Ian 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.

Tractor 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.

Kubota 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.

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

The festival of sudden inconvenient repairs continues here at the compound.

Let’s see. I put in a new air conditioner last week. My garden tractor’s alternator quit. My other tractor still has a broken front gear case, and the steering cylinder is not connected. I had to clean my roof gutters. I had to fix a windshield leak on my Dodge Ram. I am still trying to build a new welding cart.

My well pump’s expansion tank pipe broke three days ago, and I had to fix that. Day before yesterday, in a completely unrelated surprise, the pump stopped working. I found out the on/off switch was a mess, and the pressure switch didn’t look too good, either. Worked on it in the heat and humidity until I realized it was going to require an expert.

The pump guys came, and they put in a new pressure switch and replaced a burned relay. Along the way, they learned that the check valve was finished, so that accounted for the rest of the $392.50.

I still have to replace the on/off switch. I am tempted to leave it as it is; three sets of wires held together with wire nuts. The circuit breaker is 25 feet from the pump, so the on/off switch is more or less redundant.

I will put a new switch in anyway.

Before the pump guys arrived, I had to bathe in the pool twice. After they fixed the pump, I thought everything was grand. My bidet attachment was working again. That’s something you really miss when it’s gone. I thought I was in for some smooth sailing. Then I noticed the water on my bathroom floor.

I had been using a bucket and pool water to flush the can, so I thought I had spilled water on the floor. No; no such luck. The toilet was leaking where the fill valve met the tank. I tried to fix it last night, and then I gave up and shut off the water supply. This is why I have a guest bathroom.

Today, I fooled with it again, and I got some wonderful news.

I have a Briggs Vacuity toilet. This is a green marvel from the infancy of hippie-approved toilets. Under the hood, there is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would drive Montgomery Scott himself to find a way to freebase Romulan ale.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. Inside the porcelain tank, there is a smaller plastic tank. Inside that tank, there is an upside-down plastic jug. There is an air tube that comes up from the bowl.

Because of the plastic tank, you can’t get by with a single gasket that surrounds the fill valve pipe inside the porcelain tank. You have to have a gasket between the plastic tank and the porcelain. Guess what that gasket does. It goes bad. Guess how you replace it. You remove the entire porcelain tank, remove the plastic tank from the porcelain, install the gasket, and put it all back together. Along the way, you have to replace a bunch of other gaskets because only an idiot replaces one gasket when he has something taken apart.

Guess what the geniuses at Briggs did. They stopped selling gaskets. This toilet is unbelievably stupid, and Briggs knows it. They abandoned it.

That’s not completely true. You can still buy other parts that can’t save the toilet once the $1.51 unobtainable gasket goes bad.

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

I looked at this thing for a long time, and I came up with ideas.

1. Take the tank apart, cut off all the environmentalist bits of plastic except for those required to make the toilet function, plug the vacuum-tube hole permanently, and reassemble what’s left as a normal high-flow toilet. This will happen eventually, but not today, because I needed my toilet ASAP.

2. Buy a big rubber washer with a 1″ hole and put it on the outside of the toilet around the fill valve pipe. The other gaskets are all inside the tank. If there is a good solid gasket on the outside, they become irrelevant. I suppose some water inside the tank will go where liberals don’t want it to go, because it will be able to move from the plastic tank to the porcelain tank, but it will fill and flush just fine, it won’t run, and it won’t leak, and also, who cares what liberals want?

3. Buy and install a new toilet. I have never installed a new toilet, and this is not the weekend to start.

If I did buy a toilet, it would be a Toto one-piece toilet.

I have had two Toto toilets in the past, and they made defecation something to look forward to. They worked flawlessly, they were comfortable, they came with slow-close lids, and I’m pretty sure they would have flushed bricks.

Toto is a Japanese company, and we all know the Japanese have a sick obsession with quality toilets. They make toilets that massage and sing and so on. Japanese toilets are the Swiss watches of toilets.

Today I learned that one-piece toilets are totally superior to two-piece toilets. They are much more reliable. That’s all I need to know. There is no more important toilet attribute.

I think I should eventually try to convert one of my Briggs socialist hippie toilets to full-flow, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll install one Toto a month until they’re gone.

I really hate all the green garbage they’re selling us. Green products don’t work. They cost more. They kill American jobs. They kill great companies that employee huge numbers of people. They waste a huge amount of man hours, materials, and resources, just so we can be fashionable. Yes, there are fantastic green products, but we never seem to get those until our landfills are full of the bad green products that came first.

I am hoping I can go to bed tonight. I mean, just go to bed. Without hearing funny noises from the air conditioner or seeing water on the carpet or smelling smoke or having the ceiling collapse.

It’s a Saturday, and that’s bad. Friday night is the most likely night for something expensive to fail, and Saturday comes next.

In better news, I had a great Christian encounter today.

Five years ago, when my dad and I moved here, the man who owned the house sold me his two tractors and utility cart. He offered all three for much less than the big tractor alone was worth. I had to have someone look the machines over before writing the check, so I Googled and found a mechanic.

He checked the machines out and said they were okay, I sent him money, and that was that.

When I damaged the Kubota so badly I was no longer willing to try to fix it myself, I thought of this mechanic. I called him, and he said he would take the job. It took weeks for us to work things out, and he arrived today.

While we were talking, it became obvious to me that he was not a Democrat, and that meant he might be a Christian. I steered the conversation toward God, and then things took right off.

Like me, he has met Jesus. I mean personally. I don’t mean he suddenly believed and calls that meeting Jesus. Jesus himself came to him.

He was a kid, and he and his friends fished together. They liked to fish under a bridge. Over time, they had dug back into the dirt under the bridge, creating a little cave they could sit in. The mechanic, whose name is Paul, couldn’t go with them one day, and on that day, a truck crossed the bridge while they were sitting under it. The cave collapsed, and they all died.

Later, Paul prayed about it. He was very disturbed. While he was praying, something came to him and started trickling into him. While it was there, he felt complete peace and love. He knew nothing bad could happen to him while it was there.

I told him it was Jesus, because the same thing had happened to me. He agreed, saying that was what he had thought.

We must have spent an hour and a half talking about this. We learned we had a lot of common interests. He showed up in a 28,000-pound Dodge truck with a crane and a Miller Bobcat welder/generator on it. He loves guns and shooting. He hates what the world is turning into. His wife home-schooled his kids.

My buddy Mike is living here now, and I got him to come over and meet Paul so they could share their experiences.

I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but for the first time since I’ve moved here, I felt like I had met someone I wouldn’t mind knowing.

Later, I was talking to my wife on Whatsapp, and I told her about it. She said that when she has an encounter like that, she has an unusual feeling: the feeling that she and her new acquaintance can be close. Good friends. I didn’t coach her. She said that before I told her what I had felt.

We prayed for Paul and his family. I told him a few things about the Holy Spirit and tongues. Maybe it will go somewhere.

He didn’t fix the tractor because there was an issue he was not sure he had the tools to handle. He usually works on big machinery, not little tractors. He called a friend of his who works on small machines, but he didn’t get a call back while he was here. We agreed on one thing: we would get it done.

I felt a lot better about the accident. God used my broken front gear case to bring Paul here when he needed to talk to me and have my wife and me intercede for him and his family. The repair may cost me as much as a couple of grand, depending on who ends up doing it. The dealer might have to be involved. I don’t care. If God is behind what’s happening, it’s more important than a little money.

Has Kubota Actually Seen This Tractor?

I guess you can’t say you’re a real farmer until you’ve fixed your own hydraulics.

I have done some hydraulic work in the past. It consisted of replacing a rear hydraulic cylinder (“rockshaft cylinder”) on a garden tractor. John Deere welds its small cylinders shut, thoughtfully, so customers won’t be bothered with bad old rebuilding jobs. Instead, you can just buy a very overpriced new cylinder every 5 years and go through the torture of installing it but not the extremely easy and cheap task of rebuilding it.

This is the main reason why I would never buy a John Deere product other than a T-shirt, although there are other reasons which are also pretty good.

I also fixed a leaking fitting on my Kubota’s loader once. That was nice, because fluid used to drip from it constantly, and I got tired of refilling it.

Other than that, I was pretty fortunate until recently, when fluid started shooting out of the Kubota’s steering cylinder so fast, it was not practical to consider refilling it between sessions.

“No problem,” I thought, “Kubota isn’t John Deere. They will not make this unbearable for me.”

Of course, I was wrong about that.

I have a download of a Kubota workshop manual, and its terse, optimistic manuals are a lot like promotional videos tractor companies put out. I wrote about these the other day. They make removing loaders look about as hard as making a gin and tonic. In reality, you may need things like a sledgehammer, a collection of spud wrenches, and a second tractor with a front end loader, and your clothes will be filthy 5 minutes into the job, but they don’t go into that.

Anyway, the manual said I had to remove the radiator, and that meant removing the front end loader, which is nearly impossible on this model. I kept asking people for advice, and someone told me I could get access to the necessary parts without doing all that. This encouraged me to continue trying.

The steering cylinder’s rod has a bit of heavy tubing on the end, and that bit of tubing attaches it to the tractor’s frame. There are a couple of holes in the frame, and a big pin goes through them. The rod end goes between the holes, and the pin passes through it, too. This holds the rod in place.

The pin has a groove around the top, and there is a little piece of heavy plate that fits into that groove. The edge of the plate sits in it and prevents the pin from moving up and down. This keeps your rod in the frame, where it should be. The plate is held down by…well, we’ll get to that.

Kubota said I had to take the radiator out to get to the single (single) bolt holding the plate in. An Internet guy said I just had to turn the steering wheel, and the bolt would reveal itself.

The truth turned out to be unlike anything either of them said. I learned I could access the single bolt by taking out the battery and the platform it sat on. I didn’t need to fool with the radiator. Then I found out there were TWO bolts, not one, and the second one was covered by the plate the battery platform had been attached to.

So the manual said there was one bolt, there were really two, and the second one could only be gripped, badly, by a box wrench. And Kubota put it in way tighter than it had to be, so a box wrench would have rounded it before loosening it.

Amazing.

Did Kubota deliberately make things harder than necessary so they could make more money on labor for repairs? I don’t know. Kubota itself doesn’t do repairs; the dealers do. I would guess Kubota gets the same income, from parts alone, regardless of how long repairs take. And by making warranty repairs harder, Kubota would be sticking it to itself. Which, now that I think about it, is a very Japanese thing to do.

