Please help me control the egos of the hats, cats, chickens, deer, wild hogs, dead trees and the Communist Toyota 4-Runner.
I appreciate all you visitors who come here and the kind words many of you say about So Far From Heaven. But I’m asking a favor of all of you. Accept our gratitude, but don’t offer awards.
There are thousands of fantastic blogs on the web. Many of those great blogs are getting blog awards. I believe all of those receiving those awards deserve them, aside from the awards offered to this blog. This blog is not yet worthy of any blog award.
Jeanne and I work hard on So Far From Heaven and we’re both determined to make it better, possibly good enough to receive an award someday. But we both know we aren’t there yet. So Far From Heaven has a long way to go..
Giving blog awards to So Far From Heaven detracts from the value of the awards.
But the blog awards offered to this blog have also bloated the community ego. The cats, chickens, deer, dead trees and even the Communist Toyota have all become insufferable.
So until some time in the future when we consider the blog to have reached a better standard, please accept our thanks for the thought, but don’t nominate So Far From Heaven for blog awards.
I know some of you readers are out of work and having difficulties finding jobs. With this post I’d like to twist your mind around in a way that might give you a different way of approaching the affair of starting to make money to live on.
I don’t know whether there’s any hope or not, but I can tell you it ain’t easy. From the time I gave myself a Y2K until I moved back to Texas I tried a number of desperate ideas that might have worked if I’d been smarter.
But I think there still might be something here in the way of thinking about it to give you a fresh perspective. Trying to find jobs flipping hamburgers at minimum wage or clerking in a motel graveyard shift, or stocking shelves and unloading trucks for a Dollar General didn’t prove out for me. I suspect it won’t for you. A lot of the reason is that young people don’t like working around older people. At least, they din’t in my case.
But the world’s still got niches a person might fill, things that people need doing and might pay to get done that the Chinese can’t get over here to do yet.
Polishing long-haul truck rims, bumpers, gas tanks:
I don’t know whether they’re still doing it, but truckers within the past few years [some of them] had an overweening pride in their wheels, bumpers and grilles.
Frequently they’ll pay up to $100 for the tractor wheels, gas tank, bumper and grille while they catch a snooze at a roadside park or overnight truck stop. An angle grinder/polisher, portable generator and a CB radio are the main costs of going into business.
Didn’t work out for me because my angle polishing head flew off, the knurled stem that held the head walked across the gas tank, cut through a fuel line [the truck was idling] and started squirting diesel all over the place before it caught fire [after he’d shut the rig down].
Might work out better for you. A person could make $500 – $1000 per day if he was fast and good.
Bodyguard:
Bodyguard didn’t work out well for me, either, though it paid well. Anyone who needs a bodyguard usually has a reason for needing one.
Respectable people doing legal things hire bodyguards from companies who do that for a living. But there’s a type of activity going on out there in the world that needs a different kind of bodyguard. If you’re a person who’s generally law-abiding, but desperate or open-minded enough to look into it, you might find a place there.
You’ve got to be a non-drug user, absolutely and unwaveringly, uncompromisingly honest, and you’ve got to be willing to be around some of the sleaziest human beings on the face of the earth all your waking hours. And you’ve got to be convincing that you’re uglier, colder and crazier than all those lowlifes around you.
Then there’s the danger of going to prison, which isn’t likely, but could happen. The things that go sour in that line of work tend to be of a different variety.
Tool handles:
It used to be a person could do well trading with the tribes if he was willing to go deep into the rez. Might still be so. They always have tools with broken handles, so buying a load of handles somewhere for all manner of tools, replacing the handles on the broken tools you’ve bought, then taking them by the truckload onto the rez, buying their heads with broken handles and selling them a used one you’ve repaired can be middling lucrative. But you’ve got to be relatively near a big rez or a lot of small ones.
Those mightn’t fit you and probably don’t, but they might give you an idea or two about some crack you can shine a flashlight into and find a way to make a living. Even in this brave new 21st Century.
