Blogging Re-runs

Falling Back On My Previous "Body Of Work"


I'm feeling sort of lazy this morning, so I was poking around the Blogger site and looking at statistics and stuff and I realized something worth writing about.

All of y'all out there that aren't bloggers probably don't know the amount of information that my "Site Meter" can give me about who's reading and where they're reading from and how many times they stop by in any given day to see what I'm up to.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, you can scroll down on this blog and down there in the left hand column is a little box called "Site Meter" which is generally intended to stoke the ego of the blogger and be used to monitor demographics and other readership details for the purpose of making money selling blog ads...

but I'm too stubborn to make you have to wade through ads for silly consumer crap you have plenty of opportunities to buy while slogging your way through the rest of the internet to get to me and my ramblings.

So you don't see commercial ads on this web page but know that I'm sitting here watching YOU and I know if you've stopped by and I like it...torturing you with my demented thinking and humor.

You can go down there right now and double click on it (my "Site meter") and see things like that I average about 50 "hits" a day and I have regular readers living everywhere around the world--from the former classmates and friends down on the Gulf coast in Florida, to my fellow Blogger up in Kentucky going through some traumatic events needing God's Grace, and the frequent commenter over in Louisiana and let me just say that everyone is welcome and appreciated although I don't attempt to make a dime for my efforts here other than ensuring my own personal sanity and/or insanity such as it is.

Any way, using "Site meter," every now and then I end up noticing a spike in readership based on some particular topic.

Over at my cooking blog, The Redneck Gourmet, it is historically seasonal with the words "Grilled Crab Legs" and "Pork Butt" leading the way most of the year. The holiday season causes things to ramp up, and the summer holidays like Memorial Day and July 4th and Labor Day get a lot of views on the page with people trying to grill things and otherwise cook things I've already mastered and written about.

Over here at this blog, for some silly reason, my Gaza Stripper photo archive on Google gets the largest consistent number of hits...generally from the Middle East...so if I turn up with my head cut off I guess that you can assume that I succumbed to a" fatwa" issued by some third rate Islamic Cleric in a fit of yelling at me and all of the rest of the infidels out here in the world.

All of that said, I was cruising around "Site Meter" this morning and noticed a couple of hits from the same city in California--a state where the liberal residents generally avoid me like the plague or E-Coli, and when I checked the incoming link out it led me to a particularly eloquent piece I wrote back in August of 2005, entitled...

Why Does Government Fund The Arts?

After All, It's A Really, Really Bad Idea

I'm learning late in life that there has been an artist hiding inside my body. It must have been there all along because I haven’t had any surgery or an out of body experience or anything, but it’s rather surprising to me just the same.

I knew from a fairly young age that I liked music—learning to play at various ages and abilities the guitar, the piano, the trumpet and more recently taking to dragging a briefcase full of harmonicas around with me on the occasional musical evening out.

I actually like "blowin' the harp" the best because, although I have the least time and financial investment in the endeavor, I’m 200% better than I ever was on any of the other instruments. On the Harp I have the ability to improvise and “take a ride”—something I envied in a few trumpet players I knew back in high school and college.

I’ve also started working part time with water colors and acrylics and believe that I could really do some good, marketable work if I’d buckle down and stop wasting time blogging and watching the news.

My acting and theater adventures are pretty much over for the time being, not because I lacked the motivation and talent, but because of my inability to tolerate the petty politics and insufferable moronic ineptitude of the slovenly people that are currently posing as board members and individual show managers. Talk about EGOS…

Perhaps part of the problems I had with the “artsy theater crowd” here on the island was they were all flaming, bedwetting, sniveling LIBERALS and I’m such a blazing conservative LIBERTARIAN.

Just for fun I would go to rehearsals or to weekend set builds wearing my “Celebrate Diversity” T-shirt that features a dozen and a half different brands and calibers of handguns in a chart on the back.


My favorite Tee

Then again, it might have been my insistence to bringing MY radio into the theater during the week when I was working solo on the sets and listening to talk show hosts Neil Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity.

On a number of occasions people would come into the theater while I was working and out of the clear blue demand that they be allowed to change the station on MY RADIO to guess what—National Public Radio. I usually resorted to turning the radio off when someone else came in because I’d rather listen to “Nine Inch Nails” or “Tiny Tim’s Complete Greatest Hits” than listen to NPR for five minutes.

I think that it is a great idea for parents to encourage their kids to participate in the arts. Simple things like buying your kids a box of Crayola Crayons and a ream of plain office paper at a total cost of $5.00 is a great start. Buy your kid a cheep piano and make your boys learn to play like Billy Joel so they can date girls like Kristy Brinkley....er...um...any way...I think that it's great that our public schools have music class, art class, and drama classes for all ages of students and I’m completely behind the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for marching bands and class plays.

I guess what I’m saying is that I fully support government funding for the arts when it comes to ARTS EDUCATION, what burns my aching butt is other forms of government funding involving supporting unemployed, unemployable, idiots and morons that paint cows purple or put a Crucifix in a jar of human urine (brought to you with tax dollars by the National Endowment for the Arts), or guys like this that sew a dead fetus’ head on the body of a bird and display it as ART?!?!?!? WTF?

BEIJING --A Chinese artist who grafted the head of a human fetus onto the body of a bird has defended his work as art after a Swiss museum withdrew the piece from an exhibit.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this," artist Xiao Yu said Tuesday. He said the bird and fetus "died because there was something wrong with them. ... I thought putting them together like this was a way for them to have another life."

Swiss museum visitor Adrien de Riedmatten, 29, filed a complaint on Monday with the district attorney of Bern, Switzerland, calling for an investigation into the piece, which was on display at the Bern Art Museum.

"I want to know where this baby comes from and if it was killed for this work," de Riedmatten said.

"We know about the problems of late-term abortions in China and we have the right to ask ourselves questions."


What was he thinking?

The work was removed, curator Bernhard Fibicher said Tuesday, because museum directors didn't want the controversy surrounding it to overshadow the rest of the "Mahjong" exhibit, which features avant-garde Chinese works from the last 25 years. The museum is planning an Aug. 22 symposium with artists, philosophers and ethics experts before deciding whether to re-exhibit the piece.

I know that I’m taking the story slightly out of context because it didn’t happen here in the United States—it happened in Switzerland—but I suspect that if the piece was offered for display in San Fransisco or NY City, the “usual suspects” and the rest of the “Artsy” crowd would somehow manage to crack open the government’s wallet and toss a few thousand dollars at the cost of the production of the show.

My question is, should the government be paying for the production, acquisition, or display of ANY ART unless the artist and the works have attained a status of bona fied historical value?

It seems quite acceptable to me for the Smithsonian Institution to attempt to acquire Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece “Starry Night” using government money (tax dollars) because the piece has historical significance and besides—it’s bound to go up in value.


Starry Night...

On the other hand, tossing my hard earned tax dollars at some starving asshole living in a sweltering Soho loft with his tie-dyed hairy legged girlfriend is NOT, in my considered Redneck opinion, making a good investment.

Just look at most crap they put on pedestals out in front of and hang on the walls of most public buildings. Most of this shit you’d have to pay someone to haul off after a yard sale, but the government and their “Artsy” consultants see fit to toss ridiculous sums of your and my money to support these struggling businessmen.