My solution? Making a big ol’ hole. I drilled a 7/8″ part in the plate covering the second bolt, so I could get a socket on it and use a breaker bar.

Making the hole was a joy. No, really. I’m serious.

I did everything right, or at least I tried. I measured to find the location, and I made a dimple with a punch. I used a small drill to make a pilot hole. I used a hole saw to open it up. I used oil and drilled at the proper speed. The pilot drill on the hole saw snapped, and the hole saw bit into the plate, losing several teeth. Okay.

From there, I went to a step bit. I opened the hole up to around 5/8″, but the steps on the bit were too shallow to make a clean, uniform hole, so I had to use two Silver & Deming bits in succession. Finally, I had the hole I wanted, plus several gouges from the hole saw accident.

Fortunately, the gouges will be invisible when the tractor is assembled.

I was able to get a socket on both bolts, and I removed the rod end pin. After that, I managed to detach both hydraulic hoses without breaking anything, and I got the Pitman arm cap off. Then I retracted the rod manually and wiggled the cylinder out. Joy.

One of the great things about hydraulic leaks on farms is that the oil they release traps black dirt, so when you try to fix your problems, you are inundated with filth and oil. I had cleaned the tractor’s relevant parts as well as I could with a pressure washer, but there was still a lot of crud in places I could not hit. It took me quite a while to get the cylinder clean enough to handle.

Now I have a somewhat less dirty cylinder, and I need to visit a hydraulics shop.

Kubota wants $165 for the parts to fix the cylinder. They should cost something like $35. They are very ordinary parts. Kubota doesn’t make its own seals, wipers, and O-rings. I am pretty sure I can pay a shop for labor and still come out way ahead. This is literally a 10-minute job.

There are people out there discouraging amateurs from fixing hydraulic cylinders, threatening all sorts of disastrous consequences. I have looked into it, and it’s all nonsense, probably intended to con people into paying too much. Replacing the parts is an extremely easy job you can do without special tools. It helps if you have a weird tool that compresses inner seals so you can get them inside pistons, but those tools cost $30 a set on Amazon, and a set will cover a wide range of cylinders.

I would fix my cylinder myself if I knew what to order, but the shrewd businessmen at Kubota do not reveal the sizes of their rebuild parts. I may open it up anyway to make sure the interior isn’t scarred up, and perhaps I’ll be able to figure out what I need.

As of this minute, the odds are about 90% that I’ll pay to get the job done.

What are the take-aways here?

1. Kubota writes really bad repair manuals.

2. John Deere is worse because they weld hydraulic cylinders closed.

3. Rebuilding hydraulic cylinders is really easy and relatively cheap.

I am deriving a little satisfaction from doing all this myself instead of paying a dealer $1500 for transportation and repairs and waiting a month to get the tractor back. I would be more satisfied, however, if my tractor hadn’t leaked in the first place. It only has 1200 hours on it.

Next World to Conquer: Hydraulics

A couple of days ago, I finished converting the old bucket on my Kubota to SSQA. It took several days, and I would have been happier buying a new bucket. I couldn’t get the bucket before late summer, so I did what I had to do. The result is in the photo below.

I primed and painted the areas on the back of the bucket that were involved in the project. A lot of paint burned off the inside of the bucket, too, but I don’t plan to do anything about that until I get the tractor working again.

The project looks solid. My only concern is that I may have gotten the geometry wrong somewhere, leading to problems I won’t notice until I use the bucket. There is no set of comprehensive guidelines for welding SSQA mounts to a bucket. Every job is a one-time deal, and you do the best you can. I set my plates so they’re about half an inch off the ground when the bucket is on its bottom.

If it turns out there is a problem, I fully intend to sell the bucket and buy a new one. I don’t want to do this project twice.

I tried to use plasma and propane to cut the old mounts off and cut up the mounting plate for installation, but I don’t have real propane skills, and I lacked the right cutting tip, and my plasma cutter isn’t great for thick steel.

I ended up using my 6″ Metabo angle grinder and cutoff wheels. It was a breeze. Actually better than plasma, unless you have CNC. The cuts were very accurate, and it only took a few minutes to cut an end off a 3/8″ plate 18″ wide. If you have to get in places where a grinder won’t go, plasma and torches are great, but for straight cuts in open places, they can’t compare to a grinder.

Welding was uneventful. I used 0.035″ Harbor Freight wire and my $500 Harbor Freight multiprocess welder. I think that’s what I paid. It may have been $600. That thing is great. I prefer it to my Lincoln MIG because it’s easier to use. It has a nice digital display, and the torch is not as bulky.

I used DNA and acetone to clean off most of the grime near the new plates, and then I taped everything else off. I hit the plates and their surroundings with Rust-Oleum primer from a spray can, and I followed up with some Rust-Oleum Kubota Orange implement spray paint I already had. Worked just fine.

Now I have to fix the leak which is draining my hydraulic fluid.

A few weeks back, I put wood on my burn pile, and I noticed the tractor’s wheels were straightening up during turns. I didn’t think much of it. For all I knew, it was normal. Now I think the leak caused it. Last week, things got much worse in a hurry. I saw little puddles of fluid under the front end. I knew something had to be done.

My tractor is an L3710 with an LA681 loader. It’s a nice 37-horse machine. Big enough for most jobs around the farm, although 60 horses would be nicer. Most people are using little tractors in the general region of 25 horses, so I feel blessed.

To find out where the leak was, I thought I had to remove the front end loader so I could remove the side panels and look into the engine compartment. I was wrong about this, but I didn’t know it. I tried to get advice. I saw a bunch of useless Youtube videos in which smiling men in clean clothes popped the loaders off their little Kubotas, and I figured I could do it, too.

They did this:

1. Raise loader and extend built-in support struts to hold it up when detached.

2. Lower loader until the struts and bucket touch the ground.

3. Manipulate bucket to loosen the two pins at the rear of the loader.

4. Pull pins out, holding them gently between one finger and your thumb.

5. Disconnect hydraulic hoses.

6. Back tractor away from loader.

7. Dismount tractor and button spotless white tuxedo jacket while calling for a martini.

I tried this method, and I found out it won’t work for the LA681. This loader has a built-in guard for the front of the tractor, and it’s made from 3/8″ steel. It’s very heavy. There are two additional pins that attach it to the front of the tractor.

On top of that, the rear pins were cemented in place by rust and friction. They had never been greased. I managed to bang them out and get them to slide easily with grease, but it took quite a while. I never took the front pins out, because I wanted to get confirmation that the skinny struts on the loader were strong enough to hold it up with the grill guard attached.

While I was fooling with this, some online people reminded me of something I had forgotten: it wasn’t necessary to remove the loader in order to get the panels off the tractor. They lifted straight up. I had done this before, to fix a shutdown apparatus that went off on its own, but I didn’t remember this when I got into the hydraulic problem.

I got the panels off and pressure-washed a lot of black oil and filth out of the tractor so I could see. Then I identified the source of the leaking fluid. When I turned the steering wheel, oil shot out of the rear of the steering cylinder.

Hydraulic cylinders are sort of like car cylinders, but they pump oil instead of air and fuel. Car pistons have rings to seal them against the cylinder walls. A hydraulic cylinder has a bunch of O-rings and seals to do the same thing. My cylinder probably has two seals in it. I looked up all the parts, and in total, there are 14. To fix the cylinder, I have to take it out of the tractor, open it up, install new seals and other junk, close it, and put it back in.

Fixing the cylinder itself looks pretty easy, although I may pay someone to do it because it’s possible to do it wrong, and then you’re stuck doing the job over. What’s difficult is getting the cylinder out.

The workshop manual says to remove the heavy steel bumper and the radiator. To do that, guess what else I have to remove. The loader, which is connected to the bumper.

I’m not positive I have to do all that. It may be that it’s possible to get the cylinder out without removing the loader, but the manual would naturally specify the easiest way for a tractor with no loader.

I really don’t want to pay a dealer. They will charge me to take the tractor in and bring it back. Then they will charge to remove and reattach the loader. They will charge to remove and reinstall the cylinder. They will charge to rebuild the cylinder. The labor and hauling charges would be pretty bad.

The rebuild alone will probably run over $200. The parts are expensive because Kubota likes money, and there would probably be half an hour of labor in it.

Optimally, I would like to get the cylinder out and reinstall it myself, relying on a mechanic only for the rebuild. Whether that will be possible remains to be seen.

By the way, a new cylinder runs almost $1100. For comparison, generic cylinders (which I can’t use) from dealers cost less than $200. Cylinders for other brands of tractors are in the same ballpark. One wonders why Kubota can’t come a little closer to that figure.

At least I can go ahead and order a Kubota seal kit for the cylinder, right? Wrong. Kubota doesn’t make one. You have to identify all the parts yourself from a parts manual and order them separately so they cost as much as possible.

I feel somewhat discouraged. I fixed the tractor’s inability to get up to speed in reverse, I installed an SSQA adaptor without help, and I made my own SSQA bucket. I thought I had beaten the dealers. Now the tractor’s first debilitating mechanical problem pops up, just when sailing should be smooth.

I should be making my own SSQA brush fork attachment right now instead of sweating over the pressure washer and struggling to get what should be simple answers.

Have I bitten off more than I should have? Am I doing things God would rather I didn’t get involved with? Am I piling needless burdens on myself? I am going to pray about that.

Sometimes You Just Want to BUY Something

The person who laid out this property situated my shop so the doors on each end face east and west. Was this incredibly stupid or a masterstroke?

As it is, the burning sun roasts the east side of the shop in the morning and the west side of the shop until about 8 p.m. in the summer. Unpleasant if you’re working on the west side, which I frequently am. If the shop were situated differently, the sun would hit both sides of the shop pretty much all the time, but it would hit them from different directions as the day passed, and it would be possible to plant shade trees close to it to make the afternoons and evenings less miserable.

I guess the way it is is okay.

Today I removed the ears from my tractor bucket, and I quit when the real roasting started.

I put a quick attach adaptor on the tractor’s loader, and I also wanted a bucket that would fit it, but the buckets are backed up several months. That is no good, so I had to order a huge, heavy mount plate in order to modify the bucket myself. To make the plate fit, the ears have to be totally gone, ground flat. They were (were) welded in place on 4 sides, so they were not made with the intention of assisting people who wanted to remove them in a hurry.

