My Personal Trainer’s Name is Milton

Life here is going extremely well, although I have some concerns about my wife because she holds her belly and sings to it. I am pretty old, I have seen lots of pregnant women, and they have all seemed pretty miserable. My wife isn’t getting the message.

I’m having fun moving hurricane trees. A real whopper flopped in my woods, over the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. I would say it’s 80 feet tall, or, more accurately, long. It’s about two feet thick at what used to be waist level. It fell so the crown got stuck in some other trash oaks.

Some of the upper branches hit the ground, and others were caught in the other trees. In a situation like that, it can be impossible to predict what the tree wants to do. Is it firmly stuck at the top end, or is the root ball holding it up? If you cut it, will it do nothing, fall straight down, or fall while rotating? Which end will fall when you cut? Will the tree’s canopy drop, ripping limbs off the other trees? Will the stump end come toward you? Will it go up or down?

Making things worse, this is a V-shaped tree. It has one big trunk and one small one. It fell in the direction of the small trunk, pinning the smaller part of the tree to the ground. The V-shaped base of the tree held the big trunk up so the lowest good place to cut was at waist height. When you cut a nearly-horizontal tree which is three feet off the ground, the part that falls can fall…three feet. With you close at hand.

I have two new chainsaws. I got frustrated with my Echo Timberwolf and the little Jonsered CS2240 I bought in 2017, because I had trouble keeping them running. This year, I bought a Husqvarna 562XP with a 24″ bar, and I just picked up a 50-cc Echo CS-501P with a 16″ bar. The CS-501P usually comes with a longer bar, but I wanted a light, overpowered short saw for bucking. My new saws are commercial saws. The old Echo came with commercial innards for the most part, but it also had some residential-grade stuff, some of which I have replaced.

As you can see, this is a scary tree to cut. If you cut the top end, it could come loose and crush you without warning. If you cut the bottom end, you can’t tell which way it will go. It was surrounded with vines and other trip hazards, making it even more fun.

I will call the big part of the tree “Tree 1” and the small part “Tree 2.” I decided I should try to get most of Tree 2 out from under Tree 1 so Tree 1 would not fall on it and then roll toward me. Using my knowledge of tree behavior, accumulated over 7 years, I cut Tree 2 a couple of yards from the root ball, confident I could keep it from pinching the saw. Which it did, almost immediately.

I had to go back to the house and get the cordless Makita to get it loose. I could not get a wedge into the wood to open it up, so I had to make a second cut close by, while standing nearly under the trunk of Tree 1.

I can’t say enough about the cordless Makita. If you have a lot of trees, you can’t really get by without a gas saw unless you want to buy maybe 8 expensive batteries, but for most jobs, the Makita is fantastic. It has incredible torque, it cuts really fast, it makes no noise, it always starts, and Makita engineered it so it’s very easy to use. You don’t need a scrench to install or adjust chains.

Makita makes top-quality gas saws under the Dolmar name, but they don’t have much of a presence in the US.

If I only had a few chainsaw jobs to do every year, I’d be happy with the Makita and a cordless pole saw.

Well, that’s not true. I’d also want a small gas saw to free the Makita if it got pinched. Which it would.

I got a fair amount of Tree 2 out of there. Tree 1 did not move. I figured the next thing was to cut Tree 1 by the root ball.

I have bucked a lot of fallen trees, and the root balls have pretty much always stayed put. Not so this time.

Guessing that the root ball wasn’t applying any torque to the trunk, I figured the top of the trunk was in compression and the bottom was being pulled. After praying not to die, I cut into the top and made a slot deep enough for a wedge and a chainsaw bar. I pounded a wedge in to keep the cut from closing. Then I bored into the side of the trunk and cut up to the slot I had made. Then I noticed that the wedge was moving deeper into the wood.

The cut was opening, not closing as I had expected. The canopy of the tree was trying to fall.

I ended up going back to the house and leaving the tree alone. I planned to get back on it the next day. The cut was gradually widening, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to poke at it.

When I got back the next day, the trunk was nearly separated from the stump. There was a strap of intact wood under it, holding things together. The stump had rotated upward, and the stump of Tree 2 had inconveniently positioned itself under Tree 1. Tree 1 was resting on it, preventing the trunk of Tree 1 from falling and ripping the strap apart.

I had to get a pole saw and cut the strap. I was not going to be near the tree when it gave up. When the situation resolved, the canopy of the tree fell straight down, so it was no longer hung in other trees. Anyone trying to work under it, thinking it was hung securely, would have been squooshed.

Now I have to start nibbling the tree and moving the bits away from the road. I can keep nibbling until I get close to the stump, and then I’ll get the lowest segment of the trunk off the stump and onto the ground.

I used to burn everything I cut, but I eventually realized it didn’t matter if there was debris in the woods. It goes away in three years, and while it’s there, it doesn’t bother anyone. I plan to put this year’s junk in piles and leave it.

Burning piles of trees is kind of fun, and it makes you feel like you’re doing a good job keeping your land neat, but it’s also a pain. You have to be around to make sure nothing gets out of hand. You have to get permits. You have to put your piles out before a certain time of day, which is not always possible. Sometimes a pile will smolder for several days, and I just count on the condition of the surrounding grass and trees to prevent problems. It’s very hard to start a wildfire in unfavorable conditions. Impossible, really.

I don’t like going to bed knowing something out there is still burning, but it’s either that or stay up all night with the hose and tractor. It’s not unsafe to let things burn, but I can’t help thinking about worst-case scenarios that can’t actually happen.

Since I learned burn permits aren’t needed for piles smaller than 8 feet across, I am making an effort to cut trees in smaller pieces.

I am going to hop up the new CS-501P. I didn’t have a great need to buy it, but my other two small saws have some limitations, and I thought it would be fun to have a better one and increase the power. The Makita is limited by battery life, and the Jonsered is very unpleasant to work on.

I bought a new exhaust deflector. This won’t increase the power much, but it may help heat escape. It’s aluminum. Heat is what kills chainsaws, and their greenie exhaust systems hold it in. Arborists really hate environmentalists. It’s amazing how conservative they are. I can see why, when I think about all the ways environmentalists hinder their work and cost them money.

The saw has a strange removable tube in the muffler, and that’s coming out. This should make a noticeable difference. I think Echo made it removable for this reason. I may also drill some holes in the muffler.

I got myself a decent-quality tachometer. I already had a tach, but I learned the model I got was not considered accurate. Hard to believe, at the high price of $7. When the new saw has gone through a couple of tanks of fuel, and the exhaust stuff is installed, I’ll use the tachometer to check the top speed when the saw is tuned orrectly. When that is done, the saw should be making substantially more power. The dyno guy, referenced below, got something like 15% this way.

I don’t really need to check the top speed. It turns out a tachometer is not really needed to tune a saw. You do it by ear. I didn’t completely understand things when I bought the tachometer. But it should help when checking modifications to see if I’m getting improvement.

I might even open up the cylinder’s ports. I could take this little saw up to 5 horsepower, which would be an increase of about a third. My 60-cc Echo Timberwolf has a bigger engine and only put out 4 horsepower before I changed the carb and timing. My Husqvarna 562XP only produces 4.7, and it pulls a 24″ bar very well.

Does it make sense to soup up a saw when I’m planning to use a 16″ bar? Maybe not. I don’t care.

Actually, it does make sense. Most of the time, I’ll be cutting things under 4″ thick, but it would be convenient to have a light saw that really rips through things a foot across. I would be able to leave the bigger saws in my shop more often.

Adding a couple of pounds to a saw’s weight makes a surprising difference over the course of a job. A little extra weight makes the saw wear you down.

Chainsaw people are nuts. They love modifying their saws. There is a guy on Youtube who built his own chainsaw dynamometer, and he hooked it to a computer. He does modifications and tests the saws before and after. He gets saws to put out 50% or more power than they did from the factory. This stuff is not shade-tree-mechanic ignorance.

The weird thing is that modified pro saws don’t lose reliability or endurance. Reasonable modifications actually make them last longer and make them harder to damage. This is what the professional mechanics say, anyway. They also say homeowner-grade saws are different because they have plastic cases that may not like increased power. A pro saw will always have a metal case.

I will lose my warranty if I modify, but I don’t care about that. Echo is notorious for horrible customer service and weaseling out of warranty obligations, and anyway, I don’t want to leave my saw with a mechanic for 6 weeks. I went a whole summer with a saw in the hands of bad mechanics.

I should be able to fix anything at all that goes wrong. I don’t know if I will ever be able to fix complicated saws with electronics issues, but I can deal with the mechanical things.

I really enjoy cutting wood. I have never been one of those people who look forward to working out, but for a few years, I’ve felt like there was a ball of excess energy inside me. I have gone out and bucked trees just for the sensation of cutting, lifting, and hurling. It’s very odd.

I was cutting yesterday, and I was breathing a little hard. I kept going. I wanted to feel that way.

I started wondering. Was I really experiencing physical strength and energy, or was it all mental and spiritual? What if I was putting my body in danger because it wasn’t as strong as I felt?

Here’s something weird: I don’t get sore after doing this kind of work. I get dehydrated and tired eventually, but the day after I work, I feel great. I am not working out these days, and I’m old. I don’t take medicine to keep me alive. I eat a lot of ice cream. I’m not preparing myself in order to avoid soreness. I don’t know what’s going on.

I hope it lasts.

