Workin' On The RailRoad Doin' Nuthin' All Day

Professional Incompetence...


It's a dang good thing today's Saturday instead of a weekday, because I'm planning on doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING pretty much all day today.

OK...maybe I will do SOMETHING, but it will be fun or otherwise a task I choose and WANT to do.

Things like smoking cigars, sitting by the pool, reading the newspaper and cursing, stuff like that comes to mind.

And tickeling my little Turbo Pup's belly...I'll probably do some of that.

Otherwise, I'm pretty much going to be useless and proud of it.

Time to get busy I guess...Regards Y'all...

"Executive" Decisions

I'm The Emperor Of The Universe...


Just in case you haven't noticed from my earlier posting...I HAVE A CRAP ATTITUDE.

It's summer and everyone's apparently distracted and/or on vacation, so I've made an executive decision.

It's noon on Friday, I can't find anyone in their office to talk to, so I'm putting on some shorts, pouring myself a drink, grabbing a cigar and the crossword in the Newspaper, and taking the rest of the day off sitting on my deck.

Phone calls may be answered and e-mails might receive a terse response.

Best let me alone while I re-adjust and marinade my synapses in liquid hydrocarbons.

I'm Apparently Nice And Stupid

The Options Are Against The Law In Modern Times...


Dammit...I'm pretty much stuck giving 110%, yet catching crap from idiots around me with IQ's 20 or 30 points below mine living in nicer houses and explaining to me why my expectations are unrealistic.

Almost everybody else I'm dealing with right now is too busy lamenting the "economy" and "unemployment" and other senseless BS they see on TV, while at the same time taking vacation and working 9 to 5, spending money they don't have, waiting for the government bail-out and in the process delaying my production and progress.

I have to go now...the voices say I need to stay home and clean my Guns today...

Busy = Boring Blogger

You Don't Want To Know What I'm Thinking....


I guess the summer doldrums have officially arrived here at the Turbo Pup Compound.

It's not like I don't have plenty of stuff to do, including some renovation work left over from last fall when the weather got too cool and sweaty to finish things like staining and polyurethaning a couple of new exterior wood doors.

And the never ending front porch renovation/concrete refinish project.

And two weed eaters and the lawn mower and the chicken repair projects.

And on and on and on and I'm just too dang tired to say anything new you haven't already heard about the stupidity going on in Washington DC on our behalf.

I don't even give a crap about World Cup Soccer.

Just call me a Neanderthal I guess.

Whatever...regards y'all...

Things I Used To Do

And Don't Like Doing Any More...


Well, I'm pleased to report that I survived a day in Atlanta little less for the wear.

I was at my customer's office before 10 AM and was finished by 11:30 with an entire afternoon to kill.

I guess it's that I'm so old and set in my ways, combined with the fact that I lived in the city of Atlanta and its northern Cobb County suburbs from 1977 until 2003, that makes a visit something a good deal short of a trip to Disney World.

I got to do things like go through security at Hartsfield/Jackson International Airport before the return flight.

And I got panhandled on the MARTA train while watching a group of people which... while not panhandling...could be best described as a "Freak Show.".

And I took a Taxi...actually two taxis.

And find out that the "free WI-FI" at both Hard Rock Cafe and the downtown Hooters doesn't work (I went to Hooters because the girls at Hard Rock said they had free Internet.)

And that the Internet connection at the down town Starbucks works.

And that there's no Internet on Concourse C at Hartsfield during a three hour wait.

Other than that, it was pretty much just another trip supporting a long business day, and I'm glad to be back home to the Turbo Pup Compound on the Banks of the Mighty Tennessee River.

Out (From In Front) Of The Frying Pan

Into The Fire...


I was about to start moping around here this week because I was working myself out of paying endeavors and was stuck only with proposal work and puttering around cleaning up the basement and working on a couple of old Weed Eaters and a Lawn Mower I've been threatening to rebuild.

Then before 9 AM this morning I had an E-mail with a Purchase Order attached and a phone call with notice to proceed with the design and construction of a "New and Improved" PLC based control panel for a new plastics bottle customer down in Atlanta.

