Hot and humid, but maybe a little tiny bit less so. I’ll take a 4 degree improvement, yes I will. It was slightly less hot yesterday, but there was less of a breeze so it was actually kinda nastier in toto…
Spent the day on the machines breaking concrete and moving sand. Joy. Getting near the end though.
Today the septic guy is coming by to get the stuff I broke back together. Dumpster swap is supposed to happen too. Thankfully I didn’t have a ton of rubble to divert to a pile, only a couple of buckets full. I sure hope I erred on the side of caution and the dumpster isn’t too heavy.
I have an enormous pile of sand to get rid of. There will be some sort of ‘free sand’ offer locally, at some point. Somewhere between 60 and 80 cubic yards enormous. And I might be underestimating. Imagine two open top 40 yard dumpsters worth…
Had another neighbor come by and ask the details about what we’re doing and how the house leveling worked. Dumpsters and earth moving for a couple of weeks will get attention, I guess.
So more connections and conversations. Good things to stack up.
Stack some of your own, while you are contemplating the freedoms we’ve lost over the last 10, 20, and 40 years.
Celebrate Independence, in every thing you can.
nick
Happy Independence Day, Americans. I won’t be celebrating. Won’t be mourning the practical death of the Constitutional republic, but I’m closer to mourning than celebrating.
You’re welcome for the lack of world wars and for the destruction of the USSR, to the rest of the world. Sorry about the non-stop smaller
warsnon-war conflicts, but that’s the doing of the military-industrial complex and the permanent bureaucrats; we ordinary Americans don’t want them, either.Have someone check it first. Some kinds of sand are valuable enough to steal by the pickup truck load. Rounded grains vs jagged? You might be able to sell the sand.
re use of copyrighted materials in training the so-called AIs, I mentioned it somewhere, sometime last year. Others have brought it up since ChatGPT was opened up to the public and some conversations and “write me an article about…” contained copyrighted material. It’s one thing to sprinkle in references to classical literature. It’s another to include sentences from the abstract of a doctoral dissertation or a recent magazine article, without attribution.
One of the franchisees feared by the McDonald’s parent company. There aren’t many, but I would put this one at the top of the list. They have the location – Sand Lake and International Drive.
The fun starts at 10:15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfs2-cjjD1A
Don’t head down to your standard local McDonald’s looking for a cheesesteak. The franchisee does whatever he wants to the menu in that particular building.
For context regarding the real estate, Olive Garden #1 sat right across International Drive for a couple of decades until the traffic got too much even for Darden.
78F and part clouds this fine morning. No dumpster swap yet, but it’s early.
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Lavazza coffee is sold as a premium brand in the US, I wonder if it is in Europe? It’s pretty dang good.
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The Cuisinart version of the Keurig Duo is NOT well designed. The carafe is incredibly poorly thought out. There is a rim around the top that makes it impossible to pour every drop out of the carafe. You have to hold it up side down, and ‘flip’ it to kinda ‘toss’ the last little bit out. The brew side of the coffee maker is horrible too. Where you add water is one corner of the basket area, that is black on black and essentially invisible. Almost impossible to add water without spilling into the grounds. And you can’t use the carafe, like every other coffee maker in existence because of the poor spout design. Sometimes the pretender is not ‘just as good’ as the original.
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Saying “the good bacon” implies the existence of “bad bacon” and I’m not sure such a thing in possible. The universe might collapse under the weight of the paradox.
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If you are a contractor* in a small rural community, you aren’t making friends by speeding along the dirt road. People have dogs and kids and both roam freely. They might tolerate it from Derrick, because he’s Bubba’s son and has always been trouble, but the won’t tolerate if from you for long. Country folk are vindictive as hell when pushed. They are the descendants of sheep stealers, poachers, petty criminals and tax cheats, (and that doesn’t even include the irish,) and they have long memories and hold a grudge.
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The USA was founded by people who had had enough. It’s been peopled by folks who wanted to know ‘what’s over there?’ and ‘I’m going somewhere else, there are too many of you here’ and ‘maybe over there I’ll succeed.” Now it’s filled with the equivalent of trust fund babies, who don’t recognize the hard work that created the wealth in the first place, and the kind of people who prey on the trust fund babies. There’s a core left, bigger than you might think, mainly the ‘sons of Martha’, and they are getting to the “had enough” point. IDK if there are enough, or if they’ll succeed when pushing and shoving turns into sniping and shivving… but it will be ugly, and beauty RARELY arises from ugliness. In fact, in modern history, I can only think of one example….
n
*contractor= “trunk slammer”, or “tailgate slammer” in this case. Small business, dubious status, no love for the customer or the people in the area.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trunk%20slammer
BTW, WTAF google? The google ‘doodle’ looks like a dog vomited.
n
Ah, the good old days of fitness standards. Have I mentioned how glad I am being retired from the Army? I’m sure fatso has a pass because I’M A TRANNY!