This type of work makes me lose weight. When I do a lot of wood removal, I can’t keep weight on. May that happen this time as it has in the past. The Ben & Jerry’s weight has to go.

Disturbing Dispatch from Kamalia

Aging actor Dave Bautista has made a career of putting on clingy briefs and performing a fake, somewhat homoerotic wrestling act with other big guys who were not athletic enough to be make it in actual sports. You know what wrestling is like. They put their faces between each other’s legs. They hug each other tight and lie on top of each other. They have to shower each other’s fluids off their bodies.

In order to do this, Bautista took illegal drugs for years. Either that, or he just magically went from a normal weight of maybe 200 pounds to over 300, just by eating lots of chicken and lifting weights. No one else in the history of the world has been able to do this, as photos of pre-steroid professional bodybuilders show, but maybe Dave is the first.

No, he took drugs.

Call it my opinion. Sure.

Anyone involved with natural bodybuilding will tell you you’re not going to put on more than 25 pounds of natural muscle in a year, and you’re not going from 200 to 300 without drugs. A 200-pound man with an exceptional physique will have about 90 pounds of muscle, and he would have to more than double that to hit 300. It does not happen naturally.

He says he is now down to 240. He has really shriveled. I would guess he’s closer to 210, but wrestlers always lie about their size, as he did when he was in the ring. He has a great physique for a man in late middle age who doesn’t take drugs, but he’s not impressive. He’s in the same league as a typical high school basketball player who has been lifting weights for three months.

He gave interviews talking about his struggle to lose weight. That amazes me.

“No matter how tired I am today, I am NOT going to go shoot up with performance-enhancing drugs.”

He appeared in interviews and tried to convince interviewers he had just been fat. Please. Fat with a six-pack and a chest 15″ bigger than his waist.

I don’t think anyone ever looked at Bautista’s enormous steroid muscles and bulging veins and thought, “Man, what a tub.”

Here’s why he quit using drugs: he had to. You can’t keep taking high doses of gym drugs into your sixties and expect to live long. When was the last time you saw Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shirt off? There is a reason. Look up the things prolonged drug use does to bodybuilders.

Now Bautista has made a campaign ad. It was styled as a comedy sketch, but it’s clearly an ad. Leftist men are generally less masculine than conservative men, and it’s something leftist women complain about a lot. It’s not something that can be disputed.

Until pretty recently, I thought that, while effeminate men are definitely more likely to be leftists, the “soy boy” thing was exaggerated. But the more I see, the more I think it’s not that far from the truth.

When you look at Antifa assault videos, it’s hard not to notice all the long, spindly limbs and 34″ chests. There are a lot of them.

Kamala Harris is unpopular with men, and that even extends to black men, whom you would expect to give her blind support. So Bautista made an ad in which he does weird exercises, including hitting a tire with a hammer, while using the popular term for women’s private parts to describe Donald Trump. The idea appears to be that a guy who used to get overly intimate with other men for money, while wearing briefs and flexing drug muscles, is more manly than Donald Trump.

Just to compare:

1. Bautista pretended to fight other men in fake, choreographed matches with predetermined outcomes while using drugs because his natural muscles were too small to get him the job, and claiming to be at least two inches taller than he really was, and

2. Donald Trump got shot in the ear with an AR-15, and when the Secret Service tried to remove him from the stage, and he had blood running down his face, and there was no way to know whether more shots were coming, he refused to leave, forced his face out into the open, pumped his fist, and yelled, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Meanwhile, a man near Trump had his brains blown all over his family by another round, and three other men were shot and survived.

Which one proved he was a real man?

Here are a couple of photos so you can decide which person you think is more of a man:

There’s Trump, shot, bloody, and insisting on exposing himself to more fire so he can encourage and comfort his base. And there is Bautista, crossdressing in a pantsuit, a low-cut top, and pearls. Without his steroid muscles. He will probably continue to shrink. Drug muscles don’t vanish entirely overnight.

A cruel Internet commenter said, “He looks like if Jeff goldblum and RuPaul had a 60-year-old baby.” Another said he looked like a gay realtor.

Bautista made the video with the help of Jimmy Kimmel, one of worst TDS sufferers on television. Kimmel has decided to be the voice of outraged decency, which is pretty strange, given his history as second banana on The Man Show, which featured a segment called “Girls on Trampolines” and skits in which Kimmel appeared in blackface as basketball player Karl Malone.

In the trampoline segments, women wearing things like bathing suits and just plain underwear jumped high in the air and spread their legs at the cameras.

The Malone skits mocked Malone as an ignorant black ghetto figure with a subnormal IQ. Not that there could have been any racist intent.

Here is Kimmel doing the kind of thing the liberal press has been helping him to bury for the last 21 years:

That’s about 50 times worse than the act that got Al Franken kicked out of the Senate. I think Franken should have gotten off with an apology, but what Kimmel did may amount to a sex offense.

What would you do if you caught him doing that to your mother?

Where is the outraged decency? Where are the tears and remorse? Aren’t liberal celebrities supposed to vanish into rehab after doing things like this? Shouldn’t he have come back and said, “This is not who I am”?

He drank a lot of beer on the show, so maybe he doesn’t remember doing this. Surely the explanation isn’t hypocrisy.

Kamala herself made an ad that featured the kind of men leftists think are masculine. She wants to prove real men support her.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A morbidly obese guy feeding chickens and saying he eats carburetors. A scrawny old homeless-looking person with his sleeves torn off, standing near someone else’s motorcycle and tool cart for XY cred. A man who is pretty clearly gay but seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck, proving he loves the ladies.

Actually, the carburetor guy also seems gay. He has a strong lisp, which is something you don’t see a lot in straights.

Two of the guys say they drink single-barrel bourbon, neat. I don’t get that at all. There are probably 500,000 homosexual men in America who lisp and prance, can’t throw a ball or lift a suitcase, and drink over a fifth of hard liquor a day. When I was a kid, the old Irish lady who lived next door to me used to turn up tumblers of pure vodka and empty them.

She could throw a ball, though. Even when drunk.

Why would Democrats equate manliness with drinking hard liquor? Are they in the eighth grade or what? They remind me of my friends and me, in high school, counting the beers we drank between classes. We were not manly. We were little idiots.

Maybe Kamala is manly. She slurs her words all the time. My personal opinion is that they’re covering up a serious drinking problem. If not, maybe she has a neurological disease.

The stuff about motorcycles and carburetors seems like the sort of thing Democrats usually call sexist. Can’t women fix carburetors and motorcycles?

Today my wife and I saw two huge lesbians on Harleys, blasting up Highway 475 in matching T-shirts. Really loud pipes. I guess they’re manly enough to vote for Kamala.

I notice the Kamalians didn’t bring guns into the mix. Some shrill lady on the diverse writing team with no straight white males must have vetoed that.

Anyway, Bautista is nuts, and I suspect he it will not be long before he outs himself. He has married twice and had kids, but you can’t wear an outfit like that unless something is amiss. Or someone is a miss.

Burning Stuff Shouldn’t be This Hard

I got up today with the intention of getting myself a burn permit. I must have 20 tons of tree parts already in piles.

Figured I was prepared. I had my customer number for the forestry people. I knew I had to call before noon. The weather was okay.

Called with plenty of time left. I thought. They told me I had to call by 10 a.m.

Now what do I do with the day?

It seems like they used to give permits more easily. I used to call in the morning and sail right through. Then they said I had to call by noon. They said I had to take a class and get a special status in order to be able to burn under certain conditions. Now I have to call by 10 a.m.

I miss the days before I knew about permits. I went outside, set the pile on fire, and that was that. I never got caught, even when I accidentally set my pasture on fire.

It’s too bad downed oaks are worthless, because God has blessed me with thousands of oaks. They’re useless for lumber and furniture. They make fine firewood and smoker fuel, but the supply is so great, no one wants them.

The types of oak I have rot pretty fast outdoors, so even though they would make very strong posts and boards, they wouldn’t last. Indoors, furniture made from them wouldn’t look very good, and they’re so hard, they’re tough on tools.

I also have a fair number of sweet gums. It’s a second-tier furniture wood, and Asians like to make chopsticks from it. No one wants it, though. It’s supposed to be terrible for smoking. Some people claim it’s toxic.

My latest chainsaw is on the way. I thought I might get out and cut some more wood this weekend, but the saw won’t be here until Monday, and if I use my old saw now, I won’t get to use the new one for much. Also, the burn piles are immense, so I would like to stop adding to them until at least one is clear.

I guess this will be a good day to remove the remaining bits of trash that could obstruct the mower. Then I can replace the mower’s exhaust pipe. Tomorrow, I could mow. My yard looks like a jungle.

I’m looking forward to having the election over with. Biden is basically a retiree, the country is on autopilot, Harris and Walz keep making fools of themselves, and it’s starting to look like Trump will win. If he does, I expect a lot of violence from leftists, who are much more hateful and immature than conservatives. I would like to see that behind us.

Today I saw Kamala say something truthful. That makes it a special day for me.

Christians showed up at a Harris rally. They were protesting the murder of the unborn. Harris was speaking, and a man shouted, “JESUS IS LORD!”, which is true. And Jesus hates abortion.

Harris was talking about walking Trump’s progress backward and making it easier to turn women’s uteruses into murder scenes. The man shouted during a pause, when the room was quiet. He could be heard clearly.