Further, they wanted me in their factory ASAP to talk about the project.

I scrambled around finishing four more Pneumatic Valve rebuilds and making plane reservations, and now as of early evening I've gone from virtually nothing to do over the next few weeks except work on my sun tan to boarding a Delta jet bound for Hartsfield at 7:20 AM tomorrow morning.

It will be a whirlwind day trip returning early tomorrow night, but I caution any of my Atlanta area friends and blog readers that if they feel a disturbance in "The Force" in the next 24 hours it will be my presence in the "Atlanta Metropolitan Area" for only the second time in 2010.

The locals should be sure and watch "Action News" at Eleven PM to ensure I made it out of town without incident.

Time to work on some paper work and get some normal sleep on a normal schedule I guess.

Regards y'all....

I'm A Cooking Fool

Looking For New Stuff To Burn In Butter And Salt...


Since Pat's gone back to work full time--telecommuting--I've pretty much taken over a bunch of stuff solo around here she did historically even though I was sitting around doing not much of anything all day.

While I still need to start paying more attention to the hardwood floors and some other cleaning chores, I've pretty much got the laundry down to a scheduled art and I've ramped up the cooking to about five days a week in an effort to bring some sanity to our budget issues--financial and caloric (affecting the waist line.)

For instance, last week I did German Roulauden (Beef) one night, Mexican another, and a couple of pretty decent meals I've since forgotten the exact menu of. Then Saturday I did ribs on the grill with home made Kansas City Style BBQ sauce and Sunday turned out yet another of my soon to be world famous Greek Pizzas.

I'm sort of in a rut in not having the energy to develop any new ideas because I've run out of ideas, so I'm going back through my 4" thick cooking notebook trying to remember stuff I've done once or twice four or five years ago and re-cook the classics.

Over a period of about a year back about 2005 I "cooked my way" around the Mediterranean, beginning in Spain, skipping France and moving on to Italy, through Germany, Greece and Turkey...jumped down to India working on some curried stuff, then back up across Northern Africa ending up in Morocco.

Some of the spices involved in getting authentic flavors in those Cusines are hard to find without ordering off the Internet and things can get a little costly in the process.

I have so many spices I loose them in the different cabinets and sometimes spend part of two days taking everything out, swearing a given spice isn't there, and then having to come back around looking again.

Any way, today is another "valve build day" but tonight I'm returning to my Germany tab in my notebook and cooking up some Wurst, portions of Chicken Schnitzel, and Sauerkraut for dinner.

Stop by about 6:30 if you're in the area and I'll set a couple of extra plates.

Fathers' Day

Call YOUR Father If He's Still Alive.


I wish I could...

More Government "Green Energy" Crap

If You Want Something Screwed Up...Hire The Government To Do It...


We've lived up here in Eastern Tennessee at the Turbo Pup Compound on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River for twenty six months now.

Overall the experience has been quite good, and if I had arrived here when I was 25 or 30 years old I would definitely consider spending most of a lifetime living here in West Knoxtown.

As it is, it's just a matter of time and circumstance and more importantly...FUNDING...which will allow us to escape either back to our Little Island on the Georgia coast or now possibly back to the family farm in Lower Alabama.

That said, one interesting thing I've noticed after spending most of my life buying electricity from some unit of the Southern Company (specifically Alabama Power and Georgia Power), is how ridiculously expensive electricity is when you buy it from the country's only Federal Owned Utility...the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA.)

Without doing the research, I'd guess that our electric rates are nearly 25% higher here on a KW and KWh basis than they were with the Southern Company, and every time we turn around there's some controversy--whether TVA is spilling power plant ash into a local river or cancelling a green energy program without notice and apparently good reason ---more on that in a minute

Now I'm not going to go into all of the details here because you can Google yourself to death looking at the TVA's history, but what basically started out as a "Jobs Program" here in rural Appalachia in the early 1930's under the guise of harnessing the power of the Tennessee and associated river systems has today morphed into a giant pseudo-megga Corporation which produces most of it's power using Coal, with a little Nuclear Energy tossed in for good measure.