I figured I would use my gas welding outfit with a propane cutting tip. A couple of years back, I bought a very serious Victor acetylene outfit and fixed it up so it worked with propane. The acetylene regulator will work fine with propane, and I have the acetylene stuff in case I ever decide to try gas welding.

Until today, I had never used the outfit for anything but heating. I heated the 1/2″-thick ears on my 3-point subsoiler because they were bent from pulling stumps and needed to be straightened. Worked fine, but it didn’t teach me anything about propane cutting.

I have a plasma cutter, but I thought it would be too hard to get it into the corners on the bucket, so two days ago, I decided to become a propane cutting expert. It did not go well.

First of all, my bucket appears to be 1/4″ thick, and my cutting tips are the wrong size. I have size 1 tips. I should have 0 or 00. Second, I don’t know what I’m doing.

By watching a few videos and asking questions on the web, I got to the point where I could sort of cut steel, and today I gave it a shot. I was able to cut through the ears, but it was a pain. The torch kept going out, and the metal took forever to yield. I decided to try plasma, which turned out to better suited to the job than I had thought.

I tried to cut sideways into the welds holding the ears on so the jet would not cut into the bucket itself. The main problem I had was that I blew molten metal under the ears where it solidified into bad welds. I also had problems with the jet dying for no clear reason. I think the terrible ground clamp that came with my Hypertherm plasma cutter was letting me down.

I cut and recut and recut. I finally managed to remove the parts of the ears that were perpendicular to the bucket’s surface, but the parts that lay flat against it were stuck. I got out the big Metabo grinder and some Walter Zip Disks and cut the metal loose except for the parts that sat directly on welds. Those parts, I am slowly removing with the Metabo and a smaller grinder equipped with a 40-grit Walter flap wheel.

Walter makes really excellent abrasives. I have learned to avoid the cheap stuff. Cheap disks do a much poorer job and give out quicker.

I have bought a second Harbor Freight rolling tool chest for conversion into a welding cart, and it is sitting near the tractor bucket. This is why the box the chest came in caught fire today.

I was shooting gobs of molten steel all over the place, and one flew into the base of the box, causing it to go up like a match. I was very impressed at how fast it started to burn. My hair didn’t burn nearly that well the many times I set it on fire today.

My friend Mike is staying with me, and he had moved the shop’s front garden hose to the back for watering plants, so I thought it was best to grab my wall-mounted extinguisher and see if it worked. It worked just fine, leaving nasty yellow powder everywhere. I put it on the shop floor so it would be convenient in case I needed it again, and then when I sat down on my Homer bucket to continue cutting, I also sat on the extinguisher handle, shooting more powder on the floor.

After a lot of struggling, I got both ears off the bucket, and now I just have a few strips of leftover metal to grind flat.

In retrospect, I see I should have used the plasma cutter to trace around the bottoms of the ears, cutting through the bucket and removing them in 20 minutes instead of what will end up being two days. I could then have welded a couple of new pieces of plate in the holes in the bucket, and everything would have been dandy. Would the plate have been as strong as the original steel? I assume so, but it doesn’t matter, because the mount plate is very thick and will be welded over the areas where the ears went, making those areas very strong even with ear-sized rectangular holes in them, let alone new steel plate.

Oh, well.

When you fabricate, you have to be confident, or you will never finish a job. You have to be willing to say things like, “I am going to cut this whole part off and put something else in later, because it is wasting my time.” Steel is not like wood. Once you cut wood out, it’s just plain gone. When you cut steel out, you can put more steel in and make your project as good or better than it was before you started. You have to get used to welding and cutting without fear.

When I decided to go with plasma, I checked to see if there were longer tips for getting into tight places. There are. Hypertherm makes them. Guess whose cutter they don’t fit.

I think I got my cutter in 2007. Not sure. It was some kind of anniversary for Hypertherm, because the cutter was painted in limited-edition gold. In 2008, they quit making it. Now they have completely different torches.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll get an upgraded torch. That can’t cost much.”

No, it doesn’t cost much. Unless $500 is much.

I looked the price up, and I could not believe it. I know American companies charge more for stuff, but come on. It’s a hose, a couple of wires, and a plastic pistol grip.

Hypertherm no longer makes the torch that came with my machine, so if I drop mine, it’s $500 or no plasma cutting.

My cutter is a Powermax600, which seemed like a big stretch for me when I bought it. It’s a 40-amp cutter, and that figure is the current it puts into the work. I think I paid around $1600, and that hurt.

I can buy an Everlast 60-amp cutter for $1000. Yes, it’s Chinese, but it’s good enough for many professionals. An Everlast would have an inverter, so it would suck less current and weigh a lot less for what it does. It’s only 6 pounds heavier than my machine and produces 60% more current. The duty cycle is lower, but who runs a plasma cutter 100% of the time?

Hypertherm wants $500 for a torch, and they want $2000 (street price) for the cutter that fills the slot mine used to. The new one is 16 pounds lighter, probably because inverters replaced transformers about 10 seconds after I clicked “Submit Order” to buy my obsolete machine.

I looked into Everlast because I was mad at Hypertherm for charging $500 for a torch, and because I thought maybe Everlast or some other Chinese product would work with extended tips. I have not found any evidence they work with extended tips, so I guess there is no reason to flip out and buy one.

Anyway, I should just learn to use the propane cutter. I have smaller tips on the way.

Once the tractor bucket is modified and painted, which should be Monday or Tuesday, I can build the new welding cart and make a small modification to the one I already built. Then I can get rid of my old Eastwood welding cart and put all my welding stuff into my two Harbor Freight chest/carts.

I should be able to get the cart made in a couple of days because I have all the parts this time. The mod on the old one will be somewhat taxing because I have to take it apart and take all the tools out of it before I can do anything.

Once the carts are done, I jump into fabricating a fork attachment for my tractor, so I will probably have to get a second mount plate. I’m hoping I can use part of the plate I already have. Of course, I would have to cut it somehow…

Now I know why Mrs. Douglas wanted to stay in New York when her husband moved to Hooterville.

Mount Everest and Skydiving are for Losers

Today I converted my Kubota to SSQA, which means Skid Steer Quick Attach. This is a style of front end loader that allows you to drop attachments and pick up new ones in a couple of minutes. Before SSQA, which, I am guessing, was developed originally for skid steers, changing attachments was a colossal nightmare. You had to remove four stubborn pins from your bucket, pull up to another attachment, spend half the day trying to line it up with the pins in the attachment, and put the pins in. It was really bad. I know that because my new SSQA adaptor is an attachment itself, and I just installed it on my old pin front end loader.

Removing the old bucket was not bad. I intended to drop it face down in the workshop so I could cut it up and modify it later, but the Kubota would not rotate it enough to do this, so I set it down with the top on cinder blocks and the bottom on the floor. I had to remove four bolts in order to take the pins out. A lot of people get new pins when they do this job, and that tells me they don’t take care of their tractors. My pins are in good condition, not much worse than new. The guy who sold me this tractor obviously greased the fittings sufficiently often to prevent damage.

If you don’t grease that type of part, you ruin your pins and risk wallowing out the holes they go in. Then you need to have the ears on your bucket replaced. Amazingly, people let this job go on big machines like excavators. Then they have to find fabricators who can both weld heavy equipment and do line-boring, which is a difficult way of making holes line up in large parts.

Putting the adaptor on was pretty awful. There were no clouds in the sky, and I started just when the sun started hitting the outside of the workshop. I was broiling.

I decided it was smarter to move the part to the tractor than to try to line the tractor up with the part, so I put the adaptor on my amazing Harbor Freight lift table. It will raise 500 pounds to waist height. The adaptor supposedly weighs 76 pounds, but it felt like a lot more to me.

This lift table is an astounding tool. Once you have one, you understand how badly you needed it.

I got the adaptor on there and wiggled the table around to line up the adaptor with the hydraulic rods on the tractor. Big mistake. Once I had done that, I had to find a way to line the adaptor up with the holes in the rigid FEL arms. I didn’t know the pistons would move independently when not attached to anything, so one extended farther out than the other, making it impossible to line the adaptor up with the FEL. I ended up removing the pins on the ends of the hydraulic rods and installing the ones in the FEL arms. After that, I was able to move the hydraulics around enough to make the remaining pins go in. It was a very unpleasant job, but at least it was possible.

I bought a huge 3/8″-thick mount plate to attach to the bucket. This was not necessary. It turns out you just need two rectangles; one for each end of the adaptor. You weld one rectangle to each end of your bucket. The plate I bought must weigh over a hundred pounds, and most of it will be cut out and set aside. Live and learn. I thought it was better to take a chance on buying too much steel than too little, since I had no idea what I was doing.

I think I can use the scrap to make mounts for the brush fork attachment I’m going to make. My old chain-on brush forks are obsolete now, but they are made from good steel, so I think I can put them on an attachment that will be useful for moving brush and logs and also pallets.

I would go ahead and buy a brush attachment, but they don’t exist. You can get pallet forks or a grapple. I don’t want either.

Pallet fork attachments cost a lot, and they come with two forks, and two forks will do a sad job of moving logs and brush. Things will fall out between them. I can get four forks, but that seems like a stupid idea when I have four chain-on brush forks on hand, which I will never be able to sell to the cheap people around here. You couldn’t sell these people quarters for nickels. They are incredibly tight. Selling things on the web is such a waste of time, I give things to charity.

I think grapples are stupid. They are no good at all for moving brush, and I can move big logs just fine with brush forks, which will carry a tremendous amount of brush. I could carry a grand total of one big log with a grapple, but I can get about five on the forks. I suspect men buy grapples just because they’re cool. I think men like pretending their tractors are Truckasaurus.

Tomorrow I hope to cut the unnecessary, in-the-way stuff off my precious Kubota bucket and install the mounts. Then I have to apply some paint. The paint is more intimidating than the fabrication. I hate painting.

Once the bucket is restored, I will look at the scrap I have on hand and come up with a plan for the forks.

The forks were made by the Charles Mitchem company, which I had never heard of before I got the tractor. In the past, some mechanical wizard put a Vise Grip on one of the turnbuckles that tighten the chains, and he ruined it. He compressed it permanently so it was just about impossible to turn one of the screws inside it. Vise Grips are great, but they are also some of the tools ham-fisted “bubbas” use to destroy things.

