Get Ready for 5770

My sister’s illness pretty much consumed the last few days, but I have two days off, so here I am.

Yesterday I told her something I thought she needed to know, and I think you will benefit from it, too.

The Jewish holidays are still important. Don’t listen to Christians who yammer “We’re not under the law” whenever you mention the Old Testament or its principles or the obligations it lays out. Jesus was crucified over Passover. The baptism of the Holy Spirit took place on Pentecost. Many Christians believe Succoth symbolizes our reunion with Jesus. None of this stuff was ever canceled or rescinded. People who ignore the Old Testament are often the same folks who think the Jews have been discarded, and that we are somehow supposed to replace them. It’s hard to imagine anything more offensive to God.

We’re not Jews. Most of us aren’t, anyway. We can eat pork (thank you, thank you), and we are not required to memorize 613 commandments or cleanse our homes of yeast prior to Passover. But many of the principles in the Old Testament apply to everyone, and the holidays are eternal.

Rosh Hashanah is coming up. So is Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Jewish year, which, somehow, does not happen in the first month in the Jewish calendar. Can’t figure that out, but that’s how it is. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, when the high priest used to go into the Holy of Holies and atone for the sins of all the Jews.

Orthodox Jews believe in a concept called “teshuvah,” which means “return.” It refers to returning to God. When you make teshuvah, you examine yourself and determine what your faults are, and you make a decision to change. Jews don’t equate it with repentance, which they interpret as deciding to behave in a new way. They see teshuvah as returning to your true nature, which is good. That can’t be reconciled with the Christian belief that people start out bad and have to be taught in order to become good, but in practice, the difference between teshuvah and repentance is hard to distinguish. To a Christian, “repentance” would seem correct.

Although it is not mentioned in the Bible, religious Jews believe that on Rosh Hashanah, God decides how we will fare during the new year, including whether we survive, and on Yom Kippur, he inscribes his decision in his book. Here is an English translation of a prayer Jews recite. It may irritate Orthodox Jews; I’m not sure. It comes from the work of a Messianic writer.

On Rosh HaShana it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
how many will pass away and how many will be born,
who will live, and who will die; who will die prematurely and who will live out his days;
who will perish by fire and who by water; who by sword and who by wild animals;
who by hunger and who by thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague;
who by strangling and who by stoning; who will have rest and who will wander about;
who will be at peace and who will be tormented;
who will be at ease and who will be bothered;
who will become poor and who will become rich;
who will be brought low and who will be raised up.

But repentance, prayer and charity avert the harsh decree.

The word translated “repentance” is “teshuvah,” so right away, you can see fodder for argument. The word translated “prayer” is “tefillah,” which means to attach yourself to God; it doesn’t mean to get on your knees and ask for things. Maybe it’s the kind of prayer David wrote about when he said, “put thou my tears into thy bottle; are they not in thy book?”. The word translated “charity” is “tzedakah,” which means to give to others because it is just and you recognize that what you have is actually God’s. Orthodox Jews consider this different from charity, but to a Christian, this is exactly what charity means.

Quibbling aside, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are on the way. And the 40 days prior to Rosh Hashanah are known as the Forty Days of Teshuvah. The idea is that God will judging us soon, so we should be thinking about the way we live and doing things to fix it. To “avert the harsh decree” we might otherwise face.

This period began at sundown on Thursday, August 20. While my sister was receiving her first dose of chemotherapy. The following day, on the way to the hospital, I told her about the Days of Teshuvah, and I pointed out that it began on the same day as her treatment. Was it coincidental? I can’t say. But when you have something medical science considers incurable and unsurvivable, what could be more appropriate than repentance, prayer, and charity? Everyone needs these things, but the need is more obvious and likely more urgent in a cancer patient.

I work to fix my faults all the time, whether or not it is possible to detect any signs of that from my behavior. I’m thinking this would be a good time to work on laziness and irresponsibility. I want to be neater and more organized. I want to take better care of things. Christians tend to think being a good steward means pinching pennies and giving to charity, but we are entrusted with lots of things that aren’t money, and I think we need to take good care of all of them. We have to try to be healthy. We have to take care of our possessions. We have to use our time well. You can complete the list yourself.

This is all pretty horrifying to me. Already, I’m looking around, noticing things I should take care of. Arrgh. This means WORK. I’ll have to get the ladder out and paint the soffit in front of the house. I’ll have to fix the door by the sprinkler pump. And it’s AUGUST. It’s like a vegetable steamer combined with a thousand sunlamps out there. Arrgh. I can’t believe I chose this.

But I have to do it, so I might as well shut up.

Charity is a wonderful tool. Nobody does the right thing all the time, and if I understand the Bible correctly, you can avoid punishment by looking after others. That’s a real gift, because doing charity is pleasant. What a deal. Prayer is not too hard. Repentance…that’s the hurdle. Ouch. I have to wire up my compressor. I have to get rid of the dead mamey tree.

In the Bible, forty-day periods seem to be identified with change for the better. With cleansing. Think of the forty days of rain, in which the evil people of the world were destroyed. Think of the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the desert. Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days when he received the commandments and came down to purify the people. Jesus remained on earth for forty days after the resurrection. Are there other Biblical examples? These are the only ones I could think of. All these examples involve new beginnings.

In case you want to take advantage, Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown on September 18, and Yom Kippur starts at sundown on September 27.

While I was looking stuff up, I came across a Jewish blog which goes into more detail about the significance of the number 40. Maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Hospitals Outdo Resorts

I decided to Google “wee-weed up” to see if anyone had ever said it before Barack Obama, and I can’t find any examples. Maybe it’s a Kenyan expression. I think “wee-weed up” is a good way to describe the way Obama reacts whenever anyone has the guts and integrity to call him on his nonsense. Dictators get “wee-weed up” a lot. It’s one of their defining traits. Something to think about. Stalin used to get “wee-weed up” and have people shot in the back of the head.

I don’t think Obama is going to be the great and powerful secular leader he wants to be. He’ll never be our Castro. He’s too inept and childish, and it looks like health care is going to knock the wheels off the shiny tricycle which is his ego. Hillary got impaled on the same prideful stake, and then Obama took Hillary down, and now he’s finding out he’s no smarter than she was. Obama is starting to fade, and that’s great for America, but he is probably a taste of leaders to come. In the long run, our economy is going to continue to slide, and we are going to continue reacting like spoiled brats who can’t face second-tier status, and we will listen to any fool who says he can turn it around. Then we’ll give up our privacy, our property rights, our independence, and our dignity. I really believe this is our future. When the ancient Jews acted up, God allowed another nation to take them captive. He won’t need to do that to us. We’ll take ourselves captive.

I hope I’m right about Obama’s arrogance and stubbornness. So far, he has never let us down. I hope he rides the USS Single-Payer right to the bottom of the popularity polls. If not, he’ll eventually find some other career-ending position to which he will cling. Or he’ll cling to so many small errors, they’ll add up and sink him.