I have a message for all the little kids out there and their parents that think that they are raising the next Grandma Moses or Picasso—teach your offspring to read, write, and do math FIRST—then encourage them to draw, paint, etch, sing, act, sculpt, chisel, make wood chips in the floor, sew doll heads on stuffed animals, or whatever else you deem to be classified as ART.

What you don’t need to do is expect to raise an ignorant “Artsy” moron that can’t hold a job for two months waiting tables at a Pizza Hut and then expect to clamor and lobby the government to INCREASE FUNDING FOR THE ARTS.

OVER MY COLD, DEAD, DECOMPOSING BODY...

It’s just that simple...


That was a pretty darn good piece of writing right there, even if I do say so Myself...

ANY QUESTIONS???

Anybody Want Some Championship Chili?

Good...I Have It Coming Out Of My Ears...


Long story short even longer (hey I'm writing a blog and I have to have something to write about, RIGHT?)

My regular readers may remember when I got into the competition chili cooking business a couple of years ago.

Since then it's been a strange combination of death and illness and hyperventilation and finally near perfection and success, but I digress...

The first year, 2008, found me sitting on St. Simons Island with an invitation to supply the recipe and cook with my good friend and fellow Georgia Tech alumni--restaurant owner John Howton--representing his Blackwater Grill ( http://www.blackwatergrill.com/ ) restaurant in the "Rotary Red Hot Chili Cook off."

Problem was, I got sick and spent most of the month of February in the hospital, and then the week before the event one of John's Chef's got killed in an auto accident on the causeway leading from the mainland to the island.

The funeral was in Albany, GA and was the same day as the Chili event, and in light of John's need to attend and pay his respects and me limping around like a three legged dog barely able to hold my head up longer than fifteen minutes we reluctantly had to withdraw from participating.

Turns out the weather sucked and I needed the rest any way so I just stayed home and kept cooking Chili.

Then last year, in spite of having moved away from our little Island to Knoxtown, John called and re-extended the invitation to be the guest chef and bring my recipe, and we said not yes but "Hell Yes" and drove south, spending five glorious days with good SSI spring weather building a front end of our booth and putting together about fifteen gallons of chili based on Top Round Steak.

Here's a look at things on that Saturday morning as we unloaded the Chili Ingrediants first and then proceeded to build my rendition of a "Bayou Cajun Fishin' Shack":

(click on the images to enlarge if you can stand it...I'm the giant guy with the ever greying, ever balding head/pony tail in the overalls...)

That whole thing is actually built out of "blue board" foam insulation like you use on a new house, supported with lightweight wood framing and designed to be transported in a single trip in a Ford Explorer and stored in a garage or storage building in a minimal footprint.

Pretty Cool Huh?

I cooked the giant pot(s) of chili back behind in the back and the rest of the team stood behind the porch wall and reached out and served the chili tasting cups out of the door and windows giving a nice effect.

Any way, when the dust finally settled we ended up claiming "Second Prize-People's Choice" out of 31 teams, which was really equal to first prize because we came in second to the Glynn County School System Team which, as you can imagine, had everybody with a kid in school voting for them by default.



(That's John and Rhonda and Pat and Missy the Turbo Pup and I celebrating after a LooOOOG Day)

We're re-using the Bayou Chili Shack again this year but I'm going to re-paint it to look a little more colorful...sort of a Cajun meets Jamaican or Bohemian/Key West with some pastels and and other brighter colors just for fun.

I might even wear my Dreadlocks wig this year at the risk of scaring the women and small children in the process...

The thing about making competition chili is that you're torn between making something which people could sit down and eat a bowl full of, and just falling back to dumping some meat and beans into the pot and a few thousand pounds of hot peppers along with spices which will somehow get the judges attention over all of the other crap cooked that day in giant pots by a bunch of drunks who have been up all night partying.

I'm not being arrogant when I tell you that there is some crap cooked at these events that tastes like what it looks like...CRAP. How in the world people can show up and waste their time not having a clue what they are actually producing and how it will taste is beyond my spiritual and intellectual understanding.

I make a dedicated effort to cook serious, edible chili which doesn't rely on Napalm for effect and doesn't taste like raw kidney beans and Kerosene when I'm finished. I think that our recognation from the crowd last year justified my efforts and makes me want to do an even better job in 2010.

Just like last year when I based my recipe on Top round steak and home made beef/chicken stock (most people just use ground beef and canned stock), this year's "Green Butt" Chili recipe is going to be based on Boston Butts, slow cooked down and hand processed into shreds and chunks.

I just got through eating the last of this week's effort--the third cooking of the basic recipe--yielding about 3/4 gallons which took two days to put together and then sat simmering on and off another couple of days on the stove top.

The rules for the event say that you can cut and prep all of your ingredients before the morning of the cook off, so we start on Thursday making stock and slow cooking the meat, then we bring everything down to the waterfront park on Saturday morning in giant covered plastic and stainless steel tubs and light the propane fire about 8 AM in preparation for having something available for the "Judges Random Tasting" about 11 AM.

I don't see any way a person could compete in this process without owning or being associated with a restaurant or other commercial kitchen because the quantities of food and the sizes of the containers is beyond what I want to own and buy on E-Bay.

So any way, as is usual with my cooking efforts, the first time I put things together this year was the best texture and flavor so far, with the second and third pots being very edible but falling short of my semi-professional "Green Butt" standards.

I think that it's down really to adjusting the cooking time and possibly fine tuning the chili powder/spice mixture in order to keep the meat from falling apart too much giving a "mushy" mouth feel when you eat a spoon full.

I wish everyone could come over to St. Simons Island on March 6th, enjoy our beautiful little slice of the Atlantic coast, and have a taste of our chili and help raise money for charity, but in any event I know many of you will be there at least in spirit cheering us on.

There's no amount of money which can buy the opportunity to do stuff like this--last year we raised nearly $50,000--and I'm just happy to be able to contribute to the Rotary Club's efforts and have so much fun in the process.

Time to finish cleaning up the kitchen and get back to studying industrial hard chroming processes for my valve rebuilding project I guess.

Y'all have a Lovely DAY now, and somebody send up a flare if we get snowed in and you don't hear from me for a couple of days...

Snowing Potato Chips

Quick...Everybody Run To The Grocery Store...


It's too warm to stick today, but we're getting some nice little snow showers here in Eastern Tennessee on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River.

The forecast for Thursday night and Friday/Saturday is a little more interesting, and I guess the key to what happens will be when the cold air gets here versus when the moisture arrives.

I still haven't gotten a good feel for how Knoxtown handles winter precipitation because last winter was so hot due to Global Warming and we've only had one giant cold snap that lasted a couple of weeks the first of this month and it only snowed a few inches before staying below freezing for what seemed like a month but was only two weeks on the calendar.

While living in Atlanta for 27 years I was always amazed at how people would watch the TV weather and run screaming to the stores and clammor around buying bread and milk and peanut butter and toilet paper like the world was ending if a single snow flake was predicted to fall.

People here don't seem to be quite so hysterical when it comes to frozen water falling out of the sky, but just in case I have to go now and buy toilet paper and peanut butter and bread and milk just in case...

that's what you're supposed to do isn't it?

What...Who...Where...???

Winter Induced Mental Lethargy


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

As a preface, I guess that you can just consider this posting to be one completed out of duty rather than out of passion, because I guess I can consider myself to be semi-speechless...stuck here in Eastern Tennessee overwhelmed by my own insanity.

After a week of weather verging on being springlike, the past couple of days here yielded rainfall totaling over two inches, then yesterday the temperature plummeted as the rain moved out and to my amazement it was snowing about 2 PM but just lightly with no accumulation.

