09:35 – We ran errands locally yesterday afternoon. Among those was opening a corporate bank account. In Winston, we had both our personal and corporate accounts at the Allegacy Credit Union. When we moved up here, we closed out the personal account in Winston and opened a new account at the credit union up here. Unfortunately, they don’t do corporate accounts, so we had to go to one of the local banks for that. Now I just have to get the new account set up in PayPal so that I can transfer money from PayPal to the new account.
Donna Edwards, the lady who took care of setting up our account, mentioned that she and her husband own a farm. Barbara asked what they raised, and she replied (of course), beef cattle. She said they kept a small herd of about 60. When Barbara mentioned that our property backs up on Judge Doughton’s land, she said that he ran cattle on a much larger scale, several hundred of them. It seems like every third or fourth person we meet up here has a cattle farm, including Lori, our USPS carrier, and one of the women that Barbara met with the Friends of the Library Group. Donna also mentioned that in the last 10 or 15 years the number of dairy farms in the area had fallen from about 150 to a dozen or so. Apparently, it’s more profitable to raise beef cattle.
Barbara is out doing yard work this morning, creating and mulching flower beds around the house. We also plan to put in a small garden for herbs and vegetables, maybe a 10×20 foot plot at the side of the house. Barbara is going to ask Al if he’d mind bringing up his rototiller on their next visit. We’ll also install a fence to keep the deer, rabbits, and other predators out of the garden. Barbara seems to think that chicken wire won’t be enough to stop them, so we’ll probably go with a four or five foot chain-link fence. We’ll grow most of the herbs in pots because some of them can be incredibly invasive, but I do want a small patch where we can grow vegetables, mainly for seed-saving.
USPS just showed up with the bulk of my Walmart order. As I expected, they shipped one jar of the beef bouillon rather than the 12-pack they claimed to be sending me, but one jar for $2.98 was reasonable, whereas 12 jars would not have been.
“Apparently, it’s more profitable to raise beef cattle.”
Up here it’s still vastly more dairy cattle, with a few farms running beefers. And the main crops, as always, are corn, apples, and maple sap.
Are there any viable alternatives to PayPal? Both they and eBay are hostile to us firearms owners, among other issues.
Not really.
Google has Pay, but they’re not exactly ff friendly either.
There is a strong network effect at work with ebay and PPal.
Look at OfferUp for local.
Craigslist bans gun stuff outright, including reloading.
n
I wonder how much of that is True Belief by the founders or owners that guns are teh eeeevil and how much is sheer attempt to limit legal liability. Federal law prohibits suing firearms and accessory manufacturers and sellers for misuse of properly operating firearms (though some assmuncher judges sure seem to be ignoring the law). ISTR a discussion some years ago about whether “commerce facilitators” such as CraigsList or Want Ad Digest up here would be protected. (Though of course I can’t find any such discussion now that I’m looking for it. If I were conspiracy-minded, I’d wonder if Google and Microsoft were suppressing the results in their search engines.)
https://www.dwolla.com/
I tend not to *ban* evil enterprises that provide a useful service. The gooberment? Our Federal gooberment is just horrible and needs a redo.
Nice analysis of the presidential election as of yesterday:
https://www.facebook.com/JeffDunham/videos/10154163818963827/
“Looks like the election is down to Donald and Hillary. No matter what, we are going to have an old white guy in the White House.”
@Mr. paul; Do you have experience or anecdotes concerning Dwolla? It’d be nice to avoid and bypass PayPay, related eBay payments, craigslist payments, etc. and go with somebody who is at least NEUTRAL when it comes to firearms and other issues. I know I’d pay a reasonable amount for that ability and so would millions of others.
“Our Federal gooberment is just horrible and needs a redo.”
Agreed, but it won’t happen until a complete re-format and reboot, which would involve probable collapse first and then rebuilding. I still say the Empire is way too big to govern effectively and said rebuilding would be different for East Coast Megalopolis than it will for the deep South or Midwest or Cascadia.
Gorgeous day here again; wife off with dawg to the Point and later to visit the hoss, last plan I knew of. She intends to do stuff with the raised beds, etc., but I will be of very limited help in that regard today and next few, at least. I’ll do what I can for ten minutes a pop and then have to rest for ten minutes on my butt. No choice. Million effing things to do inside and out and I’m effing crippled here. Maddening.
Weapons of math destruction!
(Disclaimer: I stole the joke from the first commenter.)
Hey, if you see sumthin, SAY sumthin. So this is the kinda chit we got now. Doodle on yer iPad or a regular ol’ notepad and get hauled off by Fed marshal SWAT. Good thing I suck at math…uh-oh…I might be doodling in Old English or Old Norse…shit…I’m toast TOO!