I was supposed to drive my sister to chemo today, but she didn’t take her nausea prescriptions at the right time, so she can’t stand to be moved. When they kick in, we’ll be on our way. I don’t know when that will be.

I keep marveling at the inexplicable spending I witnessed yesterday. I can’t recall the last time I had my blood pressure and pulse checked, but I’m pretty sure they used a stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, and wristwatch. UM/Sylvester uses digital machines on wheels. I’ll bet each one costs $1500. Let me check. Okay, I just found something similar online for about $2900. Whee. This is the kind of thing that happens when you want “the best medical care in the world.” A regular sphygmomanometer runs about twenty bucks.

The chemo room was really something They had cubicles roughly ten feet on a side. Each one had a big recliner and a TV cabinet with a DVD player. I wonder…would the care be less effective if they had a big open room with recliners, chairs, and TVs? If I wanted to have a cubicle of my own, it would probably cost ten grand to build. I believe some hospitals still have open rooms without fancy cubicles. Do they adversely affect the health of patients? Doubtful.

If you want to see where your money goes when you’re in the hospital, raise a fuss next time. Scream that the tea is too hot, or that you hate the curtains. They will send you a person whose job is to sweet-talk unreasonable patients. It doesn’t matter if you’re crazy. It doesn’t matter who’s right. They will appear and hold your hand and say they love you, while you disgrace yourself in front of patients who are more mature.

I’ll bet these people pull down $75K a year, plus benefits. I don’t know if they’re a tort-law side effect, or the result of the free spending insurance always creates, or a product of liberal happy-happy feelgood medical philosophy, or what. Part of every hospital bill goes to pay them.

We don’t seem to be able to draw a line between giving the best care and spoiling the sick. These are two different things. Spending a pile of money on the best drug available makes sense. Splurging on luxuries which aren’t very helpful seems foolish. I doubt that it’s wise to reward sick people for being passive and whiny. There is such a thing as not wanting to get better. We have a funny habit of rewarding and praising people for being ill; that may look like compassion, but it’s not. We do it in order to feel saintly, and to shut patients up. It’s not for the sick. It’s selfish.

If we really cared about the poor, wouldn’t we steer funding away from frills and frippery? Wouldn’t we be able to apply that money to care for the indigent? Nobody wants reusable needles or dirty sheets, but we’re a long way from that. If you go to a luxury hotel in Vegas, they don’t treat you nearly as well. And kissing your rear end is the primary function of a hotel employee.

She just called. I’m off to the hospital again.

We Approach a Curve

I have two facts I can’t reconcile.

Today my sister goes in for her first session of chemotherapy. She has some problems which may force a delay, but they are trying to get it going today. It’s likely to be a pivotal day in her life, and it’s sobering. We don’t know what the oncologist will tell her today. We don’t know the therapy will start, and time is wasting. We can’t even guess what her scans are going to say.

On the other hand, I woke up with a strange and seemingly inappropriate feeling of enthusiasm and optimism about life. I was very happy. And I don’t know why. For a while, I’ve had the feeling that something wonderful was about to happen to me.

It doesn’t make any sense.

When your family faces a health crisis, you don’t want to fall into the trap of being miserable all the time. You don’t want to lose sleep and be unable to enjoy life, and you don’t want to become depressed and ineffective. But you have to take things seriously and make sure everything is done right.

The other day my aunt mentioned the stages of grief. Some people claim there are seven, but I’m more familiar with the theory that there are five. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So far, the theory has not panned out. Not even close. There was depression at first, and since then I think all three of us have been in denial to some extent. There has been regret (including vicarious regret) which isn’t a named stage. I haven’t noticed any manifestations of the other things, unless prayer can be considered bargaining. That can’t be true, though, because I don’t offer God anything I wasn’t offering him to begin with, and my sister doesn’t seem to be changing her approach toward him. I’m doing the things a Christian is supposed to do; I’m praying more and so on. But I don’t have anything new to put on the table.

Denial is a slippery thing. Before the diagnosis, my understanding of denial was it caused people to pretend their problems didn’t exist. The diagnosis is wrong. The call from the ER doctor went to the wrong number. You must have entered the wrong symbol when you checked the price of your stock. Your kid was on the other bus. Things like that. But now I think you can accept the reality of a diagnosis and still be in denial to some extent. You can forget the gravity of the situation and end up taking longer to do things than you should. You can engage in displacement behavior.

If that’s denial, we may be in denial.

When you’re diagnosed with a dangerous disease that progresses rapidly, you have to take the lead, or you have to let someone else take the lead. Your family can’t shoot you with a tranquilizer dart and drive you to the places you need to go. Regardless of who is in denial, only one person’s denial is likely to be damaging. The patient calls the shots. The patient has to plan and execute. That is unfortunate, because they can’t be counted on to do what they should. My dad often says he wishes he could have locked my mother in a closet and deprived her of cigarettes until withdrawal was over, because it might have kept her from dying from cancer. Life doesn’t work like that, and neither does addiction.

I don’t run things, so I suppose my state of mind is not a major factor here. I am doing what I can. I don’t think any harm will result from my feeling good, and if sorrow and grief are coming later, feeling good now is surely a victory. But I find it a little confusing that I can have periods of real happiness, and that I have this feeling of positive expectation about my own life. I feel as if God is up to something, possibly having nothing to do with my sister, and I also believe the degree to which a patient is willing to cooperate and do the right things affects the way family members feel.

There’s another variable in play here. I’ve found that the more I pray, the less I am able to perceive grief. I don’t like to admit that, because it makes me sound like a psychopath, but it’s true. When I found out my mother was on her deathbed, I prayed constantly, and I worked myself up into such a state that when she actually passed, I couldn’t fully feel it. I thought this would be the most unbearable moment of my life, but it wasn’t. Was that the fruit of faith and prayer, or was it my own mind, putting off grief the way a soldier puts off terror? And if you don’t fall apart when someone dies, is it because you don’t care as much as other people, or is it because of your strong belief that death is the beginning of a better life? I think most people see human beings when they look at dead bodies. I have never felt that way. When I look at someone who has died, in my heart, I always feel that I’m looking at something like a vacant house. A place where a person used to live. I truly feel that. I’m not just saying it. And while I’m scared to death of disease and accident, I’m not worried at all about death itself. Part of me looks forward to it, because this life is so defective and tainted. I want to be in a world where things work. My biggest reason for wanting to remain alive is that I want to be here for my dad and my pets.

Keep my sister in your prayers. I think our lives are going to change considerably over the next week.

Maybe They’re Finally Taking Him Away

Today a truck pulled up and ejected 219 pounds of Enco on a pallet. My rotary table arrived. I think I’m finally done with the basic accessorizing of the machine tools. I still want a band saw, but other than that, I may be set for a few months.

Really! Don’t snicker.