Harris said, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.” She said she thought they had meant to go to a Trump rally close by, which she described as “smaller.” Of course, Trump was in another state so he could go to the Al Smith dinner, which she skipped, perhaps out of the same cowardice that keeps her from doing interviews.

She grinned. She thought her remark was funny.

She was correct about the protestors, though. A Harris rally is no place for Christians. The Democrats openly opposed God and Israel in a voice vote at their convention years ago, they elected Obama, who was very hard on Israel and promoted perversion, and they treat the unborn like unwanted warts.

No Christian has a good excuse to be a Democrat. They have excuses. Just not good ones.

If you vote for Kamala, you’re voting for perversion, the murder of unborn children, antisemitism, racism, rioting, shoplifting, and the persecution of Christians. Those are major issues. Fake Christians who refuse to vote for Trump complain about his personality and his sexual history. That’s ridiculous. Yeshua himself is not running for president. We don’t have an ideal candidate. We have to avoid the worst choice we have, and that choice is Harris.

It’s not just Harris. It’s the flood of demonized Harris appointees that will follow, including EVERY FEDERAL JUDGE. She will appoint judges that support the castration and skinning of confused minors going through phases. They will support abortion up to and possibly past the point of birth. They will persecute Christians. They will empower Muslim terrorists.

Both parties serve Satan to a large degree, but the problem is much, much worse on the Democrat side.

Even though I hope Trump is reelected, I still believe America is finished. Evangelism is pretty much dead here. The perverts have won; even Fox uses incorrect pronouns. Young people are awful, and they are the ones who will take our places. In the future, unless the rapture comes, the vast majority of Americans will be arrogant, cruel, Yeshua-hating, antisemitic, witchcraft-loving, feminized, dishonest, shallow, useless people.

Privacy is a thing of the past. With the advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence, free will is disappearing. Immigrants from horrible places are piling in and having huge families. Nearly all churches where the Holy Spirit is acknowledged are run by greedy, heartless pimps and whores who enslave people with the prosperity gospel. The other churches promote anal sex but not holiness.

It’s not going to get better.

Christians are going to be marginalized more and more. We will be impoverished and silenced. Attacks on Jews will be tolerated and encouraged.

We chose all this. The people who came before us chose Satan over Yeshua, they raised us in their stupidity and immaturity, we are worse than they were, and the nation has continued to deteriorate.

These days, I spend a lot of time resting in God’s presence. I don’t do it just because I want him to do good things for me. I do it because I want to take breaks from this stinking, corrupted world. It’s like cracking the door to heaven and sticking your nose in. I keep begging God to bring the rapture and tribulation and put an end to this culture.

I hope it happens quickly, because otherwise, my children have no future on their own planet. They’ll live in little Christian bubbles smaller than mine.

America was wonderful. We didn’t understand what we had. The lack of persecution was extraordinary, and it was combined with extreme wealth, power, and safety. Those things are disappearing. Living here will be like living in two-tier England, where Christianity is broadly hated and Christians are seen as troublemakers and parasites.

When America is gone, there will be no big, rich, Christian country to run to. Every single large nation will belong to Satan.

The world has two big continents: the Americas and Africa/Europe/Asia. Then there is Australia, which is lost. There is no fourth land mass we can run to in order to establish a Christian society.

The filth of the coming world is disturbing to think about. The whole world will be like the most degenerate cultures we now have.

Consider “Palestine.” They hack suspected Israel-sympathizers to death and leave their body parts on display in the marketplaces. They have children’s shows where they tell kids to murder Jews. The filthiest kinds of terrorists have called their parents during massacres to show off the blood on their hands, and the parents have been transported with joy and pride.

Think of Afghanistan, where the rape of boys is considered normal. It’s a country so savage, it’s not worth trying to save. They murder the people who try to help them, just like the Somalis.

Consider Nigeria, where Muslims are so dangerous, you need multiple armed escorts in order to get around. Think of North Korea, where intelligent, hard-working people drop dead on the streets and rot, starved and full of worms.

Then there’s Central America, where drug dealers skin people alive, and the people support them.

Left to themselves, human beings are almost as bad as demons, and the majority of us have decided to be left to ourselves. There is no limit to the depravity we can embrace.

The other day, I read about government employees in Maryland, removing a young man from his parents home, permanently, because they refused to support his “trans” delusion. The parents are Christians. I was so discouraged, I prayed for God to kill the government employees.

Thousands of times, I have prayed for God to reach vile, cruel people and correct them. When I read about this kid, and I thought about him being castrated and pumped full of drugs by people full of demons, I couldn’t find the patience to ask God to turn them around. Just kill them. They can’t be reached with persuasion. They will do too much harm if they are allowed to live, and what they are doing is an atrocity.

What will I do when the demonized run Florida, my son goes through a feminine phase, and clown-haired stooges with unlimited authority drag him off to have his penis sliced down the middle, hollowed out, and turned into a fake clitoris in a stinking, never-healing hole that grows fungus and bacteria? Shooting them won’t help. I’ll go to prison, and they’ll send more stooges. Suing won’t help. The judges will be on their side. If it happens, I’ll just sit and pray and wish God would take both of us.

I understand why Yeshua, the God who is love itself, is going to return and massacre people. The Bible says his robe will be wet with their blood. I get it. Enough is enough. It’s better than letting this mess deteriorate to the point where life is utterly pointless. Saving new souls is important, but the reality is that human beings have limited value. A person is worth more than many sparrows, but it’s better that people die and go to hell than to have them remain alive and torment the people God loves without significant resistance.

God has killed millions of people, so no Christian should be upset when someone says he will do it again. He told us he’s going to do it.

He created hell and the lake of fire. Satan didn’t do these things. He couldn’t, and besides, the lake of fire is his future home for eternity.

One of the main purposes of these places is to keep the irredeemable away from the rest of us. Heaven can’t be heaven if they aren’t confined and forgotten, and the Messianic Age can’t take place unless fallen angels and demons are removed.

Regarding the apocalypse, I don’t want to see people suffer. I just want evil people to be defeated and kept away from God’s children. I have very little energy left to deal with them. Unfortunately, death and hell are the only permanent solutions. We can’t get permanent relief unless a lot of people die and go to hell. They will not change.

There is a blessing in knowing and being close to a totally worthless, hateful, destructive person who brings misery to everyone around her and makes it impossible for them to relax and thrive. It teaches you that God was right to create hell and the lake of fire. It makes you realize people eventually have to have relief, regardless of what the worthless have to suffer.

Most Christians never learn this lesson. They learn that Yeshua wants us to pray for our enemies, but they don’t pay much attention to the scriptures about turning people over to Satan or refusing to eat with them.

Yeshua never chased anyone. Have you noticed that? He showed up and invited people. He showed them God’s goodness and power by supernatural means. That’s it. When they turned him down, he left without hesitation.

He left most of the Jewish people behind at about 33, knowing hell would swallow them by the millions. He knew Jerusalem would be sacked, the temple would be destroyed, and the people would be dispersed for 2,000 years.

He could have stayed until he was as old as Methuselah, begging and cajoling. The priests had no power to arrest him. He turned himself over to them and chose to be crucified.

Would he have let a worthless son live in his house for 50 years and abuse him? Would he have enabled a junkie or a gambler? Would he have sold his house to pay the son’s creditors or bookies? Of course not. God can’t be manipulated. This is the real meaning of, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”

I curse the Harris campaign, literally, as often as I remember to do it, but a Trump victory would be like giving a terminal cancer patient Tylenol. Better than nothing, but no solution.

Incidentally, I learned something interesting about the diaspora. Solomon caused it.

Solomon was a failure and a disgrace. He was also a hypocrite. People talk about him as though he were nearly a god, and he wrote part of the Bible, but he was a curse to Israel.

God told Solomon that if he or his people turned away, the people would be driven out of the promised land. A lot of people think the Jews were driven out because the people turned on God, but according to scripture, Solomon’s rebellion, by itself, was sufficient to invoke the curse.

Look at this scripture from 1 Kings 9:

But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them:

Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people:

And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house?

And they shall answer, Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.

That’s really interesting. I wonder why no one teaches it.

Solomon praised God before the people, but all the while, he was sacrificing to fallen angels who literally stink. It looks like he, singlehandedly, assured that the Jews would lose Israel.

Look at the people we elect. And somehow many of us think we will never lose America.

Hobbies Look so Different When You’re Old

I’m getting ready to clean my roof off, remove the remaining junk from the yard, blow the debris off the pool enclosure, and maybe fix the lawn tractor.

Because I finally, after trying hard for 6 years, learned how to keep gas chainsaws running, the three saws I have been using for this cleanup all started and ran fine this time around, even though the gas is 5 months old and should have been dumped.

I’ve gotten really cocky about saws. I modified my Echo CS-590, which is a 90%-commercial saw hidden in a residential-saw disguise. I changed the timing, put in a bigger carb, added an exhaust deflector, and tuned it to run at 13,300 instead of the factory 12-something. It’s a monster now. I may speed it up to 14,000. It will do it.

Even though I really don’t need another saw, I am highly, highly tempted to get another pro-grade saw and fix it up.

When Irma passed by in ’17 and made a mess here, it was not possible to get any kind of decent largish saw, even online. The storm-cleanup market sucked them all up. Miraculously, I came across a Jonsered CS2240 which had just been made available online by Tractor Supply. I nailed it, probably within 20 minutes of its appearance.

It took me several more days to find the Echo online, so a 16″ hobby saw looked pretty good.

