Him is on the Way

I wasn’t going to write about this part of my life, but maybe I should. Today we got some test results back, and we are going to have a boy. Also, so far, all the genetic tests look fine.

Talk about relieved.

These days, when you’re expecting, they scare you to death. My wife is a young woman, but they told her she had a “geriatric” pregnancy. They were not referring to me. If you’re a feminist, and you’re convinced you’re supposed to be building a killer career instead of reproducing, and you think you have lots of time, here is bad news: you don’t. Get yourself a husband and become a traditional wife.

You think Kim Kardashian is great because she got rich and then had kids? Guess again. She’s only 43, and three of her kids are products of geriatric pregnancies. “High-risk,” they call it. She could have gotten started sooner, but her porn-heavy career as a professional slut delayed things.

My wife and I were under different constraints. I could not accept the possibility of my wife giving birth in Africa, so we had to wait until she got her green card. I did not want to see my child take his or her first steps on a video chat, and I wanted to be present in case I was needed. I definitely didn’t want to find out that my sick child was in a Zambian hospital.

It felt wonderful getting negative test results after all the hype about potential problems. God protected our child from the consequences of our sins. He took them on himself.

Today we had to take a long drive to retrieve Marvin from a bird boarding place, and on the way back, the test results came through on my wife’s phone. The website asked if we wanted to know the baby’s sex, and we agreed. That’s when we got the news. I had to hear it while I was stuck in traffic in Orlando with a parrot trying to chew its way out of a box.

I miss the days when people found out what they were having on the day of delivery. We are overloaded with unneeded information now. My wife wants to start shopping, however, and you can’t buy all that many things for a baby of unknown gender. Also, we pray for our son a lot, and I bless him and my wife. We are both really tired of referring to him as “my child” and “he or she.” Finally, we have pronouns. Correct ones, not nonsense words or inappropriate pronouns like the ones we see applied by people controlled by demons.

We also have a name. We are naming the boy after my mother’s dad. My wife wants to put a II at the end of his name. I can’t name him after my father, because even though God changed him late in life, I still have memories of my mother using his name as an insult. When my sister or I behaved badly, she would call us by his name. Also, when I was a kid, hearing his name put a knot in my stomach. I can’t go through that for the rest of my life.

I love my dad, and we reconciled completely, but there are still consequences for his behavior earlier in life.

My grandfather was more of a father figure to me than my dad was. My mom was his favorite child by a mile, and I was his favorite grandchild. I was the closest thing he had to a son, and I am still grateful for all he did for us. I can’t think of a better person to honor in this matter. He had no boys, and his other male grandchildren either have serious issues or identified with a paternal line.

I’m the one he used to take shooting and hunting. He said I was the reason he bought two ponies. I’m the one he used to put in the truck and take to his farms and on visits to friends, over and over.

He also did a lot for my sister, but he couldn’t stand her. He threw her out of his house because of the way she treated him.

I imagine seeing his name attached to a child of mixed race will gall one or two of my relatives. If so, that will be their problem, not mine, and maybe it will be a chastisement from God. A reminder that trying to put someone else in my favored position didn’t work.

Based on what I know about my cousins, it looks like I am the male descendant who got my grandfather’s patriarch mantle, albeit unexpectedly and without asking for it or knowing such a thing existed. I am the eldest son of the eldest daughter. I embrace it and try to do well, invoking God’s help every day. It’s very intimidating. I know my faults.

Merely producing children does not make you a patriarch. You have to have a sense of duty. You have to want to raise kids with ethics and introduce them to the Holy Spirit. You have to be a man who admits his immaturity and his faults and works to get God to cleanse him so the next generation will be improved. You also have to have a lot of wisdom, given to you by God, directly, you can pass on to your kids. You have to be able to accept and transmit a supernatural inheritance. A patriarch raises mature, decent children who don’t go to hell. Anyone else is just spilling seed on the ground.

Doesn’t matter if your kids are smart, successful, handsome, talented, famous, or impressive in any other unimportant and fleeting way. If they don’t know God, they are failed launches who will not succeed at producing nations. They and their seed will disappear.

You can’t be pretty much the same guy at 40 that you were at 15. You can’t live life with a 12-pack of Bud Light under your arm. You can’t have given up your family. You can’t be filled with victimhood fantasies or think every bad thing you do to other people is fine because you imagine you were cheated. You can’t be a crook who never thinks of anyone else. If your whole life is things like beer, adultery, blood sports, corruption, and money, you’re not a patriarch.

Did I want a boy? Seems like every man wants a boy. I was ambivalent at first. I thought girls would be less challenging to raise. Being a man is harder than being a woman. Given my age, I thought raising a boy might be more trouble than I wanted. Then I thought about patriarchy and the significance of male heirs to one’s legacy. I also thought about my family, which has been cursed with psychopathic female eldest children who abused and dominated males. I didn’t want that curse to continue. And I thought having a male eldest child would be good for whoever came later. He could do more for them. In the end, I felt a male child would be more of a blessing.

I delayed the beginning of my family. That’s why it took so long to happen. I was stupid and immature. I conformed to unprofitable hillbilly culture; sorry for using a slur. I also made disgraceful, damned morons my fathers. People like Hunter Thompson and the staff of The National Lampoon. Henry Miller. Fritz Perls. Others I could name. God reached out to me in spite of my punk attitudes, and it took me about 17 years to understand and apply his guidance. I did turn the corner, though. I can say that much for myself. I know people who will never turn.

Now you know the news. I hope I can control myself and avoid putting too much family content on the web. The world doesn’t have to know everything.

Maybe the Grass Really is Greener

Reader Tiomoid of Angle left a comment referring to a Youtube called Nomad Capitalist. The comment says, “Go Where You’re Treated Best.”

That’s really interesting.

I know nothing about the channel. I sort of skimmed the “Videos” page, and it looks like it’s a guy who tells people about countries where they might be better off than where they are. Maybe it’s aimed at Americans.

I’m writing to relax, so I have no plans to do unpleasant research that resembles work.

What I perceive, perhaps incorrectly, to be the thesis of the channel is interesting. Why stay where you’re not wanted? Why stay and be treated the way a lamprey treats a bass?

Today I had a revelation, which I posted here. The brief, generalized version is this: bad people want to stay close to good people, but good people want to get away from bad people.

To understand why this is true, you only have to refer back to the lamprey/bass simile. A bass would be way better off if every lamprey died right now, but lampreys would shrivel and die without fish to eat alive.

This is the kind of interaction Scott Adams had in mind when he made the remarks that changed his life.

He says he’s not a racist. He says he was being “hyperbolic.” I don’t know what’s true. I do know that people with a ghetto mindset are parasites, and the people who support them are hosts. This is also true of spoiled Antifa kids and most Palestinians.

He said people should stay the hell away from blacks. That’s ridiculous, but if he had said we should stay away from racist blacks who prey on everyone else, he would have been correct, and he should have extended the notion to other parasitic groups. For example, no honest person can say it’s smart to live near gypsies.

America the nation is parasitic now. I mean the government and cultural establishment. As policy, it torments, libels, censors, imprisons, beats, and robs people who are its biggest assets, in order to feed vicious common trash who happen to be of voting age. So why not leave?

Is it really that big a deal to be an American citizen? What do you really get?

1. Stability. Well, that is off the table now that civil war is approaching. And having a continuous line of government doesn’t mean individuals have stability. The USSR was around for a long time, and people there lived in terror and never knew when they might be whisked off to camps or places of execution. And lots of countries are stable.

2. Wealth. That sounds fine, but the fact that your country is wealthy doesn’t mean you are, and the fact that it’s poor doesn’t mean you’re poor. You can be wealthy anywhere, and it’s best to be wealthy in a place where half of the population isn’t trying to take what you have, claiming falsely that you stole it. One in six Swiss citizens are millionaires by American standards. That’s not bad. There are several countries where it is easier to get rich than it is in America. And maybe you’re already rich, so all you need is a country that won’t rob you.

3. Quality of life. This is a slippery quantity, because the people whose efforts to define it are generally not conservative, but still, the US is not at the top of most lists. Here’s an important part of quality of life: not having racist, anti-Christian, antisemitic, murderous terrorism-lovers constantly threatening to take what you have and turn you into a voiceless slave.

The weather in most of America is bad for a big part of the year. The food is not very good except for prime beef. The people in most areas are rude. We have a couple of large demographics, plus some small ones, that run around shooting, robbing, and raping everyone else plus each other. This is not paradise.

What if you travel and a foreign country locks you up or otherwise mistreats you? Uncle Sam will save you! No, he won’t. I mean, he might, but don’t count on it. Foreign prisons are full of American citizens. If you’re a famous lesbian who willfully committed a stupid crime with a severe penalty, you might get help, but in the process, a far better person might be left imprisoned in the foreign country for political reasons. Not that this has happened recently.

Is it heresy to criticize our food? No. Go to Europe or the Far East some day and look at the produce. We breed plants that taste bad but generate higher profits. They breed plants that taste fantastic, and often, they also look better than ours.

The produce in Singapore (where there is virtually no farmland) and Hong Kong (also almost no farmland) is magnificent. Wonder why we can’t do that.

Consider the Red Delicious apple. I loved them when I was a kid. Now they’re disgusting. I can’t understand why stores sell them. They bred the flavor out of them and made the texture sort of like a mixture of sand and wet styrofoam. They apparently ship quite well, however.

Our Granny Smith apples are like sour croquet balls. Can’t remember the last time I saw a ripe one. They’re great for constipation.

We have the Second Amendment! True, but then we need it more than many countries. I don’t think the Czechs and South Koreans worry too much about carjackings and home invasions.

One of the videos on Capitalist Nomad’s channel is titled “You Don’t Owe Your Country Anything.” Wow. In America, that’s blasphemy. But is it true? In many cases, yes.

I obey the law. Mostly. I cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. The police don’t come to my house three times a week to make me stop beating the putative mother of some of my illegitimate children. My kids aren’t in “the system” because I abandoned them. I don’t get affirmative action. I paid full tuition when I was in college. I don’t get student loans and then force better people to pay them off. The amount of tax I pay is really extraordinary because of the nature of my business. It’s fair to say I work for the government. When my grandfather died, my country confiscated enough wealth from his heirs, who had done nothing wrong, to make a person rich. When they brought the Selective Service back, I signed up, agreeing to give my life if they ordered me to. I wasn’t called to serve, but I would have. That’s not a small thing to offer.

Help me understand why I would think I owed America anything. I think our military people have done more for me than anyone except my parents and my mother’s parents, but is our military “America”? Most people have never served.

I do a lot for other people through taxes, but people don’t do anything for me unless I pay them. If I pay them, how can anyone say I owe them for what they’ve done for me?

I benefit from the taxes a certain percentage of Americans pay, but they benefit from mine, too. We use the same roads. I would say the rich benefit me more than anyone, because they pay way more than I do. Thank you, billionaires. Someone appreciates you.

Thank you for infrastructure. Thank you for hospitals and universities. Thank you for aircraft carriers. Thank you for all the things disgraceful politicians bought us with your confiscated money. Thank you for all the corporations that provide great stuff. Thank you for taking risks I won’t take and working harder than I want to.

I’m surrounded by people who cheat the rest of us every day as a matter of routine. Welfare scammers run into the tens of millions, at least. I live in a country where people with no conscience use EBT cards to buy liquor and cigarettes while better people buy their own ramen noodles.

There are whole neighborhoods that are nothing but wealth sinks. The government raises their kids. In prisons, it houses a huge fraction of the adult males and quite a lot of the females. It hands out food, medicine, phones, apartments and all sorts of other things. It pays for programs that help almost no one because almost no one wants to be helped.

Some people owe this country. I am not one of them. If I move somewhere else, America will be worse off, I will be better off, and the country I move to will be improved.

I’m assuming I can move to a decent location. That is still possible.

I don’t often hear people saying they don’t owe America anything, but it’s true for many of us.

I can understand immigrants saying it, provided they didn’t come here from places like Luxembourg or Japan.

Funny thing: I don’t even owe God. That sounds bizarre, but it’s true. He paid the debt I owed him. I don’t owe him for anything in the past, but I definitely have a son’s duty to serve him in the future. And I want to serve him. He’s wonderful, and serving him is a joy. Every good thing in my life came from him, and he gave it all in spite of my revolting attitude and slimy deeds.

I don’t claim America owes me, except that it has a duty to do what our stupid, cruel, clumsy government has promised in return for being a good and loyal citizen. I have done a lot for the citizenry, but I was forced to do most of it, and I don’t consider anyone to be indebted to me for it.

