This is Definitely not a Tree of Life

Christians are taught that the Holy Spirit will put joy in them. We’re taught this, but not many of us believe it. If we did, we would be considerably more excited about it than we are, and we would be trying to find out why almost none of us are filled with joy.

It sounds selfish to ask God for joy, but God has made it clear that he wants us to have it, so it’s obvious that we displease him by failing to pursue it.

Joy is an important thing. Joy makes us strong, so without it, presumably, we are weaker than we should be. How do I know joy makes us strong? Because God says the joy of the Lord is our strength. God doesn’t talk just to hear his head rattle. He means every word he says. If God says joy is strength, then joy is strength.

If we really believed the things God says, we would behave a lot differently.

Humans are full of it. We say a lot of things we don’t mean. Christians are big offenders. We talk about how much we love God or other people, for example. Usually, what we really mean is, “We’re SUPPOSED to love God, so I’m saying I love him, even though I’m not sure he’s there and I don’t really have feelings for him.”

People write and utter all sorts of pleasant words that mean nothing. We are used to hearing hot air from human beings, so when God says something, we treat it like hot air. God says he will heal us, but how many Christians believe it? Maybe 5%? Who do most of us go to first when we need healing? Other Christians? Of course not. We go to doctors first. That’s completely backward. Prayer should always be the first thing you do when you need help.

The Holy Spirit offers a whole bunch of gifts. Love, joy, and faith are among them. If you lack any of these gifts, something is wrong, and you should be trying to find out what the problem is.

I’m writing about this because the joy of God has been all over me lately. Maybe it’s because I’m not unequally yoked with my dad any more. I wake up and look forward to the day. I feel reluctant to go to bed, because there are still things I want to get done.

Joy is connected to accomplishment. If you lack joy, you will be lazy. If you have joy, you will have energy to get things done.

I thought I had a lot of energy in the past, but I have much more now. I’ve been putting out old fires right and left. Tasks that used to fill me with dread don’t intimidate me as much now.

Today I did something nuts. I got on my roof with an 18-foot pressure washer lance and blasted the crud out of my gutters. I also bleached the whole east side of the house. It was a miserable job, from the natural standpoint, but I was raring to go this morning.

I went to Walmart and bought myself 6 white T-shirts and some white painter’s pants. Yesterday I got bleach on my Carhartt jeans while pressure washing. That’s not going to happen again. Now I have a uniform. I also tried to buy a cheap straw hat with a strap, but the lady at the register couldn’t find the price, so I let it go. Just as well. It turned out to be a Corona beer hat.

I had to extend the lance, lean it on the pool enclosure, go upstairs, and climb out a window. I pulled the lance up and went to work. It kept catching on things. The job took well over two hours, and I had to go up and down the stairs over and over.

The gutters were disgraceful. I admit it. They filled up during Hurricane Irma, and ever since, I had been hiding my head in the sand. I had to do something, because I had a pretty respectable tree growing over one downspout. When I tried to pull the tree out, I had to fight with it. The root system was about 4 feet long. The tree was tiny, so I had figured there were a few little roots attached to it. Not so.

I was amazed to see dirt in the gutters. I can’t figure out how it got there. I can see how leaves would rot and leave some kind of organic mush, but sand? How does sand get into a roof gutter?

When I blew the junk out, of course, a great deal of debris went through the screen and into the pool area. I had to pressure-sweep the patio, apply bleach, vacuum the pool, skim the pool, and backwash. I was extremely tempted to put it off until tomorrow; it was about 5 p.m. when I got started on the pool stuff. Something inside me kept saying, “Christians have to shoot for excellence.”

That idea came my way via Derek Prince. He complained about the way Christians underachieved. He said that when found out a firm that was helping him publish a book wasn’t run by Christians, he said, “Thank God.” That really hit home. Christians have a reputation for slacking. No one wants to rent a property to a church or contract for services with one, because they are pretty likely to miss rent payments or run out on bills. Christians have a reputation for refusing to tip; even worse, some leave gospel tracts instead of money. I, personally, have learned never to give anything to a church. You can give them money, but if you give them something like a vehicle or a musical instrument, they will destroy it or give it to the pastor or some other idiot in his family.

We’re supposed to do things conscientiously, as though we were working for God. Ouch. I don’t think God liked my roof tree.

I had a spirit of acedia cast out of me once. Acedia is a condition which includes things like laziness and apathy. For quite a while afterward, I got a lot done. It was wonderful. Then something went wrong, and my new joy left me. I think being unequally yoked must have interfered with my deliverance. Non-Christians are oppressive to be around. When you’re yoked up to a non-Christian, you will always have a lot of ideas shot down, and that leads to a state of chronic discouragement. Maybe that’s the problem.

Anyway, I am very grateful for joy. I feel it inside me now, like fire in a steam locomotive. I need strength in order to live correctly. I don’t want to people to look at me and say, “If that’s how Christians live, what good is their God?” I want to be on top of things.

It’s startling how useful a pressure washer is. I buy several things a week to help me get more use out of mine. I have a pressure-adjusting device coming, so I can wash the car safely. I just received a special attachment for cleaning gutters. I installed a new muffler protector today, because I felt bad about the way my dad and I had let the old one rust. I’m going to buy a replacement pump so I’ll have it ready to go when the old one dies.

The pressure washer cleans the house and my car. It also cleans my concrete. On smooth surfaces, it’s better for moving leaves than a blower. I’m thinking I may take the bird cages out and blast them with it; there are things on them I have not been able to dislodge. Every home needs a pressure washer. There are a number of jobs no other tool will do as well.

Tomorrow I hope to get the remaining side of my house clean, and I can start on the workshop. I’m also going to call some people about mowing my hay and managing my timber so I can get tax exemptions. After that, I may climb Mount Everest and swim the English Channel.