The Jonsered is actually a red Husqvarna 435. Husqvarna bought Jonsered, and for some reason, they released the exact same saw under different badges.

It’s a 40-cc homeowner saw. It came with a 16″ blade. It probably came with a Romper Room chain designed to cut slowly. Most homeowner saws do. A good chain is more likely to make the saw kick back and hurt the user. Manufacturers don’t trust amateurs with good chains. If you go to Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Tractor Supply, you will find that it’s literally impossible to get a real chain unless you order it.

The little cutting things on a saw are called chisels, and they come in different types. If you want to cut fast, you want full chisels. Hardware store saws come with semi-chisel chains.

It’s kind of stupid. You buy a big saw, and it performs like a little one. And they don’t tell you. You can make a Home Depot saw cut like a bigger saw just by putting the correct chain on it.

I have since put full-chisel chains on my saws, except maybe for my electric Makita. I should check.

The Jonsered has been okay, when I have managed to make it work. I made all sorts of errors, and then the saw developed an air leak, which is common to the model. I had to have a mechanic fix that. Now I can pick it up and use it when I want it.

It’s not a perfect saw. The casing is plastic, like those on nearly all hobby saws. That makes it more fragile and harder to modify. It’s also hard to work on. My Echo comes apart in a hurry. It’s also somewhat weak because of the small engine.

I started thinking maybe it would be nice to have a stronger 16″ gas saw. I turned my Echo into a the near-equivalent of a commercial saw. It came with a metal case, which gave me a head start.

I asked around and read up. I started out by looking at Husqvarna and Stihl, but I was not that impressed. Then I saw the Echo CS-4910 and CS-501P.

For some reason, Echo likes putting commercial stuff in hobby saws. The CS-501P is for professionals, and it has a metal case, an aluminum handle, and a 50-cc motor which modifies easily. The CS-4910 is almost exactly the same saw. It has been discontinued, but it’s still around, and it costs about $180 less. You get a plastic handle, which is about as good as aluminum. You get the hobby-grade chain and a bar that is not as tough. You get bar nuts that fall off and get lost, whereas the CS-501P has nuts that stay on the saw when you remove the bar. There are a couple of other parts that differ, but they’re trivial.

You can replace the chain for $20. The nuts can be had online for about $18. So for about $140 less than a CS-501P, you get nearly the same thing. The bar is not a huge problem, because it will take an amateur a long time to ruin a bar, and they run around $40.

A year or two ago, they were selling the CS-4910 for under $300, trying to clear it out for the successor model, the CS-4920. The newer saw is not that great. It has a plastic case.

If I were to get the CS-4910, I could open up the muffler, add a deflector, put a new chain on it, and get some new nuts. It would roar. If I wanted to get serious later, I could take the cylinder off and do some porting, which means enlarging the openings to make it move more fuel and air.

Some guy on the web claims he got almost 6 horsepower out of this saw, and it starts at 3.5, supposedly. Echo won’t say, but saw nerds claim this is the figure.

There are people running 24″ bars on this saw, which is pretty neat. It only weighs 10.4 pounds. The CS-590 comes home from the store with 4.7 horsepower, it weighs 13.2 pounds, and it starts life with a 20″ bar.

I don’t want another saw with a long bar, but it goes to show what a bored guy with some tools can do. I would want the new saw to be light, easy to move around, and insanely powerful.

Modifying the saw would void the warranty, but Echo doesn’t like honoring its warranties anyway. If you want a saw the manufacturer will stand behind, Echo is not for you.

Do you have a 16″ saw? If so, I have interesting news.

Echo saws come with bars and chains made by Oregon. Oregon has a website. It says the CS-501P takes a Q66 full-chisel chain, and it says the CS-4910 takes a 20LPX066G. I already have one or two of the latter.

I could not figure out what made these chains different. The specs were the same. I thought maybe the Q66 would not like the CS-4910’s laminated bar.

I emailed Oregon, and they said it’s the same chain in different packaging. So you pay $27 for the Q66 in one package, or you pay $18 for the 20LPX066G in another.

Why?

If you’re looking for a light, mid-size, top-quality saw cheap, you can find the CS-4910 right now for $380 or so, but they are not making new ones, so you will need to jump. You can get it with a 20″ bar, but it will be slow unless you modify it. The exhaust deflector is available from a site called Saw Again, and the nuts can be found on Ebay. Amazon sells chains.

I might get one just so I can start thinking about something else.

MORE

Yesterday I put a CS-501P in a cart on a website and forgot about it. Today they sent me an email saying they were having a sale at the end of the month, and they were making sale prices available early to people in storm areas. They knocked almost $90 off.

I thought that was great. Right now, they can sell all the saws they want without discounting anything. I decided to go for it.

The business is Saw Suppliers, so if you’re cleaning up a hurricane mess, you might want to pay them a visit.

MORE

They upgraded me to 2nd-day air, no charge! Wow.

Should I feel guilty? I can do my yard-clearing without this saw. I hope I didn’t prevent someone in the Big Bend or the west coast from getting it.

Is There Anything it Can’t do?

The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Milton came through, we spent a day without power, it came back on, and since then I’ve been cleaning up the yard.

My tractor has been out of commission for a long time due to a problem that prevented it from starting. I researched it for months. I asked for advice from all sorts of people who know tractors. I got conflicting information. Nothing worked.

I was going to send the tractor to the dealership, but then we had the Europe trip, and we had three storms go by. And we both got covid.

A day or two back, I found I could get the tractor to start with some effort. It’s a pain, but it will run. Since then I’ve been moving trees and limbs.

Last year, I finally learned how to make chainsaws run reliably. I may be the only person on Earth who knows how. I spent years listening to bad advice from people who were supposed to know the truth, and it did not help much.

I have a bunch of gas saws, and I have run three in the last couple of days. All started and ran, on treated no-ethanol gas 5 months old. I have this thing licked.

My lead saw was an Echo CS-590, which is a homeowner-grade saw you can get at Home Depot. I paid $400, which is maybe half what a pro saw would have cost. I kept screwing it up because I got so much bad information. Last year, I invested in a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a real pro saw. It has electronics in it that supposedly reduce or eliminate carb adjustments.

I got good information on maintaining saws at about the same time I got the Husqvarna. I modified the Echo to make it run like a pro saw. It’s a monster now. But I’m glad I got the Husqvarna, because anyone who has a farm needs two big saws. One could need repairs. Also, the Husqvarna has a 25″ bar, which is 5″ longer than the Echo’s bar. On this property, you need a 25″ bar, but there are times when 20″ is more convenient, so now I’m all set.

I wonder how many other people in this entire county know how to maintain and use saws correctly. I would guess nearly all are arborists. I took the Echo to an authorized repair guy who didn’t know.

Milton dropped a large oak across my driveway. I would say this tree was around 20″ thick at chest height, and it may have been 80 feet tall. As noted in an earlier post, my neighbor showed up after the storm, cut the tree in two places, and moved it out of the driveway with a forestry grapple. That still left me with two big collections of debris to disentangle, cut to sizes a tractor could carry, and move. A tree service would probably have charged over $1500.

I took a little homeowner-grade Jonsered/Husqvarna with a 16″ bar and did a lot of cutting. I moved a lot of distracting junk to my pasture. Today I used the Husqvarna to cut the tree’s trunk in sections. I also cut up a 16″-thick oak Hurricane Helene left caught in some other trees.

When I went back in the house, bleeding and covered with grease and sawdust, I told my wife it was a good thing she hadn’t married a Democrat. She said, “Don’t even say that.”

I didn’t mean a Teamster or an ironworker. I meant the kind of Democrat whose pores weep estrogen. Like the pansy in the old pajamas-and-cocoa Obamacare ad. Like the skinny-jeans-wearing waifs who get pummeled when disrupting other people’s rallies.

Compared to men from the World War Two generation, I’m practically a girl, but I can fabricate, machine, shoot, run a tractor, buck trees, make ammunition, shoot sub-MOA, smoke ribs, make beer, and do lots of car, mower, and tractor repairs.

I’m very good at interior painting. I don’t mind killing annoying animals. I have stomped on mice instead of taking them to therapy and trying to rehome them. I’ve shot a bunch of squirrels from inside my home. I know how to fish for everything from snapper to marlin. I can run a yacht or open fisherman 200 miles to Eleuthera with no help, and I’ve done both. I can keep a marine diesel running. I have a basic knowledge of electronics, and I have built a bunch of electronic devices.

I can also practice law.

If my wife had married a boy-band-looking liberal, they would be equally helpless. She would be able to do all the woman stuff, but he wouldn’t be able to do man stuff or woman stuff. Hot yoga and sitting in a cubicle. That would be all he could do.

I had to make a 50-amp San Francisco adaptor for my generator on Thursday. A San Francisco adaptor is male-to-male. I went to Lowe’s and asked for 6/3 cord. The Lowe’s guy and I started having a conversation. Maybe they didn’t have 6/3. Would 8/3 be okay? Well, I wasn’t sure my generator could break 30 amps, so 8/3 was fine. I didn’t have to ask him what kind of cord a generator uses. I didn’t have to ask what 8/3 was.

He didn’t explain anything to me. He seemed to know there was no reason to. Men in this area can do things, except for some of the snowbirds.

Came home, took apart two cords I had made for 220-volt tools, put the plugs on the 8/3 cord, and we were in business.

Two new plugs are on the way from Amazon.