Saying I don’t owe America isn’t the same as saying I don’t love America. I do. Or, rather, I love what America was. I love what little vanishing bits of it still are. I can’t love the whole country. No one in his right mind can love Chicago or Newark. It would be like loving kidney stones.

I suppose I’ve written enough. I have unwound. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly about Capitalist Nomad’s content. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually watch a video.

Don’t Say “Insured”

Let me play the salesman to any Florida readers who may be trying to get insurance right now.

Buy home insurance without windstorm (hurricane) coverage.

Financial guru Suze Orman has a high-rise oceanfront condo close to Boca, AKA the Jewish Palm Beach (built in response to antisemitic ordinances and deed restrictions), and they tried to nail her for $28,000 per year. She’s a person people look to for responsible advice, and she more or less told her audience to forget home insurance, if only by example. Why?

I spent a month in a high-rise in Boca on the beach. Belonged to a rich Jewish family. They let my mother, my sister, and I shelter there during a crisis. There is zero possibility any windstorm that isn’t the product of a nuclear blast 100 yards away will hurt a building of this type. They are 100% reinforced concrete from top to bottom. Trees can’t fall on them. Their roofs are relatively tiny compared to house roofs, and they are flat and strong. They can’t flood. It’s impossible for flying debris of any size to make it above the third floor, and flying debris is not much of a problem anyway. I went through Andrew, and even at 180 mph, the bulk of the damage was from wind against structures. I was in a house that got over 160, the front was largely unprotected glass, and there were no projectile issues.

What did the insurer want $28,000 for? Theft and fire, I guess. Way too much. They were just looking for a way to make Orman pay for other people’s hurricane claims.

When was the last time a high-rise burned down in Florida? It’s extremely rare. Theft is a problem, but you would have to have a lot of stuff in a little condo to make $28,000 per year make sense. In five years, you would pay $140,000. In 10, $280,000. Come on. If you have Klimts and Picassos, you can insure them independently.

There is no way she could ever have had hurricane damage in that place. I’m surprised she ever chose to insure against it.

A high-rise in Miami Beach collapsed a while back. Should she worry about that? Insurance is not the answer for a building that is about to fall over. The answer is to get out and avoid buying a similar home. Insurance isn’t going to lift 15 floors of collapsed concrete off you. Since the panic that followed the incident, inspectors and county officials have been in high gear, identifying and fixing dubious buildings, so you should be able to avoid properties that have issues.

What I’m getting at is this: she would have gotten nothing at all for her wind insurance premiums, and spending $28,000 to insure for wind, theft, fire and liability is ridiculous when wind is most of the cost.

I think she should have looked for fire and theft insurance. I’ll bet it would have been an acceptable deal.

Here is what Orman said: “I’m not paying $28,000 a year when the insurer will probably contest any claim I get anyway. Luckily, I have the money to self-insure.” That is true for her personalty, but she can’t rebuild a high-rise if it burns. She’ll have to eat a loss that is probably in the area of 3.5 million dollars. If she can insure against that for a few grand, it’s worth it.

If you reject windstorm coverage, suddenly your rates will implode, and insurers that gave you silly pretexts for refusing to insure you will suddenly find that you’re a good prospect.

That’s what is happening to me, anyway.

The last year I had an insurance premium I thought was reasonable, I paid about $3400. The next year (last year) I hit $8000. Too much, but I thought I had no choice. Then they said they would not renew at any cost, supposedly because I was too far from a fire station. That was a lie; it was obviously because of hurricanes.

This year, I sent my agent a request, asking for insurance without wind coverage. He expressed doubt because I was allegedly non-renewed over fire. Then on the same day, he sent me an offer. Get this: $1300.

Dude.

So much for that fire story.

It is possible I may not qualify because they may not consider my neighborhood a proper subdivision, which it, technically, is. But it shows you have to be stupid to get hurricane insurance when you are not in danger of having hurricane damage.

I have other properties that don’t have hurricane coverage because they’re not the kind of properties hurricanes hurt. There has never been a problem. The money I save could pay the mortgage on another property.

I wiped out all the trees that could conceivably land on anything expensive, and now I don’t need hurricane insurance. My roof is not going to come off in the kind of maximum sustained winds this area has suffered since the dawn of history. I made sure this area was flood-proof before I moved here. Worst case: I have to move downed trees and repair some fences. Big deal. Did that already in ’17.

I guess a claim should have been filed for the cost of debris removal. It wasn’t a big deal. Might have netted a grand or two after the deductible, but probably not. I would have had to find people to move the wood, which didn’t seem possible. They would never pay me for moving it myself.

Removing the dangerous trees this year cost me $7500. Very, very cheap. If I am able to get the insurance I was offered, paying the new rate plus $7500, I will save about $6000 in the first two years alone. And having a tree land on your house is terrible, even if you’re insured. You don’t want it. Far, far better to avoid the problem entirely. Insurers will try to cheat you after your loss. They will not be able to replace the irreplaceable. You’ll have to move for a while. Forget that. Cut the trees.

I had to remove the trees anyway. Some were rotten. All were too close. If I had decided to continue to pay for hurricane insurance, I would still have had them removed. I’m going to stay on this personally from now on cutting trees myself before they become problems.

I have a 50-foot oak beside my driveway right now. It’s sick. Bet you I can have it gone in three hours. Just me and the saws and the tractor. It’s easy, as long as nothing breaks down. A tree surgeon won’t touch it for under a thousand. I know.

What if you can’t cut the trees that endanger your house? What if you have a mortgage and have to have insurance. Move to Tennessee, I guess. I don’t know what else you can do, unless you’re so rich you don’t care.

I may have my roof bulked up from below. I have wind straps that are not the very best. Better ones can be installed in existing roofs. But it would take an extremely strong storm to remove my roofs, and we just don’t get those. A tornado would do it, but what are the odds? One in 10,000?

My choice isn’t wind insurance versus no wind insurance. It’s no insurance at all versus insurance that doesn’t cover wind. The choice seems pretty obvious.

When I travel, I want to know there is some chance I will be compensated for whatever people steal. Theft is very unlikely here, but it would cost me a lot. I want to know that if my house burns, I’ll get at least most of a new house. The other stuff is not important. Insurance payments are generally half-assed, inadequate efforts to put Band-Aids on severed limbs. I want a decent Band-Aid at a decent price. I am not stupid enough to think insurance will make me whole.

I admit, sometimes insurance is pretty good. A property of mine was damaged by leakage from an upstairs property. I wanted to have a contractor fix everything at the insurer’s expense. Easy. They wouldn’t have it. When I quibbled, they offered me over $8000 for work I thought might amount to $4000, and I took it. They wanted to settle and get out fast. But they do cheat people whenever they can.

I am no expert, but it seems to me every Floridian who wants homeowner insurance, and who can reduce hurricane damage risks to near zero, should look into getting rid of wind insurance. I’m going to do it if I can work it out.

MORE

I am blogging again in order to avoid heat stroke. I’m yanking the awful hedges the original owner of this house put in by the driveway. Should have done it 7 years ago. My mouth got dry, and in the house I came.

I thought I’d comment on a story about Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner. He is supposedly worth $2.6 billion.

His advice? Never pay for insurance. He says he doesn’t have home insurance because he can write a check and build a new house.

I have mixed feelings about this advice, because he’s wrong. Sometimes insurance is great. Examples:

1. Your house’s value is NOT less that 0.05% of your net worth. This applies to a shocking number of people, Mr. Munger. To many people, losing a house is worse than dropping a pizza. If my current insurance offer goes through, I can get a new house and new stuff for $1300. I may live 30 years, so ignoring inflation for obvious reasons, I might have to come up with $40,000 over that time to pay for a house that would cost way more than that to replace, along with new stuff. I would have to be quite stupid not to take that deal. It would take me lifetimes to pay the insurer the value of what I could lose. If I were worth $2.6 billion, I would still take that deal. Fires do happen.

2. You live in an area where morons like to fall down and sue people. That covers a lot of the US. If you’re worth $2.6 billion, maybe you’re not afraid of a $2 million verdict for a con artist who says he can’t work because he fell in your driveway, but many people are worth considerably less than $2.6 billion and would feel the impact of a $2 million loss more than the loss of a coffee mug.

3. You rent cars when you travel to other states or countries. If you can rent a car for $300 without insurance and $375 with insurance, take the insurance, especially in a foreign country. American insurance generally doesn’t work in other countries. Do you really want a rental agency in some Stan country to put you in jail until you pay for a wrecked 2004 Scion with chicken manure in the glove box? I wrecked a rental car once while traveling. The lady in the other car claimed she had medical issues. I don’t know much about it, because they gave me another car, and when my trip was over, I flew home. I didn’t know she claimed she was injured until months later, and I had zero involvement with the whole business because I paid for insurance.

4. You travel abroad. See above. You can get a huge amount of insurance for a couple of hundred dollars when you go abroad for three weeks. Medical. Evacuation. Liability. How can you turn that down? I must stress that this is another situation in which my advice is intended for people worth substantially less than $2.6 billion. Travel insurance is just too cheap and helpful to pass up, unless you are filthy rich. The potential downside of not being insured is huge.

5. Sometimes a product is so awful, insurance is a smart idea. This used to be true of laptops. Maybe it is now. They broke down all the time. I bought an expensive laptop a long time ago, and I had no problem with the price of insurance. I would never insure something like a washing machine, but some products just can’t be trusted, and sometimes the cost of insurance is unrealistically low.

You may think your homeowner’s insurance covers stuff like this. Okay, sure. Do you know what your deductible is? I had a $2000 problem, and my deductible was $2500. This is why I keep my car deductibles as close to zero as they allow. A low deductible doesn’t jack the premiums up much at all, and it makes claims pleasant.

6. Dealing with a loss is just too much of a pain. What if you’re a contractor, and your ladder or impact driver breaks? Do you want to lose work while you send it to the factory, or do you want to pay 15% extra and have them hand you a new one at the store, no questions asked? Think carefully. This is not supposed to be a tough question.

If the downside is tolerable and the insurance is expensive, don’t pay. If it’s the other way around, pay. That’s what I think.

My dad taught me never to pay to insure anything I could insure myself. Basically good advice, but oversimplified. When Best Buy asks me if I want to pay $50 to insure a $200 item, it offends me, but I pay when the deal is right.

Maybe I’m missing something here. It has been known to happen. I do think extremely rich people should pursue different strategies from the rest of us. If I were Kim Kardashian, and I wrecked a Bentley, I would have a new one brought to my house, have an assistant file a claim, and give it away when it was fixed. If I were the assistant and I wrecked my 3-series BMW, I would probably take a different course.

So This is How Other Americans Live

This year, I am having a very welcome experience. I am sitting through hurricane season with the same degree of worry as a referee in a murderous MMA match. I no longer have skin in the game.

When I moved here, there were oaks all around the house and shop, and some were well over 100 feet high. Most were rotten, because they were trash oaks. Unlike live oaks, which live hundreds of years, trash oaks grow quickly, get eaten by bugs, and fall apart piece by piece. Here, they say they live for 20 years and die for 80.

I had oaks over two feet thick at chest height, held up by cylinders of sound wood with interiors made of something like rotten papier-mache. They were close enough to the buildings to fall on them if they blew over.

People call these oaks “water oaks,” although some are other species and even hybrids. Water oaks generally don’t fall over even if they’re rotten. Instead, they start dropping dead branches from near their tops. Sometimes the branches are a few feet long. Sometimes they’re 20 feet long and weigh a lot.

A typical water oak will self-destruct more or less in place, with the dead material falling close to their bases. But sometimes they just plain fall over. They can also fall just because they’re too tall and the soil here is too weak to hold them up in a blow.

We never, ever get hit by hurricanes here, but we do get hit by winds in the tropical storm range. Former hurricanes pass over us, and hurricanes that are still strong pass by within 100 miles. Tropical storm winds can’t blow a roof off or pick up a tree and throw it. They’re not dangerous to houses unless they can blow heavy stuff onto them, and that, they can do. If they are sufficiently close to tall trees.

Every year as the season started, I watched the NHC maps, wondering if I was going to have to file an insurance claim.

This year it’s very different. I paid a crew a lot of money for a day and a half of work, and now the odds of my buildings being damaged are right up there with the odds of Biden being reelected.

The first month of the season has been a big nothing. When we finally started to see activity, I was excited. Because my house might be crushed? No. Because I thought we would get some rain to fix the yard damage the tree service did. I actually HOPED we would get a tropical storm. That felt weird.