Snow is predicted again this weekend, so I guess I may have to turn my attention back to the beach chair sled project and see if I can get it bolted together in order to facilitate sliding down a hill if the opportunity presents itself.

The good news is that my client in the Midwest is happy with my PLC panel and reports that they will have it installed and start testing later this morning, so with some initial feedback in hand I can finish the second panel and get it in the box and shipped off to New England later this week.

In other news on the business front, I got another shipment of fancy three-way valves and a purchase order giving me the go ahead to rebuild them to some new specifications I'm developing. What started out as a simple mechanical exercise has turned into a fairly complex engineering effort which could possibly yield a nice monthly revenue stream in fiscal 2010 if things go the way I've planned.

I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, but I have this queer ability to dwell on little details, even when people tell me that it doesn't matter, and sometimes I end up tripping over something which really is important buried in the minutia which distracts all of the other so-called "experts."

I just hope that the stupid government will stay out of my way and let me do what it is that I know how to do, and not make me spend too much time filling out forms and mailing giant chunks of money I manage to earn in to some office in Nashville or Atlanta.

The Turbo Pup will probably spend this morning sitting by the kitchen door awaiting the return of her mom around lunchtime. She did very well considering she's spent so little time by herself or with just me and her sitting around all by our lonesome.

All of that said...or unsaid...time to straighten up the place and do a little reading before getting back to work I guess.

Regards Y'all...

Rainy Night In Georga All Day In Tennessee

Slow Cooking Chili With The Turbo Pup


Well folks, I spent most of the day Sunday living a bit out of character as a "stay home dad" with our little Missy The Turbo Pup looking at me and wondering where her mom was and when she was coming back.

This morning the Turbo Pup's Mom had to pack her bags for her first business trip in over two years, and then when everything was in the proper quantity or quality and in it's FAA/TSA approved position she flew south to Sarasota, Florida (on an airliner because at her age her arms get tired) for a business meeting all day tomorrow, and the Pup is facing only her third night alone without her Mom in the past three years...the first two nights being about a year ago when I was in Indianapolis on business and Pat had to go back to Pennsylvania to attend a funeral.

It's our own fault that it's such a traumatic experience for our fuzzy little girl, but we enjoy her company as much as she enjoys being in charge of the proceedings generally and the first couple of days of this week will just have to serve to train her that she can get by on her own if mom and/or dad have other things to do besides sit around the house all day.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this "Puppy Drama" I'm engrossed with the task of cooking my third batch of my soon to be world famous "Green Butt Chili" which I'm trying to get together for this years St. Simons Island Rotary Club Chili Cook off in early March.

Beating the "Second Place-Peoples' Choice" Award will be difficult but I'm forced to try again if I'm going to compete in the process.

In fact I think that I hear the kitchen timer going off so you will have to excuse me while I go poke at my pot now...

The Day Obamacare Died...

Drove My Chevy 'Cross The Levy...





Heh...

Re: No Re-Bar In Haiti?

Stealing Steeling Safety & Prosperity


A couple of things have bothered me the past couple of weeks as I have watched the TV news footage and look at newspaper photos of the damage and desperation after the earthquake down in Haiti.

I'm not talking about looking at things from the standpoint of being a God fearing Human faced with unbelievable amounts of carnage and death. What I'm talking about this morning is a subtle point which to the layman could be easily missed when in passing you see all of the scenes of death and destruction and suffering...

UNLESS you can take the time to clear you mind and see the details beyond the humanity and mortal horrors you're seeing.

Excuse me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty darn sure that I haven't seen much if any structural steel reinforcement---what we call "re-bar"--in the concrete walls and floors and ceilings in most of the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti be it a Cathedral or a "Palace" or a peasant's home on the side of a hill.

I guess it's just my "Forensic Injuneer" senses activating when I see something that has broke and hurt/killed someone.

In my considered Redneck opinion, I say that the people of Haiti, sitting on a known seismic fault line (which is beyond most of the indigenous population's control) and building everything out of hand mixed and hand poured concrete or cement or whatever they call their "cast and precast masonry construction methods," without secondary steel tension reinforcing, are the victims of a horrid infrastructural framework which could have done nothing but lead to eventual failure and disaster.

Any second year engineering student which has taken Statics and Dynamics and Deformable Bodies and a couple of quarters of materials science knows this to be a fact.

I ask myself..."Where do they go from here?"

I've spent a good deal of time in South Florida, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas and the Caribbean and have always been envious of the solid concrete construction methods covered with stucco and tile.

Problem is, that in practice these methods as implemented originate with the "tabby" form of primitive concrete fabrication also used here in Coastal Georgia and Florida in the 17th and 18th century by colonial settlers who, faced with limited wood resources (or in Georgia trees so huge like the giant "Live Oaks" so as to be unsuitable for being used for construction of anything smaller than a navy sailing ship keel.)

Salty water and sand and limestone in the form of ground up sea shells and bits of ancient coral reef fragments make a lovely fireplace or impromptu footing for a patio gazebo and is fairly stable when the wind blows at hurricane force.

But when the ground starts jumping up and down and shakes five feet from side to side things aren't worth a crap unless there is some steel inside, in the form of high strength rods buried somewhere there in the middle or a couple of inches in from each surface.

In the end it's all a reality of simple physics...readily understood today.

And yet it doesn't take new and improved and ever more intrusive "building codes" to drive home this grim realization...but that seems to be the only rationalization and realization and solution I keep hearing tendered by the idiot talking heads in the newspaper and TV news blurbs.

All of that said, my problem is...

What can we do about it all?

Passing a new building code won't undo the destruction which has already been done, and raising the cost of construction to meet codes like those in Atlanta or San Francisco or Knoxtown or on the gulf coast in Panama City Beach Florida today in Haiti-- a country which can't afford running water and indoor toilets--is counter-productive if implemented in a typical government induced heavy handed fashion.

Earlier this morning I wandered over to the Habitat for Humanity Website trying to see what they were up to, but all I see is platitudes and requests for money to send down to Haiti.

I'm proud to tell you that I'm not sending the government and country of Haiti one single dollar until I see some resolution to change what has been going on down there over the past TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Encouraging poor people to live in mud stucco huts while they produce generation after Generation after GENERATION of little humans in squalor, without any hope of financial success and a lifestyle above abject poverty unless they escape to the US or get a job in major league baseball of the NBA is not in my mind a good use of my time and effort and currently limited financial resources.

Falling back on my experience as a volunteer project manager with Habitat for Humanity, I would, however, enjoy the opportunity to help design and build some sort of shelter or home or condo or abode of any/every other description which is feasable for erection in this geographic situation.

I guess it's just a little too soon to get started with the implementation of that sort of effort until the dust settles. It would be cool to come up with some idea besides government trailers like FEMA foisted on the Katrina Victims, but maybe that's the way to go.

Hey, that's it...let's put all of those used and new left over government trailers which were misused and abused three and four and five years after the hurricane onto a boat and ship them down to Haiti.

You and I have already paid for them with our tax dollars, and selling them for scrap is an inferior resolution to GIVING them to someone that actually deserves them and could put them to good use.

Works for me...

How about YOU?

Thirty Days In The Hole Overnight In The Basement

Wrestling With My Own Inadequacies...


So after ignoring PLC Panel #2 a.k.a. "Eva" for about 24 hours (Ava arrived at the job site in the midwest yesterday morning), I wandered back down into my basement about midnight last night with a new resolve to conquer my mental programming demons.

I managed to avoid fooling around with the "beach chair sled project" and the endless balsa wood model airplane project and the scale model wooden canoe debacle and, with one eye cast on Fox News and the other on the laptop monitor, nearly seven hours later here I am with substantial progress made toward having the Beta version of the hardware/software for my Horner Touch Screen PLC based blow molded PET bottle panel (HTSPLCBBPETBP for short) ready for shipment.

Right now the target ship date is MONDAY, but things could change if the last 1% of the software effort takes as long as it did on the last epic saga.

Basically the new has worn off the fun I found in my initial panel design/programming efforts, and now I just want to get this thing finished, packed in a box full of foam peanuts, and launched toward Maryland so someone will start writing me a check in the next year and one half.

Of course having started a company in 2009, spent a bunch of money on government mandated fees and licenses, the obligatory office supplies and the materials/hardware needed to actually build something to sell, but not collecting one thin dime in the process (did I mention working about 500 hours in the past three months?), my guess is that my only reward will be the added government benefit of having to file a Federal and State tax return for the Business in addition to doing taxes for me and Pat and the Turbo Pup.

Isn't that just a lovely howdy do?

Meanwhile, in other news, just as it pissed me off that Obama was younger than me when he was elected president, it thoroughly pleases me that Senator Brown graduated from high school the same year I did--1977.

Isn't it nice to see the mongrel bitch Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's transition from Pit Bull to yapping ShitsuShiz'Su puppy this week as a result of the Senatorial Election results in Massachusetts?

Dingy Harry Reid and Dick "Turbin" Durbin and Mad Jack "Eyebrows" Murtha and Barbara Boxer can pretty much kiss their cushy government jobs goodbye in November if the current trend of public opinion continues.

All I say is that the stupid "Moderate" Republicans better keep their pandering butts in line or there could be some more shake-ups in 2012 if they give us three more years of "reaching across the isle" acting like tax and spend Dems.

Ok, I got all of that off my chest and onto my keyboard...I feel like reading the Newspaper and taking a nap now.

Y'all have a LOVELY day...

Hayseed Bohemian Rhapsody?

Burt Reynolds & Ned Beaty Beware...








"That's right there is funny...I don't care who you are..."

--Larry "The Cable Guy"


Wait...

I'm just back from YouTube...and there's More...



heh..

Excessive Scrolling Causes Heartburn

Internet Form Induced Late Night Insanity...


Does anyone but me get chafed when, in the process of filling out that final form you always have to do in order to buy something on E-Bay or Amazon or Paypal, you get down to the part where they ask for your "Country" and instead of having "USA" or "United States of 'Merica" at the top of the list you have to poke at the scroll bar and slide down the "computerized world tour" all the way from Albania to the bottom near Zimbabwe to find the name of the place where we all live?

I find that many if not most companies--even those solidly situated here in the good old US of A--today use web forms which insist on placing our country's name at the bottom of the list rather than at the top.

So what's up with that?

Add to my petty ill "formed" aggravations the realization that in the past couple of years since we moved from Georgia to the Turbo Pup Compound here on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River I'm also forced to scroll down past Alabama and Florida and Georgia to find Tennessee on the "State" list.

Alabama and Georgia and Florida appear when you first hit that blank on the form, while Tennessee is stuck down there with Texas and the Mormons in Utah...you know?

And inevitably I manage to screw up both the country and the state at least once in my haste and have to hit the back arrow once I get to the checkout page because I don't want to send industrial electrical parts to Uganda having paid for the overnight FedEX on my Debit Card.

And now finally I have to admit the truth....because all of the above aside what really got me going on this topic this morning was that while punching in my personal information into a Web Site page selling of all things "wiper seals" for these stupid expensive valves I'm getting paid to re-build, when I got to the DOB blank on the form I had to watch 49 numbers go by...from 2010 down to 1959...before I could hit "Enter" followed by the "Tab" key.

(In a few more years it will be quicker for me if they put 1900 first and the current year last on the list I guess.)

In closing, wandering back to my initial "Country Listing in the Internet Form" complaints, on second thought I have to admit that I can sorta kinda see the rational of foreign companies or domestic companies with huge foreign market share including us (the US) at the bottom of the list, but if all you sell is parts for old Chevy Camaros and Ford Mustangs, Crotchless overalls from the "Frederics of Hooterville" Dutch Quaker Lingerie Collection, or those stupid fake fireplaces made by the Pennsylvania Amish...do you really think the Austrians or Australians are going to come clamoring to your Internet doorstep with a credit card number in hand???

Thereby causing me to have to wear out my mouse button finger scrolling around looking for the wealthiest part of North America in your list of countries???

Think about it people...

In the mean time, I have to go put a new water pump on my Camaro, then jump in the shower before donning my new overalls in time to sit in front of the bay window waiting for the UPS driver to deliver my ventless electric fireplace with a real hand made wooden cabinet.

Talk to y'all later...

PANTS ON THE GROUND?

Seen This?





Heh...

CNN & MSNBC Anchors Committing Suicide

"Tea Bagged" Out Of Office...


Generally you have to duct tape me to a chair and take the TV remote control away from me to make me watch CNN (or any other legacy product from Ted Turner's former media empire) or MSNBC.

Thus I spend about five minutes each year watching either network unless I'm stuck in a "departure lounge" at the airport or sitting in a bar/restaurant where the idiot kid bartenders think people want to watch the drivel spewing out of Anderson Cooper's retarded mouth.

Tonight I made an exception to my viewing habits and, after Scott Brown's US Senate victory in Massachusetts, I turned over to CNN see what the tone was like.

I don't believe I've seen a group of people with sadder, longer faces (and poop stains on their skirts and pants) in the past 25 years.

These people were in disbelief, and still, in the moments following the loss of what I call the "Kennedy Memorial Life Guard Chair" instead of an actual "Senate Seat," they're turning their attention to how Obama and the Obamamaniacs can continue to ram the current stinky smelly pile of crappy legislation down the voters throats or up our behinds.

It's going to be real damn interesting to see what unfolds over the next couple of weeks in the US House and Senate relating to continuing along the path of the past year or shifting gears/changing tracks in an effort to avoid a giant negative landslide in November.

If you're not paying attention or you're just hiding in the closet afraid to say anything, I hope that this will be a wake up call to all of the people out there that just wandered to the voting booth last year after hearing jingoisms and slogans and voted for what was sold to you as "Hope and Change."

Based on what I've seen so far, all I can do is "Hope for a Change" else the last few decades of my life could end up being a hellish existence in a foreign country...that country being the one I grew up in and was stolen from me and my family.

Think about it...

I Put That Sucker In A Box...

And Shipped That %$#@#er Down The Road...


If you read this blog you probably know what I'm talking about this afternoon, and if you don't you probably wouldn't care or won't understand.

Time for a half bottle of Bourbon and a Cigar, if you will excuse me...

Thanks For Reading

Another Dubious Milestone

More People I Want To Be More Like...

Hey...I Can DREAM...Can't I?


The ultimate Ladies Man:


"...don't mess with my Belovid Ramona..."

and the Ultimate salesman:



"Mr. Douglas...have I got a deal for you..."

Absolutely No Comparison

RIP Dr. King

















(We all got the short end of that political stick today I'd say...)