Joy is good. Joy is necessary. Joy is better than caffeine, because it doesn’t keep you awake all night. I recommend it.

I Feel Almost Competent

I have to blog again. I have fixed the surging on my Homelite pressure washer. I feel invincible.

I found the answer on one of the most useful Youtube channels imaginable: Steve’s Small Engine Saloon. The proprietor took a carburetor just like mine, opened up the access to the pilot jet, and reamed the ethanol crud out with a 0.013″ wire gauge drill bit.

It’s so simple a swing voter could do it.

I ordered the drill bits he recommended, and today I spent 10 or 15 easy minutes opening up my pilot jet.

Now my engine doesn’t surge at all. The next time I use the pressure washer, I’ll actually know what to expect from one second to the next.

Here’s another one of his videos. This one got the pressure washer running. The one about surging made it run correctly.

Ethanol is so destructive; why doesn’t everyone know about wire gauge drill bits? I’ve thrown out a number of Harley jets I could have saved, had I known what to use.

You always hear people say you should use carb cleaner or Sea Foam to fix clogged jets. That stuff never works. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever seen carb cleaner fix a carburetor. I put Sea Foam in some tools with clogged carbs, and while it improved things, it didn’t solve my problems. A mechanical device like a drill bit gets in there and gets it DONE. It doesn’t make excuses.

I have a generator which is acting up. You better believe I’m going to yank the carb. I’m positive I can fix it. Once I get that done, I can MIG weld again. I’d like to build a mobile base for my giant table saw, but I can’t do it without MIG.

If I had known about wire gauge bits, I would have used them to fix my Echo CS-590 chainsaw instead of wrecking it and then paying a repair shop $135.

The outside of my buildings should be pretty clean 7 days from now. It’s a dream come true.

Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

That about sums it up.

No More Shades of Grey Here

Success is clinging to me like a bad smell.

Today I finally figured out how to clean my house. I don’t mean the inside of the house. I mean the outside. I have had algae, mold, and other things trying to take over ever since I moved here. The house is supposed to be white, but some parts are grey, and others are green.

Last week I got my dad’s pressure washer running, and I started pimping it out. I put a new hose on it, and I got an 18-foot lance. I even ordered some totally unnecessary chromed parts to replace rusted ones the Miami weather had messed up.

I used the washer to clean part of the driveway (special attachment), and I tried the narrow spray nozzle on the sides of the house. It turned out to be useless for this purpose. That surprised me.

I started Googling and reading.

I learned that there are products you can put in a pressure washer’s soap tank, to make it clean various things. Some of these products are detergents. Others are fungicides. Some contain bleach. I didn’t want to use bleach, because bleaching my house seemed like a good way to damage it, so I looked into other chemicals. The more I looked, the more I read that bleach was the way to go.

I also read–and I don’t know why this should surprise me–that you should never use bleach in a pressure washer. Apparently it eats the seals in the pump, as well as the O-rings in the hose and wand. Never, never, never use bleach in a pressure washer. That’s what they say. Unfortunately, they also say a pressure washer will not get a house clean without bleach, so everyone uses it.

I found out about a product called Mold Armor EZ House Wash. It contains bleach. It comes in a bottle that attaches to a hose. Reviewers said good things about it. They said you could stand on the ground and hose down your second story. That sounded good to me. Pressure washers can be hard to control, and I didn’t want to bleach myself as well as the house. I bought some Mold Armor EZ House Wash and tried it. I have incredible water pressure, so I figured it would work great.

It turns out this product will, in fact, reach the second story of your house. Provided you live in a Barbie Beach House. I found that it sprayed about 8 feet. I could barely reach my first-floor soffit. What a ripoff. Who writes these bogus reviews?

It’s also weak. It didn’t do a great job on the things it managed to hit. It’s also awkward to use. It’s not easy to aim it and turn the bleach flow on and off without hitting the wrong things.

I decided to give the pressure washer a try. I made a solution of about 4 parts water and 1 part 10% pool chlorine, along with a generous squirt of Dawn. I put it in the pressure washer’s tank and blasted the side of the house It shot all the way up to to the roof of the second story. No need for the 18-foot lance, and no need to climb out an upstairs window and walk on the roof. Nice.

It was beautiful. I bleached the house, and in a few minutes, the area I sprayed was nearly white. I was able to use the rinse setting on the pressure washer to get the chlorine off the wall and my plants.

It was so easy, it was ridiculous. When I was done, I needed to empty the soap tank, so I sprayed the driveway. Bonus! I can use the pressure washer to improve the driveway after getting the bulk of the crud off with the hard surface attachment. You can apply bleach to a driveway with a mop, but the pressure washer will do 150 square feet in one minute.

My neighbor paid some dude $300 to wash his house. I figure I can do my house in an easy three hours.

Now…what about the pump? Won’t the chlorine eat it?

Maybe the pump will die, but guess what a replacement pump costs? I’ll tell you: $80. Hmm…pay some guy $300 every time I see mold, or spend $80 on a new pump every three years. Tough call.

If you go to a ripoff parts site to get the pump, it runs $163. Forget that noise. Ebay!

The washer has a great Honda motor with Easy Start, and the pump is easy to replace, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to keep it running a very long time. I can go ahead and buy a new pump now, and when the old one dies, I won’t have to wait for shipping.

Here’s something I didn’t know: unless you spend four figures on a pressure washer, you should expect the pump to crap out in a couple of years. They don’t put this information on the box in big orange letters. They expect homeowners to use their machines very little, so cheap pumps are standard. It’s really sneaky. They give you a great Honda motor so you feel like you bought a quality machine, but they don’t tell you the motor will outlive 10 pumps.

I also bought a pressurized can of pump protector. It’s a greasy substance–possibly grease–you’re supposed to shoot into your pump every time you store it for a long period. This is another thing they don’t mention on the box. I decided I’m going to use it every time I use bleach. Can’t hurt, and it cost 6 bucks.