First, at the Hospice Thrift Store in Kerrville I found these gloves with no fingertips for $1.50. When it’s cold in this cabin I go to 18 layers of longjohns and sweatsuits, Sorel snowboots and innovative headgear. But my fingers stiffen until I can only use the computer with a lot of mistakes.
I’m thinking those gloves are going to fix that one.
But on arriving back home and tuning the computer to this frequency I found to my delight that Michael had explained the solution to another one I’ve been scratching my head over longer than I care to admit.
Some of you readers are a lot smarter than I am, and I happen to be stuck. I’d be obliged if any of you can wrap your minds around this problem and tell me how to do it.
One of the projects I work on daily involves series regularly scheduled ‘events’ happening across the world. Every day they’re conducted at the same locations and at repeated intervals, several hundred times each day for each location.
I know the precise geographic coordinates for the locations and the local times of the events. But one part of the experiment requires examination and comparisons of simultanious events, say, from a location in Australia, another in NY, another in Rhode Island, to keep it simple.
But two events happening, say, in Rhode Island and New York at the ‘same time’ by the clock are actually several minutes apart. They occupy the same time zone, but events in Rhode Island at 3PM aren’t the same events as those happening in NY at 3PM.
But even without taking DST into the equation, events in Australia might be 15 hours and 30 minutes later by the clock to be simultaneous with New York, or Rhode Island, and only one of the two. The event in one would be simultaneous with Australia several minutes earlier, or later, than the other.
I can calculate minute-by-minute sidereal times for each of the locations, but establishing a baseline for the relationships in terms of simulataneity eludes me. I do all this on a spreadsheet. I know nothing about programming computers.
I’d welcome any suggestions. Particularly if it involves something automatic and repeatable. It’s probably something simple, even stupid, but I’d like to get past trying to figure out how to do it and get around to actually doing it.
Gracias, Old Jules
I’ve got to get going. I’ll be back online sometime later today.
WordPress is behaving as though it gets paid by the hour this morning. Everything’s taking forever to load. Besides, the blog never gets much traffic Fridays anyway. So I’m going to try the patience of those of you who do visit by indulging in a post I promised my friend Rich in North Carolina and a couple of others I’d put up.
I’ve got a goodly bit on the plate elsewhere today and mightn’t be around the cabin much, but if WordPress goes on salary and I’m back I might put something else up later.
Some of you expressed an interest.
Then there’s this:
Sunsounds run through different frequencies and filters
Black hole – NASA – The comments are worth reading for a smile – Guy wants to know why the camera doesn’t get sucked into the black hole.
Then there’s this:
The Spitzer telescope examination of the galactic center
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
For discussion of Nikola Tesla history, inventions, and coil design and construction techniques. The physics of Tesla’s varied patents, and ideas are especially welcome, even if they generate some heated discussions.
This list is for the dissemination and discussion of all things TESLA. Since Tesla was a man of wide and varied talents, other physical phenomena discussions are possible.
All About Packgoats is a collection of interesting and insightful people who share an interest in hiking and packing with goats. With experience ranging from veteran packgoat professional to weekend hiking enthusiast, the answers to your packgoat questions can be found here.
This discussion group is devoted to the study of gravity and the physics of gravity and the interaction thereof. This forum is intended to allow all views and concepts to be entertained and evaluated by all, regardless of how traditional and fundamental or non-traditional and non-fundamental the ideas might be. Whenever possible, material submitted for discussion should include supporting data when available.
Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
My old friend Keith stopped into the blog a few days ago and commented on one of the posts. By doing so he reminded me I haven’t said much about a subject dear to my heart: Outrageous adventure.
When Keith and I were searching together we were both in our early 50s, both involved in careers, both plenty old enough to know we weren’t going to find that lost gold mine, though I, particularly figured we would. [I still held by the statement from my neophyte search early in the 1980s, “If I can’t find that mine I’m not half the man I think I am.”]