While they have more hydro plants than coal/nukes, the reality is that coal and uranium/plutonium make many more light bulbs glow here than water does falling through a turbine.

So any way, the latest rage up here on the Banks of the Mighty Tennessee River has been a government financed "Green Energy" program called "Generation Partners."

The idea was that you could put in solar panels on your house or on top of an industrial or commercial building or even out in a piece of bare ground you owned and get financing based on the future income generated by making "clean energy."

The reality was that TVA was subsidizing owner's return on investment by paying a 12-cent-per-kilowatt-hour premium for any energy you generated and put back into their grid above the amount of electricity you actually used.

Without the artificial, taxpayer funded premium, none of the stuff worked or payed back...the power produced by solar here in Tennessee cost more to produce than the electricity you could buy from a Reactor or "pollution belching" coal fired plant.

Any way, an extensive cottage industry of companies has sprung up over the past couple of years here supporting the program and earning a living for hundreds if not thousands of people dedicated to supplying components and even pre-designed systems of stuff which when put together would let a homeowner make electricity on their roof or in their back yard, and allowing XYZ company to cover their flat roof with panels and get the Federal/State tax credits and earn a little money or at least reduce their normal TVA inflated electric bills.

Pretty cool, even if you're not an Owl Gore loving, tye died, patchuli stinking, sniveling, bed wetting, tree hugging eco greenie weenie...

Right?

All of that said , now guess what TVA did last week?

TVA put the program on HOLD.

Why, you might ask?

Because nobody was building solar panels and taking advantage of the "government tax incentives"?

NO...to quote the Knoxville News Sentinel:

TVA was halting the program because of excessive demand.

...

Ken Elder, owner of solar startup Soltility in Friendsville, said he learned of the freeze through an e-mail from another solar firm late Wednesday and received an e-mail notification Thursday from Nashville Electric Service. TVA did not issue formal information regarding the program until Friday.

"The folks that are working with me are just devastated because we are just really gearing up with potential customers," said Elder, who has been working as a consultant in the industry and is beginning to develop small commercial and residential projects on his own.

"TVA could do a lot of damage just studying this for six or eight weeks. Almost as bad as that, they could come back and say, 'We're going to re-implement the program, but it's not going to be at 12 cents per (kilowatt) hour, it's going to be 4 cents,' " Elder added.


Click on this link and go read the whole story if you're interested, but the bottom line here according to my considered Redneck opinion is this.

This is a perfect example of the mindless, useless, bureaucratic double talk by the Imperial By-God Federal Government of the United States of 'merica in general, and the Obamarama Administration in particular.

The government knows that Solar and Bio-mass and Wind and any of the other so-called "Green Energy" technologies out there won't work without subsidies, yet when they encourage people to go out and invest in their precious eco-friendly technologies--whether it's as an owner trying to get a loan to finance a project or it's a business owner starting a business to supply solar panels and windmills and pipes and technology to implement the systems--you can bet that you are at risk, EVERY SINGLE DAY, of having the rug jerked out from under your feet.

This current "suspension" of the Generation Partners program is indefinite but is supposed to only last for the next six or eight weeks, but in the mean time what are the businesses selling equipment, and owners of projects which were in the application/approval process going to do?

How many new start-up businesses can survive TWO MONTHS without selling anything?

How many customers are going to say "FORGET IT" and walk away from the inane process of permitting and loan/grant applications with the Government through the TVA just saying:

"Oops...we changed our mind...Excuse us."

There is no EXCUSE for crap like this, ladies and gentlemen.

And you probably won't be hearing about this latest example of government ineptitude on the national news, but I suspect that stuff like this is going on behind the scenes all over the country while at the same time President Obama and Pelosi and Reid are running around touting our need to ween ourselves off of the Arab oil tit.

Crap like this makes my head spin at near orbital rotational velocity, and if yours doesn't it should be and you better start paying a little more attention before going to the voting booth this fall and in 2012.

That will be all...for now...