A better pressure washer will run a grand or more. The one I’m using cost $300, and it works great. I can go through 7 pumps before I reach the point where I’ve spent what a better machine would cost. A better machine would pump more water, and it would be adjustable, which would be nice, but at the moment, my washer is doing everything I want it to.

I feel like keeping this washer alive far past its time, just to make a point.

The carb is still surging, which is annoying, but today my wire gauge drill bit set arrived, so I should be able to clear the carb today or tomorrow. If I can’t manage it, I’ll have to spend the princely sum of $15 on a Chinese replacement.

Unreliable sources say American Indians came up with the saying, “It is a good day to die.” I would counter with, “It is a good day to live.” When your pressure washer is working and you have a new set of wire gauge drill bits, it’s hard to lack enthusiasm for life.

In even better news, I managed to fix problems with a deed to one of my properties. It has now been accepted and recorded, and the property in question is officially out of my dad’s estate, bringing me one step closer to getting probate over with. Yeah, baby!

Tomorrow I’m hoping to contact a couple of people who can help me get agricultural tax exemptions for my house, and if that works, my property taxes will be cut in half. I’m eager to get that over with.

The 23rd psalm says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” When I spend time with God in the morning, I recite that, and I say, “Today is one of the days of my life, so it must apply.” It says “ALL the days of my life.”

Can’t wait to see the rest of the house brightened up.

Welcome, Loving Father

I truly believe God is helping me get it together in the natural, now that my dad and the spirits that swarmed around him are gone. I keep finding new ways to improve things around me.

I have always hated waxing cars. Because I hated waxing, which involved sweating in the Miami sun, I also neglected washing. I would run vehicles through a gas station car wash once in a while, but that was it.

This week, I got my dad’s old pressure washer running. A fantastic Youtube video showed me how to get the ethanol crud out of the carb’s main jet in a hurry, and I bought a new hose and an extended wand for cleaning my house. I even have some new metal parts on the way, to make the pressure washer look better. I may remove the frame and paint it.

The first thing I cleaned with the pressure washer was the pressure washer. I knocked some decals off, but I can live without them.

Once the machine was running, I thought about the SUV I inherited. It’s not very old, and I would like to keep it in good shape. I’ve learned a lot of things about pressure washers and cars.

First, a gas-powered pressure washer is not too strong for car washing. Some people say otherwise. Yes, it will damage your car if you hold the nozzle too close. There is a way to avoid that. Hold it farther away.

Second, you can use ordinary car wash soaps in pressure washers. I found that people liked Turtle Wax products. They wash and wax at the same time, and they’re not expensive.

My machine dilutes soap at a ratio of 20:1. The soap should be applied at 128:1. That means I have to dilute the soap at around 7:1 before I put it in the pressure washer’s tank. It will work. Other people do it, and the people who make car wash soap endorse it.

Do you just load the machine and blast away? NO! You need a foam cannon. This is an attachment that turns soap into heavy foam. You cover your car with the foam, wait a while, and blow it off. Job done. I suppose you can work on details after that, but the foam will get the basic mission accomplished.

I can handle that!

I needed a foam cannon that could handle 3100 psi, and Amazon had one, for around $20. I’m all set. Now I don’t have to wash by hand. I don’t have to wax by hand. I don’t have to drive to a car wash and pay to use their pressure machine. I don’t have to drive to a hand car wash and sit for 90 minutes.

Simple.

The wax probably can’t compare to hand-applied wax, but who cares? I can wash the car twice a month with very little effort. Even bad wax will look good if you apply it twice a month.

The pressure washer surges a little. Oh, no! What will I do?

1. Chinese carbs sell for under $20 on the Internet, and replacing a carb takes less than 10 minutes.

2. The same guy who did the video about cleaning main jets did a video about cleaning idle jets. Ethanol crud in the idle jet causes surging.

His channel is wonderful. He introduced me to a new tool called a wire gauge drill bit. These are tiny bits that bend. You buy a 0.013″ bit, put it in a pin vise, and ream out your idle jet. Just takes a minute.

It’s not easy to get information about wire gauge drill bits. I’ll save you time. There are two main types: carbon steel and high-speed steel. HSS (as we tool nerds call it) is a superior material because it stays sharp longer, but carbon steel is what you want for a carb, because it bends without snapping.

I already have a bunch of carbide bits in small gauges, but they’re very brittle. I don’t want to have to retrieve a broken bit from my carb.

My bits will arrive today or tomorrow, and then I’ll be ready to fix the carb. If I fail, $15 or so will get me a new one.

I’ll link to the set I bought. It comes with bits and a pin vise. Here it is.

A pin vise is a pen-shaped tool that clamps onto pin-like objects such as drill bits. It’s sort of like the body of an X-Acto knife.

While I was fooling around with the bits, I decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I bought some special tools for working on electronic devices. I already have a lot of electronics tools, but they’re for old-fashioned products. Newer things like smartphones and tablets require weird new tools like spudgers and suction cups.

There is a great website called Ifixit. They have a forum. They are “right to repair” fanatics. Manufacturers (*cough* Apple) like to make products hard to work on so we give up and buy new ones instead of fixing them. Right-to-repairers are fighting them. They’re even getting lawmakers to protect the right to repair without voiding warranties.

Ifixit has a neat set of electronics tools. Unfortunately, it’s worth about $25, and they charge $60. I found several items which were better and cheaper. When combined, they will do what the Ifixit kit will do, much cheaper.

Example: the Nanch precision screwdriver set. I already have precision screwdrivers, but this set has a bunch of tiny weird bits to help you remove fasteners Apple and Samsung and the others use to keep you out of their products. The Ifixit set has screwdrivers and bits, but people complain that the bits fall apart. This set has better steel.