It wasn’t a smart thing to hope for. I can still lose electricity for a few days, and I shouldn’t hope for something that will harm people who are less prepared.

I still have properties in areas where hurricanes hit with full force, but they are not houses. I don’t care what happens. Andrew hit them about as hard as a hurricane can, and they weren’t harmed.

Because winds other than tornado winds (rare) can’t hurt this house, I don’t need wind insurance, and I don’t need flood insurance because before my dad bought this house, I checked the government’s satellite maps. This property can’t flood. There is one area where I can get a little standing water, but it’s maybe a quarter-mile from the house, and we’re talking about a couple of inches of water.

I am now looking for a company that will insure my house for everything except hurricanes. I don’t want to pay for insurance I will never use. Insurers are cutting customers off, citing stupid pretexts like the distance to fire stations. The real reason is fear of paying off storm claims. It seems to me there ought to be someone out there who will want to take my money, knowing they will never have to rebuild my house unless it burns.

They ought to love insuring people in my area because the storm risk is so much lower than it is in coastal areas. I’m not sure they know what they’re doing. Maybe the problem is that so many people in areas that don’t get really strong winds let trees grow close to their homes.

I’m turning into what most Americans already are: a person who isn’t interested in hurricane news. It feels great. I pray when I read about any disaster, impending or otherwise, but from now on, I won’t feel I have a personal stake in any of it.

Mower Buyer Battles Iron Dome of Incompetence and Lies

Buying used stuff online seems to be getting harder now that Facebook has taken over.

I don’t have a Facebook account, so I don’t have Facebook Marketplace. If I signed up today, it would probably be 6 months before they would let me use Marketplace. They don’t accept new users, and you have to have “friends,” i.e. strangers you have no interest in knowing yet who read about your life every day. To look at items, I have to use my wife’s account, which she needs to delete for her own good.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the strangers, given that I blog, but here, no one is collecting my data, and I don’t have to worry about college and being looked up by old acquaintances I’m hoping I never hear from again.

Craigslist is drying up, and Facebook won’t let you play unless you join the slimy collective.

My mower saga started with a rude lady who treated me like a terrorist. Then I messaged another seller, and she didn’t even answer. She just changed her listing so it said the mower was sold. I reported her for not responding. You can do that.

I found a mower with 22 hours, listed under what looked like an individual’s account. In reality, the listing came from Crystal Tractor, one of the only two big Kubota networks here. They have a store in Deland, and that’s where the mower was, supposedly, at one time.

I messaged the account holder, and he said he would check on the mower. That was days ago. I messaged him again yesterday. No answer.

I Googled to find out who really advertised the mower. It wasn’t hard, because the ad photos and video matched photos from Crystal Tractor’s website.

Today I called Crystal Tractor, and they said the mower had sold long ago. They didn’t offer me anything else. Small wonder, because their online used inventory is pathetic.

I reported the guy who advertised the mower falsely and did not respond.

Why is Crystal Tractor advertising under individual accounts?

I think I understand why my local dealer has a whole herd of unsold mowers. It looks like Kubota doesn’t require franchisees to maintain basic competence or ethics.

I went to Ocala’s inaptly-named Florida Coast Equipment, and the nice lady I dealt with had no idea what she was doing. Didn’t know how the products worked. Didn’t seem to know Kubota made garden tractors. Didn’t know what mower buyers need. Didn’t offer to scan the chain’s inventory to see if they had anything I might want. It was like they had just hired her away from Olive Garden. How do they sell anything?

To sell people expensive machinery, you have to know your products. People don’t want to hand over 5 or 6 figures without some reason to believe they’re getting what they need and paying a fair price. You have to make them comfortable. The guy who showed me Scag mowers knew everything about them, and he clearly knew what mowing was like. If I decided to buy a mower from him tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to ask him a thing.

I’m so frustrated, I have considered the unthinkable: buying a John Deere.

I dislike the John Deere company because they treat customers so badly. Other companies make products that are just as good or better. Nearly all small tractors, for example, are of equal quality, regardless of what people with green hats and face tattoos tell you. But John Deere, like BMW, promotes a perception of nonexistent exceptionalism. As though they’re doing you a favor by selling you something exclusive and exciting, which is not an accurate description of their run-of-the-mill products.

John Deere charges way too much for parts. They fight people who want to repair machines they paid for. On the other hand, they do make good zero-turns, and if I had one, I could probably do all the repairs myself and never see the inside of a dealership.

I could paint it orange.

I like Kubotas for their quality and the easy availability of parts, but I also like a feature their zero-turns have. The decks lift up without floor jacks. Kubota builds jacks into the decks of some models. I don’t want to buy a mower without this feature if I can avoid it, because blades have to be removed and replaced once in a while.

My Bronze Age Deere tractor is repaired, maybe. I started it up, and it did not leak. I’m going to see if I can cut my waist-high grass, and I’ll keep looking for something better.

What if it keeps running? Should I forget about a new mower? I don’t think so. I don’t trust my mower, and thanks to leftists and their demented king, product prices keep skyrocketing. I think I already lost about $3,000 by not buying a couple of years back.

I really don’t like the idea of spending money on a gas zero-turn when a used diesel what will outlast it can be had for less money.

I have learned what a good used diesel should cost. With a few hundred hours, no more than $10,500. A mower with very low hours…maybe $12,000. In terms of what you get, there isn’t a big difference between new and 500 hours.

Hope the old mower will get me through a few more months. It will probably take me that long to find a replacement.

A Bargain that Robs You of Peace is too Expensive

I’m learning more about buying and selling online.

I was interested in a used mower. I contacted the person who claimed to own it. She was really rude and gave me problems over things like photographing her ID. She wouldn’t give me useful answers to questions. She did not make a normal effort to make things work, as you or I would. There was no way to work with her, so I cut her loose. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I wondered if she was a criminal or maybe a drunk.

I discussed this with some people online, and most thought she sounded like a scammer, but some thought I was the problem. They thought it was crazy to ask someone for an ID, and one even said I looked like a scammer because I had no trailer and would have to send a truck.

These people have no common sense. They’re like people who have successfully gone through dozens of sex partners without catching a disease or getting pregnant. They recommend stupid practices because they haven’t been burned yet.

If you get on a motorcycle without a helmet right now and weave through traffic at 150 miles per hour, the odds you will be fine are over 99%, assuming you know how to ride. If you do this and come out okay, should you then tell people what you did was smart? Should you come down on people who won’t do it? If so, you’re the reason doctors call motorcycles “donorcycles.” You are not smart.

We are always surrounded by people who seem fine even though they do stupid things. People who have nice homes, cars, phones, and toys and owe hundreds of thousands or millions to credit card companies and banks. People who have had hundreds of sex partners. People who bought British cars. You have to see through the surface when you make decisions.

You don’t know who has herpes, HPV, or HIV. You don’t know whose car is leased. You don’t know who is going to end up paying $20,000 for an $8,000 couch because of interest.

I’m talking about a principle Christians should understand. We are surrounded by people who ignore God’s warnings, and most of them don’t spontaneously combust or get sucked into the bowels of the earth as soon as they sin. They seem fine a lot of the time. Many never seem to face consequences. It’s an illusion. A trap. God is not mocked, and mercy isn’t approval.

Beyonce Knowles, who promotes slutty behavior, seems fine. Taylor Swift, who promotes perversion, seems fine. Sean Combs, a proud criminal, seemed fine until recently. Kanye West, who says he is “the god of me,” appears to be in good health, and he’s still rich. Elon Musk keeps a demonic charm on his nightstand, and he’s doing well. Their current status doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble or that they’re in any position to serve as role models.

I can tell you some things I have decided. These things apply to substantial purchases, not little things like lamps and drills.

1. Always insist on an ID from a seller unless there are circumstances proving he is legitimate.

2. Never, ever do business in cash.

3. Always try to meet at a police station the first time around.

4. Accept the fact that you may have to let someone see where you live and enter the driveway. You can’t hide in a hole if you want to sell things. If you’re dealing with something large, accept the fact that someone will probably have to know someone else’s address and enter their property. That being said, don’t let anyone in your house if you can avoid it. It’s usually not necessary to let them inside. Keep your garage door closed. Don’t show them your tools or anything else they don’t need to see. You should probably avoid going into other people’s houses.

5. Be aware that if you receive stolen merchandise, you may be charged with a felony, not a misdemeanor, even if you didn’t know the merchandise was stolen. You need a signed bill of sale stating that the seller owns the property outright. You can be convicted because you didn’t do your due diligence, and a bill of sale with an affirmation of ownership will be something the court looks for. Put any guarantees or conditions on the bill of sale. Every party has to have a copy.

6. Never deal with snotty people unnecessarily, online or elsewhere. It makes you a man-pleasing self-sellout with no self-respect, and nasty people often cause problems later. They rob you of peace, and peace is not a luxury. It’s a basic need.

7. If you buy something big, and you have to send for it, give the seller a $100 deposit to hold it, good for a specified period, after which it becomes his. On the bill of sale, specify that the deposit will be refunded in full if the item disappears, regardless of how it happens. Pay in full when the item goes on the truck.

People with no common sense told me I looked like an identity thief because I wanted to see an ID. That’s just plain dumb. If I pay you 4 or more figures for something, I am eventually going to know who you are, and I will be able to find out where you live in a couple of minutes. This is the Internet age. You might as well show your ID when you meet to make the exchange, because you’re not sharing information the other person won’t eventually have, and criminals hide their identities.

You can’t sell someone a table saw or tractor anonymously. Life doesn’t work like that. They’ll see your face. Your car. Your license tag.

As for cash, look at it from a criminal’s point of view. A person is going to a known location, or departing from a known location, at a known time, with over 4 figures in cash. Let’s get rid of the police station argument right away. Who looks after you on the way to and from the station? Who looks after you when you leave the bank? A criminal who may be totally uninvolved with the purchase may force you off the road and take your money. It happens every single day. Google it.

Who will keep thieves out while you’re keeping the money in your house, waiting to deposit it?

I don’t care if you exchange the money in a bank lobby or in the White House with the Secret Service watching. Sooner or later, you will be on your own.

Even if you’re sure you won’t be robbed, don’t take cash. Counterfeit isn’t something that only exists in movies. It’s all around us. Remember George Floyd? Counterfeiters make phony bills in many denominations. Do you want to trust yourself to examine dozens of bills? You’d have to be an idiot.

That means I was an idiot, because I did it twice.

No cash. Period. There are cashier’s checks. There is Zelle. There are wires. There are credit cards. You want a data trail.

As for meeting at a police station the first time around, it will give you a chance to check each other out, exchange ID’s, and, if things are going well, exchange the item for the money electronically. You should to it if you can. But it won’t protect you from cash thieves.

If you can’t stand the idea of someone else knowing where you live or parking in your precious, secret driveway no one could ever, ever find unless you told them where it was, the burden of moving the goods somewhere else is on you, so work something out. But they will still be able to find out where you live if they want.

If you want guidance about dealing with sellers, look no further than Florida’s Pawnbroking Act. A pawnbroker has to copy a seller’s ID and make him affirm that they own whatever it is he’s selling. You should do no less.

In Florida, a pawnbroker who receives stolen merchandise and an ordinary citizen face different penalties. The penalty for you–felony prosecution–is worse. It’s not worth it just to get a good deal on a guitar. You should know the law where you live.

What if you can’t prove the seller owned what you bought? Does that sound unlikely? Women who have had breakups or divorces sell marital property every day. People who owe money on things sell them. People who are in bankruptcy sell things. Addicts sell things that belong to their relatives. Whether the thing you bought is stolen or just obtained improperly in a way that is less incriminating, you can lose it.

As for new rule 7, what do you think a seller will do if you give him $5,000 for a trailer, and when you or your agent arrives to pick it up, it’s gone? Would you expect him to give you your money? He’ll say you assumed the risk. Meanwhile, your trailer is sitting behind his brother’s house.

No delivery, no money.

People who won’t do business responsibly will make you suffer if you deal with enough of them.

This is where I am now. If anyone has corrections or additions, please put them in the comments.

More Proof Will Rogers was a Liar

I got my John Deere mower working, so I SHOULD be able to keep the lawn down until I get something better.

The repair was surprisingly easy compared to other problems this tractor has given me. I would say this should be a 45-minute repair for a professional who has done it before. I took maybe two hours. Couldn’t find my smallest inch-pound torque wrench, so that slowed me down.

In the meantime, I have experienced a big disappointment. A lady who is advertising a Kubota diesel for a very nice price appears to be a no-go. I can pay for the mower up front, right now, but she is just too weird to deal with.

