You are Smarter Than all of Ford’s Engineers

All sorts of nagging problems seem to be getting solved here. God’s grace in action.

My car has been annoying me. It’s a Ford Explorer. These cars have some really stupid–I mean seriously stupid–engineering.

1. They put a foam rubber cover on the engine. It has a very high R-value, so it’s like putting several inches of attic insulation on the motor. The general rule throughout the automobile age has been that you want your car to run hot enough to do its thing well, but no hotter. You don’t want to roast everything under your hood, like your expensive battery and all the weak modern plastic parts that eventually crumble after a lot of heat cycles. You don’t want to have to strain your cooling system to get rid of heat that would happily leave on its own if permitted. My car was designed so a rubber blanket would keep it hot while a complicated cooling system tried to get rid of the same heat. I have placed the engine cover where it can keep the garage floor warm.

2. They put the water pump–a cheap part that fails often because Ford makes junk on purpose–inside the engine. That sounds like something out of Dilbert, but it’s completely true. In about 1985, the water pump on my gorgeous 1970 Buick deuce-and-a-quarter convertible died, and with almost no mechanical skills, I replaced it by myself in an afternoon. The cost was probably around $30. The cost of replacing a Ford Explorer water pump can be as high as $4500 if you’re stupid enough to go to a dealer, and even private mechanics sometimes charge half that much.

Explorer engine pumps fail very, very often. So do their gaskets. The design is amazing. There are two gaskets, one inside the other. When your inner gasket fails, coolant goes out of the car through a hole between the gaskets. You’re supposed to see this even though it happens under the car. When the outer gasket fails, coolant goes into your oil pan.

Hey, I’m no engineer, but let me spitball here a minute. My car has about 8,000,000 sensors, most of which were a bad idea to install. Why not have a coolant level sensor instead of using ME as a sensor?

Why not use three gaskets? Why not 4? If you’re determined to go stupid, go big. Maybe a lot of Explorer engines with three bad gaskets and one good one would still be running.

You read the stuff about the oil pan right. Ford designed its water pumps to shoot coolant into the oil pans of running engines. Guess what you have to buy when that happens? Starts with an “E.” For “Edsel.”

My car is probably worth $18000. Cost of a new “E”? Call it $8000 if you’re really lucky. Then you have the same kind of engine that committed suicide once already.

3. The car has shutters on the radiator. What can you say about a feature that dumb? At highway speeds, they close. That means you also paid for a shutter motor and a bunch of electronics and programming. When they close, the drag coefficient of the car drops by about 0.01%, and you gain half a mile per gallon. Look it up. I’m not lying. This is Ford’s way of trying to cope with ridiculous mileage mandates which, ultimately, come from allowing women to vote. Don’t get me started. Although I already am.

What happens if the shutters close at the wrong time, which they obviously will, because there are trillions of Explorers, and that’s how probability works? The radiator won’t get air. Personally, I would rather lose the half-mile per gallon, since this car gets bad mileage anyway, and not bake everything in my engine compartment.

My car has been sending me false overheating signals. This is disturbing, because when it happens, all you can think is, “IF I DON’T PULL OVER IN THE NEXT MINUTE, IT WILL COST ME TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.”

Lots of bad things can happen when a car overheats. You can lose an engine. You can get hidden damage that causes you to lose the engine later, long after you congratulated yourself on dodging a bullet.

The car started beeping on a very hot day while I was in a Burger King drive-through. I went in and ate, and when I came out maybe 15 minutes later, the car was miraculously cool. That’s not long enough for a car to cool down.

I started out of the parking lot, and the temperature gauge shot up. Too fast to make sense. I got out of the lot, and it dropped within maybe 15 seconds.

I checked the coolant level, it was low. I topped it off. The car behaved for a while. Then it beeped again while the wife and I were running errands.

I started Googling. I interrogated people on a forum. I thought I might be looking at a second thermostat replacement, and I considered using a cooler thermostat than the super-hot job Ford installed.

The coolant level dropped again, after one day, so I bought some fluorescent dye and a UV flashlight. If there was a leak, I would be able to find it under the hood.

I added dye. I drove around. I saw a lot of coolant spillage lighting up under the hood. It occurred to me that I might have spilled dye myself, so I hosed everything off, topped off the coolant, and ran errands on a blistering-hot day.

Nothing happened. The coolant level stayed high. I saw no leaks.

I can’t figure it out, but it looks like I don’t have a problem after all. Maybe the people who replaced the first thermostat left the coolant low, and over time, it got so low it messed with the temperature sensor. Maybe the coolant level dropped after I added the first dose because it was being sucked into the system.

I don’t know. I do know I was planning to take the car to a shop tomorrow, and now that’s off. I bought a third thermostat and some coolant and distilled water, so I plan to flush the system. I’m hoping the car doesn’t really have a problem.

I was actually starting to look at Toyota Highlanders on the web. The Highlander is supposed to be a better car. Every car has weak points, and the Highlander is no exception, but not every car has a water pump inside the engine. A water pump which is known to go bad frequently. Along with a timing chain which has a predicted service life of 100,000 miles.

A modern car should go 300,000 miles without major problems if maintained well, so what kind of fool makes a car with a 100,000-mile timing chain that costs thousands to replace?

A Highlander timing chain is very expensive to replace, but on the other hand, Toyota says there is no recommended interval, so that means they don’t expect it to fail at 100,000 miles. I don’t know what Ford says. I don’t feel like checking. I do know that people all over the web say it’s a maintenance part, like a spark plug or air filter, as contrasted with a lifetime part, like a rear differential.

A maintenance part. Deep inside your engine. It’s like doing a tonsillectomy through your butt.

I think I got my Makita cordless chainsaw fixed.

The saw was running dry. It has an oil tank like a gas saw, and it has the same sort of pump, sending oil to the bar and chain through a hole in the saw body.

I was afraid the $22 oil pump had failed.I took the bar off and cleaned a lot of crud out, hoping crud was blocking the oil. Better than waiting for a pump.

I ran the saw with the bar off to see if the pump worked, and oil dripped out of the saw body, as expected. It seemed like less oil than a gas saw would drip, but that is supposedly normal. I closed the saw up and used it to move an oak I felled by the driveway.

Today I looked at the saw and noticed that the bar was blue around the edges, which some people say is a sign the saw ran hot and toasted the steel. Others say bars are blue from the factory because they harden the edges where the chains run. I don’t know what the truth is.

I opened the saw up again and saw something amazing.

When cleaning saw oil passages up in the past, I have thought mainly about the saw bodies. Wood dust jams into the little slots the oil comes out of, so you knock it out with something and go on. Exactly what I did the first time I checked the Makita.

What I did not know was that fine dust and bar oil could harden and turn into something like wood filler or just plain concrete.

On the bar itself, I found little accumulations of hardened dust shaped just like the oil slot. When the saw was closed up, these accumulations pressed into the slot and sealed it up like a gasket.

I had to scrape the bar itself. It took a while. That stuff was hard.

I learned something. When you run a saw, before you do anything, floor it with the bar pointed at something. If oil doesn’t spray onto whatever you’re aiming at, fix the saw, because the chain is dry. You can have oil dripping from the bottom of a saw without getting any on the chain.

I have 5 saws on the premises right now. I have had so many saw problems, my former biggest saw has an old bar that has been run so little, it’s practically new. Another saw is actually new. The rest needed to be sharpened. I knocked that off.

I generally use files, but I decided to try Pferd sharpeners because they file not just the teeth, but the depth gauges, which are the pointy things between teeth. Gauges tell your teeth how deep to cut, and if you keep filing the teeth and not the gauges, you end up cutting with the gauges alone, and that’s not very fast.

Pferd sharpeners are almost exactly the same as Stihl sharpeners, but when I got mine, they cost way less.

Sharpening your saw is very important. A dull chain can make a 70-cc saw cut like a 30-cc saw, and if you don’t know it’s dull, you may think a bigger saw is the answer. You may spend money needlessly. Also, a dull saw can make a saw overheat, destroying the piston, cylinder, and maybe some other stuff. A small saw with a sharp chain is better than a big saw with the kind of chain most people use.

Speaking of things that are better than a big saw, I have a phenomenal tip for you, born of experience. Buy a cordless pole saw, not a chainsaw. You probably don’t even need a chainsaw. They’re only appropriate for firewood and thick trees. No one says this, but it’s 100% true, and it should be considered canon by now.

With a 10″ pole saw, you can cut trees 12″ thick. Not gracefully, but safely and effectively. You don’t need a 16″ chainsaw, the homeowner’s preferred size, unless you’re cutting bigger stuff.

With a chainsaw, you have to stand right next to what you’re cutting, and believe me, you will make mistakes when you try to guess which way things will go when you cut them. The farther away you are, the safer you are. With a pole saw, you can be 6 feet or more away from your stupid mistakes.

Most chainsaw tree-whacking injuries occur within a couple of steps of the cut, and if you have a pole saw, you’re already two steps away when you need to run. This is a very, very big deal no one talks about.

If you have a pole saw, you can cut things higher than your shoulders. “I’m already doing that.” Yes, I know. You’re an idiot. You never raise a chainsaw above your shoulders. What do chainsaws do when operators have problems? They fall. They don’t levitate and fly away. The lower a saw is when you use it, the better off you are, because less of you is where it may fall.

When you cut your leg off with a chainsaw, why does it happen? It happens because the saw was higher than your leg when you had your problem, and because a chainsaw is so short, you were able to keep your finger on the trigger while the bar was cutting you.

If you drop a pole saw, it’s pretty unlikely the bar will come near you on the way down. Cutting your leg with a pole saw is virtually impossible.

You’re supposed to wear safety chaps when you use a chainsaw. They really work, and no one uses them. They’re hot, and they look kind of gay. If you’re using a tool that can’t cut your leg, the fact that you refuse to wear chaps won’t be a problem.

Even safety experts have no issues with operating pole saws overhead. It’s what they’re for. You can even use one from a ladder. You never, ever use a chainsaw from a ladder.

A pole saw will always turn off when you let go of the handle, and you have to let go of the handle in order to get near the bar. It’s brilliant.

You also get less sawdust on you when you use a pole saw because it’s not ejecting things directly at you from one foot away.

If you go cordless, you will never need ear protection. That’s a huge bonus. Earmuffs cause painful headaches, they’re hot, they may eventually smell, and they’re disgusting because they’re filthy. And they don’t really protect your hearing well. With a big saw, you also need plugs.

Unless you’re cutting things over 12″ thick regularly, or you’re cutting firewood, you don’t need a chainsaw, even though they’re cool and you want one. You should get a 10″ Kobalt battery pole saw from Lowe’s for less than the price of a homeowner-grade Husky 16″ gas saw that plugs up with ethanol gas at least once a year. Get an extra battery. Do it, and you will almost never need to reach for a chainsaw.

It’s so much safer, it’s in a different safety universe. It’s cheaper. It works better. It’s easier on your back. It can do lots of things a chainsaw can’t do. It can do nearly anything a chainsaw can do.

You won’t even have to adjust the chain. The saw does it for you.

You want it.

I have a tree crew coming this week to do major cutting and moving so I will never need hurricane insurance again. They need places to dump wood for burning, and they need to be able to get to the back of my shop, where some of the worst trees are.

I had two big piles of trash wood waiting to be burned, so yesterday, I called for a permit. They told me I could not have one. They said dispersion was too low. What?

I found out this meant there was not enough wind to disperse the smoke, and they were worried that soy people might get a widdle cough.

They said I could take a $50 course and become a second-level burn pile guru, and then they would give me permits when other people could not get them. I checked online. No courses were available. NICE.

Help me understand why being a burning expert should entitle you to burn more wood than other people. It produces the same amount of smoke. It must be a gimmick to direct money to the government or some contractors who bought the government some escorts.