I can’t believe how big a 10″ rotary table is. Half the people I quizzed said “go big,” and half said, “I’ve never needed anything bigger than 8 inches.” The people who said to go big seemed to like 12″, so I split the difference. Guess what this thing weighs? I’ll spoil the surprise. About 118 pounds. And it’s oily and has no good parts to grab onto when you lift it.

I had the truck guy wheel the pallet into the garage. It had several wooden boxes strapped to it, along with a cardboard box containing a cheap chuck. I always try to resist the temptation to lift heavy things, so once I got the lid off the rotary table box, I had to figure out how to get the table out without picking it up. I ended up running a nylon rope through the center hole and tying it to my hoist. I got it up to waist level, figuring I could sort of swing it over to my bench. In reality, the last foot or so was not much different from plain old lifting, but I did try.

At least I avoided lifting it out of the box. One of the worst experiences in life is lifting a heavy object out of a heavy box that tries to come with it. Then you find yourself shaking the object and the box, rupturing disks one after the other, trying to make the box drop. I didn’t have to do that. This is one of the great things a hoist can do for you. Even if you don’t mind lifting an awkward 80-pound tool, you will not enjoy lifting that tool plus the 10-pound box it came in.

The tailstock looked small in the Enco picture, but I would guess it’s about 40 pounds. Hey, I can check. Hold on. Okay, 33 pounds.

Right now I can lift the rotab onto my mill, but I haven’t put a chuck on it yet. Let’s see. It’s 35 pounds, so add that to the rotab and the backing plate, and it spells “truss.”

The chuck looks really nice. I’ll check the runout and see what the story is. You never know. Sometimes a Phase II turns out to be as accurate as a Bison. Actually, I’m not sure checking the runout is possible. Can you do that with a chuck on a rotary table? I would think the table would have its own error to worry about. I’ll figure it out later.

I couldn’t figure out how to manage getting this thing on and off the table. I wanted to put a hoist over the mill, but then I’d have to have a shelf or something nearby, to put the rotab on. And that would be a pain. It would be in the way, and I’d have to screw it to the wall, and I’d have to go around behind the mill to get the rotab onto it. Bad idea. Then I realized there was perpetually empty floor space beneath the mill table, to either side. I can make a little wheeled platform about a foot square and put the rotab on it. When I’m not using it, I push it back under the mill. When I need the rotab, I pull it out so it’s under the hoist. I think this will work. I could make it a little longer and stick the tailstock on it.

A hoist is overkill. A small block and tackle would be faster and easier, but I don’t know where to get stuff like that. I could go to a boating store, but I’m sure the stuff they sell for boats would be insanely expensive. By the time you run all over town looking for something that costs $25, a $50 hoist doesn’t seem like such a bad compromise.

I’m going to try to get this thing working. I have enough junk to make things now. All I need is inspiration and something resembling drawings.

I think I’ll go fondle my new drill bits before I go to bed. Enco put a cobalt set on sale for over 50% off. There was no way I could turn that down. It beat the snot out of the great Ebay deal I was planning to go for. People said I was stupid to get cobalt. I suppose I should listen, but so far, the cobalt bits I’ve used have been incredible compared to HSS. FINALLY, I have drill bits and a nice box in which to store them. Big hurdle there.

I am so grateful for this stuff. I’ve wanted to do this for so long.

I’m open for business. Look out.

Who Will Give me $4500 for a Clueless Ex-Bagman?

The other day I sent out my first hurricane email, to a friend on the west coast. The Florida west coast, I should add. I referred to The Cone of Death. We were in it at the time. One of the recent storms was headed toward Florida, and the weather nerds always put up maps with big cones over the areas where the hurricanes are likely to go. I sent a clarification later, changing “Cone of Death” to “Cone of Certain Death.”

That storm fell apart, but now we are having hurricane weather anyway. By “hurricane weather,” I mean we’re getting annoying winds and intermittent rain, day in and day out.

I always love it when a storm falls apart or heads out to sea. I wish I could say I love it because it means no one will suffer, but I’ll be honest. That’s only part of the reason. I also love it because it disappoints hippies. Every year, Al Gore’s ridiculous predictions are proven wrong by the mildness of our hurricane seasons, and there are people out there who find it unbearable.

Maybe I’m just as bad as they are. It bothers me when the stock market rallies. I don’t want the economy to turn around until our immune system kills the socialist flu. If Obama’s Marxist approach fails to prevent a recovery, everyone on the left will say he saved us, and the swing voters in the middle will believe it, because they are the most gullible, least informed people on earth. Then we’ll get more socialism, and the economy will tank, and we’ll be told the answer is even more socialism, and before you know it, we’re Italy or Greece or England.

I still think this is where we’re headed. If we don’t discard this anti-Christian, anti-Jewish leader, and if we don’t change our ways, we have every reason to believe God will stop blessing us. Losing wealth is bad, but if it drives you to church, it’s a small price to pay, and God has a habit of restoring things once we turn to him.

It’s shocking how bad Obama is for Christians. He’s as great an enemy as the unborn have ever had; he believes in letting them die alone on cold tables after incompetent doctors try to kill them. He is very open about favoring barbaric Muslim regimes in their dealings with Israel, the only civilized nation in the Middle East. He wants to tax our tithes and offerings and alms, which, many of us believe, are essential to our blessings. He wants to replace voluntary giving, which is a pillar of Christianity and Judaism, with coerced giving. Men of God will no longer administer the money. Instead, it will go to twisted leftist hacks who will decide which behaviors they want to reward. The givers will not be blessed, because blessings come from righteousness, and there is nothing righteous about having your money taken by force. There is no altruism or piety in it. Nothing worth rewarding.

I will never understand why Jews voted for a man who attended an anti-Semitic church for twenty years. Someone explain that to me. I guess the explanation is obvious. Self-hatred. “Let’s make the Gentiles love us. Let’s give away more land; God isn’t real, and even if he was, we know better than he does. Let’s end black anti-Semitism by electing a black President. If we vote for a secular messiah, people will finally start loving us, and we won’t need to support a refuge in the desert.”

It’s a good approach. It worked great in Germany and Russia and Poland and Spain and Portugal.

I guess I should be more amazed that Christians voted for him. There’s a prominent Catholic out there who runs around debating, trying to prove it’s okay to vote for someone who supports partial-birth abortion and withholding care from live abortion victims. Many Christians fail to realize that we are never going to right the world’s evils through purely human effort, and they can’t see the clear Biblical division between government and religion. In the Bible, God discouraged the Jews from having a secular government in addition to the church, because he knew the church and government would be at odds, and he knew the government would be unpleasant to live under. Now we have a world where people think voting liberal pleases God, because liberals like giving money away. Never mind the fact that a huge percentage of people who vote for liberals do so because they will RECEIVE other people’s money, which is taken away by means of the threat of fines and jail time. I’m not sure how that works out to be unselfish.