You may need a six-seven foot fence, Deer will laugh at a 5 foot fence.
My neighbor and I just do an electric fence. Intermittent. They get next to it, touch it, and get comfortable. Then get zapped.
Lots of pellets around act as fertilizer.
We’ve seen deer just running normally and their bounds would easily go over five feet. Some dogs can jump over that, too. I dunno about chain-link; you can put up a substantial wire fence that will stop them at eight feet. Got bears in your AO? That’s another issue; forget bird feeders or outside garbage cans. And despite Colin’s ferocity and willingness to fight, he ain’t no match for Mr. Bear. We hear tell of 400-500-pounders in the north country nowadays, and that’s black bears, which normally used to go at half that. And then there’s coyotes, extremely clever and slick little buggers, and the new coy-wolves. Whatcha got for venomous reptiles? The usual rattlers and copperheads, I imagine. Moccasins?
“You may need a six-seven foot fence, Deer will laugh at a 5 foot fence.”
Did I mention the punji stakes?
I thought the punji sticks were for two-legged vermin.
Seriously, you can throw up some eight-foot stakes and simply string good strong netting or wire mesh between them, maybe with some tin cans with marbles in them. Plus Colin barking ought to be good for something.
And for the helluvit, throw up some solar-powered motion-detector floods out there. Between the fencing, lights, noise and dawg barking, that oughta do it. But trial-and-error will show youse just what the threats are to yer garden and what defensive measures will work.
Wow, the obesity epidemic in the US is so bad, even the bears are twice as heavy as they should be.
Plenty of Murkan derps outweigh those bears, evidently. They’re yet another official grievance group, of course, taking up two seats on planes and trains and buses but throwing hissy fits about paying for the other seat, you know, one for each buttock.
Few of them will last through the coming shit-storm.
Woo-hoo! Put a 256GB SSD in wife’s dead Acer laptop and installed Winblows 7 Ultimate via USB stick and it went like greased lightning. Got my Thinkpad back, took Winblows off it and installed PC-BSD. And I have OpenBSD upstairs on an HP Workstation laptop, 17″, with backlit keyboard, etc. The Linux, UNIX-like and OpenVMS Borg continue to invade FireBase OFD.
Fun preppy stuff here:
http://freedomoutpost.com/survival-communications-after-a-collapse-pringles-can-and-broadband-routers-could-create-a-wifi-network/
With a clip from my boyz at The Screensavers show, now the New Screensavers, Leo LaPorte and Patrick Norton.
I’ll be trying out some of this stuff this year; I already have LookingGlass email server running on a RaspberryPI.
re RaspPi, I’ve been thinking about retiring my ancient – 15 years old – file/print/web server and replacing it with one or more RaspPis. Have been thinking about it for quite some time but haven’t gotten around to it because I’m a lazyass and what I have works well enough. OTOH, it’s kind of noisy because of the fans and it takes up more room than really needed because it’s a full-size tower.
Probably one outward-facing RaspPi running Apache and Tomcat would handle all of my web-serving needs, and one inward-facing unit would handle all of my file and print server needs. And the electricity savings might just pay for the new hardware in a year. (I back-of-the-enveloped in my head a moment ago and got that the server costs about $1000 per year in electricity. This is implausible, but I can’t find the mistake, so I have no idea how much the electricity costs. Have I mentioned lately that I barely sleep, and as a consequence basically stumble through some days?) Anyway, sleep aside, it’s a shame I’m such a lazyass, because that’s the kind of project that would make sense.
By the way, the current server was built according to spec from one of RBT’s “build your own PC” books. Aside from replacing the power supply and several fans, the dual-processor Athlons in the Antek case have just kept ticking along, running almost 24/7 for a decade and a half. (Utterly obsolete now, of course, but that’s Moore’s Law and corollaries for ya.)
I back-of-the-enveloped in my head a moment ago and got that the server costs about $1000 per year in electricity. This is implausible
If your machine consumes 200 watts (a lot actually), it would take 5 hours to consume a kilowatt hour. There are 8,760 hours in a year. Divide that by 5 to get the KWH consumed in a year, about 1,752. If your electric rate is $0.11 per KWH, your electricity would cost about $192 a year. I suspect your usage is more along the lines of 100 watts or less. Thus cutting your cost to about $80 dollars a year.
Or you could use existing technologies like winmail over HF, or
http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ modified wi-fi gear at high power on the ham portions of the 2.4 Ghz spectrum…
no need to reinvent the wheel.
nick
(lots of old satellite tv antennas available cheap that will get more range out of the link, but for 48USD per end, you can get a tiny ubiquiti Nanostation with 10km range)
Oh, forgot to mention my big prep this week.