Look how smart old people are. A young person would still be wondering.

Being old means you know how the world really works. This is one of the best parts of being old. And one of the worst.

I called today before 7 a.m., thinking they were more likely to be nice to me if I showed I was serious. They told me it was too early, so I called again at 7. I got a different person. Not the masculine-sounding lady who had been so terse and authoritative in the past and probably wears plaid shirts. Yes, I’m insinuating something. Just a guess.

The lady I got could not have been nicer. Same weather, but I got my burn permit anyway.

Now I have two smoldering circles of ash, and I won’t have to sacrifice pasture needlessly for extra piles.

I took the tractor out and moved all sorts of junk from behind the shop. My bush hog. Two rolls of fence wire. A bunch of treated lumber. A hay bale spike. A subsoiler. My debris fork. My tractor bucket. A harrow. Now there’s lots of acreage back there so they can get their machines in.

I was afraid I would need my truck because of the car’s problems, and it has refused to turn over. I finally decided to address it. I am charging the batteries up, and I checked the wiring. Yes, the horrible squirrels have nibbled a bit, but not enough to prevent the truck from running.

I think I have a ground issue, so I’m going to clean and grease every ground that looks relevant, and I’m hoping to get the truck going by Wednesday.

I also decided to check out a problem I had been dreading dealing with. My truck’s 4WD shift has been swinging freely as though it were not connected to anything. I got under the truck, and guess what? It’s not connected to anything.

Remember what I said about stupid engineering? Dodge makes these trucks so the transfer linkages fall out with no warning. A linkage is a funny-looking rod, and it has two weak bushings at the ends. The bushings WILL fail even if you don’t use the transfer case, and when they do, the linkage goes away without telling you, perhaps hitting the car behind you as it tinkles and bounces down the interstate.

I have parts ordered. I’m thinking of finding a way to make sure the linkage can’t fall out again. Dodge’s engineers couldn’t do it, but I can, because IT’S REALLY SIMPLE.

Dodge wants something like $60 for the parts, but the Chinese sell basically the same thing for $15. They’re all over Amazon because THEY FALL OUT ALL THE TIME AND DODGE CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP IT.

I looked up my Harley’s value, and I plan to put it on Craigslist so I can get the truck indoors away from squirrels. The title is around here somewhere, and as soon as I find it, goodbye, Softail.

I also found myself and my wife better car insurance. By going from GEICO to State Farm, we can cut over 50% from our bill and get nearly the same coverage. Insurance rates are insane. One company wants x. Another company wants 0.5x. Another company wants 3x. A 4th company will not insure anyone in Florida, for no clear reason. Rates bear no relationship to reality that I can perceive. I guess we’ll switch tomorrow.

Things are coming together. With God’s help, the car won’t blow up, the tree job will go smoothly, the truck will roar again, and my chainsaws will again be useful as well as ornamental.

You Can’t Stand Bad Company Forever

When I pray these days, I often complain to God about having to live in this world. I don’t blame him for anything. I just want someone to vent to. I keep telling him, “I hate this place.” I keep telling him he has been right about everything. The state of the world proves it over and over.

My life is excellent. I have health, prosperity, a wonderful wife, and a home pretty far from most of the vicious, demonized, leftist and Muslim nuts who are sincerely looking forward to a chance to kill every person like my wife and me. I enjoy life a great deal. I’m extremely grateful, because I know my blessings are extreme. But I will never feel at home here while demons rule the world. I always say it’s like I went to a Mexican resort for a luxury vacation and was not allowed to go home.

The Bible says Lot was in a similar situation. It says:

[B]ut he rescued Lot, a righteous man who was distressed by the debauchery of those unprincipled people; for the wicked deeds which that righteous man saw and heard, as he lived among them, tormented his righteous heart day after day.

I am not calling myself righteous, but I have some awareness of right and wrong. Enough to make the spectacle of the modern West revolting to me, every day. Enough to make me understand how much worse it will get.

Living on this earth is like living on a somewhat clean platform in the middle of a tank full of feces, urine, pus, menstrual fluid, dead bodies, rotten fish, and every kind of filth imaginable. The platform may be a big blessing, but you’re still in a bad place.

The other day I realized I should not say that I hate this place. The place is not the problem. A place can’t be good or bad. It’s the people.

I hated Miami because the people were rude and trashy. I could not wait to get out. What if the people were nice?

Miami has a magnificent bay and barrier islands. It has quick access to Gulf Stream fish. In a couple of hours, you can take a boat to the Bahamas. There is never any snow or ice. It’s sunny, and the sun improves people’s moods. It’s easy to grow fruit and ormamental plants there. Put the right people there, and it would be very nice.

What if you took all the Swiss and put them in Dade County, Florida, and you moved everyone in Dade to Switzerland?

Miami would be wonderful. People would get along. The economy would be fantastic. Crime would be almost nonexistent. The educational system would be tops. Switzerland, on the other hand, would be mostly ghetto, and everyone there would hate each other, because they hated each other where they came from. Crime would explode. The murder rate would skyrocket. Tourism would plummet.

God showed me this: I should not complain about a place. I should complain about the power and presence of the wicked. Where the wicked are few and weak, things are good. Where they are many and dominant, you end up with something like Somalia or San Francisco. Places where decent people are unhappy and persecuted, and the filthy are rewarded and promoted.

We hear a lot about genocide these days. From liars. Liars keep making the insane claim that Israel’s actions of self-defense are genocide.

Unlike Gazans, Israel and the Jews are truly threatened with genocide, and genocide is the openly-stated aim of their Muslim enemies. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s clearly true. The interesting thing is that genocide really is in the works from our side, but it will come from God, not his children or the Jews. God himself is going to clear the majority of those who hate Yeshua off the planet. He won’t send us out with ridiculous AR-15’s with skulls engraved on the magazine wells. He’ll do it personally, with the help of angels. He’ll also let the wicked kill each other off. He’ll even let animals kill them. That’s in the Revelation.

Eventually, God is going to decide he and his children have had enough of the presence and power of the wicked, and he will get rid of them and put the cleansed world back in our hands.

Genocide against the wicked is inevitable, because the mere presence of evil people and spirits is unsustainable for everyone else. It can’t be tolerated forever. Similarly, those who are against us are not looking for coexistence. They want us gone. Dead. Not just dead, but erased from history. Many religious Jews pronounce this curse on Yeshua: “May his name and memory be blotted out forever.” That came from Satan. Satan wants it for Yeshua and all those who are important to him. This is why Holocaust-deniers, and those who claim ancient Israel was not Jewish, exist.

It’s the people and the spirits. They ruin the world. When they’re gone, the world will be like a big petting zoo. Even animals will get along. Finally, the dream of leftists will be actualized: a vegetarian world. But they will be elsewhere.

I know what it is to have unbearable people removed from my life. My sister is the biggest example. It’s not enough to have peace with her. Having to interact with her is intolerable. The constant flow of lies, slanders, and emasculation can’t be tolerated. I can’t coexist with someone who pits everyone against me and tells lies to people who like me. She can’t be permitted to have a conversation with my wife. It would be like putting my wife on the phone with Hannibal Lecter.

My sister can’t be near me. I can’t have dealings with her. I’ve had enough. Having her in another state and not communicating with her are enormous blessings. She will probably die before I do, and I will not go to her funeral. She makes every interaction a source of persecution to me.

The children of Satan, on a large scale, are the same way. The worse and more numerous they get, the more they need to be gotten rid of. I understand why hell was created. There is no other solution.

Hell is full of beings who are against God, and even there, seeing where being hateful put them, they are still vile and sadistic. They could be trying to unite and make the best of it, but the fallen spirits torture dead human beings around the clock, for no constructive purpose. They literally make hell worse.

If there is a nice thing about hell, it’s this: there is no way for the dead to get here from there. The people who are there now will never, ever bother any of us again.

I keep praying for God to set his children aside in places where they are concentrated and dominant. I ask him to drive out the wicked and give their land and wealth to his children in these places. I ask him to keep the plagues of this time off these places. I say that if curses have to come, they should fall on places where he has been rejected openly, like New York City and Japan.

I want us to have some peace and comfort in places where we are improved and blessed while waiting to be extracted. Let the children of Satan torment each other, far away, if they have to be hateful. They can’t be saved, but maybe they can be kept away from us.

Has Anyone Seen my 56 Million?

The other day, I was confused about some things somewhat-conservative actor Tom Selleck said, and I wrote about it. He lives on a 63-acre avocado farm in California, and at the age of 79, after a very successful acting career (for a conservative), he says he may have to sell his farm in order to finance a pleasant old age.

Thomas Magnum, the eighties pinup man, is 79. About as old as Biden. Can you believe it? He’s not in the same boat, though. Biden looks like his father or even grandfather. I wonder how old Higgins is. I’ll check. The actor who played him would be 91 today. Zeus and Apollo have been dead since no later than 1995.

I looked up his taxes, and I found out he pays about a thousand dollars per acre per year, which is bad, but not shocking. My dad’s home near Miami had a tax bill not far from half that high one year, and it’s a merely somewhat above average home on half an acre. Thank God that place is gone. What a horrible area. Living in that miserable place is bad enough, but then they force you to pay an amount equal to a living wage in exchange for the privilege of suffering. I can’t understand the people who bought that house.

I wondered how Selleck could be worried about his finances given the money he has made, the value of his property (about $12 million), and the fact that he will almost certainly die within 15 years. His kids are grown. Even a reverse mortgage should keep him up in fine style, and surely he has assets other than his home.

Well, someone in Hollywood got mad at Selleck and criticized him for complaining. This person says he was paid $56 million over the last 14 years for his work on a CBS series. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but that seems like a lot of money to me.

Unless he has a drug addiction or a gambling problem, he should have been able to pocket over $20 million, even in California, even after paying his agent. That’s just the last 14 years. Doesn’t include Magnum, P.I., his movies, or his ad work.

I don’t know, man. I’m starting to wonder about this guy.

Maybe he doesn’t realize he will be dead by 2040. He has already exceeded the average American life expectancy, and he is about 7″ above average height. Tall people don’t live as long as short people. If he can support himself for 15 years, he’s okay.

I remember telling my dad he needed to get professional help with his weight, and he would always say his grandfather lived to be 100. That was true, but his grandfather didn’t drink and weighed about 140 pounds. My dad started to lose it noticeably at about 82, and he died in assisted living when he was not far into his 88th year, at the age of 87. His older sister had the same grandfather, and she died at 84. She was huge.

My mother’s father didn’t think realistically about age, either. He rented a farm to a 68-year-old man with the provision that the man could stay as long as he lived. When he was questioned about this, he said, “That old man can’t live long.” My grandfather was 72.

I think I’m pretty realistic about being old. When I think about taking up a new pastime, I think, “I’ll be dead before I get anywhere with it.” I have thought about planting trees here, but barring the rapture, they will still be small and useless when I die. When I work in the yard and I get tired, I go in the house, leaving branches and leaves and whatever on the ground if I have to. I’m not going to die for yard work. Heat exhaustion is something old people can’t play with.

When I put heavy things on high shelves, I wonder if I’ll be strong enough to take them down if I ever need them. I take that into account.

Regarding Selleck, maybe he has spent a lot of money enjoying life. Maybe he has put millions in trust for his two grown kids, where he and his wife can’t get it. I certainly hope he has arranged for his kids to be rich without work. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to stuff yourself like a turkey and then die poor.

If every generation in a family has to start with nothing, it’s a stupid family. Inheritance is supposed to help people not to have to have the same problems their ancestors did.