I contacted the company and got an email that was terse and useless. I thought it was rude. They told me to call a retailer. I would have said, “Sorry you’re having trouble with our product, but unfortunately, we are not able to sell directly to the public. We suggest you contact your local dealer and see what they can do for you. Here is the part you need, so you can tell them the number.”

I ended up buying a huge tap and cleaning out the turnbuckle. Lost sale there, Chuck. It’s a bad idea to ignore customers who can do their own metalworking.

Since they were so useless, I don’t feel too bad about criticizing their product. The forks are strong and very useful, but putting them on a tractor bucket is at least an hour’s work. After that, they move around when you lift things, and they damage your bucket. They have to be tightened over and over, so you have to get off the tractor repeatedly while you work. I would never buy anything like them again.

Another useless company: Florida Coast Equipment. This is the local Kubota place. I called them in an effort to get an SSQA adaptor. They said they would call back in 15-20 minutes. Then they didn’t call. Two days later, I called, and they claimed it would take at least two days to do “research” to find out if such a part existed. And they didn’t call.

What equipment or vehicle dealer has to do research to find out if a part exists? John Deere is one of the most thoughtless, greedy arrogant companies on Earth, but I can go to their website and learn the status of every [overpriced] part on my ancient garden tractor in seconds. You would think a Kubota dealer could do better.

I know Kubota makes an adaptor which can be made to work with my FEL, but I can’t get it because the dealer is unprofessional, so here I am with an ATI Tach-All which costs more. At least it’s already Kubota orange.

Some people say the Kubota adaptor is better. I don’t care. I can weld. Now that I have something to work with, it doesn’t matter whether it has problems. I can fix anything. I don’t think the Tach-All is inferior, though. It appears to be very well made. Very nice welds. Not many products have those these days.

I am looking forward to having the ability to use my bucket without forks. I am looking forward to switching attachments in a few minutes. I am looking forward to new attachments. A tractor is no good unless you have multiple attachments you can swap quickly. I now have quick attach capability at both ends of the machine, so I should be in good shape.

I need to find a way to extend the bucket’s lower lip so I can load it with leaves. That way, I can rake leaves into it and dump them quickly. I don’t need an attachment worthy of the space program. Maybe a plywood box. I’ll come up with something. These leaves have to go.

Maybe I’ll get a citrus crate. They’re made of plastic, and they hold about a cubic meter. I used to fill three wooden ones per day with grapefruit back when I was a kibbutz volunteer. It should be easy to find a cheap crate now that plagues have hit the world and the citrus industry is vanishing.

Another tractor victory: I fixed my reverse problem.

When I got this tractor, I noticed it was incredibly slow in reverse. I mean slower than crawling on all fours. I thought it was a nanny/lawyer thing. I knew my grandfather’s old Massey Fergusons moved much faster, but they banned diving boards, they banned lawn darts, they put ridiculous backup beepers on consumer vehicles…forcing farmers to creep in reverse seemed like part of the plan.

Today I asked around, and I decided to look at the pedal linkage. This tractor has a pedal that behaves like an accelerator, and it also determines your direction. It’s not a throttle. It doesn’t affect the RPM’s. It’s somehow connected to the transmission.

I found out the nut that went on the bolt that attached the pedal to the link was gone. I had been creeping in reverse for almost 5 years for nothing.

The pedal still worked okay for forward, because it bottomed out on the link and pushed it. In reverse, it barely did anything.

I checked as well as I could, and it looked like the bolt took an M8-1.25 nut. The threads were messed up, though, because the previous owner kept using the pedal without a nut, and the pedal rested on the threads.

I thought I would take the link out and run a tap over it, but there was no way. Of course, Kubota had made it hard to work on. Removing the fasteners that held the link on was not possible because Kubota installed them so tightly the nuts would have rounded before turning.

I tried removing the pin that held the pedal on, but it was held on with a snap ring that had holes too small for my snap ring pliers. Metric snap rings? I have no idea.

I found a flange nut lying around, and I decided to force it on. If the threads got more mangled, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be where I ws to start with. Fortunately, the nut overcame the bad threads, and now my tractor zips around like it should. For the first time since 2017.

I bought a new Harbor Freight rolling tool chest yesterday, just like my old green one, only red, to match my Lincoln. I turned the green one into a fantastic welding cart complete with bottles, and I plan to do the same thing with the new one. This will enable me to get rid of my old Eastwood cart, which was great for $50 but has no storage and takes up a ton of room. Once I have the new cart up and running, I can empty my portable toolboxes that contain welding-related stuff and use them for other things.

I didn’t want to get another chest while I was working on the tractor, but Harbor Freight came out with an unusual 25%-off coupon which applied to good products, not just the usual junk, so I jumped at the chance. Tomorrow I should go buy the metal I’ll need.

I may get a Milwaukee chest and mount my belt grinders on it. My shop is a catastrophe, and Milwaukee makes a chest that would end my belt grinder mess. It’s a very unusual chest which happens to be perfect for belt grinders.

On top of all this, I’m contemplating building another outbuilding. I filled my shop with tools, and I’m tired of leaving my cart and tractors outside. I was reluctant to commit to this property because I was thinking of moving to Tennessee, but I am starting to think this is where God wants me and Rhodah. I called 811 and had them locate all the underground wiring, so now I have a better understanding of where I can build and plant.

I also ordered a hitch and harness for the Explorer, and I want to build or buy a utility trailer. My truck is fine, but now that Mike is staying here with his trailer, I see that a truck is no substitute. I got a hitch I can install myself. It bolts up.

That’s about all for today. I guess it’s enough.

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I used to recommend a Christian teacher named Perry Stone. He got all sorts of revelation from God, and he taught about the deep truths of the Bible. He connected things in various books. He explained the meanings of symbols. It was something to see.

He didn’t ask for money, and he made it clear he never intended to. He counted on God to bring donations in. He gave materials to people who couldn’t pay, such as prisoners. He called his ministry Voice of Evangelism instead of putting his name on it.

Over time, he started to become somewhat crazy. He was angry a lot, and sometimes he relayed stories that were not true. He hadn’t checked them. He supplied information that wasn’t reliable.

He started to seem very proud of himself. He seemed to think he was always right. He wouldn’t admit it when he was wrong.

Eventually, he started asking for money. God didn’t give him what he wanted, so he appealed to people to help him build a big campus. He started calling his business Perry Stone Ministries.

I used to support his work, but it seemed to me that he was going astray, so I stopped. It was particularly ominous to see him appearing with Steve Munsey, a crooked megachurch grifter who is known for helping preachers get people to give them money. Rick Wilkerson Sr., the failed pastor of my old church in Miami, idolized Munsey and let him ruin his church. He thought Munsey was a genius because he had a Starbucks in his church.

I used to post comments on Stone’s Youtube videos, warning him to get away from Munsey.

In 2020, women associated with Stone accused him of gross sexual behavior, including things like showing them how sexually aroused he was. One said God had told him his wife Pam would be dead soon and that he needed to be with another woman. He took time off from preaching, but he went back very quickly.

He began attacking the victims and messengers. A lady stood up in church and called him a “nasty perv,” and he threatened to have her arrested and sue her, neither of which were credible options. He said those things because he panicked. His pride had been breached publicly, while he was on camera, in the pulpit, and after years of being surrounded by yes-men, he could not handle it.

He claimed he had a divinely-inspired dream about “ugly fish,” which represented women interfering with his ministry. He said he expected bad things, such as death, to happen to them.

In short, he went off his nut.

Recently, highly disturbing audio emerged. He had a meeting with two men who were close to him. One was a ministry leader, and the other was a cop who handled security for him. They tried to talk sense to him and calm him down. He cursed and said he was going to kill himself. I’ll provide quotations.

I’m going to go commit suicide up in the mountains and end this thing.

Listen to me, before God, I’m going to go take pills in the mountains … because I can’t put up with this. I am a very sincere person but I have almost no friends, man. And I have almost no friends because of s— like this.

I can’t shake a woman’s hand, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!” Pat them on the back, “Oh, he’s coming on to me!”

I will take my life before I let the ministry go down. I swear to God I’ll take my life!

No, no, no, no. This is going to get bigger. If he’s got letters, it means they’re talking. The ministry is ruined. I’m going to shut down and sell the building. I need to. I need to shut OCI down and sell the building and forget everything I’m doing. And if Pam Stone knows this, Pam Stone will leave me. Oh, she’ll find out. She’ll find out. And by accusations I’ll be destroyed, so what do I have to live for?

This is not your ordinary TV preacher scandal response. Stone reacted like a scared little girl, and he was caught up in selfishness, threatening to spite the world by depriving it of his exalted self. We haven’t heard any audio indicating remorse or a rational response. I doubt there is any.

The voice is undeniably Stone’s. You can go hear him on Youtube, and the story appeared in a reputable paper.

I looked at Stone’s Youtube channel last night. Videos are still popping up, many without Stone. Comments have been turned off. This is one of the signs of a ministry’s death. Crooked preachers like Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, and John Gray don’t let people comment on their videos. Cockroaches run from the light, as conservative Twitter users know.

I know what happened to Stone. Lust wasn’t his big problem. Pride was. He became so full of himself, he could not accept any kind of correction, and he craved wealth and admiration. After he became incorrigible, lust was able to get in and control him, and then after he sinned, pride made him lie.

God told me this: “The concealment of a sin is worse than the sin itself.”

I know why pride defeated Stone. He didn’t pray in tongues enough. He told people they should do it, but his own prayer life was scant. He bragged about the long hours he spent studying the Bible and other books. You can’t put in long hours every day and have a prayer life that works. It’s not possible.

He used to praise old mountain people who prayed in tongues “excessively,” and to him, “excessively” meant 20 minutes. That’s not excessive. That’s just a beginning. If you only pray in tongues 20 minutes a day, you aren’t winning at life. You are being deceived and defeated.

Stone thought a 20-minute session was a big deal, so he must have been putting in much less time than that.

One of the signs that you’re not praying in tongues enough is that you become deceived. Stone is clearly deceived. He isn’t being corrected by God, and he appears to be somewhat insane.

He needs to go home, quit preaching, get his prayer life going, and let God fix his life. He needs to repent publicly, for real, not like he did the first time, and apologize to the people he wronged. He needs to have demons cast out of him.

