Tools of Renewal
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I Bought 40 Pounds of Junk Food for Nothing
September 28th, 2022Expected Giant; Received Midget
The hurricane news today is generally good. If you live where I do. In Fort Myers, it’s a colossal disaster. It’s hitting the Fort Myers area right now. It will not be great for Tampa or Orlando, either. Assuming the predictions aren’t hype.
The NHC thought the storm would weaken before hitting the coast and come in at Category 2 or so, but the official measurement looks more like Category 4 or 5, so the pessimists are winning that battle. At least it’s not hitting Tampa, a large city, directly.
For me, the good news is that they are predicting maximum sustained winds of 29 mph where I live, and the winds will be from directions that are not favorable to a lot of property damage. If the predictions pan out, I probably won’t even lose my electricity. That would mean I could continue bathing. With hot water. Not pool water.
The storm is nearly as close to Tampa as it will ever get to me, give or take, and the winds in Tampa are not terrible: 44 mph. When the storm makes its closest approach to me, it will be a lot weaker, so the winds SHOULD be lower. But as the storm’s history shows, hurricanes like to change directions.
One source says 44 mph. Another says 9 with 14 mph gusts. How can that be?
It’s hard to tell what’s really happening. Cape Coral is about as close to the eye of Ian as Florida gets, and they are reporting 31 mph winds with gusts to 43. Can that be right? I would have expected something like 140 based on the maps. Cape Coral is well within the NHC’s hurricane-force band, meaning Cape Coral is inside the hurricane, so the sustained winds should be no lower than 75 mph.
I haven’t been able to find the Weather Channel’s usual hysterical, dishonest coverage. I have been trying to find videos of raincoated reporters pretending to have a hard time standing up in light winds, or reporters standing on their knees in 6 inches of water to make it look deeper, but I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe you have to have cable to get that kind of helpful informational edutainment.
It should be possible to get good, solid information instantly using the web, but it’s not.
I just checked the Weather Channel’s site, and they have privately-hosted videos. One features a guy named Mike Seidel, broadcasting live from Fort Myers. Supposedly the eye wall is coming ashore, and the storm has maximum winds of 155 mph. The little meter in the corner of the screen says 31 mph with gusts to 58. What?
When I saw his name, it rang a bell, so I Googled “‘mike seidel’ fake news.” Yes, I remembered him for a reason. He got caught lying during another hurricane, pretending to struggle to stand. I’ll embed a video.
He didn’t lie verbally. He lied with his body. As my friend Mike points out, he leaned the wrong way. He leaned to leeward. That’s not how it works.
Today Seidel, who still, incredibly, has a job, is standing and walking normally. I guess he learned something.
Here’s another classic:
I can’t stand it:
The Anderson Cooper video reminds me of Baghdad Bob. Remember him? “There are no enemy tanks in Baghdad, and our victorious army of Islamic holy warriors [boom] @*$^@(*@^$#!!! ALLAH SAVE ME!!!”
I have been praying for God to keep the storm from harming Christians and their property, and I am still okay with it leveling Walt Disney World.
Things are looking very good for me and most of the state, but now I have a giant stockpile of junk food to deal with, and I may no longer have an excuse to eat it. This morning I ate a big bowl of Sugar Smacks (now called Honey Smacks, which is no better) with milk and cream, and then I followed it up with Cape Cod potato chips and onion dip. And three Pepperidge Farm cookies. Lunch will be more like actual food. I’m planning to have a delicious half-pound cheeseburger.
I am seriously wondering if local charities take pretzels and chips.
Ordinarily, I would have had a normal breakfast, but you know how it is when you’ve been fasting.
There is really nothing to do here except wait for NHC updates and think about food. And, of course, pray.
The storm still poses a hazard for me. It will probably cause a mosquito explosion. The water it leaves behind may be here for a couple of weeks.
Time to make sure all my portable power banks are charged, just in case. I need to have cell power so I can talk to my wife.
More: 2:23 P.M.
Things still look pretty good here. The projected path of the storm has moved slightly to the north, but it’s still favorable for my county.
Here is the weird thing: the Internet says the wind speed here, right now, is 26 mph. When I look outside, I see a pleasant breeze. The trees are moving a little. Doesn’t look like 26 mph to me. I would guess it’s between 10 and 15.
Hope it continues this way. The forecast says we are looking at another 7 mph, tops.
Sitrep: 6:15 P.M.
I always tell people you can often predict hurricane behavior better than the pros if you look at the rawest data you can get. This has turned out to be true with Ian. Of course, prayer is the main reason every good thing has happened.
At around 3:25, I found a radar loop and checked it out. It showed that the eye of the storm was moving more to the east than the official reports were saying. I thought that was good news, because it was likely to move the whole cone of future misery eastward later.
Lo and behold, the cone has obliged me. The 5 p.m. cone indicated that the storm was projected to veer eastward from the previous cone. This increases the length of time it will have before it makes its closest approach to the compound, and it also makes that approach farther off. Time will weaken the storm, and distance is obviously helpful, as people in Wyoming and Australia could tell you right now.
The storm has moved so far eastward, it’s actually slightly to the east of me. The center is about 120 miles south of me, which is close by hurricane standards, the maximum sustained winds are at around 130 mph, and virtually nothing is happening here. The center is forecast to get within maybe 60 miles of me, but that will be after the storm passes over a lot of real estate very slowly, so it should be much weaker. NOAA says it will be at about 65 mph at that time, so people 60 miles away shouldn’t get much wind.
Tampa is way closer than I will ever be (twice as close as I am now), and it’s getting the best Ian has to offer. Its current wind figure is 32 mph. I talked to a potential tenant today, and he said his relatives in Tampa were saying not a lot was happening. Tampa was supposed to get a good beating.
Of course, if a storm can move east, it can move west, too, but the experts and models say that won’t happen. They have a consensus, and as we all know, when it comes to science, a consensus is always right.
What a burden off my mind.
The wife and I will keep praying for others. I hope you will, too. No prayers for Disney World, though. It ought to be obliterated. I don’t want to see homes or businesses that don’t promote evil harmed, but if Ian wiped Disney World and Universal out without harming anyone around them, I would be content.
Ten O’Clock Update: Ian Now Weak Category 2
Hurricane Ian continues to puzzle me. The Weather Channel says the wind here is moving at 38 mph, but when I go outside, I don’t see it. The trees are bouncing around a little, but it’s not unpleasant.
Tampa is in a much worse location, but the Weather Channel says its winds will top out shortly at a mere 52 mph. After that, Tampa is expected to wind down. For Tampa, Ian is at its peak right now.
I am still trying to understand what’s happening. I had to dig to find information on Irma, which made a mess here. I relearned a few things.
Irma was Category 3 when it landed in Florida. It came ashore on Marco Island. This is nearly the same place where Ian landed today. Marco supposedly had 155 mph winds when it landed, and Irma’s winds were clocked at 120, so much lower.
Irma was huge, though. People are calling Ian big storm, but Irma was about twice as wide, so being 100 miles from the center of Irma, at a given maximum sustained wind speed, would be like being 50 miles from the center of Ian. In other words, Ian has to be twice as close to give you the same wind speed. That means Ian is much less dangerous to me than a storm like Irma.
Irma moved about 1.5 times as fast as Ian, however, so it spent less time wherever it went. A fast-moving storm does less damage in any one area. So Ian’s strong winds will hit less of Florida, but they will spend more time in every location than they would were Ian traveling at Irma’s speed. On the other hand, the smaller diameter of Ian reduces the destructive impact of its lower speed. It’s not a simple picture. The destructive power of storms depends on a number of variables.
Irma traveled a long way before it dropped to tropical storm speed. When it knocked my trees over, it was close to where it crossed the threshold. And the center was close to me. Probably 30 miles away.
Ian is now dropping 5-10 mph of wind speed per hour, and it will be maybe 10 hours before it gets close to its nearest approach to the compound. I don’t know if it will keep dropping speed as fast as it is now, but it will probably be a tropical storm in 10 hours. Weather Underground thinks it will be Category 1 in less than 4.
Category 1 runs from 75 to 95 mph, and Ian is now at 100, so it should cross the line quickly.
So, weak storm. Twice as far away as Irma. Half as wide as Irma, so it will be as though it were 4 times as far away.
Irma also rained like crazy, and Ian may not match it. Rain helps trees fall over because it loosens the roots. They are predicting 4″-6″, but my feeling, based on observation, is that it will be less.
Irma didn’t do all that much damage here. The house was untouched. So was the workshop. I lost trees in the woods, but no one cares about those. I wasted a lot of time cutting them, but I should have let them rot on their own.
I believe I had two trees that landed on fences between me and the neighbors, and only one tree was large. I had one large tree land on my own fence between my house and pasture. I had another big tree land on a fence between my parcels. I would not want to go through Irma again, and Irma caused me a lot of work, but it was no Andrew.
I think very little will happen here. A much worse storm than Ian wasn’t all that bad.
Hope I don’t seem self-obsessed because I am not writing much about the problems in Southwest Florida and Cuba. I am well aware that many other people are suffering very badly. I can’t do anything to help them except pray, and I have done that, so I am studying the storm for my own benefit.
No Comments »Shoo
September 27th, 2022Ian Moves Eastward
The 5:00 news concerning Hurricane Ian is good.
As I noted in my last post, there are two things you have to watch as a hurricane approaches: the predicted path and the way the predicted path is moving as it is updated. Since yesterday, the path has been trending eastward, moving it farther from me and closer to Disney World. Today at 5:00 p.m., the new path was considerably farther east than the 2:00 path.
For yours truly, this is good news for several reasons. It suggests the path will keep moving eastward and increase the minimum distance between me and the eye. It means the eye is already expected to be farther from me, at closest approach, than it was last night. It means Ian will be weaker when it gets near because it will have to cross a lot of land. It also means I won’t get south winds. I’ll get east winds followed by north winds followed by west winds, and the north winds will probably be strongest.
My problem trees are to the north of my buildings. I don’t want south winds. North winds might actually knock over some trees I’d like to lose, saving me the cost of a tree service.
Of course, outlets other than the National Hurricane Center are still supplying bad information. According to the NHC’s predictions, the maximum sustained winds here should be around 50 mph. That’s not good, but it’s way better than earlier predictions. Another site, however, is claiming 67 mph with gusts of 100 mph, about 5 miles away.
So who am I supposed to believe? The NHC, which has always been the best source of information, or a private site which predicts winds much, much higher?
I don’t trust any private source. The NHC is better. Even the NHC is inclined to pessimism, but I think that comes from a natural fear of accepting good news. I don’t think they deceive people deliberately like the news organizations.
I think the forecast for this county will get significantly better. I base that on experience and faith.
My nearest neighbor hasn’t been here long. He has a land-clearing business. He has at least one huge wheel loader at his house. Yesterday I let him know the power pole on his land was the main source of past outages due to wind. Trees used to fall and put it out of commission. Today I heard a big machine moving around over there. I think my neighbor did a little work. That was nice.
My friend Mike is still staying here while he starts a business. Today we sat down and prayed about the storm. It was right after that that I got the nice 2 p.m. report.
We started talking about various things, and I mentioned the revelations Rhodah and I had had over the last day. We both have the impression that God is giving up on the world and that evangelism is a low priority compared to preserving the people he already has. Mike was amazed, because he had the same thought yesterday. He was in Palm Beach County, and he thought about what he saw around him. It made him feel like humanity was lost.
I would love to see the rapture happen right away (provided Rhodah and I make it). I am sick of the antics of Satan’s children. Today I saw that a man had been suspended from Twitter for informing people that men can’t have babies. I want to live in a world where it’s okay to tell the truth and everyone tells the truth.
Isn’t it obvious that a man can’t have a baby? Of course it is. But human beings are herd creatures, and when we are pressured to believe and repeat lies long enough, we give in and follow the flock. The only way to avoid falling for lies is to hear from the Holy Spirit all day, and only a tiny percentage of people hear him, because preachers have been teaching idiotic things like cessationism, legalism, and the Mammon gospel instead of helping people to know God.
People can believe any moronic notion if they think it will help them fit into the herd, and they will perform acts of extreme cruelty to those who refuse to go along.
I hope to see even better news at 8 p.m. when the next update is issued.
3 Comments »Predicting the Predictions
September 27th, 2022Let Disney Drink my Mickey
The practice of trying to figure hurricanes out is not simple. Lots of factors have to be considered. How strong are the winds expected to be? Where is the storm supposed to go? How fast is it moving? How wide is it? Are the people giving you information complete liars, or are they relatively impartial?
Today I saw some liar saying Ian was expected to land in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Not true at all, so why scare people?
Back when Andrew hit, a homosexual meteorologist named Bryan Norcross became a big celebrity in South Florida. His TV channel was able to keep broadcasting after the storm, and the others were off the air, so people came to rely on him. Women fell in love with him and mailed him marriage proposals and their dirty underwear. They didn’t know he was a homosexual because he hid it. He became Florida’s hurricane guru, and for some years, he rode the wave.
I think he is the biggest reason the press lies about storms. They have the baseless, irrational feeling that if he could do it, they can do it, even though the circumstances are different. They all seem to be shouting, “PICK ME!”, and it will never work, because there is competition. There will never be another big hurricane guru.
I’m just guessing.
Why are so many weathermen homosexuals? It’s strange.
Anyway, my primary answer to the Hurricane Ian problem is to fast and pray. Everything else is less important.
We get a lot of information from the National Hurricance Center. The difficult thing is deciding what it means.
We are used to seeing predictive cones that try to show how a storm’s direction will change. Thing is, there is another level of predictions. The storm’s direction changes, and so do the cones. They themselves trend, which goes to show how unreliable they are. If my prediction concerning what will happen on Friday changes between Monday and Tuesday, it’s not a very solid prediction, and a clever person could decide to try to predict how the predictions will change. Second-order predictions.
The NHC is now saying the cones themselves are trending eastward. Ian’s cone was centered over the area of Tarpon Springs, north of Tampa. Now the cone and models suggest it will land south of Tampa and head for Disney World.
This would be a very big break for my county. It might mean winds that are 25 mph lower, and that would probably be the difference between lots of downed trees and a few downed trees.
If the cones keep moving southward, our farm might escape damage entirely.
I have prayed for God to keep the storm off of his people and their property, and I also asked him to prevent the ungodly from having worse problems than is necessary. Today, I changed that a little. I thought about Cuba and Disney World.
Cuba just legalized homosexual marriage by a wide margin, which is just one more indication that Cuban culture is depraved. The storm hit Cuba the next day. It occurred to me that Disney promotes the daylights out of homosexuality and the occult. They now have a show about a demon-worshiping girl who is supposedly the Antichrist, and people are saying how nice it is that paganism is getting positive coverage.
It’s so absurd, it’s hard to comment effectively.
Anyway, I wondered if Cuba’s error was connected to the weather. With that in mind, I told God that if the storm had to go somewhere, he might consider Disney World. Just drown it. No one will be there because it will be closed. It’s fine with me if he shows the world what he thinks of Disney. When storms hit places like my county, it just provides fuel for trolls who say God hates Christians or conservatives or that he doesn’t exist.
My wife and I had similar revelations yesterday and today.
Yesterday, I started wondering whether God is still primarily interested in adding new souls to his family. Maybe he is more interested in holding onto the ones he has so as many as possible will make it in the rapture and avoid the tribulation and hell. The world is an extremely filthy place now, and the constant temptation, which is increasing fast, is very dangerous because under its influence, Christians are losing their salvation. I asked him about it.
As I was praying, I started thinking about my sister.
My sister treated my mother terribly. My mother used to pay her rent so she wouldn’t be on the street, and in order to avoid trouble with my grandparents, who owned the apartment, my mother used to go there on occasion and clean it, carrying out bag after bag of filthy garbage and dog manure. When my sister was in law school, my mother was thrilled she might amount to something, so she supported her financially. My sister showed her gratitude by parking in a handicapped space over and over at a cost of $250 per ticket, and my mother paid the fines. I could go on and on.
When my mother was dying, my sister continued treating her badly and neglected her. My mother wrote a journal for the first time in her life, and in the journal, according to what I have been told, she wrote about how she loved me and how badly my sister had treated her. After my mother died, my sister told me she had stolen the journal and thrown it out so I would never see it. She said it with a big grin on her face, glowing with the pleasure of sadism. She told me because she thought it would hurt me, and the thought of my suffering and the evil she had done made her light up with pleasure.
Not long before my mother died, she told me she was going to disinherit my sister. I talked her out of it, but she insisted on giving me her brokerage account, and she said it was a drop in the bucket compared to what she had spent on my sister.
After she died, my sister, as an heir, was heavily involved in my mother’s estate and my grandparents’ estates, and she made all of us extremely miserable. She offended many people to the point where they refused to do business with us. It was a very bad experience.
If I had not talked my mother out of disinheriting her, these things would not have happened. A lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain. I made a big mistake.
Years later, when my dad started talking about disinheriting her, I kept my mouth shut, not because I wanted the money but because I didn’t want to be chained to my sister again. That decision led to one of the biggest blessings of my life. I don’t have to have any contact with my sister. And because I’m married, she can never inherit from me, so there is no point in her trying to involve herself in my business.
I am the reason my sister was disinherited. I could have saved her, but I minded my own business and respected my father’s decision.
A few years ago, God gave me a phrase: “The whole world is like my sister.” I took it to mean the whole world was like a person who loved evil and could not be helped because of it.
Yesterday, I thought about these things, and I realized God had prepared me for the future. He showed me what my sister was like and that even though I was a Christian, I was supposed to quit chasing her and trying to help her. In doing that, he showed me what the world was becoming: a place so rotten there was no point in chasing people and trying to start revivals.
Sometimes I have felt bad because I have reached so few people for God. Yesterday, I thought about that. I really tried to reach people. I joined churches and ministries. Fools were promoted over me, my efforts to help were swatted down, and the pastors came to consider me their enemy. I tried to help the people they were looting, and the victims themselves persecuted me, saying I was touching God’s anointed and so forth. I was rejected soundly, over and over.
I was very enthusiastic, but Christians wanted nothing to do with me. I would guess I have reached maybe 20 people.
Maybe I’m not the problem.
During the last century, there was a huge revival. Millions of people all over the world were baptized with the Holy Spirit. Things like that don’t happen any more. Not like they did then. And the preachers who still draw big crowds are generally money-worshiping pigs. They want us to think they’ve brought millions into the kingdom of heaven, but in reality, they’ve helped keep them out. They teach people they can be saved permanently by raising their hands once in church, and that they can go home and continue living sinful lives.
Now I suspect God is preparing a small percentage of Christians for the rapture instead of focusing on evangelism. Maybe the next wave of evangelism will be the tribulation itself, in which people will be suffering so terribly, and God and Satan will be so open about their existence, that a few more grains of barley will find their way into the harvest.
The tribulation is all about evangelism. Most people don’t know that. “Tribulation” is a process that separates stubborn grain from its husk. You drive nails into a board called a tribulum, you stand on the board with the nails protruding toward the ground, and you have an animal pull you around so the nails ride over the grain and break the husks. In the Bible, harvest represents saving souls. The tribulation will be God’s last attempt to win souls before the Messianic Age.
I don’t think I should continue feeling bad about reaching so few people. I said what I believed. I didn’t hold anything back. I made myself available. I provided financial support and my own labor. I submitted to the leadership of ghetto people and crooked, half-bright pastors. I prayed a great deal, alone and with others. I was there. The fish just didn’t want the bait.
I am in good company. Jesus himself is only known to have reached 120 people even though he drew large crowds. The Jews of his time generally died unsaved.
I hope I’m right about these things and that the rapture comes soon, because I am fatigued with this place. I don’t want to raise children in a world where perversion and pride and hate are pervasive and they, as Christians, will be treated like demons.
2 Comments »Tennessee Looks Better Every Day
September 26th, 2022New Storm Threatens to Ruin my Fall
Tropical storm preparations continue here at the compound.
Hurricane Ian’s path has wobbled this way and that over the last couple of days. It was headed for Tampa. Then it was headed for the east side of the panhandle, where there is not much to destroy. Then it turned farther east. Now it’s headed for Tampa again. If it hits Tampa and continues on the present path, the eye will come pretty close to me.
The good thing about this, from my limited perspective, is that the winds that hit here will have to go across a tremendous amount of land first. Land kills storm winds.
Hurricanes circulate counterclockwise, so when one passes near you, you know the directions the wind will take as it goes by. If it passes on the west, as Ian is expected to, the first winds will be from the east, and they will be weakened because they will have to cross Florida twice; first from the Gulf to the east and then from the east to me. After that, there would be southern winds, also weakened, because they will have to come up the middle of the state. Finally, there would be west winds. They would have less resistance, because they would only have to cross from the west coast.
I think the big questions are 1) how wide is the storm, and 2) how strong will it be, generally, when it makes its closest approach to me.
In 2017, Irma spent a lot of time over land before it came near me, but it was very strong when it came ashore, at over 140 mph. It had a hurricane-force wind swath about as wide as Florida until it was about 100 miles south of me, and the tropical-storm-force field was over 5 times the width of the state even after it passed me.
Ian (which Fox is calling a “monster”) looks like it will be much smaller. When Irma was at the stage where Ian is now, it was much, much wider. If Ian stays smaller, the tropical-storm-force band will be narrower and will also have speeds that drop off faster with distance from the eye.
Right now, Tampa’s forecast calls for 80 mph sustained winds, tops, making Ian a Category 1 storm when it hits the coast. That isn’t consistent with other claims I’ve seen. Some news sources say it will be a Category 4. It’s hard to know who is telling the truth because journalists and meteorologists lie about hurricanes so much.
The National Hurricane Center is fairly neutral, so I’m checking their site. They say Ian will DECREASE in intensity after it hits Cuba, so it appears the Cat 4 story is just another media lie. Here’s what they say:
The NHC intensity forecast calls for Ian to become a major hurricane before it reaches western Cuba early Tuesday. It is then forecast to reach its peak intensity over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico in 36 h. After that, southwesterly shear in association with a deep-layer trough over the eastern U.S. is forecast to significantly increase over the hurricane on Wednesday and Thursday, which will likely disrupt the vertical structure and import drier air into its circulation.
They think it will hit land with winds of about 85 mph, and the center of the probability cone is right around Tarpon Springs, about 15 miles north of Tampa.
If this is more or less what happens, things shouldn’t be too bad here. It sounds much better than what the professional liars are saying. I don’t want a Category 4 storm landing 100 miles away.
Anyway, I have propane, a big cooler, water, and as of this afternoon, a generator that sort of works. I should be able to have hot food and refrigeration for two or three days.
I have not finished my tractor fork project. I don’t know if I will get it done by the time the storm comes. I ordered myself a set of clamp-on forks just in case. I need them anyway because they will turn my tractor in to a fairly decent forklift. Brush forks can sometimes be used for forklift duty, but sometimes they won’t fit whatever you’re trying to lift.
Hope I don’t end up bathing in the pool again. Prayers for me and the other people in the cone would be appreciated.
No Comments »Still Friends
September 25th, 2022Fabrication and Revelation
It’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I remember joking about getting a Bridgeport mill. I thought it was a good example of a tool no normal man would have in his shop. Now I have a mill, three lathes, an arbor press, a plasma cutter, a hydraulic press, and three welding machines. I have two belt grinders and about 5 angle grinders, and I’m building my own tractor fork attachment from old parts and steel tubing.
Today was an intimidating day. I had to take two 56″ pieces of 2″ square tubing with 1/4″ walls and turn them into a frame to hold tractor forks. Then I had to weld them to plates I modified to attach them to my tractor.
I don’t know what a foot of 1/4″-wall tubing weighs, but my guess is around 4 pounds. Okay, the web says 5.41 pounds. It’s a little unpleasant moving a 56″ piece around on a welding table. When you weld it to another piece plus 4 pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls amounting to about 56″, it gets heavy. Then when you attach the whole business to two 3/8″ plates with areas of over a square foot, you can forget about manipulating it safely without machinery.
I had to rip the scale and rust off all the tubing, weld it into a frame without too much distortion, and then add the plates. It was quite a job.
When I got the frame put together, I had to figure out how to hold it in place against the mounting plates while I tacked it on. The answer, as it so often is: a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I put the plates on the tractor, put the frame on the cart, lifted it up to the plates, shimmed it so it was in the right place, and clamped everything together. Then I added some very big tacks and moved the tractor into the shop so I could finish welding.
I think things went well. Two of the tacks popped, but I clamped the frame back down as if nothing had happened, and I finished my beads.
Tomorrow I can add more weld to make this thing indestructible. Then I have to get started, cutting up the old fork tines and adapting them to this frame.
How will I hold everything in place while I weld? Beats me. If you had asked me yesterday how I would have done what I did today, I would have had no idea. Ideas will come. God will inspire me.
I used to see ads for welding tables that held half a ton or more. I wondered what kind of nut would need a table like that. Now I am that nut. A bigger table would have been a big help today.
I have been looking at tables online. I am positive I want to stick with fixturing tables. Solid tables require you to weld things to them in order to make them work, and that would drive me crazy. All of my work would have funny places where I had ground off tacks.
Fixturing is great. A fixturing table has dozens or hundreds of holes in it, and you use them to hold clamps that hold your work in place while you weld. This ensures that the work will not warp.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. No it doesn’t. You may think it will when you buy your table, but it won’t. Only two things prevent warping: skill and huge steel. The thicker steel is, the harder it is to warp it. If your steel isn’t all that thick, you have to develop the skill to lay welds down in a way that minimizes distortion.
Fixturing is still helpful, though. You really need to have your work held in place while you work.
If my table were stronger, I could put the fork attachment on it and weld the tines on. The manufacturer, Klutch, claims it will hold 600 pounds, but I am suspicious, and I don’t want to learn they were fudging by having the attachment fall on me after it passes 200 pounds. I put casters on the table, and they will supposedly hold 1600 pounds among the 4 of them. All I can say about that is this: China. That’s the home country of the company that made the 1600-pound claim. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it ain’t.
A company called Langmuir has come up with a table it calls Arcflat. It’s actually a system of cast iron boxes with fixturing holes. You can use one box as a table, or you can buy several boxes and clamp them together. They are supposed to be very precise and very tough, and the whole setup for three feet by four feet would run about $2000, tax included.
That’s a lot. On the other hand, what would a dubious-quality set of pallet forks cost me? Well over a grand. A grapple would run over three grand. And I think grapples are stupid. I’ve seen them in videos, and I have never seen one do anything my forks can’t do. I’ve seen my forks do many things a grapple can’t do.
Pallet forks are the only quick-attach forks available online, they are vastly inferior to the forks I already have when it comes to moving trees and brush, and they cost a fortune. By adapting my old forks, which I would never be able to sell for a decent price, I can get a dynamite setup for under $300. That means my little table, which cost $200 with tax, has paid for itself and then some. It also helped me fix my subsoiler, so there’s maybe another $150 saved. It helped me make a bunch of mobile tool bases, so I probably saved a couple of thousand there.
I would have been smart to buy a big table to begin with. But I didn’t think I had room, I was cheap, and I didn’t think I’d build big projects.
Tomorrow will be the point of no return. I will start chopping my old forks up for repurposing. I’m sure it will work out, because when it comes to fabrication, there is always a way to fix things.
I had a wonderful dream last night. Or maybe night before last. I was in my dad’s house, and my parents were there. My dad was suffering from dementia, as he did in life. He was standing at the kitchen sink, puttering around with things. Sometimes people with dementia look for things to do in order to give themselves purpose.
He picked up some kind of utensil which he thought was supposed to be covered. It was not. He said, “Somebody didn’t cover this. That’s okay. Still friends.”
He was forgiving someone. Covering for them. It was wonderful to hear. The tone of his voice was so sweet. Like it didn’t even occur to him to be angry. “Still friends.” No big deal. Everyone makes mistakes.
It made me think about a problem I’ve had since he died. I have tended to remember him as he was when he was young. He was extremely hard on people, and he was not the kind of person who would forgive quickly. Even after you apologized and made things right, he would keep hammering. In his last months, he changed completely. He was gentle. He loved prayer. Whenever I showed up to see him, he said, “Here comes my beautiful son.” He was like the Dad I saw in my dream.
Since his death, I have tried to remember him as he was when he died, but old habits have crept in and caused me to remember the old Dad who died months before the new one. The dream has helped me to remember the new Dad and forget the old Dad, just as God has.
It made me think about love and what a privilege it is to be a gentle and benevolent person. Love is the reason the universe was created. It’s not an incidental benefit. I have to remember to take pleasure in being like my dad was in my dream. The modern world taught me to be cynical and hard. I changed myself in order to feel safe. That was a mistake.
We are in a lot of danger now. An apocalyptic spirit of murder has been released, and we are nastier to each other than ever. This is especially true of the Internet. It’s a snake pit. Social media sites, in particular, are disgusting and perilous.
The dream was life-changing. From now on, when I feel angry about something someone has done, I’ll just say, “Still friends,” and let it go.
Hope I can get my forks working before the storm. It looks like we’ll miss the real wind, but some trees could still come down, so I want to be ready before the power goes out and I have to use the generator to weld things.
1 Comment »Never Scrap Anything
September 24th, 2022Tractor Forks Gradually Materializing
Looks like my tractor brush fork attachment may be usable by the time Hurricane Ian either gets here or misses us.
When I converted my tractor bucket to quick attachment, I bought a heavy mounting plate and cut the ends off for the bucket. I welded them to the bucket, and this left me with a big piece that could also be turned into a mount with some modification. I decided to use it to hold brush forks on. I have been cutting and welding, and now I have two plates which should be suitable for attachment to a heavy frame which will hold 4 brush fork tines.
I had to make these plates wider, and I also had to add metal to the bottoms. Before I did this, it would have been hard to attach a frame in a way that put it at least as low as the bottom edges of the plates.
Brush forks need to slide freely on the ground, especially if you want to use them as forklifts occasionally. You can’t have something protruding down behind them. In order to have the tines flat on the ground and have ample steel to weld the tines to, I needed to have the frame on the ground, too.
It’s a complicated problem, and my explanation probably doesn’t make it very clear. If I hadn’t added the additional steel, the mount plates would have extended 2.5″ down below the rear ends of the tines. The tines would not have slid easily on the ground, and the bottoms of the mount plates would have banged into things a lot.
It took me a couple of hours yesterday to cut out the steel pieces to add to the plates. I had to use the mill as well as a big angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. Today it took me another 90 minutes or so to weld everything together and grind off the lumps. It was not easy to weld these things and make them pretty because of their shapes, so I settled for ugly strong welds followed by a lot of grinding.
Tomorrow’s work should go by fast. I have two 56″ pieces of 2″ by 2″ tubing with 1/4″ walls, and I have 4 shorter pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls. I will turn all this into a sort of ladder structure which will be my attachment’s frame. The long pieces will run horizontally, and the short pieces will be welded between them at intervals of around 15″. I should be able to accomplish this in an hour or so. Then I have to weld the frame to the mounting plates.
I figure I should be done in three hours or less.
After all this the real fun starts. I have to cut the rear portions off my old forks so they can be welded to the frame. I have to weld them in place. This will give me 4 pieces of tubular steel around a foot long. I will have to cut these so they can be used as struts to keep the tines from bending when horizontal loads are applied to the tips. I figure one strut per tine will do it.
I think I may be able to get this work done in a day. Then it will take me another day to weld it all together. This will put me in position to use the forks if trees come down this week. If they don’t come down, I’ll have time to paint everything.
Once this project is done, I’ll have a quick-attach tractor and quick-attach forks. I’ll be this area’s king of cheap quick-attach tractor guys.
By using bits of the old mounting plate, I saved around $140. The whole project will cost me $198 for steel, plus whatever paint and consumables cost. And maybe 4 bolts. This estimate is based on the assumption that this will work. If I ruin my old forks and can’t make good new ones, I’ll be spending a lot correcting the problem.
I hope this thing will be as strong as I need it to be. I believe it will be. People tend to overbuild weldments and underestimate what they can take, and this generalization applies to me. If I’m only a little worried, it probably means the attachment will be considerably stronger than it has to be.
I am amazed how nice the shop is now. I get things done fast. I know where most things are. I don’t have to search much. Thank you, God, for making this dream come true.
1 Comment »Gimme Gimme Gimme
September 24th, 2022Hate-Based Handouts for the Undeserving Always Solve a Nation’s Problems
I saw some character talking about slavery reparations, so I thought I should write this, not that it will do any good whatsoever.
Reasons why slavery reparations are stupid and unjust:
1. Single biggest reason: reparations have already been paid many times over through affirmative action and government assistance. Nearly every time I have applied for a job or admission to a school, I have been put at the back of the line behind minorities. Many people like me have been rejected because of affirmative action, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the courses of their lives. My black friends in law school were quietly whisked away to a secret tutoring center in Arkansas where they were given summer courses to give them an advantage over everyone else before freshman year started, and the rest of us paid for it without being informed. They also had organizations working to give them scholarships even when they didn’t ask. My experiences are typical. The benefits already extended through affirmative action are far greater than the benefits that would be provided through further lump-sum reparations.
2. Wealthy blacks who have already outdone the rest of us financially would receive reparations paid for partly by poor and middle-class whites. Jay-Z can get two new tires for his latest Lamborghini.
3. Blacks whose ancestors were never slaves, including blacks who came here decades or centuries after slavery ended, would receive reparations. My wife is moving here from Zambia. Why should she get reparations from Americans?
4. Blacks whose black ancestors owned slaves in the United States (there were many) would receive reparations. Slavery would be rewarded.
5. Blacks whose black ancestors sold slaves in Africa (this is how nearly all slaves got here) would receive reparations.
6. Whites whose ancestors never owned slaves, and whites whose ancestors were abolitionists, would have to pay reparations.
7. Non-blacks who are not white and who came here long after slavery ended would have to pay reparations. Welcome to America, Koreans.
8. The descendants of whites who were enslaved through indenture would not receive reparations, but they would have to pay them.
9. Every black person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the injured can’t be made whole.
10. Every white person who was alive when slavery existed in America is now dead, so the guilty can’t be made to repay. Fining an innocent person for what another person did is evil.
11. Virtually all non-blacks who are affluent now are affluent through assets accumulated long after slavery ended, so almost no living non-blacks have assets that came from slavery. Everything I inherited came from people who had nothing when they were young. What the non-black affluent have generally has no connection to slaveholding ancestors.
12. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay American Indians whose economic losses were hundreds of thousands of times greater.
13. If we pay blacks, we will have to pay Mexicans because we took a lot of the West from them. Try and put a price on Texas.
Hope this is helpful.
The theft scheme known as slavery reparations comes from a spirit of envy, not a desire to do justice. As the apocalypse unfolds, people will be filled with murderous hatred. The Revelation says so. Various canards will be used to justify the evils one group does to another. The reparations canard is no better than the “Jews sold us out at Versailles” canard.
It is important for us to forgive each other and realize our problems come from bad relationships with God, not from the bad intentions and acts of other people. If you are right with God, he will give you favor and deliver you over and over. If you live a life of sin and rebellion, you can generally expect to remain at the bottom of the food chain, regardless of your race.
Holding people responsible for what their ancestors are accused of is sick and evil. It will lead to bloodshed here in America.
1 Comment »Those Aren’t Windmills
September 23rd, 2022Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms
A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.
I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.
The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.
Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:
House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.
The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:
Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’sexpression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state orany part of this state.
The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:
[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.
If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.
I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.
I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.
I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.
Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.
Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.
My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.
Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.
Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.
I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.
Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.
As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.
There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.
They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.
Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?
The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.
The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.
Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?
If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?
Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.
Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?
The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.
It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.
Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.
We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.
I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.
No Comments »They Should Call Them “Playshops”
September 22nd, 2022Look Where I Spend my Afternoons
When my wife and I pray, we always ask that God turn our homes into places of abundance, peace, and order. He is certainly doing that here at our house in Florida.
My workshop is a wonder to behold. Four months ago, you couldn’t walk across it without turning sideways, making a lot of turns, and stepping over things. I didn’t know where many things were. There were oak leaves all over the floor, along with metal filings.
I kept my tractors and my utility cart outdoors because I didn’t think I had room for them. I got an estimate for a second shop because of this.
Now you can walk through the shop. The filings are gone. The leaves and other debris are gone except for certain areas that are not easy to access. My belt grinders are on a gorgeous 46″ tool chest with a beautiful attachment that holds tooling arms and a VFD enclosure. My mini lathe is on another tool chest, and all of my mini lathe paraphernalia are in it.
The tractors and cart are in the shop, and there is still room to work.
On top of all these things, I replaced the carb in my big chainsaw and got a new part to fix the oil pump. The small saw is running correctly, I cleaned out the carb on the utility cart, I installed a new choke cable on the cart, and I pressure-washed the cart so I could work on it without getting filthy.
I have all the steel I need ($198) to turn my old chain-on brush forks into a quick attachment. My tractor is almost completely reassembled, and I fixed the pedal so it reverses at full speed instead of crawling.
I took some of the drawers out of my old Craftsman tool chest and fixed them so they stay closed again. That box is very high quality, and it’s stainless, so I’m glad it works again. I have been cleaning the drawers out and organizing them.
My workbench was buried in random junk. It’s all gone now. There are a few things I leave on it, but I can use it again. I took mineral spirits and turpentine and cleaned it so using it doesn’t make me filthy any more.
The old foam cart I that used to hold my belt grinders is now cleaned up and sitting next to the mill where I can keep my rotary table on it and use it to hold things while I machine.
I put a long drain hose on the big compressor, and I put a weight on the end of it. Now I don’t have to crawl to open the valve, and the hose can’t whip around and hit things.
My arbor press, hydraulic press, planishing hammer, dry saw, and metal band saw are all in one corner now, and that corner has its own air drop with three quick connectors so the hammer and hydraulic press can both be connected at once.
It’s beautiful. And the weather has changed, so now I can use the shop. It still hits 90 in the daytime, but it takes a lot longer to get there, it’s dryer than it was a week or so ago, and it cools off in the afternoon.
I find myself sitting in the shop at times when I would have been in the house in the past. My dream is to live in my shop and sleep in my house, and it seems to be coming true.
Here are photos from a week or two back. The shop looks even better now.
With all this new space, I’m tempted to get a bigger welding table. I’m crazy about my three-foot-long Northern Tool table, which was a tremendous bargain, but I’m about to start work on a 5-foot-long project which will probably weigh 250 pounds when the main weldment is done. I don’t think I can rationalize a table that long, but three feet by four feet would actually make sense.
I may put a new engine in the utility cart. The original engine is a 350cc Subaru Robin, and while it’s a very good engine, Subaru has abandoned it. New parts are hard to come by. A dubious Chinese rebuild kit costs about $400, and a rebuilt engine is over $600, not including the cost of sending my old engine to the rebuilders in trade. My engine smokes, and I’m not looking forward to the day when it poops out for good and I can’t find parts.
I found new surplus Subaru engines in a different configuration for $355, shipping included. Yes, they will be orphans too, but presumably, because they are newer, Subaru will provide parts for them a little longer. I can get an engine and a rebuild kit right now and save the kit until I need it. If Subaru runs off on the new engine, I will still be able to keep it going.
Honda makes nice engines, too, but I believe they need a lot of parts to make them work in carts.
I can get Harbor Freight Predator engines, but I think they would require a lot of fabrication or the purchase of an expensive installation kit. After all was said and done, I’d have a questionable Chinese engine instead of something made by a top Japanese manufacturer.
Some people put big Predators in carts and make them do wheelies. I think I can live without that kind of performance.
My goal is just to avoid buying a new cart. They are incredibly expensive for what you get, which is nearly nothing. A crummy little engine, a simple steel box, and a couple of axles. My cart is extremely useful, so I need to have it running, and I don’t want to drop over $10,000 on a new one.
It’s amazing how much carts cost when you compare them to tractors. A tractor will last 40 years and do all sorts of amazing things, it will have a wonderful diesel and hydraulics, it will have a PTO, and it will be extremely sturdy, and tractors aren’t that expensive. A cart, which is a flimsy piece of junk by comparison, will struggle to haul 700 pounds. And it will cost nearly half as much as the tractor.
Rhodah and I pray for things that are obviously important. We intercede for people who have problems. We always ask God to help them get right with him, because handouts without personal improvement are a waste of time. We ask God to help us to be improved. I think we know what’s important, and a big shop full of tools is not high on the list, but it’s still very pleasing to have him come through with regard to things that aren’t necessities.
No Comments »Sometimes Joy Comes in the Afternoon
September 13th, 2022Kubota Resurrected
The Mach V is running again. I got the tractor put back together. Nearly.
What a rotten experience this has been. I installed a quick attach adaptor without help, and then I did a lot of welding and cutting on the bucket so it would fit. I felt invincible. Then my steering blew out. Then I found out removing the cylinder for repacking was major surgery. Then I got the silly thing out and got it fixed, and when I put it back in, I cracked the engine’s front cover, resulting in over $2000 in repair costs plus months of life with no tractor.
Now I’m back where I hoped to be a couple of months ago. I thought I would begin working on a new set of quick attach brush forks back then, but I found myself plunged into the horror of cascading parts failures and extremely slow repairs.
Things are going incredibly well now that I have an organized and roomy shop. The weather is terrible; hot and humid with intermittent torrential rain. Because I can get the tractor into the shop, I was able to fix it anyway, in relative comfort.
You wouldn’t believe how fast work goes when you have 6 tool chests and you know what’s in every drawer. I think I got a lot less exercise than I usually do in the shop, because instead of walking around for hours looking for things, I went straight to the chests and got what I wanted.
This morning, I had a tractor with no sheet metal forward of the dash, no battery, no radiator, a gallon of dirty oil, and a two-gallon hydraulic fluid shortage. By around 5:30 p.m., everything was fixed but the sheet metal. No point in buttoning a project up until you see if it works.
When I fired the tractor up, it ran fine. After giving it time to circulate the hydraulic fluid, I used the steering and the loader, and everything worked. My bucket was lying in the driveway where it had been for a couple of days, and I was able to reattach it.
Tomorrow I should be able to get the sheet metal on, and then I’ll order a few screws to replace the ones a battery spill ruined before my time.
I plan to make the battery area better than Kubota did. I’m putting the battery in a plastic tray to catch leaks. I wire-wheeled the bar that goes across the top of the battery to hold it down, and after minimizing the rust, I painted it with a special rust-blocking paint. I put anti-seize on all the screws near the battery so they would’t corrode again.
The original battery tray is a pitted mess, so I replaced it, and I am not spending $60 on a third one. I am determined to keep the acid where it belongs.
I was going to replace the hydraulic fluid, but it seemed like a stupid idea, because I wasn’t sure the tractor was okay. I thought I should run it first. While I was thinking about this, I realized I needed two filters, not the one filter I originally thought I needed, so I didn’t even have the option of replacing the fluid.
I decided to take my two-gallon jug of Tractor Supply fluid, which many people say is bad for Kubotas, and top off the system to get everything running. I think it was a good move. I can’t say whether Tractor Supply fluid is really harmful, but it won’t hurt anything if I use a little to keep the tractor working while I check it out and wait for a second filter.
A fluid change for this machine is pretty cheap. Only around $500, depending on which fluid and filters you use. Chicken feed.
Glad I won’t have to do it again for 200 hours.
I can see why a lot of people never change their hydraulic fluid. If you use a machine for work, you could put in a thousand or more hours per year, so $2500 per year for a compact Kubota and much more for something like a backhoe.
I’m not thrilled with the dealership that fixed the tractor. It came back with an empty tank, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t empty when I sent it. They took a very long time to fix it, and they charged me for things that were not mentioned in the estimate. Could be worse, though. A local diesel place charged him almost $100 for a small hose Mercedes sells for $20, and then they charged him over $14 for hazardous waste disposal. Man, that hose must have been dangerous.
I had a fantastic day working on the tractor, but the joy is blunted by the knowledge that I can’t use it for anything until I make brush forks. The old ones are awful, and they don’t fit the quick attach adaptor. I have to get a new plate that fits the adaptor, and then I have to cut it up and weld the old forks to it. Another couple of hundred dollars. On the plus side, I’ll be doing it myself instead of relying on people who keep telling me it will be done by the end of the week. Every week.
One thing I hated about my old forks was that they moved around all the time. They could not be made to stay rigid, so impacts from things I hit turned them this way and that, and I had to get off the tractor over and over to line them back up. Now that I want to make a new attachment with forks, I’m concerned that rigid forks will send all that torque back to the bucket and cause problems with the hydraulic cylinders.
I guess that won’t happen. The bucket itself has hit a lot of things, and the cylinders are fine. I suppose I could rig up shear pins, but it’s probably unnecessary.
I looked into buying steel for new shop shelves. The quote was $350. That’s around $150 more than I hoped, but even though steel prices are dropping, steel is a lot higher than it used to be. Perhaps that will change now that the recession is picking up momentum. Once China’s real estate collapse finally breaks through the measures the CCP has taken to hide it, steel should be very cheap indeed. As should copper.
Seems like God is making things easier and easier for me. Things I couldn’t do before get done. Hope it continues and increases.
No Comments »Any Harbor in a Storm
September 12th, 2022When China Fails, Cambodia Comes Through
Once again, Harbor Freight’s army of Chinese factory workers has come to my rescue. Or has it?
Some years back, I decided to turn a mini lathe into a CNC lathe. I bought a set of plans and went to work, and I got it to work, sort of.
I highly recommend not doing what I did. The plans I bought said to use a long piece of a peculiar type of threaded rod instead of a ball screw, and I ended up with a great deal of backlash. They say you can program it out, but I moved on to other things before I did that. I have considered putting a ball screw in it, but I haven’t done it.
It is possible to make one of these project lathes work, but it may not be worth the effort once you get done. Depends on what you want to do. Lathes are inferior to mills, regardless of what most hobby machinists believe, and this is the reason why CNC mills are much, much more popular than lathes. If you absolutely have to make your own CNC machine, it should be a mill.
Anyway, I brought the lathe up here from Miami either 5 years ago or 3 years ago, and I plopped it on the same Black & Decker Workmate it occupied in Miami. And as it did in Miami, it collected dust and sat in the way.
I considered building a wheeled cart for the lathe, but I never did it. I also considered selling it, but it seems like I always have a hard time drawing people who will pay reasonable prices for things. And I kept thinking the lathe might be worth keeping if I put a good screw in it and learned how to program it better.
Okay, I hate selling tools. There. Now I’m being honest. Happy?
I’m glad I didn’t build a cart, because I just put a new acquisition under it. I bought me a FOURTH Harbor Freight tool chest.
My first two chests are the small US General kind, and they’re Taiwanese. They are holding up my welders now while sitting on custom welded bases I made. The third chest is a bigger US General. It’s Chinese, even though it looks like it was made in the same factory as the other ones. Only the wheels are different. The one I bought today turned out to be from Cambodia, of all places.
I didn’t know the Cambodians made anything. Harbor Freight is certainly playing the field these days. I wonder if the Chinese know they sell Taiwanese products.
The line my new chest belongs to is called Yukon, and it’s supposed to be one tier lower than US General, which produces very, very good chests at excellent prices. I looked the new one over, and my verdict is that there is very little difference in quality, if any. I would say the sheet metal is slightly wavier in places, and the chest is only 18″ deep, whereas the US Generals are 22″ deep.
I wanted a chest that took up less room and consumed less cash than US General, so Yukon’s chest fit the bill perfectly.
The nice thing about Yukon chests is that they have solid hardwood tops, which US General doesn’t provide. It’s easy to screw stuff to hardwood, it’s more ridgid, and it’s easier to replace than steel.
The neat thing about this story is that I used another Harbor Freight tool to get the chest out of my car. Ordinarily, I would have drafted my friend Mike, but he’s out of town.
The employees at my local store assumed doubtful expressions when I told them I had an SUV with no trailer outside, but I had measured the car, so I thought I had a good chance. By way of encouragement, I told them they could just refund the money and take it back if it wouldn’t fit. That didn’t seem to excite them much.
Anyway, the Harbor Freight guy and I shoved the chest into my car, and when I got home, I removed it by pushing it onto my Harbor Freight Central Machinery hydraulic cart. This thing will lift 500 pounds from about 9″ from the ground to maybe 30″.
Everyone needs one of these. Or the bigger one, which lifts 1000 pounds. They are unbelievably handy. And they can be modified. You can put a big table top on one and use it for a workbench. You can attach ramps to one and push or drive mowers and so on onto it. I have repaired and installed wall ovens singlehandedly with one.
I got one end of the chest on the cart, and then I put a $17 Gorilla collapsible aluminum bench behind my bumper. I got the box out so one end was on the cart and the other was on the bench. Then I managed to lower one end onto the floor by myself. The box weighed about 170 pounds according to Harbor Freight’s site, so handling one end was not impossible.
Putting the casters on a heavy tool chest by yourself is an interesting experience, but I came up with tactics that worked, and I didn’t put a scratch or dent on anything.
Getting the lathe off the Workmate was a joy. I didn’t enjoy lifting it, because with the stepper motors, it probably weighs over 100 pounds, but I was glad to put it onto a wheeled platform so I could move it around instead of killing workshop space permanently with it. Also, a lot of junk and crud had accumulated in its part of the shop, and I got to clean it all out. The filth was amazing.
Now I have good access to the lathe, and I can put all my mini-lathe tooling and parts in handy, spacious drawers instead of using the ridiculous toolbox I bought years ago. Toolboxes tend to cling tenaciously to shelves and the floor and discourage the use of whatever is in them. Chests are warm and giving. They practically throw their contents into your arms. In other words, they’re convenient, and convenience is at least a third of getting any job done.
I now think I need to get a ball screw, and I should also think about putting Mach 3, the CNC program I used, on my ancient 2005 laptop. I have never been able to make myself throw this laptop out, and now I have a valid use for it which it is well able to perform.
The big controller box I made for the lathe fits in the chest’s bottom drawer, which is fantastic. It won’t be able to collect any more crud there.
I am now up to…let’s see…SIX tool chests. And I regret nothing. Storage is extremely important if you actually want to get anything done in a shop. Without it, things get damaged and lost, and the things that aren’t lost are impossible to find. Instead of working, you spend half your time walking in circles looking for what you need.
As the photo shows, the chest I bought is blue. I am making a real effort to add color to the shop.
I am now planning to put in a split unit for cooling, and I will have to add a ceiling and insulate the doors. Once these things are done, there will be nearly no reason for me to ever go in the house.
I credit God with my success. When you can’t get things done, there is usually a supernatural reason. Rhodah and I have started seeing things returned and restored.
Now I have to finish putting my tractor back together. That’s easy now that I managed to put it in my shop. It seems like we have torrential rain here every day now. Well…we DO, actually. But now that the tractor is indoors, it’s no big deal.
In other news, I got trolled after my last post. I wrote about the vision my wife had, in which God said the royals would have a funeral soon. The vision occurred on June 22, and I wrote about it a couple of days later. Some guy showed up and made fun of us, and he also ridiculed the gift of tongues and the vision, so he blasphemed the Holy Spirit Himself.
I decided to publish the comment because sometimes when someone does something they will later be embarrassed about, it’s best to see to it they get the exposure they wanted at the time. What he said will not age well.
It’s strange that he ridiculed a documented vision that clearly came true, but I guess he wasn’t concerned with being analytical. I can understand ridiculing people whose predictions fail, especially when they insist they didn’t fail. I’m thinking of the people who still predict a 2020 Trump win. I don’t understand ridiculing someone whose prediction came true, especially when that person’s husband revealed the prediction without making any claims about the source and without asking for money or a new jet.
Anyway, we have prayed for him. As I heard a preacher say recently, everyone will believe in God eventually. Here’s hoping my commenter comes to believe before it’s too late.
No Comments »Queen’s Fate Predicted in Vision
September 10th, 2022Russia and Japan Next?