We don’t force new generations to come up with their own languages, writing, and science. We don’t burn all the books every 20 years. We treasure and protect these things and do our best to pass them on. No one ever says, proudly, “No one gave me electrical engineering and medicine. I figured it out for myself!” But fools love to say, “I’m a self-made man!” Like it’s great that their parents and ancestors were also fools.

Money is no different from other good things. It should be passed along, and so should the ability to make and handle money.

Inheritance is one of the big differences between advanced cultures and backward cultures that amounted to nothing. Africans and American Indians didn’t preserve knowledge through writing. They didn’t build things that lasted so their descendants could use them. They didn’t amass wealth and pass it on. They managed to go millennia without developing technology. As a result, they ended up living like cave men while people in other places had running water and calculus. They died from diseases that can be prevented by wearing shoes and boiling water. When advanced people showed up where they were, they were running around just about naked, and they didn’t have things like chairs. They were worse than children.

The wealthy people who didn’t have to work to get wealth make up a tiny percentage of Americans. That’s disgraceful. The grandchildren of most wealthy people have to build their own wealth, and many of them have nothing. If your grandchildren end up worse off than you, what was the purpose of making yourself rich? Was it just to make your own life better?

Americans are hypocrites. They really hate heirs, but nearly all of them want their children to be heirs. We love making fun of wealthy people who have problems, but we all want to be wealthy.

Wealth is good. It is completely good. It has no bad qualities. Christians have given it a bad name, and that’s ridiculous. Saying wealth is bad is like saying health is bad. Good looks are bad. Nice weather is bad. It’s idiotic. God himself says wealth is good. In the Bible, he promises it to people who please him. Would he reward people he likes with a curse? Of course not. Wealth is only a curse when you make it a curse. Your nature is the problem.

Giving heirs things is very good. Spoiling them is not. Two different things. Wealth can’t spoil anyone. We all know or know of rich heirs who are not spoiled, and prisons and poor ghettos are full of the most spoiled people in America.

I certainly hope the Sellecks have set their kids up.

What if he gave most of his earnings to charity, and he hasn’t said anything? That would be better than wasting it on yachting vacations, Hermes, and Balenciaga.

Looking around, I see the web says Selleck has had other homes. In 2016, he was featured in Architectural Digest, a magazine devoted to showcasing homes owned by extremely self-indulgent people with sick fringe values. The article says he had an 1800-square-foot apartment in Los Angeles, and he covered the walls with expensive paneling. He and his wife brought in very, very expensive professionals to fix the place up. They spared no expense.

They will never get that money back. Most of it is not an investment. Spending tons of money decorating a house generally will not pay off. The furniture will be removed, and the kind of people who buy fancy homes will want to remove a lot of what was done and replace it.

I fixed up a house and sold it, and it was a terrible idea. If I had sold it as-is, I would be a lot better off today. I sold another one with problems, and it was a much smarter decision. House flippers only make good money when they get good renovation work, cheap. Most of us aren’t in their shoes. Contractors generally treat their clients badly, costing them huge sums of money and wasting valuable months. If you want to live in a torn-up house and be your own general contractor, it’s different, but Tom Selleck wouldn’t do that.

In the article, he speaks lovingly of a table in the apartment, saying it used to be used for slaughtering pigs. If your grandfather made a table, I can understand why you would love it, but the pig story sounds exactly like what a designer would say in order to get you to make a sucker purchase.

“In this very chair, Vin Diesel read the script for Fast & Furious 6.”

Selleck lived in Hawaii for a long time. That’s expensive. Everything except pineapples and sand has to be brought in on boats or planes. I don’t know how many homes he had there, but one is pretty nice. The address is 4161 Akulikuli Terrace, in Honolulu. You can see a video of it below.

Does he still have the L.A. place? If so, he is paying the state serious money.

Even if, by some unforeseen fluke, I become extremely wealthy, I will never have a home in Architectural Digest, nor will I ever pay a decorator. I made a decision. I decided my home would be usable. We expect to have kids. We will have guests. I have a parrot. We can’t have really, really nice things, and I don’t want them anyway. Things have to serve me. I can’t stand serving things. If I can’t sit on a couch without taking a shower first, I don’t want it.

We will have pretty good furniture. We will make a pretty good effort to make the downstairs look pretty good. Upstairs, I have a fairly cheap couch and a recliner no woman would own, and only one of the beds has a headboard.

I have a Ford and a Dodge. Both were bought used. The newest one is 9 years old. I may replace the Ford with a Toyota because the Ford I have has a reputation for turning into a money pit after a certain number of miles, but if I buy a Toyota, it will be at least a year old.

I think we will continue to live very well by global standards, even without Selleck’s earning potential, and I don’t think we will have to move. If you have a nice house, good food, good medical care, and somewhat nice stuff, you are rich as far as I’m concerned.

It looks like Tom Selleck has spending problems, not money problems.

My grandfather may have been worth what Selleck is now, in terms of buying power, and he lived in a nice, comfortable house that was kept up perfectly. He drove Buicks from his car dealership, bought at cost. He wore his pickup trucks out. He got his clothes from department stores in Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t have a wine cellar or a tennis court. I would guess he never flew first class in his life.

He didn’t worry that he might have to move out of his house. When his television went out, my grandmother told the people at the store to bring another one, dismissing their concerns about her ability to pay, saying, “We’ve got enough money to burn a wet mule.”

He was generous with other people. He helped his children when they didn’t deserve it or show him gratitude. He didn’t spend his money on decorators so he wouldn’t feel bad when shallow rich people showed up for expensive parties he never threw. He left some money and land behind when he died, and so did his wife.

I think he handled his money very well. He was probably the only person in Eastern Kentucky who subscribed to The Value Line, and read and understood it, in the 1950’s.

My dad bought a lot of real estate, and he did some investing. He could not match my grandfather, but he wasn’t like some of his partners, who had to spend every dime they got before they got it. He never talked about having to move out of his house, and he eventually became very concerned about making sure what he had went to me smoothly. He could have had a new Mercedes every year, but he chose to fund his future, and that of his descendants, instead.

Any couple that can’t find a way to live well until they die, on what must amount to at least $30 million, is doing something wrong. With that kind of wealth, you can take two very expensive vacations per year, wear excellent clothing, drive very nice cars, and live on an avocado farm. You should be able to get excellent help when you become feeble. I’m sure of it. Maybe you can’t have three or four mansions, and you might have to shop at normal malls sometimes, but lots of movie stars shop at malls that don’t have Neiman-Marcus or Bulgari.

Selleck will be dead by 2040. His wife will be dead by 2055, tops. They’ll both be fine if they show even below-average restraint.

Ostentation is sinful. Spending to be accepted by trashy rich people is wrong. It stirs up resentment among people who have less. It makes you think you’re better than you are. It lands you among empty, disgusting people. It sucks money away from better causes. You can have an incredibly cushy life without making a spectacle of yourself and spending in order to obey your insecurity.

Ostentation is partly aggression. It’s a way of insulting others. The Bible says that if you mock the poor, you insult God himself.

I just happened to run into an article about Antonio Brown, who was apparently an NFL player. The article says his career earnings were about $80 million. Wikipedia says he signed contracts amounting to well over $100 million, and that doesn’t include earnings off the field. Now his net worth is negative, and his earning potential is not much better.

He’s not a smart guy, so he can’t run out and get another high-paying job. Football was all he could do, at least for more than $20 an hour. It’s a horrific story. Imagine making $80 million in about 12 years, losing all of it, and then having to think about how long it would take to make that much money with your other abilities. In his case, it’s about 2000 years. That is the actual figure.

He’s a friend of Kanye West. West has a very shaky sports agency firm called Donda Sports, and Brown is the nominal president. Brown appears to be nearly illiterate, though, so it’s not clear whether he can actually perform any duties. Maybe West will pay him a lot anyway. But if he does, Brown will lose it. It won’t help.

I understand the desire to spend money on fun things, and I have certainly wasted money, but you have to have some sense of proportion. If your net worth is two million dollars, and the Lamborghini you want costs $1.5 million, it doesn’t mean you can afford it.

I can waste money, but I don’t understand insane spending.

Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll get my pickup truck fixed up really well, I’ll move to a nice rural property in Tennessee, and I’ll probably get some better heavy equipment, used. A bigger tractor and an excavator. I’ll have trouble-free appliances. If I travel long distances, I’ll definitely go business class, because long flights in coach are very unpleasant. I’ll get survival supplies and a generator. Nice stuff for the wife, but not too nice. Can’t think of much else.

Prime steaks more often. I would do that. Beef is a luxury in Biden’s world. I would probably get a lawn service. I would want an air-conditioned workshop for sure. That’s like $45,000. I’d quit buying all forms of insurance not required by law.

I really like the shoes and shorts I wear. I like Hanes T-shirts for about $3 each. I could see getting a good horsehide jacket not designed for motorcycling.

No boats. Been there. No planes. No vacation homes. Absolutely no club memberships. No jewelry for me. Jewelry on men is effeminate. No servants except maybe a maid to come in weekly. No ridiculous assistants to stand between me and commoners. No bodyguards. No entourage. No public giving of any kind. It’s ostentation.

I’ll tell you what. A comfortable home in Tennessee, all my bills paid, good food, good vehicles, zero concerns when buying things like tires and refrigerators…what else could you want?

Then I could invite Architectural Digest in to photograph my synthetic area rug from Lowe’s and the good downstairs recliner.

I’m not great with money, but I don’t see myself auctioning off private planes and gold chains to pay my creditors. I should be able to avoid getting a real job. I hope so. If I ever have to sell this farm, it will most likely be because I am too old to maintain it personally.

I hope I continue to improve, increasing my income and net worth while having the privilege of giving effectively to people who need help.

Tremble at my Mastery of Unimpressive Low-Paying Tasks

I am now a master chainsaw mechanic.

When I moved here, I managed three weeks before a hurricane came, and although we didn’t get the actual storm, a lot of trees fell. I was desperate for forestry tools, but they were not to be had. I managed to scrounge up a small Jonsered (Husqvarna) saw and a bigger Echo CS-590.

I have been lazy, and I didn’t know much about saws, and I could not find anyone around here who could fix one, so I had all sorts of trouble. I made dogged efforts to get good information so I could help myself, but I got misled over and over. Seemed like I never had a running saw when I needed one.

I just broke down and bought a pro-grade saw with a little computer in it. People call cheap saws “homeowner” saws, but the truth, I think, is that homeowners need the best saws, because we need tough equipment that can stand poor management.

I bought the new saw because I was really tired of trying to fix the others. Then once I had the Husky to rely on, naturally, I wanted to make the Echo run. I have turned it into a project saw.

Last year, I believe, I put a bigger carb in it. The carb comes from a 620P, which is a stronger saw with the same displacement. A week or two ago, I put a partial rebuild kit in the carb, which had been sitting since at least last year. That made it run, which was a huge improvement.

Today I added two other things: a better exhaust deflector to get heat out of the saw, and a little doodad that bumps the ignition timing 6 degrees forward to make the saw run more like Echo’s true pro saws.

I also tuned the carb myself, using a cheap Ebay tachometer and directions I stole from the Youtube Channel Steve’s Small Engine Saloon.

Echo says the saw should run at between 12,000 and 13,000 RPM. Web denizens say the ignition limits it to 13,000. Not true. Today I fired my saw up, and I got 14,000. It sounded really, really nice. Too nice. I didn’t want to blow it up. But I could not get the top speed to drop.

I finally realized I was turning the saw’s high-speed jet the wrong way. With that in mind, I started turning it the right way, and I settled on 13,300 RPM, roughly. Another Youtube saw guy runs his modded saws a little faster than that, and everyone thinks he’s a genius, so I guess my saw can take it.

Now the saw starts within about 6 pulls. Three with the choke in, and another two or three with it off. To me, that is astounding performance. Some people say their saws start on the first pull. Not sure how that’s possible with a choked carb, but they say that. After what I’ve been through, 6 is wonderful.