Off to San Diego from Vegas early tomorrow. I get to sell books while MrsAtoz dazzles them with her keynote. She speaks to a more, uh, upscale, crowd of school administrators. I’ve found that the more they make, the less they buy. I’ll be hauling books back to Vegas. Cheapskates.
We’ve yet to own a Keurig machine which lasted beyond a couple of years. Hecho en China plus the high levels of chlorine in most municipal water supplies.
More than a kernel of truth:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/07/james-howard-kunstler/blobocracy/
“Hard times will produce strong men and women with a bias toward reality, which naturally tends to comprise things that are truthful. Untruth will be consigned back to its traditional category: Evil. It will be shunned, as it should be. Nations come and go and perhaps America, as a federation of states united as one, will go. Many of the self-evident truths that were born with her will remain to be honored one way or another, in some region of this large land-mass, or another. Events await. Facing our time of dark uncertainty, we have a lot to think about this Fourth of July, a very solemn holiday.”
Mr Atoz
I’ve found that the more they make, the less they buy.
the best example is freakanomics, as high they are on the chickens pole, more entitled they think they are
BTW have a nice 4 of July
CDC Altered Minnesota Death Certificates that List a Covid Vaccine as a Cause of Death
https://brownstone.org/articles/cdc-altered-death-certificates/
7 of 9 fraudulently coded by the CDC.
And the distribution of deaths–by date and age–indicates that the data sent to the CDC was already scrubbed to minimize any mention of the Chinese bioweapon.
There are a whole lot of people that should be banned from any public health job and stripped of their credentials. Many of them should lose their pensions and spend time in prison, with a few, Like Fauci and Walensky, spending a short time in prison to exhaust their appeals prior to being put to death.
The bag [of cocaine] was found in the LIBRARY. Huh.
The room that just so happens to be where Hunter used his laptop.
Oh, and the Secret Service allegedly assumed it belonged to Hunter. The Secret Service did not collect fingerprints from the bag as they knew Hunter had left it behind.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2023/07/04/the-plot-thickens-on-cocaine-found-at-the-white-house-n2385081
The Secret Service was not created to supply enforcers to protect crime families.
“There are a whole lot of people that should be banned from any
public healthlaw enforcement job and stripped of their credentials. Many of them should lose their pensions and spend time in prison, with a few, Like [ok, more than a few, starting with the 51] spending a short time in prison to exhaust their appeals prior to being put to death.”Food storage near-failure that you should be aware of:
I have a number of #10 cans which I used as the bottom layer of food storage. The cans go on wood on the basement floor, then I stacked 50# bags of flour, sugar, salt, and rice atop them to keep the bags off of the floor. (And then bales of paper towels and toilet paper atop those, because I don’t have any better place to put them.) The basement is heated, sort of, but not climate controlled in any other way. No problem with mice or other pests. (Not sure why. You’d think that we should have mice but we don’t.) The cans have been down in the basement for a year; prior to that they were in an upstairs closet for a year or two. (As can be expected, there were spousal complaints about food taking up space and not looking neat enough.)
In moving things around, I found that the tops of maybe a third of the cans are corroded. None is rusted through and no seals are broken but the food needs to be eaten soonish. The bottoms are fine. All I can think of is that the cans got condensation and some of them had worse airflow because of the chance stacking of the bags. So far as I can tell, the rice, flour, salt, and sugar are all fine. I discovered the problem with the cans in rotating stuff, and the most-recently-pulled flour and rice had no problems that I could tell and no one’s died of eating them.
I’ll pull out (and consume) the rusty cans and see about spacers, like 1×1″ boards. Not sure that’ll be enough because the bags bloop down. Might need 2x4s on end to make sure that there’s enough ventilation.
Bloop. Is that a technical term?
If I say “the bags bloop down”, everyone knows what I mean.
Similarly, if I describe a plus-size woman as a bloompa, everyone knows what I mean.
>> 7 of 9 fraudulently coded by the CDC.
For perspective, how many other deaths besides the 9 in same time period?