Obscure Musical Stuff I Know

And Things I Think That You Should Know Too...


Have I mentioned that I spent a good deal of my life with a Trumpet in my hands a long time ago?

Probably not, because I never really mastered the instrument beyond a tolerable level of competence although I played it through junior high, high school, and into college in the GT Naval ROTC band.

In fact, the first time I went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans I was actually IN Mardi Gras, trumpet in hand, as our band was invited to march and play in three major parades--Bacchus, Edymoyn and Poydras (I think)--on Canal Street and in the Superdome.

Any way, today I currently own an old Holton B flat trumpet and a cheap Chinese Fluglehorn like Chuck "Feels So Good" Mangione plays, but best intentions aside they spend most of their time in their cases these days as my lips have lost their finely tuned pucker as a result of disuse. (By disuse I mean that talking and eating don't qualify for keeping your skills using an instrument with a mouthpiece in tune...)

I also have a real Australian Didgeridoo, a genuine Hawaiian Ukulele, and a whole box full of Horner and Lee Oscar Harmonicas laying around in my office at any given time, and I can make strange noises with my armpits and wet my hands and make funny fart like sounds and wait a minute...I lost my train of thought here...

...wait...

...I've got it...

...I know, what I was saying was that I consider myself to be sort of a musical person on and off through the years, and I pride myself in carrying fairly high standards when it comes to the music I listen to because I find silence or the roar of a power tool to be vastly superior to much of the stuff put out on CD since they stopped making 8 track tapes and vinyl records.

Any way, I've been working on singing the Blues when we do our karaoke nights out the past half year and you already saw the Elvis Presley's "Tryin' To Get To You" and some other stuff I've put up here in the past.

Tonight I present for your enjoyment a man I greatly admire--Big Joe Turner --who's career spanned 60 years from the 1920's until he died in 1985.

As I understand it, Big Joe started out singing without a microphone or electricity in taverns and juke joints and a result became famous not only for his singing but for belting out his lyrics at a HUGE volume, with no amplification.

I'm a fan of his work and if you Google him or go to Best Buy and check out the blues section you'll be surprised of the volume of his work and the songs he did that other people like Elvis covered in later years.

Here's a couple of links to YouTube showing Big Joe doing what he did best at the Apollo Theater in about 1954:




...then about ten years later in 1965:





And if you haven't had enough, listen to this:



I find it to be comforting to find stuff like this recorded for posterity on YouTube...maybe some day a hundred years from now people will see me singing Big Joe's hits at the local karaoke bar...

Then again...Probably not, but that will be all...for now...

Can I Get Any More Lazy?

Professionally Frivolously Distracted...


Oh...I don't know...where to start blithering this morning...

I'm sitting here looking at the boxes and giant bags of packing peanuts laying in a pile in one corner of the shop, but I've been paralyzed the past day and one half trying to get the final details checked off the punch list on these PLC Panels, and even with hiring a software programming consultant last week I managed to go backwards on Friday and Saturday because he did the revisions in version 9.0 of the Cscape software and I was running version 8.8 on both my computers.

And did I mention that my customer asked for some changes on the second panel that required "free" software and hardware revisions and the associated delay so we could make both panels match each other since they were both still laying here in the building?

And of course as usual with the downloading and updating of new technical non-consumer software, it was generally a pain in the butt requiring me to do cartwheels and mental hand stands and back flips before getting things back to normal...a couple of extra unplanned hours when it was all said and done.

Just now when I thought I was "home free" with regard to shipping things out on Monday my Infrared Sensors seem to have lost their collective minds and so when I get through writing here I'm going to have to take a hammer and beat the crap out of everything go back through the calibration process and see if I can make the temperature readings make sense.

Apparently I'm smart, but inevitably not smart enough many times when I'm allowed to wander off in the business world and start selling things I sometimes shouldn't be allowed to get involved in I guess.

Do me a favor and hang up if I call your house and in a fit of entrepreneurial fever offer you some sort of new super duper gun or a hand grenade or a new slimming, form fitting Kevlar/Spandex/Nomex fire proof bra and/or girdle for your wife or Grandmother.

Somebody save me from myself...

PLEASE???

(did I tell you about my new Rogers' Turbo-Sonic Hydrodynamic Pulse Doppler Laser Nippleometer?)

Gun Porn

I Wish I'd Said That...

A good friend sent this to me in an E-Mail this afternoon and I couldn't resist putting it up here on the blog because it's good stuff if you are a law abiding gun owner...here goes...


Clint Smith, Director of Thunder Ranch, is part drill instructor, and part time stand-up comic (Thunder Ranch is a firearms training facility in Arizona ).

Here are a few of his observation on tactics, firearms, self-defense and life as we know it in the civilized world.

"The most important rule in a gunfight is: Always win and cheat if necessary."

"Don't forget, incoming fire has the right of way..."

"Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets. You may get killed with your own gun, but he'll have to beat you to death with it, cause it's going to be empty."

"If you're not shootin', you should be loading'. If you're not loadin', you should be movin', and if you're not movin', someone's gonna cut your head off and put it on a stick."

"When you reload in low light encounters, don't put your flashlight in your back pocket.... If you light yourself up, you'll look like an angel or the tooth fairy...and you're gonna be one of 'em pretty soon."

"Do something. It may be wrong, but do something."

"Shoot what's available, as long as it's available, until something else becomes available."

"If you carry a gun, people will call you paranoid. That's ridiculous. If you have a gun, what in the hell do you have to be paranoid for?"

"Don't shoot fast, unless you also shoot good..."

"You can say 'stop' or 'alto' or use any other word you think will work, but I've found that a large bore muzzle pointed at someone's head is pretty much a universal language."

"You have the rest of your life to solve your problems... How long you live depends on how well you do it."

"You cannot save the planet but you may be able to save yourself and your family."

"Thunder Ranch will be here as long as you'll have us or until someone makes us go away, and either way, it will be exciting."

More Excellent Gun Wisdom.......

The purpose of fighting is to win.

There is no possible victory in defense.

The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either.

The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.

1. Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll Just kill you
(blogger note...at this point in my life...that would be ME .)

2. If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

3. I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.

4. When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away .

5. A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers. The reporter recognized the Colt Model 1911 the Ranger was carrying and asked him

'Why do you carry a 45?'

The Ranger responded, 'Because they don't make a 46.'

6. An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.

7. The old sheriff was attending an awards dinner when a lady commented on his wearing his sidearm. 'Sheriff, I see you have your pistol. Are you expecting trouble?'

'No ma'am. If I were expecting trouble, I would have brought my rifle.'

8. Beware of the man who only has one gun, because he probably knows how
to use it very well.

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
---G. K. Chesterton---

A people that values its privileges above its principles will soon lose both.

"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.."

---Thomas Jefferson----


And I think that THOSE words pretty well sums things up here on a warm balmy (it's 53 degrees F here in my back yard) Friday afternoon...

Stuff I Don't Usually Talk About

Not Braggin'...Just Sayin'...


I'm sitting around here this morning waiting on a couple of things to happen regarding paperwork and the Internet and project stuff, and I keep glancing with one eyeball at FOX News' coverage of the hellish situation going on down in Haiti since the Earthquake.

I can't even begin to tell you how my heart goes out to the private citizens of that country, and the amount of anger I feel toward the corrupt, abusive government and government "officials" which in past and present administrations have taken advantage of and in the process neglected innocent men and women and children over the past 200 years the country has been free from the French.