The little things I’ve done so far are supposed to bump the saw’s cutting speed up considerably, like maybe 15%. If I open the muffler up, I may see nearly 25%. That would be pretty nice. In truth, choosing the right chain and keeping it sharp make more of a difference than anything, but power is good.

Now what do I do? Use my big Husky because it’s almost guaranteed to work, or use the Echo in order to keep my nice new saw from getting dirty?

My plan is to put both in my cart when I cut big stuff. I’ll use whichever one works.

I feel almost competent.

Even Better Than a Butt Lift and Taylor Swift Tickets

When I moved here, and I was looking after my dad, I was too careful with money sometimes, because most of his cash was tied up in unneeded properties that weren’t selling. I didn’t want to start dipping into my own money to deal with his problems, not knowing for sure that I would be the sole heir. What if I never got the money back? What if he proposed to an assisted living attendant?

I could have gotten rid of some dangerous trees on the property–trees I didn’t think I should cut on my own–but I was concerned about his liquidity. Every time hurricane season rolled around, instead of relaxing in safety, I counted on the odds to keep trees off my buildings. I couldn’t be completely calm. I lived for the day hurricane season ended, meaning I went through six months of rolling the dice.

I continued doing this until today. I just fixed the problem. I was going to get on it a year ago, but with all my wife’s immigration issues, I let a lot of things go.

Next week should be very, very interesting. I am paying for one and a half days of work from a crew with some very intimidating machinery. The guy who owns the company just came by, and we made a deal. He is going to do things like lifting full-grown oaks out of the ground. He is removing so much stuff, he wants to put it in three burn piles.

One burn pile will hold tons and tons of debris, so any job that fills three has to be big.

This is going to be very nice. We never, ever get hurricane-force winds here, but we do get tropical-storm-force winds sometimes, and they can knock trees down. If a tree hits your house, it’s a disaster at best, and because hurricanes damage so many houses, it can take forever to get repairs.

Insurance here is going nuts under Biden, and DeSantis hasn’t been able to fix it. I may not be able to insure my house at any price next time around. If I can insure, it will not be cheap. People with inferior properties are paying between $20,000 and $30,000 per year in some places. Suze Orman, the money guru, has a little high rise condo that can’t possibly be damaged by storms, and she says she refused to pay the $28,000 she was quoted. I’m not paying anything like that, but insurance costs me almost as much as property taxes.

Insurers blame storms for most of it. When I think about possible losses, I think a fair amount about theft, a little bit about fire, and a whole lot about storms. If the trees are removed, and the house doesn’t burn down, I can insure against theft on my own. I will not need storm insurance at all.

I might be able to retrofit a sprinkler system to make fire less of a problem, and I’m already doing a lot to keep burglars away. The political spirit of the area and the normality of the non-feminized males keep the relatively bright ones in terror, and the local cops openly say they like it when homeowners kill undocumented guests, so things could be worse.

When my dad bought this place, the appraiser raved about it. Underpriced, he said. That may have been true, but the driveway was looking shabby, the roof only had a couple of years of life in it, and the trees, he ignored. I now have a new driveway and roof. That should hold me for 20 years. The trees are the last major concern that has to be addressed. The rest is all piddly stuff.

When you buy a house, look at the trees around it, because in all likelihood, no one else will. How close are they to the foundation and the roof? How fast do they grow? How long do they live? How strong are they? Do the analysis before you buy so you won’t be sandbagged later. That’s my advice.

Man, I can’t wait. I arranged the work at the last minute. The first named storm will be here this month, barring a statistical anomaly. All the people who procrastinated worse than I did will be looking for tree surgeons, and they’ll be busy. I took too long, but I took care of business just in time, and I’m not paying the mid-season price.

I’m paying less than the cost of a year’s property insurance.

I am going to hate losing the shade, and the trees looked very nice. It’s worth it to know my wife and I will not even have to think about seeing our house crushed.

Removing some trees will help with the leaf problem here. Our oaks produce thick, heavy leaves that feel like leather. They sink in water. When you shoot a leaf blower at them, they actually seem to grip the ground harder. They resist mulching and raking. When you burn them, they burn for days and can’t be put out. They kill grass but somehow allow weeds to grow freely. I hate them. Destroying a dozen or so major leaf droppers should improve things a great deal. I’ve managed to make great progress with a mower mulching kit and the world’s most powerful backpack blower, but having fewer leaves would be better.

Maybe I could plant some decent trees to take their places. Mulberries. Bushy magnolias. Pecans. I’ll be ancient before they grow tall, but at least they’ll get a start.

As a person who loves tools, I am eager to see what kind of tree can lift a grown oak up out of the ground. Whatever it is, I want one.

Stop Being a Fruit and Buy Man Tools Before It’s Too Late

Cutting up fallen trees is maybe 95% of my tree work. On this property, they fell themselves due to rot, so I don’t have to do it. And I’m afraid to fell them, because a lot of them are rotten and could drop logs on me if disturbed.

Nonetheless, I decided to fell a water oak today.

When this house was built, someone who didn’t know what he or she was doing allowed several oaks to remain right beside the driveway. I mean RIGHT beside it. Within two feet or even one foot.

This was stupid. Pavement and tree roots don’t get along, and oaks grow silly horizontal branches from their trunks whenever they feel like it. On a tree close to a road, these branches block cars. Pushing a tree over is the safest and cheapest way to get rid of it, but if you push over a tree next to a road or sidewalk, the roots may lift the pavement or concrete. The trunk acts like a prybar. This means you have to cut the trees the hard, slow, unsafe way.

It’s also a pain to make it up a curved driveway with oaks up against it. Your guests are likely to ding their cars.

Today I was mowing, and I decided to try to cut the tree, even though the top was rotten and could conceivably drop wood on me.

The tree was about 12″ thick at knee level, and I would say it was 50 feet tall. It was in a place where it couldn’t hit anything expensive when it fell, except for me. I looked at it carefully, and it seemed to be leaning slightly over the driveway.

I got out my 18″ Makita cordless saw, because it’s strong and handy, and I made a homeowner-grade notch on the side to which I thought the tree would fall. Then I started the back cut.

The saw got pinched. How? If a tree is leaning away from a back cut, the cut should get bigger, if anything, as the cut progresses.

I had to pound a wedge in to get the saw out. Then I got a 10″ EGO cordless pole saw and continued working, thinking a few feet of pole length would make me less likely to be crushed.

The tree started to move, and I fled like Biden from an unscripted interview, only the soles of my footwear actually left the ground. It fell exactly where I thought it would. So why did the saw get pinched?

The wood was very wet, and wet wood likes to swell. I don’t know if that explains it.

Getting rid of the tree was real work, but it wasn’t unpleasant. A tractor, a great brush fork, a timberjack, gloves, and some good saws made everything go smoothly. I am old, but I can get rid of a pretty big oak in about two hours.

The stump was a problem. When I used the Makita to cut it close to the ground, it didn’t want to finish. I fired up the new Husqvanra 562XP with its 24″ bar, and it slid right through the stump. That saw is perfect for this property. It has enough grunt to make a 24″ bar work, and it’s not too heavy.

Where I cut the stump close to the ground, it was around 20″ across.

I poured pure Roundup concentrate on it, like I did some other stumps. Is it legal? Don’t really care. Come arrest me. If I had any used motor oil, I would have used that, too. “Here’s one for my homies at Exxon Mobil. Deepwater Horizon style, y’all.”

This is all fun, but I will probably still have to pay to get some things moved. I have big trees too close to the shop and house, and I can’t make them all fall where I want with the tools and skills I have. Tomorrow a guy is coming to give me an estimate.

I’ll miss the shade very badly, but you would have to be an idiot to keep trees like these. The guy who built the house was not thinking. Maybe his wife put her foot down, thinking trees were more important than shelter and their life savings. I want the problem trees gone before the hurricane season really gets going. If my buildings are safe, I will be at peace all season long instead of hoping trees fall the right way.

So how much money have I saved this weekend? Based on previous estimates from arborists with unrealistic conceptions of my unwillingness to handle my own problems, I would say at least $2500.

That is offset by the grand or so I spent on a new saw and some parts for other machines. Maybe I should have made my old Echo function instead of springing for a second big saw, but based on my horrible experiences with shops and trying to do my own repairs, I think I did the right thing. From now on, I will ALWAYS have one big saw ready to cut. I will never again have to wait three months and put up with downed trees while shop nincompoops keep my only big saw.

I’m not counting the other stuff I’ve done for myself when I figure what I’ve saved. I had to go to a neighboring property to cut trees rooted on my side of the fence, and that had to save me another $2500. I must have done $15,000 worth of work since I’ve lived here, not including this year.

Arborists charge too much. If you’re an uneducated tradesman, and you can’t make a very good living charging $500 for an hour’s work, you are incompetent. If you insist on getting over twice that much, go ahead and lose your business and find a job shoveling manure. I was willing to work with you. I’m not your sugar daddy.

An arborist here should be able to gross three grand a day without pushing it or overcharging. He should be able to keep half of that. That’s $7500 per week, assuming he doesn’t have a subordinate who can use his equipment to handle Saturday jobs and bring in another $750.

Keep $2000 to live on, and invest the rest in your business. Get a second lift truck. Find a guy to run a second crew. There’s another $6500 per week.

Am I wrong? I doubt it. I think an arborist who charged reasonable prices would be booked up solid, all the time. The volume would pay off much better than sitting idle while trying to talk people into giving you their IRA’s for quick, easy jobs.

Quick nickels make people richer than slow dollars. Sam Walmart died a billionaire because he got that.

If they mess with me tomorrow, I am completely capable of renting a cherry picker and removing most of the problem trees. It’s not that hard if you take things slowly and minimize the risk. The smaller the pieces you cut, the safer you are. It’s hard to hurt yourself if you’re willing to spend hours cutting three feet at a time.

I should rent one anyway, just to get over the intimidation.

Moving the pieces is easy. It’s a joke. It’s safe. The fork I created for my tractor is nothing short of amazing. It does nearly everything a grapple will do, much, much better. The other things a grapple will do, I generally don’t need, or I can easily work around them.

I was told I could get this place cleaned up by a crew for $4500. If that’s true, consider the check signed. If not, I’ll be renting, doing most of the work by myself, and then paying a much lower figure for the rest. The $4500 figure I heard was unreasonable, but not so high I would refuse to pay it in order to avoid a huge hassle. Let’s see what happens.

I have 4 new wedges coming tomorrow, because I cut up and/or lost the ones I already had. One vanished into thin air while I was cutting a leaning tree. The parts I ordered for hot-rodding the Echo will arrive tomorrow, too. I finally got a decent helmet with a mesh mask and ear covers.

I need to start killing more small trees before they cause problems. Letting small trees grow in bad places is like encouraging small amounts of immigration from Muslim countries. Decades later, you will pay a large price.

It’s Working

Here’s to traditional marriage. I think my wife will agree.

Today I decided to make a big step on making this property my own. Sometimes I’m intimidated because I can’t help thinking the original owners knew what they were doing when they made bad landscaping decisions. I am getting over that. Today I killed a magnolia and two bottlebrush trees.

It seems like I fix just about everything these days. My tractor’s poorly-situated steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I took it out, modified the frame (drilled and painted a big hole) to make it easier to remove next time, and took it to a hydraulic place for a rebuild. I would have rebuilt it myself, but there were problems identifying the parts. Now I have the numbers, because they were on the receipt.

I managed to bust the engine’s front cover while putting the cylinder back in, necessitating an expensive visit to the dealer, but at least I know how to deal with the cylinder in the future. And I painted up the new cover I bought, so it looks a lot better than the old one.