“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because I got caught
it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home.”Fixed it for him.
https://www.aol.com/united-ceo-apologizes-chartering-private-230002751.html
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2023/07/04/auto-draft-119-n562425
why rewrite when it is so unnecessary?
“There are a whole lot of people that should be banned from any
public healthlaw enforcementgovernment job and stripped of their credentials. Many of them should lose their pensions and spend time in prison, with a few [the list below, to start] spending a short time in prison to exhaust their appeals prior to being put to death.”Violation of the U.S. Constitution so egregious that the judge finds plaintiffs “likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants” and issues a preliminary injunction.
In addition to individuals there are whole units of the U.S. government that are irrevocably rotten and should get the” death penalty” of disbandment and closure.
ADDED:
Defendants consist of
President Joseph R Biden (“President Biden”), Jr,
Karine Jean-Pierre (“Jean-Pierre”),
Vivek H Murthy (“Murthy”),
Xavier Becerra (“Becerra”),
Dept of Health & Human Services (“HHS”),
Dr. Hugh Auchincloss (“Auchincloss”),
National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”),
Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (“CDC”),
Alejandro Mayorkas (“Mayorkas”),
Dept of Homeland Security (“DHS”),
Jen Easterly (“Easterly”),
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”),
Carol Crawford (“Crawford”),
United States Census Bureau (“Census Bureau”),
U. S. Dept of Commerce (“Commerce”),
Robert Silvers (“Silvers”),
Samantha Vinograd (“Vinograd”),
Ali Zaidi (“Zaidi”),
Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”),
Dori Salcido (“Salcido”),
Stuart F. Delery (“Delery”),
Aisha Shah (“Shah”),
Sarah Beran (“Beran”),
Mina Hsiang (“Hsiang”),
U. S. Dept of Justice (“DOJ”),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”),
Laura Dehmlow (“Dehmlow”),
Elvis M. Chan (“Chan”),
Jay Dempsey (“Dempsey”),
Kate Galatas (“Galatas”),
Katharine Dealy (“Dealy”),
Yolanda Byrd (“Byrd”),
Christy Choi (“Choi”),
Ashley Morse (“Morse”),
Joshua Peck (“Peck”),
Kym Wyman (“Wyman”),
Lauren Protentis (“Protentis”),
Geoffrey Hale (“Hale”),
Allison Snell (“Snell”),
Brian Scully (“Scully”),
Jennifer Shopkorn (“Shopkorn”),
U. S. Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”),
Erica Jefferson (“Jefferson”),
Michael Murray (“Murray”),
Brad Kimberly (“Kimberly”),
U. S. Dept of State (“State”),
Leah Bray (“Bray”),
Alexis Frisbie (“Frisbie”),
Daniel Kimmage (“Kimmage”),
U. S. Dept of Treasury (“Treasury”),
Wally Adeyemo (“Adeyemo”),
U. S. Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”),
Steven Frid (“Frid”),
and Kristen Muthig (“Muthig”).
Start with the Tenth Amendment, then look at the rest of the Constitution, then eliminate every Agency, Bureau, Department, and Office which is not specifically authorized. Blacklist every employee from ever again working for or with the federal government, whether as an employee, a contractor, or a lobbyist.
@Alan
“For perspective, how many other deaths besides the 9 in same time period?”
From the Chinese bioweapon or other sources?
This was a study of death certificates submitted by one state. It is likely that the state of Minnesota had already done some scrubbing of their own (in the form of “You doctors don’t really want to be putting that on the death certificate, no do you?”) as the data appeared to exhibit statistical skewing. There are a number of other questons that should be asked, including:
What was the overall rate of miscoding in this data?
Is there similar miscoding in other states data.
@SteveF
Maybe.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/will-the-supreme-court-dismantle-the-administrative-state.php
ADDED:
“The Supreme Court decision brings to a halt one of the arms on a million-armed machine. We need to dismantle that machine. Nothing, No One, and No Place will never do it.”
https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/03/nothing-no-place-and-no-one/
Don’t Get The Idea That Internet Censorship Is Diminishing
“Misinformation is being spread by those with political and opportunistic motives.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/04/dont-get-the-idea-that-internet-censorship-is-diminishing/
The link, of course, deals with censorship of climate skeptics, but the quote is timely in another respect:
The question of the day to ask people you know: “What did you hear yesterday about the White House being shut down Sunday because of a hazmat situation?”
Note: Edited the question to make the timeline clear.