The song lyrics from Janice Joplin comes to mind saying "Freedom's just another word for...Nuthin' left to lose" when it comes to thinking about Haiti.

And I have to ask where Jessi Jackson and Al Sharpton and all of our other demagogue "race war-lords" are when stuff like this happens outside of Watts or Harlem or anywhere USA and the leaders are BLACK taking advantage of other BLACKS?

The scenes of people digging through the rubble of crushed houses and apartments and hospitals and orphanages with their bare hands has brought back to me this week some uncomfortable memories of my time spent in the Philippines back in the late 1970's while that country was still under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos.

Like Haiti today, the Philippines was and is a country of vast social and economic stratification, with a very thin upper class and almost as thin middle class sitting over and around a giant group of people living in abject poverty--which when I was there meant living on less that $1000 per year.

They would offer to sell a young Midshipman in the US Navy EVERYTHING and ANYTHING for any minimal piece or part of the equivalent of $18,000 per year stipend we earned while wallowing around on a ship in Subic Bay on our summer orientation cruises.

Any way, it was Monsoon season while I was there stationed on the USS New Orleans LPH-11 Amphibious Assault Carrier (a boat load of "Squids" and "Jar Heads" and clunky helicopters) and it rained almost every day and some days it rained so much that the sides of the surrounding mountains would get so wet that they decided to slide over and cover the crude roadways carved out between the little towns and villages surrounding the Naval and Air Force Base.

They had this one big rain and mud slide and word came out for volunteers to go help look for survivors and dig people and some cars and a bus and other stuff out of the debris.

I went.

I lasted a half day.

After hitting a dead woman in the head with a shovel before excavating the rest of her body and finding a purple colored cold wet tattered kid--striking him in the arm and making a cut that didn't bleed--I had to leave the recovery effort along with several other young 19 year old men because it was obvious there were no survivors and the more experienced guys were tired of watching us suffer in an operation which was beyond our capacity to process mentally and emotionally.

They let me leave on the first truck out, and I hate to admit that I was actually glad to get out of that situation because I guess I was just not up to it all in the end.

In my considered Redneck opinion, it's real easy to sit around and watch TV and pontificate about how you would do things in any given situation, but I'm here to tell you that what's going on down there in Haiti right now would drive most average Americans mad, and I'm fairly certain that most of the idiots we've elected to our House and Senate would run screaming from the scene if they actually had to face the realities on the street there.

And still, look at the fundamental, critical, vital role that the US and the US Military is playing... and how utterly useless the United Nations is in this process, and then please consider reality rather than wish for "hope and change" the next time you go to the polling booth to vote in an election.

New Toilet Seat

I'm So Excited I Can Hardly Set Down...


But when I do...it's C O M F O R T A B L E

Dead Internet Service

Creative Juices All Backed Up...


I think that I need some "Mental Liquid Plumber" this morning as I look at the back yard weather station display showing a temperature of 19 deg F.

That would be because my synapses are starting to feel clogged up if not frozen for a variety of reasons beyond my control this week.

If you stopped by here before 8 AM you only found yesterday's ramblings because by the time I got through working on fine tuning PLC #1 (a.k.a. Ava) I couldn't get to the Internet to write anything.

Comcast apparently was performing maintenance and had a "system outage" allowing me to still have cable TV so I could watch Food Network reruns with Alton Brown--at the same time preventing me from accessing the www since some time around 3 AM until just now.

I'm probably only one of two people over the age of 45 in Knoxtown that regularly gets pissed off when my Internet provider decides to cut a wire or fiber optic cable in the wee hours of the morning...of course all of the perverts and college students are inconvenienced because they have to log off and stop looking at photos of naked strangers and Twittering about what they ate for dinner or the hot babe/guy that made eye contact with them walking down the street.

Then of course after the outage I had to perform my usual ritual of bowing down to the Technology Voodoo Gods, scurrying around the house with a painted face, splashing goat's blood on random surfaces with a petrified Rooster's foot & chanting gibberish while rebooting the server PC and two laptops and two VoIP boxes AND the wireless router to get things back up and running.

In the mean time the lost couple of hours of Internet time not only stopped my blogging, but also ended some work I was doing putting together the owner's manuals for the PLC's (a.k.a. sisters Ava and Eva.)

As you probably know, very few companies actually send you an owner's manual these days when they sell you anything made from China or Silicon Valley no matter whether it cost $9.99 plus shipping and handling or a months salary...they make you go online and spend your money on paper and printer ink if you want a real hard copy of the instructions rather than clicking on the "Help" button and wading through a list of unrelated topics a couple of miles long.

So now it's time to try to chase my programming consultant down on the telephone and get back to downloading some stuff for Ava and Eva's documentation and other than that...

y'all have a FANDAMTABULOUS day...

If you will...

Crap What Pisses Me Off

I've had Better Days...


Sometimes on this blog I enjoy indulging myself by screaming and ranting and raving and yelling and uttering explicatives like %$#@%$#@ and *$&# and bluuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaahhhhhh youuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaah to my heart's content.

Then there's day's like yesterday when I'm angry and upset and generally out of sorts but I prefer to keep my discontent to myself and suffer in silence.

Yesterday was most definitely one of those days.

Still, having suffered a couple of month long visits to the hospital in the past couple of years and disappearing from the Internet as a result, and having developed a semi-regular following, and not wanting to appear to be a "drama queen/king", I pretty much try to put something up here every day just to try to make a few people laugh and let the balance of the population that find me more annoying than funny know that I'm still alive and well and still breathing.

All of that said, just know that it seems that when I do as little as I manage to do all day for as many days as I do or don't do it, it's sometimes hard to remain upbeat when I don't accomplish anything at all for large periods of time.

I often pride myself in and with my sloven-ness and devil may care attitude toward life, but in then end I'd like to be remembered for having carried my fair share of the freight around here...and I'm afraid I might be a wee bit short of that task when looking at the black ink---falling into the red column of the ledger books if I don't straighten up here shortly.

I beg of you to please excuse my terse, tense tone if and when I let it leak out, and await the day when the warm balmy winds & salty breezes awaken the lofty, carefree wisps of my spirit allowing the eruption of steaming, stinky BS which would otherwise normally tumble out of my mind...

...through my fingertips...

...across my computer keyboard...

on to your expensive finger print smudged monitor for your enjoyment and/or dismay.

(did I just write that?)


Then...in the words of "Emily Latella"...

... never mind...

It's A L I V E !!!

Still Stupid, But Better Looking Than The First Model...











And don't do anything to make me cause it to "probe" your temperature because it knows several places to look...

Yawnnnnnnnn

Somebody Poke Me With A Pointy Stick...


I guess that about says it all this morning. I have a serious case of lethargy complicated by sunlight deprivation.

Years ago when things got like this I just started looking at airfares to the Florida Keys or Jamaica.

Today I guess I have no choice but to put on a sweatshirt, go down to the shop, and turn up the heater and go to work...

...trying to avoid the unfinished sled on one workbench and concentrate on the nearly finished PLC panel on the other.

Y'all have a LOVELY day...if you will...

Better Send Over The Guys With The White Coats And The Net

My "Transformer" Beach Chair...


So here I am, sitting around today looking at the heat wave we have going on outside--it's up in the HIGH 20's right now on the other side of my front door--and it occurred to me that rather than fighting the inevitable weather conditions I should just go with the flow and come up with some way to enjoy the coming twenty couple of feet of snow we're going to get between now and April.