The Three Tenors Terrors

Funny, But Dangerously True...





(Watch You Tube take this video down...like the last one done by these people...because it might be "offensive")

What The Heck Happened To Me?

I Think I Better Call Somebody A "Mental Health Professional"...


I was sitting around taking a break for a minute this evening, and something suddenly hit me.

I've put in about 30 work hours over the past three days.

I haven't done that in over two years.

I haven't done it regularly for over a decade.

I hope I'm not going to make it some sort of habit, or I'll be kicked out of the ASOPPABB (American Society of Professional Pirates And Beach Bum's) and be stripped of my Hawaiian Taxi Driver Shirts and knit Rasta hat with fake dreadlocks.

Maybe I shouldn't have said anything here on the blog, but chances are I won't pull off such a feat again in the near future so if the ASOPPABB officials come knocking I'll just say it was all boastful self aggrandizing.

Regards Y'all...

Attention K-Mart Shoppers...

The Tree Is Off My Roof...


We had a hellascious thunderstorm here at the Turbo Pup compound yesterday afternoon.

In addition to the fun of enduring a 10 hour power outage--from 2:45 until about 11:50 PM, in the middle of the fireworks show a tree (or more accurately, a tree BRANCH the size of a 12" wide tree fell over and landed on the roof over the bedroom.

After deciding to buy a new Home owner's policy when I got off the phone call where they gave me a roofer and and tree services name but promised to stop by sometime in Fiscal 2010, I went over to talk to my neighbor who's tree the branch belonged to.

He said forget hiring a tree service, HE would take it down.

I said I'd loan him every tool I had, hold the ladder, and stay out of the way when required.

Got 'er done...more details and possibly some photos later...got to check e-mail and make a couple of calls.

MORE... 10:30 PM

I forgot to mention the lucky way the branch fell--actually just "leaning over" onto the roof, such that there was virtually ZERO damage. A couple of shingles were nicked along the edge of the gable.

Talk about luck, in the end of the day we avoided having to have a new roof and possibly made a new friend of our neighbor in the process.

Can't ask for much more than that I guess....

Abridged Official Transcript Of Oval Office Address

Brought To You By This Blogger As a Public Service


"Blaa Blaa Blaa Oil Spill Blaa bla balallllllaaa British Petroleum, Blaa blaa blaaa working families blaa blaaaa forced compensation.

Blaa blaa blaa great country blaa blaa limitations of my office blaa blaa determination blaa greater regulatory reform.

Green energy blaa blaa blaa don't pay attention to Owl Gore bonking that bimbo instead of his wife bla blaaa blaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Fossil fuel evil like Heroin blaaa wind energy blaa ethanol blaaaaa solar panels on your new bicycle blaa blaa shut up Biden blaa blaah.

Now I've got to go call for a tee time blaa blaa blaa and get started working on killing the coal companies once I'm finished with the Oil Companies...blaa blaa blaa

Thank you America...and good blaaaaaaaaaaaa evening"


Overall it was only a little over 18 minutes of Hell...I've listened to it once on the Radio and watched it once on TV and every bone in my body aches from enduring the process.

Now I have to go soak my head and press it in a vice and see if I can squeeze the inane words back out my ears and nose.

Please excuse me.

Two Steps Forward...Three Steps Back

Do The Hokey Pokey And You Turn Yourself Around...


Dang it if yesterday wasn't one of "those days" for me here at the Turbo Pup Compound the International headquarters of my little company

You know, the sort of day where you're awake all day and you're sitting in front of a Computer doing whatever it that you're supposed to be doing (not playing Solitare or fooling around on E-bay in other words,) and when 5 PM comes the pile on your desk of stuff needing doing is higher than it was at 8 AM.

I guess the good news is that I have new profitable stuff to do on a more frequent basis.

The bad news is that I have the sort of personality where just because it's time to go to work on any given task doesn't mean I have the energy and creative mental attitude to crank through the process and deliver my usual super human superlative results.