It’s a shame to see him taken down like this. He has become so deranged, he is willing to consider killing himself–going to hell–in order to avoid more embarrassment. His pride is worth more to him than avoiding eternal torture by an enemy who will have special punishments waiting for him.

Because he is crazy now, people will assume he was always crazy. They will be less inclined to look at the sound, valuable work he did years ago. Nice work on the part of Satan. He has retroactively defused bombs that were wrecking parts of his kingdom. Fewer people will benefit from Stone’s earlier teaching, so more people will be more vulnerable to attack. If he gets to torture Stone in hell, it will be the cherry on top of the sundae. What a trophy.

Stone didn’t teach people how to protect themselves, so many of his followers are sticking up for him. They’re not praying in tongues enough. They’re not seeking correction. As the Bible says, a bad tree bears bad fruit.

I was praying about this last night. I told God it was discouraging, because if a man with Stone’s background can fall, what could happen to me?

I have been proud and extremely resistant to correction from other people. I have been hostile to people who were right when they argued with me. I keep trying to improve, but what I say about myself is true.

God has given me grace to pray in tongues. That is what will save me. I am doing what Perry Stone does not do, so I should avoid the snares he fell into.

I hope he doesn’t kill himself. He should have enough money to have a soft retirement, so he should be able to stay home and stay out of trouble. The problem with disgraced preachers, though, is that pride usually drives them back into the limelight. Alberto Lee Santiago, the pedophile who ran my last church, went to prison because he insisted on preaching after he was caught, and I don’t think he is any crazier than Perry Stone.

In other news, the gardening project is going well.

The tomatoes we repotted the other day are all alive. Mike was sure it was good to put tomatoes in a 50/50 mixture of peat and dry cow manure from the pasture, but I insisted on checking the web, and I settled on a mix of peat, potting soil, composted manure, and perlite, along with epsom salt and lime. We repotted 10 plants, and we did 9 my way. Mike insisted on doing one his way. As of today, 9 are doing well, and Mike’s plant is somewhat yellow and is losing…is “branches” the word? He is full of remorse. I think the 9 healthy plants will thrive pretty well and produce tomatoes. They are looking stronger by the day.

I am planning to try Ruth Stout no-till gardening, which could also be called “no-character gardening,” because it requires little work. A lady named Ruth Stout decided to try throwing seeds on the ground and covering them with old hay, with no other preparation, and she found she got better harvests than people who worked hard tilling, enriching, and weeding the soil.

You can see why this appeals to me. First, I am somewhat lazy, second, I want big harvests, and third, my soil is like beach sand. Growing things in the ground would be very hard.

I found out Yukon Gold and LaSoda potatoes grow well here, and I also learned you can grow beans and tomatoes the Ruth Stout way. I have seed potatoes and sweet potato slips coming. I have pole beans on hand. I may get more tomato plants.

I think potatoes and beans are important, because they have calories. You can’t live on cabbage and cucumbers.

Getting a lot of hay seemed like an obstacle. It’s expensive. Then I remembered the round hay bales in my woods. My tenant farmer puts them there for his cattle. I can’t take the edible hay, but the cattle have left a gigantic amount of old poopy hay strewn around, and it’s free. I got myself a manure fork today, and I loaded up the utility cart. It took about 10 minutes, so getting enough for a bed should be fast work. As of today, I own a manure fork, so I’m armed with the correct tool.

Better news yet: you can plant vegetables in oak leaves. I only have a few thousand tons of those. They’re acidic, which is a problem. If only I had a source of something to cut the acidity. Like the gigantic pile of ashes under my burn pile.

I think I’ll put down a layer of hay and then pile leaves over it. The leaves will trap moisture for sure. Or maybe I should put the leaves down first, because they will definitely kill all the grass and weeds under the bed. They have killed enough of my grass to make me confident.

We have not built a structure to protect plants yet. The potatoes won’t need protection, because squirrels are too stupid to dig potatoes. My understanding is that they will eventually discover pole beans. Tomatoes will definitely be attacked. I was thinking of building a greenhouse-like thing, but the more I think, the more I believe I just need a frame covered with chicken wire. It’s not cold enough here for a real greenhouse.

The war on squirrels goes better and better. I have learned that trapping nuisance squirrels is legal here, and I have also discovered conibear traps. These are little snap traps you can bait with marshmallows and peanut butter. You tie them to trees, and squirrels climb up and grab the bait. They’re extremely humane (mainly to me, I admit). They crush a squirrel’s neck instantly. I plan to try them. I got squirrel-thinning permission in writing from the state, so there is no reason to hold back. During the past week, I have executed so many squirrels, I have lost count. There are three in the yard now, waiting for their rides. From hawks.

In past years, I spent a lot of time sitting in the woods in a blind I bought, failing to shoot or even see squirrels. I wish I had known what I know now: the best blind is my house. I shoot most of them from the front door and bedroom.

Being a Southerner is so great.

Tomorrow, I plan to pick a spot for my bed, amass a large amount of leaves using the blower, and put them in place. Then I plan to cover them with poopy hay. Then I have to wait for my seed potatoes and sweet potato slips.

I need to learn this stuff before Biden starves us all. I don’t want to be unable to find carbohydrates because I sat on my rear end and trusted the government. I would be a lot better off had I started two years ago.

I don’t know what Biden-trusting people will do in cities. Eat each other, I guess. What if they start driving to the country to steal food? Good recipe for the wave of killings predicted in the Revelation. When times are good, shooting people who steal crops and livestock seems barbaric. When your chickens and vegetables affect what your family weighs in the spring, or how many members make it through the winter, all that changes.

For the first time in my life, I understand why my great aunt Berthy shot at a man who tried to steal her chickens. I get it. As a Christian, I don’t see myself doing that, but other people would.

I learned I can eat wood ears. They call them “chicken of the woods.” I will never run out of those here. I wonder how many calories there are in a serving. Coons and possums are edible, too. You can even eat a coyote or bobcat if you need to.

The recent improvement in my squirrel tactics could serve me well in the future, if I’m not able to thin them out and they remain in good supply. Two people could fill their meat needs with a weekly tally of 8 squirrels. When things get bad, no one will care much about whether they’re in season, and since they will be nuisance animals when they’re close to my house, killing them would be legal anyway.

If all this sounds crazy to you, ask yourself how crazy a 5-dollar carton of eggs would have sounded last year.

Hopefully the rapture will lift me out of here before I start putting moles in my soup.

That’s Some Privilege, That White Privilege

More apocalypse news: proud celebrity cuckold Will Smith has started a fad. As you probably know, a young man named Isaiah Lee attacked pro-transsexual comedian Dave Chappelle while he was performing. I didn’t expect to blog again so soon, but news that seems important to discuss has popped up twice in three days.

I call Chappelle “pro-transsexual” because he is. A contingent of perpetually enraged leftists have decided he hates transsexuals because he talked about them in his act, but he supports them in their efforts to destroy themselves.

Lee appears to be some kind of mixed-race person with black blood. He has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and he supposedly had a replica gun which contained a knife blade. What goes through the mind of a person who designs a silly weapon like that is not clear to me.

I just saw new information. The replica “ejects a knife.” Why not get a real gun that ejects BULLETS? After all, leftists keep telling us buying a gun is quick and easy.

Lee may be a woman. You know how that works these days.

Is Will Smith responsible? He has definitely made it more likely that other immature people will physically attack speakers. On the other hand, you can’t really be responsible for what other people do. Your guilt for encouraging them is not the same as their guilt for acting.

Satan, or as I often call him through clumsy typing, “Stan,” has done a great job, providing leftists with incredibly stupid arguments that allow them to rationalize violence and various crimes. They say it’s violence when other people SPEAK against their beliefs. That means violence in response is justified, even long after the fact. Then they say their own violence is expression, like speech, so it doesn’t justify any type of physical response.

“My violence is protected expression. Your protected expression is violence.”

The dissonance is remarkable, but if you can seriously believe Caitlyn Gender is a woman, what can’t you believe?

Delusion is possibly the primary symptom of demonic influence. We are neck-deep in it now, and the waters are rising faster than ever. Either the end is not far off, or God’s people are in for a very rough ride. Anyone crazy enough to think Chaz Bono is a man is crazy enough to make a coat from the skins of Christians.

Lots of things are happening here at the compound. Mike found a lady who sells tomato plants, including heirlooms, so now we have Better Boy, Cherokee Chocolate, and Mortgage Lifter plants. I’m trying to determine what kind of enclosure to build them. I have never had a greenhouse. A simple structure covered with plasticized fabric is said to be enough to kill a squirrel’s interest, but I am told such a greenhouse will get too hot in the summer and kill the plants. I am thinking about chicken wire, but some people claim squirrels will chew through it.

I feel less and less when I kill a squirrel. I see why the old timers in Kentucky were so hard. They needed crops and livestock in order to keep their families alive, and I am starting to think the same way, given the Biden Catastrophe. I no longer have any patience with vermin.

The squirrel trap I bought is finally working, so that’s interesting. Peanuts pay off. I have a bigger trap baited with a peach and a chicken leg. I want to save a few of my peaches this year. I saw a rabbit eating one. The problem varmints here are squirrels, coons, coyotes, armadillos, and possums. Bobcats can also cause problems. Rabbits aren’t a big deal, because there are so few. I blame the coyotes.

I always take the squirrels, put them in the car with me with lots of air conditioning, buy them a few things at Louis Vuitton, and then check them into nice hotels, safe and sound. Don’t worry about them.

I know I said I had no patience with vermin, but I feel a little sorry for rabbits, because something is killing the daylights out of them, and the rabbits here always look miserable. I guess I’ll shoot next time, though. Rabbits are tasty, and there is no season because everyone hates them.

We plan to grow things in buckets. The lady we got the tomatoes from has a true survival farm on half an acre of sand, so I know I have no excuse for starving. She has tomatoes, squash, onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, chickens, potatoes, and probably some other things.

If I can grow food here, maybe moving to Tennessee is a bad idea. Heating a house up there with limited electricity due to Biden would be a lot of work.

The lady who sold us the tomatoes said a lot of locals are moving to Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

That’s about it from the compound. Stay prayed up and don’t make any trans jokes unless you’re packing.

Cut Big Wood for Small Money

Continuing the practice of blogging about inconsequential matters, I am about to divulge a couple of helpful tool-related things.