Then I started looking around for some sort of plans for a cool sled that I could build to replace the three sleds that burned up when my house burned down in 2001.

The problem I have with most sleds is that I am 6'-3" tall and now weigh about 240 to 250 pounds, depending on how much Chili and Ribs and Pizza and Liquor have been through the house in the past week.

And most commercial sleds, at least the ones you can find at Ace hardware and Toys-R-Us and the other local home improvement stores, are designed for children and midgets and women that do underwear and weight loss "system" commercials that could ride down a snow covered hill on a potato chip or a sheet of heavy duty aluminum foil.

I, on the other hand, want and NEED a real sled--a MANLY SLED--something that will take my bulk and is actually able to handle different kinds of snow and ice conditions and most of all can actually turn a little so I can avoid busting my brains out against the local oak tree or wedging myself under a Volvo SUV going 30 MPH.

Then I found this website selling this sled and I was in LOVE instantly...

Problem is, I can't really justify spending $345 plus freight for something I'm pretty sure won't work on the beach in July.

And since I'm resolute that we won't be living anywhere more than a couple miles from the beach as soon as possible i.e. NEXT WINTER I won't really need a sled unless I open a Ruby Tuesdays or Applebees Restaurant and want to hang it from the wall or ceiling in the bar area for very long.

Then I said to myself...I says...

"Virgil, you're an Injuneer, Right?"

"And you've got that new high tech workshop with all of those power tools from your previous home and investment property renovation work, Right?"

"And you, being a pack rat at heart, also have a bunch of scrap stuff--metal and lumber and pieces of old cars and washing machines--laying around your property in various boxes and bins and piles just waiting for your next invention to come along, Right?"

So...

"Why not B U I L D your own version of the ultimate adult sled, and use familiar, surplus parts and pieces to accomplish your plan."

Then instead of answering myself directly by talking to myself, I went to work this afternoon on the project, and here's a look at what's currently happening in my basement...with only a couple of hours of thought and a little bit of grinding and drilling and otherwise making sharp metal chips.

I took an old used beach chair like this (this one is still new):



And the reflector off of a cheap old Home Depot shop light that had crapped out last year, then I cut everything apart and now I'm in the final stages of the AutoCAD drawings for a suspension and steering mechanism to make this haul my lumbering Butt down my front yard or the side streets in the neighborhood the next time we get any significant frozen precipitation:





The front handles you see there will ultimately allow me to hold on for dear life and once I cut the "skis" apart into two sets in theory I'll be able to steer the silly thing around barking dogs and police cars and maybe I can get my own reality show or at least make it onto FOX news in the process.

More photos and Autopsy results to follow later...

Wish me luck

Sittin' Around Doin' Nuthin'

I Got A Bad Case Of Winter Malaise...


Well, it's the tenth day of December, 2010 here on the calendar at the Turbo Pup Compound on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River, and I'm pretty sure that the temperature hasn't made it above freezing yet this year.

Looking at the wireless display on the backyard weather station, it's 19 outside right now as I write...an improvement of 5 or 6 degrees over the past half dozen overnight lows.

I don't care who you are, but if you live more than a few inches south of the Mason Dixon line that's cold weather by most standards.

Since I'm actually working sorta-kinda part time these days I've indulged myself in doing ABSOLUTELY nothing so far this weekend if you don't count blogging and otherwise fooling around on the computer...

...wait a minute, I did work on a project spreadsheet and write a couple of invoices yesterday in anticipation of FINALLY shipping these stupid PLC panels out of my basement this week.

I know that starting a business requires an investment in time and money, but if I actually tracked the hours I have invested in getting the Alpha and Beta versions of this Touch Screen PLC based Infared Temperature Sensor Panel (TSPLCITSP for short) put together and fine tuned I made something like $0.025999 per hour.

The good news is that if they work as advertised our customer is threatening us with needing another DOZEN panels this year, and phase Two of our efforts is a new, even bigger and complex custom panel designed to monitor the performance and energy usage on an air dryer system which will also be utilized in multiple locations once the concept is proven.

Continuing in my description of my slovenly-ness, I did manage to take the time to watch the Georgia Tech Basketball Team (previously ranked #17 in the country in spite of losing to UGA last week) solidly BEAT the Duke Blue Devils (formerly ranked NUMBER FIVE in the country) yesterday.

Oh...and I made a new kind of White Pizza with a real home made white sauce for dinner that came out pretty good.

I also trimmed my nose hair and cut a few extra inches off a couple of toe nails while wallowing around in the bed reading the newspaper and looking at junk mail and sales ads did most of the laundry and sharpened my other domestic skills in anticipation of resuming my responsibilities of being a "kept man" as Patricia re-enters the workforce, in the process earning about five times more than I made last year as a professional beach bum and part time brain surgeon, rocket scientist, political commenter, and forensic injuneer.

Time now I guess to grab a early morning nap before resuming my efforts in doing nothing all day (possibly interrupted with some work finishing the control panels...)

Regards Y'all...

Happy 75th Birthday Elvis

Sorry I'm A Day Late...


Up or down, in or out, here's a look at "The King" in his prime in 1968:




...RIP Mr. Presley

I Bought A SNOW SHOVEL?

Just Shoot Me I Guess...


I went out yesterday and did something I SWORE that I'd NEVER, ever, Ever, EVER do no matter what, but early in the process of spending our second winter owning a house in a city at the northernmost latitude I've ever lived in I felt compelled to do it.

I came home from Home Depot with two bags of sand in the trunk and a Snow Shovel laying in the floor of the back seat.

The sand was purchased to add weight to the ridiculously light back end of our
Chrysler 300 (which is also rear wheel drive,) but I felt better when I rationalized that the sand will do double duty in June this spring when things finally thaw out because we can add it to the beach area in the Turbo Pup Pool Compound.

The bad news was that they were out of their $8.00 per bag "Ice Melt" stuff, some of which I had used earlier on our driveway in order to rescue the car from it's parking place in the grass.

I'm resolute that as soon as they get another shipment anywhere in Knoxtown (Lowes, Home depot, and the grocers were all out of it I heard) I'm going to buy an entire tractor trailer load pick up a few hundred pounds of the stuff in anticipation of needing it to be able to get to the grocery store to buy bread, peanut butter, and toilet paper later this month.

(I wonder how the left over stuff would taste on the rim of a Margarita glass...Roy?)

And does anyone but me think that I'm too old to be involuntarily learning this "Winterization Process", and thereby see a basic problem with this picture in general?

Let me explain.

Here you have a guy (that would be me) which spent most of the first 42 years of his life waiting to go on vacation...where?

Not sitting around in snow in Ski Apparel.

Not sitting in front of a slot machine in Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

Not sitting around or playing golf in the Desert in Arizona or Southern California.

Try sitting around with his feet in the sand, hand wrapped around a cold adult beverage, looking at the OCEAN.

Then FINALLY, realizing a lifetime of dreaming, I was fortunate enough to be able to give up just Vacationing and spend most of the next SEVEN years of my life actually LIVING on or near the beach on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

Fast forward to TODAY, AND I find myself not only not sitting in the sand...but ACTUALLY BUYING sand and hauling it around in my car trunk, and BUYING giant shovels which are good for nothing but shoveling WATER...

FROZEN water.

Problem is...I don't want to SHOVEL W A T E R.

I want to wade in and lay in and swim in water.

L I Q U I D Water, preferably in it's WARMER forms.

