celebrated Quatro de Mayo at dinner at the local Mexican Restaurant, in order to avoid the crowds associated with the traditional Mexican Cinco de Mayo celebration to be held today.

I've not been in much of a mood to join in celebrating the 5th of May on the calendar ever since my father passed away suddenly on May 5th, 1996.

Today it's hard to believe that I've spent nearly a third of my life without the love and guidance of the greatest man I ever knew.

But I have...somehow.

It hasn't been pretty, but I'm still here regardless...screwing around often times needing a good slap up side the head once in a while or a stern look.

Miss you Dad...

The Waters Subside

Enthusiasm Levels Follow...


Dang I'm stuck feeling lazy these days.


I've only managed to get up and put on shoes and something besides PJ's (OK...lounge pants and a t-shirt) for maybe three hours each day since we got back home Saturday.

I have managed to muster the energy to wander over to Home Depot for a few minutes on both Sunday and Monday, but I guess that's something akin to a kid getting up long enough to go to the candy store, so I guess that the trips don't count as actually being productive.

I did crawl back up the ladder yesterday and pull the last five or six hands full of crap out of the gutters...stupid little "propeller" seeds from a neighbor's trees...so now my gutters are clean as a whistle and hopefully won't start clogging up and overflowing again until this fall when the leaves and pine straw start dropping again.

Did I mention that I HATE gutters and the maintenance thereof?

So any way, if you've been asleep since about Midnight you probably don't know that they arrested another stupid f**king towel head "naturalized citizen" of Pakistani descent at the airport at JFK under suspicion he built the "world's stupidest car bomb" and planted it in downtown NYC near Times Square.

I say the good news is that, since all of the sniveling, booger eating, tye died, patchouli stinking, human rights activists won't let us profile when arresting terrorists and illegal Hispanic "immigrants", that generally the worst things the folks from Mexico and Central America want to do to me is mow my grass or baby sit folks kids or paint my house or possibly hang Sheetrock for $5.00 per hour.

Of course there are the occasional drug dealers and career criminal thugs that come across the southern border, but I guarandamntee you that if the Mexican invaders had the same propensity to blow things up and cut people's heads off that the towel heads stupid Mohammad following shit heads peaceful islamacists from the middle east have the government would get off their butts and do something.

As it is, I expect that by this time next summer we'll have another 11 to 15 million swarthy Spanish speaking legal residents and, just like it did when Regan legalized the invaders in the mid 1980's, Congress will continue to refuse to take positive, meaningful steps to actually close the borders and stop the influx of illegals.

comprende?

Back To Reality

For Only A Week...


Well, the rain NOAA and the National Weather Service threatened us with--causing us to abandon South Carolina a day early on Saturday--finally got here to the Banks of the Mighty Tennessee River after dark this evening.

In spite of my best efforts spent cleaning most of the crap out of my gutters this afternoon, the stupid little "propeller seeds" from a nearby tree that remained in there when I was finished apparently have managed to pile up again at the downspouts so three out of four of them are CLOGGED...AGAIN...and water is spilling over and pounding a couple of Tomato plants and generally making a mess around the base of the house.

I didn't put the gutters on the house and it amazes me that the old guy that owned it for almost 45 years managed to keep them clean enough to do any good. I've already made several modifications to the downspouts and it looks like I'm going to have to replace two more soon in order to get good flow (they're old small pipes like they used in the 1960's.)

I'd really like to have totally new guttering installed but that's a thousand bucks we really don't have or otherwise want to spend now on "this old house." Thus I think with a little injuneering and some fine tuning of the existing "rainwater collection and discharge system", and then adding a coat of paint when we do the trim and soffits and fascia later this summer, that I can make things work as intended.

I actually hate gutters.

The new "International Building Code" and most local codes by default require them on new construction, but gutters are just a band aid on the water flow/control problem most homeowners face, and most of the time they end up a government mandated architectural eyesore in the process.

If you do a little checking around and look at average and maximum hourly rainfall totals for everyone here in the subtropical southeastern United By-God States of 'Merica you'll see that most houses with even smaller than average roof surface area/roof pitch standards can easily overflow even a commercial grade 6" x 6" gutter system...even with 3" x 4" downspouts...unless you have your builder/contractor install downspouts something like EVERY 10 FEET ALONG THE FRONT AND BACK AND SIDES OF YOUR HOUSE.

And who wants to look at downspouts between every window and door any way?

My solution is to do things the old fashioned way and build the house up on a berm or high spot, then slope the grade/soil/dirt sharply away from the house and let the water flow off the roof in sheets and spill onto the ground naturally and run down across the lawn to the carefully thought out swales (swale = "drainage ditch.")

The problem with that great, simple, workable theory comes today when the "greedy developer/builder" gets a site plan approved by the idiots downtown on the "zoning board" allowing him/her to cram 24 houses on a little 5 acre piece of dirt which slopes toward the middle on all four sides.

Then when it rains and everyone's government mandated gutters overflow everyone ends up living on water front property and someone possibly is flooded out by all of the highly directed water pouring out of downspouts.

Come to think of it, I believe that the code enforcement folks down in Florida have the right idea as I learned when I was permitting a house (which I never ended up building) in Gulf County Florida.

While they still require gutters and down spouts, down there they will only allow your house and other solid, non-permeable things like concrete/asphalt driveways and patios to cover something like 45% of the total real estate area of your lot.

That way when monsoon season hits or a Hurricane or Tropical Storm comes ashore the water which lands on your property has a place to go and soak into the ground in the process before washing your car and your neighbors Dachshund Puppy into the bay or Gulf of Mexico.

Fortunately up here in Eastern Tennessee we have a near half acre lot like everyone else on our street and we're on the uphill side of the subdivision so other than my gutters pissing me off two or three times a year we don't see many serious water problems.

Still, if it were up to me I'd take a crowbar and a hammer and BEAT THOSE OLD GUTTERS off my house and just let things drip all around when it rains.

Don't tell the government morons, but from what I can tell that's what happens (water pouring over the flooded gutters in sheets) at least half the time on most homes due to stopped up gutters/downspouts...so what good does making people buy them (gutters) if they don't keep them clean?

Maybe Obama and the Obamamanics can appoint a "Gutter Tsar" to run around inspecting gutters and fining people for having trees and weeds growing up out of their stopped up gutters like the stupid renters a couple of doors down from here do as I write this tirade.

Wait...

OK...I'm going to stop writing now because the longer I go the more pissed off I get it seems about...of all things...government mandated GUTTERS...

oh....OH....ah....Ah....AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...

Clunk...

(the sound of me falling over backwards out of my chair...)