There are Christians out there who will eagerly vote for 90% tax brackets for the productive, while refusing to donate 10% to the church. You have to wonder what the world would be like if people tithed and gave offerings. Would government charity exist? There would be little need for it. Right now, we give less than 2% of our income to the church. The figure should be more like 15%. That’s a huge amount of money. Think of what it could do.

Our selfishness created a vacuum, and socialism arose to fill it. And–wonder of wonders–socialism has always denied the existence and power of God, often making Christianity a crime. Coincidence, I’m sure.

I can’t believe I helped create this problem. I used to give, and then someone told me I was already donating to the world’s largest charity via income tax, and I believed it, and I cut back. What a mistake. I cheated God, others, and myself.

How misguided leftism is. Right now, we’re taking nice vehicles, destroying the motors (40% of their value), and parting them out or crushing them. None of those cars will go to the poor. Many would have gone to charity. The government is giving the owners money taken from other taxpayers. In actuality, the immediate source of the cash is foreign creditors, like the Chinese government. Not only will we have to pay for other people’s cars; we’ll be charged interest. Meanwhile, there are people all over the US who have no transportation. What a perfect storm of stupidity. Wealth destroyed. Debt increased. And people are happy about it!

I can’t root for the economy while we’re doing such stupid things. It’s like hoping your teenage son makes good money selling dope.

When God called us sheep, I think he was flattering us. Surely no other mammal has judgment as bad as ours.

Sea of Options

Truck owners, clue me in.

I originally wanted a regular cab pickup with an 8-foot bed, in 2-wheel drive. But it’s easier to get the other good stuff, like the big motor, the good suspension, and trailering doodads, if I go with an extended cab, 6.5-foot bed, and 4×4.

Am I going to regret this for eternity? Will the smaller bed drive me insane? I have no idea how to put a sheet of plywood in a short bed. And the extended pickups have a really stupid pretend backseat, which is utterly pointless. I would rather have empty space.

I am thinking this would still be a good choice for the rare occasions when I’d move very heavy stuff, because it will pull a rental trailer with no problems.

They’re not Just for Compost Any More

Moxie has located one of the best dog Youtubes I’ve ever seen. It shows that even a dog can be smart enough to realize socialism is evil. Take a look.

As long as I’m talking about dog videos, I’ll post one of my favorites.

I wanted to set up an electronic amusement system for Maynard and Marvin. I was going to mount cheap plastic keyboards over their cages, with cords attached to the keys. I figured they would enjoy playing bird music. But the keyboards I ordered never showed up, and I forgot all about it. I have to get that project done.

I had another idea for connecting two toys, one in each cage. My hope was that they would battle each other in a perpetual tug of war, and that this would make them shut up once in a while. I made preliminary efforts to get this working, but they paid no attention. I have tried to stimulate them to be more cooperative, even offering to name one of them Employee of the Month, but it appears that they have no ambition whatsoever, unless “ambition” can be construed to mean a lifelong quest to poop on increasingly expensive objects. I think Marv actually has dreams where he poops on the Mona Lisa and then receives worship and peanuts from hordes of adoring parrots.

I don’t know why that dog is eating carrots. A Republican dog should eat meat, preferably dripping blood and still squirming, and if possible, it should be something endangered. Or a hippie. Dogs like eating things that smell. On the other hand, the drug residue in a hippie’s carcass could cause a dog to trip for days, and then you would find Oreo wrappers all over your yard and maybe blacklight posters taped to the ceiling of the dog house.

Anything that reeks brings a dog pleasure. To a dog, a hippie would be like an entertainment center, and each smell would be like a separate channel. The dirty Birkenstock channel. The greasy hair channel. The infected piercing channel. Hippies always claim they love animals, but if they did, they would visit bored dogs at the Humane Society and let them smell them for a while.

I’ll send PETA a note and see what they think. Maybe instead of ink, I should write it in blood from a package of factory veal.

Saddam Hussein was an Amateur

I decided to try to reform my pepper plants, so I went out with some Velcro tape and a pair of scissors, and I tried to prop up the Trinidad Scorpion and the prig ki nu. I met with limited success.

The Trinidad Scorpion is relatively narrow. When I got out there it was maybe four feet wide at the widest point. It narrowed on the way down, so I was able to throw some Velcro around it, tie it to the trellis, and snug it up so it was off the ground. But it was still obscuring the Tobago Seasoning Pepper beside it, so I had to cut off some limbs. Man, it feels strange, pruning a crop as if it were a tree.

I moved on to the prig ki nu, which is maybe six feet tall and five feet wide. I tried to lift it and tie Velcro around it, but it was hopeless. That bush must weigh seventy pounds. I had to cut off a big section that protruded through the trellis and over the patio, and I had to extract a bunch of branches that went through the chain link fence and menaced the Persian lime. Finally, I got a mooring line that used to be on my dad’s boat. I looped it under the bush, took it back around a fence post, and pulled. The plant lifted up, and I tied the rope.

This thing is not a bush any more. It’s a small tree. It has wood in it. I don’t think they’re supposed to do this.

When I was done I had several branches that I had removed or accidentally knocked off, and I didn’t want to waste the peppers. Now I have three fourths of a cup of green Thai peppers and half a cup of ripe red ones. I don’t know what to do with them. I’d love to put them in vinegar in a squeeze bottle. Like sport peppers. But the last time I did that, they got moldy. I don’t know why the ones in the store don’t do that. Maybe they’re boiled and treated with preservatives. Maybe I’ll freeze the silly things.

I must have three or four thousand Thai peppers out there. And the Tobago Seasoning Peppers are going nuts. I should go out and grab them and do something with them. And the habanero golds are in the same state.

Chili at my place! Bring your asbestos pants!

Bad Seeds

I just mailed some pepper seeds to Dan from Madison. I emailed him and told him to try not to touch them unless he had to. Yesterday, I used a cutting board to seed two peppers so I could dry the seeds for mailing. Later on, I felt a sharp, burning pain in my finger, and I couldn’t find any injury. I think I grazed the cutting board when I put it away. The pain lasted for hours. I’m pretty sure it was the Trinidad Scorpion. Suddenly I understand the name. It was like a really nasty insect sting.

The other day Jim from SOTW informed me that his dad had had heart surgery. I should have posted a prayer request. Don’t know where my brain was. I’m posting it now. Says he has two stents, but no heart damage. Still has lung issues. Sorry, Jim.

I’m trying to get all serious about the “good steward” business. The limes and Key limes keep piling up, and I have been giving them away and throwing them out. Finally, I decided to freeze the juice. I cranked out half a cup of key lime juice and one and a quarter cups of Persian lime juice, and I divided the Persian lime juice into two portions, and I put everything in vacuum bags. Now I’m freezing them before I suck the air out and seal them.

I better go out and cut down a hand of bananas so they’ll ripen and I can get a start on eating the bunch.

My dragonfruit has a flower on it, but it doesn’t look like the fruit part is going to make it. I can’t wait until that thing starts bearing. It would help if the Salvadorans would stop attacking it with the weedeater.