When I asked if she still had the mower, she replied, “Yes,” without punctuation. No new details. No greeting.

I asked if she was okay with electronic transfers and said I couldn’t show up at a stranger’s house with cash. Check this out:

“I would never bring a stranger to my house. [My own neighborhood, misspelled] isn’t far from here”

What? What does that mean? Do you take electronic transfers or not? Why are you telling me you’re not far away? Are you planning to deliver?

I sent another message saying I would draw up a bill of sale, and I said I would need her ID. I said I would produce mine. So she would know I wasn’t a scammer, I provided evidence I was a lawyer. I also said I would need her to hold the mower until I sent a truck for it.

Here is what she said:

Great! I have no problem providing ID or signing a bill of sale. Please make sure it says the sale is “as-is.” I can take Zelle, a cashier’s check, or whatever works. We have a trailer, so we can do the sale at the police station, and we’ll drop it off at your place. Let me know if you what day is good for you.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Of course that’s not what she said. That’s what about 95% of the people in this area would have said. They’re really nice. Here is what she actually said:

You sound like a lot of work. You either pay [price] on Zelle or cash when I meet you somewhere or no deal. It’s that easy

Man, I really want that mower now. She’s a dream seller. I just know I can trust her.

It’s too bad, because the price was good.

All kinds of guesses are rolling around in my head.

Guess #1: this person is an alcoholic who is too drunk to respond coherently and too filled with bitterness and self-pity to be polite. She rolls over in bed occasionally and fires off a rude, terse response before passing out again.

Seems like self-pitying bitterness is a big thing among drunks.

Guess #2: this person is a couple of guys from Nigeria, and they want to kill me and take my money when I show up at the location of their choice.

Guess #3: her ex-husband bought the mower, and it’s obvious why he is gone. This is what his life was like every day. She says she is selling it because she moved to a smaller property, so that would be consistent with a divorce.

Guess #4: the person who owns the mower is on vacation, and her Facebook account is being used by a person who lives in her house. Maybe a junkie daughter who wants to sell it for drugs.

You can’t buy an expensive mower without the seller’s ID and a bill of sale guaranteeing the seller owns the item free and clear. You would have to be stupid. You could find yourself happily cutting your grass when a couple of big guys, at least one of whom is sleeping with the lady who sold you the mower, jump your fence and threaten to beat you up for stealing it.

I could save several thousand dollars by buying this mower, if it exists, but a long time ago, I decided not to let any more abusive people into my life. I’m not going to grovel before a person who seems like a nutcase in order to save money I don’t need. This is one of the greatest perks of not being poor.

I got a final message. She says I don’t need an ID. I assume she means her ID. Yeah, I do need it. This brings me back to guesses 2 and 4.

Her account doesn’t have any posts since 2022.

Said I had decided to buy something else. Meaning some as-yet-unidentified mower that does not involve this lady.

It’s so rare to encounter a jerk here. It’s like spotting a bird you thought was extinct.

I feel better already. It’s like this lady took me back to Miami for part of a day. It’s like my sister broke in my house and had to be removed by the police.

The account shows a lady who competed in an obscure beauty pageant. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that world is flypaper for people with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. If you’re fortyish, which means you have no chance of winning a serious pageant, and you have to be Mrs. Acme Fertilizer Queen 2020 for Northern Idaho, and tell the world, in order to smother your self-hating inner voices, something is very wrong. You probably competed against 5 other people, none of whom is a day at the beach, or they wouldn’t have been there.

An obscure beauty pageant is a big nothing to everyone except the contestants and the people who make money from it. The whole point of a beauty pageant is to choose someone who competed against the cream, not the sour milk. Anyone who is quality will shoot for Miss America. Or would have, before they let misfits and tormented, sick men compete.

Miss America is the only real American pageant that ever existed. The rest are like Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us.”

It’s nice to be old and know how to spot trouble. There are so many people I should have avoided when I was young. I wish I could go back, get between them and my young self, and deploy bear spray.

My Continuing Search for a Solution to a Problem God Already Solved

The mower saga drags on.

My old John Deere 430 tractor/mower is an end-of-life product, and it breaks down over and over. I need to put an end to my mowing problems.

I am torn because I love resisting impulsive purchases. I was a real spendthrift when I was a child, and I can’t help thinking of myself as one now. I like the idea of fixing things over and over and beating the repair-phobic system. It makes me feel righteous. On the other hand, I want to have faith in God’s provision. I don’t want to be cheap when I have more than enough money to spend fairly liberally.

I definitely want to give, because God has made it obvious that prosperity is connected to the generosity we show other human beings. By using the term “human beings,” I exclude greedy preachers. I think they’re another species.

Things that are rolling around in my head:

1. I can fix the JD forever if I want. I’m a machinist, so even though JD has discontinued some essential parts, I could make them when I need them. There is a guy who built his own 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe automobile from scratch. Fixing the JD repeatedly would cost very little.

2. Fixing the JD repeatedly would be a lot of hard work, and it would still mow slower than a new zero-turn mower and be a pain to maintain.

3. God does not want us to work hard. I don’t care what other Christians say. Hard work is very clearly a curse. When you have to work too hard, it means something is wrong with your walk with God. If you don’t think hard work is a curse, you should really read the Bible some day. God literally says it’s a curse. It was part of the first curse he pronounced on man.

I say “man” in order to stand up to the pronoun nuts. I will never say “humankind” except derisively.

4. If God gives you abundance, and you refuse to use it, why should he continue to send it? I can buy the nicest diesel mower on Earth without affecting our lifestyle. I don’t think I should, because it would be excessive, and it would not fit through our gates. But I could. It would be like buying a modest new car, and I can certainly afford that. The other day I was tormenting myself with mower thoughts, and I realized God had already solved the problem. I was just prolonging things by overanalyzing it, as though it really mattered whether I bought new or fixed old.

5. Ostentation is a sin. I never thought it was good, but recently God showed me it’s actually a sin. This is bad news for women, because their main goal when they get dressed is to show off clothes, shoes, and jewels in order to put other women in their places. Men are not quite as bad about ostentation. Anyway, I shouldn’t spend twice as much on a mower as I should, if people who come here will be bummed out about their own mowers if they see it.

Trying to impress people with a mower would be somewhat pathetic.

6. I don’t care too much about “waste.” I don’t think God cares. What we call waste is built into the nature of the physical universe. It’s written in the laws of thermodynamics. Unavoidable. God built it into our bodies. A man produces about 300,000,000 sperm cells every day, for example. I wonder who counted them. Even Elon Musk doesn’t have 300,000,000 kids. If an oak tree produces a hundred million acorns over its life, in all likelihood, none of them will become trees. The disciples caught a huge number of valuable fish when Yeshua showed them where to cast their nets, and then they walked off and left them to rot. God approved. Fish that could have fed the poor.

God approved when a grateful woman put maybe $30,000 worth of perfume on his feet. Judas the thief, on the other hand, practically had kittens.

God loves human beings, but he keeps creating people he knows will go to hell. Most people go to hell. It seems clear he considers it worth it in order to produce a smaller number of children he can enjoy forever.

I think destroying things for no reason is bad, and the word supports that, but I don’t think God is concerned about me throwing out uneaten food or mistakenly buying more mower than I need.

Worrying too much about economy can cause you to waste something really important and irreplaceable: your time.

7. If God doesn’t want me to work hard, why shouldn’t I hire someone to mow? That’s a good question I ask myself. I could do it, but I would feel helpless, which is something I buy tools in order to avoid. Also, it seems better to spend on something you can touch and maybe sell later than on someone else’s labor. When you pay a worker, the money goes away forever. All of it.

8. I think I blew it by not buying a new mower several years ago. Prices have gone up by thousands of dollars, for the same equipment. It’s natural to think delaying a purchase will save you money, but there are $19,000 mowers out there that seemed expensive to me when they were selling for $15,000. If I had bought one, I could have been enjoying it since maybe 2019. Do I want to have to say the same thing to myself when mowers go up another 30 or so percent?

9. I want to avoid buying too little machine, but what if I’m overcompensating because I’m not familiar with zero-turn lineups? What if I spend x and then find out 0.5x would have worked out just as well?

Sooner or later, I’ll have to reconcile all these things.

I thought I should go ahead and get a gas mower. I hate gas equipment, because it’s just plain inferior, and I have this stubborn notion that used gas engines are much less trustworthy. That’s probably true. Diesels are built for professionals, so they are built to run longer without problems. My Kubota tractor has 1,200 hours on it, and it shouldn’t need much of anything until 4,000. A low-end gas mower may start pooping out at 500, and a good one is doing well if it doesn’t need serious repairs before 1500.

I thought I should get a gas mower anyway, because they cost WAY less, and I’ll probably be all done with mowing, forever, before 1500 hours. But I hate gas. I hate it. Less torque. An ignition system full of parts that can go sour. Problems with leftist corn fuel.

A used diesel is probably better than a new gas mower, and they can be had for less. A good zero-turn can last 6,000 hours, apart from the engine, so as far as the body is concerned, it doesn’t matter much whether you buy new or used. If you buy a used diesel with several hundred hours, you still have a body which will last 20 years, and your engine is likely to last just as long in residential use, whereas a gas engine may have to be replaced, to the tune of maybe $3,500.

I was afraid of buying a used diesel because the JD was a used diesel when I got it, and it has been a spoiled, useless, sickly princess. But it was 27 years old when I got it, and in my opinion, the design was unusually stupid. JD made it hard to maintain and work on. Zero-turns are very simple, and in recent years, at least, they have been designed to be easy to deal with.

The JD has two PTO’s and front and rear hydraulics. You don’t need that junk to build a mower. The JD’s extra parts are jammed into the frame like JD was being charged by the cubic inch. A mower has more room for everything.

I’ll just reveal a figure. I looked at a $12,500 gas mower. That may not seem expensive to you, but it’s hard for me to believe a figure that high is possible. I can get a Kubota diesel with under 600 hours for a lot less. That’s a mower that runs $19,000 new. The gas mower would probably give me 1,500 more hours without real trouble. The Kubota would probably give me maybe 3,500, and then I could sell it and get more back than a gas mower with a dying engine would bring. I can save a lot by tempering my justified fear of used machinery with reason.

The local Kubota dealer is not great for repairs, but they do get the work done, and I probably would not need any work for 10 years.

I found a Kubota near me for a very good price, but the deck is 72″ wide. I wanted a 60″ deck like the one I have. I have to go out in the yard with a tape measure.

I have to have some blades spinning this week. That much is certain.

You Only Pay for Concrete Once

I got off my behind and looked at mowers today.

My prehistoric John Deere 430 diesel garden tractor is about as reliable as MSNBC. John Deere itself has moved the 430 to end-of-life status. They haven’t announced it, but when you stop selling hydraulic cylinders for a tractor you designed to have cylinders that can’t be rebuilt, the truth is obvious. They are still selling other parts, perhaps to get rid of existing inventory or because they also fit models that are not quite at the edge of the abyss.

I ordered parts to fix the mower’s suddenly-leaking injector pump, but I think I’ll still get a new machine. I can’t keep spending months at a time with no mower and tall grass and weeds.

Somewhat remarkably, I learned that one of my concerns with the mower is, perhaps, not all that valid. I was upset because I had to remove the deck to change the blades. It’s a dangerous job for one person, and I hate it. Well, today someone pointed out that I could jack the front of the mower up and remove the blade screws from underneath.

This seems really obvious, so I’m not sure why I never tried it. I must have considered it. Maybe I had concerns about being killed by a 1500-pound riding mower slipping off jackstands in a driveway. I don’t mind dying a Southerner’s death, but that’s just too stereotypical. It’s like being in a NASCAR infield and getting hit by a flying tire.

Also, you have to get the deck maybe a foot off the ground in order to get an impact driver on the screws, and you have to find a way to hold the blades on while starting the screws with your fingers.

It doesn’t sound great. It’s not necessarily intolerable, either.

If I get a new zero-turn, I will still have to lift the mower’s front end, but the screws go in from the top, so I can knock the nuts loose and probably drop the blades even before I lift. I will need to lift it to put the blades back on, but the process will be way easier, because instead of trying to insert long screws into spindles, I’ll be putting little nuts on screws.

“Little” being a relative term.

I should only have to lift a zero-turn a couple of inches.

A while back, I made the perhaps self-indulgent purchase of a commercial-grade chainsaw, and the main reason I chose the one I did was that the dealer was more competent than his competition. Seems like the same thing is happening now.