The house’s original owner had some horrible brush tines that were held on with chains and chunks of wood. I cut them in pieces and turned them into a quick-attach fork which is a thousand times as good. Welding, cutting, painting. Got it all done without help. No one else has a fork like this one. It’s fantastic.

I put a Pat’s quick attach set on my 3-point hitch, and it made it easy to switch attachments. Totally superior to the heavy, overpriced adaptors other people still, for unknown reasons, buy. I stuck a ballast box on the hitch, so now I have a compact ballast and a great brush fork to work together.

Today I went out and ripped my bottlebrush trees out because they were sick and planted two feet from my workshop. You never plant anything two feet from a building. Not even shrubs. The trees threatened to beat up the eaves during storms, and if they had been big trees, their roots would have threatened the foundation. They were in the way. Planting them was a bad choice. I pulled one out pretty easily with a chain and strap. The other one took more work, but now it’s on the burn pile. I plan to replace them with this: dirt. Or maybe two small shrubs with roots at least three feet out.

The magnolia was maybe 15 feet from the workshop and 10 feet from a water oak. It had to go. It had no future. It could have fallen on the shop. Every tree that poses a falling hazard is on the way out.

I am terrible at felling trees because I rarely have to do it. To gain practice, I tried to lean the magnolia away from the shop. When it started to move, I ran away like Sir Robin facing the Mad Chicken of Bristol, and the tree decided to stop falling. I decided brute force was the answer, as it so often is, so I chained it to the tractor and pulled it over.

I cut it in pieces and got rid of it, and now the cattle are snacking on magnolia leaves. I put glyphosate concentrate on the stumps.

When I came back in the house for breaks and to shower, my wife stared at me. I think she was starting to appreciate what I do around here. I was soaked in sweat. I had a mashed fingernail from a farm jack. I had a stick in my hair.

I had done maybe $1000 worth of work in around 3 hours. I base that on absurd quotes I’ve received for tree work. It was definitely work, but I enjoyed it. I have good tools, and my skills are adequate.

When I started taking off my work clothes, I was going to put them in the laundry room, but she told me to leave them where they were and let her know when I wanted food.

I showered, drew myself a Yard Boss Lager, put on my new glasses, sat in my new recliner, and relaxed.

My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.

I got up yesterday, prayed, ate, dealt with a business lease for a rental property, fixed a cabinet door my wife had leaned on…I did all sorts of stuff. I can handle things that would leave metrosexual modern husbands in tears. I can drive a manual transmission. I can shoot, and it doesn’t bother me to kill cute animals that cause problems. I can make ammunition. I own taps and dies.

In return, my wife looks after wife stuff. She doesn’t compete with me and try to find an edge every day. She leaves the toilet seat up.

Satan has turned modern marriage into an endless competition. A series of selfish negotiations. It was never supposed to be like that. We were supposed to know and love our roles.

When you drive a car, the engine doesn’t decide it wants to be an air conditioner. The battery doesn’t decide it wants to be a transmission. The parts of a family should work together the same way.

Interestingly, in news related to old guys with rural properties, I have read that Tom Selleck is afraid he will have to sell his farm.

Tom Selleck must surely have a lot of money. He was in a very successful TV series 40 years ago, and he made a number of okay movies. He did a bunch of Hallmark movies. He has been in a CBS series for the last 14 years.

He lives on an avocado farm in Ventura County, California. Reports about the size of the farm vary, but it’s around 60 acres. He says he may have to sell if his series is cancelled, in order to have a good lifestyle until he dies.

How can that be true?

I looked it up. You can find the address on the web. He pays about $65,000 per year in property taxes. He may live another 15 years, so let’s say $1.5 million yet to pay, with numerical increases for inflation. Shouldn’t he be able to pay that?

His home is an avocado farm. Aren’t avocados expensive? Shouldn’t there be at least six figures of net income from that?

I decided to find out what John Travolta pays in my county. It’s about $27,000 per year. He has a smaller property, but on the other hand, the improvements are nuts. An incredible mansion that connects to a system of runways. He has carports with jets in them, at his house! One jet is a commercial airliner QANTAS used to own.

Travolta pays no state income tax, unless he has property in other states. He pays no county or city income tax. His property tax, during the same period during which Selleck will pay $1.5 million plus increases, will be about $400,000 with increases.

He can have all the guns he wants. He can keep an AK-47 in his car. If he shoots a criminal, our sheriff, Billy Woods, will probably take him to Dairy Queen.

He doesn’t have rolling blackouts. The power is always on.

I wonder what Tom Selleck is paying California, his county, and his municipality. And why is he there? He’s supposed to be conservative. My guess is that his wife won’t let him move. Or maybe he’s a RINO.

He could be in Tennessee or Florida right now. Or Idaho. Or Wyoming.

Zillow says his property is worth about $12 million, and Zillow is usually pretty accurate. Zillow thinks Travolta’s house is worth $3.5 million, which is very modest considering his wealth. The acreage is about a third of Selleck’s, which is still pretty good for a non-agricultural property.

If you don’t need runways, I guarantee you, you can get 60 acres here for what Travolta’s house is worth. With an agricultural exemption, your taxes will be around $16,000 per year.

You can have horses, cattle, goats, sheep, ostriches, emus, donkeys, or just about anything else you want. What you can’t have is California.

Selleck should not have a mortgage right now. Unless something is wrong, his home is paid for. He should be able to sell his ranch, pocket maybe $9,000,000 after capital gains, move to a better state, buy a better farm, and have well over $5,000,000 in additional retirement funds. He should have something saved up from his work. He should have the maximum Social Security benefit.

Maybe he just spends too much. When you’re 79, and you’re worried about your future, you ought to be able to rein in your spending and survive on a net worth of over $12 million. Even if all he has is a reverse mortgage, he should be able to fly business class to nice places every year and eat anything he wants.

If he moves in next door, I’ll be happy to help him and his wife find the best local barbecue.

Consider Your Chains Broken

I’m starting to feel like my mission in life is to shame manufacturers who make it hard to get parts and information.

Today I’m going after Textron/EZ-GO. This annoying company makes good carts, but finding parts on their antiquated site is impossible, and their customer service is bad. On top of that, they charge like crazy.

Right now, I have a request for information waiting, and I am not sure they’ll ever respond.

I did something stupid, causing a wheel to fall off my ST350, and I messed up some lug studs. I fixed them with a die, but I don’t trust them, so I need new studs. Problem: it’s very hard to find them.

If you look for EZGO studs on the web, you will see endless ads that say “except ST350.” Sites that sell all kinds of EZGO parts generally don’t sell these studs. You can get a new rear hub with studs in it, but expect to pay at least $85.

Some kind person found a site that sells the studs. It’s called Country Cat, probably because all us cats in the country have carts. I’ve used it before. I bought a $250 OEM carb for about $125. I have a China carb that works, but I wanted insurance for the future because of the difficulty of getting EZGO parts, and the price was impossible to turn down.

In case anyone else out there wants these studs, here is a link:

LINK

You can try a car parts place, hoping a similar stud will work, but only one place near me had a book listing studs by measurements. Generally, they are sold by car model. The studs I found would have required precision boring, which I did not want to do.

If you have an EZGO Workhorse, you should buy these studs and set them aside, and you might consider buying a carb, because the Subaru Robin engines in these “old” (two short decades) carts get very bad support.

I’m compiling info on my power equipment, and I just got my Husqvarna 125B blower figured out. This is a very small, light gas blower which is very handy for things like blowing crud off a porch or out of a garage. If you’re very old, it’s good for birthday cakes and discouraging old women who want to kiss you.

The carburetor in the 125 series is a Zama C1Q-W37. The Husky part number is 5904601-02. Unfortunately, Husky makes it hard to find the carb partial rebuild kit, which is what is needed in nearly all cases when a 125 blower won’t run. The Zama carb kit’s part number is RB-47. It’s very cheap. This is a total rebuild kit. The diaphragm kit is GND-18.

I have a Chinese carb in the blower, and it runs nearly perfectly, so I have little motivation to change it, but I probably have the Zama in a box somewhere, so I ordered the kit, and I’m going to try to repair it.

The OEM carb is cheap, so don’t pay the highest price you find. You can get it for something like $35.

I looked into my new Husqvarna 562XP saw so I would have a rebuild kit on hand. The carb is from Zama. The entire carb designation is C1M-EL48, and the diaphragm kit from Zama is the GND-105, which is cheap. The total rebuild kit is the RB-181.

This is only for saws from number 20121401173 forward. Before that, the saw came with an EL44 or EL46 carb, and they are not as highly regarded.

Excuse me if any of this stuff has already been published here. It’s hard to keep it all straight.

Not Even the Kragle Can Ruin Small Engine Thursday

Today is Small Engine Thursday. The first of its kind.

I’ve been struggling to pull myself out of the sludge of years of small engine problems, and it’s starting to come together. I bought a new Husqvarna 562XP chainsaw. I got my Echo CS590 running. I took my small Husky saw and my Echo polesaw to the shop.

I decided every Thursday would be Small Engine Thursday. Start every small engine on the property, let it warm up, and make sure all is well.

Today I ran the CS590, the 562XP, my Husqvarna 125B miniature blower, my Echo SRM-3020T trimmer which has a circular saw blade on it instead of string, and my huge Echo backpack blower. The 125B could probably use a carb rebuild and a return to the original non-Chinese carb, but it moves dirt and leaves and doesn’t quit.

I have several parts on the way to make things better. I’ll be modding the Echo saw and stashing carb rebuild kits away for later. I bought some more tools, of course.

Yesterday I put a new oil cap on my Makita cordless chainsaw and cleaned it up to confirm it was pumping oil.

The EZGO ran a couple of days ago, so I’m not worried about it. I don’t want to fool with it until tomorrow because I did something dumb. I removed a wheel to fix a tire, and I must not have torqued the nuts correctly when I put it back on, because the wheel fell off just outside my gate. I had to jack it up, put it back on with the one nut I was able to find, and limp it to the garage. I had to order new lug nuts and a die to clean up the lug studs. The die arrives tomorrow, but if I can find new lug studs, I’ll just buy them.

Both tractors run now.

Things are good. Now if I can just find out why my car is throwing false overheating alarms.

Maybe Some Day Manufacturers Will do This

I am doing something I should have done long ago. I am studying my yard tools and writing down useful things.

I’m writing stuff down here because I know other people have pulled their hair out trying to get this information.

My Echo chainsaw is a CS590 Timberwolf. It uses the same carb rebuild kit as Echo’s other 60cc saws. The part number is P033000000. The carb is made by an extremely annoying company, Walbro, which has horrible customer service. The Walbro part number is K22-HDA.

My Echo pole saw is a PPT-280. The carb part number is A021001340. It’s a Walbro WYK-233A. The rebuild kit’s part number is P003001120. The Walbro kit number appears to be K13-WYK. It replaced other kits with other numbers. The kit is hard to find due to poor support from Echo, which (apparently) is also Shindaiwa and Yamabiko.

My Echo weed trimmer is an SRM-3020T. It’s a monster. The carb is a Walbro WYG-11A, which you can get for about $80. Echo part A021004831. There are two repair kits. One is a tune-up kit which doesn’t include carb parts. It contains an air cleaner and spark plug and so on. The part number is 90181Y, and it costs over $30. The ECHO number for the carb kit is P003005940.

Check your weed trimmer’s serial number to make sure the carb kit fits. There were multiple versions.

Echo’s website is useless. It doesn’t function.

My Jonsered CS2240 (Husqvarna 435) saw has a Zama C1T-El41 carb. Easier to find than Walbro carbs. The rebuild kit has two part numbers. RB-149 and Z000-001-K035. Don’t ask me why. You can get one for around $12.