First, it looks like the lives of old car batteries all over the world may be extended in the future. Someone somewhere has invented a device that takes worn-out batteries and makes them usable again. It’s not a gimmick. It works.

I have done nearly nothing since the pandemic started, and I am only now coming out of my catatonia. I am trying to fix things I shouldn’t have allowed to have problems in the first place. I let the batteries in my truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, and garden tractor run down, and I had to do something.

The motorcycle and farm tractor responded to ordinary charging. The garden tractor did not. Putting a charger on it for a day would get it to the point where it started, but if I stopped the engine, I couldn’t start it again.

I got myself a NOCO Genius. This is a strange device that will charge various types of batteries and repair certain batteries that resist charging due to abuse. It’s about the size of a tender you would use on a car in storage. It has two leads with clamps. It will charge any kind of 12-volt battery, it will also charge 6-volt batteries, and it will often successfully repair 12-volt batteries.

The Genius did not work on my friend Mike’s AGM motorcycle battery. He had forgotten to attach the tender’s leads, and the battery had gone dead. We tried the Genius but got nowhere.

The Genius revived my garden tractor’s battery. I had to charge it conventionally in order to get the Genius to realize it was there, and after that, the Genius took over. The repair cycle lasted 4 hours, and after that, the tractor started repeatedly. Will it last? Not sure yet.

The Genius also worked on my truck’s batteries, although, to be honest, I didn’t try the conventional charger, so it might have worked, too. I didn’t feel like wasting my time. I gave the batteries a repair cycle, and then I left a conventional charger on them overnight. No problems yet.

Here’s what I wonder: should I use the Genius prophylactically? All of my batteries are getting old. Maybe I should give them a repair cycle once every few months, sort of like shipping Keith Richards to that clinic in Switzerland where he gets an annual total blood transfusion. I should do some research. If I can get 8 years out of a battery instead of 4, why not do it?

Here’s the other tip: whenever you install a light bulb with a threaded base, you should grease the threads lightly with Vaseline.

I have ceiling fans, and a couple are pretty cheap. Each of the cheap ones has 4 deep shades attached to it, and each shade contains one bulb. The bulbs on one started fizzling, and I decided to take a bulb out so I could identify it and replace it. When I started turning it, it turned and turned. The socket came loose from the shade, with the bulb stuck inside it.

I eventually managed to get the bulb out, but that left me with a lamp which was not in great shape. I didn’t know whether the wires had been broken by the twisting, and the socket flopped around loose in the shade. I was concerned that even if the wires worked, I would never be able to install another bulb.

Mike and I fixed the lamp. He removed the lamp unit from the fan, and I repaired it. I learned that the sockets in the fan were held in by right-hand threads, which is very stupid, because the bulbs also had right-hand threads. When I put torque on a bulb to remove it, I also put torque on the threads that held the socket in the shade. In a situation like this, when the bulb doesn’t want to come loose, you can end up unscrewing the socket instead, which is what I did.

Obviously, the shade should be attached to the fan with a left-hand thread. When installing bulbs, you don’t put enough clockwise torque on the socket to loosen a left-hand thread attaching the shade to the fan, but when you try to loosen a stubborn bulb, you may apply more than enough torque to remove the socket.

I Googled around, and I learned there are special greases for light bulb bases. They prevent bulbs from seizing in their sockets. I also learned Vaseline works just as well, and most American houses already contain Vaseline. From now on, I plan to use it.

I have some LED bulbs on the way from Amazon. Home Depot could not match the price.

Taking a fan lamp shade off the fan and reinstalling the socket is not fun at all, so my advice is to do anything you can to avoid loosening the socket. When I reinstalled the socket, I tightened it pretty good, and on one of our trips, my wife made me take a jar of Vaseline for dry skin, so I shouldn’t have to reinstall any more sockets. Assuming I can get the bulbs out of the other cheap fan when they fail.

I still have dry skin, and I’m not sure where the Vaseline is. Don’t tell the wife.

I might as well toss out one more tip. I learned there are Chinese companies making credible clones of high-end professional-grade Stihl chainsaws. Pro Stihl saws are great tools. You can’t get anything like them at Home Depot or Tractor Supply. A pro saw will make short work of things a homeowner saw will take a long time to cut.

No, I am not excited about buying more Chinese stuff, and it would be nice to support companies that invent things instead of imitators, but you need to hear me out.

1. I would never buy a $1300 Stihl chainsaw (or any other kind of Stihl chainsaw), so suggesting I go with the real thing is just plain dumb. It will never happen. Yes, I could get a used one, but it would take a long time to find it, and God only knows what would be wrong with it. Since I would not buy a real Stihl, I am not costing Stihl money by going Chinese. In fact, I would be making them money, because I would probably replace a few of the Chinese parts with OEM.

2. My biggest homeowner-grade saw is a 20″ Echo with a 59cc motor. It’s very nice, but I get some big, nasty downed trees here, so it can be quite slow. The Stihl clone would have 92 cc’s and a 28″ bar, and they scream through big logs. A larger saw would be a big help.

3. The patents on the original Stihl saws have expired, so I wouldn’t be supporting IP theft. If you want, you can go out tomorrow and start an American company making Stihl clones, and Stihl won’t be able to stop you. Expiration is a patent’s most important function, because the purpose of a patent is to get new inventions into the public domain. Using other people’s unprotected ideas is not immoral or illegal.

For about $360, you can get yourself a monster Stihl-like saw that will do a phenomenal job by homeowner or farmer standards, and all the parts are replaceable and easily sourced, so if you have a problem, you will be able to fix it. In fact, as noted above, you can replace iffy parts with Stihl parts.

You can spend more and get a Chinese saw with upgraded non-Chinese parts if you’re really worried about China quality.

You can also buy a parts kit and assemble your saw yourself, learning a lot in the process and saving maybe $80. If you build the saw, which supposedly takes less than a day, you will presumably develop the ability to repair it if it breaks, and that should calm your Chinese-warranty concerns.

The two Chinese companies I know of are Farmertec and Neo-Tec. Farmertec’s Stihl clones are called Holzfforma saws. I guess some Chinese guy thought that sounded German. People who have used both saws say neither is better than the other. Each one has pros and cons. Both are a whole lot better than Home Depot saws.

In some Youtube videos, the Chinese saws cut slower than Stihls, but a guy who did the intelligent thing and did tests using the same bars and chains found no significant difference. Testing using two different chains is ridiculous. Chains get dull fast, and when they do, cutting slows down.

I may build a saw. It sounds like fun, and given the problems my mid-grade saws have given me, I would like to know more about fixing saws. It would be great to have a saw that would cut a big oak log without me having to walk around and cut from both sides.

A Stihl would last me 50 years, because I’m not a pro. What if a Farmertec only lasted a quarter as long? Gee, that would be awful. I would still be dead long before the Stihl became cost-effective.

As long as I’m talking about chainsaws, I should let you know I have learned that premixed gas–the stuff that sells for $40 per gallon and promises no carb clogs–isn’t completely reliable. Sometimes it clogs saws. I thought I’d toss this information out for people who are trying to fix dead saws and who are convinced the gas isn’t the problem. Sometimes it is.

More inconsequential matters will be discussed here as they present themselves.

Illness or Nature’s Vaccine?

Bad news. My modified squirrel trap has not attracted any visitors.

Fed up with the continued destruction of my property by worthless rodents, I took a badly-designed trap and made some improvements. It has been in action for about 18 hours, and nothing has happened. I placed an order for a Squirrelinator, which is a factory-made trap dedicated to, well, you can guess. It should be here in the middle of next week.

I took a chunk of neurotoxic rat bait, smeared it with peanut butter, and put it in my chicken house, which the squirrels have turned into a resort. Later today, I’ll see if they’ve eaten it. I’m going to do whatever has to be done until I have a decent body count.

I have excellent rat baits made with an anticoagulant, but I was afraid to put them in the chicken house because I didn’t want hawks and owls to eat poisoned rodents and die. I’m reading up on it today. It looks like the Audubon Society recommends the anticoagulant as safe for predators, so maybe I should start using it.

In other news, I see another prediction of mine has come true. It’s not a big surprise, because I try not to predict anything that isn’t obvious. The Omicron variant has been found all over the place. Hawaii, New York, California, Colorado, Minnesota…it’s doing the blue state tour.

When we first heard about Omicron, which my wife inadvertently dubbed “the Unicorn Variant,” journalists and even scientists voiced “concern” that it “might” pop up in new places. I’m no epidemiologist, but I said that if you find one case, there are dozens of others you don’t know about. I said Omicron was already everywhere except places like Australia and New Zealand, which have sick, authoritarian rules. I was wrong about Australia, however. Omicron has been found there.

Australia is actually an Omicron hotspot, with more identified cases than America. Maybe arresting people and putting them in concentration camps isn’t working as well as they expected.

Of all the people on Earth, you would think Australians would be reluctant to put people in prison. You would think they had had their fill already.

The usual suspects also said they were worried the vaccines wouldn’t work well against Omicron. I wasn’t worried about that, because I already knew they wouldn’t. They don’t work well against any variant! Why would Omicron be different? The Dutch found 14 infected airline passengers, and today they’re telling us all 14 were vaccinated. If this surprises you, you should go in for cognitive tests and be very careful climbing airplane stairs.

A failure rate of 100% in 14 patients seems pretty bad to me, but then I am no doctor. I am no statistician, but it sure seems like the results could not have been worse. I can’t help feeling there just might be some predictive weight to this data.

I keep hoping Omicron will turn out to be a blessing. So far, there are no news reports suggesting the symptoms are anything but mild, but scientists say Omicron is extremely contagious compared to Delta. Put those things together, and Omicron might be the inoculation man couldn’t create. It might displace the nastier variants and give us resistance to them which would provide either immunity or safety from severe symptoms. It could turn coronavirus into the new common cold. Ineradicable, but not dangerous.

It may turn out to be the Omicron VACCINE.

Or it may kill a whole bunch of us.

We’ll know by the end of the month. That’s my new prediction, and like the others, it’s obvious. Omicron will hit thousands of people this month, if it hasn’t already, and it will have enough time to start producing deaths. If Omicron goes viral metaphorically as well as literally, and waves of deaths don’t materialize, sell your stock in mask manufacturers.

Now if we could just pay the Chinese to create a killer bug that only hits building contractors and tort lawyers.