Keith and I plotted, planned and trekked into more canyons than either of us can remember and, while we didn’t find that lost gold mine we saw places not many human beings have ever seen, certainly not many in a longish time. We systematically explored promising locations from the Zuni Mountains, to Santa Rita Mesa, to Pelona on the south side of the Plains of San Augustin, to the Gallinas.
I don’t know how Keith thinks about all this these days, but I know how I think about it. I wouldn’t subtract one mile, one minute, one canyon of it from my life, though we never found what we were looking for.
Not from that, not from Y2K, not from flying a Cessna 140 all over the sky for a number of years, and not from this current adventure of survival that’s my life today, for that matter.
It seems to me people have become too ‘smart’ and ‘wise’ with the debunking culture to allow themselves a piece of outrageous risk with minimal prospects for any returns. It’s been that way for a considerable while. I believe it’s robbed a lot of people of experiencing a side of life that once a particular sort of individual demanded of himself.
An old man who wasn't afraid of adventure
When I say it’s been going on a long while I mean it. During the early 1950s my granddad and step-dad became the laughingstocks of Portales, Dora, Garrison and Causey, New Mexico, by injecting a piece of it into their lives. They bought a WWII jeep, equipment, and joined thousands of other similar men searching for uranium. Probably the last ‘rush’ in US history.
They were gone several months, didn’t find a thing, and when they returned they endured the jeers and snide laughs of everyone around them. But both men cherished the memories of that time as long as they lived. They had something the stay-at-home sneerers would never have because they were too smart, too dedicated to the other side of human existence to allow it into their lives.
And the venom they expressed for anyone else doing it provides a hint they probably wished they had.
Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood
Just keep it safe and simple pretending to remember something about the ‘fighting’ by Allied troops across the planet. Hug yourself with some feelgood to help you feel sensitive and patriotic.
Carefully remember today ONLY the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor carrying some vague message we should remain prepared against similar future events.
Carefully do NOT remember the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the savage treatment of Allied POWs and civilians in occupied territories of The Greater-East-Asian-Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Carefully do NOT remember the beheading of hundreds, maybe thousands of prisoners, the starvation and death by disease of a huge percentage of other prisoners compared to elsewhere, almost anywhere among the armies of either side.
Carefully do NOT remember the overwhelming percentage of that conduct was perpetrated by enlisted men and officers below the rank of captain. Men who returned to their homes to be accepted within a couple of years as allies and fast friends of the US and other nations they fought, invaded, raped, pillaged and slaughtered only months earlier.
Carefully do NOT remember the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japanese industry and infrastructure destroyed by the war, rendering much of US industry obsolete or absolescent. DON’T remember the 20,000 suicide-before-surrender Japanese cliff-jumps at Okinawa.
And while you’re at it see if you can find a feelgood argument with someone about the ethical and moral side of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Better to forget all of it than pretend to remember some of it. Crank up your Mazda, turn on the FM and listen to some oldies while you remember what it was like to have a job. What happened 1941 – 1945 had nothing at all to do with anything happening today.
You don’t remember a damned thing about anything that happened to other people. Just remember Santy’s coming to town.
Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
“So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command. “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”
“Who?” Hydrox explains.
“Us. You. Me. Niaid, Shiva, Tabby. The Great Speckled Bird and the hens. It’s coming on Christmas. Why aren’t we gearing up? Going on buying sprees? Getting into the spirit of things?”
Christmas where the desert went and why
“Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear. “You’re thinking of what? Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up? Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”
I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time. “Well, yeah. Everyone else does it. Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing? Don’t you miss that?”
“I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters. “So did the other cats. Christmas. Halloween. Easter. But especially Christmas. Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over. Garbage piled up around the pickup containers. You humans are a mystery to me. Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away.
“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are. Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive. You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”
This raised my hackles a bit. “We’re smart. We’re on top of things. Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence. Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground. Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.
“You eat better than the people who did all that work. You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”
Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place. “Yeah. And who’s responsible for all that?”
“Human progress,” I replied proudly. “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