I propped the limbs of my ponkan tree up with stakes because the fruit are overwhelming it. The tree is healthy but very scrawny, and it is determined to bear lots of fruit. It looks kind of stupid right now, but I know the limbs won’t tear off.

I have to prop up the pepper bushes before they rot. I guess I’ll tie them to the trellis they grow next to. They grew too big for their own good.

This is much better than the days when everything rotted and blew away.

Frozed

I just got back from the dermatologist. I procrastinated on my yearly skin cancer screening, because the one thing you should always be sure to do when faced with the possibility of contracting a highly curable cancer is to put off checkups as long as possible.

He froze about half of my head with his little spray bottle and said I could keep the rest of my head until my next visit. More or less.

This is the first time I’ve had to have anything frozen. But none of it was significant, thank God. If there is one time it’s good to have your prayers answered, it’s when you go in to make sure you don’t have melanoma. And I have been spared again. I think he froze three spots. I also showed him a thing on my arm, and he opined that I had self-medicated by scratching it completely off. Now I know how to save money on dermatology. I also rely on Maynard, who likes to walk around on my bare back biting out anything that strikes him as odd or potentially tasty.

One satisfying thing is that my health insurance coughed up part of the fee. With any luck, it will never kick in for anything other than preventive checkups. I know I’ll never break even. But that beats the alternative. God bless them; they can have it all, as long as I stay healthy.

I always get nervous when I go to the dermatologist, because to me, totally harmless skin irregularities and deadly cancers look exactly alike. I guess medical school is worth the money, because my doctor took–no exaggeration–three seconds to check my back and determine that my worst problem was love handles.

I like this guy because he doesn’t wait until the end of the session to tell you you’re not going to die. He looks at a bump, and he says, “This is nothing,” and he whips out the spray.

Sometimes I get the impression that I annoy doctors and dentists by being healthy. They see so many terrible problems, and then I walk in all worried about a new freckle or the mere possibility that I might have a cavity.

Lots of people in Florida die from skin cancer. I had a neighbor who died from melanoma. So even though I had no reason to think I was in trouble, now that I’m clear for another year, I can’t help feeling like I got a second chance at life. Silly, I know. I’m used to having things jump out and grab me without warning. I guess it’s hard to get over that.

I’m going to take another crack at truck shopping. I resisted getting a four-wheel drive because it has more parts to break, and it’s not very useful where I live. But it turns out the other options I want may be impossible to get without four-wheel drive. I also had the ridiculous feeling that I would get lower mileage, but that’s dumb, because there is no reason why the front wheels would have any more friction in their bearings than they would on a two-wheel drive. I don’t know exactly how it works these days. I don’t know whether the four-wheel engagement locks hubs which are otherwise free-spinning, or whether the wheels are rigidly connected to long axles which engage somewhere farther upstream, but the mileage figures show that it doesn’t matter.

I would like to be a useful person. It’s hard to do that with a T-bird. We’re supposed to be good stewards when it comes to money. With that in mind, it could be hard to explain why your only four-wheeled vehicle has two seats and a trunk the size of a kitchen drawer. It would be pretty good for driving lonely flight attendants and swimsuit models around, while explaining why they need to start going to church, but there isn’t much call for that, as far as I know.

I’m trying to make the garage more ergonomic. I mounted my lathe back plate on the wall. I’m planning to put in a second hoist above the mill, so I can move the vise and rotary table on and off the table without popping something vital in my upper body. I need to be able to lift stuff and then move it a couple of feet horizontally. Maybe I should try to hang the hoist on a rail or a jib. It only needs to be capable of lifting a couple of hundred pounds, but the smallest hoists I’ve seen are rated for 1,000. I guess that’s not important.

People have suggested getting a cart I can shove things off on, but a cart takes up a lot of room. Maybe a narrow shelf behind the mill would work, if I fixed it up so it had a part that acted as a bridge to the mill table.

My knurling tool never arrived. The seller had a computer issue. Their software kept telling them it had shipped. The other day they apologized and said it was on the way. I was tempted to ask them if they had actually seen the package, or if they had asked their lying software again.

I finally have drill bits on the way. I found a set of good cobalt bits at a price too low to turn down. The stock market is in the toilet today because retailers are face-planting left and right. Having seen the deals on new and used tools over the last year, I could have predicted that. Sometimes it’s shocking when you learn what startles “experts.”

Yesterday I tried to help my sister with car maintenance. She has a newish BMW 335i. What a horrible car. It has no oil dipstick. I’m serious. If you want to check the oil, you get out the manual and go through a bunch of steps, and three minutes later, the computer tells you not how much oil is in the crankcase, but how much oil it thinks you should add. And you have to run the engine while you do this. The brake fluid is the same way, and the brake reservoir is fixed so it takes a strap wrench. I stuck some oil in the car to keep it from seizing before she took it in for its BMW-endorsed Owner-not-allowed “free” maintenance, but I gave up on the brakes. Hope she doesn’t run into anything.

This car is like a HAL 9000. It talks to you, it tells you what to do, and it ignores your wishes. I can’t stand it. I’m sure it’s great for people who have more money than brains and who trust a talking car and a greedy dealer more than they trust themselves. But it’s not for me. If this thing conks out on a lonely highway, you have to wait for the BMW Luftwaffe helicopter to save you. Give me a car I have a hope of fixing. I just want transportation. Not a new world order. I don’t want a screen in my car coming on every day, telling me I have to hate Goldstein. This car is so authoritarian, overpriced, and hostile to privacy, they should call it the Obamamobile.

I’m glad that health care nonsense is not working out. I’d be on a nine-month freeze-spray waitlist, and if I lived until I received treatment, the government would pay $5000 in other people’s money for the service.

WTB: Hazmat Suit

Just got an update from Heather, RE her mom’s cancer:

Nojo

Church was great last night, as always. But it was also disturbing. In the sermons and videos I’ve seen lately, and in my studies, I have seen a thread that suggests something bad is up ahead, and that I may not be able to do anything about it. I feel like I’m being prepared. But I’m not sure.

The thing I’m concerned about primarily involves someone else, not me.

Pentecostals always strive to get the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit. We’re told to “covet” the gift of prophecy, although it’s not clear that the thing identified as “prophecy” in this context is the same thing that word describes in the Old Testament. Ancient Jewish prophets were supposed to be stoned if they ever prognosticated wrongly; they had to be infallible to be considered prophets. I have heard people describe the New Testament “prophetic” gift as something different. An ability to exhort and instruct people, with God’s guidance. If that’s true, it’s unfortunate that we use the same term to describe it.