That said, all I want to know is...

Who's idea was this Frozen CRAP any way?

Two People = SIX Phone Lines???

A Tale of Two Three Cities...


Man I have to tell you, I'm worn out mentally and now physically because in the middle of all of the other stuff going on around here I just got through dragging a heavy duty 100' extension cord and my hammer drill with a 15" long concrete bit on it around two sides of my house in the snow and ice.

"Why would you be doing THAT...Mr. Rogers?" most sane people might inquire?

Because the idiots at AT&T jerked us around since Wednesday waiting for them to send a so-called "technician" out to install Pat's new business phone line, and after the 8 AM appointment deadline passed we found that all they really needed to do was throw a switch at NASA or in Washington DC or maybe at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and we'd have a dial tone.

Earlier this morning I walked outside with an old trimline phone in my hand, plugged it into the "network interface", and found that they'd turned the stupid thing on quite by accident.

So any way, all complaining about Utility companies aside, did I mention that with Pat's new company supplied land line and cell phone that we have...

Get ready...

SIX TELEPHONE LINES FOR TWO PEOPLE (and ONE TURBO PUP who doesn't have thumbs and doesn't dial the phone very often.)

I know, I know I KNOW...maybe an explanation is in order so I can get all of this straight myself, and in the process see if I can rationalize paring things down a little because I think that there's an itty bitty chance that we're spending WayyyyYYYY too much money taking unsolicited offers of insurance and debt consolidation and God knows what else these days on all of these communication devices.

First of all there's MY cell phone, something I've had in various incarnations since about 1990 before every man woman and infant on the entire planet had one and felt the need to walk and drive around blabbing all day.

It currently has our old home number from Vinings, Georgia ported over to it so bill collectors people we knew in the Atlanta area could find us when we moved to St. Simons. It's a 404 area code which constantly confuses people when they call and I say I live in Knoxville.

Then there is our home phone, which is actually a Vonage VOiP phone and phone number that we got when we lived on St. Simons. The wierd thing was that while south Georgia has a 912 area code, that it wasn't available on VOiP so Vonage gave us another 404 Area Code. In the process we eliminated AT&T/Bell South from our lives in regard to land lines and telecommunications as of 2003.

Next there's Pat's cell phone, which has her old Atlanta era cell phone number which we never changed as we moved from city to city and from Bellsouth/Cingular to T-Mobile and now to Verizon.

Confused yet?

Well, I actually am, because with speed dial, since I never actually DIAL any of our numbers I can only remember one of them most of the time without bursting a blood vessel thinking about it.

Next comes along my new company, and in the interest of trying to look like a real business enterprise I decided that it would be nice if when my customers called me here in Knoxville they actually called a Knoxville number, and when my suppliers here in town called they didn't have to call long distances soooooo...

Along comes phone number number FOUR.

We bounced along quite comfortably from October to this week running around the house playing hide and seek with the EIGHT WIRELESS HANDSETS answering FOUR TELEPHONE NUMBERS...

looking in sofa cushions and under the bed sheets and in other out of the way places when something started making noise or we actually wanted to of all things place a phone call.

For some reason there must be a law or a rule or something that says that no matter how many phones you have there is never one closer than 25 feet through at least two pieces of Sheetrock from you when it rings or you want to call and talk to someone or order Pizza.

All of that rambling aside, it brings us to this week when Pat finished her paper work and the last hour when I went out and drilled a hole through 12" of brick and concrete block and 2x4's and poked a wire through the wall (the old wiring was 46 years old and I didn't want to fool with making it work.)

So now we have our third dial tone in the building, the first associated with a "land line" in almost seven years, and with this week's experience I can tell you that the legacy phone companies' customer service is still operating in a "Monopoly mentality" and it's no wonder people continue to eliminate "Ma Bell" or whatever incarnation they call themselves from their lives.

And then finally, with the arrival of the package containing the new Cell phone any day now, I'm fairly certain that I'm going to literally DROWN in A SEA OF DIAL TONES AND DIFFERENT RINGS.

Six phone lines and ten phones.

I must be out of my freaking mind.

Would somebody PLEASE wrap a phone cord around my neck and put me out of my suffering???

And don't write, CALL...operators are standing by....

Frozen Out Of My Own Driveway

Mother Nature Laughs At Global Warming Zombies...


So we sat around most of the day yesterday waiting on the predicted "winter weather" to arrive and all it managed to do until about 3 PM was spit and sputter and produce maybe a dozen snowflakes in my yard.

Then I walked outside about 3:05 and it was sleeting lightly as the temperature at the back yard weather station rose toward freezing, then things turned to snow shortly thereafter and the temperature started to slide back south on the thermometer.

Then of course the inevitable happened and I managed to break the only #8-32 tap available in the building which I was using to cut threads in some holes in the steel back plate of the latest PLC control panel, so we ran out the door to the bank and Home Depot and on the way home stopped at our local watering hole for some drinks, fried green tomatoes, and "naked" chicken wings for dinner.

Things kept going down hill but since they had closed schools early and a bunch of people had already left work we ended up arrogantly sitting around talking to our friend "Barber Bob" (who has actually trimmed my hair a little twice in the past two years.

Then we headed home and things were fine on Kingston Pike but the streets in our neighborhood were getting a little slick and when we got to our driveway we discovered that it was impossible to make it up past about the half way point.

I tried it forward.

I tried it backward.

I tried driving with two wheels on the grass but without positraction all I ended up doing was making a wound on the grass I'll have to repair when things finally thaw out--probably in March.

So the good news is that we don't have to worry about sliding down the driveway if we have to go anywhere in the next week, but the bad news is our car is parked off the street in the edge of my front yard as a target for the asshead vandals to put a cinder block through the windshield or beat with a baseball bat.

OK, we really don't have that kind of crap going on here in this area of West Knox but still I hate leaving things to temptation because in my experience many people generally lose their mind when it snows and the aforementioned kids will be out of school, unsupervised, and some won't be able to resist getting out and risking life and limb driving around doing nothing (except denting my fenders.)

...more...

Good God, I just re-read what I just wrote and realized I've officially become an old curmudgeon...without even trying.

That said...everybody better not act up...don't make me come over and beat you with my walker...

Cold Snow Day

Hot In The Basement...


Well, I'm back up thrashing around this morning trying to avoid the inevitable 8 hours slaving away building stuff people want to pay me to do, and looking at the Internet weather sites I see that the snow has made it somewhere between here and Nashville this morning.

According to my back yard weather station it's 18 degrees F and the projection is we'll have a major heat wave arriving after noon with the temperatures climbing all the way up to FREEZING for the first time in nearly a week.

The forecast is for 1 to 2 inches of the white stuff with flurries continuing over the next couple of days, and since everything outside my front and back doors is frozen solid I expect that it will stick around for a while this time.

The good news is that the newly installed insulation and space heater has half of the basement warm and toasty.

Honestly I should be working on control panels rather than blogging right now, but my brain is fried and I have some sort of mental block which is keeping me from making some of the program logic work the way it's supposed to--I'm still saying the first PLC is possessed by some demon...

Any way, my Sales Rep for the PLC's and IR Probes is stopping by later today so I have to clean up the kitchen after last night's Pizza construction extravaganza and go pick up the socks and underwear and puppy toys out of the living room floor make a little more progress on the second panel so I have something to show him while asking him idiotic clueless questions.

Y'all have a LOVELY day in the cold...if you will...