I am sure leftists will eventually start swarming homes all over America, killing and looting. They’ve done that in every revolution. But should we all be scared of them?

In percentage terms, there aren’t many tough leftists. There are a lot of leftists who can throw bottles of pee at the police, and many of them can rob and kill unarmed people with stolen plastic 9mm pistols, but how many can deal with a conservative who can shoot and has multiple weapons, modified to suit his needs, for various uses?

Even gang members don’t train, and they are generally stupid.

Kyle Rittenhouse was a chubby, out-of-shape high school kid with a cheap AR-15, and he obliterated three leftists as they and a big crowd tried to lynch him. He killed a child molester (raped 5 boys) who had been in prison and gotten a reputation for fighting. He blew the bicep off a criminal who charged him, committing assault, with an illegal pistol in hand. He killed some idiot criminal who tried to bash his skull in with a skateboard. He scared the rest of the lynch mob off. Rittenhouse was extremely effective, and his two armed assailants, as well as the unidentified person who shot at him early in the incident, were incompetent and useless.

I just don’t think you can sit around smoking dope all day and apologizing for your maleness and expect to be a real factor in physical confrontations with armed people.

If my wife had married a vegan yoga boy, they would have to live in an apartment or on a very small lot. They would have to live somewhere where there was little for men to do.

Man stuff is fun. Burning things and blowing things up are fun. Steel-toed boots are fun. Shooting is fun. Catching fish and cutting them up is fun. Welding, machining, running heavy equipment, and bucking trees are fun. How could anyone prefer wearing a man bun, carrying a murse, and spending his time going from one moronic activist meeting to another?

Good knives are fun. Concealed carry is fun.

God is masculine, and he was right to make men masculine. The sex roles he created work. People who accept them enthusiastically are fulfilled.

I feel like buying another rifle.

Tomorrow I have to finish moving trees and limbs. Then I have to replace my diesel yard tractor’s exhaust pipe, cut off the muffler I made for the old one, and weld it onto the new one.

I’m glad God didn’t let me become a sissy.

18 Hours of Electricity

This must be what the rapture feels like.

What is the rapture? A sudden translation to a place where your problems are instantly ended.

Last night I slept on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, after a long, hot shower, and today I got up and ate eggs fried in butter, two big slices of toast made from homemade bread, and three slabs of Tennessee Pride sausage. And not I’m sitting in a leather recliner, thinking about how great I feel.

This is much better than yesterday. I almost had to bathe in the freezing 70-degree pool. I had to work on our generator with no running water to wash my hands. We had no air conditioning. Most restaurants were closed. There was no gas.

What a difference.

When I was young, I took things like electricity and cars for granted. I am not like that any more. Sometimes when I’m driving down the road, I tell God how amazed I am. I’m doing 70 miles per hour. It’s 95 degrees outside, and the inside of the car is at 69 degrees. I’m in the shade. I’m sitting on leather upholstery. If I want, I can have the great musical artists of the last hundred years sing and play for me.

That’s pretty wild if you think about it. Three generations back, the only way to travel faster than 7 miles per hour was to board a train. Nobody had air conditioning. There were almost no recordings.

I thank God constantly for dishwashers, clothes washers, and dryers. You shove your stuff in and walk away, and your electric slave does the work for you, better than you could.

My grandmother was an educated woman with a wealthy husband, and she had to wash 6 people’s dishes and dirty underwear. When I was little, she had a washing machine with a wringer on it. Imagine standing on your porch running your family’s used underwear through one of those with your bare hands.

I’ll be honest. She had a lady who came in and helped, but I doubt that took care of all the laundry. Granny did make my mom and her sisters do chores, though.

Anyway, somebody was washing other people’s dirty underwear.

My grandmother had washboards. She had one in her house when she died in 2003.

In Zambia, my wife used to bathe in a bucket a lot of the time. The Zambian power grid is not great.

I always ask God not to take wonderful things away from us.

I eat homemade bread because my wife hates American bread. I can’t say I blame her. The white stuff has no taste, and the brown stuff is like eating a welcome mat. I showed my wife how to make my white bread recipe, and now she’s happy.

Bread probably costs us $1.50 a loaf, and I have never had anything that compares with it, anywhere. It’s so good, I have considered making it worse so I don’t eat so much of it.

I was only without power for a day, but today I feel like royalty. Appreciate what you have while you have it.

The comedian W.C. Fields was on his own when he was a kid. He left home at 11. He found himself a hole in the ground and put a cover on it. For a while, that was where he slept. When he was old, he still got excited about beds and clean sheets. He described the feeling of settling down in a clean bed. He said, “God____, that’s a sensation!”
And he was rich.

I think about that every time I go to bed.

When I was a kid, and I didn’t have something someone similarly situated had, I thought God was unjust. I don’t feel that way now. I feel pampered, because I am. I don’t care if the guy across the street has a hundred times what I do. My life is great.

The natural thing is to become spoiled when God gives you things. That’s a choice you make. You can choose to become more grateful. The Bible shows that God punishes the spoiled.

If you have good health, a clean, safe, quiet, pleasant home, good food, good clothing, people who love you, and God, you are rich. It’s true. It’s not just something to put on a greeting card.

This is all true and wonderful, but now I have to fix the tractor and move the downed trees and branches from my yard.

Well. A lot of people don’t have a tractor or a yard.

HOT WATER!

We just spent almost 24 hours without electricity. It was harrowing. Imagine a whole day without a power recliner.

No one is wondering, but anyway, I’ll give a sitrep. Things are okay here. The storm actually nearly almost lived up to its potential until maybe 5 a.m., and then it disappeared.

This is not what they predicted. We were supposed to have winds of 28 or 34 mph right now, depending on which Chicken Little gave the forecast.

I hate doing without power, but I am too cheap to buy a real generator big enough to run the house. We have had two short outages in 7 years, so figure $2500 per outage to keep the power on. It’s a lot of money to pay to avoid two or three baths in the pool and throwing out some freezer-burned meat.

While I was out and about today, I saw quite a few wires on the ground, some under trees, so I started to wonder if we were going to get power back this week. I went to WaWa and bought about 6 gallons of no-ethanol gas for my generator. I was lucky to get the gas. I just drove about 40 miles looking for more, and it was nowhere to be found.

I hadn’t been planning to use the generator, but we both wanted to take showers, and the water heater and pump need electricity.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get the generator going. I did all the right things when I put it away, but small engines are cursed.

Sure enough, when I put a quart of gas in it to test it, it would not run. I took the pull cord assembly off and cranked it with a drill, and it still would not run.

I started going through the procedures. I decided to check the fuel valve, and I found that no fuel was going through it. I started trying to take it off, and it turned out to be really obstinate. I started to wonder if I was wasting my time. Maybe the gas wasn’t deep enough in the tank.

I thought that, and then I thought, “It has to be deep enough. I can see the drain below the surface of the gas.” But I tilted the generator anyway, and gas ran out of the valve.

I could not believe it. The generator will not run unless it has maybe a gallon of gas in it OR you tilt it.

China.

I must have spent two hours trying to make it run, and there was nothing wrong with it.

I had to cannibalize two cords from my tools to make a cord to hook the generator up to the house. I have a bunch of 50-amp welding sockets in my shop, so I made what I call a San Francisco cord. It’s male on both ends. One 50-amp plug goes into my 50-to-30 adaptor, which came with a welder, and the other goes to an extension cord, which goes to a wall socket. Worked perfectly, but I had to order two new plugs.

I got the generator going for one reason: I knew that two things were true.

If fix generator, power come back on right away.

If not fix generator, power come back on in a week.

This is how the universe works. I fixed the generator, and two or three hours later, we had power.

The generator is small; 5500 watts. As I recall, it was the only one I could get before Hurricane Irma went by us. Until today, I had never used it to power the house. I used it to run welders before I installed new wiring in the shop.

Today we learned it will run one water heater, the pump, the lights, and the refrigerators and freezers. It seemed unhappy when my wife took a shower, but it didn’t quit.

Should I get a bigger one? I can get one with about twice the capacity from Harbor Freight, and it will have electric start. I could spring for a real generator that runs on propane and powers both air conditioners, but I don’t think I will.

Bigger generator. Not bigger wife.

I live in what may be the greatest neighborhood on Earth.

When Irma came through, and I was going crazy with looking after my dad and moving from Miami with no help, a tree fell across our driveway in the same place where one fell last night. We had to drive around it while I tried to find a saw. It was almost impossible to get one, even online.

A day or two after the storm, someone cut and moved the tree, inside our gate. They trespassed to do us a favor. People we had never met.

This morning, I walked outside–frankly, I was looking for a place to answer nature’s call, because I didn’t want to carry a Home Depot bucket to the bathroom to flush the toilet–and I saw a grapple tractor in my gate.

My neighbor was driving it, and he started asking where he should cut it and move it. Like it was his job.

I talked to him for a minute and said I would get dressed and come back to help. He said he would probably be done before I got back. Sure enough, he was.

Today I told my wife that if a neighbor came onto my property in Miami after a hurricane, it would be to steal my generator. My neighbors here practice what I call reverse vandalism.

This was a $1000 job, minimum, and he did it for nothing. I could have done it myself with my compact tractor, and I will have to finish it myself, but it was a very nice thing to do.

I don’t know what’s going on down south. I know it’s bad, but I haven’t been able to watch the news today, so I am out of the loop. I spent a lot of time praying last night because I couldn’t sleep. I hope it helped.

