Cool and wet this morning. Friday was beautiful until just after dark, then it stormed. Even that was nice as it stopped by 10pm and left everything smelling clean and fresh. Also wet, which is why this morning is wet. Hopefully it didn’t rain more overnight.
I didn’t quite get the trench drain cut yesterday. I am about 2/3 cut but the saw died and wouldn’t restart. I didn’t have the energy to try for more than half an hour. I’ll put a new air filter and add oil next time I’m up here, and hopefully it will start so I can finish the cuts. I spent the rest of the day cleaning up, putting away, and getting ready to leave.
Which is what is happening today. I’ll leave here for a series of pickups, then home before the end of the day. I wouldn’t have minded staying at the BOL for a couple more days, but I’ve got plenty to do at home too.
Pickups are mostly for home, but with two birthdays and a wedding anniversary coming up, I’m on the lookout for presents too. The intarwebs say that “china” is the traditional gift for a 20th wedding anniversary, but I’m pretty sure that won’t fly at Casa De Nick… so I’m keeping my eyes open. And my options.
Meanwhile, stacking and working continues apace. At the pace of a turtle, but even turtles make progress.
Find your pace, and work at it.
nick
The Dollar General business model depends heavily on tax subsidies at various levels, with a mix of community, state, and Federal money often providing sufficient cash to keep the lights on and pay a full time store manager in return for providing essentials at chain retail cost for locals and limited numbers of visitors.
Anymore, the store is often the chain of last resort in rural areas, and, during the Pandemic kabuki, the putzes arbitraging the merchandise like hand sanitizer and toilet paper out of the remote locations onto Amazon/EBay were literally stealing even if the law was vague on the subject.
Dollar Tree has a different business model but effectively the same ownership, with both companies’ stock shares nearly 100% held by the usual institutions. Dollar General picks up a few retail sheeple.
Gotta wonder if criminal reporter Jim Cramer ever got into that story back in the day.
Tractor Supply, yet another ward of the institutions and, often, taxpayers, is closer to the Dollar General business model than Dollar Tree.
Not that I’m saying Jim Cramer is a criminal … cough.
Cramer made his career covering the Ted Bundy trial in Tallahassee. Yeah, that’s it.
Haven’t done the math, and don’t watch the financial shows anymore, but I feel like you could have done pretty well if you just did the opposite of whatever Cramer was touting.
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Up and moving. Bacon and egg in ma belly. Coffee in the cup. Rained last night, and again this morning. It’s wet and dreary. 730 often looks dreary though…
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Gotta get out of here pretty soon. I’ll wash up and I should be pretty close.
n
38F in the Vegas area where I’m at. 26F on The Strip. Oof.
Super Mario is coming to Orlando, and he’s bringing his friend Donkey Kong.
Universal put single day passes on sale this week for their new park.
Meanwhile, over in the Pedo Island adjacent part of the Disney property in Florida, Mickey shows that his Summer won’t just be about throwing up construction fences in yet another park, this time to hide the draining of the river around Tom Sawyer Island.
https://d23.com/d23-event/mickeys-of-glendale-d23-shopping-at-walt-disney-world-resort/
56F and I’m about to get on the road.
n
A pleasant 41F this am in the high desert, windy, some clouds … multiple windstorms into the 40s overnight.
Last night was astronomy club meeting, and my right front tire was 13psi when I went out to the truck. Sigh. It was fine on Wednesday around noon when I gassed up.
I called the friend that I was going to pick up and he drove instead: but there is already something on the todo list for today.
Houston, your traffic sucks. That is all.
In Alvin, at a nursing home to visit ex-wife of wife’s father. Place smells like shirt(-r) and urine with a helping of disinfectant. Typical. It takes a special person to work here.
We had to sign in, leave a phone number, have our picture taken, enter who we were visiting, get a badge printed. They are serious about controlling visitors.
There is a traffic jam in the lobby. Wheelchairs. At least a dozen. Seeing people in this facility in various levels of demise makes a person appreciate mobility and reasonable health. Some are just laying in bed waiting to die. Not a living that anyone wants I would think.
Similar facilities exist in small towns all over The South. At best, a lot of Medicare/Medicaid fraud is involved in return for basic care, but the towns frequently depend on the nursing homes as drivers for the local economy so authorities look the other way.
I doubt that DOGE will get too much cooperation when they start digging into those places.
If DOGE lasts that long.
BTW, to any prepper types with the local nursing home on their list of potential places to scavenge for supplies –along with any hospital, most of those places would be death traps in a grid down situation once the $10/hr labor moving the bleach mops stop moving and the antibiotic-resistant bugs start multiplying in the carpet and seams in the linoleum.
Hot Skillz News!
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3842456/go-based-typescript-to-dramatically-improve-speed-scalability.html
Pay no attention to the bloated binaries behind the curtain. It is Redmond after all.
No one should need more than 16 Exabytes of RAM.
I avoided the Go trainwreck at work, but that probably would have cost me a career if I were 10 years younger.
>>The intarwebs say that “china” is the traditional gift for a 20th wedding anniversary, but I’m pretty sure that won’t fly at Casa De Nick… so I’m keeping my eyes open. And my options.
So would she prefer “russia” instead? That must be the contemporary gift, no?
Greenland
We got stuck in Beaumont in a LONG traffic jam, over 8 miles. I crawled for 4 miles of it and that took 1.5 hours. I got off the I-State and took some side streets to get back on I-10 about 200 yards before the problem. The state was closing three lanes of I-10 East to one lane East to install some K barriers. What an absolute mess. The number of trucks probably exceed the number of cars. The trucks could not get off the I-State and take the side streets. I was able to bypass 4 miles of the backup.
Made it to Slidell for the night. On to Atlanta tomorrow. The last 60 miles, about 50 minutes, I could feel waves of fatigue waving over my body. If it was much further I would have let the spousal unit drive. But I soldiered on like the idiot I can sometimes wear like a champ.
Some really bad weather back home. The weather is in front of us so not much going on except for wind. At the BIL’s house there was severe hail that broke the rear windows of some cars, dented a whole lot of other vehicles. This was in Bryan Texas. We were just north of Houston when it went through and just got a little rain.
We got pummeled by wind all day. North of Houston was brown sky from blown dust. Houston proper was blue sky. I drove with the windows down all afternoon…
Whole pack is back together.
Kid 2 spent the past week on a school trip to WDW and Universal Studios. She had a great time and is very tired. Bus ride there and back… straight thru, sleep on the bus.
D1 spent the last day and night with her friend including a couple of trips to the Rodeo. She wanted to go to a party tonight… nope. She’s home now too.
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I did my pickups. Scored some big laminated slabs of mahogany. they are tabletops made of 2x2s and are about 30″x51″. I got 5. I only really needed one or two. I thought I might make workbench tops from them. Didn’t realize they were actual mahogany. They are squishing the back suspension of my truck at the moment. They are very heavy.
Projects. I got um.
n
Home Sellers and Buyers Accuse Realtors of Blocking Lower Fees
Shocked I Am, NOT
I put RE agents (of which Realtors® are a subset) in the same category as lawyers.
>>I put RE agents (of which Realtors® are a subset) in the same category as lawyers.
I guess Warren knows something…
Get your tix yet?
Rachel Zegler breaks silence on ‘woke’ Snow White controversy ahead of ‘scaled-back’ premiere