Paid off the mortgage on the house. Took only 8 years to do it, so just a bit of savings on interest….
nick
As for my foraging today, not much to report.
What was interesting was the number of people at estate sales and yard sales that were willing to share that they thought we were headed into a shooting war here at home. One lady was quite vehement about it. Another guy asked if I had enough ammo… A third thought things would change with a Trump presidency and if they didn’t all bets were on civil war. I must have heard very similar sentiment from half a dozen, possibly 8, including 2 women. I don’t have a lot of experience with women volunteering that they daily carry and are stacking food and ammo…..Benghazi figured prominently in her hatred of Hillarity.
One guy told me how he shut his trucking business down in the face of .gov regulation fees and taxation. In 15 years he went from taking most of his profit home, to giving up 58%. He was strangely precise about the 58…Now he buys and sells for extra income while his wife works for our local school district until she can retire. He’s gone Galt.
If enough people believe it’s inevitable, it just might be.
nick
(there is a LOT of anger at freeloaders, immigrants (illegal and mooslim), and a feeling of betrayal by elected reps, esp the Republicans that were voted specifically to counter the obammy onslaught.)
SteveF : for about $130-ish, you could put together a nice RaspPi network server/etc (that includes a 500G USB hard drive, a powered USB, and a keyboard); although you could do away with the keyboard after setup (use an SSL shell plus Webmin to access the RaspPi).
It’s a fun project: I created a media server with mine. Found a great tutorial on the setup; it’s all documented in a post I wrote for Chaos Manor Reviews (here: http://chaosmanorreviews.com/a-raspberry-pi-media-server/ ); included in there is the link to the excellent setup tutorial by Mel Grubb.
Thanks, all. Yah, I’ve been looking a bit at how much (or rather how little) a server setup would cost, and how large (or rather how small) a volume would be needed (short answer: the two RPis and the hard drive would fit on the router shelf). Really, what it comes down to is a severe case of lazyassedness. A terminal case, most likely, though the odds are high that I’m even too much of a lazyass to die in any kind of a rapid fashion.
“If enough people believe it’s inevitable, it just might be.”
This will go astronomical if Cankles gets in. And she’ll provoke even more of it, probably deliberately.
“Paid off the mortgage on the house.”
Our goal here, too; AFTER we pay off the back taxes and get up to date with the current taxes. And WHILE we continue to make repairs, renovations and improvements on it. Difficult on 1.25 income.
In other nooz, the current Firearms News (formerly Shotgun News for many years) has an article in it on “pouring” yer own ARs, via polymer kits at this place:
http://ar15mold.com/
The Ghost Gunner 3D printer for rolling yer own lowers is roughly five times the cost of these kits, which should be able to produce five or six AR lowers. OFD may opt for both this year, as the attic workshop takes shape. Plus the standard old drill-and-mill method. Good way to get wicked familiar with all the parts and things that can go wrong and how to fix them. The AR15mold folks are developing their kit continuously and also working on an AR10 kit.
With all this shooting war stuff about to kick off, someone who knows ARs real good might do very nicely.
Household nooz; wife is cleaning out her studio and we have our contractor guy coming out this week to give her an estimate on putting in larger windows for it. He’ll be back in the fall anyway to finish the rest of our windows and shutters. She’s still recovering from the Kalifornia bug and all the recent travel and crashed at 8:30 PM here. And I paid the enterprising young neighbor kid to mow our lawn; I’d last for about one row with it and he’s a good hard-working kid, though obviously not playing with the full load of intellect most of us are born with.
Tomorrow I’ll try to do a couple of outside yard things, nothing too heavy, and also make a stab at the attic work space again. I effing HATE being useless.
“It’s a fun project: I created a media server with mine.”
What Mr. Rich H. said. It IS a fun project and you can do a million things with these puppies; webcam surveillance, timers, servers, and my fave, clusters. PLENTY of documentation on all these capers, plus Toob vids galore.
“…what it comes down to is a severe case of lazyassedness.”
Is it that or sheer exhaustion? A guy who rarely sleeps can’t be accused of being lazy, I don’t think. Wife here has insomnia and sleep apnea and does stuff for a few hours straight during the day and is then exhausted. And I sure don’t last for double-shifts of work anymore or any extended hard or heavy work; we just ain’t got it like we had it at 20 or even 40, homie.
“…there is a LOT of anger at freeloaders, immigrants (illegal and mooslim), and a feeling of betrayal by elected reps, esp the Republicans that were voted specifically to counter the obammy onslaught.)”
Indeed. And I’m way more angry about the Repub traitors than I am about the FSA and crimmigrants. I bailed out of their little show over twenty years ago and they got a LOT worse after that. If I came to power somehow, they would be the first people I’d put up against a wall, and only after that would I do the usual suspects, i.e., libturds, progs, SJWs, bureaucrats, lawyers, flag-rank officers, cop department brass, financial speculators, union bosses, etc., etc.