Milton exceeded my expectations. It maintained hurricane-force winds all the way to the east coast. On the other hand, the storm surge was wildly overestimated.

I wish we lived in the kind of country where the president would lead us in prayer before natural disasters, using the name of Jesus. We would see great results.

At least we have DeSantis.

I’m really excited. I’m going to take a hot shower. What a luxury. Right now I smell like Antifa.

Never think you don’t have it good. If you have a pleasant home, a car, air conditioning, a dishwasher, laundry machines, and hot running water, you have luxuries that would have astonished people throughout most of man’s history.

November Can’t Come Soon Enough

Here we are at about Milton minus 13 hours.

Before I write about how good things look, of course, I have to mention the fact that many other people are not so fortunately situated.

Anyway, here is the news, as I understand it.

This morning, I found a Jacksonville station with a meteorologist who, I sense, may be fed up with the hysteria. He provided what seemed to be a calm, factual forecast. That’s a rarity. I assume he’ll be disciplined. He is an insult to the Anderson Cooper stand-in-a-flooded-ditch school of hurricane coverage.

He said the hurricane part of the hurricane was only 30 miles wide. People don’t understand how big Florida is. The driving distance from Key West to Pensacola is about 830 miles. This means hurricane-force winds will only hit something like 4% of the state’s coast.

California is shorter than Florida.

They expect the storm’s center to hit Sarasota. That’s 140 miles from here. That means the hurricane-force field will end something like 125 miles from me, and at the edge, it will be Category 1, not Category 4. A hurricane’s strongest area is the eye wall, pretty close to the center of rotation. The winds drop quickly as you get away from it.

They think the maximum sustained winds will be about 125 mph, so that’s the eye wall. At the edge of the storm’s windy part, how strong will the winds be? Simple. About 74 mph. That’s the figure used to define hurricane-force winds. If the hurricane-force area has an outer edge, the winds there must be doing about 74, and they will be lower just past it.

So 125 miles from me, sustained winds will be at about 74 mph, and they will drop off over the 125-mile distance between the edge and me. Also, the winds will have to cross about 70 miles of wooded land with hills to get to me.

The threat of tropical storm winds is iffy here as of the moment. That means we may not get sustained winds of 39 mph. They are predicting 28. That’s at tree-top level. On the ground, it will be lower.

I don’t care too much about gusts. A good gust can do damage, but it can’t compare to a nasty sustained wind that slowly pulls roofs off.

Hysterical forecasters love conflating sustained winds with gusts. They’re saying we may get winds of 60 mph. Well, sure. We get those during thunderstorms sometimes. For a few seconds. No one cares about those. Sustained winds define a storm.

They keep saying we’ll get TROPICAL-STORM-FORCE WINDS because we are sure to get brief gusts. That appears to be a lie; a deliberate prevarication intended to get people excited. You can’t have a tropical-storm-force gust. It would be like having a year-long decade. If the wind isn’t sustained for at least 60 seconds, it’s not a tropical-storm-force wind, no matter how strong it is. It’s a gust.

Meteorologists, even the ones hired for their looks, know the difference between a gust and a tropical storm. They shouldn’t lie.

I’ve never seen anyone but me call them on this huge and obvious lie.

Based on what I see now, we are headed for something like Helene, which means I could lose a few trees. The ground is wetter this time, so more trees could fall. Nothing bad is likely to happen near the buildings. I might lose power, but the odds are with me. The power company has been really aggressive about trimming trees since Irma, and a guy who works for them lives on my street, so we get priority.

I have several trees that have to go, so if Milton pushes them over, I’ll be thrilled. It will save me the work of felling them. Bucking trees is easier and safer than felling them. It takes no skill.

The pool got a bit gross due to our recent trip, but I have been fixing it up in case we have to bathe in it or use the water to flush toilets. Other than that, a power outage shouldn’t be too bad. I guess I should run to Walmart and get some ice for the cooler.

I haven’t bothered with the generator. I guess I should have. It could keep a ceiling fan, the refrigerators, and a water heater going. But I would have to get up every 6 hours to feed it. It may be ready to run, because I cleaned it up after the last time I used it, but I know better than to assume a small engine will work just because I take care of it. Gas is just too screwed up these days.

I learned that the only way to keep small engines going in a situation where there are long layoffs is to put oil in the gas tanks and run it through the carbs. I haven’t done that with the generator.

This is not a typical storm. Yesterday, the sun was bright and there was almost no rain. It was like a normal day. Ordinarily, the two days before a hurricane are gloomy, with an ominous feel. Today is more typical. It’s overcast and drizzly, and there is a light breeze.

They think we will get the worst of it after midnight. The nice thing there is that if the power goes out while we sleep, we may sleep the whole night. If the power went off earlier, the house would heat up and make sleep difficult. Heat makes it hard to fall asleep, but it’s not likely to wake a person up.

I just looked at the 11 a.m. cone, and while the overall wind field seems to be spreading, the hurricane area looks smaller, and the winds are dropping, as expected. The landfall area seems to have shifted south a little, which is good for me if true.

The storm is speeding up, which is great. It’s moving at 17 mph. The faster it moves, the less damage it will do, and the sooner life will resume.

It will be a bad couple of weeks for the people south of Tampa. I keep praying God will push the storm farther south to areas where there aren’t many people.

If you want to see some really stupid, uninformed, dangerous reporting, go look at the site of the British “newspaper,” The Guardian. It’s a left-wing rag, so no surprise. They say Milton has been called “the storm of the century.” Yes, by The Guardian.

They say there will be “up to” 15-foot storm surge in Tampa. No, there won’t. Where did they hear that? Tampa is outside the maximum surge area.

They’re making it sound like Milton is still a 160-mph storm. Off by 15, Fleet Street.

Publix and Winn-Dixie are closed today. The Postal Service is still delivering. Walmart is open. It will be open tomorrow, too, along with everything else. It’s not the end of the world.

This morning I learned that DeSantis was within a couple of miles of me yesterday.

North of me, about 5 minutes away, there is a facility called the Florida Horse Park. I don’t know much about it. It probably covers a hundred acres. For weeks, it has been covered with things like generators and powered lifts. It looks like there are hundreds of them. I thought somebody had rented the park, and they were selling these things.

Turns out it’s a staging area for hurricane relief. The tools at the park will be dispatched to help people. It’s amazing.

It’s very nice to be so close to it. They can have machinery here in less time than it takes to make toast over a can of Sterno.

DeSantis made a speech there yesterday. I wish I had known. We would have been there. We drove right by it. It’s a few hundred yards from the dump.

Speaking of dumps, DeSantis ordered them to stay open around the clock, and some local goofballs tried to close one. This was in Pinellas County, which, for practical purposes, is greater Tampa. It’s full of stuff that needs to be disposed of, partly to prevent it from going airborne tomorrow. They locked the gate used by public vehicles to dump storm debris. In response, a state trooper used a truck to destroy the gate, with the governor’s approval. Man, I love this guy.

Pinellas officials are lying, saying the facility was open, but news outlets clearly say the dump was not accepting storm debris, in an area recently pounded by two storms. Yesterday, even after the gates were opened, the line to dump debris was three hours long.

Our local dump isn’t supposed to be open on Tuesday, but Big Ron made it happen, so we dropped some trash.

In an amusing side note, Biden says DeSantis has been great with hurricane efforts, thus preemptively kneecapping any efforts Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hoped to make, to libel DeSantis and Republicans in general. There is speculation Biden is trying to kill the Harris campaign.

He doesn’t like Harris–who does?–and he deeply resents being kicked off the ticket. I don’t think he cares about our country. I believe he’s completely self-centered, so even if he really thinks leftism is best for America, he might be willing to torpedo the Democrat who replaced him and put Donald Trump in office.

Stories imply Harris has been trying to work with DeSantis as though she were president, and some say DeSantis has not been receptive. That’s understandable. He wants her to lose, and Joe Biden is the president. Biden may be senile, but he is still managing relief and preparation efforts, so why give Harris a chance to grandstand and virtue-signal?

“This was a middle-class hurricane, and LGBTQQIP2SAA BIPOC’s were disproportionately affected…”

Biden just told the world he and Kamala have worked together on all of his decisions as president, so now she can’t distance herself from his stench. That had to be a deliberate jab. Biden knew she was conning the world, pretending she would have done a better job.

I don’t know what to do today and tomorrow, apart from intercession for the people on the west coast. Guess I’ll be eating the inevitable Pop Tarts and hoping the air conditioning keeps working.

Tennessee Looks Better and Better

Things are looking good, post-Helene. God took care of us. A tree fell over in my side yard, maybe 80 yards from the house. A smaller tree snapped about halfway up near the workshop, but it didn’t hit the building. We have a lot of leaves down.

There may be some trees down farther from the house. I haven’t checked yet. the lights went out for about 30 seconds, but they came back on. People here got very serious about tree-trimming after Irma, so power outages are not as common as they once were. I checked the power company’s site last night, and I saw a total of 14 outages on their map. That’s impressive.

My wife had a doctor’s appointment set for today, and they called and said they had no power. That was a surprise.

My big complaint is the upcoming weather. We expect a nasty, rainy week, so I’m not planning to do much about the debris right away. The general rule is that the weather gets noticeably better in October. Can’t wait.

The coast is a wreck. Not the entire west coast; just the areas where the surge was bad. It looks like the 20-foot surge that was predicted failed to materialize, to no one’s surprise, but I did see video of small houses floating around. I saw a lot of structures that are just plain ruined. I don’t know where people will go.