Liberals explanations for cocaine being found on a table in the White House library:
1. Some tourist left it there.
2. It’s not cocaine, it’s cocaine hydrochloride.
3. Don Trump Jr. left it there in January 2021 and sumbuddy just now noticed.
4. Aliens
I think #3 is most likely, as none of the Bidens, including Dr. Jill, appear to be literate, so why would they be in a library?
“Prodigals” by Alan Dean Foster
https://www.amazon.com/Prodigals-Alan-Dean-Foster/dp/1680573268?tag=ttgnet-20/
A standalone science fiction space opera book, no prequel or sequel. This is apparently Foster’s 140th book to be published. I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback published by WordFire Press in 2022. I have acquired and read many of Alan Dean Foster’s books over 50+ years, I regard him to be one of our finest science fiction authors of my generation.
One fine day in the not too distant future, a large spaceship arrived and went into orbit around Earth. The aliens in the spaceship demanded to speak with leaders of Russia, European Union, China, and the USA. When the USA sends its five person delegation, they are informed that the aliens require several tons of wheat and corn. The USA complies. Then the delegation asked to take a tour of the spaceship. And things go wonky at that point after they find out that the spaceship was stolen and the original owners are coming for it.
Alan Dean Foster has a website where he has a neat picture of a KK-drive spaceship and all his book development notes at:
https://www.alandeanfoster.com/
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (I could be talked into 5 stars)
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (859 reviews)
“I could be talked into 5 stars”
From 4.4?
I have an enormous pile of sand to get rid of. There will be some sort of ‘free sand’ offer locally, at some point. Somewhere between 60 and 80 cubic yards enormous. And I might be underestimating. Imagine two open top 40 yard dumpsters worth…
That is six or seven dump trucks of sand !
“I could be talked into 5 stars”
From 4.4?
It is a short distance from 4.4 to 4.5. However, I just don’t see myself rereading the book which is my criteria for 5 stars.
The USA was founded by people who had had enough. It’s been peopled by folks who wanted to know ‘what’s over there?’ and ‘I’m going somewhere else, there are too many of you here’ and ‘maybe over there I’ll succeed.” Now it’s filled with the equivalent of trust fund babies, who don’t recognize the hard work that created the wealth in the first place, and the kind of people who prey on the trust fund babies. There’s a core left, bigger than you might think, mainly the ‘sons of Martha’, and they are getting to the “had enough” point. IDK if there are enough, or if they’ll succeed when pushing and shoving turns into sniping and shivving… but it will be ugly, and beauty RARELY arises from ugliness. In fact, in modern history, I can only think of one example….
My great**17 ??? grandfather got dragged over here from Ireland as an indentured servant (slave) back in the late 1600s. Most of the McGuires in the USA are descended from him. He lived with the family that bought him for 30 years and then they all died in a Cholera epidemic. He survived. That is what the USA used to be, a bunch of survivors. Uncle Santa may have destroyed that mindset.
I am thinking about making myself some turkey sausage Jambalaya for supper. The wife took the daughter to the ER this morning, I just took some stuff to them. The daughter may be having an emergency hysterectomy today or tomorrow, things got worse this morning. She was hoping to put it off until October as she and her surgeon are still negotiating about the bowel resection and colostomy.
It is raining outside, no fireworks around here tonight. They shot off quite a few mortars last night as a warmup. I am sure that there will be a few diehards no matter what.
In moving things around, I found that the tops of maybe a third of the cans are corroded. None is rusted through and no seals are broken but the food needs to be eaten soonish. The bottoms are fine. All I can think of is that the cans got condensation and some of them had worse airflow because of the chance stacking of the bags. So far as I can tell, the rice, flour, salt, and sugar are all fine. I discovered the problem with the cans in rotating stuff, and the most-recently-pulled flour and rice had no problems that I could tell and no one’s died of eating them.
I have had 60 or 70 #10 cans in the top of my bedroom closet and in the second story of the office building for over ten years. No signs of corrosion. Both spaces are air conditioned and heated as necessary which sounds to be the difference.
I am surprised that stuff in your basement would corrode. Can you take an air sample and send it somewhere for analysis ? Or, does somebody have a service ? Is your basement ventilated at all using passive or forced ventilation ? BTW, most labs assume that air is saturated with water, they won’t even measure the water in the air.
Have you looked in your basement for water leakage? Do you have a sump pump ? Does the sump pump work ?