I have to wait until my mind locks onto any given problem in order to make good use of my time and efforts. That's a good reason to not be on anyone's payroll but my own in spite of my two year long investigation into returning full time to the "American workforce."

I have proposals or the requests for proposal laying on my desk representing 300% more dollar value that the work we've done since the company started last fall.

I'm excited, but the work is complex and the proposals sometimes take a full week's worth of man-hours to complete at this point because we don't have a Catalog or a standard product line--everything is custom designed and custom built...and I just can't sling prices out the door without doing very accurate pricing estimates in order to not get beat and also not end up giving things away at cost.

Oh well, I could be sitting here with the phone lines quiet and nothing to do, so I guess that I should stop complaining.

Meanwhile, in national news I see where walking down a ,pubic public sidewalk with a camera in your hand while asking a US Congressman a simple question can get you assaulted.

Don't you imagine that if the tables were turned and I walked up to a Senator or Representative on the street and proceeded to grab him by the arm and neck I'd be spending at least one night in jail and probably have an assault conviction on my record when the dust finally settled?

Moving on, NOAA reports that the first area of "disturbed tropical weather" is slowly sliding it's way across the Atlantic. I can do without the hysteria but you just wait and see all of the wild eyed reporting with so-called pseudo-experts chiming in talking about the devistation which will result if the ensuing storm moves into the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course one real tangible outcome of any storms in the Gulf of Mexico will be the effect on the slow process of capturing and pumping the leaking oil out of the damaged wellhead. I hope BP has some plan for keeping their jurry rigged vaccum apparatus intact even if they have to move the workers and equipment away from the site in anticipation of the storm.

They could be right back to square one if a large enough storm forms and comes near.

I can't decide how upset to be about this disaster...it's certainly bad for the residents and the tourists and I personally have a number of friends and family which reside in coastal Panhandle cities.

But all of this freaking out and running around in circles like your head is on fire over the first event of this kind in the 60 year history of offshore drilling is ignorant, uninformed overkill in my considered Redneck opinion.

And finally this morning, on the cooking front, if appliances keep dieing in my kitchen I'm going to be reduced to grilling weenies on the grill every day.

Our little 12 bottle wine cooler (that only actually holds about five or six bottles has given up the ghost last winter and is still sitting on it's stand serving as an expensive table for keys and junk mail.

Now the over the range combination "vent hood"/microwave has crapped out in the past couple of months and I've been too cheap and lazy to go down to Home Depot and drag a new one home.

I hate "vent hoods" which do nothing but suck up a little smoke and steam and blow it right back in your face, so I'm planning on buying a REAL VENT hood wide enough to cover all four eyes on the Range and with a big blower. Then I'm going to cut a hole through the carport wall and blow my fumes out on the old Chrysler 300.

It's only a little more expensive to buy the hood and a giant counter top microwave that's large enough to actually pop a bag of popcorn on the turntable and then when we move take it with us (the microwave) rather than bolting it to the wall in the kitchen.

Of course the new hood will also require a new or modified backsplash and if I do a new backsplash I want to replace the existing counter tops, and after writing about the process my back already hurts and my brain's getting tired worrying about the other details, thus...

I'm gonna go now and do a little more proposal writing...

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

New Project Yields New Tools

Tools To Men Like Toys To Toddlers...


It seems that I might get to go tool shopping in the next couple of weeks in support of a new Injuneering project.

The prospect of making decisions on new tools was actually enough to get me out of bed and keep me off the sofa most of yesterday in spite of the weird malady that struck me down Saturday.

I've had similar symptoms twice in the past three months, and in an effort to understand the process I've decided to call it the "shaking shuddering hee-bee-jee-beees"...

And I'm suspicious that it might just be psychological because in spite of the physical symptoms--fever and aches--I think that it could be the result of watching all of the stupid crap that's beamed into my home on Cable TV.

Follow me here...I'm afraid that after a steady diet of Weather Channel and FOX News and Food Network, followed by the occasional foray over to CNN and some of the broadcast channels like ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC et. al., that my immune system takes over and forces me to lay down and close my eyes for ten or twelve hours and just take a "chill pill."