What I have gathered from other people, and which may be completely wrong, is that the two best brands of commercial zero-turns are Kubota and Scag. I am familiar with the local Kubota and Scag dealers. I have dealt with them before.

My tractor had a problem, and I took it to the Kubota people. They are very, very nice, very, very helpful people. I’ll say that up front. They agreed to fix a problem I caused, bending the rules somewhat in order to save me a lot of money. On the other hand, they were very slow. They said I could expect the tractor in a certain amount of time, and they were way off. And they could have done it faster. It wasn’t a tough job.

They also turned it over to me with a lot of rocks and wet sand in it, and it had some bad scratches I had never seen before. They charged me hundreds more than they quoted, and they charged me extra for “shop supplies.”

To me, “shop supplies” charges are like the tipping option at a burger joint. If you want more money, just put it on the menu. Don’t wait till I order, let me relax, and then try, with no hope of success, to shame me by spinning the tablet around while you watch me choose an option. If anyone is going to be shamed, it will be you.

If you want $1500 for your work, don’t tell me $1300 and then put $200 on the bill for shop rags and WD40. It’s shady, and it makes me want to go somewhere else next time. American mechanics have a very, very old tradition of not charging extra for little things which should be part of their cost of doing business. Imagine if I were practicing law, and I charged clients to sit in my chairs. What if I charged them for coffee?

I never charged anyone for things like paper, pens, copies, stamps, or envelopes. I never charged anyone for driving time or gas. When my dad traveled for work, he got reimbursed for some travel expenses, including food, but he ate gas station bills.

The Kubota place is more or less okay, and now that I know how they operate, there will be no more surprises if I go there again, because I will have them tell me about everything they could possibly charge for. As a potential mower buyer, I am still concerned about how long they take.

The other place fixed my chainsaw. It was a small job which literally took them 20 minutes or less, unless they started learning to fix saws the same morning. They took 4 weeks to get the saw to me. They also sharpened the chain, which I asked them not to do, making it unsuitable for manual sharpening. I bought a new chain.

This means the other place is also sort of okay, but it’s somewhat more okay than the Kubota place. They delayed me, but not as badly, and the things they did wrong were not as important. And they charged me what I expected, as I recall.

My understanding is that professionals get the fastest service because they need their tools to make money. That’s great, but homeowners who can’t get their tools also lose money, and their yards and farms fall apart. You can’t let a tree fall on someone’s house or car just because he’s not a professional tree surgeon. I routinely do thousand-dollar jobs with my own stuff. What if I had to pay crews whose tools were turned around faster so they could use them?

I went to the Scag place and checked out a Tiger Cat II mower. Most of their mowers were indoors, but the Tiger Cat was in a nearby building, in the heat. They moved it to the shade outside the showroom so I could see it. It looked pretty good. It seemed to me the company had worked very hard to add thoughtful touches. They tried to make it easy to operate, maintain, and repair. It seemed very sturdy. It had a Briggs & Stratton Vanguard engine, and they are highly regarded. The guy who showed me Scag mowers knew everything about them. They quoted me a firm price which was significantly lower than prices I had seen on the web.

I went to the Kubota dealer. I had to look at their mowers in the burning sun. The lady who helped me spoke what I would call B-in-ESOL English. She was fairly fluent, but not completely. She was very nice, but she didn’t seem to have any idea what I needed or what it was like to run the machines. She tried to show me a 25-horse diesel tractor, for mowing my lawn.

They didn’t have the diesel garden tractor that interested me. She showed me pictures in a catalog and on a website. She had to ask the guys who worked there how it worked.

She showed me a Z781 mower. Very nice. Comparable to the Scag. She did not show me all the thoughtful features. I don’t think she knew what they were. She didn’t know anything about the Kawasaki engine.

The dealership sells big machines. Hundred-horsepower tractors. Real excavators unsuitable for trailering behind little pickups. Could it be that she didn’t know what she was doing because I was looking for a small machine? I don’t think so. If you can understand an excavator, you can understand a zero-turn mower and a garden tractor. A lot of the vocabulary is the same. She spoke like a salesman’s wife, not a salesman.

She wrote me up a quote for the zero-turn and said she would email me a quote for the small garden tractor. I left the dealership feeling very unfamiliar with both products.

I had to go home and Google, which is what she was supposed to help me avoid. I’ve been Googling for days. I was ready for a different experience.

When she quoted me for the zero-turn, she added a $1200 warranty extension without asking me if I wanted it. So how much of that goes to her? Maybe $400? Salesmen should not be so obvious.

It makes me wonder if the “shop supplies” thing was an honest mistake.

She never sent me the tractor quote.

I wonder if they deal with a lot of rich idiots. Travolta lives here. Maybe he goes in once in a while and buys a $300,000 excavator without looking at the invoice. There are wealthy people here who pretend to be horse farmers, and they buy Kubotas.

I don’t think I looked rich. I haven’t worn an expensive watch or any watch in maybe 25 years. I never wear jewelry of any kind because it’s dangerous and effeminate. I wear Carhartt pants, hiking shoes, and a T-shirt everywhere I go. I showed up in my old Ford.

I went home and researched more. I figured out that the Kubota was about $1000 more expensive than the Scag, oranges-to-oranges. The Scag has a better motor. The Kubota has a better warranty. Kubota is an old, solid company. Scag is newer but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

So that’s it. I’m buying a Scag or not buying anything. There is no point in fooling with the Kubota people, because I have to have a dealer who knows what he’s doing and provides information instead of just charging a markup for delivering a machine. A dealer that doesn’t tell you anything is a lot like a vending machine. You pick your product as well as you can, put your money in, and walk away hoping for the best. I might as well buy a mower from Amazon.

If the mowers sold for the same price, or the Kubota were $500 lower, I would still go for the Scag. I’m afraid to buy from people who don’t seem to know their jobs.

I would like to see both businesses do well. It is frustrating to watch people crash and burn unnecessarily when you want to work with them. The Kubota people could do so much better. I’m sure they could sell a lot more machinery.

I wonder if the machines on the lot are paid for.

I love the name of the mower. “Tiger Cat II.” If I ever start a toilet company, I’m going to name our flagship bowl the Tiger Cat II. It sounds so dramatic. TIGER CAT II! LET YOUR INNER BEAST OUT!

It’s a lawnmower. Come on.

It even has tiger stripes on it.

I guess it can’t hurt to make a menial job seem like an adventure. It probably helps.

I can still pave the yard and paint it Hialeah Pink. That option is still on the table.

Deliver me from John Deere

I am relaxing in a recliner today, and not by choice. TMI warning for those not interested in the medical issues of strangers. I had a hideous skin thing dug out of my back earlier today, so I am not allowed to bend over or do anything strenuous because of the stitches. I guess I won’t describe the skin thing, but I will say it was not cancer. And if you ever have the same problem and your skin thing opens up, afterward, you may never again be able to eat or be in the same room with Gruyere cheese.

I didn’t get a skin thing because I’m filthy. I scrub my back with soap every day.

As a Floridian, I am not very scared of skin cancer. People up north think it’s real cancer, but except for melanoma and maybe whatever it was that got Jimmy Buffett, it’s not. The vast majority of skin cancers are squamous and basal cell, and unless you let them go practically forever, they amount to nothing. You can actually cure little ones yourself with a can of computer keyboard spray. Freeze them, and they die and peel off.

If you get squamous and basal cell and you let it go until it burrows into your body, well, then you have real cancer.

Dave Portnoy is running around calling himself a cancer survivor because he had a superficial lesion cut out of his neck. Not impressed. That’s like saying you survived the Las Vegas massacre when you were blocks away at a crap table. He announced his survivor status in a pretty lighthearted way, so he is clearly no more impressed with his lesion than I am.

I’ve frozen quite a few things off in my bathroom. For all I know, I’m a cancer survivor.

I am not allowed to do anything, so suddenly I want to do all the things I’ve put off. I want to install a new pool filter. I want to burn a few tons of yard waste. No can do. I’ll be allowed to start doing things three days from now, but then I won’t want to do them.

I want to go look at a new lawnmower. I am considering dropping what I think is an enormous sum on a commercial zero-turn, because my geriatric John Deere tractor is ready for assisted living. I’ve already written about it.

I keep turning it around in my head. Do I want the mower because I’m a covetous, pampered spendthrift who hates working on machines he should be grateful to have, which is a proposition that could be defended with a colorable argument, or is it because it is legitimately stupid and cheap to keep relying on a machine that makes me miserable?

I could get a new but not-too-expensive machine, but their engines last a third as long, and they are not as sturdy as the better models. They’re only less expensive if you die before they wear out. If they die first, they’re actually more expensive than better machines.

Having no 3D flesh and blood people to teach me anything, I have joined a lot of forums in order to learn things. Recently, I’ve been engaging on a forum related to outdoor work. People were taking about heat stroke and safety, and I offered my always-coveted and respected two cents’ worth, which I will paraphrase here, because I’m sure you want to read it.

When I’m working outside, and I start to feel like the heat is getting to me, I put my tools indoors, go inside, take a shower, and hit the recliner. If the yard is full of tree branches, I don’t care. I don’t have an HOA. I answer only to God and Ron DeSantis.

I also try not to lift anything heavy. Sometimes I’m too immature to follow my own advice, but I do try to find help or use machinery to pick up things I could pick up if I exerted myself. When it comes to trees, I cut branches and logs up to make them lighter. I never carry brush or limbs more than maybe 25 feet. I move the tractor or cart to the mess.

Young men always want to impress other people with their strength, which is usually nothing impressive and not something other people care about. I have lifted things in order to impress people, and I’m sure I failed. When I got older, I got somewhat less stupid, so I developed my current policy.

The amazing thing is that when you look out for your body, other men make fun of you.

My sister dated a deaf bodybuilder much younger than herself. One day, they were present when I needed to move a boat propeller which weighed maybe 75 pounds. I had moved it many times before, but I was getting wiser, so I suggested dividing the load between myself and my sister’s escort. He sort of smirked and picked it up by himself. Like I was some sort of disgrace even to men unlike himself who were not products of illegal drugs combined with suboptimal priorities.

I didn’t care. God bless him. I didn’t have to exert myself, and I didn’t risk injury. He thought he was putting me in my place by doing my work for me, and of course, while I didn’t think much of his attitude, I was very happy to stand by and do nothing.

I used to be an armorbearer at Miami’s corrupt Trinity Church up on 2nd Avenue. One day, we had to come in for some pretty amateurish “training.” As one of our tasks, we were supposed to pick up another armorbearer and carry him across the stage, running.

I flat-out refused. My knees were good, but not perfect. I didn’t see any reason to risk screwing them up. I didn’t care about the inappropriate, manipulative, and mindless appeals to teamwork, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. I hate manipulation more than, probably, anyone else on Earth. I don’t even like being manipulated to do things I already want to do.

If you paralyze yourself at Trinity Church, jumping in front of a bullet for Pastor Rich Wilkerson, all you will get from the church is a warm thank-you followed by stonewalling from its attorneys. They weren’t going to pay for knee surgery or back surgery, which often doesn’t work anyway.

My best friend at the church had a back problem that day. He was not supposed to lift things. I told him this in front of the other guys: “These guys won’t be around to help you if you hurt yourself.” That was a major no-no, but I said it anyway. He had kids to support, and he had to be able to move and carry things.

They kept hooting at him to do the exercise, so he picked a guy up and ran. Thanks to God alone, he was okay, but I thought he was nuts, and he probably agrees today.

You can do things faster and sometimes better and easier if you forget about safety. No doubt about it. I don’t care. You only get one body, and once you have a permanent disability, you won’t get relief until you die.

I’m writing about safety because I’m thinking about my mower. The deck under the mower weighs around 340 pounds, and it’s very difficult to remove and replace. You have to remove it in order to sharpen the blades, which should be done at least once a year. You also have to remove it to change the oil, although it is possible to suck oil out with a pump if you’re satisfied with an imperfect job, and you can install a long tube that moves the oil plug out from above the deck.

I have removed the deck several times, and I have lifted it up onto its side and removed and replaced the blades. If I keep the mower, I’ll have to keep doing this until one of us is too far gone.

This is a real problem, and the older I get, the scarier the possible consequences are. A back injury from lifting can put you on a walker and leave you peeing in a bag for the rest of your life. Or you can have both types of incontinence and end up wearing diapers.

Remember the Butterbean? He is a fierce stump of a man who overpowered opponents in mixed martial arts and the WWE. A very scary guy. Today, I could beat the daylights out of him, and so could you. He’s in a wheelchair, not because he had a disease or accident he could not avoid, but because he did not take basic measures to look after himself, like finding a better way to make a living. His problem? Back and hip injuries. Needlessly self-inflicted.