Only Took 7 Years to Get it Working

I got my Echo Timberwolf chainsaw running, finally. I did two things. I did a half-rebuild on the Walbro HDA-327 carb (same rebuild kit for all 60cc Echo saws), and I finally got straight information on the starting procedure. I learned some simple things which, oddly, are not widely known.

If you have an Echo CS590 saw, I can help you start it.

First, you need to know about the choke. It’s not just a choke. It also holds the throttle open. It does this when it’s engaged, and it also does it after you disengage it, so if you pull the choke and then push it back in, the throttle will stay open.

With that in mind…

1. Lift the on/off toggle switch that controls the spark. Without this, you have no chance of starting it.

2. Engage the choke. Leave it engaged. This chokes the engine and opens the throttle so the saw will get a lot of gas when it tries to start.

3. Depress the compression release. Some people claim it keeps saws from starting because you need compression to start, but my saw starts with it depressed, so that can’t be true. It makes it easier to yank the cord.

4. Engage the brake. No one listens to this advice, but it’s bad to have a saw start at high speed with the chain spinning like crazy.

5. Put the saw on the ground and put your foot through the handle to hold it down. No one does this either, but it’s safer than the showoff way. One problem: it’s not actually possible to put your foot in the handle unless you have tiny feet. Put a piece of wood through the handle and step on it.

6. Pull the cord out a couple of inches and then yank as hard as you can. After a few pulls, the saw should make some kind of noise. When you hear that, disengage the choke. It doesn’t matter how feeble the noise is. If you keep yanking, you will flood the engine.

7. The saw should start within a few pulls. When it does, tap the throttle to release the detent that holds it open. The extra gas is only to make the saw start. If you run it fast with the brake on, you’re going to fry your clutch.

8. Release the brake.

That’s about it. If it doesn’t work, your saw is badly tuned or has some other problem. Fix it.

Other tips:

1. Avoid canned fuel. This one surprised me, but there is a very sharp saw mechanic on Youtube who says she has repeatedly “fixed” dead saws by pouring out Trufuel and other canned gas. Get yourself some ethanol-free gas if possible. If you can’t find it, get ordinary gas. Treat it with Echo Red Armor oil and Biobor EB to make it last longer. Don’t use Sta-Bil red. The blue stuff might work. Supposedly, you can get 6 months out of regular gas treated with the right things. Biobor EB promises “up to” 18 months, but it doesn’t mention “down to.”

2. If your saw won’t start, dump the fuel and replace it before doing anything else. Just find a quiet corner of your yard and dump it on the ground. No one will get cancer.

3. If you’re storing your saw for a while, dump the fuel, put canned fuel in it, and run it dry, pulling the choke to get all the gas out. The big problem with this is that a dry saw may have problems with dry seals later, but you can’t have everything.

4. When you treat your fuel, take a Sharpie and write the date on the jug. Never use a jug you also use for gas that has no oil in it, because you will get confused and ruin your engine. If you know how old your fuel is, you can make intelligent decisions later.

5. Start your small engines every week. Pick a day and start them all. If you avoid letting your saws sit idle, you should be able to avoid the business of running them dry.

6. If you flood your saw, make sure the throttle is open and try again. Engage the choke and disengage it. You can also put a velcro strap around the trigger to keep it depressed. This sometimes works.

To start your Echo warm:

1. Make sure the switch is on.

2. Engage the choke.

3. Disengage the choke. Now the throttle is open.

4. Engage the brake.

5. Put saw on ground and immobilize it.

6. Yank until it starts.

7. Tap throttle.

8. Disengage brake.

Here’s something really important: whenever you see the saw when it’s not running, turn the switch on. It won’t hurt anything to have the ignition on when the saw is not running, but if you leave it off, you will forget to turn it on before starting the saw, and you will flood it.

Here’s some more interesting info. Heat ruins saws. How do you get rid of it? A few ways.

1. Keep your blade as sharp as possible. Believe it or not, pulling a dull blade will overheat your saw. You will ruin the cylinder, piston, and possibly other things inside the engine. When that happens, you have a parts saw.

2. Ask around and see what knowledgeable people think about your saw’s factory exhaust. Some saws have pretty restrictive exhausts, and they contribute to heat. There are known ways to fix this, and they are simple.

3. If you have an old-fashioned bar with a lube port, lube it.

My saw runs like an F1 car now.

Echo CS590’s come with plastic caps on the carb screws to keep people from adjusting them too far. You will eventually want to get rid of these caps and adjust the saw correctly, but this will probably violate your warranty, which is generally regarded as worthless anyway. It doesn’t even apply to carbs.

The carb has a main jet with a hole in it to prevent it from running too lean, and this causes problems. You can buy a better main jet, pound the old one out, and pound the new one in.

I put a bigger carb (from the 620P) in my saw because it allows for upgrades later on. I’m also getting a new exhaust deflector to reduce back pressure and heat, and I will be putting two small holes in the muffler for the same purpose. I’m going to install a new key on the flywheel to advance the timing and give the saw more power.

Once all this is done, I’ll have a saw about as capable as my new twice-as-expensive Husky 562XP, which is not modified. I might put a 24″ bar on the Echo, because it’s the perfect size for this farm. A 20″ bar is a bit handier, though.

I’m going to take the Echo to the shop to have a pro tune it before I use it. If the carb isn’t right, I could damage the saw, and I would rather pay than see that happen. As I learn more about carbs, I’ll be more confident about fixing it.

I found out that 2-stroke carbs usually don’t need full rebuilds. I watched a Steve’s Small Engine Saloon video, and all he did was replace the diaphragms, internal fuel screen, and needle. I did the same things, and my saw started running. I squirted some carb cleaner into appropriate places while I worked on it.

My carb will start if the H and L screws are out 1-3/4 turns, so yours should too, if it has the same carb. Doesn’t mean these settings are optimal, but if you can get the saw to run, you can adjust the screws.

This is a good saw, and for the price, it’s fantastic, but it has a reputation for flooding very easily, and the advice you will get on the web and in the manual will generally make things worse. If you don’t know the secrets, this saw will make you wish you were dead. It’s worse than having no saw at all.

I would advise people to avoid the 60cc Echo saws and get saws that are less troublesome. If you’re a pro, you will not notice any problems with these saws, but an uninformed amateur with dubious tools and skills can make better choices, in my opinion. Any saw that works is better than a garage princess.

A bargain saw that ends up costing you hundreds in parts and labor, in addition to preventing you from clearing your land, is no bargain.

I’ve been relying on new Chinese carbs for a long time, but if I can fix up my OEM carbs with rebuild kits and get good results, I’ll continue doing it. I can’t keep supporting my local shop as though I had two X chromosomes and a dresser full of skinny jeans and yoga pants.

When the Desire Cometh, it is a Tree of Life

I had an extraordinary experience today. A very good one.

I have lots of trees. They fall down a lot. I have to keep saws in order to deal with them.

When I first got here, a hurricane passed by at a distance, and even though we were not hit, we got winds high enough to knock over lots of large trees. This was about 23 days after my arrival. The previous owners left the property in great shape, and I only got to enjoy it for three weeks before Satan blew his nose all over it.

I had no saw, and after the storm, getting a saw was impossible. Not only were local stores cleaned out; because people had gotten used to Internet shopping, online retailers all over the US were cleaned out. One state did that. It’s a good lesson to remember.

One day not long after the storm, I had a near-miraculous experience. I was stubbornly Googling to find saws, and I found a Jonsered (red Husqvarna) 16″ 40cc saw advertised on Tractor Supply’s site, and it was at a store only 20 or so miles off. I bought it, thinking there was no way I would actually get it. I thought it had to be a website error, or maybe an employee would hide the saw and sell it to a friend or relative. Incredibly, when I went to the store the next day, the saw was there.

I managed to find a 20″ 60cc Echo CS590 online at Acme Tools, and I pounced. Once it arrived, I had two fairly good amateur-grade saws to get me through the job of fixing the property.

I didn’t know much about small engines. I didn’t know:

1. Modern gas is garbage, and that goes quadruple for ethanol gas. If you let ethanol gas sit in a small engine for even two months, you may clog your carburetor so badly it has to be disassembled and cleaned.

2. Sta-bil gas treatment, which is what most people use, is also garbage. It forms a thin protective layer atop gas in your tank, but if your tank ever moves, the layer breaks, and the protection stops until it forms again. Not knowing this, I used Sta-bil.

3. The most important thing to think of when you buy a small engine is the quality of the local repair apparatus. If you don’t have a good repair shop nearby to fix your gold-plated Stihl, you are much better off buying and scrapping three Poulans in a row.

I clogged up both my saws. More accurately, Democrats clogged them up, because they’re the idiots who force the ethanol scam on us, and they’re probably somehow responsible for the fact that even ethanol-free gas is not as stable as it used to be. I have no evidence to back that up, but I’ll bet it’s true, because the whole thing has that Democrat smell about it.

I fiddled with various solutions to the problem. I bought cheap Chinese replacement carburetors to get around cleaning the factory carbs. This sometimes worked well. I kept having problems, though, and around 16 months after I bought the saws, I took the Echo to authorized repair centers, and while they did manage to get it going, they took about three months. When I started using it, screws fell out of the case because they had not been tightened enough, and that cost me more time while I waited for new ones to arrive.

The saws have continued to have issues, and I am part of the problem. I let them sit more than I should have. The more problems I had, the more discouraged I was, so the less I tried to use them, and then I let them sit longer.

I bought an 18″ Makita cordless saw to fill in the gap. I have to say it’s wonderful. It has incredible torque, and it always, always, always runs. With 4 batteries, you can do the kind of job that would take you about two hours with a gas saw, as well or better than a gas saw. After that, you’re stuck with a dead saw, but that’s not so bad, because maybe 95% of cutting jobs involve less than two hours of work.

I’m not saying the saw will run for two hours on 4 batteries. It won’t. I’m saying it will do a job you can do in two hours with a gas saw. Most of the time, when you’re doing a job with a chainsaw, the saw isn’t running. You’re driving wedges or moving around or doing other things.

I have some trees that need work right now. Two oaks are hanging out over a neighboring property, and I have to get together with the people over there and move them. I haven’t been able to get either of my gas saws to work right. The Jonsered surges while idling, making the chain move and making the saw dangerous, and the Echo can’t be started no matter how many tricks I try. I got all sorts of expert advice which does no good.

I have really suffered with these saws. I’ve had jobs pile up on me. I have wrestled with these saws over and over in my shop, exhausting myself and getting filthy, never knowing when the next adjustment or change in procedure might make them work. It’s very unpleasant, walking out to the shop for the fifth time, after four failures to get results, not knowing whether this day will be any better.

I was willing to spend money. I was willing to work on the saws myself. It didn’t matter. I could not get anywhere. I felt that any American with a good net worth should be able to get a saw fixed easily and quickly, but it was an obstacle I could find no way around.

Every time I thought about the problem, I felt frustration. I felt hopeless. I marveled at the difficulty, and even though I was willing to pay for help, I marveled at the cost.

Mechanics now charge about a hundred bucks an hour, which is obscene, but they’re no better than they were when they charged 10 dollars. If you keep taking a $300 saw in, it can turn into a $900 saw before long. What if you buy a $900 saw to begin with, and it has fewer problems, so you save hundreds on mechanics? It starts to make sense after a few years of suffering.

I used to say I would never buy an expensive saw, but over the last week, I have had a change of heart. Getting my Echo saw repaired seemed impossible in this county, and I as getting nowhere fixing it myself. I didn’t want to take it back to the people who held it hostage in the past. I started to think it might be better to get a more powerful new saw, which I needed anyway, and treat it right from the outset. I could buy a brand with a good local repair shop and put my Echo problems behind me.