I also ordered a couple of suction cups. My 2016 Samsung phone came apart easily. The new phone I had to get is different. It’s full of goo. In order to waterproof it, Samsung glued the shells together. To get them apart, you have to put a suction cup on each side and pull. Many phones and tablets work this way. If you want to replace the battery, you have to open the phone, scrape off the old goo, and put in new goo. You can buy new goo online. A goo-based gaskety sort of thing for my phone is readily available.

My phone used to run for 24 hours with no problem, but it seems to be losing its stamina. Replacing the battery costs $70 locally, and the tech would keep the phone for a while. Now if I get tired of the battery, I can fix it myself for about $20.

The pressure washer carb gave me an excuse to get more tools, so color me happy.

I’m also planning to have my pickup painted. It’s in great mechanical shape, but Dodge paint is not very tough. Two-part paint is garbage, if you ask me. The stuff they used in the 70’s lasted forever, and you could repaint your car yourself if you wanted. The new stuff lasts exactly 7 years in the Florida sun, even if you wax, and once the clearcoat cracks, the whole car has to be sanded and painted.

I figure the SUV will need paint by 2023, but I will probably be ready to buy something else by then.

Let’s see. What else has changed? My arms were starting to hurt from holding my cell phone. I get a lot of long calls these days. Friends want to talk about God. There is something about the shape or size of a smartphone that makes it unpleasant to hold for long periods; it puts strain on the muscles around the elbow. I finally ordered a Bluetooth rig. I was going to get a Plantronics for somewhere in the area of $100, but I found a Chinese job everyone raves about for $20, so I’m giving it a whirl.

I never thought I would talk on the phone so much it would be a problem. Historically, my cell phones have gotten very little use apart from texting.

I’m spending a lot of money this month, but with a few exceptions, it’s all stuff I should have bought long ago. I may even upgrade to fixed wireless Internet, since my current service is about what the Flintstones had. You tell the mammoth whose head sticks through a hole in your wall that you want to see cat memes, and he tells a pterodactyl, and the pterodactyl flies off and tells a guy who chisels memes on slabs of rock.

I’m also getting rid of some things. I’m canceling my dad’s newspaper subscriptions. I can tell God doesn’t want me reading or watching the news right now, and the unread papers keep piling up. I’ve been looking into ways to get newsprint for my birds, and it looks like rolls are cheaper than newspapers.

UPDATE

I started writing this blog post on the 26th, but I forgot about it. I am here to continue.

My Amazon foam cannon was a failure. It’s Chinese, so no surprise. Sometimes Chinese products just don’t work. I’m returning it. I found a new one at Lowe’s. The packaging says it’s good for 3700 psi, and my machine is 3100, so the high pressure of the machine should not be a problem.

The Lowe’s cannon cost $35, and I’m not happy about it, but I don’t want to spend the next month sending foam cannons back to Amazon.

I keep learning new things about 2-cycle tools.

I thought ethanol, all by itself, was the thing that ruined engines. Now I’m wondering. Ethanol is unquestionably poison, and it cuts fuel storage life in half, but the Youtube guy I watch claims that even ethanol-free gas is bad. He says it contains olefins, which create varnish, and benzene, which ruins diaphragms.

Saw makers sell ethanol-free premixed fuel for $20 and up per gallon. The Youtube dude claims this fuel doesn’t contain olefins or benzene in significant amounts. He says you should fill your saw with Gucci gas before you store it, run it for 5 minutes to get the bad gas out, and then put it away with the tank full.

Question: why put it away with the tank full? The gas in the tank won’t get into your carb, so it can’t help your engine. A cynical person would say the manufacturers just want to make sure you spend a hundred bucks a year on their products instead of 6 dollars.

Where I live, there is no such thing as “winterizing.” I am equally likely to use a saw in any season. I might put a saw away three times a year. I’m not spending $10 on Gucci gas every time I do that. In my case, it adds up to $30 per incident, because I have three saws.

I’m thinking I may spend 6 dollars on a small can of super gas and run one ounce through each saw when I think I’m not going to use it for a while. If one ounce won’t work, neither will half a gallon.

Alternatively, I could use an ounce of Sea Foam. It can’t turn into gum, so it’s probably better than Gucci gas. You can run a saw on 100% Sea Foam without problems.

I have reached another conclusion: when you buy a new chainsaw, you should remove the carb, sell it, and buy a Chinese carb. You can make a $60 profit, and Chinese carbs are better, because they can be adjusted and they are easier to repair. The original carb will probably be Chinese, too, so the quality is the same. You should keep the old carb long enough to get past early warranty issues, and then you should pull it.

There is no point in playing along with the hippie nanny-state ethanol/emissions drama any longer than you absolutely have to. Some day, we may have practical saws that run fine on bad gas and don’t pollute unnecessarily (or we might wake up and get rid of ethanol), and that would be great, but until then, you may have to break the rules unless you want saws that sit unused or require repairs that effectively boost their prices by 30%.

While I’m bloviating, I found what may be the most amazing Harbor Freight tool ever: the circular saw sharpening machine. For the pre-coupon price of $55, this thing will sharpen any blade up to 16″ in diameter, whether steel or carbide. Reviewers love it, although it takes some effort to make it work right.

I have a ton of blades, and I’ve always felt that paying a big percentage of a blade’s price to have it sharpened was a bad deal. I have a 14″ dry cut blade, and when I lived in Miami, I would have had to mail it to someone. Imagine the hassle and expense. I’ve been putting up with a moderately dull blade. Sharpening was a pain, and a new blade was $140. If I buy the tool, I can fix the blade myself, right here.

So there will be some redemption in this blog post, I will relate a couple of words God gave me this morning.

1. Thank you for freeing me from the world.

I feel that very bad supernatural events must be coming, because I am disconnecting from the world more and more. Fiction movies and TV shows seem juvenile to me; people who run around in spandex pretending to be superheroes look especially undignified. I no longer have newspapers coming to the house. I’m extremely grateful because I don’t have a regular job, in which I would be coerced to go along with the system. I’m very glad I am less dependent on the Satanic world we live in, but I am concerned for everyone else.

I used to wonder if it was right for God’s people to flee areas and let Satan’s people have them. This week, I thought about that, and I realized it’s a very Biblical thing. Noah and his family fled, and they were saved. Lot and his daughters fled. Abraham fled. Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt. God has a history of pulling his people out of places, and sometimes it precedes disaster and judgment. If God is moving people like me to the country, to areas where Christians predominate, it seems likely that some kind of supernatural catastrophe is coming to areas the ungodly control. My guess is that demonic activity, including persecution, will explode soon. We’re already seeing signs.

2. Thank you for humiliating the losers.

Satan is a loser. He is the “god” of all losers. He is the father of all losers. He is the biggest loser there is. He is an outsider and outlaw. His crowd is like the family at the end of the street with the lawn that never gets mowed, with a living room full of stolen goods and a backyard full of marijuana plants. We all know what losers are like.

These days, we think it’s cute to call yourself an outlaw. In the old days, it was like being called a maggot. It was a huge insult. It should be, still.

The spirits that serve Satan are losers. They threw their futures away. Now they come after us, just as human losers do, selling their tired, stinking wares, hoping we’ll become losers, too, so God will suffer.

I’m very grateful that God is humiliating the losers in my life. I want these spirits to be degraded and abased all the time, and I want the Holy Spirit to be honored and empowered.

God showed me something today. All Christians know that demons want to enter and live in bodies. While I was watching Derek Prince this morning, he taught about God’s desire to make us his temples, and I realized the Holy Spirit wants bodies, too. He doesn’t want to control or ruin us, but he wants to live inside us, just as demons do.

I already knew this, but somehow God has given it new emphasis in my heart.

The symmetry of the supernatural is amazing. Satan copies everything from God. He is the China of spirits.

Over the years, I invited losers to live in me and turn me into a house gone to seed. Now God lives in me, and the losers are being humiliated and evicted. This is what God wants for us.

The losers have no future but pain and humiliation. I’m very glad to see God break them. I wish I had gotten on board sooner.

That’s all for today. I may go foam my car.

Step Away From Cursed People

My dad and my sister shared some problems. They both hoarded things, and they didn’t take care of what they had. My sister destroyed a house by failing to do normal maintenance and cleaning, and my dad would have done the same thing to his own house, had I not stepped in from time to time. They drove filthy cars. My dad didn’t take care of his boat, so it was normal to have problems when we took it out.

My dad used to get very angry with my mother and me when we talked to him about taking care of things. If one of us pointed out termite droppings or wet spots on the ceiling, for example, he would raise his voice and ask if we wanted to pay for the repairs. It was very unpleasant, so we both adopted the same strategy: keep quiet until there was a disaster. When the ceiling fell in, he was willing to let me call a roofer. Before that, talking about roof leaks was a bad idea.

My sister’s house had a water leak under the floor. She said her monthly water bill was between 300 and 400 dollars, but instead of hiring a plumber, she just paid the bills and lived with the termites, ants, roaches, and rats the water attracted. Her living room floor eventually caved in. At some point, a hot water connection under her kitchen sink broke, and the house filled with steam. When the steam dissipated, she assumed everything was all right. Of course, the steam was gone because the water heater couldn’t keep up with the flow. The interior walls of the house turned black with mold within a few days.

My dad kept junk that served no purpose. He printed out thousands of emails and kept them. After I took over his office, I threw out maybe 200 pounds of useless papers. My sister could not walk 30 feet in a store without picking up something to buy, and her house was so full of unneeded things, it was hard to walk in some rooms.

I don’t like saying negative things about my dad these days. I used to get relief from it. I vented. He used to gaslight me a lot, and when people gaslight you, you vent in order to confirm your own sanity to yourself. I don’t need to vent now. When my dad died, he was a wonderful father, and he loved God. I don’t enjoy criticizing him, but sometimes I have to say unpleasant things in order to make a point.

I was unequally yoked with my dad. I chose to stay with him when I went to law school, and I chose to work with him afterward. I believe God sentenced me to spend years dealing with him because of my bad choices. Eventually, I understood that it was wrong to be so close to someone who hated God, and I wanted to be free. I kept telling God I would never have another unequal yoking. I hoped that once my yoking to my dad was over, I would be free of some of his curses.

I believe my dad and my sister were cursed. Hoarding and letting things fall apart around you are abnormal behaviors. Their problems went beyond these things. Their property suffered unusual damage and wear, and it was hard to fix things when they went wrong. Contractors ran off with their money and didn’t do their jobs. Repairs turned out to be unsuccessful. Things that shouldn’t have gone wrong, did.

For a long time, I have hoped that I would not have to deal with these curses after my dad’s death. I managed his affairs, and even though I was a Christian with a good prayer life, it was hard to take care of his property. Bad things kept happening. Problems resisted correction.

When he bought what is now my house, a bolt of lightning destroyed a maple tree by the driveway. The main air conditioner in the house had to be replaced right away, and it leaked water that buckled some flooring. Three weeks after we moved in, Hurricane Irma knocked trees down all over the property. I had surprising difficulty in moving trees and burning them. My chainsaws got gummed up. My generator clogged up. I also had terrible problems with the lawn. I bought an expensive sweeper to get rid of oak leaves, and I installed mulching blades on the mower. These things didn’t help. I searched the Internet, and I asked many people for advice. I got nowhere.

I also felt a powerful sense of dread when it came to getting going on fixing things. I holed up and let many things go. I had to fight the dread every day. I felt great resistance.

I felt that the problems had to be related to our unequal yoking. My own belongings usually fare pretty well. The record isn’t perfect, but I am not a hoarder, I take fairly good care of my things, and I don’t think I would ever let a house get condemned.