He did impress a lot of strangers who don’t care about him, though.

My best friend is a very big guy, and he has always been proud of it. He lifted things he shouldn’t have. He hurt his back throwing a jockey. He had to have two disks fused, and it didn’t work.

In no time, you can go from being a superior and intimidating physical specimen to being someone who can be bullied by average guys and who is down at the bottom of the list as a potential mate.

I feel impressed with myself when I manage to get the mower apart and lift the deck onto its side. I won’t lie. But just about any guy could do it, and it’s a stupid thing to do without a machine.

Pulling the deck out from under the tractor has to be done by hand. There is no machine that can do it. Shoving the reluctant deck driveshaft onto the PTO shaft is a recipe for back spasms and disk injuries.

The more I think about it, the more I think the best choices are to hire a lawn service or buy a new mower. But if I get a lawn service, I have no idea how high their rates will go as inflation continues. Buying a mower is a simple matter of swiping a card and paying once at the end of my cycle. The freedom and relief would be immense.

I am thinking about the mower I need. It has to be very tough, because this property is the Bermuda Triangle of mowing. New rocks seem to create themselves and pop out of the ground, and there are always sticks falling from the trees. It has to be reliable, because repairs are high on the list of reasons for ditching the old mower. It has to be very easy to work on, because when I work on the old mower, I have black thoughts about the engineers who designed it. It has to have good parts support from the manufacturer. Finally, the local dealer who services it can’t be a complete idiot. That’s a tough one.

It doesn’t have to be extremely fast. My time is roughly as valuable as that of a goldfish. I would love a diesel, but I will not live on Earth long enough to take advantage of the longevity, and if I treat a 4-stroke gas engine well, it should be willing to start when I need it.

A new diesel garden tractor is a possibility, and they cost about as much as good zero-turns. They are more versatile. On the other hand, a zero-turn will be more maneuverable, and while I don’t need light speed, I would like to move faster than I do now. I mow at a snail’s pace. I think zero-turns move faster.

The new fuel lines for the John Deere have arrived, and the other little parts should be here shortly. Maybe I’ll be able to get it put together on Sunday. After that, will my motivation to buy new stand fast, or will I, once more, cave in to a possibly misguided desire to be financially responsible?

Or I could go the Miami Cuban route, pave my yard, and coat it with pink house paint.

Ask me next week.

Patience With John Deere Wearing Thin

I’m trying to figure out what to do about my lawnmower.

I am really tired of fighting with my John Deere 430. It’s supposedly a very tough machine. It cost about $9000 new, 34 years ago. That makes it, roughly, a $20,000 item today. Okay, let’s assume it’s extremely well-made. It still needs repairs all the time. Was it like this in 1995, or is it just age? No idea. Doesn’t matter, because I can’t snap my fingers and make it new.

I could send it to the local dealer and spend maybe $1500 on it to get it fixed. Towing both ways. New fuel lines. Fluids. Fix a small hydraulic leak.

That would probably take a month, during which my grass would grow to thigh height, leave me with an old tractor that could get me through 5 more years. The parts supply is drying up, so I can’t keep fixing it forever at the dealership.

I got frustrated and started thinking about buying a new commercial-grade zero-radius-turn mower, or “zero-turn.” But a good one with a reasonably wide deck would cost over ten grand. Is it worth it, or am I letting fatigue and extreme annoyance cloud my judgment?

The web says a gas mower goes 500-700 hours before dying. I assume this means an amateur-grade mower, because I can’t imagine a lawn service replacing mowers, what, every 125 workdays at 4 hours per day? That’s maybe $17,000-$26,000 per year.

If people are saying they run 500-700 hours, that means they run 500 hours. For me, that ought to be about 8.5 years, assuming the yard doesn’t expand too much. It does expand as trees fall over or have to be cut.

Various people discussing commercial gas mowers on the web cite figures of 1500-2000 hours before problems pop up, and the 1500-hour problem I see mentioned is burning oil, which is not fatal right away. If these figures are based in reality, a commercial mower’s engine should be good for 2000 hours. I see people guessing at much higher figures for the other parts. It ought to be possible to get 3500 hours with one repower job. I may be raptured or reduced to bone by 1000.

So if this information is correct, a commercial mower will go about three times as long as a Lowe’s mower, for roughly twice the price, with, presumably, less aggravation. Surely there have to be perks other than longevity.

I don’t like the idea of buying a cheaper mower and putting up with a flimsy chassis. This yard is crazy, and I also mow weeds in my pasture. Even now, I occasionally hit a rock or a piece of wood.

What about buying a used commercial mower? I think that’s what I already did. The John Deere 430 is not a homeowner machine. When my tractor was new, a homeowner model cost a lot less. Zero-turns were just getting popular when my mower was made, so I suppose tractors with belly mowers, like the 430, were still mainstream at that time.

This means I bought a used commercial mower, and it has been an instrument of torture. If Kafka had worked on one, he would have written several more short stories. I lose several months a year because it comes up with new ways to break down. I could send it to the dealership and spend a grand a year, but based on my experiences with dealerships, they would keep it for at least a month at a time, so it wouldn’t help much.

I think buying used is stupid. The choices are: fix the 430 again myself and hope for the best, pay the dealer to fix it and hope for the best, and blow a huge wad on a new commercial mower. And be substantially less delusional when hoping for the best.

I don’t want to give up the tractor features, but what do I do with them? Let’s see. I pull a cheap harrow. I think I used it two years ago.

I have a real tractor. It runs a bush hog. It will hold over half a ton on its fork. It has a big bucket. It will rip stumps up and dig trenches with a subsoiler. The Deere will not do any of that. It’s a little tractor for pixies. The Kubota has 37 horsepower, and the Deere has 20. You would think the Deere would still be a pretty respectable machine, but it’s in a different universe.

I think they’re good for plowing snow in small driveways. I recall seeing them rigged up for snow on the web.

It would be good to have the 430 if the Kubota refused to start and had to be moved. That’s about it. I could do that with the car, though.

The Deere’s muffler fell off. The alternator died. The alternator belt broke, and replacing it was a horror job. Removing the belly mower to fix the blades is a ticket to back surgery. The PTO switch died. The rear hydraulic cylinder had to be replaced. The grill fell off, and I ran over it because I couldn’t see it.

I could probably get $2000 for it, because people with no common sense love the John Deere 430.

If I get a new commercial mower, I’ll be paying, realistically, about $950 per year to use it during the 5-year warranty, all-inclusive. Afterward, ignoring inflation because I can’t predict it, that figure could be maybe $1100 per year. Call it $90 per month over 15 years. I’m assuming I’ll still be able to mow when I’m that old. What does a landscaper charge here? More than $90, but how much more?

That may not be much more than keeping the John Deere going, now that I think about it. Or maybe I could get several years out of it with no big repairs. It’s a crapshoot.

I could go for a cheaper commercial zero-turn and reduce my monthly figure to maybe $60 per month.

I am sick of this tractor. I would love to sit down, turn a key, back out of the shop, mow the yard, pull back in, and go have a beer. Every time. These days, I sit down, turn a key, back out, mow for an hour, have a problem, limp to the shop, sit down at the PC, and order parts while my yard grows.

The Kubota has only had two problems I didn’t cause. The shutoff solenoid needed a zip tie to line things up so it worked, and a safety switch on the forward/reverse pedal needs to be fixed, which is a small job once you find out what the problem is. The Kubota is great. It’s everything the John Deere is not.

The dealer here is very slow to fix Kubotas, but I’m not sure there is such a thing as a dealer who will fix a homeowner machine in under three weeks. And when your machine rarely needs help, slow dealership shops cause limited pain.

I’ll pray about it and decide what to do. One thing is certain: I am about to have a mower I can rely on, whether it’s a repaired John Deere or something else.

My Blood Runs Anything but Green

Every time I think I’m done fixing my outdoor power tools, they pull me back in.

Now it’s my John Deere garden tractor, again.

When I bought this thing used, I read up on it, and I found that odd people who made landscaping a kind of sick hobby thought it was wonderful. They said this tractor was coveted and would last forever. I saw nasty old ones selling for over $3000.

Since then, the rear hydraulic cylinder has failed, a big spring on the belly mower has snapped, and the PTO clutch has refused to work. All this, under very light use. If this is what a great, dependable old mower is like, what are the bad ones like?

The cylinder is what turned me off John Deere forever. Even buying a John Deere hat would make me nervous.

The rear seal failed, and oil gushed out. This is the same oil that runs the transmission and steering.

A normal hydraulic cylinder has a removable cap on one or both ends. When your seals fail, you unscrew a cap, pull the rod out, pull the old seals off, put new ones on, seal everything up, and go back to work. Back when my cylinder’s seal failed, a similar cylinder from a different company might have cost $100. My cylinder was around $180, I believe, and now they are discontinued.

The John Deere cylinder was welded shut on both ends. Welded. Seals are expected to fail. It’s not a sign something is defective. A seal is like a spark plug or shock absorber. They have to be replaced every so often. And John Deere gave me two cylinders that were welded shut. This is like selling you a car with the lug nuts welded on.

I managed to install a new cylinder. I could have used the lathe to cut the old one open, and I could have done a lot of welding and threading to turn it into a new cylinder, but it was May, it was hot, and my yard was a mess.

Installing the new cylinder was a nightmare because John Deere made the tractor as hard as possible to work on.

When the next cylinder fails, I will have to find a way to rebuild an old one or replace it with something different. Even if the replacement is Chinese, it will be better than the original.

Right now, my fuel lines are leaking. If I had written this two days ago, I would be able to say my fuel LINE was leaking, but I screwed up another line when I tried to fix it.

The injector pump has three rigid plastic lines going into the top. They have 17 mm hex fittings, and the fittings are so close together, there is no kind of wrench that can be applied to the center fitting without removing one of the others. Guess which fitting was leaking?

When I turned the front fitting, instead of getting easier to turn, it got harder. I found out this was because the fitting and line were stuck together. The fitting should have turned around the line, but it twisted it instead.

After a lot of fruitless work, I started the tractor and limped it into the workshop so it would be sheltered while I looked for answers.

Finding answers was hard. I started yesterday, it’s about noon, and I finished about half an hour ago.

John Deere’s shop manual is useless. John Deere’s site is useless. The site showed me fuel lines, and I bought two, but it did not mention the crush washers and O-rings that also have to be replaced. I got that information elsewhere.

These parts are not shown on Deere’s online diagrams. I finally found a fuel injection manual published by Yanmar, the maker of the engine, and that gave me Yanmar part numbers. For parts legitimately worth about $10, I just spent about $50. That doesn’t include the lines. The local Deere dealer doesn’t stock any of these things, so I ordered everything online.

Someone else out there will have this problem and need help, so I will cut and paste some information including part numbers.

Fuel lines:
Front – AM100753, replaced by AM876210
Middle – AM100754, replaced by AM876211
Rear – AM100755, replaced by AM876212

O-ring (Yanmar): 124550-51370
Packing (Yanmar plunger barrel 28): 174307-52170
Packing (Yanmar delivery valve seat 19): 124550-51350

***CORRECTION: someone who asked me not to reveal the correct numbers for the Yanmar parts says my numbers are wrong. I already used these numbers to order, so I am going to order the other parts and see how they compare. I guess I’ll have to eat some shipping costs.***

The delivery valve seat packing goes under the O-ring and a couple of other things. The other one (plunger barrel) goes farther down. See Yanmar manual.

I may not have parts for a week, and my yard has been growing ever since the tree crew massacred a bunch of dangerous oaks. They wiped out a lot of the yard, and then we had very hot, dry weather, so I had to let the grass rest. Yesterday would have been a great time to start mowing again. Now I’ll have to deal with deep grass and seed heads.

Should I complain about the failure of these 34-year-old parts? No, but John Deere could make some effort to help people get new ones. The site doesn’t list them or provide diagrams, and when you use the tool that tells the site to list parts appropriate for your product, it won’t let you.

My plan for this tractor is to keep it going until it blows up or until I can no longer stand fixing it. Then I’m getting a gas zero-turn, or, if Jeff Bezos gets high on mushrooms and sends me a hundred million dollars, a diesel zero-turn, which would last longer and be less trouble.

My real tractor is also acting up.

Modern tractors have a bunch of irritating parts designed by lawyers, not engineers. They have all sorts of switches that turn them off when you really need them. For example, I had to bypass a switch on the John Deere that shut the engine down whenever I got off.