I tried to get advice on the web. I got some great advice and some stupid advice. People told me this Echo model is a dream saw which always starts reliably. Go Google it and see if you believe that. There are multiple videos of people who have struggled with this saw; they publish their solutions. Other people I communicated with offered solutions I already knew about, which did not work. Others, more helpfully, recommended certain saws to me.

I learned some stuff which may possibly be true.

There are two types of chainsaw: professional (logger and arborist) and bad (homeowner and farmer). An average homeowner can get years of satisfying use from a bad saw, but pros do not like them. They’re less durable, and they tend to be heavier for their size. Drop one from a tree, and you may have to scrap it. They have other shortcomings too.

There are three good brands of chainsaw in America, or maybe I should say manufacturers, since a manufacturer can have more than one brand. The manufacturers are Stihl, Husqvarna, and Shindaiwa (parent of Echo). Stihl and Husqvarna make the best pro saws. Shindaiwa/Echo makes some pro saws, and it also makes the CS590, which has pro guts in a homeowner-saw body. If you shop, you can get a CS590 for around $400. Add over $300 to that for a comparable Stihl or Husky with all-pro construction.

The CS590 is probably a fantastic bargain for people who use saws frequently, know how to prevent them from clogging, and have good repair shops close to them. For me, it was an orange plastic torture device most of the time. I did a lot of things wrong when I got my saw, making it worse, and I had no help.

Yesterday, I finally decided I should get a pro saw and then keep looking for places that could fix the Echo and the Jonsered. A new Echo place had opened up, so maybe there was hope for that saw. I would work it out so I had two big saws, at least one of which would most likely run on any given day.

Based on advice, I decided I wanted a saw with modern electronics in it to make it run better. Husqvarna and Stihl have saws that adjust themselves to deal with things like temperature and humidity. Pros tell me they work better than old-fashioned saws. Husqvarna’s system is called Autotune, and Stihl’s is called M-tronic.

There is a Stihl/Husqvarna dealer 5 minutes from me. I thought that would be a great choice. I would pick a model on the web, go in, ask them how quicky they did mechanical service, and get a price. If they made me happy, I would buy a saw.

I figured I wanted a Husqvarna 562XP or a Stihl MS362 C-M. Big enough to move a 25″ chain, which is exactly what I need.

I went to the nearby place. They were very nice, and they assured me they could turn small repair and maintenance problems around in a week or so, barring the need for hard-to-find parts.

On the other hand…

1. There were three guys there, and none of them knew much about chainsaws. They were not very familiar with the Stihl line. I had to Google and confirm stuff they said. One of them said I needed to visit when the “two-stroke guy” was there.

2. I’m pretty sure they represented a non-M-tronic MS362 as an M-tronic saw. I don’t think they knew it.

3. I asked what they could do regarding price, and they said “nothing.” Stihl sets the price, and you pay it. Over $900.

4. I mentioned Echo, and they said they wouldn’t let an Echo product come through the door. So much for getting my old saw worked on.

5. They’re a Husqvarna dealer, but they don’t sell Husqvarna saws.

In the parking lot, I looked up the next-nearest Husqvarna dealer, and I drove over. Same kind of place. Tractors, saws, zero-turns, and so on. There was one guy there, in a dirty shirt. Young. He worked on machinery, himself. He was the owner.

1. He knew everything about Husqvarna saws as well as Echos. He used to work in an Echo shop. I asked him all sorts of stuff about the 562XP on the wall, and he knew all about it. He knew all the known issues. He knew the best way to cope with the ethanol crisis. He told me stuff no one else had, and I have researched for years.

2. He said he could fix Echo products. No problem. He also does Jonsered, of course. He had a Husvarna 435 there, which is just like my ailing Jonsered. He can fix my bogging Echo trimmer.

3. I asked about the price, and he gave me a 15% discount which wasn’t officially supposed to kick in until later in the month. I asked about the warranty, and he said Husqvarna would add three years if I bought their gas.

4. He told me about the yearly stuff the new saw would need and about what it would cost.

When he told me about the discount, I was sold. He said I only needed to spend $28 on the gas, so I jumped on it. He registered me with Husqvarna. He took the saw, filled it, and checked it out.

I was looking at around $970 for the Stihl without M-tronic. I got the Husky, Autotune, the gas, and a 5-year warranty for about $840, and I finally had a place to get things repaired.

I’m going to bring my sick tools in and get them fixed. Then I’ll have three gas saws and one cordless, so it’s not likely I’ll end up with no saws that work.

When I left the store, I felt like I was high on heroin. The stress left my body completely. The misery of dealing with this saw with no help for 7 years was over. I can deal with the two trees I have to help move this week, and I can expect to have working saws from now on. I can get yard tools fixed.

I’m not doing the sensation justice. A stronghold was broken. It was a very big deal to me. I felt ecstatic. Euphoric. Peace enveloped me. I thought I could feel my blood pressure dropping.

This story shows how to sell saws, both for your own store and for the one your competitors run. The guys at the first saw did as much to sell me this Husqvarna as the guy who got the money. They tried, but I don’t think they’re all that good at sales. They seem like nice people, but the other guy completely outclassed them, like Tyson Fury boxing Kevin Hart.

I may be able to deduct this expense because I rent out my pasture. Sure hope so. I plan to start running every small engine I have, every Thursday, from now on. Once everything is working, I’m going to keep it going without a lot of down time.

That’s the end of my tale of struggle and frustration. Even now, I deflate, breathe out, and sink into my recliner when I think about how relieved I am.

It’s going to be amazing to see everything on the property working.

Threefold Cord in Action

Even if you know leftism is just a collection of Satanic brainwashing myths, it makes an impact when you see your beliefs proven right. This is normal when things God tells you are demonstrated right in front of you.

Leftism is rebellion against divine authority. That includes every form of leftism, including feminism.

Christians are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and communicate with him throughout the day, submitting to him and listening to him. A man is supposed to be the anointed authority over his household, backed up by the authority of God. A wife is supposed to submit to both God and her husband.

A man and his wife are supposed to have different jobs. A man has the primary obligation to guide, provide, and protect. It’s a position of self-sacrifice. He provides a stable environment in which the wife and kids can thrive in safety. A woman is obligated to look after the house, and she is supposed to handle the bulk of childcare. The childen are supposed to submit to both parents as well as God. The dog submits to everyone. Satan and his fatherless imps are somewhere below the dog and the rats and roaches.

Before my wife got here, I had to do everything. Manage the business. Bring in the money. Look after bills and taxes. Look after the buildings and grounds. Shop. Cook. Clean. I had to buy a back scratcher.

Leftists hate it when you say this, but it’s true: men are not that great at homemaking. Our standards are completely different. Even if we are clean and orderly, the homes of unaccompanied men lack the peaceful, warm atmosphere of homes ordered by women.

I was reasonably clean, but I had a plastic folding table from Home Depot in my kitchen. I had plastic chairs around it. I had an ammunition press and a large cache of cartridges in the dining room, along with two benches and a lot of tools.

The garage was chaotic. I sprayed it with pesticide, I kept the garbage from backing up, and once in a while, I opened the doors and ran the leaf blower. That was good enough for me.

There was a lot of junk on the kitchen table, because I ate in the living room. Left to their own devices, men will eat in three places: the couch, the patio, and standing over the kitchen sink.

Walking in my master closet was very difficult because I had left a lot of guns and other junk in there.

I was tired of cooking, not because cooking was a lot of work, but because I also had to clean and shop. Sometimes I made good food, but often, I made things that were simple, that I could choke down in order to prolong survival. It saved me work.

I had $20 white sheets from IKEA. I got hooked on them while caring for my dad. Cheap and easy to bleach. On top of the sheets, I used either a quilt I found among my sister’s abandoned belongings when she moved to rehab, or a cheap Chinese electric blanket.

Things were good. Men are not like women, so I was okay with my standards. Things are better now, however.

My wife nearly freaked out when she got here, saying she could not be happy unless things were in order.

All junk was removed from the master suite. We went through things I had been ignoring, and we threw out stuff I should have dumped long ago. I was relieved to have the motivation and help. We laundered the pillows. We made several shopping trips for real bedding.

My wife emptied and cleaned my dresser and end tables, and she put things back in, in ways that made somewhat more sense. She vacuumed. She dusted. She organized the closet. There is so much room in there now, you could have home church in the closet. She goes in there to pray for long periods.

We emptied the kitchen cupboards and pantry. My wife cleaned, we threw stuff out, and things went back in. We got a rack that hangs on the pantry door, and we filled it with things like condiments and cookies. We like it so much, we have a second one on the way for the other door. The pantry seems three times as big now.

My friend Mike stayed here last year, and he left a household’s worth of junk and food-related things. We threw out a lot of expired Mike items.

She organized my laundry room, where I keep my paranoia shelves full of nonperishable food. They seemed full when she arrived. Now they seem empty. Simply moving stuff around made a big difference.

She attacked the garage. Mike had left a huge box of seasonings, oil, condiments, and other food items in there. Unbeknownst to me, he had left a box of starch and a box of confectioner’s sugar open, which explained why I had a roach problem in a garage where the garbage was always sealed up and dumped regularly. The box containing all the food items was full of roach poop and irate live roaches. I had to blast it with Raid and leave it alone for hours before I could put it in the car to take it to the dump. Roaches will colonize a car if you let them.

I sent Mike photos, and he said he wanted to save some things. Mike is a man, too. Everything went to the landfill.

Mike had left a couple of hundred pounds of random items in the room where I keep the piano. My wife moved it all into a smallish space in the garage.

I sold Mike my Moto Guzzi motorcycle a long time ago, in order to get it out of the garage. This plan backfired, because he left it where it was. Inspired by my wife, I put it outside under a tarp. We now have so much room, we can bring the pickup inside.

Mike keeps saying he’s going to fly down and haul his things off. I don’t know how long I can protect them from my wife.

My bathrooms were pretty clean, but now the cabinets are ordered. I redid the sink P traps, so now we are safe from leaks. My wife bought post-poop spray for use after people drop a deuce.

We plan meals together. We shop together. Generally, I cook. When I cook, I get to go sit down afterward. My wife cleans up the kitchen. That’s totally new. I can’t get used to it.

While I sit and she cleans, I can almost hear shrill, high-pitched voices with New York accents, telling me women aren’t supposed to do that.

Yesterday, she cooked a neat African meal. It was the first time she cooked an entire meal here. It was really good. I didn’t know she could cook. I got up to do the dishes afterward, and she sent me to the living room and cleaned the kitchen herself.

When I work on things like the tractors and the grounds, I don’t have to think about things I’ll have to do in the house later. I don’t concern myself with vacuuming or cleaning toilets. It’s all done for me.

I’m having problems with my old gate opener, so I have to keep opening it up and working on it. I have a kitchen cart I’m building, and there is still some welding and painting to do. While I work on things like that, my wife is in the house, imposing order.

I haven’t done a load of laundry in weeks. Clean clothing magically appears in the dresser. If I spill something on my shirt, my wife insists I give it to her and go get a fresh one.

I showed my wife how I clean toilets when she got here. Since then, I haven’t cleaned a single one. They’re always shiny and fresh-smelling, like only the angels used them. I’m not positive, but I think she keeps leaving the seats up. I’m afraid to ask. What kind of woman does that in feminist-ruined America?

We got on the living room. We looked at a zillion couches and chairs. We bought a really nice vintage rocker at a consignment store, which we visit frequently. I learned about Howard Restor-A-Finish, a product that works wonders on used furniture. I picked out a traditional wool rug like the ones my grandparents had, and we’ll get one after the turn of the year.

I’ve been on Ebay, buying traditional kitchen stuff. I got some old copper Jell-O molds for the walls. I bought some Griswold cast iron trivets to replace my mother’s trivets, which were looted and lost. I may pick up a few more century-old cast iron items.