I always ask for the gifts called the word of knowledge and the word of wisdom. If we understand the word of knowledge correctly, it means God informs us of things we otherwise could not know. For example, a prophet told Paul he would be bound and imprisoned. This is a good gift to have, because we always profit from knowing bad things are on the way. Very often, we can avoid them through prayer and repentance, or just by taking the appropriate action, such as taking a different road or changing a flight. Other times, we can’t avoid them no matter what we do, but we can be prepared, and we can find whatever blessings follow in the aftermath. And we can avoid being offended. People who live by faith get used to having God solve their problems, and on the occasions when he doesn’t, it’s easy to get angry at God and question his goodness, and that’s worse than the problems themselves. If you see things coming, you’re not as likely to take that attitude.

God has never spoken to me. A lot of people like to yap about how God told them this or that, and I am always highly skeptical. It’s not that I don’t think God tells people things. But I think it’s unusual to be completely certain that God has told you something. I’m sure God has put ideas and motivations and so on inside my mind, but I would never claim God had “spoken” to me unless I clearly perceived words, either written or spoken, which I knew came from God. I would have to hear a voice or read something. That has never happened to me.

Many times, I’ve felt that something I was considering doing or an idea I had had was right and inspired, and then it has turned out I was wrong. What if I had stood up in church and hollered, “GOD TOLD ME THIS,” and then rattled on about something God had nothing to do with? People do that all the time. I’ve seen ministers do it. They say extremely stupid things, and they attribute them to God. Isn’t that taking the Lord’s name in vain? You claim you speak in his name, and then you say something dumb. Is there any better example of violating that commandment? Think about the harm a person like that can do. They can convince their followers to commit suicide, for example. That has happened. What if Moses had made up the thing about God directing the Jews into the desert? “God said we’d be fine. Those dried-up corpses are an illusion.”

I absolutely refuse to say God has told me things. It will never happen, unless I have experienced miraculous events I know I can rely on. God sent Joseph an angel. He sent Mary an angel. He spoke to Moses and Abraham. He sent an angel to the father of John the Baptist. He doesn’t need me to sit down here guessing. My guesses are often wrong. If he wants me to know something, he is well able to tell me. I think God illuminates the Bible when I read, and he gives me wisdom when I need it, and many times, during prayer, I’ve felt sudden rushes of faith that I considered confirmation that I was going to receive what I had asked for. But that’s not “God spoke to me.” It’s wrong to confuse these things.

I saw a preacher the other day, stating that Jesus appeared to him after his daughter’s death. He said Jesus explained some things to him, and he related it to the audience. This is a guy who can say “God spoke to me.” But if you’re trying to quit drinking, and you suddenly have a feeling that God won’t mind if you have one more bender, it’s probably not God, and whatever it is, it’s not someone “speaking” to you. If you’re defaulting on your loans, and you think God is telling you to give him a big offering which you could be using to pay your debts, you may be hearing from somebody, but I doubt it’s God.

I have known someone who claimed to give generously to ministries and charities. I later found out that this person was a financial train wreck, with huge debts and a negative net worth. How can that be, if we are promised time and time again that God will provide for people who help the poor? It had to be because this person robbed men to give to God. If you rip off your creditors to give to charity, aren’t your creditors the real givers? Surely, when this person told me God directed the giving, those claims were untrue.

That’s something I need to think about, actually. I avoid incurring debt, but there is one matter involving debt which I should look after.

I always hope I’ll reach a state where God will supernaturally inform me before bad things happen, in a very explicit and direct way. That would sure be nice. Because I have not been taken in by the liars who stand in the pulpit making highly questionable statements about people who “refused” to let bad things happen to them, “by faith.” I am used to experiencing deliverance and God’s generosity, but I am not a complete idiot. If Peter was crucified, and if Paul was shipwrecked, stoned, flogged repeatedly, and beheaded, bad things are going to happen to me and the people I care about from time to time, and it’s just plain stupid to think I can run around squalling, “I’M STANDING ON THE WORD” and avoid misfortune every single time.

The neat thing about many of the bad things that happened to Biblical figures is that they knew about them in advance. Nobody wants to be beheaded, but if it’s going to happen, it looks much more like a defeat if it happens unexpectedly and they drag you off kicking and screaming. It’s really not the same, when you take it calmly and get your house in order first. For the enemy, there is no real victory in harming you. The victory is in stealing your faith and your dignity.

So this is a gift I would like to have. It’s good to say, “I don’t understand why this happened, but my faith is not shaken.” It’s better to be able to say, “I am grateful I knew about this and was able to get all the blessings out of it.”

I don’t have that gift, but I think just about any believer will routinely receive subtle–or not so subtle–clues about the future. God tends to prepare us for things, and sometimes we realize it as he’s doing it. I hope I’m misinterpreting the things I’ve seen lately.

In other news, I think I’ve made a wonderful discovery. When I started getting into tools, I got myself a big pump jar full of Gojo, because ordinary soap is useless on the kind of greasy dirt you pick up from working on machinery. And the Gojo did not work very well. In the old days, it was great. It took just about anything off, and you didn’t even need to add water to it. It was miraculous. So I was disturbed to see that the new stuff didn’t do the job.

Finally, I pinpointed the likely culprits. Hippies. Who else routinely removes great products from the marketplace? I knew the old Gojo was full of scary chemicals. The new stuff says “natural” on the bottle, and “natural,” like “eco-friendly,” is often a synonym for “more expensive yet totally ineffective.” Like the pathetic pyrethrin-based bug sprays South Florida insects cackle at. I don’t know what the hippies didn’t like about the petroleum-based chemicals in Gojo, but they must have found fault with them, because Gojo is worthless now. I will never buy it again. I also tried Zep, and it’s also worthless.

Yesterday I went to Northern Tool to look at a band saw and a chain hoist. Because I am crazy. And while I was there, I spotted some obscure brands of hand cleaner. I figured the hippies had probably banned all types of good hand cleaner, but I checked the labels anyway, and I saw some very promising references to “petroleum distillates.” I bought the smallest size of a product called Permatex, and I took it home and did my best to grease up my hand, and I applied the cleaner. Seems to work. It has that same mysterious vibrating quality the old Gojo had; remember watching the can shake after you slapped it down on the sink? And it took the crud off my hand.

My advice is to run to Northern Tool and buy several crates of this stuff before the hippies find out about it. They think we should all be free to take street drugs full of lye and baby laxative, but they can’t bear the thought of allowing us to have bug spray and hand cleaner and breast implants. Yoda might have put it this way: “The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the logic is.”

I’m going to empty my Gojo can and fill it with Permatex, which doesn’t come in nice pump bottles. Life is too short to spend with black grease smears on your hands.

Plus Thoughts on Giving

Ammunition is starting to reappear in stores! Hooray!

Don’t you wonder how much money the ammunition and firearms makers raked in because people stocked up after the Marxist Messiah was elected? I hope they piled up huge profits they’ll be able to use for R&D, retooling, and lobbying.

Some people claim wars were a big cause of the shortage. Hogwash. I admit, I haven’t sat down and added up the number of conflicts going on at the moment, but things haven’t changed much since the Bush era, and there were plenty of bullets to go around back then. This shortage was caused by the election of a leftist with “Potential Dictator” stamped all over his forehead.

You can actually buy small pistol primers now. And they don’t cost $60 a box, either. They’re back down to 30 or so. I’ll bet they go lower. A saturated market is not good for prices. There are profiteers and neurotics out there whose houses are packed full of guns and ammunition they will never use. Even relatively reasonable people stocked up to some extent. I won’t need small pistol primers for at least three years, and I have no gun purchases in mind, which is amazing, for me.

I paid $600 for my Saiga 12 shotgun. Last time I saw them for sale, the price was $500. You can once again buy Wolf AK-47 ammunition for 30¢ a round. Even 9mm is starting to show up. I’ve seen it for $14 a box, which is still insanely high, given commodity prices and the economic slump. I’ll bet you can buy it for $9 in three months. It is conceivable that I may be able to get more Swiss GP11 ammunition at a reasonable price. I never thought that would happen again.

I wonder what it’s like to be in the firearms industry right now. They must be on their knees every morning, thanking God for their amazing luck.

If there is one silver lining to the country’s tragic willingness to elect unqualified, immature Marxist egotists, it is that we are not nearly as willing to give up our guns. This is one area where leftists aren’t making the headway they hoped for. I have said that I think God is behind that, and I still think it’s true. I think he’s willing to punish this country for greed, cruelty, abortion, sexual sin, and abortion, but I don’t think he is ready to disarm individuals yet. There are too many people here who serve him.

I am hoping to use my machine tools to improve my guns. I need to fix the scope mount on my K31, for example. It’s skewed to one side, causing it to shoot about 6″ to the right at 100 yards. And I have to put all the aftermarket doodads on my Saiga, to turn it into an ergonomic, laser-guided living-room sweeper.

My dad’s concealed carry permit arrived this week. I paid for his course, as a birthday present. When he announced the card’s arrival and showed it to me, instead of saying, “Look at this,” or “Guess what I have?”, he said, “I’m putting you on notice.” I told him I’d watch my back.

Concealed carry is great, but it can be a pain. I get tired of the weight of the gun, but I force myself to do it every day, because it’s a great privilege and blessing, and because safety measures are worthless if you don’t use them. A seatbelt you don’t wear can’t save your life when you need it.

When I joined my church, they gave me a copy of Robert Morris’s The Blessed Life. I’ve been reading it this week. It’s somewhat self-serving to provide new members with this, because the book is about giving, which includes tithes and offerings. And I am extremely wary of greedy preachers and overblown “name it and claim it” prosperity preaching. Still, it’s a wonderful book, and I believe the fundamental message is right. It is true that we are obligated to give generously; not just monetarily, but in all ways, and not just to churches, but to people in need. And it is also true that withholding generosity will cause your life to be cursed. I believe those things wholeheartedly. I don’t believe every Christian can have a private jet, but I believe we are supposed to have “shalom,” which means a very general type of success. Good relationships, good mental and physical health, spiritual growth, and more than enough wealth to cover our needs. A perfect life? No, but a good life which always moves forward toward better things. A life for which each of us can’t help but be grateful, in spite of the challenges.

This is a very tough message for churches to preach, given the shameful and disgusting excesses we have seen in this area. The distinction between valid teaching on generosity and self-serving teaching intended to stimulate gullible people to make preachers rich is slippery, and it will be lost on many Christians, especially those who were victimized in the past. The crooks and psychopaths who took us in didn’t just take money; they poisoned the well against godly teachers who would come later and remind us of the power of generosity. Stealing money is bad. Stealing another person’s willingness to do right is much worse.

The neat thing about this book is that I keep seeing little confirmations of things I came to believe before I read it. The Holy Spirit teaches us, and it’s always amazing and humbling to see how our “brilliant” conclusions have already come to other people.

Pentecostal churches are still going a little heavy on God’s promises to us, and maybe a little light on our obligations to him, but I think they’re headed in a better direction these days. I bailed out about twenty years ago even though I thought they were mostly right about God. I don’t want to repeat the mistake of refusing to go to a good church because it appears imperfect. And I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. It’s not like these churches are packed with fools who only show up because they think God will fix all their problems and give them big houses. The people are wonderful, and they are very concerned with doing what is right.

One of the things I like about the book is that it defines “covetousness” as setting your heart on things. This is something I’ve thought about a lot, although it opened my eyes to see it used as a definition of that term. We have natural, normal, righteous desires in this life, such as sexual desire, a desire for wealth, and a desire for food. It’s sick to starve those desires. God never intended for us to do that. It’s sick to call them “lust,” “greed,” and “gluttony,” no matter how they manifest themselves. It’s not wrong to have desires. What’s wrong is overindulging them, serving them, and allowing them to cause you to sin. Fundamentally, it’s wrong to see the things you desire as replacements for God. They become idols. Contentment comes from God, not from sating your desires. It’s okay to see someone else’s house and think it would be nice to have one like it. It’s wrong to resent that person, or want him to lose his house, or set your heart on having his house or one like it, regardless of what you have to do. And it’s wrong to think a house will fix your life. That’s idolatry. It’s the error that keeps socialism alive. Expecting blessings only God can give, from things other than God.

Desire for sex isn’t automatically lust, and desire for wealth isn’t automatically greed, and so on. Stupidly equating all earthly desire with sin leads to warped, unhealthy, self-righteous asceticism. We’re not supposed to be free of these things. We’re supposed to be in charge of them. That’s how I see it.

I think money moving into and out of a person’s hands is like electricity moving through a circuit. It passes through, and along the way, it’s used to do good things. But if charges get stuck in the circuit and accumulate too much, you end up with a destructive disaster. The key is to avoid bottling it up. Or you could think of it as food going through a warehouse. If you shut the “out” door and stop distributing it, it rots, supports rats, causes harm, and benefits nobody. If you shut the “in” door, you have nothing to give others. If you get used to giving and denying your impulses, you learn not to set your heart on things, and they become less dangerous to you.

Living right is complicated. You have to be generous. You have to be responsible. You have to control yourself and be logical. You have to know when to rebuke and when to suffer other people’s faults quietly. You can’t sum it all up effectively in a paragraph or learn it all in a day. Jesus gave a very brief summary of the law and the prophets, but he never suggested we rely on that summary and throw the other stuff out.

Morris gave an interesting interpretation of the confusing verse reading, “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness.” He believes it means we are to help others in this world with our money, so that in paradise, they will greet us in gratitude.

It’s a pretty good book. I recommend it.

By the way, World Vision now has a special area in their Gift Catalog, listing gifts that carry matching funds. You donate X to some cause, and they get 3X or 10X or whatever in matching funds, so it’s almost as if you donated much more. Very neat idea.

Machining Woes

Heather’s mom is having kidney problems, and Heather is asking for prayer. Here is the link.