The other day, I got my newly-revived and modified Echo chainsaw out to cut a big oak that fell unexpectedly, and it would not run. For the 3000th time. I finally guessed it might be the fuel filter, but none of the new ones I had were the right size. I rinsed the old one with brake cleaner, and now the saw runs.

This took up a lot of my time. When it was over, I got back to work, and my Kubota tractor, which I needed to move wood, refused to start.

After a lot of who shot John, I realized it would start if I jiggled the forward/reverse pedal. I got some wood moved.

I went on the web asking people if they had any idea where the safety switch on the pedal was. I could not find it. They said there was no safety switch. That was last week. Finally, today, someone told me where it was and how to fix it.

The tractor works, but I have to fiddle with the pedal, so I am going to have to creep under it in the summer heat and handle the problem, which will turn out to be harder to fix than I now expect.

I don’t know what other obscure problems the John Deere will have in the future. Another failed hydraulic cylinder is a certainty. Maybe I should buy a used one now and modify it. I hope the next bad cylinder will be the one on the steering, because that one is easy to get to.

I understand when products have unavoidable problems due to their nature and the natures of their jobs. Stupidity is another thing. Deliberately sabotaging customers, which John Deere did, is yet another. They could have used the same kind of cylinder everyone else uses. They went out of their way to make things hard and expensive. Would I buy more John Deere products? No. The whole business makes me hope they go bankrupt. A John Deere bankruptcy would benefit the consumer by allowing better companies to fill the void, just as the huge defeats the Big Three experienced gave us access to Toyota and Honda.

It would help. Or would it? The other companies may be just as bad. I tend to doubt it, based on the scuttlebutt about John Deere’s attitude toward hosts. I mean customers.

You poison Kim Jong Un, his sister steps in, and she’s even worse. That’s how the world often works.

I spend a fair amount of time on tractor forums, and my understanding is this: all small tractors (below 100 horsepower) are equal in quality. Except Mahindras, which are worse. They’re all made overseas. They all last about the same number of hours. The key to a good tractor experience is picking a good dealer, not a good tractor. You need someone who will be helpful when you need repairs.

The local Kubota place is pretty good. I’m afraid to enter the Deere dealership.

Buying a John Deere will not guarantee you a superior tractor made by American hands. It will get you a foreign tractor just like every other company’s tractor, but the service and parts picture may be much, much worse.

If you absolutely have to have green, there is always Krylon.

Just for fun, I’ll price zero-turns.

Life is Never Childproof

My wife and I have been talking about raising children.

One issue that came up was the nature of the property where we live. It’s mostly pasture and forest. I have a house and a workshop, and the rest of the property is full of things like nettles, poison ivy, blackberry briars, holes, and snakes. The house itself has no bedrooms for children on the first floor. We live on a private road that opens onto a two-lane highway with a 55-mph speed limit, so opportunities for riding a bike are not good, and the nearest house is probably 250 yards away.

I’m not sure what to do about the house.

We have two stairways. One is carpeted. The other is hard oak. If the kids live upstairs, what are we supposed to do to protect them?

When I was a kid, my grandparents had a two-story house. They moved into another two-story house when I was about 5. The second house had a set of steep concrete steps covered in thin, hard vinyl.

I never saw a baby gate until I was an adult. I don’t know if they existed. My grandparents had 8 grandchildren, and none of us ever fell down the steps or came close to it. Neither did my grandparents. Nobody did.

The cabinets had no childproofing. I used to play inside them. Whatever chemicals were in the house were available to all. The guns were not locked up.

I have never known anyone except me who had a poison scare as a child. I sampled some rat poison once, and nothing happened. They sent me home from the ER without doing anything for me.

I have never lived in a modern baby-safe house. I don’t even know what the rules are.

I have never known anyone who fell down the stairs as a child (or adult) and had an injury of any kind. Does that mean the concerns are overblown?

I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I was three. My dad bought a house when I was that age. It was one house over from a corner, and the street intersecting our street was somewhat busy. A block to the east, there was a big lot which was often flooded, and there were snakes.

My friends and I used to walk out the door early in the day and spend our time running around like wild Indians. We didn’t cross the busy street, but we could walk a block or two in the other direction, all by ourselves. No one cared. No one was afraid grown men would grab us and have sex with us.

We didn’t know what homosexuality was, and we didn’t know what sex was.

We built forts in the swamp area. We used to have wars. We would chase each other around and hit each other with sticks and branches. Houses went up sometimes, and we played on the construction sites. It was understood that the big sand piles were there for our amusement. I was probably in junior high before I realized people weren’t supposed to go onto other people’s property and play in their unfinished houses.

We played with what are now known as war toys. My parents got me a plastic machine gun and a plastic battleship. We always had cap pistols. I had boots and a cowboy hat. We played cowboys and Indians, and no one ever questioned the notion that the Indians were bad and had to be shot. Sorry about that. We learned from Hollywood, which is always a stupid idea.

No one I grew up with ever committed a gun crime. I did throw a knife at my sister when I was a kid, but most people would have done the same thing eventually. She was special. My gentle 103-pound mother went at her with both fists.

When I used to visit my grandparents, my grandfather would put his grandchildren in the back of a pickup and drive us around on mountain roads at up to 80 mph. We loved it. We never died. I was his favorite, and he used to let me “help” him on his farms. He would sit me on the fender of his tractor while he raked or mowed, and he would also let me steer. If I had fallen off the front of the fender, I would have gone under the rear tire.

We used to shoot together. I never had a lesson in gun safety. I think I was expected to be smart enough not to shoot anyone.

He taught my aunt to swim by throwing her in a river.

Kids were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted in cars. My father used to put me on his lap and let me steer. I sat in the front seat like other human beings. We had a station wagon, and I liked riding in “the very back,” next to the rear window. In sedans and coupes, there were “parcel shelves” against the rear windows. Flat places big enough for kids to lie down in. And we did. Sometimes we had to move the little air-freshener dogs with the bobbing heads.

There were no such things as baby seats.

When we got bicycles, we rode on the streets. There were no helmets. I knew one person who got hurt. He was a teenager who decided to ride down from the peak of Miami’s 79th Street Causeway bridge at top speed. He rode on a narrow sidewalk, and he lost control and hit a sign with his face. He ended up with dentures. A helmet wouldn’t have helped.

We didn’t wear knee or elbow pads. Sometimes we rode barefoot, which was really dumb. I tore half the nail off my big toe that way.

My elementary school was a mile from my house, and my junior high was half a mile farther away. I used to walk and ride to school. Not always, but sometimes. So did my friends. The whole time I lived in that area, I heard about one kid getting hit by a car.

It was bad. A teenaged girl with no license spread him out on the asphalt like chicken salad. There were big stains. We were told his brains were splattered. But the rest of us got by without school zones.

At phys. ed. class, we were told to climb ropes to the top, or maybe 15 feet, above hard-packed ground. I was the kid who could never figure out how to climb the rope, but others made it. At playgrounds, we had merry-go-rounds, and naturally, we got them going at top speed and jumped off. We had see-saws, and we used to do things like jumping off while the other kid was up in the air.

I was probably 10 when I got my first pocket knife, and I got my first rifle at 12. No one thought it was weird to let me have these things. My best friend was a year older, and he was shooting deer and antelope.

My parents thought it was okay to buy me slingshots. Two neighboring kids had bows.

On Halloween, we went out without adult supervision, even though our mothers worried about us and believed legends about razors and drugs in apples and candy.

We always threw the apples out anyway. It was so unfair; giving us fruit. We got really angry at people who gave us things they knew we didn’t like.

Today, it seems like very few kids participate in Halloween. It seems like it’s more of an adult holiday. Adults go to parties and get high and drunk, and as a female comedian said, the women only have one costume: “It’s a slut.”

“Sexy vampire.” “Sexy nurse.” “Sexy witch.” “Sexy Disney character.” “Sexy nun.” Plain old whore. That about covers it.

When kids go out now, they form little squads behind adults with flashlights, they go to a few houses on prearranged routes, where they only see the same parents they see all the time, and they go home. Halloween was never really dangerous, but this is where we are.

Halloween is a Satanic holiday. It’s huge with the witches. That’s the reason to stay home and dress normally. The razor blades and drugs are mythical.

If your parents let you did things leftists from up north thought were unsafe, or they slapped or spanked you, leftists could not do anything about it. There were no powerful agencies roaming around taking children away from old-fashioned parents. If your parents took you to the emergency room with bruises, the doctors never called anyone to interrogate you and have your kids carted off to scary facilities where bullying and sodomy took place.

It must be true that kids used to have more accidents. Surely modern practices have made some difference. I’m sure government intervention saves more kids from abuse than it used to. I guess kids are safer if they can’t leave their yards. But I think some of our measures are overprotective. The truth is that a healthy upbringing in which kids face some risks is valuable. Probably so valuable that it’s better to lose some kids than to turn the rest into helpless basket cases.

Some kids have no common sense. Some kids are smart but make stupid mistakes. These things will always be true. Bad things will always happen.

Here’s a problem: now that we have all these safety policies, even if they’re overreactions, if your child has a very rare accident because you didn’t adhere to modern nanny standards, you will be considered a bad parent. Your spouse may agree. Society is destroying fathers’ ability to do a very important job: toughening kids up. It’s siding with destructive female neuroses.

Disempowering fathers and enabling neurotic women are almost always disastrous.

When I think of the terrible ways in which my parents failed me, I never think about not having a bike helmet. I think about my dad choking my mother. I remember my parents making no effort to teach me good habits or help me succeed. They didn’t teach me to do homework. They didn’t make me do chores. They didn’t show me how to defend myself. They taught me nothing about investing. My mother didn’t teach me proper hygiene. I was not introduced to the Holy Spirit, who is the only source of safety and success. The guns, skateboards, knives, fireworks…not issues.

What do we do about the house? Do we sell it? Do we seal off the upstairs, hoping there won’t be a fire? Do we put cameras up there?

The yard is both good and bad. It’s a world of adventure for kids. On the other hand, the grass in this area is thin and awful, so you wouldn’t want to lie down on it or do much of anything not involving being upright. It has a fence and gate, and that’s good for safety, but getting to other kids will be impossible without vehicles.

The workshop might as well have been designed intentionally to put kids in the hospital. Table saw, band saw, tractor, lawnmower, sharp things, pointy things, hammers, chemicals, torches…send them in there when you get tired of feeding them, and you might get lucky. I guess locks can solve the problem.

What about cars? My Explorer is turning out to be a lemon by design, and it’s a horror to work on. Ford designed it so stupidly it is likely to need thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs even if I take care of it, so I’m thinking of getting a Toyota 4Runner. But the 4Runner isn’t THE safest car on the road. What if my kids get in an accident, and I didn’t buy them THE safest car?

The guns can be locked in a storage room, and of course, the key will have to be hidden, and not in a place the kids will find it, unlike most things parents hide. Every dad who ever hid a dirty magazine, and every mother who ever hid a device or outfit from a dirty boutique, should be aware that their kids found them. It happens.

What are we supposed to do about schooling? DeSantis has done a lot to help, but Florida schools are still dominated by leftist morons and affirmative action cases. They didn’t disappear when he was elected. They are burrowing and hiding, waiting for him to leave.

They will still try to groom our kids and, yes, turn them into homosexuals and phony, mutilated “transgenders.” They will still teach them that socialism is a great idea. It worked out so well in Cuba and Cambodia. They will teach them that rebellion is brilliant and that their elders, with all their wisdom, are silly imbeciles. They will still see our children–God’s children–as theirs.

Some day, this blog post may be seen as proof my children should be taken from me.

Homeschooling is a must. That or private schooling. What are the odds we’ll be able to find a good private school that acknowledges the Holy Spirit?

The kids won’t be able to walk past our private road. They won’t be able to ride bikes much of anywhere. The geography won’t permit a lot of wandering.

What do we do about phones? Thanks to Disney, Florida is a pedophile’s dream, so they flock here. You can’t turn a kid loose without some means of calling for help. But if you give them smartphones, they send each other naked pictures and videos, and they watch adult pornography. If you give them cheap phones, the other kids torment them.

We can’t protect them from society, which is now extremely filthy. They have to live on this planet. It’s not like it used to be. By the time they get to high school, they will know about sodomy, VD, pornography, and seductive causes that give them excuses to cultivate sadism, bigotry, and arrogance.

What do we do about the Internet?

It’s like we’ll be raising children in a building with walls, floors, fixtures, and furnishings smeared with excrement from diseased people, hoping they won’t get sick.