And CCP members.

One thing is certain: if Omicron saves the world, the CCP will start pressuring smaller countries to call it the Xi Variant.

My understanding is that new diseases tend to become less severe as they mutate. Hope that’s correct. Didn’t pan out with smallpox, though.

If I get sick, my first move will be to blow my nose on my squirrel baits.

It’s amazing how dumb our statist overlords are. Why would anyone think it was smart to enact travel bans AFTER a new virus hit several countries? How badly did you have to do in elementary school math to think that was intelligent? We never find covid variants before they go around the world. By the time they’re detected, they’ve been carried all over the globe. Travel bans just add economic distress and feelings of powerlessness to our problems.

Speaking of feelings of powerlessness, I have realized they may be the worst consequences of covid. It has taught us man is weak and can’t fix his own disasters. It has taught us our governments have way more ability to control us than we had allowed ourselves to think. It has turned many of us into shuffling shut-ins who lack confidence in their ability to change their lives for the better.

It’s very important for people to think they can affect their circumstances. Take that away, and they develop what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This is one of the reasons welfare states get worse, not better. People start sucking up government money, and they become convinced they need it. They believe going to school and applying for jobs won’t change their lives much.

When you pay someone so much for doing nothing he can’t significantly improve his lifestyle by going to work, he is likely to choose to stay home and make excuses. That’s exactly what’s happening right now. It’s turning America into a much more socialist state, and socialism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism brings dystopia.

I believe feelings of powerlessness also breed hatred and resentment. If you’re helpless and someone else is responsible for your happiness, you will feel entitled to make that person miserable when things don’t go your way. This is one explanation for the intense anti-white racism in America. Blacks and Hispanics are taught that whites, Asians, and Jews cause them to live in squalor and crime through racism, but paradoxically, many think the people who caused their problem are the saviors who can fix it. They believe the rest of us have special powers we’re not using.

It’s crazy, believing a certain class of people is evil and responsible for your problems, yet running to them over and over again, expecting them to make things right at their own expense.

Why would you expect a malicious enemy to save you?

The rest of us didn’t cause the problems, we’re not malicious, we are not good enough to devote our lives to making things better for you, and even if we were, we couldn’t do it. You have to do some things for yourself.

Anyway, I’m convinced the pandemic has made things worse.

Maybe Omicron will save us from the pandemic. The apocalypse is a delivery process with labor pains, and labor pains come and go. Maybe we’ll get a few years of rest. I wonder. I tend to doubt it, because I have reason to think the rapture is imminent.

One nice thing about proof the variant has spread is that it should convince the nations of the world to drop recently-imposed travel bans. Rhodah and I were planning to visit the Netherlands, and they have an Omicron ban. Maybe they’ll show some common sense and relent.

As for the rapture, I had a disturbing dream last night.

For years, I’ve had dreams about airports. There are things about airports I don’t like. When you’re in an airport, you’re not where you want to be. You want to be somewhere else, which is why you went to the airport. Airports, then, are inherently representative of not having arrived.

Also, airports are dirty, the food is bad and overpriced, and while you’re in airports, you are subjected to degrading control through unreasonable rules.

At least the Hare Krishnas moved out.

Last night, I dreamed I was in the imaginary airport again. My second-oldest friend had been there, but he had left. His family was still there. He had gotten on an elevator to turn himself in.

In the dream, Nazis were in power. My friend and his family are Orthodox Jews. The Nazis were allowing people to turn themselves in. In the dream, you could get on an elevator, and as soon as you got to the bottom, you would be in Auschwitz. You would go through the death camp process and be killed and incinerated. By the time you turned yourself in, you were doomed. There was no way to change your mind and go home, and no one could rescue you.

I couldn’t believe what my friend had done. Why did he trust the Nazis? Even though it wasn’t possible, I tried to help. I saw another Jew, and I ran up to him and tried to tell him what had happened. I wanted to know if he had any idea what to do. He thought I was Jewish and that I was asking him to help me.

Nothing was done. It was already over when I asked for help. I knew my friend was somewhere down below, beyond help, regretting his choice.

I now think the airport I dream about represents the earth. You spend time here on your way to heaven or hell. You get routed one way or the other depending on what kind of ticket you chose. This place isn’t your permanent home.

I don’t know if my friend represented himself, someone else, or a class of people.

The Nazis were the state-worshipers and man-worshipers of the Earth. The beast’s troops. The vaccine-lovers and distancing freaks. People who are willing to give up all their rights because they’re terrified of death. They say, “Trust us, and everything will be fine.”

If the airport represents the earth, then there must be departing flights. You can either go up or down. That seems to be a very Jewish idea. Moving to Israel is considered a move upward, and people who leave are called “yardim,” meaning they descend. The name of the Jordan River comes from the same root.

That’s it for today. Two containers of maple syrup have arrived, and I need to test them. I might skip dinner food and make waffles.

Taking Ecclesiastes 10:18 to Heart

I learned something useful today. Putting a small amount of ginger in beef jerky really improves it.

I made another batch yesterday, and while I was mixing the marinade, I thought about teriyaki. My best guess is that teriyaki jerky requires replacing all of the Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce, but for some reason, I stuck with half and half, and I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger. I didn’t have fresh ginger.

It made a big difference. I wouldn’t say it tastes gingery. It just has more zing to it. I think powdered ginger will actually work better than fresh, because it has a sharper flavor.

So that was nice.

I grabbed the wrong cut of meat by mistake. I wanted eye round, and I think I bought bottom round. Anyway, today, the surface of the jerky has oil on it. It’s not congealed fat. Just oil. They say you should use beef with as little fat as possible. This cut seems to have more fat than eye round. The danger of using fatty meat is that the fat will go rancid. Will that happen when the meat is still lean but slightly fattier than eye round? I don’t know, but it tastes better. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it doesn’t go bad, maybe I’ll switch to this cut permanently.

I also got new gutters installed. This house had only one roof gutter when I moved here, and it was between the roof and the patio enclosure. There was no guttering over the garage, so big, fat raindrops fell directly on the driveway. They were starting to wear it away, and I couldn’t leave the doors open when it rained, because so much water splattered into the garage. I had them run guttering over both doors. Feeling smug about that.

There was also an issue over the front porch. The roof was designed in such a way that a huge amount of water was directed onto the porch roof when it rained. It caused some rot, and I had to spend a grand on repairs. Now there is some hope the new guttering will direct the rain elsewhere.

The strangest part of the roof design was the lack of guttering on the workshop roof. The rain fell straight onto the grass, in front of a concrete porch. The rain destroyed a strip of grass beside the concrete and washed out a lot of the dirt. I could not grow anything in front of the porch. Rain also threw dirt all over the concrete. Now I have a gutter that runs the length of the building, and I may go crazy and plant something in the ugly rut where the rain used to fall.

I don’t know what’s happening in the world, and that suits me very well. I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy. I don’t need to read fake news to kill time as well as my digestion. The election will have an outcome whether I read about it or not, and if the rapture comes, it won’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, regardless, because God looks after me very well.

It has occurred to me that readers may be confused because I say I feel like the rapture is upon us, but I also talk about planning for shortages, civil war, and so on. I’m writing about different possible futures. One involves me being here while leftists torch the country and force sane people to dig in and defend, and the other involves me being somewhere above, gleefully oblivious to everything that happens here. I keep feeling powerful indications that I won’t be here, but I have been wrong before.

Today I prayed God would see to it I never found myself in a situation in which I would truly need to use a firearm. I have asked for that before. I don’t want to be pulled down into the mire with the pigs. I don’t think Christians were put here to shoot people. I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, it means something has gone wrong in your relationship with God.

The ammunition situation has gotten even worse. I set up alerts so a search site would tell me when certain types of ammunition were available. This morning I got an alert, and when I checked before 8:30 a.m., the site was sold out. People are hovering by their computers, snapping ammunition up as soon as it appears. Either that, or George Soros has a bot doing it to keep patriots from getting cartridges. Of course, people have been storing up ammunition since the Obama years, so Soros and Bloomberg could bankrupt themselves and still fail to accomplish their goal.

I don’t really think billionaires are buying ammunition to cause problems, but it would make a great conspiracy theory.

I wonder what life in blue America is like. Hell, I suppose. Terrorism, lack, and irrational fear surrounding a mild disease. My cousin near Chicago still can’t buy disinfectant wipes, but they’re slashing them to $2.98 per can at my local Walmart, just to get rid of them. My cousin near Atlanta says they finally have meat in stores, although restaurants can’t get what they want because they’re last in line. My Illinois cousin is visiting my aunt in Kentucky, and she can’t get wipes there, either. Of course, Kentucky isn’t all that red. Not down deep, regardless of whom they voted for. They love government handouts too much.

There are two realities, and I’m very satisfied with mine. I have zero interest in experiencing or even witnessing the false, unnecessary reality of leftists.

If you think about it, the two-reality solution continues after death. It might as well start now.

I Have a Panic HOUSE

Today I am having my roof fixed. I’m paying $1000 for something I could probably do myself, but I am not interested in rolling off the roof and becoming a permanent yard ornament. I’m also not excited about having my ceiling fall because I didn’t know how to do roofing correctly.

I wanted to put blinds in my former dining room before the roofers showed up. Why? Because it’s a workshop/gun room now. I have a lot of ammunition in that room, and anyone looking into a window would know what it was. These days, ammunition is like gold. You can buy it, but if it’s a popular caliber, you’re likely to shell out three times what it cost last year.

Roofing companies are a top resource for released prison inmates. If you can’t get a job anywhere else, a roofer will probably take a chance on you. Good information to have, if you’re a homeowner or, perhaps more importantly, a homeowner’s wife or daughter. The thought of an electrician or plumber seeing my stuff doesn’t concern me all that much. Roofers are different.

Sadly, I signed a contract before buying blinds, and I didn’t think I had time to get them installed before the roofers showed up, so I didn’t do anything.

Today the roofers showed up without warning, so moving my ammunition out of sight, one container at a time, was not an option. Someone was looking out for me, however, because I had my ammunition loaded on a wheeled shelf unit. I rolled it into a hallway, and I was all set.

I should have bought these shelves a lot sooner. I cheaped out at first. I bought plastic shelves from Home Depot. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. They run $40 each, and when you overload them, they bend. Mine bent. The shelves I have now are fancy chromed Seville Classics jobs from Amazon. I have two units. One is mostly dedicated to ammunition. The other is for reloading components and other items. I have hundreds of pounds on the first one, and it’s not sagging at all. Wish I could say the same of myself.