Sooner or later, coastal people will have to get serious about building for hurricanes. The people who own concrete houses on stilts don’t have much to be upset about today, but owners and occupants of frame houses situated on the ground have lost everything.

Everyone hates insurance companies, but insurance is a business, and it’s not realistic to expect insurers to offer good rates to people who know their homes will sustain catastrophic damage every 25 years or so.

I don’t know why coastal people got in the habit of building structures that weren’t ready for hurricanes. It’s bizarre. Everyone knows storms will come. Everyone knows how to build for them.

Another interesting phenomenon: rescuers were pulling people out of flooded areas late last night. Why were they still there? Two days ago, everyone knew these places would flood. Shelters were ready.

I saw a video of an airboat that had been removing people from an area where there was a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I don’t understand ghetto people. They did the same thing in Louisiana when Katrina hit. Stayed right where they were.

Ghetto people have a culture of helplessness. Can’t work. Can’t get through high school. Can’t take care of their kids. Can’t stay out of prison. Can’t evacuate before storms. Can’t recover after storms.

Helping the poor is hard mainly because they respond so badly to help. They turn every blessing into a problem. They are used to being rewarded for failure, so they put their energy into failing.

My aunt was a principal in Eastern Kentucky. They used to test the kids for ADD. She found out parents were telling their kids to fail on purpose so they could get aid money. I wonder how those kids are doing today. Well, I don’t have to wonder. Everyone who could add two and two left, and now the place is full of drug addicts and professional thieves.

The failure culture is found everywhere people have gotten used to government handouts.

I don’t understand the people who left their cars in flood areas. It’s not that hard to drive a mile inland. Now they’re pedestrians, and if they replace their cars, they’ll have to pay the deductibles.

Coastals need to learn not to move into homes that can’t withstand storms. Even if you’re insured, you have to move out and throw out lots of your belongings. You probably won’t be compensated for everything, because you won’t have an inventory, and you won’t be paid replacement cost. Even if they overpay you, replacing your stuff will not be a simple matter. It will take a very long time, and many things won’t be available. While you’re living somewhere else, there’s a good chance looters will come in. It’s better to start off in a home that won’t flood or disintegrate.

Insurance isn’t God. It can make things better, but it’s no substitute for prevention.

If you look at the web, you’ll see people promoting the notion that hurricane-proof homes require magical new technology, or that they cost too much. Not true. My dad’s house down south was built in 1951, and it took about 170 mph without significant damage. There are concrete stilt houses all over the Keys, and they don’t all belong to tech billionaires. I put hurricane doors and windows in a house for under $20,000, which is not much compared to decades of insurance premiums.

Houses built for hurricanes cost more, but not that much more, and they save a fortune. It’s not unusual for a modest home to cost $700,000 today. Adding $50,000 to make it safe from storms is a reasonable expenditure.

Why don’t schools in coastal states teach kids these things? Too busy telling them Heather has two mommies and that chromosomes don’t matter.

My house is hurricane-proof, by local standards. It wouldn’t work in Cedar Key a hundred yards from the Gulf, but it will take anything a hurricane can dish out in my area. It would take a tornado to take it out. I felt pretty good when I heard a storm was coming, because I knew the odds of a serious problem were extremely low.

If I had just moved in without thinking, I could be in a flood plain right now.

Later on, I’ll look around and see if any other trees need to be cleaned up. I already know I won’t have to file any claims.

When is He Coming?

Written on August 6.

The murderous 30-mph storm is behind me now, so there is time to write of other things. I did not drown in spite of LIFE-THREATENING FLOODING, I was not DEVASTATED, and my wife and I are okay even though Debby BARRELED DOWN ON US forcing us to SHELTER IN PLACE and HUNKER DOWN.

I guess I’m a little tired of humanity today. Is it obvious? The sheep and liars are getting to me. Every time a storm pops up, the TV sheep baaaa the same lies at us through their veneers and lip fillers for the same selfish reasons.

I have realized I should have more sympathy for people who get hit by weak storms that rain a lot. When I think of hurricanes, I don’t think much about the threat of rain. I haven’t lived in an area that could flood since I left home for college. Even in Miami, I was about 15 feet above sea level. When I think of hurricane problems, I think of winds that put trees on houses, remove roofs, toss ships across streets, and push walls down.

It’s a weird thing, but Florida has been inhabited–by people who build things, not just primitive, illiterate Indians–since the 1500’s, but we have not figured out that putting a house’s floor 4 feet above the normal high tide line is wrong. This state is full of buildings that pretty much sacrifice their first floors when storm surge hits, and insurers keep paying to fix them over and over. And we reimburse the insurers. Even people like me who can’t have flooding or hurricane-force winds.

Some people in coastal areas are smart enough to have homes that are lifted up above the surge line, but I suppose they are still a small minority. If you go to the Keys, you will see some houses with cars under them. The houses sit on pillars, and the first floors are carports. Living areas start on the second floors. It’s a big advance, but having your car washed away is still bad.

It is possible to build low-lying buildings water can’t get into. I know this because I’m not stupid. We don’t seem interested in doing it, though.

Anyway, because I was safe from water problems, I have been dismissive of people who get upset about weak, wet storms. I will try to do better in the future.

I got some breezes during the night before Debby hit land, but the damage was limited to a few downed branches and some leaves. Today it’s dry, so I can fire up the Kubota and move the limbs out.

There are a few downed trees around here. I haven’t seen any on my property yet, but I haven’t done a tour because it was wet. My wife and I drove to a medical testing place and a grocery yesterday, at a time when the TV people had convinced the rest of the country we were battling a killer storm, and I would guess we saw 7 oaks on their sides.

When you see a Northern Florida oak that has snapped, you realize how pathetic they are. Many of them are just empty shells. They look good from outside, but a three-foot-thick oak may have a trunk which is just a tube with walls four inches thick. Inside, there will be rainwater and thousands of roaches. The better oak species are more solid, but most oaks are of the types that rot standing up.

I don’t know why hollow oaks fill up with roaches.

America is kind of a hollow oak. Looks pretty good from outside, but it’s rotten inside, the guts are gone, and it’s ready to snap in a good breeze.

Today I saw some idiot woman bragging about ruining a family gathering. Someone had a baby, and the guests were saying it was a boy. The grinning, smug, sadistic idiot said she told them to wait 10 years and “see if it sticks.” And she gave the child a onesie with some kind of perversion symbolism on it. She was proud of herself. She was happy she had hurt everyone’s feelings.

Such people are our future. I don’t like typing the word “our” in this context. I hope I’m not in that particular future. Any more than I already am.

People are not sufficiently willing to disown each other. It’s a real problem. It’s a very big problem with relatives. People have this idea that you should stick with your family until the bitter end. They think it’s a Christian principle. Yeshua, on the other hand, told people who wanted to follow him to abandon their own unbelieving fathers. Quickly.

As Spirit-led Christians, we have to give up on people who will never grow. We have to give up on our subcultures, our nations, and humanity itself. We can’t keep identifying strongly as Americans, whites, blacks, or anything but children of God. We have to figure out who our real team is.

I’m an American the way Daniel was a Babylonian. Thanks, America, for whatever my family and I get from you. I will pay my taxes and obey most of your laws. I will try to be an asset. If I could still be drafted, I would serve. I show up for jury duty even though they always dismiss attorneys. I will set your interests above those of other nations until it becomes impossible. I could see buying a flag. But that’s all you get. You don’t get my heart.

America is not my permanent home. I belong to heaven. This is just a temporary destination; an assignment. I’m like a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia.

There are no dead Americans. Think about that. None of my ancestors are American. They’re citizens of heaven and hell. Ronald Reagan isn’t an American. George Washington isn’t an American. They graduated.

I said I would set America’s interests above other nations’ until it became impossible. I must be a traitor!

Really?

What if I were a Jew born in Germany in 1890? What if I served honorably in World War I, got a chestful of medals, and then had to watch other Germans beat my friends and relatives in the street?

People say, “America, right or wrong.” Should Germans, Jewish or otherwise, have said, “Germany, right or wrong”?

Jehu had two men murder the queen of Israel. Her husband the king was anointed by God. She was the rightful queen. God approved of what Jehu did. Hmm.

Leftists are suddenly the most patriotic people among us, in the sense that they believe our children belong to the state. You can’t be any more patriotic than that. If you give yourself to the state, it’s a big deal, but giving your children is far, far more patriotic.

They’re less patriotic in that they run around cursing America, but they have always had problems with cognitive dissonance. They say America is evil and racist, but we should give America our kids.

If you’re a real patriot, shouldn’t you consider your children property of the state?

They push this idea constantly. But who really accepts it?

If children are property of the government, why are we expected to take them with us when we emigrate? Aren’t we stealing the government’s property?

People move to other countries to improve the lives of their families. Who ever moved to another country to help that country at his family’s expense? Who would abandon is wife and kids in Communist China and move to America, not to help himself, but to help America? Perhaps a lunatic.

Citizenship is disposable, like membership in the Elks. When the Elks stop treating you well, you cancel your membership. The only permanent membership you should never give up is your membership in God’s family. Abandoning your country and siding against your wife and even your children in order to preserve your relationship with God are not merely acceptable; they’re mandatory and necessary.

America is turning on people like me. It is becoming our enemy.