After all...you can only spend so much time screaming at the television and throwing old dirty underwear and socks at the screen in response to the "latest inane example of mental ineptitude purveyed for public consumption" LIEMIPPC for short.)

You know?

So any way...I'm quoting a new project which requires a bunch of machine shop work once I get through doing the drawings, but instead of all machining being done by a vendor outside our building I'm looking at doing some of the lower tolerance work myself...in the process buying a nice drill press and a metal cutting power bandsaw and using them to cut the raw stock in house and make a bunch of sharp metal chips in my basement floor in the process.

Of course having the new tools in the basement will open up a whole new world of insanity induced construction projects...things like the first prototype of the "Rogers' Pulse-Doppler Laser Nippleometer"...a creation that's been on the drawing board for about 15 years at least now.

It's really a simple device you wear on your head or like eye glasses, designed to be able to accurately measure the ambient temperature by bouncing a laser beam off random women's breasts.

The concept was pretty exciting years ago when I was single, wandering around in public looking at them (women...not their breasts) and wondering if it was really that cold outside or they were just glad to see me...

but I digress...

...so any way...I'm back on my feet, feeling better, and have quite a busy week chasing new proposals around trying to close some business and starting Tuesday building more Pneumatic Valves, so I'm sure you'll understand why the blogging will be sporadic at best.

UNLESS something really STUPID happens and I have to chime in.

In the mean time...

Regards Y'all

I'm Tired & Cranky

Under The Weather & Busy Also...


Well, I got a late start Saturday morning, but by mid-day I managed to drag myself to Lowes' to get some flex pipe for the mutant pool filter project and stop by Food World, but by about 3 PM I was shivering and sleeping on the sofa with some kind of unexplained fever, and it was near midnight before I was able to get up and eat a sandwich.

The proposed and planned "Beer-Butt" chicken had to spend the night in the basement fridge as a result.

Maybe Sunday will see chicken rather than Pizza for dinner.

It sucks getting old...More later when I wake up if I feel like writing.

Sorry Y'all...

AMERICA RISING

And I'm REAL Busy...


Well...The bad news is that two of my tallest--about 5' high--tomato plants got blown over in the gusty rain yesterday and I was forced to stand them back up and pound giant 7' long pieces of 1/2 and 3/4 inch re-bar into the ground in order to keep the flimsy "tomato cages" from falling back over.

Then I got a couple of phone calls and had to start working on a couple of proposals for new work and found out I had more pneumatic valves coming in to be rebuilt and the first activities which suffered on my schedule were sitting outside smoking cigars and blogging.

OK, blogging suffered first because I'm going outside now to read some more of Bruce Feiler's "America's Prophet--Moses and the American Story."

If I could I'd send everyone a copy because it provides a great historical lesson relating to our countries founding.

Meanwhile, at the risk of having published this before (and I'm too lazy to look), go check this video out and then get back to me with a 300 word essay trying to make the case that it's wrong:



That will be all...for now...

I Finally Found A New Truck With The Options I Need

Use Your Turn Signal Or Else...





More...




Now if you change lanes every five seconds around me, roll through four way stops, or just generally drive like an idiot while texting they'll have to do DNA testing to figure out who you were...

Question 'O The Day

Inquiring Minds Want to Know...


Why does virtually everyone wearing white plastic "Tyvek" chemical suits cleaning up "tar balls" down on the Gulf Coast shown on all of the TV coverage have dreadlocks?

Just wondering...

I have to go shave my back now, I'll expect an answer in the comments when I return.

Bye, Bye (Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Butt)

If I Could Dance...I'd Be Dancing...


Did you hear the news?

Someone's no longer going to be sitting every day in the White House.

No, it's not this guy...a caricature of a President:




It's this lovely woman who should have retired at age 65 so she could be cast on Broadway as The Wicked Witch of the West a ancient Grandmother in the local community theater:




Go here and read the details if you missed the story.

I'm not dancing, but I have a little extra spring in my step as the rabid barking moonbat liberals like Helen Thomas continue to get their due once in a while.

Heh...