We bought a bunch of picture frames, and we are putting family photos on the walls and coffee table. We have dedicated a hallway wall to future photos of friends and relations.

When my grandparents died, my relations took things that were ostentatious or valuable. I got my grandmother’s kerosene lamps. They’re worth around $30 each, but I remember seeing them on the mantel in her basement. We took them out and cleaned them up, and now they’re on our mantel, along with a couple of clay whiskey jugs I inherited. I’m considering putting an old butter churn on the hearth.

We go to the flea market and look for other vintage junk. Not something a man does when he lives alone, unless he has hopes of attracting another man.

I bought some vintage postcards of scenes I remember from Kentucky. I got a frame for them, and we’ll put it on a wall somewhere. I have a 1950 stamped postcard from the post office at the kibbutz where I worked. It commemorates the opening of the post office. We’ll frame that, too.

Furniture stores have sales in January and February. We plan to take advantage. We couldn’t find an old bedroom set we liked, so we chose one, and we will buy it next year.

Men create quarters. Women create homes. I would never have done any of these things had I not gotten married.

The difference is tremendous. The house seems bigger. It’s more peaceful. It’s a good place for prayer. I’m much more on top of business obligations, because now I have more time as well as a person who depends on me.

My wife doesn’t have to think about food, clothing, housing, protection, car problems, anything related to tools, or medical care. I don’t have to occupy myself with wife duties. It’s tremendous. It’s traditional. It’s correct. It works.

Of course it works. It was God’s idea.

Meanwhile, the US is full of 35+ career women–feminists–who live with cats, worry about their eggs, and put out because they think it’s the way to find husbands. They learned this from feminist leaders…who didn’t marry.

They’re miserable. They have no one to look after them. They have no one to look after. They have to compete with girls who are younger and therefore much more attractive. They think about buying ideal semen from tall, high-IQ, handsome strangers they will never meet and who are probably mostly transients and fast food workers. Women who bought the lie try to buy sperm from the kind of men who won’t marry them. They know most of their kind will die single.

Single men are better off than single women. Harsh fact of life. My life was very good before I met my wife. She was poor. She lived in a hovel with two other women. She had no reason to think kids were on the way any time soon, and she had no way to provide for them. I was sitting in a big house on a farm, enjoying my hobbies and my relationship with God, lacking for nothing except someone to pray with and make sacrifices for.

Our relationship is unusual in that she was in another country, but American single women are also worse off than single men. They are not as capable of looking after themselves as men. No one ever says, “It must be tough, being a man, living alone.”

They crave kids most men don’t crave. They have biological clocks, but it’s possible for a 100-year-old man to have kids.

My great-grandfather had 11 kids by his second wife, my great-grandmother. She was 15 when he married her, and he was already old. He and her father arranged his second marriage without consulting her. He married her on her 15th birthday, and they were married when he died at the age of 78.

He was about 55 when my grandfather was born. He ended up with 21 children. He was about 70 when his last child was born. Women can’t do that.

My great-grandmother was probably saved from additional children by menopause, not any deterioration on her husband’s part. Meanwhile, American women in their twenties are freezing eggs.

We pray together at least twice every day. We share testimony and revelation. We discuss the Bible. We help motivate each other.

This is a good system, but because I was raised in Satan’s world of sick relationships, somehow there is a part of me that feels I have to defend it. Like the part of me that used to feel like I was walking into porn theaters when I walked into gun ranges.

God’s system is right. It works. It’s for everyone.

I feel as though I am working harder than expected to make this home feel homey, and I think this is because the world is washed up. It’s a hard, cold place now, full of perversion and outright insanity. A traditional home is insulation from, and a counterbalance to, the filth of the persecuting, trans-worshiping, phone-addicted world, and it’s a reminder that we will eventually live in a world filled with God’s light and warmth.

I’m writing this not long after Jill Biden put out a stomach-twisting video of the left’s vision of a proper Christmas. You must have seen it by now. Christmas is supposed to be a sort of second Thanksgiving, in which we celebrate the gifts of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. It’s about the love of families. We celebrate these things in our homes, where we try to rekindle our warmth and love for each other. A home is never so much a home as it is on Christmas.

Ms. Biden’s video is a sickening parade of sexual oddities in bizarre costumes, with fake grins of the sort you would expect to see on kids high on molly, prancing among creepy decorations as though recreating the kind of thing an unsaved person might see while descending into hell after a Christmas Day overdose.

It’s terrible when the left tries to destroy Christmas, but it’s even more nauseating when they try to take it over. The Biden video has nothing in it to remind us of Yeshua. It’s full of dancers who are about as charming as horror movie clowns. Their insincere grins are supposed to be cheery, but they come off as threatening, like the grins of demons awaiting the arrival of the dead.

It reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for years: the distaste homosexuals feel for Christmas.

Young people may not remember it, but we used to hear a lot about the misery homosexuals endured over Christmas. Other people were celebrating with their husbands, wives, kids, and other relations. Homosexuals had nobody and no relationship with the God they knew detested their behavior. Christmas was a yearly reminder that a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs, selfishness, sex with feces-smeared anuses instead of vaginas, and too many sexual partners to remember was vastly inferior to normal heterosexual life.

I don’t know if it’s true, because self-pitying mythology was common, but they used to say many homosexuals committed suicide over Christmas, recognizing the emptiness of depravity and not knowing any way to be delivered.

The church has done an extremely poor job of delivering people from sexual perversion and compulsive fornication, but to be fair, not many people are interested in deliverance.

There is no way homosexual families will ever be “right.” It’s a hopeless quest, like putting a wig on Bruce Jenner, giving him a girl’s name, slicing his penis off, and expecting normal men to ask him out. It’s terrible when people give up everything to chase toxic mirages.

Jenner has actually complained that men don’t want him. It is astonishing that he didn’t expect that. You can put icing and candles on a cow pie and tell people it’s a birthday cake, but no one in his right mind will want to eat it.

There is a HUGE difference between a woman and a castrated man full of wrong hormones. Huge. Ask any man. The flesh feels different. The mannerisms are feminine, not effeminate. The mind is different. The skin has a different scent. Women don’t make noise when they walk. And women don’t have big man hands built for swinging swords and axes.

I think Biden’s video is motivated in hostility toward the “haves,” like all of leftism. Other people have decorations with crosses. They read the Bible to their kids. They look at manger displays. They hold hands and thank Yeshua, knowing he has prepared a perfect future for them. Leftists are out in the cold, so they try to make Christmas about nonexistent elves, a maladjusted fat man obsessed with other people’s kids, reindeer, trees, drunkenness, fornication, and gifts bought on credit, which assure a miserable New Year full of bills and interest.

I see Biden’s video as an act of aggression. It’s an effort to replace Yeshua and Christians with sexually ambiguous weirdos in costumes straight out of a child’s nightmares. Maybe it’s a deliberate effort to mock Christmas and Christianity. “It’s our White House now, and THIS is your White House Christmas.”

And the choreography and music are horrible.

All in all, I think a Christmas tree lighting ceremony ruined by perverts and angry Muslims is easier to watch.

How could “Dr. Jill” look at this video and not realize it was a belly-churning abomination?

“Dr. Jill.” The doctor of education. Like Bill Cosby.

I’m a doctor, too. I’m a doctor of law, like every lawyer under a certain age. I don’t go around making people call me “Dr. Steve.” Ridiculous. If you want people to call you a doctor, get a real doctorate. Become a physician or a mathematician. Learning how to teach kids to clap erasers isn’t the same as mastering neurosurgery or real analysis.

Shaquille O’Neal has a doctorate, and he insists the world is flat. He says he has seen it through airplane windows.

Dr. Shaq.

Great guy. An inspiration in many ways. Not a real doctor.

We need to stop questioning God’s guidelines. The person who created them is God, after all. He knows what works. His ways work. There are millions of normal families all over the world who do things God’s way, and they get results. They’re not buying sperm and cutting themselves.

I am extremely grateful for the change in my life. I wanted this even when I was a kid. I wanted it even after hormones kicked in, and other boys were only thinking about nailing up as many pelts as possible. I knew it was right, even though I was a terrible Christian.

I pity the people who won’t listen. It doesn’t matter how hard and long you suck on a poisoned pacifier. You will never get any milk.

Mail-Order Bride Shipping Arrangements Made

Thanks, everyone who prayed for my wife to get her visa. They gave it to her this afternoon in Lusaka.

It’s an annoying story. They promised a response within 5 business days and then made us wait two weeks. It’s actually worse than that, because they didn’t do anything at all that we are aware of until she showed up yesterday at the embassy to find out what was going on.

I think they would have let our application go for weeks had she not visited the embassy. I believe we would still be waiting, and I also think she could have gotten the visa last week if she had gone earlier to shake them up.

She had a dream this morning. She was at her grandmother’s house, and a tall Arab dressed in white traditional clothes showed up and bombed the place. Somehow she knew he belonged to her church and attended regularly.

He had arrived on a private plane, and he left on one. He had authority behind him. He was rich.

It sounds bad, but her relatives on her dad’s side curse her and each other all the time. It’s a popular pastime in Zambia. When something good happens to someone in your family, you kill a chicken or whatever and curse them.

The immigration system is weird, as anyone who has seen luxury hotels full of illegals could tell you. I had to pay a new immigration fee today in order to get the green card processed. They should give you a green card when you get your visa, but they make you pay separately.

Looking for flights is annoying. We want her to go business class this one time in her life (until I croak). For $7000, I can get a somewhat better selection. For $5000 or less, I get a research project.

Orbitz offers a bunch of acceptable flights, but when you select one, it disappears or increases in price by a sizeable factor.

Skyscanner is supposedly one of the best flight sites now. We have also used Kayak a lot.

I found an acceptable flight, so we are all set.

Guess it’s time to shop for a turkey.

God Bless the Government

I guess the 4 people who read this blog are now wondering why my wife isn’t here in my house. I wrote some stuff suggesting she was going to arrive a while back.

New immigrants have to get visas in order to enter the US. Unless they’re criminal or terrorists who just walk across the border and then get many thousands of dollars’ worth of our money in order to help them remain here and burden us. Legal immigrants who do everything right have to be interviewed at American embassies or consulates. Generally, they get their visas within a few days of their interviews. Interview Monday, visa by the following Monday.

We were scheduled for an interview that was to take place almost a month ago. Then the embassy fired a bunch of employees for corruption, and perhaps not coincidentally, our appointment was postponed 10 days. She went to the appointment, they asked for a little more evidence to prove we were sincere, and they said they would get back to her within 5 business days of receiving it.

That was over two weeks ago. We emailed to ask if anything was wrong, and we got no answer. Today she went to the embassy to check on her application, and she was told to show up tomorrow at 2 p.m. “for collection.” This presumably means she is to collect her visa and green card, but she didn’t ask for clarification.

Barring the kind of miracle nobody wants, she will be on a plane this week. We are not going to wait around.

I hoped she would be here the first week of this month. Now I’ll be happy if she is here for Thanksgiving.

Of course, flight prices have gone up a thousand dollars. I don’t care any more. She’s not going to sit over there and wait so I can save a thousand dollars.

She got the impression that the people at the embassy had forgotten about her. They had to poke through their computer. Maybe they are having a hard time now that they have a smaller staff. I suppose it takes a while to replace skilled people.

We should have a visa and green card in hand by 9 a.m. tomorrow. We did everything right. We supplied tons of evidence. Normal life should start by the weekend.

After all this, of course, she will have to get familiar with operating the lawnmower and changing my car’s oil, and as for me, I will want a new recliner.

Okay; probably not.

If I never do another video chat in my life, it will be too soon. I look forward to praying with her in person for a change.