Now that my dad is gone, things have changed a great deal. A chainsaw I could not get fixed is finally okay. My pruner’s carb was clogged up, and I found a $15 Chinese carb on Ebay that was actually superior, so I didn’t have to pay anyone to fix the old one (I listed the price incorrectly as $11 in an earlier post). I got rid of a horrible overgrown tree in a concrete planter beside the pool; it had been ruining the patio. I got my dad’s old neglected pressure washer out, and when I looked for information on fixing it, I found a Youtube video featuring the exact same machine with the same problem. I fixed it very quickly, and yesterday I blasted all sorts of crap off the patio. I even found I could remove green discoloration from the screen enclosure; that had been driving me crazy.

I finally found out how to avoid the problems ethanol gas causes with small engines. You would be surprised how hard it is to get that information. The advice you get through casual Internet searches and from reading product manuals is wrong.

I couldn’t get anything to grow here. Now I have three healthy grapevines and two strong blackberry briars growing by my garage.

The tax collector’s office is going to connect me with someone who will mow my pasture for nothing and reduce my property taxes; I’ll get an exemption as a hay producer. I bought a harrow to loosen the oak leaves in my lawn, and now I’m removing and dumping leaves and other debris at a very fast pace. My lawn is going to come back.

I got an 18-foot extension for the pressure cleaner, so I’ll be able to clean the entire house. I found a great video on pressure-washing concrete. It showed me I need an accessory that will make all my pavement look great.

Before my dad died, I could not get rid of the house my sister used to own. It seemed like it was impossible to sell. Now I have a contract on it, and two other buyers are waiting in the wings. I could not figure out what to do with my dad’s old house, but now I’m in the process of listing it.

I was planning to mow the swale by the highway to my east, to keep weeds and trees out. Yesterday I was driving home, and I saw that someone had just mowed it. I assume it was the county. Beautiful.

My house is very clean. It’s considerably cleaner than I’m used to. I have never had the kind of gross habits my dad and my sister had, but I was not neat, either. I love living in a clean house. I still need to order it, but that’s happening.

Before my dad accepted Jesus, I had a great deal of stress in my life, and I had problems that seemed impervious to my natural and supernatural efforts. When he moved to assisted living and started praying with me, things improved dramatically. Now that he’s gone, I sleep well. I don’t worry. Problems keep dissolving. I feel God’s joy in my heart. I marvel at my happiness and how well God is treating me. It may seem strange to hear that an old man who lives alone on a big farm could be enjoying life so much, but it’s true. I wish I had gotten rid of my unhealthy relationships earlier in life.

I also keep feeling that God is going to put me together with a lady I know. I have been wrong about things like that before, so I won’t predict anything, but I keep seeing surprising confirmation.

Unequal yokings are extremely destructive. Let them go. God wants you to pray for your enemies; he does not want you to live with them, marry them, work with them, be close friends with them, or partner with them in business. If you choose unequal yokings, you will pay. There is no way around it.

I recall a Christian writer saying unbelievers were like black holes. Boy, is that true. God is like a sun that shines and makes us grow, and strong Christians also feed and help those around them. Unbelievers who won’t listen seem to suck light in and deprive the rest of us. They waste and destroy. The things you do for them impoverish you and don’t help them. Being around them drains you.

Don’t make the mistakes I made. Clear your life of toxic people as soon as you can. You may be stuck with a spouse or a minor child, but you can get free of a boyfriend, girlfriend, fiance, fiancee, brother, sister, partner, or friend who is corrupting your life.

I had a visit from a Christian friend yesterday, and he asked about someone I knew in Miami. I had to relay some bad news. My Miami “friend” had been cut loose. I realized I only heard from him when he wanted something. He took advantage of me and people I knew. He treated people disrespectfully. He would do things like borrowing tools and letting them sit in his yard in the rain. He used racist language.

When I took him fishing, while the other guests cleaned up the boat, he came and stood beside me at the fish-cleaning table with a beer in his hand, chuckling because he had left them with the hard work.

He was envious; he could not be trusted to borrow tools and not damage them “accidentally.” He blew up and threw tantrums. He had a lot of bad ideas, but he always had to be in charge.

I’ll tell you a story about him. We used to give each other birthday presents. I always got him nice things. For example, I got him a big Forschner knife for use while barbecuing. One year, he gave me a plastic toy. It was a big pink pig in leathers, sitting on a plastic Harley. When you flipped a switch, it oinked, and lights flashed. He said, “It’s YOU!”

This was probably something from a store like Tuesday Morning, where they sell junk other stores couldn’t unload. As soon as I got home, I threw it on the trash pile by the street. I did not open it or even take it inside.

On another occasion, he asked he if he could take a look at a cigar I was smoking. I handed it to him, and he threw it down–on my patio–and made a remark about how I shouldn’t smoke Cuban cigars.

This person, who was not accomplished or admired by people who knew him, always tried to make me feel ashamed of myself, as though I were inferior to him. I was highly educated and had a number of things going for me, but I felt bad nearly every time I was with him.

When God showed me I was only negatively impacted by this person, I let him go, instantly. I never explained. I never regretted it. It was great to be rid of him, because I felt so much better. I used to pray for him, but I don’t even do that any more. He’s a grown man, and he knows what he’s doing.

You may have someone like this in your life. Maybe they like to say they love you, and you believe it. If a person loves you, he will treat you well. If you’re not being treated well, you are selling yourself cheap, and you need to cut the cord. God told me it’s more important to weed the wrong people out of your life than to include the right people.

It can’t think of anyone I regret cutting out of my life, but I can think of a lot of people I regret including.

Derek Prince spoke about our value, and he made a good point. A thing’s value is whatever someone will pay for it. Jesus allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could have you, so you must be very valuable.