More than a kernel of truth:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/07/james-howard-kunstler/blobocracy/
“Hard times will produce strong men and women with a bias toward reality, which naturally tends to comprise things that are truthful. Untruth will be consigned back to its traditional category: Evil. It will be shunned, as it should be. Nations come and go and perhaps America, as a federation of states united as one, will go. Many of the self-evident truths that were born with her will remain to be honored one way or another, in some region of this large land-mass, or another. Events await. Facing our time of dark uncertainty, we have a lot to think about this Fourth of July, a very solemn holiday.”
Nice, thanks. I am in the middle of his four World Made By Hand books. I will get back to them soon. The books were outdated by reality but Crooked Biden is trying to make them come true by destroying the Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal industries in the USA as fast as his demented mind can do so.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PDTVWQ8?tag=ttgnet-20
LOL to the LOL:
EXCLUSIVE: Cross-dressing gunman behind July 4 Philly bloodbath that left five dead is BLM supporter who made chilling Facebook posts about ‘black massacres’ and ‘evil spirits’
Amish tranny. Reparations! Reparations!
Those Trumpkin white supremacists will stop at nothing to make Progressives, Democrats, LGBTQ+MAPs and other
right-left-minded people look bad.Lots of excitement on the local Faux News until the race of the perp became clear.
The media is still waiting for “the one”.
@Lynn
Your daughter and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.
Hysterectomy. Yikes.
Thoughts and prayers.
A fair amount of banging and fizzing going on outside, and has been since dusk. Oddly, for all the guns out here, no rapid fire mag dumps like we hear in Houston every holiday.
@stevef, would putting a wire shelf between the bags and the cans leave enough air space? The bags would be more uniformly supported, and wouldn’t bloop down…….
I’m eating my dinner, and planning my day. I didn’t get quite as far as I hoped. I took an hour off and taught the kids and the wife how to run the machines. Kids had great fun. It was worth the time.
But it leaves me a bit behind where I’d hoped to be. I’ll have to make it up, or extend my stay by a couple more days. There is more to do, everywhere I look, that needs concrete removed. And I’m out of places to store sand. I’m done digging in the yard, so I’ll be laying in the geogrid and back filling tomorrow.
I’ve been gradually reshaping the front yard grading as I go, and I spent a half hour on it at the end of the day, so that is actually better than I’d planned. I was saving that for Wednesday. I can keep going, but if I had to live with what I’ve done so far, I could. The main elements of the new drainage plan are in place.
Septic guy came by and did his thing. We had a good chat about the state of the nation, and what to do about it (stack.) Avoid cities. Avoid troublemakers.
Lot of like minded folks out here.
It got hot in the sun, but stayed in the low 90s in the shade. I didn’t sweat thru my shorts, only my shirt. The clay soil has turned to powder and the dust is getting everywhere. I’m filthy, everything else is too. Cowboys on the trail must have been caked in dirt. Shower floor runs red when I get in.
And now, to see about a tiny little fire, with a lot of smoke down on the dock. Maybe I’ll be able to see some of the big sounding fireworks that are going off all around.
n
Poor little neighborhood cat is across the street yowling her head off.
I feel sorry for her.
Thanks for the thoughts and prayers. The daughter and wife are home. The daughter had a ovarian cyst rupture. Very painful. The sonogram did not identify the problem but the cat-scan did. They gave her morphine to cut the pain and reduce the vomiting. And she needs more iron infusions, she has had a blood infusion and four iron infusions already this year. Sigh.
The daughter wants to keep her ovaries when she has the hysterectomy in October. She also does not want the bowel resection and colostomy that the obgyn endometrial surgeon says will probably be required since the endometriosis has enclosed her ovaries and attached to her large intestine and bowel.
I’m eating my dinner, and planning my day. I didn’t get quite as far as I hoped. I took an hour off and taught the kids and the wife how to run the machines. Kids had great fun. It was worth the time.
And Nick wins the Cool Dad contest today !
Cooled off somewhat. Only 80F with 93%RH. Felt cool with a gentle breeze on the water.
Radio was alive on the upper shortwave bands, lots of stations I never hear. Lots of noise to unfortunately.
Didn’t see any fireworks although I could hear them. Petered out shortly after I went down. Nice night to sit on the dock.
@lynn, I hope your daughter feels better soon. I understand not wanting the bad parts, but she’s had serious issues a long time. I hope they can sort out the female stuff without damaging her bowel. Tough choices.
Now I’m off to bed.
n