On June 24, I wrote about a couple of predictive visions my wife had a day or two earlier. I wrote about them in case they turned out to be from God. No one with any brains has any respect for a prophet who predicts the past. If you think God told you something about the future, you should reveal it before it happens, not after.
This week, one of her visions came to pass.
Here is my description of her first vision:
In one vision, she went into Buckingham Palace. There was a small table there. On the table, there was a small tree. It was not a real tree. It was jewelry. It appeared to be made of white gold, and it had pearls on it, like fruit. One of the pearls dropped off, and God told her there was going to be a funeral soon.
That would have been on about June 22, and Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8. That means she died 78 days after my wife had her vision. That’s “soon.”
Am I saying this means the vision was from God? No. I’m just saying it proved to be correct. My best guess is that it came from God. We know Satan can give people visions. Anyone who did drugs in college can tell you that, and Mohammed created a false religion which was based on a vision from Satan. Assuming he actually had a vision and didn’t just make it up.
Was the funeral vision inspired by news about the queen’s physical condition? If you Google, you will see there was very little news about the queen’s health during the week before Rhodah had her visions. People knew her health was deteriorating, but the news wasn’t flooded with stories about it. Also, news stories don’t cause visions. You can have a dream inspired by a news story, but visions happen when you’re awake.
The news that the first vision came true concerns me. Do I really care about the deaths of foreign monarchs? Is that why I’m concerned? I’m not a royal watcher. That’s for women and homosexual men. I’m concerned because of the second vision.
In the other vision, Russia attacked Japan. She was surprised, because she thought Taiwan, not Japan, was in danger, and everyone thinks China, not Russia, will attack.
To be specific, she said Russia was bombing Japan in the vision.
After Rhodah had her visions, I Googled, and I learned that Russia and Japan don’t get along. They have battled in the past, and because of World War Two, Russia now claims some islands which seem to belong to Japan. These islands have a lot of strategic importance, because they give Russia Pacific ports that don’t freeze over. Russia’s access to the Pacific is not good.
We don’t make money from religion, so unlike most–well, ALL–of the false prophets who said God told them Trump would be reelected in 2020, we have no motivation to make up prophecies. We don’t try to manufacture them. That makes us somewhat more credible than the offering-dependent charlatans. On the other hand, even a sincere Christian can be misled by hostile spirits.
I am not predicting that Russia will attack Japan, based on what my wife saw. Just relaying the information so it will be documented one way or the other.
3 Comments »Shelf-Absorbed
September 5th, 2022Little Shop of Horrors no More
While my wife and I wait to be permitted to see each other in Ireland, and while what we hope are the last days of our wait for a green card pass, I continue to work on my shop.
I finished my belt grinder cart. Photo below. It’s almost as great as it looks.
Is any project ever really finished? I still want to put some kind of arm on it to hold a shallow container of water below the 2″ by 72″ belt. It will catch sparks and keep crud out of the drawers.
Today I have been emptying boxes that have been on the floor since 2019, when I moved my big tools up here. I am also getting stuff ready to throw out. As I work, the shop gets bigger and bigger, and my ideas about building a new shop seem more and more ridiculous.
My next project will probably be shelves.
I have a huge 4-tier 4′ by 8′ set of shelves against one wall. I am not happy with it. It used to have the long side against the wall, making it very difficult to use because of the reach. Now both long sides are exposed. It’s still not great, because it juts out into the garage and takes up too much room.
I figure it has almost 128 square feet of storage, not including the floor. I would like to create a similar amount of shelving on the walls. This would open up the center of the shop.
I got an idea from Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. You would think a person like me would be a big fan of the show, because it’s all about tools and a sort of engineering, but I’m not. I don’t have the attention span for it. It drags a lot while they’re building things and explaining. I’m always thinking, “Come on man. Blow something up.”
Also, the chemistry of the hosts is somewhat off-putting. Everyone knows they don’t like each other, and it shows. When I watch, I always feel like Hyneman is trying hard not to sock Adam Savage in the mouth, and while I can see how Savage would get on a person’s nerves, I think most people would get along with him better. Just a guess.
Anyway, Hyneman’s primary business is in a terrible building which is about 100 feet long and 12 feet wide. I assume he must have gotten a great price. To cope with the shape of the building, he created his own shelves. They cover one wall. He could have gone out and bought prefab shelves and attached them, but they would have been expensive, and I don’t know if anyone sells appropriate shelves. His ceiling is very high.
He got himself some 1″-square tubing and welded it into a system of shelf supports. It’s brilliant. He has vertical tubes which appear to be about three feet apart, and he welded horizontal tubes to them to hold the shelf material. I don’t know what the material is. Probably plywood.
As he pointed out, welding is extremely fast compared to drilling and screwing, and square tubes are very easy to weld together because they have a lot of flat surfaces. I don’t know what tubing costs right now, but steel prices have been dropping, so it may be possible to get 12 feet of tubing for around $10. If that’s true, I could put up a framework for maybe $120. Two shelf units 9 feet long with 4 shelves each would give me 108 square feet of shelf. It would be better to use 6 shelves per unit, because shelves that are too far apart are wasteful. This would give me 162 square feet.
Plywood is expensive, but not like it used to be, and I could cannibalize the plywood in my existing unit.
As part of the project, I would like to get a small shed for materials. Then I could keep more tubing and plate and so on. Grabbing stuff you already have is always better than driving to buy more.
The shop has gotten so much bigger, I am once again able to park my garden tractor and utility cart in it. The big tractor is too much to ask for, but with all the new space, I should be able to forgo a new shop and put up a smaller shelter for the tractor and a few implements.
Guess I better get back out there. Those dead roaches aren’t going to sweep themselves out into the yard.
1 Comment »Unholy Roller
August 29th, 2022Doing Your Best Doesn’t Always Help
Some people are impressed by surgeons. Some people are impressed by gymnasts. I am impressed by painters.
I don’t mean all painters. Painting a picture is easy. Painting a house is easy. People who can do these things are a dime a dozen. I’m impressed by people who can paint THINGS. Even a mailbox is hard to paint well. How people manage to paint cars and motorcycles is beyond me.
I made myself a nice tool arm rack for my belt grinder. I created it to fit on the side of a Harbor Freight tool chest. It wasn’t hard. Just cutting, welding, and grinding. Then I tried to paint it. What a nightmare.
I figured I would use Rust-Oleum farm implement paint in John Deere green. Truck bed paint is tougher, but it’s always black or a color which is repulsive. I got myself a can of primer and a can of paint, and I figured I was on my way.
First problem: it rains here every day now. Torrential rain. It starts in the afternoon and goes on for hours. Sometimes it starts again at night. I don’t have a shed where I can hang things to paint them, and painting them in the shop is a problem, so I ordinarily hang them from a limb of a magnolia tree I plan to cut down. Finding a time to hang this project was difficult. Seemed like every time I went outside, it started raining.
I finally got it primed, and I found a way to paint it in the shop. When I painted it, the paint was rough. This was a new problem. I have gotten better results with earlier projects.
It turned out to be a couple of things. First, spray paint is harder to apply smoothly than brush paint, which I have used in the past. Second, the primer I picked was a high-build primer. I thought it would cover imperfections. Instead, it provided imperfections of its own in the form of a sandy surface.
I took an angle grinder and removed all the paint and primer. I chose a new primer and started over. By this time, I had lost days.
I didn’t take chances. I sanded the new primer before spraying, and then I added the paint. The result was adequate. It could really use more sanding, but it will do, and I can always wet-sand the paint and add another coat.
I planned to put a sheet of 3/4″ plywood on top of the cart to distribute the weight of the grinders and give me something to screw them to. Yesterday I made the sheet. I cut, sanded, and primed it. I used a roller to prime it.
Before I could prime it, I had to deal with the primer that shot all over the table saw, the project, my drill, my apron, the floor, and me, among other things.
I had obtained a tool for stirring paint. It goes in a drill. I lowered it into the can and used the low gear to stir. No problem. Very controllable. I figured it was so easy, I could go ahead and use the high gear.
When I changed gears and pulled the trigger, half of the paint went up, out of the can for good, and onto everything around it. It happened instantly. No possibility of controlling it.
An hour later, after learning that turpentine is the only really good thing to use to clean up spilled latex paint, I took my 6″ mini roller and painted both sides of the plywood.
Then the bugs took notice.
A june bug flew in from my left, did a spiral, and corkscrewed into the fresh primer, where it lay kicking its legs. A swarm of little flies showed up shortly thereafter.
I fixed things by putting a fan next to the plywood to prevent bugs from landing.
Today I got another 6″ roller cover. Cleaning roller covers isn’t really possible. You can squeeze enough paint out to keep them usable for a couple of days, but you will never be able to clean a roller cover to the point where you can use it to paint a new color. I picked Home Depot’s best cover, supposedly. I didn’t want to take chances.
