09:35 – I cleaned the fallen leaves out of the troughs on the roof yesterday. This year is the first time I haven’t climbed up on the roof to do that. Instead, I stood on the ladder and used a leaf rake with a handle extension duct-taped onto it to drag the leaves down and over the edge. I wasn’t able to get all of them, but I got enough. I won’t be climbing up on the roof any more. As Dirty Harry said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Today will be a good day to stay inside. The forecast is for rain and thunderstorms all day. I’ll finish the last load of laundry today and do some work on science kits.
I’ve been researching the competition for the prepping book. I’ve now looked at more than a dozen of the current general prepping titles and, with just one exception, they are universally bad. Not just bad, but hideously bad. And the exception is mediocre, at best. Almost without exception, the authors have no clue what they’re talking about on most or all of the subjects they “cover”. Pretty clearly, they’ve used the Internet as their source of information rather than actually having done any of this stuff themselves. One, for example, divides defensive weapons into four major classes: pistols, shotguns, rifles, and … carbines. Another talks about “hamm radio”, and it’s obvious from the rest of what she has to say about comms that this isn’t merely a typo. She’s completely clueless about radio. In her list of “top brands” of transceivers, she recommends, and I quote: “MURS (Multi-Use Radio Service), Yaesu VX-3R VHF/UHF, Handheld VHF 2 meter Amateur Radio Transceiver 5watt, and TYT TH-F5”. Geez. It’s like listening to a science lecture presented by someone who’s stumped if asked the orbital period of our planet.
11:48 – I’ve been getting the daily free Kindle books email from kebooks.com for a couple of years now. Usually, I just jump down to the mysteries section and download any that look interesting for Barbara. Today, I decided to look at the non-fiction category, where I found six or eight prepping books and three or four on Kindle publishing/marketing. So I downloaded all of them.
The prepping books are ridiculous, both in terms of content and size/price. A typical prepping “book” runs anything from 15 to maybe 60 pages and is normally priced at $2.99 to $4.99. What a rip-off, even if the content were worth reading. As to the books about publishing/marketing on Kindle, I’m not even going to bother looking at them. Why? Here’s the cover from one of them:
