Slouching Towards Bugtussle

Today I surprised myself. I contacted a realtor about a property in Blount County, Tennessee.

One of the problems I’ve had since my dad died is a reluctance to take ownership of things. For example, sometimes I say “we” when I’m talking about things we used to own together. “We have two wells.” “We have a pool.” Things like that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just managing things for my dad. I have even been reluctant to change the bad landscaping at my house, just because I feel like the previous owners knew something I didn’t and would disapprove.

I can tell you something that has helped me. Sometimes I say, “My dad moved to a far-away country and gave me everything he owns here.” This is true. He owns nothing in this world.

The idea of selling properties and moving to another state by myself is slightly intimidating. I wouldn’t be asking anyone’s permission. I would just go. I didn’t think I’d start looking for a new place so soon.

I was waiting for God to give me ideas about where to go. The older I get, the more I realize we screw up our lives by putting ourselves in traps God had nothing to do with. We choose horrible husbands, wives, careers, and homes. Then things go badly, and we’re stuck. You can’t just drop a spouse like a bruised peach at the supermarket. You can’t make a better career appear instantaneously. If you’re in the wrong home and the wrong area, you probably have a mortgage, and that means you’re stuck like a coyote with its paw in a trap. I don’t want to “follow my heart” or “go with my gut.” I don’t want to trust my ridiculous judgment. The world tells us to do those things, but worldly people live in defeat and regret. I want to get guidance from God.

I felt he was telling me to move to Tennessee, but I couldn’t figure out where to go. I knew I didn’t want to be in a flat area or a city. I wanted to know I was in Appalachia. I didn’t want to be in a county where they still had Klan meetings. I didn’t want to be close to Gatlinburg or the other tourist traps.

This morning I started to think he wanted me to move to Blount County.

I read up on it after I got this impression. It seems like a nice place. Good climate, nice hills, and real stores within a reasonable drive. Land prices are cheaper than they are here. I could set myself up on hundreds of acres of woods.

This week the nightly lows will be in the sixties in Blount County. That would be nice. I love Ocala, but it’s up around 95 degrees every day right now, and it’s only going down into the upper seventies at night. Working outdoors during the day is nearly impossible. You can put a couple of hours in, pausing frequently, and then you have to quit.

The human body is funny. When you overheat, you get tired, even if you’re not working hard. Your body will refuse to give you full performance, and it will make you breathe hard as if you were exerting yourself. It’s not helpful when I’m trying to cut downed trees or dig up a boulder.

I contacted a couple of real estate brokerages online about a property, and in my messages, I said, “No calls, please.” Both called within seconds. They apparently refuse to deal with me over the web like normal people. I sent the calls to voicemail.

Real estate agents are really annoying. When you call about a property, they don’t see you as a person who wants to buy that property. They see you as a lead. They want to turn you into “their” customer. Then they get 3% of the sale price of any property they tell you about.

I wanted to see what the property was shaped like. A lot of big properties are long and skinny, and I’m not having that. It doesn’t do you much good to have 300 acres if your neighbors are 100 yards away in both directions. I found the property on a government website, and it’s shaped like a lizard. No good. Oh, well.

I see where the term “gerrymander” comes from.

I got tempted to stray from Tennessee, and I looked at a place in North Carolina. It’s remarkable. It has two well-kept, very livable buildings. One is the main house, and the other is a sort of shop with its own kitchen. Really nice. It only has 40 acres, though. The number 300 keeps rolling around in my head. I really like big pieces of land. I always have. My favorite of all my grandfather’s farms was around 300 acres.

I am sorely tempted to spend a few days in Tennessee, just looking around.

In other news, I made real progress with my grilling. I went to Home Depot and got me a Bernzomatic TS8000 torch. I already have a Turbotorch, but it’s for the workshop. The Turbotorch was recommended to me as the best torch of the type, but it has been balky ever since I bought it, and it doesn’t seem to burn any hotter than the one I just got.

Today I made two 6.5-ounce burgers (because I had exactly 13 ounces of meat) and put them on the grill at its highest post-modification setting. As I grilled, I applied the torch to scorch the outsides of the burgers. It worked very well. I got some deep browning as well as a little crunch, and the insides of the burgers were hot and juicy. One had very little pink in it, and I always shoot for medium, but burgers are not steak, and medium-well is still very good. Medium can actually be a little mushy.

I have a Searzall tool on the way. I think I wrote about it. It’s a torch attachment for searing food evenly. Once it arrives, I should be all set. Regardless of the appalling shortcomings of propane grills, I’ll be able to put a good sear on the outside of every piece of beef I cook.

It’s amazing that the grill industry makes such feeble products.

I sound like I’m knocking my new grill. I think it’s an excellent product, as propane grills go. I believe it cooks as well as a $2000 grill. I should know; I had one. I just think the entire industry should be doing better. A $2000 grill should make amazing steaks, and when you buy a $100 grill that cooks as well as a $2000 grill, it should produce the same result. I have a $100 grill that, as delivered, cooked steaks just as well as an industry-leading, yet disappointing, $2000 grill.

It would be nice to have an electric salamander some day. That would put an end to the striving.

I still plan to get a square cast iron griddle for the butane stove. Frying puts a magnificent crust on a steak. I guess I could fry and then touch up with the Searzall! That would be interesting.

The feeling I get is that grilled burgers need to be at least an inch thick before cooking. Otherwise, the insides cook too fast. It’s just physics. I think the torch allows me to do a better job with thinner burgers.

I wonder how a propane knife forge would do. Someone needs to try that. It sounds stupendous. I guess the melting fat would be a problem, because it would run into the insulation and burn.

There’s a Youtube video of a lady cooking a steak using a forge. She’s not much to look at, she has a whisker problem, and her miniskirt is too short for a woman of her years, but she may be onto something.

Poor thing. It must be hard landing a man when you look like that. You have to give her credit, though. She’s in there punching. Takes good care of herself. Look at those toned legs.

I’m sure I’ll report on the Searzall when it arrives. Try to contain yourselves.

Cactus Cooler Cans Under the Cushions

I hate strongholds. Unless they’re good strongholds.

A stronghold is anything that’s hard to change. If you can’t quit overeating, it’s a stronghold. Cancer that won’t yield to prayer is a stronghold. Unassailable faith in God is also a stronghold; it’s just a positive stronghold.

I have rocks and stumps in my yard. I don’t know if they have anything to do with the supernatural, but they are stubborn obstacles to my enjoyment and improvement of the lot. Remember Joe Starrett in Shane? He had a big stump in a field he worked, and he never quit striving to get the stump out, because it drove him nuts. The novelist had the same feeling about stumps that I do.

I got myself a subsoiler for my tractor. It’s a big hook that goes down in the ground. You can hook it to stumps and use the hydraulics to lift them. It works well on small stumps and fairly big rocks, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. There are some big stumps on my land, and I have seen rocks half the size of cars.

I had three stumps and several rocks jutting out of the ground in an area where I wanted to put blackberry briars. I already have the plants. I managed to get the stumps out this spring, but the rocks would not yield. I started digging around them to find out where the edges were.

Today I dug around a couple of really annoying rocks, trying to find where they ended. The rocks were up against each other, and I figured that if I could find a way to move one, the other would then have less to anchor it, and I would be able to extract it, too. I unearthed a sort of horn on one rock. I decided to loop a tow strap over it, put the tractor in low, and pull.

When I took off, I was surprised to see a patch of ground the size of a yoga mat lift up. The two rocks were actually one.

I pulled the rock up halfway out of the ground. Then I propped it up with a piece of 4×4. With the rock in that position, I was able to loop the strap under it. The rock had a waist to it, so once the strap was around it, it could not come off.

The big danger was that if I reached under the rock with the strap, it might fall back on me, and then there I would be, waiting for death with a large rock on top of what used to be an arm. I avoided the problem by using a Johnson bar to shove the end of the strap under the rock. I then pulled it through from the other side.

I am painfully aware that many people die every day from doing stupid things. It’s very important to try not to be stupid when you use tools. That sounds simplistic, but it’s the truth. Most people who go to emergency rooms with horrible tool-related injuries did something stupid. Reaching under a half-ton rock held up by sand and a small piece of wood is very stupid.

When I took off with the tractor, the rock came right out, and I dragged it easily. That surprised me. It makes me rethink everything I knew about stumps and rocks. Maybe the strap is a better tool than the subsoiler.

Now I have a six-foot-long rock sitting in my hard. I’m considering using it for landscaping. I could probably sell it, but it doesn’t look too bad in the yard, and it’s a conversation piece.

The shovel in the photo is 44.5″ long, so that gives you an idea how big the rock is.

I feel fantastic. It’s great when an annoying problem suddenly gives way.

There are still two rocks I really want to uproot. Maybe it can be done. I hate getting in there with a shovel and doing all that exploratory work, when I have a tractor. Sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

If you need a thousand-pound rock, let me know. I am always open to offers.

More Toxic Items for the Trash Heap

When you’re a Christian, you’re supposed to have testimony. God is supposed to do supernatural things for you and around you all the time. If that’s what’s happening to you, be of good cheer, because it means your life has the potential to get much, much better. Once you get hooked up to the power source, good things will happen.

I had an interesting experience night before last.

I’ve been cleaning up my home, getting rid of objects which give evil spirits power. This is an extremely important thing to do. Praying for help with your problems while living in a house full of demon doors is like bailing out a boat without plugging the giant hole in the hull.

If you don’t cleanse your house, expect problems, and don’t be surprised if God refuses to help you with them. That’s the bottom line.

Recently, I threw out a bunch of literature I considered problematic. I threw out works by Plato and Homer, as well as some other Greek idolaters and/or sexual degenerates. Night before last, I realized I had two items which might be just as bad.

A couple of years ago, before my dad became so demented he could not drive, I got him a gift certificate from Barnes & Noble. I don’t recall the occasion. Maybe Father’s Day. He complained that he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to read, but he decided to drive to the store anyway. He came home with some neat bookends: heavy plaster casts of Homer and Socrates. He liked them a lot.

The bookends came with us to Ocala. I put them in my storage room along with a lot of other things I didn’t know what to do with.

Here is what occurred to me: if Homer’s pantheist works aren’t fit to be in a Christian house, and Plato’s praises of homosexual predation shouldn’t be here, why should I keep images of Homer and Socrates?

It bothered me to think of throwing the bookends out. I pitied my dad. He was once a big, strong, forceful man with a high IQ and power over other people, but in his last years, he was confused, and he needed help. He seemed to shrink. He used to walk around with his pants rolled up, just as the poem says.

I remember when he showed the bookends to me. He was very pleased with what he had done, and he seemed to want me to approve and share in his pleasure.

My dad doesn’t deserve pity. He is an immortal being with a perfect mind and eternal youth. He is invulnerable. He lives in a realm of joy and love. I forget this, and I feel sorry for him. I felt like throwing the bookends out would be like throwing my dad out and forgetting him.

I decided to get rid of them anyway. I didn’t hesitate for a minute. God has a problem with hellenism, and that means taking part in it, even in small ways, creates serious, annoying problems for me. It creates obstacles for God. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want the channel to be wide open.

I can’t take garbage to the dump on Thursdays, so I got out of bed and put the bookends in the garage with things I intended to take later. I have found that God will honor this just as well as taking things to the dump or destroying them.

I went to sleep, and hours later, I woke up suddenly. I heard a male voice yell, “BOH!”, as if someone had been kicked very suddenly and very hard from behind. I don’t know if “boh” means anything. It means “where” in Hebrew, but that may not have any significance. It may just have been an exclamation of surprise or pain.

Anyway, right after this happened, I felt a very powerful change.

I have a problem with my nose clogging up at night. It’s nowhere near as bad as it once was, but it happens. Right after I heard the sound, I realized my head was wide open. Not only was I not congested; I felt completely open and empty, as though someone had gone in with a tool and enlarged the passages in my head.

It was so extreme, it made a great impression on me.

It’s as if the bookends had been giving power to a spirit that wanted to take away my air.

I’ve had a little congestion since then, so I can’t say I was permanently delivered, but it was very, very odd.

Today the bookends go to the dump. My dad won’t care. They’re not his, and he doesn’t care about them in heaven. If he could come back, he would throw them out, himself.

I don’t want to suffer needlessly all my life and then get to heaven and find there were painful problems that dogged me to the end when I could have gotten victory simply by throwing unimportant things out.

My ideas must sound crazy to lukewarm Christians. Most Christians have convinced themselves of some very stupid notions. They think Satan and evil spirits aren’t real and shouldn’t be discussed, which is remarkable, since Jesus is a spirit, and he cast out evil spirits here on earth. They think they can melt into the world’s culture and still please God. They see nothing wrong with exposing themselves to poisonous entertainment created by people who hate Christianity. They use drugs and fornicate and expect God to give them every blessing in the Bible.

The earth is a battleground, we are at war, and we live behind enemy lines. We’re surrounded. It’s very serious. A lax attitude brings greatly diminished results, and it can result in damnation, even if you think you’re a Christian and you’ve been baptized.

We sleep with our eyes open, every day, like Samson on the lap of Delilah. We cuddle up to our enemies and expect them and God to treat us well.

God is throwing many, many people into hell every day, and we act like everything is fine. Most people go to hell, and things are not fine.

I keep asking God what else I should get rid of. I look forward to more protection and help, as well as a closer relationship with him. I don’t care about the things I lose. They’re snares and stumbling blocks. I want the pearl of great price.

I find I don’t miss the things I discard. For example, I don’t miss my blues or jazz CD’s at all. I am very slightly unhappy about throwing out a collection that took so long and cost so much to put together, but it’s not a big deal. I wasn’t listening to the disks anyway, so what have I lost?

Getting rid of things can be very empowering. This week I took the tractor and ripped out a bunch of shrubs beside my house. They were old and tough and hard to deal with. I took ownership instead of continuing to defer to former owners who have zero authority here. I’ve installed smaller shrubs that will look better and be much easier to care for. I should have done it sooner. This is my house. It’s not their house. It’s not my dad’s house. I own 100% of it.

I’m strongly inclined to get rid of my mother’s crystal. She liked Waterford. As a heterosexual man, I don’t see much appeal in expensive crystal, and even if I did, Waterford is heavy and lacking in elegance. I feel like selling every piece, just so I won’t have to carry or wash it again.

I want to get rid of my mother’s china. She had two sets. My sister got the newer, nicer set, and I got the old set. It’s very tasteful, but when am I going to use china? She had two sets of silverware, and I got the Fifties-looking set that looks dated and a little tacky. I think it clashes with the china. I’d like to get rid of the silverware, too. I don’t like silver flatware. Polishing it is a nightmare.

My mother was a wonderful lady, but her taste was not everything it could have been. She grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and she never got completely past it. There were a lot of hits, but there were also a lot of misses.

I have a huge fruitwood china cabinet. It’s about 6 feet long, and it’s extremely heavy. I do not like it. It’s in a room–my unused dining room–where I should really put some tools and a bench. I’m contemplating putting it in a consignment store.

My grandmother had a lot of nice stuff, because she and my grandfather never divorced, and my grandfather, who was very well off, let her spend money on her house. My dad was extremely cheap with my mother. She bought things from estates and outlets, and it showed. Their marital problems led to losses. The only items of any quality that remain are the crystal, the china, some silver, a filthy Chippendale chair, and the china cabinet. It’s not worth curating, to put it mildly.

Dysfunctional families start over, again and again. They don’t build. Often, the things they pass on are not worth keeping. It’s better to dump this depressing stuff and start from scratch.

I don’t think spirits have attached themselves to my mother’s paltry collection of feminine treasures, but bad memories have. Also, I really believe I’m going to be living in Tennessee before very long, and I can’t stand the thought of paying movers to haul junk I don’t want.

You probably have toxic objects in your home. There are plenty of Christians out there who have testified to the importance of getting rid of them. I hope you’ll consider it. It’s not our imagination. The things you possess can ruin your life.

Landscaping Tips Put my Worries to Rest

I had an interesting morning. A lady from the university extension came out and told me what to do about my landscaping.

When I moved here, I was very reluctant to second-guess the previous owners. They had been very sharp about designing, constructing, and maintaining the house. Their landscaping, on the other hand, looked crazy to me, but I assumed they knew more than I did, so I didn’t want to cause problems by trying to correct them.

I have three citrus trees. They looked bad to me when I moved here, and citrus is disappearing all over America because of an unstoppable blight, but I gave the sellers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was possible to grow citrus in this isolated area, and I just needed the right chemicals. Guess what? My impression was correct. All three trees have citrus greening. There is no cure, and if I plant new trees, they’ll get it, too. It’s time to cut them and drag them away.

The extension agent agrees that some of the hedge choices were dumb, and lots of the plants are so old it’s time to pull them and get new ones. Now I can quit blaming myself for having crazy hedges. I’m going to rip a bunch of plants out with the tractor and replace them with things like podocarpus, which always look great and don’t get woody and hard to trim.

My irrigation system really is stupid; it’s not my imagination. In Miami, lawn sprinklers sprinkle…lawns. They water everything else, too. My system waters shrubs near the house, a small driveway island, and my front gate. The bulk of the yard gets no water. The agent said I should turn the system off, and there is no point in fixing it so it waters the grass. My grass isn’t thin because it’s dry; it’s thin because it’s a crummy type of grass, growing on sandy soil. My hedges don’t need watering.

This is all great news, because my system runs off the same pump that supplies my house. I don’t want to wear it out, and I don’t want to put so much demand on it that it sucks dirt and gravel into my pipes.

The grass is supposed to look bad, so what I thought was a terrible mess is only a moderate mess.

Areas I thought looked bad because of leaf accumulation actually look bad because of shade. The grass here needs a lot of sun. I can fix the rough areas by planting something called crown grass. It’s not real grass, if you ask me. It doesn’t spread. You get big, discrete clumps of three-foot-high grass that cover up your dirt. You can’t kill it, so it’s perfect for me.

She agreed that I had killed a lot of grass. I put ammonium sulfate on it, and she says it does not like that particular chemical. In more positive news, it will grow back.

I have a bare area among some trees in the front yard. She says I need something called “cast iron plants,” so named because they thrive no matter what. They’ll cover the area so I won’t have to go in with the mower and mow the dirt and few little bits of grass.

She confirmed that a mulberry tree will work here. That would be nice. I have a big area with nothing but grass, and a shade tree with edible fruit would be a big plus.

She didn’t like my idea of putting a bamboo wall between my neighbors and me, but under pressure, she admitted it would work. She recommends against it because some people get stuck with bamboo varieties that spread and ruin everything. If I’m confident that the variety I get is non-spreading, bamboo will be a big enhancement to the property.

I have an irritating horse lady across the fence, and she had the gall to suggest I should not shoot in my backyard because it upset her pets. Like would be better if she were invisible.

Now I have to find the plants the agent recommended and put them in my yard. Of course, Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t have them, so I have to look for nurseries. Once I find the plants, I can get to work, and my yard will be much less bother than it is now.

Do More With Dumore

Yesterday was productive. Spiritual progress began while I was still in bed; God helped me to be very effective in my time with him. Natural progress started before I left the bedroom. I had some problems with the recorder’s office in Dade County, as well as the Florida Revenue Department. People from both organizations called, and their errors were corrected. It’s not easy to call them yourself. You have to wait forever on hold. Much better when they call you.

I also fixed my TV before starting the day. I have a 55″ TV in my bedroom. In the past, I chose not to have a bedroom TV because it seemed inappropriate, but now that I use TV’s to listen to Julie True and watch Christian videos, it’s a different story. I got a Roku TV a few months ago. Unfortunately, it had started to make buzzing sounds when I played music.

I found that when I pressed my finger against the back of the TV in a certain area, the buzzing stopped. That meant something was touching the inside of the panel. I put the TV on my bed and opened it up. I found that a lot of wires and cables were stabilized with cheap vinyl tape, and one data ribbon was twisted unnecessarily, bringing it closer to the rear panel. I removed the cable, took the twist out, and reinserted it. Then I added a couple of pieces of Gorilla Tape. I put them on things that looked like they could vibrate against the cabinet. Bang. Problem solved.

I believe I would have gotten more done yesterday, but I had some issues with a weed eater and rotary tool I ordered. The weed eater’s box had been torn open, and things were missing. I contacted the manufacturer and the company that sold it to me. I ordered a new weed eater. Today the one I received goes back.

The rotary tool didn’t work out at all.

I have a Dremel I got in about 1995, and it has had a number of problems. It pooped out while I was using it to burnish the edge of a holster, so I Googled around to see who made good new rotary tools. I figured Proxxon was the answer. I already have one, and it seems okay. I learned that people often complain about the electronics failing, so I gave up on Proxxon.

I decided to go with the reviewers, and I bought a Dremel 4300 kit. I paid $100, and when the tool arrived, it turned out to be useless. I put my leather burnisher in it, and as soon as I turned the tool past 15000 RPM, it went nuts. It started screeching, and the tool wobbled in the chuck. There was no way to make it work. I tried a collet, and I got the same result. The same burnishing tool works fine in my Proxxon, and it worked fine in the old Dremel, so my best guess is that the one I bought is defective. If not, the design is incompetent. I’m sending it back. I started looking for options again.

It appears that no one on earth makes a good corded consumer-grade rotary tool. There are Dremel and Proxxon, and then there are the Chinese clones. I looked for tools made by real companies like Makita and Dewalt, but there was nothing. Milwaukee makes a cordless job which is probably good, but I’m tired of chargers.

I decided to check out Dumore. This is a company that makes industrial tools like tool post grinders. Their products are extremely expensive. A simple Dremel-like tool will run you over $300, and it won’t work with all of Dremel’s gadgets. On the other hand, they run for lifetimes, not weeks.

You can get a used Dumore inexpensively on Ebay. Oddly, the same tools that sell for over $300 new routinely sell for between $50 and $100 in fairly good condition. I checked the Dumore parts site, and things like bearings are not expensive. The highest price I saw was somewhere over $30, and most bearings I saw cost $4.41 each. Bearings and switches are the only things in a Dumore than can be expected to fail with any frequency (I think), so I don’t see any reason to be afraid to buy used. I would guess it’s unusual for the windings to fail.

Most or all of the Dumores I’ve seen don’t have variable speed, but this can be fixed with a simple, cheap external controller, so it doesn’t matter. A foot pedal is a nice addition to a rotary tool. You can put it down without handling the switch.

The Dremel is going back to Amazon, and my next rotary tool will be a Dumore. No more playing around.

Dremel prices keep going up, but the quality doesn’t keep pace. It’s strange that companies like Makita and Milwaukee haven’t gone into competition and exterminated Dremel.

I got the rotary tool mess fixed yesterday, and I also succeeded in burnishing the edge of my latest knife sheath, so it’s finished, but for improvements I may make later. I used the Proxxon.

I keep thinking I should get a Foredom eventually. This is a quality rotary tool with a flex shaft. I have a Chinese clone which works very well, but I know I’ll eventually want a second flex tool.

It appears that today will be productive, too. I already re-worked a lease with the lady who helps me rent properties, and I had a very powerful prayer session before I left the bedroom.

God willing, it won’t rain today, and I’ll be able to mow the yard.

I love it when God helps me get things done.

Heinous Retaliation Soon to Commence

The excitement here never lets up. Today I expect my new weed eater to arrive.

I know people call them “trimmers” because “Weed Eater” is a trademark, not a description, and Wikipedia says Weed Eater was swallowed by another company and turned into Husqvarna AB. I don’t care. I call them weed eaters.

Why am I buying a weed eater when I already have one? Simple. I bought the wrong one because of a lack of confidence.

I hate dealing with ethanol-tainted gas. Ethanol is a scam which hurts everyone except a few greedy farmers and politicians, and it ruins carburetors and other machine parts. I bought an electric weed eater in order to avoid dealing with carb varnish. I got an EGO trimmer, which uses a huge lithium battery.

The trimmer works well, but let’s face it: it’s not a 30-cc gas trimmer. Also, the batteries only run something like 20 minutes, and I have a big property. I can replace the battery as needed, but then what if I want to use the EGO hedge trimmer and the edger on the same day?

I decided to write off my loss and get an Echo trimmer. I ordered a monster. It’s the second-biggest one they make. It’s crazy powerful, and it weighs two pounds less than the EGO.

I also ordered blades for it. String trimmers are great, but once woody weeds get over 3/8″ thick, you have problems. The answer is to mount a circular saw blade on your trimmer. You can zip through limbs 3″ thick with a blade. It’s amazing. You can see people do it on Youtube.

The blades will fill a gap in my yard-machine armory. I have a hedge trimmer, and it’s okay for light trimming, but if you want to cut a hedge back one or two feet, it’s not good. When you drop down into a hedge’s lower regions, you run into thick limbs, and they don’t cooperate with hedge trimmers.

I have a number of hedges which I think are too high. I want to take some of them down two feet. I want to take others down a foot. This would be a nightmare with a hedge trimmer. I’m hoping the weed eater and blades will massacre the thick stems without much effort.

The people who used to own this place let the hedges rise up over the lower panes of the windows. That seems wrong to me. If you told your builder to put your windows at a certain height, presumably, you didn’t plan to block the panes and stare at the backs of your hedges all day. I want to see some of the land I paid for. My plan is to cut the hedges six inches below the window sills.

The blades should also be nice for getting rid of grapevines in the woods near the house. They’re so thick it’s hard to walk in some areas, and they also provide great cover for rattlesnakes to hide while you approach them.

Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to buy a series of blades until I find the one that works. There are a number of people who have tested blades on Youtube. One guy actually put together a chart showing which blades did what best. What you want is a pair of Renegade blades. You want a 32-tooth blade and an 80-tooth blade.

I guess you could buy circular saw blades at Home Depot, but the ones modified for weed eaters have holes drilled in them to make them lighter.

Once I have the new weed eater set up, I’ll be able to use it for everything except trimming near things I don’t want to cut. They would destroy things a string would bounce off of. Because I still have the lithium weed eater, I suppose I can use it for string trimming and leave a blade on the new one.

I wondered if I should get the very meanest trimmer Echo made, but it was considerably more expensive, and it seemed like overkill, based on what I had gleaned from the web. People are getting very good results with trimmers smaller than the one I ordered.

I hear UPS outside. That guy must think I’m nuts. He’s here like 4 days a week. He’ll have to deal with it. I’m not going to drive half an hour so I can spend more in a real store and not get the exact product I need.

It will be nice having my hedges under control. I don’t want my house to look like the Addams mansion.

Now if I can Just Get it to Cast Itself into the Sea

God has given me another productive day. The trick is to pray, curse your problems, and bless your efforts, in the name of Jesus Christ, BEFORE the problems pop up.

I’ve been working on three stubborn stumps in my front yard. I got one out this weekend, and then yesterday, I went after another one, and I got a bonus. I located a huge rock near a stump, and I managed to get it out of the ground and move it out of the area. I also succeeded in removing the second stump.

Today I went after the third stump. I prayed for help. I spoke the Lord’s opposition to the difficulty of removing it, and I spoke his help to me. After maybe 90 minutes’ work with the subsoiler, drill, sawzall, and Root Assassin, the stump surprised me by surrendering suddenly. It popped out of the ground for no obvious reason.

Here it is. I may have it bronzed.

I bent the tabs that connect the subsoiler to my hitch. I don’t know how I did that. My tractor is not big, so you would think it wouldn’t be able to bend what appears to be 7/16″ plate. I don’t care, however, because the subsoiler still works, and even if it didn’t, the amount I paid for it is a lot lower than the cost of having people come in and remove stumps and rocks. I don’t care if I break three of these a year.

Now there are no stumps in the area where I was working, and a big rock which would have caused problems is gone. I have three little blackberry plants ready to go in the ground. I just have to get more soil. When I began this project, I didn’t know I’d have four huge holes to fill.

I’m wondering if I should put clay or some kind of waterproof material in the bottoms of the holes, to retain water. The dirt here drains way too fast.

The Internet, which never lies, says blackberry roots don’t go deeper than 10″. I could put pieces of tarp down about 15″ and then put soil and plants over them. I wonder if anyone has tried this.

I also finished sewing my second knife sheath. I bought a Lionsteel M4 with olive wood handles, and the sheath that came with it wasn’t right for my jeans. This sheath was harder to sew than the first one. I don’t know why. Anyway, here’s a photo.

I still have to finish up the edges. Right now, the sheath is drying. I wet it down and molded it around the knife’s handle so it would hold the knife in place without a strap. I may have to add a strap later, though. That’s okay. The stitching is not great, and I may redo it. If I do that, I’ll have a good opportunity to add a strap with a snap.

I sharpened several knives. I bought a Cold Steel Swift with CTS-XHP steel. Cold Steel doesn’t use CTS-XHP any more because they can’t get a reliable supply, so it’s getting hard to find these knives. I found one on Ebay for something like $20 below the street price, so I had to buy it. Yesterday, I used it to trim a piece of leather, and it went dull right away. I had to do something.

My understanding is that manufacturers supply defective edges on knives. They sharpen them with belts, and they do it too quickly, softening the steel on the edges. This gives you a very sharp knife which gets dull fast. I think this is what happened to the Swift. Cutting the leather shouldn’t have affected it at all.

I got out my diamond hones and a weird ceramic hone, and I touched it up. Did I get rid of the soft steel? I don’t know. I’ll keep using it. If it gets dull fast, I’ll know the answer.

It’s so sharp now, it’s creepy. The fact that it sharpened up so fast may indicate that the edge is still soft.

The Swift is a very, very nice knife, but it’s an assisted-opening design. You open it part of the way with a little button on the blade, and then a spring slams it open the rest of the way. I don’t like that. I can open a knife just fine by flicking my wrist. Using a spring seems dangerous.

The whole point of buying a steel like CTS-XHP is to avoid frequent sharpening, so I hope the knife isn’t a dud. I have a Gerber Gator II with cheap steel, and it’s a great knife, but for the fast dulling. I paid $15 for it. If I’m going to get cheap-steel performance, I might as well pay cheap-steel prices. The Gator II is indestructible, and it has a very comfortable handle.

I also sharpened my Entrek sheath knife. I have seen the way Ray Ennis sharpens these knives when he makes them, and I don’t think it’s their best feature. Apart from the heating issue, the knife, as it came from the factory, didn’t seem to want to bite into things.

I have DMT diamond stones, but I didn’t use them. I like kitchen-style hones. I have them in two diamond grits, plus the ceramic one and two steels. They seem to work just as well as stones, and they’re easier to use. Also, you don’t have to use liquid.

On top of all this, got a lot of business done. Leases for rental properties and so on. And I stocked up on groceries. Breakfast was sub-optimal this morning because I was running low on things. I had three fried eggs with cheddar cheese, plus whole wheat toast. I had been planning to eat fresh vegetables, boiled eggs, pita, and so on.

Tomorrow, the sheath for the Lion Steel knife should be dry, and after a little finishing, I should be able to use it. I want to get used to going out in public with a sheath knife. I feel conspicuous, but open carry is 100% legal, and I prefer sheath knives to folding knives.

Time to shower up and spend time with the birds. Hope your day was as good as mine.

Stump Removal isn’t for Sissies

Today I would have to say the smug-o-meter is pretty much pinned. I just used the Kubota to yank a stump and a very big rock from my front yard.

My yard is full of oaks and large rocks. I believe it was last year that it occurred to me that I could remove them using a subsoiler attached to the tractor. A subsoiler is the same thing as a middle buster, but it has a narrow blade. I figured I could hook things from below and use the hydraulics to pull them up. It works a good percentage of the time.

I have some blackberry plants that have to be transplanted, and as of last Friday, there were three stubborn stumps in the area where I wanted to put them. Friends came to visit, and as city people often do when they visit farms, they got excited about outdoor work, and they volunteered to help me out.

Here’s a photo of my friend and his 13-year-old son working on the stump’s roots with a maul. Notice who is doing the work. I know it seems harsh to make a kid swing a maul in the sun, but we had to, because my friend’s wife was in the house.

We used the tractor, a maul, a drill with a 1″ bit, a sawzall, and a tool called a Root Assassin. This is a short shovel with weird features intended to make it useful for digging up roots. The tip is forked and sharpened to catch roots and cut them, and the sides of the shovel are serrated so they cut whatever they slide past. The blade is long and skinny so it goes deep without a lot of resistance.

It’s a pretty decent tool. It’s expensive, but I think it was a good buy. Obviously, it wasn’t going to cut 3″-thick oak roots, but it was a dandy tool for finding them and moving dirt away from them so they could be cut with other tools.

We worked for quite a while. Finally, I remembered an important step. I told everyone we had to use our supernatural tools. We prayed, and I spoke defeat to the difficulty of removing the stump. A little while later, it surprised me by yielding to the subsoiler. I was amazed. I had been expecting it to continue resisting for at least another day.

Today I decided to go out alone and work on the stumps. It has been raining a lot, so the dirt is wet. I figured that would give me a big advantage. Dry dirt holds onto things much better. This time, I was smart. I remembered to invoke God’s power before I started, and it paid off.

I took the tractor to a fresh stump and made passes beside it at various distances, figuring I would sever the roots where they were thinner. Right beside a stump, roots are thick and strong, but they taper off quickly as you move farther out. They’re easier to cut, and if you can pull them with the tractor, you get good leverage, and you may twist the stump loose.

The first stump I worked on today surprised me. I made a few passes beside it, and then I yanked on the stump itself. Up it came. I was thrilled. Nothing is more frustrating than a stump you can’t get rid of.

The second stump is still out there. It was a lot more determined to stay where it was. I kept moving around it, finding and popping roots. I moved so much dirt, I couldn’t see the stump clearly. Toward the end, I realized I had moved away from the stump, and I was actually pulling on a huge rock. It was coming loose from the ground. I would say it was a little smaller than a typical ottoman. Very heavy.

This was pretty exciting. I hadn’t realized there was a rock there. I hate underground rocks, and I was planning to put blackberries where this one was, so getting rid of it would be a major coup. I was surprised to see such a big rock coming loose. It dwarfed the biggest one I had already pulled.

The rock was too big to pull out of the hole with the subsoiler. When I really tried, I broke the shear pin. I decided to use a rope. I got myself some 5/8″ rope and tied it around the rock, which, fortunately for me, was peanut-shaped. The small waist allowed me to attach the rope so it wouldn’t slide off.

I put a loop in the other end of the rope and put it over one of my tractor’s forks. The tractor picked the rock right up. It wasn’t happy about it, but it did the job. The loader is rated for 1500 pounds, and the forks probably weigh 300, so I had 1200 pounds of capacity to play with.

I was ecstatic when the rock came off the ground. Just before it left the ground, I thought about the fact that it was going to be swinging on a rope. I tried to prevent it from swinging toward me, but it was too late. It whacked the tractor. The people at Kubota were way ahead of me, however. The heavy bumper took the hit with no damage at all.

Moving the rock to my rock collection area was interesting. I had to sort of roll it onto the forks, and then I tilted the forks back so it rolled toward the bucket. As I drove to the dumping area, the tractor pitched and rocked every time I hit a bump.

The rock is now resting safely among my other trophies. I need to start selling them to landscapers.

The stump is still in the yard, but I think it will yield readily now that it can’t rely on its friend the boulder for support. I may fill the voids with pricey potting soil instead of relocating dirt from the pasture. Might as well give the blackberries every advantage.

Man, it’s nice when tools do what they should.

I don’t know why the rock looks so small in the pictures. It’s a good three feet long. More, really. It must look small in the first picture because most of it is in a hole.

Maybe tomorrow I can get rid of the last stump, and then I can get the blackberry plants off my patio. That would be nice.

I’m all About Progress

With God’s intensified help, I am continuing to get things done. I got new accounts set up with the Florida Department of Revenue, which is surprisingly hard. I removed more leaves from my yard; I now have an impressive pile of them out in the woods. I’ve also made real progress on stump removal.

I have several stumps in my front yard. The man who sold my dad this house made a huge blunder. He had stumps sawn off level with the ground. NEVER do this. In order to remove a stump using force, you need to be able to grip it, and you need leverage. The longer the trunk is, the easier it is to pull the stump.

I tried burning the stumps with charcoal. It will work, but it’s very slow. I tried lifting them with my tractor. I tried potassium nitrate. I still haven’t found a universal solution.

Potassium nitrate will dramatically accelerate the speed at which some stumps rot. You can rot a stump in a month or two with it, and because the chemical will penetrate down to the roots, you will end up with a stump that burns easily. Potassium nitrate helps wood burn. I used potassium nitrate to soften a stump near my front door, and it worked very well, but other stumps seem to ignore it.

A couple of days ago, I resumed work on a stubborn oak stump. It came from a tree about ten inches across. I figured it would be pretty easy. I would use the tractor and subsoiler to go around it and rip out all the roots holding it in, and then I could lift it out. When I started ripping and digging, I found that the 10″ tree had a solid ball of wood just under the ground, nearly 20″ across. It wasn’t going anywhere.

I dug so much, I created a moat around it. I used a sawzall to cut many of the roots, and then I got out a Remington electric pole saw. This is a weak electric chainsaw. I didn’t want to put my nice gas saws in the dirt. It dulls the blades quickly and might cause other problems. I didn’t care all that much about the Remington; it was already pretty beaten up. It did a wonderful job. Better than a sawzall.

After that, I got the feeling that God was telling me to get a long pry bar and twist the stump out. The idea was to lodge the bar in the stump, attach a strap to the far and, and pull with a tractor. I saw two problems with this: I figured the bar would snap, and I also thought it was too big to go in the largest hole I could make. I have a 1″ auger on a hammer drill, and the pry bar seemed bigger than that. Nonetheless, I did what I thought I was supposed to do.

While I was looking at the problem, I decided to get a real saw out and cut a slot in the top of the stump, like the slot in a screw. This was easy. I rested the bar in it and pulled with my garden tractor. The bar bent instantly. I wondered if the idea had really come from God.

While I was staring at it, I decided to lower the saw into the moat and cut horizontally. I went about halfway through. Because I had a vertical slot in the stump, I was able to put the prying end of the bar (not bent) into the slot and pry. Before long, I had a bunch of stump chunks out. Big ones. In a short time, I was able to cut the stump off flat, maybe 9″ below the surface of the yard.

I wasn’t done. My drill removes wood much faster than a chainsaw. I took it and drilled vertically through the stump’s remains. I guess I spent 15 minutes doing this. Most of the holes went all the way into the soil. I removed a big percentage of the stump. I can bury it now and not worry about it, or I can go out and beat it with a maul and see how much of it breaks off. If I bury it, it should rot a lot faster than it would have, had I not drilled it out.

I plan to try the maul and see what happens. Can’t hurt.

The pry bar worked out very well. It bent, but it motivated me to do things that led to a better solution, and the bent bar is still useful. It only cost $27, which is fine, considering how much stump grinding costs.

I’m hoping to get the new rockshaft cylinder installed in the lawn tractor. I need to mow this week, and I don’t want the old cylinder shooting fluid all over the yard and garage.

Installing a new hydraulic cylinder is intimidating, but it appears that it should not be hard. SHOULD not, I say. You know how these things go sometimes. The old shaft is held in with two cotter pins. After that, you remove two fluid fittings. You put the new cylinder in its place and start working the hydraulics. The pump will fill the cylinder with fluid. Then I top off the fluid, and everything should be fine. As Jeremy Clarkson likes to say, “How hard can it be?”

I’m not sure how to get the new cylinder to move so it’s the same length as the old one. It will have to be extended to the same degree as the old one in order to fit. If I can’t work it out, I’ll have to find a way to move the hydraulic stuff in the tractor so it fits the new shaft.

It’s not easy to expand or compress an empty hydraulic cylinder. I think it needs to be expanded. Maybe I can tie it to a tree and pull it with a tractor.

John Deere makes this cylinder with welded ends, so I can’t replace the seals. Really rotten thing to do to customers. Rebuilding hydraulic cylinders is easy and cheap, and welding the ends on one is probably not significantly cheaper than putting real end caps on it. John Deere is known for high prices and pushing people to dealerships for overpriced repairs.

This is one of the reasons why all small tractors made in America are made overseas. When a company acts like an ass, foreign competitors move in, and Americans lose jobs. I have no sympathy at all when an annoying company gets Asian competition. It’s like the Mac/PC thing; Apple had a better product, but they treated customers and other companies the way lampreys treat bass, so PC vendors crushed Apple for years. Pffft. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company.

I also conquered a decades-long problem which had never stopped nibbling at me: I bought a new Stetson.

When I was in college, I bought a nice beaver Stetson cowboy hat. I got it for fun, but it turned out to be a fantastic hat. I don’t know if cowboys really wore these things, but they should have. In hot weather, they’re too warm, but when it gets cold and wet, a Stetson is great. A Stetson will keep your head dry and warm, and you will also look sharp.

One day while I was working in the student grocery, a Japanese girl named Kana came up to me, pulled off my Stetson, took a black bandana off her neck, put it on the hat over the band, and put the hat back on my head. It looked very good, and the whole thing was flattering. Kana was very attractive. A bit on the sassy side for a Japanese girl, and she was friendly to me and my male friends. I don’t mean she slept with us.

I don’t know how Japanese Kana was, or if she had ever been to Japan. Seemed like she had a little bit of an accent, but you know how Asians are. Raise them here, and they still have accents for a couple of generations.

When I decided to travel after dropping out, I took the Stetson with me. While I was living on a kibbutz, an Israeli kid asked if he could borrow it, and that was the last I ever saw of it.

Recently, I felt bad about losing the hat, and I started looking for a new one. I keep thinking about moving north, and I pictured myself walking around in cold weather with the wrong hat. Of course, Stetson had discontinued it. I created an Ebay search with email alerts, and whenever a new item was listed, I checked it out. This week, a nice hat popped up. It was the right size and model. It seems to be a tiny bit darker than my old hat, but it was too good to pass up. I bought it for about 1/4 the price of a new hat, and it’s in new condition. Sweet.

Now I just need the right bandana.

I can’t wear it now; it’s too hot. When I move to Tennessee, I’ll be able to wear it maybe 7 months out of the year!

I also had a Stetson “Indiana Jones” hat I bought for fun. As I recall, it didn’t like the rain very much, even though it cost $57.50 in dollars that were much bigger than today’s. It may be that the movie hat was wool and not beaver felt. Wool hats don’t tolerate rain well.

It was probably of lower quality than the cowboy hat. After all, it was made to take advantage of a movie fad.

Today I plan to keep getting things done. I’m going to call the University of Florida and ask for a horticulturist to come out and tell me what to do with my yard. I’m going to get another peach tree, and I have realized I need a mulberry, too. I know just where to put it. Some day, people who visit this property will thank me for the shade.

Now I Really Live on a Farm

Yesterday was a big day. The cows arrived.

I now have what I believe to be 15 cattle on the property, including 14 heifers and a bull who looks very tired, for obvious reasons.

I took the cart out yesterday and greeted the livestock. They stared at me the way male engineers stare when a woman enters their cubicle farm. They approached within about 50 feet. I don’t know what kind of cattle they are. Some are completely black, so I assume they’re Angus. Others have a lot of red on them, so maybe they’re part Red Angus or Hereford. Others are white. Charolais, maybe? I don’t know if any of the heifers are purebred.

I am assuming all of the non-bull types are heifers. It has been maybe 30 years since I’ve spent time with cattle, so I can’t tell a heifer from a steer at 50 yards without seeing it from a few angles.

I wasn’t expecting a bull. Some bulls are obnoxious, so I kept an eye on him. He came near the cart and started snorting and pawing the ground, but it turned out he was just throwing dirt on himself. He seems to enjoy that. I have a big berm in my pasture, and he found a bare place in it and got as dirty as he could.

They spend a lot of time trotting. Not sure what that’s about. Maybe it has something to do with the new surroundings.

Manure production has already begun, so I’m happy about that. My friend Mike was asking me how I intended to collect manure. I said I was going to throw it in the bed of the cart. That didn’t sit well with him. He thought I should use a tub. Here’s how I see it: cow manure is not real poop. I would never throw dog poop or hog manure into my cart’s bed, but dry cow manure is not much different from composted grass clippings, so it doesn’t scare me.

I want to combine it with my copious leaf piles.

I was not happy to see that the heifers liked climbing on my berm. I don’t want them to mash it down. I still intend to shoot out there.

Here’s a great thing about cattle, which I didn’t know until yesterday: they love Spanish moss. I saw them eating it. I figure a cow can reach up maybe 6 feet, so if they do their job, all the Spanish moss below that height should disappear in a few months. If only they climbed trees.

My pasture will be kept trimmed, so I won’t have to mow it. The cattle will eat a lot of the weeds. They’ll eat Spanish moss. Free manure. Tax break for agricultural use. Free fence maintenance. It’s a good deal.

Aside from all that, they improve the atmosphere. A farm should have something going on.

I sent photos to my friends. I was surprised at how enthused these city-dwellers were. One young lady said, “Teach me to be like you.” I told her she needed to be like Jesus, not me. I reminded her to pray in tongues a lot every day, and I said she needed to ask God for correction and get away from the ungodly people in her life. So the cows brought me an opportunity to serve God.

It’s funny, but out of all my grandfather’s grandchildren, it looks like I turned out to be most like him. He had a number of farms, and he had tenant farmers. He had a lot of real estate, and he managed it and rented it. I’m doing all that stuff. The other grandchildren don’t seem to be following in his footsteps. He was especially fond of me, so maybe it’s fitting that I am inheriting his mantle.

I wonder if I’m going to increase my holdings.

Last night, a young friend called to tell me how his walk was going. He’s getting a lot of the same messages I am. He has been surrounded by very counterproductive people all his life. He lived in Miami Gardens, which is a very backward, crime-filled area, and he was happy there. Now he says he has to stay away from places like that and cut off a lot of people. I was glad to hear that. God keeps showing me the connection between joy and ridding myself of unequal yokings.

When you don’t have joy, you lack strength and enthusiasm, so you don’t get as much done as you should. Or you force yourself, and you live in misery.

Today, as usual, I watched Derek Prince with breakfast. He said some things about the sabbath, which is Saturday. God showed me something.

Many Jews say the commandment to keep the sabbath is the most important commandment. A famous zionist named Ahad Ha’am said, ” “More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” They see it as a source of strength.

Derek Prince was talking about Sunday, the day after the sabbath. According to him, Jerusalem goes wild on Sundays. People are rested up from the sabbath, and they go out and attack life. Why is that?

God has shown me that being around beings who are against him drains joy and strength. If that is true, then by the symmetry of the supernatural, being with God and the righteous must increase joy and strength.

I’m not ignorant enough to think that most Israelis spend the sabbath with God. Most are atheists or very weak Jews. Nonetheless, God has a strange pattern of blessing the Jews in certain natural areas, even when they’re in rebellion. He has made them smart, capable, and prosperous, and he has kept them alive. Also, the principle of rest works in the natural as well as the supernatural. Israelis may be keeping the sabbath poorly, but it still produces some results.

The Bible tells us to rest in God. It says to wait for him to act, and things will be fine.

Rest is necessary, if you want to have strength to get things done. The best rest is time spent in the presence of God, trusting him to look after you.

The sabbath must have been a shocking idea in the ancient world. As far as I know, from listening to other people, the ancient world had a 7-day work week. The Babylonians only got one day off per month. It must have been strange for the Jews to have Moses tell them they had to give up 14% of their productive time.

I think God is confirming something to me. If you want strength and help, you have to pull away from the world as much as you can. It’s not enough to sit in church once a week and then go home and watch godless TV and devote yourself to worthless pursuits.

God has a history of drawing people out. It is believed that the name “Moses” means “to draw out.” He drew Enoch out of the world. He drew Noah’s family out of the world. He drew Abraham out of Ur. He drew Lot’s family out of Sodom. He drew the Jews out of Egypt. Now he draws his children out of the godless world, even while we live in the midst of it. Eventually, he will draw us out in the rapture.

“Moses” means to draw out of water. That makes sense. In the Bible’s symbolism, the world is a sea, and the water is voices. We have to be drawn out of, and set above, the water of ungodly voices. Remember how Peter walked on water, as long as he was focused on Jesus? God has used drowning a number of times, to show the way he feels about those who are against him. He drowned the entire human race. He drowned Pharaoh’s army. He drowned the pigs Jesus allowed demons to enter. He also drowns our old selves when we are baptized.

The first psalm says that if you want to prosper, you can’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly. That’s a big deal. Many churches teach the counsel of the ungodly, almost exclusively. They teach positive thinking and meditation. They teach hard work (a Biblical curse). They teach people to have high self-esteem, even though God says he fights the proud.

Synagogues are notorious for teaching worldly counsel. They teach leftism and false “social justice.”

If we rely on the counsel of the ungodly, and we seem to succeed, how can God be glorified? He doesn’t take credit for other people’s work. If you want God to do the work of helping you, you need to stop relying on the world and yourself.

God limited the number of Gideon’s men so he could receive the glory for winning the battle. He used a skinny teenager without armor to kill Goliath, so he could receive glory. He used one weak man–Samson–to defeat the Philistines, so he could receive the glory. He came in the form of a weak man–Jesus–to conquer the world, so he could receive the glory. He made the Hebrews stand by and do nothing while he drowned Pharaoh’s army, so he could receive the glory. He cursed Moses for striking a rock to bring water out of it, instead of merely speaking to it, because Moses deprived him of glory.

If you want power to flow, glory has to flow to God. We have to be completely dependent on him. Otherwise, he folds his arms and lets us fight our own battles.

When you spend time with God instead of working, you give God glory. When the Jews refrained from working one day per week, trusting God to look after them, they gave God glory.

This stuff is important. It explains why God doesn’t move more powerfully in our lives. We want him to do the work, while we credit human beings.

I feel that God also showed me something about harmony.

God has told me there is no peace without authority, and he also says authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. God brings organization. When the Spirit rules people, they never disagree, and they always work together. We have to be baptized with the Holy Spirit in order for God to harmonize us, because God communicates with us and orders us through the Spirit.

Harmony is a necessary ingredient of peace. You can’t have peace without harmony.

Why does God like music so much? Because it organizes people. It unites us. While we sing and dance to the same tune, we are unified. We respond to the same melody and rhythm. It’s a picture of heaven, where everyone is unified, all the time.

Machines do a lot of our work for us now, but back when men moved things with their backs, music was necessary in order for them to succeed. They used to sing songs while they worked. For example, men pulling on an anchor line might sing and pull in unison on certain beats.

Harmony multiplies our strength. When an army walks across a bridge, they don’t march in time. They break step, because otherwise, the power of their unified steps could cause the bridge to resonate and collapse.

Some people who say they have been to heaven claim the flowers there sing. That makes sense. Surely every living thing in heaven is in order, and music is a manifestation of order.

I suspect that even the trees in heaven sing. I’ll bet the trees in the Garden of Eden sang.

Maybe this is why singing in tongues is so much more powerful than speaking in tongues.

I asked God for wisdom yesterday. He has promised to give wisdom liberally to people who ask. It seems that he is piling it on. It’s a little overwhelming.

He’ll do it for anyone, so ask him.

I think it’s time to run the harrow and get rid of some leaves. I hope what I wrote is useful to you.

I am Now a Destination for Christian Tourism

I should start keeping a running list of the things I get done. God’s joy keeps flowing through me, and walls keep coming down.

This weekend I bleached two of the workshop’s exterior walls. I treated some Spanish moss with sodium bicarbonate to kill it. I trimmed some hedges. I finally found out what was making my garden tractor leak, I researched the problem, and I found a new part for it. I treated the yard with weed and feed. I cleaned up a lot of the downstairs. I bought copper sulfate because the sodium bicarbonate didn’t satisfy me. I fixed the rickety ornamental fence my grapes grow on, and I fastened my blackberry briars to trellises.

I can’t recall everything else I did.

Today I listened to Derek Prince, and he taught about joy. He said something I’ve believed for years: Biblical joy is not happiness. It’s not an emotion. It’s a thing of the spirit.

I distinguish between the soul and spirit, and so does the Bible. For example, I believe anger is an emotion, which comes from the soul. I believe confidence and enthusiasm come from the spirit. I believe depression comes from the spirit. There are lots of other examples.

What I feel these days isn’t quite the same thing as happiness, although it seems to lead to it. I feel energetic and enthusiastic. I feel confident and optimistic. That’s joy. It’s strength. That’s why the Bible says the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Depression, discouragement, and laziness oppose joy. When you’re depressed, one of the symptoms is laziness. You find it hard to motivate yourself. You feel that whatever you do won’t be rewarding.

I love listening to Prince because, in addition to teaching me new things, he confirms things I already know. Most of what I hear from him is confirmation, not new knowledge. That tells me I’ve been hearing from God. God…tells…everyone…the…same…things. There is no such thing as “healthy” debate.

People in heaven don’t stand around arguing. They already know the truth about everything. God has told them.

Your opinion doesn’t mean squat in heaven. There are no opinions in heaven.

I devoted myself to Trinity Church in Miami, and then I plunged into now-defunct New Dawn Ministries. Both churches were cults. Most of what they taught was correct, but they taught enough garbage to render it ineffective. The pastors made slaves of people. They manipulated, which (according to sound doctrine) means they practiced a form of witchcraft. They squeezed us for money and free work. They got angry and defensive when people spoke the truth and exposed what they were getting wrong.

While I was pulling away at my oar in these galleys, God told me many things, and I got in trouble for repeating them. Now I listen to Derek Prince, and I watch videos made decades ago, in which he says the same things God was saying to me, and for which I was ostracized and disliked by my pastors.

Anyone who prays in tongues every day will hear from God, and God will tell you what he tells me. If I get something wrong, he will tell you I’m mistaken. You really need to hear from God himself.

I had a wonderful experience this weekend. I have a list of people I pray for, and I’m on it. Among other things, I pray that God will give us our own properties and that he will use them for his purposes. I ask him to make them places where the righteous gather for prayer and so on. A couple of days ago, I saw this prayer answered. Some friends who attended Trinity and New Dawn called, and they said they wanted to visit in order to fix their relationships with God.

Look how my life has changed. People want to to come see me so they can get to know God better.

I need names for these people, so I will call them Archie and Edith. Archie was an armorbearer at Trinity, and he also served at New Dawn. He and Edith have two children. One is a grown woman in her twenties. I will call her Gloria. They have a son who must be about 11 now. Let’s call him Mike.

Archie and Edith left Miami, which is a sign God is trying to help them. They moved to the Pompano area. They ended up at a Calvary Chapel church. Calvary Chapel is an organization which focuses on church growth without promoting the works of the Holy Spirit. They don’t ban things like tongues and prophesy, but they don’t promote them, either, which means they discourage them. You can’t be neutral.

Archie called, and we started talking about their walks with God. We got somewhat worked up, and he put me on speaker so Edith could talk. They both complained that they didn’t feel God’s presence at Calvary. Whatever the problems with Trinity and New Dawn were, the Holy Spirit was active. The pastors were off course, but there were people at both churches who did good work when the pastors weren’t around. I will admit that the pastors at New Dawn promoted the works of the Spirit. Their big problem was that they also promoted greed, pride, and manipulation.

Archie started expressing frustration with churches. I saw where he was going, and I told him God had been telling me that the age of the church was over. Organizations were failing him. The most powerful work was going to be done among individuals who were not assembled in churches.

I told them about the strange little ministries I had seen on Youtube. Individuals are going around healing and baptizing people and spreading good teaching. I told them about my trip to Clearwater, to be baptized at a Last Reformation event. I said they needed to have their own meetings at home; just the two of them.

Edith said she was depressed. This is a problem she has had for years. She said she couldn’t get herself going. I knew what the problem was: lack of prayer in tongues.

Long story short, I told them they were welcome to come up. I said I would show them the things I had been shown. We could redo their baptisms in my pool.

They’re planning to come up in June, for at least two days. I sent them Youtube links.

Gloria is an interesting case. Back in 2012, when she was in her late teens, she took the stage at New Dawn and started teaching. She spoke things that came straight from God’s heart, about how people needed to stop being hypocritical and seek God for real. I was amazed. For a long time after that, I thought she was destined for big things. Nothing happened, though. She didn’t continue. I didn’t understand it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I see that now. In the Bible, there were times when people who weren’t very close to God prophesied. It had more to do with the presence of God than their status as vessels. Gloria is very worldly. She is very much a part of the godless millennial culture. We just happened to catch her on a night when God took hold of her. I hope she improves. She has been a burden to her parents.

I’m going to pray for God to help Archie and Edith get here, and for him to help us do what he wants. Satan’s tricks are obvious. He will try to prevent them from coming, and he will try to cause problems if they make it, so it’s time to take preventative measures.

Always Accurate; Never Biased

I have been on a roll for weeks. God has been helping me break strongholds that used to drive me nuts. I had a lot of lingering tasks I could not seem to get done, and they keep falling before me.

Yesterday I installed a new moonroof motor in the SUV I inherited. This was a real problem. I need to go to Miami to get junk out of a house I own, so it can be sold. I don’t want to drive my pickup. Water was coming into the SUV because the moonroof drain holes got stopped up, and it killed the slide motor. In order to unplug the holes, I had to open the roof, so I needed the motor to work. I couldn’t drive the SUV to Miami with plugged drain holes. In order to go to Miami, I had to install the new motor.

The installation was a pain, but being me, I had all the tools I needed, and the most important tool was my knowledge of the supernatural. I prayed and spoke God’s help to myself.

I also got new insurance for a house I’m selling. I applied for an online account so I can pay my corporation’s taxes using my computer. I consulted with my realtor and chose a listing price for another house I’m selling. I established contact with a difficult condominium association which has apparently screwed my account up again, and I got them to commit to working it out with me. Things are moving right along.

I used to think worry was an important motivator. That’s true, IF you can’t get joy. Joy is the motivator you want. Worry is a stick; joy is a carrot. Joy is painless. It’s pleasant. It doesn’t give you ulcers, high blood pressure, strokes, gallstones, heart attacks, constipation, insomnia, obesity, or teeth that are worn out because you grind them at night.

The world is full of options. There are options that are available to God’s children, and there are inferior options for the carnal. Joy is for God’s children. If you can’t get God’s joy, you better get worry or some other source of drive, because if you don’t, you may fall way behind on your responsibilities.

God has been filling me with joy lately, and as the Bible says, the joy of the Lord is our strength. It’s not just a flowery saying that looks good on a greeting card. The joy of the Lord IS strength. It will help you get things done.

I’ve noticed that there are things that dull my joy. One of them is looking at the news. A while back, God told me to quit doing it. I canceled the newspapers my dad subscribed to, and I quit looking at news sites. I still see some stuff when I got to Yahoo to check a throwaway email account, however. I shouldn’t look at it. I need to be serious about it. When I look at the articles, I feel my joy slipping away, and I feel discouraged. The world is disgusting; it’s full of morbid tendencies. The world is failing, like a cancer patient, and when I read about it, I get caught up in the despair.

Generally, you go to a person’s side when he’s dying, and you sit it out. When a person is dying from a self-inflicted problem, and he refuses to change, it’s different. You shouldn’t take part in it. The world is going to succeed in destroying itself. I need to limit my participation in that.

I don’t actually need to read the news. I’m not endorsing ignorance, but right now, the news does me much more harm than good, and let’s face it: I am not going to change the world, or learn anything that will help me or those I love, by reading the news. God guides me every day. He’s not going to let me walk off a cliff just because I ignore the hysterical, biased squawking on Fox and CNN.

God keeps showing me how poisonous unequal yokings are. My dad, my worst unequal yoking, was a terrible weight to me until about two months before he died. He made me miserable for much of my life. Even though he changed tremendously shortly before he died, I am still recovering from the effects of my dealings with the pre-transformation Dad. I’m like a plant that was hidden in a closet; now I’m in the sun, and I’m growing and thriving.

When I was a kid, my sister and I used to push my mother to divorce my dad, and we were correct. He was that toxic. God supports marriage, and he hates divorce, but he permits divorce based on infidelity (and probably other things, under the new covenant), and my dad was unfaithful. We should have cut him loose and moved on. When I was older and had a choice, I chose to stay close to him and try to restore our relationship, and when I did that, I sentenced myself to years of needless conflict and waste.

You would think that when I turned back to God, over 10 years ago, he would have told me to dump my dad and make new connections. He did not. He was very clear. I believe I was sentenced to stick with my dad for a while, so I would get a bellyful and learn to hate unequal yokings. It worked. I absolutely hate them, and I will never permit myself to have another one.

When I sit and read news stories, I yoke myself with the secular world. I concern myself with problems that don’t apply to me. It does not matter what happens to the world; I am not part of it, so I will be fine. God has said, “A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” He has also said, “Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge–even the most high–thy habitation, there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

You know what? Fox and CNN may be your news, but my newspaper is the word of God. I have a different source of news, and my news is different. Now I see why God doesn’t want me to read the news. It’s as if I were studying to be a pharmacist but instead of pharmacy classes, I went to history classes. It’s not the correct input for people on my path, with my future.

It’s crucial to know and accept your place in life, and your path. You can’t look at what other people are doing and insist that you be allowed to do the same.

On a related note, I watched a neat Derek Prince video the other day, about the gifts of the Spirit. The Bible makes it clear that we are expected to prophesy; it’s a universal gift, and we are told to “covet” it. It also lists interpretation of tongues as a gift. Prince led a group of people in prophecy and interpretation, and I started trying to do what they did.

It appears to work. My only concern is that the messages I’ve delivered seem to have very little critical content. The main criticism is this: he says I have to listen. If I am correct, he says my enemies will be cut down before me like wheat before a scythe. He says he will be with me forever. He says many others have come before him, but he is the only true God.

I wondered who he was talking about when me said others had come before him. He said that over and over. In the case of the Jews, he could be talking about the many false messiahs, such as Moses of Crete or Menachem Schneerson, a former Lubavitcher Rebbe who, though he is dead, is worshiped by many people. There was also a pretender named Jesus Bar-Kochba.

It’s interesting to note that Jews who worship Schneerson, who, by their own criteria, can’t be the Messiah, are still considered Jews. If you worship Jesus, you’re out. I wonder if anyone has considered the seeming hypocrisy.

I’m not Jewish. I never thought any Jewish pretender was divine, so if God talks of others who came before him, he can’t be talking about Jewish false messiahs. On the other hand, I have looked to certain human beings to teach me and save me.

When I was in high school, I used to read philosophy books and self-help books. I read people like Krishnamurti and Kierkegaard. I even read Fritz Perls. He was an old pervert who founded a school of psychology called gestalt. Later in life, I found a guy named Wayne Dyer, who taught a very effective (short-term) method of defeating depression. When you defeat depression, joy rebounds in you, and you can get things done. It changed my life.

I was given an anti-depressant when I was at Columbia University, and I had a psychiatrist. Didn’t help in the slightest. Complete waste of time. My psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, was possibly the worst messiah of all. He just sat in a chair and asked me questions.

I’ve put my faith in a lot of people who were wrong. Some were able to help me dramatically for a short time, but they always failed in the end. Their teachings were carnal, which means they were divorced from the Holy Spirit and Jesus. They were secular false messiahs.

I even turned myself into a messiah. I thought self-esteem and optimism, which I generated, could save me. Big mistake.

Because I was ignorant about God, I thought depression and low self-esteem were my fundamental problems. I was depressed for most of the first 30 years of my life, and I also suffered depression when I went to graduate school in physics. I don’t get depression any more. It’s actually somewhat difficult to remember what it was like, and that’s fine with me. It just does not happen. I can have a couple of days during which I feel down, but that’s it. God doesn’t cure depression temporarily; he annihilates it and keeps it off of you permanently. It’s one of the benefits of prayer in tongues.

I believe my depression was a demon, or more than one demons. Whatever it was, it could only be removed by God’s power.

I hope I’m hearing from God correctly. I intend to keep trying. God has made it clear that we are expected to prophesy, and I want to do everything I’m supposed to do.

Jesus said this:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?

Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?

I don’t believe God will allow me to be deceived if I ask for things he has told me I’m supposed to have. If he will, what hope is there for us?

The things I hear when I try to interpret and prophesy are far better than anything I would have expected God to give me, so I certainly hope they’re coming from God and not me.

We have to have God’s guidance. If he doesn’t inform us, we will walk into one defeat after another. The Bible isn’t enough. The Bible won’t tell you to avoid an airline flight that’s going to crash. It won’t tell you your neighbor is about to go on a shooting rampage. The Bible is great when it comes to generalities, but for specific, real-time information, you have to have the Holy Spirit.

Pre-Christian Jews inquired of God all the time, and he answered. The Holy Spirit spoke to Christians in the New Testament all the time. It’s abnormal to live without God’s timely, specific counsel, yet somehow, we think anyone who claims to hear from God is a nut and a heretic.

I think I’m going to be living in Tennessee at some point in 2020. I believe that will be my last move. I’ll say these things publicly, and we’ll see how they pan out. I think I’ll be looking for properties in earnest by the end of this year. I refuse to borrow (carnal and not the way you behave when you’re the head), so maybe that means all of my surplus property will be sold by then.

Many children of God are being moved to rural areas where they will live in greater safety and be less unequally yoked. On the other hand, most Christians I know don’t hear from God, and they plan to stay where they are. I can’t help them. I can tell them what I know, and after that, the burden is on them.

I think my black friends are in greater trouble than the others. They have been brainwashed to think they have to help “the community” at the expense of everything else. They think they have to live in urban black neighborhoods and hold onto black friends and relatives who pretend to be Christians yet are steeped in sin.

Their neighborhoods are going nowhere. They will not be fixed. They will continue to rot. Staying there is disobedient, and when bad times come, God’s help will be limited, because they should have known better than to stay.

White neighborhoods full of ungodly people are headed for trouble, and black neighborhoods are even worse off. That’s just how it is. As Lot’s wife could tell you, God won’t reward anyone for stubbornness. When he says “leave,” you have to leave.

I shudder when I consider the fate of Jews who live in or near big urban centers. Blacks and Hispanics, who tend to concentrate in cities, have major problems with anti-Semitism, and before long, they will be free to act on their urges. Muslims also accumulate in cities.

The Bible talks about enemies overrunning Israel and raping the women. When people from a certain area are dispersed, they tend to bring their curses with them to their new countries. It may be that many Jews in America will share the problems Israel faces. After all, Israel is a people, not a place.

Today I have to fix a hedge and work on state taxes. I should also put new gage wheels on the deck of my diesel mower. They just arrived. I might also add some stones to an area I mulched last week. Rain is disturbing the mulch.

Am I getting the property ready to live in or to sell? Looks like both. I hope so. As much as I love it here, I can’t stop thinking about Appalachia.

Pour it On; I Can’t Get Enough

One of the strange things about being an effective Christian is that you have to love being told you’re wrong. You have to prize criticism. If you look for it, you can see this idea throughout the Bible. For example, Psalm 141 says, “Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my head.”

Here on the demon-infested earth, we are taught to deny blame. Worse, we are taught to falsely accuse those who bring our faults to our attention. We learn to avoid accepting blame and taking responsibility. By dodging and lying, we avoid the blessing of improvement.

Jesus and the other martyrs were killed partly because they were critical. Leftist Christians like to portray Jesus as a Pillsbury Doughboy sort of person who went through life hugging people and giggling, but in reality, he was very critical and extremely rude. He knew what was wrong with us, and he wanted us to be saved from our faults, so he told us the unsweetened truth. Those who accepted his remarks were saved. Many or all of the rest continued to rot on earth and then ended up in hell.

When you develop a real prayer life, you will hear from God, and very often, what he says will be criticism. You have to take it the right way. When God criticizes you, it’s as if he were shoveling rubies into your pockets. He is giving you keys that unlock the doors that keep you undeveloped and weak.

You can’t say, “I can’t believe this. I’ve been at this so long, and I’ve been so patient, and now you’re telling me I’m still a mess.” That’s self-pity, and self-pity is a form of pride. God fights the proud; the Bible says so. Do you want God himself to fight with you? You’re guaranteed to lose. You have to say, “Thank you for showing me the way out!”

Yesterday I watched a Derek Prince video, and he talked about carnality. If I recall correctly, he connected it with a desire to be independent of God.

I didn’t think much about what he said when I heard it. I agreed with it, and I figured I was not in deep trouble. Last night I woke up and thought about it more, and I realized the desire to be free of God was in me. It shocked me.

Of course, I was hearing from God. I am not smart enough or good enough to figure things like this out without help.

The desire to be free of God is a characteristic of fallen angels and demons. Psalm 2 says this about them and their children:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,

Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

I don’t want God to vex me or speak to me in wrath.

People who say they have visited hell commonly say the presence of God is not there. This is supposed to be one of the worst things about hell; it’s probably what makes hell what it is. Every good thing streams from God, so if he’s not around, life is agony and constant humiliation. I know this, but I have still had a desire to live in a world where I could lead a “normal” life without so many restrictions and without putting in so much work in prayer and so on. I have desired to be close to God, but at the same time, part of me missed the days of delusion in which I tried to get by on my own, without choosing God’s side and setting myself up as a target for Satan.

I knew there was no such thing as a “normal” world where people lived “normal” lives, but the concept still sounded good to me.

The desire to be free from the light burden and easy yoke of the Spirit-led life is related to the spirit of antichrist. As Prince taught, “anti” means “against,” but it also means, “instead of.” The Antichrist–the man–won’t just be against Christ. He’ll be a substitute Christ. He’ll preach what I call “the alternative righteousness.”

God is both love and judgment. The Antichrist will ignore judgment and push false love. He’ll tell us we have to be really nice to each other. He’ll say this is all that matters. He’ll say homosexuality and other forms of sexual sin are just fine, as long as we’re nice. He’ll say pride is fine, as long as we’re nice. The Bible says we should be kind, but it also says God himself puts people in hell, which he created, for disobedience. The Antichrist will teach that hell doesn’t exist, and he’ll tell us we can make the earth our heaven.

I always talk about the alternative righteousness, but I didn’t fully understand what it was until a few days ago.

When Jesus walked the earth, many of his followers expected him to put on a crown and kill the Romans. They thought he would lift Israel up above its enemies. In other words, they expected a political leader. He told them they were wrong, but they didn’t understand. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He also said, “My kingdom is within you.” He was not a political agitator. He never complained about the Roman occupation, and he even advised his followers to pay taxes.

The Antichrist will be the kind of leader the Jews of Jesus’ time were hoping for. He will be very political. He will be a military leader. He will go after Christians and Jews. He will convince people he can create a false Eden here on earth.

He will be politically correct. There is more to that ugly phrase than we understand. “Political correctness” is synonymous with “alternative righteousness.”

We have strange ideas about righteousness. We think it means you’re supposed to walk around in a robe and be peaceful and effeminate, more or less. A righteous man, to us, is an asexual zealot who walks around staring up to heaven all day. That’s not righteousness. The word “righteous” simply means “correct.” When the Bible says God is righteous, it’s saying God is right about everything.

Correctness is righteousness, so political correctness is political righteousness. “Political” is nearly synonymous with “carnal.”

There have always been two kingdoms on earth: the political kingdom, and the kingdom of heaven. God discouraged the Jews from choosing a king, because he wanted them to be ruled through the kingdom of heaven, guided by priests and prophets. They rejected his advice and chose the curse of politics. They wanted a secular–carnal–leader.

The secular way is the carnal way. It means living without God’s counsel and commands. It means disobedience to God.

What does “carnal” mean? It means “of the flesh.” Animals are carnal. They can’t understand the things of God. They do their best with their natural abilities. When we choose carnal, political solutions, we become like animals. What does the King James Version call animals? “Beasts.”

Political correctness is carnal, and it’s the way of the Beast.

A few years back, God startled me by telling me I had a spirit of antichrist, so I fought it from time to time. I understood various aspects of it, but I don’t think I understood all of it. Now I see that wishing the universe were different and that we could live outside of the Christian paradigm is an antichristian mindset. It opens doors to spirits that hate God.

If anyone ever wishes to be free from the “burdens” of godly life, it has to be because he has forgotten how good that life is–how good and pleasing God is–and how horrible the alternative is.

Now that I have this revelation, I have something new to repent of, and that’s a tremendous gift. It’s always a relief to find out I’m doing something wrong, because it means there is a way to fix things and improve my situation.

The earth isn’t going to be fixed. Christians who push for that need to pray for correction. The Bible makes it very clear that we are going to lose in the short term. It also makes it clear that our path is not political. We are not going to repair the world by convincing everyone we’re nice, winning their hearts, and electing Christian governments. We are going to be persecuted and murdered, and weak Christians will participate in it. We will be demonized, and people who harm us will think they’re doing good deeds.

You can be repaired. The world can’t. Not until Jesus returns, kills his enemies, and rebuilds the planet.

I’m excited about the correction I received. I know my life will be better in the future because of it. I can’t permit myself to fantasize about a world where I can live “normally.” It gives the spirit of antichrist, which hates me, a foothold.

Today I prayed for God to make me more dependent on him. More, not less.

Things are still going well here. I’m tearing this place up. Yesterday was a slow day for home maintenance, but I mopped the back porch with pool chlorine nonetheless. I backwashed and shocked the pool and identified and bought a chemical for killing Spanish moss. I got keys made for my utility cart. I also got a ton of business matters fixed.

The cheap moss-killing chemical is baking soda. They say it really works. I plan to load it in the pressure washer and spray it on the trees near the house. It would be a dream come true to see that nasty stuff dry up and drop. I’m wondering if it will have any effect on algae. Hmm…a website says it kills algae in lawns. I may have a new treatment for my roof.

Today my new leaf blower arrived. It will be like strapping myself to an engine from an F15. Can’t wait to blow leaves and other junk across the farm. I’ve already done some work today, even though I feel like I’ve barely started. I mopped the back porch with pool chlorine again, before breakfast! It wasn’t clean enough to suit me, but before I’m done, it will be. I’ll pressure-wash it if I have to.

I guess I’ll mix the baking soda with Dawn, to make it stick and penetrate. I bought Simple Green for the first time in my life, and I tried using it in the pressure washer, but it seems weak and utterly useless. Hard to believe it’s this overrated. It doesn’t seem to do anything well.

The motor for my car’s moonroof arrived. I was dreading installing it, because of the hot weather. Even in the garage, it’s hot. Then I remembered that the car had an air conditioner. I can park in the shade and run the AC while I work. Not sure why this wasn’t obvious to me.

My advice is to keep asking for correction, because you’re even more wrong than you thought. Be glad you’re wrong, because if you were doing everything right, and your life was as it is now, you would have nothing better to look forward to.

Problems Dissolve Before Wave of Solutions

I’ve had another exciting two days.

The house I live in is wonderful, and the previous owners did a great job taking care of it. Unfortunately, they made a lot of bad landscaping choices. One example was the choice to leave a large oak tree standing 10 feet in front of the house. At some point, they cut it, and they didn’t have the stump ground. When I arrived here, I had a two-foot-wide stump taking up valuable landscaping space, and it had octopus-like roots extending in several directions.

I have fiddled with the stump for quite a while. I put drilled holes in it and filled them with saltpeter. That softened the wood so it was like a very tough cork. It didn’t get rid of the stump, however. Saltpeter is supposed to cause stumps to rot very quickly. Barring that, it’s supposed to make them very flammable, so you can apply kerosene, set them alight, and watch while they burn down into the ground. I didn’t get those results.

The saltpeter didn’t do everything it should have, but it made the stump vulnerable to conventional attack, so yesterday and the day before, I took a sawzall to it. I had come to understand that a lithium sawzall was a phenomenal landscaping tool. I cut a bunch of roots, and then yesterday, I got out a 4-foot prybar and a maul, and I went to town on the stump.

I would estimate that I worked an hour, spread out over two days. I tore out what must have been 150 pounds of oak, in big chunks. It was fantastic. Cutting and removing the roots gave me access to the stump itself, and it surrendered in a short time.

The stump is now gone. I loaded it in my cart and dumped the bits in the woods. Now I have an area where I can plant another peach tree. I don’t know if my first peach tree needs a pollination partner, but I would like to have two varieties, in case I don’t like the one I already have.

I also fixed the ground under the eave of my workshop. For some inexplicable reason, there is no gutter on the roof, so rainwater runs straight off the roof and down onto the lawn, digging a trench in the ground and splashing dirt onto the workshop porch. I learned about the virtues of melaleuca mulch this week, and I picked up 18 bags. I used several of them to fill in the trench the rain dug. Now when the rain pours off the roof, it will land on a bed of what is supposed to be the most stubborn plant-based mulch on earth. Melaleuca mulch binds together after you put it in place, and it’s also heavy, so it won’t float or wash away.

I may put some sort of plants in the mulch. Not sure yet. I put raspberry plants there in 2017, and the rain obliterated them. Weeds seem to grow really well there, though.

I have another area where the old pine mulch was nearly gone, so I blasted it with glyphosate, hacked out a flowering bush I never liked, and dumped a thick blanket of melaleuca mulch on it. It looks much–or mulch–better now. I also installed a hummingbird feeder hanging from a brand-new shepherd’s hook.

I finished trimming my hedges today. Oops…that’s not true. I finished one more side of the house. But it’s a big percentage of the total hedge burden. I can’t say the hedges look neat now, but at least they look like someone tried to put them in order. That’s a gigantic improvement.

I vacuumed and brushed the pool and got some liquid chlorine. Tomorrow I’ll backwash it and shock it. The pool is still recovering from my recent gutter-cleaning adventure. Lots of roof grit and leaf compost dust went into the water. I was starting to get a little algae, so today I nipped that problem in the bud.

I trimmed a couple of trees today. I have a tree with hanging branches, like a willow, and they interfere when I try to mow. I used to put up with it, figuring I wasn’t supposed to cut the limbs. I assumed the droopy effect was one of the tree’s features. Today I thought about it, and I remembered that I own the house now. I don’t care how the person who planted the tree feels. I can do what I want. I hacked out the limbs that were in my way. Now the tree looks much better. I have another tree with limbs that touched the pool enclosure. It occurred to me that a mouse could climb the tree and walk out onto the enclosure, providing him with roof access. I don’t need that headache, so I cut the tree back just to be sure.

My blackberry and grape plants live in an area bordered by a ludicrous ornamental rail fence, and the fence is not sturdy. The rails have a tendency to pop out and fall. Today I took a long 1/4″ drill bit and drilled holes through the posts and rails, and then I used an impact driver to run long hex screws through them to hold them together. I intend to keep running screws until the rails quit flopping. It’s a great solution. It’s unobtrusive, and the whole job of installing a screw takes 30 seconds.

The blackberries are doing very, very well. The bugs here just don’t like them. Today I bought trellises for them. They will be installed tomorrow.

I ordered more batteries for my 18-volt Makita toys. I figure a total of 6 batteries will be enough to make it highly unlikely I’ll ever have to quit work because I’m out of juice. I considered buying no-name Chinese batteries, but there is some question as to how long they last, and you can find great deals on real Makitas on Ebay, so I didn’t take a chance.

I researched strawberries. Someone suggested I put strawberry plants in the planter that used to house the annoying pygmy date palm I dismembered. It’s a great idea, because the planter is by the pool, screened in. The squirrels won’t be able to get near it, but they WILL be able to hang on the screen and stare at the berries they will never get, and that serves them right.

I put glue rat traps in my storage room. I hear funny noises coming from that area at night. I think it’s just the air conditioning moving doors around, but why gamble? If it’s mice, they will soon come to realize the folly of their decision to trespass in my realm.

I wish the day were longer. I want to kill everything in the poolside planter and dump it in the woods.

Getting rid of the stump is a huge blessing. It was like a Satanic stronghold, right in front of my door. It was as if it were taunting me. When I first came here, it was like cast iron, and I saw no hope of removing it without paying someone. Now it’s out in the woods in pieces, and the front yard has lost a major eyesore.

I’m just getting started. I’m going to kill and remove my citrus, which is all mortally ill. I’m going to get my garage wired up for machine tools, and I’m going to move my lathe and mill up here. I’m going to get my truck painted. I’m going to get the driveway resurfaced. This place is going to look like a civilized human being lives here.

Every morning, I keep asking God to help me fix this place so people who look at it will know there is a God in Israel. Christians shouldn’t do everything in a half-assed way. People shouldn’t be able to point their fingers at us and say, “Look at the third-rate care their imaginary God takes of his children.” Our lives should be in order. We should be examples to everyone else.

My hot rod leaf blower arrives Wednesday, God willing. The crud that has been sitting on my driveway since I pressure-washed it is about to be blown halfway to the property line. The leaves that have suffocated my yard will be lucky if they land before they reach Orlando.

Things are good. God is faithful. Christianity works. Don’t give up.

Barriers to Property Sale Collapse

Last year in May, God gave me this phrase: “Extremely effective.” I took it to mean he was going to change me so I got things done faster. It sure looks like that was correct. I have been getting things done right and left since my dad died.

Today I got my cattle lease signed. I drew it up a few days ago. A local man is going to put about 18 cows on my property. They will keep the weeds down, produce lots of useful manure, and kill my property tax bill. They will also make the place look less like Edward Scissorhands’ dad’s winter home. When a man lives alone on a big property, the atmosphere can get creepy.

Today my tenant Homer showed up and worked on the fences. He says the cattle will be here next week. Probably. I put new locks on all the gates he will be using, and when he shows up next week, I will hand him a key.

Yesterday and today, I solved some problems with the title on a property I’m selling. The person my dad bought it from had some little problems, and they popped up when the title insurance people did a search. The first three issues were unpaid fines relating to very stupid and untrained dogs that didn’t behave. That was no problem. A phone call fixed it. The fourth problem was bigger, and it involved a law firm that deals with debt.

At first, I was told I couldn’t resolve anything without consent from the person who was named in the documents, but I knew better than that, being a lawyer and all. I pointed out that I could make an offer to pay without poking my nose into the particulars of the matter, and of course, the attorney was fine with that. He didn’t go into his unsavory line of work because he hates money. Payment is payment, regardless of the source. We worked it out, which really means I agreed to pay him whatever he wants. There is no way to get a reduction in the time I have available. I will be paying on Monday. As it turns out, I am in a situation that will allow me to get reimbursement without making demands or suing anyone (or getting permission), so I won’t be out any money. It will cost the dog owner some cash. Nothing I can do about that, and the truth is, I don’t care.

I am getting the property I live on under control, fast. I fixed all the hedges in front of the house this week, and I will be doing the rest of the house shortly. I put a peach tree in the hole where my lightning-blasted maple used to stand. I ordered some Tupi blackberry plants. These are great warm-climate plants with thorns. Maybe they’ll discourage squirrels. If you buy blackberries in a grocery store, chances are they’re Tupis. They’re big, and the flavor is good. I’m thinking I should sow some in my pasture, to crowd out and kill the disappointing native berries.

I got some info on mulch. It appears that the best possible mulch comes from obnoxious melaleuca trees. These things were brought to Florida from Australia. They’re like eucalyptus trees, sort of. They’re the trees we get tea tree oil from; there is no such thing as a tea tree. They have overrun a lot of South Florida and destroyed much of the awful Everglades (as if I care). The mulch repels bugs and lasts a long time, and killing melaleucas is a mitzvah, so it’s a win-win kind of thing. Melaleuca mulch isn’t available everywhere, which is amazing because it’s such a great idea, but my local Lowe’s happens to have it, so I plan to load up. Much of my mulch is worn out, and I think melaleuca is just the ticket to cover my weeds.

I got a new blade for my lithium Sawzall. This is important because I have a big stump in front of my house, and it has long roots. You should never use a chainsaw on roots, because dirt dulls a chainsaw instantly. A Sawzall is a great tool for cutting roots and branches, especially if it’s cordless. I picked a 9″ wood blade. I can’t wait to get rid of the roots around the stump. The core should come out with the tractor after that.

I found out which extension agent I need to talk to, concerning yard maintenance. I have given up on getting advice from other sources. Forums are useless. I need someone with deep local knowledge because the climate here is so weird. It’s not tropical, and it’s not temperate. We have monstrous weeds, plus gophers, armadillos, and horrible oak trees with destructive leaves. We also have thick algae here that grows on driveways and houses. I have to have information in order to deal with this mess. On Monday, I will hook up and dominate.

My car had a problem. I inherited my dad’s Ford Explorer. It has a moonroof, which is one of the dumbest features a car can have. It gives you all the maintenance problems of a convertible, with none of the style or fun. It amazes me that people like these things. Moonroofs have drain tubes that get plugged, and when they get plugged, water rises in your roof and kills your moonroof motor. In order to unclog the tubes, you have to open the moonroof, so basically, you have to replace the motor before you can clear the drains.

This week I spent a very hard day lowering the headliner in the car. I found the motor, and I have a new one on the way. It’s actually easier to replace the motor than the moonroof fuse. Ford used to put fuses in a convenient panel near the door, but now they hide the indoor fuse box under the dashboard. To get to it, you have to remove a trim panel, lie on your back in the foot well, and twist to your right. It took me over an hour just to find it, and I had directions. Actually changing a fuse would be so hard, it would be physically dangerous. I could tear a muscle. Unbelievably bad engineering.

In any case, the damage to the car was limited to a motor and some dampness on the carpet by the passenger seat, so I’m happy. I would have had to pay hundreds to get a mechanic to fix it.

It’s annoying that car makers don’t warn people about moonroof problems. When you buy a car, you know you have to change the fluids, buy tires, fix the brakes periodically, and get things lubed. You know you have to get front end alignments. No normally aware person will just assume there is an easily blocked tube in the moonroof, which has to be blown out periodically with compressed air. People find out about it after their cars start to smell and their moonroofs stop working.

Some owners have problems much worse than mine. The gaskets around the rear moonroofs go bad, and then water pours into the well where the spare tire sits, filling it to the brim and taking out a stereo speaker in the process. The tire well doesn’t have a drain in it. Nice work, Ford. Good thinking.

I wish I could have my moonroof welded shut. It’s an idiotic product. People who like moonroofs must not know what real convertibles are like.

I’m pretty sure I disposed of some other lingering problems this week, but I can’t think of them offhand.

I hate to say it, but life without my dad is a thousand times better than life with him. Things are going better for me because he’s gone.

I have two dads to consider: the old one, and the new one who appeared 7 weeks before he died. I am still recovering from the damage the old one did, even as I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the new one. He was full of love and generosity. He blessed me every time I saw him. Unfortunately, he was just too ill to continue living.

I love my dad very much, and I can’t wait to be with him again, but that’s the new dad. The old dad was a radioactive weight that held me down.

It’s very odd, being glad to be rid of one version of my dad while missing and loving another version.

Every day, I pray for God to keep killing my old self and giving life and dominance to my new self. I learned that from watching God work on my dad.

I think I’ll get the Sawzall out before it gets completely dark.

Get the unequal yokings out of your life, give yourself completely to God, beg God for correction every day, and worship him physically when you talk to him. Don’t just sit there. Lift your hands and tell him you’re worshiping him. He expects you to make physical gestures of worship, it and pays off.

God will give you peace and victory, but you have to do things his way. Until you give in–as long as you insist on making God work within your own unfortunate version of Christianity–you won’t know how beautiful life can be.