Who is a mere man to tell you you’re not valuable, or that you should live in constant shame? Without the Holy Spirit, a man is just a rat that walks on two legs. Would you let a rat shame you?

Ask God to help you get rid of your unequal yokings. Repent. Apologize for forming them. If you want God’s help and his joy to flow in your life, you need to get rid of the immature people who stop you up like gallstones.

On another note, God showed me something very good this week. He gave me a phrase: “I forget what I was.”

Often, I forget that I used to be a real idiot. I have made fun of people who believe in the prosperity gospel, but in the 1980’s, I believed it, because I hadn’t heard otherwise from the Holy Spirit. I have been very hard on people who think Steve Munsey’s awful teachings about Jewish holidays are sound, but I gave money in one of the Munsey-based drives Trinity Church in Miami mounted. I knew very little about God until I was 40, and what I did know, I threw away. I wasted years.

All the revelation I’ve had is just that: revelation. It’s an inheritance, not something I earned. I didn’t think any of it up. When I used to try to figure God out, I got it wrong. I didn’t know much of value until the Holy Spirit came out and told me. I still have to resist the feeling that I came up with these ideas myself. It’s a delusion.

Psalm 1 says a man is blessed if he doesn’t sit in the seat of the scornful. Who has been more scornful than I? I have been cruel to people who knew less, even though I used to be one of them. I thought ridicule was a good thing.

If I understand the Bible correctly, it says we have to be charitable to people who sin, because if we are not, we may fall into temptation, ourselves. I don’t want to be a slave to sin. Also, I don’t want to be an obnoxious person who drives people away from God with a self-righteous attitude.

I’m going to keep this new information in mind. I want to be improved.

One benefit of ridding yourself of unequal yokings is that you will be free from pressure to be part of today’s culture of cruelty and ridicule. You will tend to become like the people you associate with, and these days, everyone loves pride and cruelty.

I hope God keeps blessing and correcting me. I really want to get rid of those awful oak leaves.

Antifa Gas Costs me Another Day of Work

This week I finally got some use out of my big Echo chainsaw, which had been out of commission for months. What a relief.

I screwed the saw up in a number of ways. First, I used Democrat gas. I used 10% ethanol fuel, which ruins small engines. There is no way to defend this stuff. It doesn’t save us money on fuel. It’s not really good for the environment. It makes food and animal feed more expensive by removing corn from the market. It’s bad, bad, bad. It’s stupid. And the motivation for making it is greed, not a desire to improve the environment.

I left socialist gas in my saw for something like two months. My understanding was that you had to leave it a lot longer before it would clog a carburetor. I was mistaken. My saw would not start. I tried all sorts of things. I took it to an authorized repair place, and they kept it 4 weeks, did nothing except put an ancient carb on it to replace my new one, and then returned it to me in a non-functioning state.

I replaced the carb at my own expense, and I sort of got the saw running. Unfortunately, I wrecked it while trying to get the new carb adjusted. The problem–and this is only a guess, based on faulty memories–is that I revved it a lot with the brake on. This caused a bunch of failures. It warped the clutch drum. I am told it melted a line which supplied oil to the chain. I am also told it ruined the clutch springs.

I was told about the oil line and clutch springs by the people who finally fixed the saw.

When you rev a saw with the brake on, you engage the centrifugal clutch with a drum (which is also a sprocket) which is locked in place. The drum can’t turn, so the clutch rubs on it and heats it up. Then the drum warps. After that, disengaging the brake doesn’t work, because the new bulges in the drum rub against the brake whether or not the brake is on.

A chainsaw’s chain carries heat away from the hot parts. When you rev the saw with the chain locked, heat builds up where it should not. I think this screwed up my oil line, assuming the repair people were being truthful when they said it was melted.

Anyway, the place that finally got the saw running was another authorized repair center. They took 4 weeks, but they managed to repair the saw. Unfortunately, they did things I didn’t want done. They claimed they sharpened the chain, and they also said they put Loctite on the saw’s screws. I can sharpen a chain in 5 minutes, and I don’t want screws I can’t remove. Sometimes Loctite is too much.

I took the saw out this week and did some work. It ran well, although I’m not sure it’s running wide open.

When I looked at the wood being ejected from the saw, I was not happy. It looked fine, which is to say, it did not look coarse. When a chain is sharp, it will produce big chunks of cut wood. When a saw sprays dust, it’s dull.

I sharpened the saw today, and I got really big chunks and curls of wood. Happiness. But what about the money I paid to have it sharpened?

I was also disturbed to see that the bar looked dry. It oiled fine before I wrecked the saw. I had to adjust the oiler, which makes you wonder how much the repair guy knows.

I was still reasonably happy with the repairs, until I put the saw down today, turned it off, and then returned and tried to start it. Three of the screws around the starter cover had vibrated out, in a pasture. They are gone forever.

What about that Loctite? If it was there, it didn’t work.

You don’t actually need Loctite to hold screws in a plastic saw case. You just need to tighten them correctly. Someone didn’t do that. Now I’m wondering: did the repair guy loosen those screws? They said they Loctited screws, but did they mean every screw on the saw? Maybe they didn’t work on the starter cover, so maybe they never intended to Loctite those screws. It could be my fault. Perhaps I put the wrong screws in (some are shorter than others), or maybe I left them loose.

Seems to me that when you work on a saw for money, you tighten every screw that holds the covers on. It takes 30 seconds, and it’s common sense.

Now I can’t use my saw.

I found new screws on Ebay. I was going to talk to the repair people, but they close at noon on Saturdays, so they’re at home drinking beer when I need them. I’ll have the screws on Thursday. I ordered two sizes. The ones I’m sure I need arrive Thursday (or sooner), and the ones I MAY need arrive Friday. I ordered enough so I’ll have spares.

