Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured. I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.
That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky. Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.
I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits. If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.
Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch. A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.
I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top. I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb. Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.
Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section. Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.
Every night someone, coons, deer, hogs, break into Fortress #1 where I keep the two younger roosters and the Communist Americauna, the Commie because it’s the only where she’ll sleep, roosters because daytimes they want to beat hell out of TGSB.
Every morning I go out and repair it before releasing the roosters into the pen and the Commie hen to free range. And by mid-day the two roosters have usually found a way out, by which time TGSB is usually in the other henhouse anyway, stove up and just wanting to rest.
If they don’t find a way out, I usually let them out mid-afternoon because I don’t care for the idea of anything being penned up all time. It allows them to run free for a few hours before bedtime.
But they’re still a potential threat to TGSB, and they’re a nuisance to get back into the pen, will never go in until the Commie hen re-enters to roost.
Today I’m pulling a page from the immediate, current activities of the US Congress and Whitehouse. As of today I’m going to fix that pen so they can’t get out. Period. Until I take it into my head they’ve been there long enough so’s I feel good.
Suspending Habeus Corpus, I am. Indefinite detention for anyone strikes my fancy. Maybe if I decide I don’t like one of the cats I’ll put him/her in there, too.
When I got booted out of Peace Corps training at Hilo, Hawaii in December, 1964, I dropped off the plane back to the mainland at Honolulu. I went to work in the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel Makahiki Restaurant for a while as a bussboy while deciding what to do next.
I was the only Haole working at the Makahike. All the other bussboys were Filipino and the waitresses, managers were all Orientals. The bussboys all worked for minimum wage and a percentage of tips, which still left things marginal as a means of survival.
But I soon discovered the bussboys all had an edge. On my first day, maybe first hour working there I went into the back carrying a huge tray full of dirty dishes and food left behind by the eaters. I’d no sooner gotten out of sight of the customers before the head bussboy grabbed me by the arm, put the tray down and began screaming at me. Moving dishes and pointing at leftover food items I’d mixed, spilled water over, made no effort to keep separate from others.
“Garbage! You made it garbage Haole bastard!”
It turned out all the bussboys kept discarded food separate and put it on a table in the back each time they unloaded from the customer service area. Then, anytime one of us had a brief break in customer demand up front, we’d go to the table and gobble a half-eaten steak, papaya, anything suiting our fancy.
During the time I worked there I ate well. I’m not certain I’ve ever eaten better, more consistently, even during times of affluence.
In the post Could you choose to live on the street? I described a man I knew as a youngster who dropped out of being president of a bank to live under a bridge. I suspect one of the ways he survived involved carrying what I did at the Makahiki a step further.
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance. Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon.
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control. There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen. Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled. They couldn’t stay in step.
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
There might be a lot to that. I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)] and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers. But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens. See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
In case you hadn’t noticed it, WordPress has evidently installed a planetarium software over-ride here with the stars speeded up and going across the blog north-to-south instead of horizontally. I’ve no idea why.
After they filmed the scene from the movie 21 grams at the motel next door to where I lived in Grants, New Mexico, I got the job of helping to clean up the site afterward. While I watched them finish things up I saw wossname, Sean Penn smoking the cigar above and leave it in this ashtray.
Those folks left a hell of a mess.
But being the sort of guy I am, I emptied those butts into a baggie and stored them away for whatever future use I could put them to. That’s bound to be an expensive cigar and I always figured on smoking it on down, but I could never build up the certainty I’d advanced to that level of risk level yet. Whatever’s on that cigar always seemed to me potentially more lethal than whatever I’ve already got and don’t know about.
But I’ve digressed. What I wanted to say is, “DAMN those movie people are a messy bunch.”
That, and, “Why don’t WordPress stars move horizontally across the screen like normal stars?”
Every year I wonder about these pictures of Scrooge and others wearing pointee nightcaps. It’s a subject dear to my heart because I became an aficionado of sleeping hats when I used to do my slumbering outdoors a lot.
The function of a nightcap is to keep a person from losing his body heat through his exposed scalp and hair. Besides doing that it needs to stay on the head while you toss and turn. Those pointed hats do none of that.
I’ve tried a lot of different types of sleeping caps through the years and found it’s not easy to find one that satisfies all the minimum criteria:
This one’s sheepskin and I’ve used it for 30 years when the weather’s cold enough. But it’s stiff and doesn’t stay on all that well because one of the straps for tying under the chin broke off sometime way back there and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. The temperature has to be not-too-warm or it becomes a cranial sweat lodge and not-too-cold because it doesn’t provide any protection to the exposed part of the neck.
A balaclava solves some of that, but it’s only one layer thick, somewhat expensive, and tends to wear out at the chin. When the ambient temperature gets down around freezing it needs some help.
They make those fleece caps for women and I find them in thrift stores for a buck frequently. When I find them, I buy them and wear them a lot, outdoors, indoors and as sleeping caps when the weather’s cold, but not cold enough for something more extreme.
During this last cold snap when the water froze inside the house I came up with this, and I like it a lot. It’s a fleece blanket folded four times lengthwise, wrapped around the head and tucked into/zipped in to the fleece vest. It stays in place and is warmer than anything I’ve ever found. It’s tempting to drag out the scissors, needle and thread and cut it down to a four-layer balaclava, but I hate to mess up that fleece blanket. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” school of winter headgear might apply here.
When the weather’s cool but not cold, the stocking cap is a seductive option, even though they don’t ride out the night well. I keep a stack of a dozen of them on the bookshelf above the bed so I can reach up and find one for a quick reload without turning on the light. Same concept as a fresh clip of ammo for a rifle near at hand.
Pointee hats are talk. As Tuco observed in The Good, Bad and Ugly, “When you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
I don’t have a clue what this thing was originally intended to do.
Neither did the people running the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
I watched the value reflected in the price tag for about six weeks falling from the original $50 to $14.95.
Every time I went in there I folded it, unfolded it, stood it up this way and that way, squinted at it trying to figure out what it was for, but seeing other possible uses the people who designed it never thought of.
This thing is a tough, expensive piece of work.
It was evidently intended to lock something in, or out.
And clamp to something along one side.
Whatever it might have been, it’s about to become a part of something else. I pointed out to the manager that it’s been there at least six weeks.
He picked it up and examined it every which way, same as I’d been doing.
“What do you suppose it is?”
“I figure it’s a way to block off the wind going through the chainlink door into my chicken house. They just added a lot of extra parts.”
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.
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 