I stirred the paint successfully and started applying it. Then I saw a big cluster of fibers stuck to the board. I thought it fell from somewhere, but I was wrong. It came from the roller. All over the board, there were little hairs that came from my expensive “professional” roller cover.
Now the board is drying. It has one coat of paint on one side, and that coat has fibers in it. I can’t do anything to it until tomorrow, when I hope I can sand it and make the fibers vanish without destroying the primer and paint.
I can’t believe Home Depot sells this terrible product. It is also extremely irritating to try to do everything right and then be let down by a product which is not merely worthless but destructive. It’s bad enough when a product doesn’t work. When it destroys other things and ruins hours or days of work, it’s a catastrophic product.
It should take two days to paint a board well. I figure I am looking at 4, minimum. Sand and paint tomorrow. Paint the day after. Paint again the day after that.
Other than that, the project is going well. I attached the rack I made to the cart, and it fits perfectly. It will hold 4 tool arms very well. There is a holder for a 5th arm, but it has limited potential because the enclosure for the VFD is under it and prevents the holder from allowing a long arm to slide the whole way in. I put the holder in anyway because I may get a new VFD some day, and the holder might conceivably have a use for a shorter arm.
Adding the 5th holder at this point was easy. Adding it later would have required removing paint, welding, grinding, painting again…
If I get a different VFD that doesn’t require a platform, I’ll still need to do some of these things, but it will be a much simpler job.
After all this, I have to put my table saw on wheels. The base I have on it now is an add-on from Amazon or somewhere, and it’s about 1% as good as one I could make myself. I’ll go back to truck bed coating. It’s very easy to apply.
I’m wondering if I should keep my little Rockwell 1×42 grinder. It’s a nice tool, but I have a 2-HP motor and a spare VFD sitting around. That’s maybe $1000 worth of hardware. It’s the parts of a grinder that make up most of the cost. I could probably make the rest for $100. Two pulleys, a spring, and a body made from a small amount of welded tubing or plate. Couple of other things. A cord.
I could make a second 2×72 grinder that rotates so the belt is horizontal. Or I could just make a grinder which is fixed in a horizontal position. There is no reason to have a rotating grinder when you have them in two orientations.
At least I don’t think there is.
If you have two grinders, you can put different belts on them so you can go back and forth when you’re doing different jobs.
Anyway, I hope to see this project finished this week.
4 Comments »Nein
August 22nd, 2022No Munich for You!
I will say this for the Germans: they may not be helpful, but they are fast. My wife applied for a tourist visa last week, and she was turned down early this morning. Why? Because they think she wants to stay in Germany as an illegal alien.
This is different from our experience with the Italians. Their representative in Lusaka lied to us, convincing Rhodah she would get a visa if we bought airline tickets in advance. She was extremely rude and insulting, too. The Germans were polite and truthful and simply said no.
I have been reading about the problems Africans have getting visas in Europe. It appears to be a systemic thing.
I read a remarkable story about two African scholars. They helped put together some kind of scholarly gathering in Europe, with lots of academics. They visited Europe once and went home. Then they applied to return for the event. Their presence was vital to the event’s success. Excluding them would have been like excluding the Rolling Stones from a Rolling Stones concert. They were clearly employed in their own country. They had all sorts of proof they intended to return. They were turned down.
Boris Johnson, former prime minister of England, acknowledged the problems Africans had with visas. A couple of years back, he got so upset, he spurred reforms.
Some people say the problem is racism. I don’t think that’s accurate, although it may be. I think it’s just incompetence and institutional prejudice.
Prejudice is not the same thing as racism. You can be prejudiced about anything. It doesn’t have to be race. To be prejudiced means you make judgments without knowing the facts. The people who grant European visas are very clearly prejudiced against citizens of African countries. Even the nice countries. Not just Nigeria.
A baboon could look at Rhodah’s history of travel to foreign countries, as well as her husband’s assets in America, and realize there is no possibility she will try to stay in Europe and clean people’s toilets for cash. The Europeans, who are known to be smarter than baboons, didn’t really look at our applications. They just stamped them. African? No visa.
This makes me realize there is no point in trying to find Zambian employment or buying Zambian real estate for Rhodah. The Europeans claim they look for such ties when granting visas, but they are obviously lying. If two university instructors can’t get in, with a horde of European academics vouching for them, and a history of visiting and then going home, a crummy Zambian house and a job won’t get Rhodah in.
Why should a house or a job help? You can move to Europe and then sell your house. You can move to Europe and quit your job in Zambia so you can get down to toilet cleaning and hiding from the government. Sure, if you’re the president of Zambia, or you own a huge emerald mine you have to manage personally, you would need to get back to Zambia fast. Other people with normal jobs and properties would not.
A normal Zambian job would not be a big motive to get back to Zambia, because an illegal alien would be trying to get away from a life of normal Zambian jobs.
I don’t think a Caucasian would have been approved, either, but I can’t say for sure. Rhodah said the lady at the Italian embassy sucked up to a white family during the same visit when she was snotty to Rhodah.
The Germans were polite and respectful and still turned her down, so maybe the demeanor of embassy employees doesn’t mean much.
We are not upset with the Germans, because they didn’t abuse us. They were just following orders.
Sorry.
We are back to looking at destinations.
Oddly, Hong Kong is now open, and we could both go tomorrow without visas. It would be an interesting destination, even if it’s small and not likely to keep us entertained for more than three or four days. The big problem with Hong Kong is the quarantine rule. We would have to sit in a special hotel for three days and pass covid tests. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s a consideration. What if one of us failed a test? Imagine two weeks in a hotel room, with the same room service menu in front of you the whole time.
Singapore and the Philippines are open and will let Rhodah in immediately. Both hot, humid places. Singapore is tiny, so again, not much to sustain our interest. The Philippines are poor and don’t have much to offer.
We can go to a whole bunch of sweaty beach destinations. Lots of Caribbean islands. Bermuda. The Seychelles. Beaches only appeal to shallow people who don’t have a lot going on upstairs, though. Lie in the sun. Get drunk in the evening. Parasail. Lie in the sun. Get drunk again.
We are looking into the UK because of Boris Johnson’s efforts. We are also going to apply to Ireland again. It’s not the destination of our dreams, but it’s pleasant and welcoming. The Irish treated us very, very well, both at the embassy and during our visit. We will never forget that, even if we do get tired of tourist-grade fish and chips.
I have never had any interest in visiting England or Scotland. Ugly architecture, no mountains, mediocre scenery, bad food which is in some cases frightening…not exciting. I have no interest in going to “the old country” and looking up my ancestors. I have no ties whatsoever to Great Britain. I don’t care about my ancestors. I’d be over there eating disappointing meals and wishing I were in France or Austria.
I don’t understand people who want to poke around in courthouses and libraries and look for their own surnames. Maybe that would be interesting if I had noble blood or something, but my ancestors were pretty much owned by nobles and did absolutely nothing to make the world remember them.
Even if your ancestors were a big deal, should you really be proud? Here’s something you can say to most people who have impressive ancestors: “If they were so great, what happened to you?”
I’m not interested in getting to know the British, because I have seen such disappointing things. Unbelievable coarseness. Rudeness. Arrogance. Hatred of Christianity. Maybe the media and the web show the worst side of England, but I don’t want to bet thousands of dollars to find out the truth.
Maybe I’ve watched too many Guy Ritchie movies.
The French are rude, and that is fact, not bigotry, but I still want to go back. The food and sights are worth putting up with the percentage of French people who are offensive. When the British grow a Mont Blanc and invent things that can compete with croissants and Napoleons, I might change my mind and put Great Britain on my list beside France.
I’m harder on Americans than anyone, in case a British person is reading this and feeling feisty. American places I would pay not to visit: Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Cleveland, Atlanta, Houston, Miami….
I would rather spend a month in London or even Glasgow than a day in Miami.
Many of our cities are snakepits. It amazes me that foreigners are willing to pay to see them.
I think I really depressed a guy in Ireland. He was looking forward to his Miami vacation, and I made the mistake of giving him my views. Dude…you live two hours away from…EVERYTHING…and you want to go to Miami, sit on one of the world’s worst beaches, and spend half your vacation stuck in traffic, listening to rap through the closed windows?
The nonexistence of Miami will be one of the key benefits of the Messianic Age.
Think of the places an Irish person could go for a fraction of the cost of a Miami mistake. Rome. Athens. The Tirol. Paris. Marseilles. Istanbul. Vienna. Norway. Zermatt. It makes me sick.
I should have kept quiet, though.
Okay, whatever. We’ll pick a couple of places in Ireland we haven’t seen yet, we’ll get really nice hotels, and we’ll tough it out. Maybe we’ll see London if things go our way. First world problems, right? The best kind of problems to have.
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