I moved one of my plastic shelves to the laundry room, where it has become my paranoia storage area.

I went to Walmart yesterday for dishwashing powder and salt, and I bought a big, heavy bag of jasmine rice. I also picked up 4 pounds of great northern beans, canned salmon, two large jars of Skippy, and 6 pounds of pasta. This is a lot of food. One person could probably go a month on it. I also have 6 gallon cans of Stanislaus pizza sauce.

You would think a long-term food supply would take up a lot of room and cost a lot of money, but you would be wrong. My shelf unit is maybe 25% full. My total bill at Walmart was around $80, and I bought a lot of things unrelated to preparation.

I plan to add more rice and maybe some different beans. I have 48 cans of tuna on the way. I want to dry apples. When you’re from Appalachia, not having dried apples is uncivilized. Ordinarily, drying apples is a pain because of bugs, but I have a screened-in pool, so no flies.

I checked into generators. Not a great option, unfortunately. I would have to spend close to $20,000 to get a whole-house rig that would cost me $5 per hour to run. That’s about $3600 per month for electricity, assuming diesel would even be available, and the price would go way up in a crisis. Unless you have your own natural gas well or hydroelectric plant, I think you can pretty well expect to do without power in a hard core prepper scenario. Maybe you can run your laptop off solar panels.

I wonder if people are buying manual pumps for their wells.

There is zero fresh water near me, unless you count swampy ponds.

I suppose I’ll have to hope we still have power during the civil war.

The Internet says my power company uses a mix of coal, uranium, “biomass,” and natural gas. What is “biomass”? Chicken manure, maybe? Is there anything chicken manure can’t do?

Let’s see. Coal comes from the South, so that may still be available after the North turns on us. Natural gas comes from the South. I would guess that biomass comes from the South. Would we still have nuclear power? The plants are in-state, but would we be able to get uranium? Maybe the Chinese would sell it to us on Alibaba or Banggood.

There is a lot of oil in Jesus-friendly areas, and there are also many refineries. That’s good.

If you would like to dry your own apples, I have the ultimate tip. Spend $25 on an apple peeler. They really work. You can core, peel, and slice an apple in 5 seconds. I should go get apples today. You can dry them by setting them on a window screen.

I don’t like factory dried apples, because they put a chemical on them to keep them white. It kills the flavor. To get the real flavor of dried apples, you need to avoid that stuff. Real dried apples taste like apple butter. Factory apples taste like air.

The future is uncertain. Are we looking at a few weeks of pro-Biden terrorist riots followed by a crackdown and resumed calm, will we have a full-blown civil war complete with drawn borders, or will we simply move into an Israel-type situation in which terrorism is a normal part of daily life? Actually, we’re already in that situation, except that the acts of terrorism committed here haven’t been as serious as the ones Israelis face.

A full-blown civil war with new borders would be a catastrophe, because leftists would freeze or simply steal the bank and security accounts of conservatives and centrists, and they would also cut off our access to phones, the Internet, and credit. Leftists would probably be massacred routinely due to their inferior capacity for violence. They’re pretty good at throwing bottles of pee, but they would do poorly while trying to familiarize themselves with firearms, camouflage, tactics, and so on. Jesus people have been shooting, hunting, and serving in the military for centuries.

My hat is off to people who think they can do well after a total breakdown of society. It would be very hard to prepare sufficiently well to guarantee that. I figure it’s realistic to prepare for a bad month or two, tops, and I see no hope of providing my own electricity over long periods. I will have to bank on a future in which companies in my area adapt and continue producing power.

Should I cut some firewood? Arrgh. Anything but that.

In my area, I would probably need wood for maybe 45 days. That’s a lot of wood. To prepare it, I would need to create huge snake-infested piles which would eventually attract termites and rot.

I have a lot of downed wood already. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens. I can cut it into firewood if I have to. I was going to burn it, but maybe it has value.

In any case, there is no possibility my ammunition will get the roofers excited today.

Next: I Cut Down the Mightiest Tree in the Yard With a Herring

It’s time for me to pat myself on the back again. I made my own hummus today, and then I installed some new shrubbery beside my house.

I’ve made my own hummus many times. Recently, I started making it again, because I eat it for breakfast nearly every day, and the store kind costs over 4 bucks. The price of the ingredients is around a dollar, so it irks me to get ripped off like that.

I found some recipes online. I wanted to see if I could do better than I had in the past. I learned something. The reason your hummus is coarse is that you’re not peeling your garbanzo beans.

Arabs remove the skins from their garbanzo beans, and it makes hummus very smooth. I guess it also removes most of the fiber, but I don’t care about that.

Removing the skin is a royal pain. You have to heat the beans with baking soda and then rinse them with cold water. This is supposed to make the skins “float off,” but it doesn’t. It only loosens them. Then you have to get in there with your hands and rub them off. It took me maybe 20 minutes. Maybe there’s a better way.

When I was done, I had very smooth hummus, so I would have to say that removing the skins is important.

As for my hedge, I killed the old one because it looked bad, and I had to put something in its place. You would not believe how many choices there were. Over a hundred. I decided to let the lady at the nursery tell me what to get. She gave me 4 choices, and I picked the one I disliked least. I came home yesterday with 6 Indian hawthorn plants, or, as we snowflakes call them, First Nations Oppressed Little Brown People hawthorn plants.

Today I learned that the name of this plant has no “E” at the end. Exciting.

You know what? There are no native Americans. Little fact there for you. Neither science nor the Bible says human beings are native to the Americas. And white people were never illegal aliens. The Indians didn’t have real borders or immigration laws, and many of them were fine with Europeans living here. I’m not saying white people turned out to be great neighbors, but then many legal immigrants end up causing problems, so nothing new there.

Yesterday, I used my Root Slayer shovel to rip out the old hedge, and today I went over the dirt. I hit it with my electric edger to sever any roots the shovel left behind, I torched it for a while, and I added a pre-emergent herbicide to keep weeds from coming back. I put down 4 cubic feet of expensive dirt, shoved the plants in, and covered the works with melaleuca mulch. I hope it works out.

I plan to poison the ground pretty heavily with imidacloprid, so that should also help.

I came in and had a burger, and I saw some news. Louisville malcontents are rioting over the Breonna Taylor shooting. Is this a surprise? No. I guarantee you, BLM terrorists have been going to places like Best Buy and the Timberland store, picking out things to steal during the inevitable riots. I am sure they do that. If you’re a thief, and you know your in competition with at least hundreds of other thieves, you’re going to do your best to get to the good stuff first.

Terrorists are out and about because the grand jury’s announcement came out. No homicide charges. Unfortunately, news sources are saying things like, “No charges in Breonna Taylor death.” To low-information, riot-prone people, this looks like, “Cops did everything right in Taylor case, and no one will be held accountable.” That’s not what happened. One cop apparently sprayed the place with bullets without thinking, he got fired, and he has been charged with a crime. He didn’t hit Taylor, and the cop who did shoot her obeyed the law, so that’s why there is no homicide charge.

Interesting fact: the cops identified themselves more than once. Everyone is having conniptions, claiming the people in the apartment didn’t know who the police were. Not true. They knew perfectly well, and one of them shot at the cops anyway. This is what caused Taylor’s death.

Yes, they had a no-knock warrant, but they announced themselves anyway. But news outlets are not making much effort to point this out, and some are still saying the cops didn’t identify themselves.

It doesn’t matter, because thieves and terrorists were going to riot and loot no matter what, but the rest of us might as well understand the facts.

No-knock warrants seem pretty risky to me. If cops broke my door down at 3 a.m. and didn’t identify themselves, I would do my best to kill as many of them as possible, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You don’t lie in bed next to an unused rifle and hope the people breaking down your door turn out to be the police. It doesn’t work that way.

So now that opportunists are out in the streets looking for free stuff and a chance to do racist violence, what are they protesting? That’s not clear. Are they protesting no-knock warrants? The no-knock warrant had no effect on Breonna Taylor, and reforms are underway, so I would say there is no legitimate reason to protest. Are they protesting the racism of the police? That seems foolish. The police always shoot back when people fire guns at them, regardless of race. Are they protesting the grand jury’s racism? That would be a bit odd. Grand jurors are random citizens who have zero affiliation with the police, prosecutors, or the judiciary. They don’t belong to a secret organization that meets to burn crosses. For all we know, they were all black.

I’ll just pull back the curtain and tell you how juries are selected. Lawyers pretend it’s all above board, but the truth is that you try to get the most prejudiced people you can find. You want people who already think your client is right, without hearing the evidence. The procedure by which they find this out is called “voir dire,” which comes from an old phrase meaning “speak the truth.” It’s not the same as “voir” and “dire” in modern French. Attorneys ask a bunch of questions, jurors answer them, and then the attorneys try to eliminate anyone who might not see things their way.

Grand juries are different. Voir dire is basically about your ability to serve. They don’t ask you dog whistle questions to try to find out what your biases are.

The people who didn’t hand down a homicide charge in the Breonna Taylor case were not chosen for their unwillingness to indict. They were chosen at random.

I suppose the prosecutors may have steered things this way or that, but in the current atmosphere, and given the way unethical hack prosecutors railroaded George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, I would not bet on anti-black prosecutor bias in this case.

Of course, it doesn’t matter. Free TV’s, and a chance to curse the police out and throw things at them without having your head slammed on the trunk of a cruiser…that’s what matters.

I’ll bet looters get into violent confrontations over who got the best stuff. You know they do.

Today I was praying about the rapture, and I asked God again if it was coming this year. I felt an overpowering surge, telling me the answer was yes. Can it really be true? It would be so beautiful to leave this place behind. It’s getting extremely filthy and violent. I would love to live somewhere where I belonged. I would love to stop seeing people who hate the truth, marching in our streets and tormenting the innocent with the consent of the leftist half of the population. I would love to know I would never have to see that type of person again. And what will the 7-year marriage of Christ be like? Best vacation ever.

Please, let it happen. I am ready TODAY. NOW. I intercede for people all the time, and I try to tell people helpful things, but there doesn’t seem to be much more I can do for God while the world is sliding into insanity. I don’t think there is a lot I can still accomplish.