I had an interesting day. I was determined to check my Parlec vise and see if it needed adjusting. The parallels were sliding out from under parts when I tightened it. I went out and started moving the table to an appropriate position, using the power feed. The power feed slowed down. I figured it was defective. Then I heard a noise, and I looked up and realized I was trying to move a workpiece past a cutter which was not rotating.

Naturally, I lost my mind for several minutes. I could see that I had knocked the head out of tram. No dial indicator needed. I assumed I had destroyed the mill’s entire head. But it turned out to be okay, and I got some more valuable experience in tramming. Man, I felt like an idiot.

I put the vise back on the table and aligned it, and I put two 123 blocks in it, one on top of the other. I centered them in the vise and tightened it, and the lower block didn’t come loose. So it appears that the vise is okay, although it doesn’t work that great for parts that don’t press against the lower parts of the jaws.

I finished up one T nut. Had a couple of issues. First, I tapped the nuts by hand, because the alternative was to spend a year putting each one in the lathe and centering it in the 4-jaw chuck. The mill’s lowest speed makes me nervous, so I didn’t want to use it for tapping. When I was done, it turned out the threads were not perfectly perpendicular to the top surfaces of the nuts. I don’t think it matters when they’re in use, but it’s a bummer. Second thing: I made a subtraction error and made one of the nuts the wrong size. It will work, but I wanted it to be right. Guess I’ll make new ones.

It sounds nutty, but while I had no problems with advanced math and physics involving tons of variables, addition and subtraction of actual numbers drive me crazy. In higher math and science, mistaking plus for minus is usually a trivial error which is easily fixed. If you make the same error with numbers, it can cause real problems.

I will make nuts until I get them right. You watch.

I Will not go Quietly Into the Day Room

I am grateful for all the supportive comments I’m getting about my sister’s condition. It’s unfortunate that she doesn’t blog, because I’m getting all the kind words, and I’m not the one who is ill. I’m a peripheral figure in this story. It’s unseemly and disturbing when a blogger takes someone else’s misfortune and uses it to make himself the star of his own soap opera. I’m not going to do that.

Reader Ruth suggested I hop in an RV with my sister and dad and tour the country. It’s a wonderful sentiment. But while I am going to be as helpful as possible during my sister’s illness, there are some sacrifices I am not quite ready to make. I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I think anyone who has made a long car trip with these two (and my sister’s dog) would understand. Illness changes a lot of things, but it doesn’t change everything! If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. You are welcome to my bone marrow, but if you want to go RVing, send me a postcard.

I did promise I would go a couple of places with her. She wants to visit Israel, and there is a famous evangelist she wants to see when he appears in Sanford, Florida.

I hope that if I’m ever seriously ill, I’ll live up to the examples my mother and my aunt and my uncle set. They didn’t moan and complain. They didn’t pull out the cancer card when they wanted things. They didn’t lay guilt trips on people. Some patients do those things. When my mother’s surgery turned out to be a failure, she continued treatment primarily to please the rest of us, and she felt terrible guilt about the smoking that caused her disease. She did not want her illness to be our illness, any more than it had to be. She spared us the pain of remembering getting angry with a cancer patient.

My mother always said manners were extremely important, and I thought she was crazy. She was right. I thought she was too concerned about things like keeping your elbows off the dinner table, but she was also trying to tell me to be considerate. When you consider other people’s feelings, you can make a big difference in the way they feel. Sometimes it lasts a day, and sometimes it lasts much longer. We have developed a revolting reverence for assertiveness and aggression, and it’s very sad. If you travel from a place like Miami or New York to a place where the culture is kinder, you will probably notice that you feel better all the time. Spend a month in Texas or Alabama, if you want to see what I mean.

Consideration continues to be important when you’re seriously ill. It probably becomes more important, because the things you do during such times carry a great deal of weight and are not forgotten. If my mother had lashed out at me or my dad during her sickness about mistakes we had made, we would still be in pain from it. People tend to open their hearts to you when you’re sick, so they are especially vulnerable.

My big machining task for today is adjusting my Parlec vise. When I put parts in it, they rise off the parallels. That’s bad. It’s exactly what the vise is designed to not do. It’s why it costs four times as much as a normal vise.

A lot of people reflexively scream “KURT” when you say you want a milling vise. There are lots of vises out there, but almost none of them are really good, and you take a chance unless you buy a Kurt. I was reluctant to get a Parlec (Taiwanese) for this very reason, and some people told me not to do it, but after researching it, I thought it was safe. Now the parts are rising, and naturally, it makes me nervous. If it can’t be fixed, it’s $400 down the crapper. I have been told that the rise is okay, if it measures out small enough.

Last night I found out a few things. It’s awful, but I had to go to the Kurt website and download one of their manuals to get the lowdown. Apparently, you can’t clamp things off-center and expect the vise to work. The part has to extend to the midpoint of the vise on the x-axis. Also, you should try to keep parts low in the jaws. That, of course, is impossible. Much of the time, you have to rest things on 123 blocks or parallels. It’s not clear to me whether the y-axis pressure has to be exerted low in the jaws, or whether the thing that actually matters is the z-axis pressure, which would presumably be translated to the ways by the parallels. If the latter alternative is right, then the parallels don’t matter.

Anyway, today I’ll put an indicator on the vise, measure the rise, and see if I can adjust it. It has a set screw that helps keep the moving jaw down.

I am going to have to grit my teeth and start machining methodically. So far, I’ve been so excited about having the mill, I’ve been winging it, just to see the chips fly. But that’s no good in the long run. You have to calculate feeds and speeds. And you have to plan your cuts, in order. It’s like doing a science lab in college. I used to write chronological lists before my labs, and they got me out a lot faster and saved me mistakes.

Sometimes doing one operation before another can make life really hard, or it may make the rest of the job impossible. And when you use an edge finder which takes a collet which won’t hold your cutting tool, and which uses a way different z setting, forgetting to take all the right measurements at the right times can cause you real agony. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Collet out. Chuck in. Tighten nut. Raise knee. Realize you need another measurement. Lower knee. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Chuck out. Collet in. Do this three or four times in half an hour, and you will develop a real enthusiasm for checklists. And trying to remember four-digit DRO measurements will give you a serious hankering to master your DRO’s memory functions.

I also have to learn to use some kind of design software for layout. This may well be the task that results in my being fitted for adult diapers and a jacket that buckles in the back. All software is written BY nerdy engineer types. That’s bad. What is infinitely worse is software written FOR nerdy engineering types. They don’t even try to make it usable. People discussing these applications like to throw the phrase “learning curve” around, to help you understand just how screwed you are. That’s where I am now. At the base of a learning curve resembling Mount Crumpet in the original Grinch cartoon.

“Click to see tutorial.” Okay, but what do I click to get a tutorial to help me understand the tutorial? At times like these, I wish I lived near the Mexican border so I could drive across and buy Thorazine. But a month or two from now, I’ll be very glad I got adjusted and attacked these hurdles. I was a great lab student because I surrendered, acknowledged my severe mental deficiencies, and took appropriate steps. Machining should be no different.