With regard to the physical dangers, we’ll have to make decisions about risk and accept the consequences. That’s all we can do. We can’t raise kids, especially effeminate boys, who can’t do anything but cry and operate phones and tablets with their stick arms and muscular thumbs.

I told my wife to expect our children to get cut, scraped, burned, and bruised. It’s not preventable. They will get sick sometimes. They will get scars. We live in a cursed world. If you don’t want your kids to suffer, have yourself sterilized. If you don’t want to risk losing children, don’t have them in the first place.

God risks it, and loses, every day. He loses most of the people he creates.

I have been concerned that I might love my children so much I smother them and stunt them. It will be hard, handing a kid a new pocket knife or even letting him ride a bicycle in public. It will be hard to let him associate with other kids without me, knowing about bullying and peer pressure, which is the voice of the antichrist. I have to remind myself that human beings like me ruined the world and made it an unsafe place, and now we have to live in it without hiding from it.

Regarding the spiritual dangers–the temptation and corruption–we will just have to stay close to God and do what we know to do. After that, we have to accept what happens. Short of joining a cult and moving to an isolated compound, I see no way to raise kids in anything resembling an acceptable environment.

This world is a rotten place, and it’s our fault. It’s disgusting and dangerous. Not really fit to live in. It’s getting worse rapidly. I wish we had somewhere else to go. But it’s either have kids here or die childless.

I hate this world. Having children will make me hate it more.

God created the world so he could reproduce, and he expects people to have children. We will play the ball as it lies, and we will rely on God, thanking him and never blaming him.

Who Was That Guy I Was?

Yesterday I dug up some things I wrote about 18 years ago. At that time I thought I was a Christian, but the things I wrote were awful. Cruel and full of R-rated language and subjects. Impossible to distinguish from things an unbeliever would write. Immature.

It was a good experience, because it helped me with pride. When you’re a Christian, it’s easy to feel as though you were born holy. You can forget what you were before you surrendered. You can find yourself being too hard on people who are actually doing better at their ages than you were.

Today I got some revelation about it. I realized that if God kept improving me, in 18 years, I would look back on the person I am today and be disturbed. That’s not flattering, but the up side is that it means God can keep blessing me with improvement. Being made better is good. Obviously.

Last week, I had some dangerous trees removed from around my buildings. I thought after that happened, I would find myself outside more, cleaning up the damage and getting the pool and yard in shape. That didn’t happen.

There is less shade than there used to be, and we are in a period of really unpleasant weather. It feels like clouds have gone away for good. The second half of May was very hot. My car’s external thermometer hit 100 one day, and that was while I was driving, not while the car was sitting in the sun.

Since the tree-cutting stopped, I have been sitting in the house doing nearly nothing. The unjust and absurd Trump verdict came in on the day the tree service left, and I felt like it was strong confirmation that normal American life had ended permanently. The viciousness of Satan’s children is blossoming like never before in my life, and worse, they now have unprecedented favor from their father. And Christians are becoming like them, so our own favor has shriveled. Satan’s children are dominant, like Muslims in Hamtramck or homosexuals in San Francisco. We are the counterculture, and we are on the decline. We’re not going to rebound.

I have been discouraged by two climates: physical and supernatural. The physical climate will recover when the heat wave passes, but the supernatural weather is going to keep getting worse.

There is a real climate change, all right, but it has nothing to do with the temperature.

I have been reading the book of Enoch. It’s an interesting book. The idea is that Enoch and his great-grandson Noah had prophetic experiences and wrote them down. Jews don’t consider the book to be scripture. Some say it’s because of the clear references to Yeshua as Messiah and God. The book was written before Yeshua was born, so these references would be problematic to the post-Malachi version of Judaism that continues to the present day.

Here is some material that very clearly refers to Yeshua:

And there I saw One who had a head of days,
And His head was white like wool,
And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man,
And his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.

And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that

Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, (and) why he went with the Head of Days? And he answered and said unto me:
This is the son of Man who hath righteousness,
With whom dwelleth righteousness,
And who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden,
Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him,
And whose lot hath the pre-eminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness for ever.

And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen
Shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats,
[And the strong from their thrones]
And shall loosen the reins of the strong,
And break the teeth of the sinners.
[And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms]
Because they do not extol and praise Him,
Nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them.
And he shall put down the countenance of the strong,
And shall fill them with shame.

And darkness shall be their dwelling,
And worms shall be their bed,
And they shall have no hope of rising from their beds,
Because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits.
[And raise their hands against the Most High],
And tread upon the earth and dwell upon it.
And all their deeds manifest unrighteousness,
And their power rests upon their riches,
And their faith is in the gods which they have made with their hands,
And they deny the name of the Lord of Spirits,

And they persecute the houses of His congregations,
And the faithful who hang upon the name of the Lord of Spirits.

Whether the book of Enoch is scripture is not for me to say, but Jude quoted it in the New Testament as an authoritative reference, so at least part of it is correct. There are a few other New Testament passages that some believe to be references to Enoch.

Enoch confirms some things God has been telling me: he really hates punks, and those who belong to him praise and honor him. Read it yourself and see. Enoch predicted destruction for those who didn’t praise the name of God. If you refuse to praise Yeshua, you’re refusing to praise the name of God, because Yeshua and Yahweh are one. Bowing down before Allah or Yahweh while blaspheming Yeshua is not helpful. Rabbis and Imams aren’t men of God. They make a living blaspheming God. You can’t have the father if you reject the son.

Look at this:

And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him to the holy and righteous;
For he hath preserved the lot of the righteous,
Because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness,
And have hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits:
For in his name they are saved,
And according to his good pleasure hath it been in regard to their life.

That could not be more Christian, but it was written before the Christ was born. Just like Isaiah 53, Psalms 2 and 22, and Proverbs 30:4.

The above passage from Enoch is consistent with what God has been telling me and doing in me. I say we have to distance ourselves from the world. The culture of this world is sick and leads to damnation. Popular Christians, like the Hollywood stars who acknowledge Yeshua weakly while advancing a filthy system dedicated to sin, are failures. Christians who want to be everybody’s friend are barely Christians, if at all.

Enoch tells of a time when the wicked will be removed from the world and it will be turned over to God’s children. That’s consistent with the Revelation and with things Yeshua said. It’s what he was talking about when he said the meek would inherit the earth.

Enoch mentions God’s anger at the people and spirits who have prevented God’s children from succeeding and getting the blessings that were intended for them. Satan’s children are like their father: squatters, murderers, and thieves.

It is disturbing to see the things God shows me confirmed. It would be nice to think I could have a pleasant life in America, like people in the 1950’s, surrounded by people who had some understanding of kindness, decency, and humility. Instead, we are led by famous whores and pimps. Not just whores and pimps, but unusually gross and stupid whores and pimps. Public discourse is as revolting as the discourse of sailors 70 years ago. Economic opportunities are shriveling, and to get them, you have to bend the knee to the most disgusting sorts of perverts, racists, witches, and liars.

The world has always been bad, but not like this. Not in America. We literally have perversions the Sodomites were not able to come up with in their time. At least sexually, we have outdone the filthiest people in the Bible.

It’s sad that so many people claim Sodom was only destroyed for selfishness. Not true. The Bible makes it clear that sexual sin was a big factor.

Jude said:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

A guy who seems to be a prophet just spoke a word in which God said he was sending famine and confusion. He said they would not touch his own children. I hope the second part of the prophecy was genuine. I don’t want to find myself eating squirrels because I have to, not just because I want to. I don’t want my wife to go from African poverty to global poverty, just when she thought she had escaped.

I don’t want to be swept up in the confusion. I can tell men from women, so I think I’m okay.

Actually, I can’t always tell men from women. Sometimes it takes a little study. That’s new. But I know that a hairy, bearded fool in a dress is not a woman. Many Americans can’t say that, and the government is on the side of the fools.

This stuff is really happening. Confirmation keeps coming. The question that obsesses me is how long it will be before we can get out of here. I am ready to go today. My wife and I keep praying God will call his children soon, and that he will do whatever it takes to help the two of us make it.

Does any intelligent person want to be here after this year’s presidential election? No matter who wins, there will be pandemonium, and I choose the word deliberately, since it means, “all demons.” I think Trump will win, and if he does, the left will erupt, as it has been trained to do. If Biden wins, who knows what the right, the military, and our police will do? Trump supporters will say the election was stolen, and this time, they will indisputably be right. The unfair things that are being done to Trump and his supporters will not be forgotten.

When I think of the post-election turmoil, I can’t help thinking of it as entertaining, like a disaster movie. I think that’s because I’ve spent my life watching shows and movies made by an industry that teaches people to be jaded. I’ve seen so many people pretend to suffer and die, I have to pause and remind myself that real people really suffer.

The post-election fighting will be an engrossing spectacle. No doubt about that. But it won’t be like watching chaos on a screen. The pain, hunger, poverty, and horror will be real.

I feel as though the world were standing still while Yeshua prepares his entrance. I feel as though I could hear the trumpet at any second. I wish it would sound. I heard it in a dream, and it made me feel like weight was falling from my shoulders.

Goodbye, Shade

When I moved here, one of the things I liked best was the woodsy location. The area of the property where the house is located had a lot of big oaks close to both buildings.

Since then, I have reconsidered.

The oaks drop leaves that are like little pieces of leather. They drop tons of them, literally, on the lawn. They kill the grass, but they seem to let weeds through just fine.

The trees rot. Here, whenever you cut an oak more than 10″ thick, you can expect to find a big brown spot in the center of the trunk, if not a hollow area full of giant cockroaches. The trees rot from the inside out, and they die from the tops down. Eventually, big rotten logs start to fall straight down. When a tree gets sufficiently rotten, it snaps and falls over.

The roots of these oaks are amazing, because they don’t hold the trees in place very well, but they are nearly impossible to dislodge after the trees are gone. The trees rot fast when standing, but the stumps seem to last for eternity.

Because the roots aren’t great, you never know when a strong wind will push a tree over.

The people who built this house thought the trees were cute, and they were, but a house with a tree on the roof is less cute, so today a bunch of guys who looked sort of like Vikings came and murdered most of the trees that menaced my house. The rest have a date with the saw tomorrow.

Where I used to live, arborists climbed trees. I used to work for an arborist from time to time, and he would put spikes on his feet and go right up an 80-foot Australian pine and start cutting. It was terrifying to watch. When you’re way up on a tree, and a piece of the trunk weighing 500 pounds falls off, the tree swings back and forth like a spring, and there you are with the trunk a foot from your face.

Also, when the tree snaps as you cut it, you have to be sure you did it right, because when you’re right next to a tree in the process of snapping, lots of bad things can happen. This is especially true if you’re tied to the tree.

Here, I have not seen anyone in a tree. They go up on lifts.

I think it may be because the trees are so treacherous here. The tops are full of rotten wood. If you were to climb one, the motion of your body could make the top snap off and hit you on the way to the ground. You might also anchor yourself to something rotten without knowing it.

The tree guys surprised me. I didn’t see ear protection on any of them, and they were running very big Stihls. None of them wore chainsaw chaps. The only guy who had a helmet was up on the crane, and he was the one dropping logs, not one of the ones dodging them.

I don’t know how they can hear anything after running saws every day for years.

I now have two really large piles of dead oak to burn. They’re not far from the house. I would ordinarily have the wood put in the pasture, but because the machine that moves wood is slow, it would have slowed down the work and cost me money. I’m going to go out and see if I can move one of the piles myself tonight.

The yard looks like someone fought a war in it. The grass here is feeble. If you walk across it three times, it starts to look bad. If there is no rain for 5 days, it turns brown. We have had several dry days. The grass was not ready for a crane, a grapple, and a lift.

I’m going to miss the shade, but it was an unaffordable luxury. We have an insurance crisis here, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a policy next year. I am not going to sit through hurricane season wondering if I’m going to have to build a new house at my own expense.

From now on, I’ll have fewer leaves, the grass will look better, and my house will be in no danger whatsoever from hurricanes. Well worth losing some shade.

The people who built the house should have removed the trash oaks and planted better stuff that would stand up to wind. Now I have to plant that stuff, and I will be dead before it looks good.

I’ll have to poison my new stumps, and later I’ll think about ways to remove them. A rented track loader with a stump bucket sounds good. Or an excavator.

If you build or buy a house, don’t be stupid. Don’t doom it with inappropriate vegetation. It will rob you of peace, and it could squoosh your investment.

Fox’s site says Trump has been found guilty in Alvin Bragg’s kangaroo court. Another big oak nibbled by bugs.