The whole purpose of staying here is to have America look after my family and me, so my obligation to support America is shrinking every day. Increasingly, America threatens my future and the welfare of my wife and the children we will have, because we can never conform to statism, perversion, the persecution of Christians, or antisemitism. The little punishments for people like me increase every day, just as antisemitic laws increased in Germany and Austria. Just as punishment of Christians increased in what is now Turkey as the Satanic Muslim cult took over.

This place is lost. The frog motivational speakers love to tell us about is boiling.

If you’re not a trashy person, you may have no idea who Megan Thee Stallion is. Ghetto black Americans have come up with some pretty dumb slang, and “stallion” is at the top of the list. A stallion is a male horse, and as we all know, stallions are commonly referred to as models of masculinity. For some reason, American black people started calling attractive women stallions some years ago. Believe me, it’s gross, hearing a young black man express his sexual attraction to a stallion.

Megan is a slutty rapper. She dances while spreading her buttocks at her fans. She sings about her vagina as well as the penises of the men with whom she fornicates.

Kamala Harris just had a rally, and Megan showed up to do her act. Look it up. She sang–well, she can’t sing, because she has no talent–she barked several of her pornographic songs. She omitted some filthy words. She spead and wiggled her buttocks at the crowd. She has 4 slutty-looking dancers behind her.

This was at a rally promoting the only Democrat candidate for the presidency of the United States. Leftists are making fun of people who thought it should not have happened.

Children work in political campaigns. They go to rallies.

Until today, I never thought about it, but because my children will be considered black, they will be targets for this generation of child-stealing musical whores and pimps. They may be ostracized and abused for refusing to join in.

Look what Kamala Harris is telling young black girls. “Spread your buttocks on stage and sing about receiving oral sex. This is empowerment. This is how you punish people who think you should be anything other than whore and a savage.”

Joe Rogan is the subject of a rumor now. They say he is going to sue MSNBC for creating a doctored video falsely implying he admires Kamala Harris. In reality, he thinks she’s a fool. He said she could win the election anyway because Americans swallow BS so readily.

Today I was reminded how right he was about the stupidity of present-day Americans. I saw a patronizing female influencer lying about the effort to ban gas stoves. She is extremely popular. Women love being told lies that justify dethroning men and God and establishing a female supremacist, pagan world where their destructive emotion-based fantasies become law.

You really need to see this woman to understand how gullible other women have become. Her name is Arielle Fodor, and she claims to be a kindergarten teacher. She’s as dumb as a stick. She speaks to adults as though they were mentally retarded.

Her followers run into 7 figures, and leftist publications write very, very favorably of her. The fact that this could happen proves Joe Rogan is right.

In a world where this lying dimwit is admired, Kamala Harris can be president. What happens then? A stupid, dishonest, soulless woman who craves positions of power yet runs from responsibility and decisions can run the free world and appoint all our federal judges. It’s unthinkable, but polls make it very clear she has a good chance of winning.

Here is a woman who may be over 25% African, teaching black girls to be obnoxious, brainless sluts. Running for president and likely to win.

I can’t make myself picture this empty bag of sagging skin standing behind the podium at the White House, but it may happen anyway. Picture her dealing with China, Russia, and Iran. Imagine her groveling with her belly up for Hamas. Cackling to be petted as she says Israel has to be held accountable.

America itself is responsible. America is doing this to children of God who live here. America will let this feeble-minded creature confiscate wealth, give it to rioting morons, and launch nuclear missiles. How much loyalty should America get from us? Should we wave flags 15 years from now as armed men in panties march us to killing fields?

God has to get us out of here. There is no fighting these people with weapons. There is no convincing them to change. There is no living with them. I live in a nice, safe bubble right now, but there is no future here until Yeshua comes and removes the demons and powerful idiots from the world.

“I Thought I Heard a Scream and a Thump”

I’m sitting around watching the storm news. It’s not easy to stop, because it keeps changing all the time. One minute, you’re sure the problem is gone. The next, it seems to be headed your way again.

I guessed this thing would land near Apalachicola, endangering possibly tens of homes and a half-built Valero station. Sadly for me, it made a lurch to the east between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., so now it’s looking more like it will be maybe 30 miles east of Apalachicola, making it closer to me as it passes my latitude.

I can’t believe they named the storm Debby. They spelled it wrong, and every self-anointed wit on the web is saying things like, “Debby does Tampa.”

The TV weather people look unbelievably disappointed. I can almost hear the men thinking, “I waxed my chest for this?” Not that I’m saying all TV weathermen are gay. I’m sure some of them are not.

They thought it would be a hurricane at 8 p.m. tonight, and it’s still just a tropical storm. The farther it goes without becoming a hurricane, the less likely it is to to make the cut and the weaker it will be when it finally finds Florida.

It’s so lame, they’re forecasting gusts, not sustained winds. Gusts are the smartphone filters of hurricane forecasts. They make storms seem much more impressive than they are.

Andrew hit my dad’s house down south with sustained winds of about 170 miles per hour. Debby is forecast to hit Crystal River, which will be closer to the eye than I am, with 46 mile-per-hour gusts. That could mean sustained winds of 20 or even 10 miles per hour. We had a stiff gust early this afternoon–maybe 25 miles per hour–when the background wind was basically nonexistent.

Saying a storm has 70 mile-per-hour gusts is like Burt Reynolds saying, “I’m about six-one,” when everyone knew he wore boots with 4″ heels.

Some guy from Accuweather was practically squawking that Debby would be Category 2 upon arrival. He wanted to sound serious, so he didn’t use his indoor voice. Channel 10 in Tampa, in contrast, has given up. They keep saying, “This will not be a WIND storm.” If it’s not a wind storm where you are, it’s not a hurricane. It means the real hurricane either missed you or didn’t exist.

I think they see the writing on the wall and don’t want to be embarrassed.

Debby was “doing” 70 at 8 p.m., already north of Tampa, and Cat 2 starts at 96. I do not see that happening.

Debby could be one of those storms that shocks everyone, but obviously, unusual storms are less likely than normal storms.

Channel 8 has a thing they call the Wobble Tracker, and it’s really just a live radar feed with the historic and anticipated future track superimposed on it. At 9:20, it looked like the eye of the storm was breaking up and moving back west a little. I wonder if it’s dying. That would be great. And hilarious.

I have already suffered with this storm, though. We got maybe two hours of very heavy rain, and we had dinner while it was coming down. I looked out the window while we were eating, and I saw water coming over the side of a roof gutter instead of going out the downspout.

I have a guy who cleans my gutters, but I don’t believe in calling him unless I see a problem. I looked at the gutters several weeks ago, and I thought they were fine. Looks like I was wrong.

I went outside in the nasty rain and saw that water was pouring over the top of the downspout, so something was blocking the flow.

I thought maybe there were leaves inside the downspout. I paid to have the leaves removed from the gutter, but I never mentioned the downspouts.

I really did not want to climb out a bedroom window and try to check the gutter and downspouts from the roof. I did not want to ruin my wife’s Sunday by dying. I came up with a plan. I got my giant backpack blower, inserted the nozzle in the bottom of one downspout, and fired away. Black, rotten leaves and dirty water blew out of the downspout, and most of it came down on my back.

The water flowed better, but I was not sure all was well.

As I was already wet and filthy, I decided to get on a ladder and look at the gutter from the top. There was a lot of junk in there. I reached in and pulled some out, but I knew where I was going. It wasn’t enough.

Before long, I was on the roof in pouring rain, wearing only gym shorts and hiking shoes, grabbing filth out of the gutter and throwing it in a mop bucket. Nice. Welcome to home ownership. You have to fix stuff when it needs to be fixed, regardless of whether it’s fun. Otherwise, you pay a steep price. It’s not like being a kid or a tenant. They get to do nothing.

It was better than having water back up into the house and ruin the kitchen ceiling. I came back in, covered with dirty water, and asked my wife if she was glad she wasn’t the husband at that moment. She most certainly was.

She told me how lame most husbands seemed to her, compared to me. I didn’t see that coming. She said most men can’t do anything. Her brother-in-law’s rented house had a bad lock on a gate, and when his family moved to another house, a locksmith had to be called to fix it.

It’s nice to be appreciated. All those years getting acquainted with tools have paid off. It’s too bad I didn’t know enough about gutters, though.

Now the gutter and downspouts are 90% clean, which is enough to keep the water moving until the storm goes away. I plan to make a PVC-pipe tool to attach to a blower to reach into the gutter and blow leaves out. Doing it by hand is not very safe, since the only thing between me and concrete is a pool enclosure screen. Part of the roof by the pool is very steep.

I am going to try to go to sleep. The storm looks like it’s getting weaker, not stronger, and in any case, it appears to pose no threat to my property. There is a chance a neighbor’s tree could fall across a wire and kill my power, but that’s about as bad as it should get.

Luckily for me, a power company employee lives on this street.

A Bargain that Robs You of Peace is too Expensive

I’m learning more about buying and selling online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Never, ever do business in cash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No delivery, no money.

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

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

More Proof Will Rogers was a Liar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what she said:

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

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

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

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

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

All kinds of guesses are rolling around in my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her account doesn’t have any posts since 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mower saga drags on.

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

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

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

Things that are rolling around in my head:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Only Pay for Concrete Once

I got off my behind and looked at mowers today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Little” being a relative term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She never sent me the tractor quote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a lawnmower. Come on.

It even has tiger stripes on it.

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

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