Allow me to introduce you to my wife.
Under the principle that correlation = causation, it is obvious that the betrayal of the populace by the political class is your fault. Please report to the biodiesel factory for processing. No, wait, with a bad back you’ll never be able to climb into the vat. Dammit!
“Allow me to introduce you to my wife.”
If we actually met, picture Godzilla next to a munchkin.
“No, wait, with a bad back you’ll never be able to climb into the vat. Dammit!”
True, that. I’ll throw somebody else in in my place; how about any random half-dozen of the miscreants and felons who live across the street kitty-corner, sort of, in subsidized housing, with very nice views of the bay? (our fantasy is to win Powerball or a comparable-amount lottery and buy out all the non-brick structures within line-of-sight here and demolish them, after which we’d landscape around us and the remaining brick structures.)
I became an Independent here in Vermont twenty years ago and about eight years ago I stopped voting altogether in national and state elections. I do, however, take a strong interest in whether the highway department garage gets moved off the lake shore, and whether or not they get a new salt shed, too, both issues which I support wholeheartedly. This trumps, pun intended, any of the bullshit that goes on in Montpeculiar or Mordor, easily.
I also wholeheartedly and enthusiastically support our gun laws here…..
….oh wait…
WE DON’T HAVE ANY, BWAAAAAHAAAAAHAAAAHAAAA!
“Hillary Clinton’s Six Step Plan to Disarm the American People”
http://freedomoutpost.com/hillary-clintons-six-step-plan-to-disarm-the-american-people/
“Awr Hawkins, writing at Breitbart, lists six of Clinton’s unlawful, tyrannical and even criminal proposals when it comes to infringing upon the rights of the people to keep and bear arms.”
“Here’s his list:”
1. “Consider Australian-style gun ban”
2. “Allow Crime Victims To Sue Gun Manufacturers”
3. “Allow Crime Victims to Sue Gun Sellers”
4. “Replace Instant Background Checks With Indefinite Background Checks”
5. “Outlaw Private Gun Sales”
6. “Add No-Fly List to Background Checks”
“Trump Slams Hillary Clinton as ‘Nasty, Mean Enabler’ of Husband’s Affairs”
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-slams-hillary-clinton-nasty-mean-enabler-husband-s-affairs-n569791
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
#NeverClinton
What kind of deer do you have? I have seen adult European red deer (cervus elaphus), which are similar to NA Elk / Wapiti, jump, from stationary, over one of those chain-link fences that people use to enclose their tennis courts – at least 2.5m, and maybe closer to 3.
Even small deer, like roe, can clear remarkably high obstacles when they want to.
Rather than keep the deer out, I’l let them in and just put them in the freezer!
Ah, the claws are coming out.
“RACHEL JOHNSON: Nothing is scarier than Donald Trump – apart from his sex-doll wife Melania
By Rachel Johnson for The Mail on Sunday
I find myself haunted by that image of Donald Trump, his glamazon daughter Ivanka on his right and glamazon wife Melania on his left. Both are gazing blankly into the middle distance as if on strong prescription meds, as the newly anointed presumptive Republican nominee declares he is going to make America great again.
The picture says, ‘Look at me, with my beautiful bitches’, and reminds us that if nothing goes to plan, the current Mrs Trump – a 6ft, 125lb Slovenian model with the ice blue eyes of a snow leopard about to sneeze – could become the 47th First Lady of the United States.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3579122/NOTHING-scarier-Donald-Trump-apart-sex-doll-wife-Melania-says-Rachel-Johnson.html
” the mere thought that a Mrs Trump might fill the shoes of Eleanor Roosevelt, of Barbara Bush, of Jackie K, even of Hillary Clinton (who declined to stay home and bake cookies), or of legal eagle Michelle Obama, freezes the marrow – and would catapult the women’s movement back many decades.”
OMFG
nick
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
You’re finally on board, Mr. Lynn.
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
Trump 2016 !
@nick,
I’m just guessing, but why do I think every straight man in the western world would think Melania Trump is more attractive than Rachel Johnson?
Yah think?
Where is the outrage like when “legal eagle” moooshelle was compared to a sofa slipcover?
Wanna bet not one feminist comes out against this article? Not one hashtag war? Not one prominent woman condemns the attack on a candidate’s wife?
maybe someone on the right, but certainly not the left.
nick
BTW the article was prominently featured “above the fold” as they used to say. It’s rapidly falling down and getting smaller…
Kind of like the hit piece of a couple days ago alleging ‘fondled models’ and other crimes against women and nature, which has now vanished….
nick