I’m feeling some guilt about the screws. I learned what they were on a parts website, but I got them from Ebay. I don’t feel right about getting information about a product from one company and then buying from another, unless there are special circumstances. I’ve bought things from the parts site in the past. The main reason I went with Ebay was time. They’re faster. I’ve waited a long time for this saw to work, and I really need to get some trees moved. Maybe I should put in a token order from the parts place to soothe my conscience.

In case you’re wondering, Echo Timberwolf saws have a number of M5 20mm and 16mm T27 Torx bolts with a tapping thread. That’s what you need. You don’t need Echo-brand screws, which are obscenely overpriced. Stihl saws also use these screws.

The big saw will be offline for several days, so I’m not cutting tree trunks any more. I have a 16″ saw for bucking, but it’s just not the same.

Today I cut a big oak that fell during hurricane Irma. It’s in my pasture. I left it alone originally because I liked the way it blocked the view from the road. The leaves fell off, so I had to do something.

I’ve been thinking of getting an anvil, because…anvil. Anvils are cool and useful, and I may want to forge something some day for fun. You can get a very good Chinese 66-pound anvil from Amazon for about $170. Less on Ebay. To use an anvil, you need a stump to rest it on. Today I thought about that while I was cutting the oak, and I decided to make a stump.

The bit of oak trunk I chose was about 22″ in diameter, judging by the extent to which it was too big for my 20″ saw. You would think cutting a stump for an anvil would be simple, but it isn’t. It’s not easy to make a chainsaw cut perpendicularly to the axis of a tree trunk. It will usually be off by a considerable extent. Today I found that it’s possible to do surprisingly fine work, adjusting and massaging a cut with a chainsaw. I ended up with a stump that should work fine.

I read that certain stumps sold for anvil purposes (they exist) are 22-1/2″ tall, so I shot for 23-24″. I got a fairly decent piece cut, and I sprayed the ends with metal primer to slow drying and prevent the wood from checking and splitting.

Why did I use metal primer? It was handy. Nearly any kind of paint will prevent checking.

The stump I cut has spalting (mild rot) around the circumference, but I don’t think that matters. Spalted wood is fairly solid, and the anvil will be sitting on sound wood in the center of the stump. We’ll see what happens. I stood the stump up on the porch of my workshop to keep the rain off of it, and if I go through with my plan, I’ll find a permanent location for it indoors.

I’m sure the stump will work. It’s possible that bits may come off the circumference with time. I’m not worried. It should be fixable, and if not, stumps are not hard to find here.

I was wondering how to make the stump sit on concrete without rocking. I think I have the answer. I can use a chainsaw to shape the bottom of the stump so there are three big parts that contact the floor. Anything with three feet will sit flat on a flat surface.

Marxist gas didn’t just do my chainsaw in; it also choked my Echo pole pruner. I have been working on it for a while. I believe there is varnish in the fast jet. Carb cleaning stuff doesn’t help much. I think the only real answer is to remove the metal plug the greenies have put over the fast jet screw (to prevent it from working correctly), remove the screw, and use carb cleaner on everything. That would be hard, so instead, I bought a Chinese carb.

Echo pruners, like Echo chainsaws, use carbs made by a company named Walbro. A tiny, simple Walbro carb for my pruner costs $100. Amazon and Ebay sell Chinese clones for…wait for it…$11. Hmm. Do I pay the repair people a huge sum to fix my Walbro carb every time Bolshevik gas clogs it? Do I pay $100 for a new Walbro carb every time? Uh…no. I will simply buy a new Chinese carb whenever the saw doesn’t run. It takes 5 minutes to install, and it looks like the quality is no different from Walbro. My guess is that Walbro has Chinese people make its carbs. I doubt there is any difference at all.

I finally have the gas problem under control. I go to Sunoco and buy ethanol-free 91-octane gas for nearly the same price as 89-octane Bernie Sanders engine poison. Then I treat it with Biobor Ethanol buster (Sta-bil doesn’t really work). I put it in a new gas can that has had the dangerous, useless socialist spout and cap replaced with old-fashioned ones from Amazon.

There are so many obstacles to making small engines work, it’s a wonder anyone succeeds. The gas is poison. The cans don’t work. Most fuel stabilizers don’t work. Running the engines dry between uses doesn’t work. Home Depot charges something like $40 per gallon for real gas.

I’m hoping the lessons I’ve learned will work. It’s amazing to me that people aren’t marching in the streets over this stuff. Everyone has the ethanol problem, and most of the solutions we are given do not work at all. It shouldn’t have taken me, an intelligent person, a year to get past the lies and fables. Why not just tell us the truth up front? “This gas is garbage. Only a couple of fuel stabilizers work, and you will find out the others don’t work when you try to start your engine next spring. Running your engine dry in the fall won’t help. Your EPA gas can cannot be made to function correctly, and we don’t care, but you can buy parts for it on Amazon and turn it into a functioning 1980 gas can.”

It’s bad to have people jamming us up, but it’s worse when they try to hide it from us. Just tell us the truth. We’ll pay for your bad gas and accept the fact that its real purpose is to make corn growers rich so they can contribute to political campaigns. We’ll pay for the gas can parts. We’ll pay for additives that work; just tell us which ones they are.

I’ll work with the system. I will not pay $40 for Home Depot gas, but other than that, I am willing to tolerate the farce, as long as I can keep my engines clear.

Arrggh.

My pruner carb should be here Monday, so I can use the pruner on Wednesday. That will be nice. I may go ahead and hack up the old Walbro carb, since Echo’s multi-year warranty doesn’t apply to carbs (the parts which usually malfunction). If I can get the Walbro clean, I can hold it in reserve and save myself $11 when the China carb (the other China carb, not the Walbro) poops out.

Considering the BS I had to deal with, I got a hell of a lot done this week. The oak is ready to burn, and I have the beginnings of a good anvil stump. I only worked maybe three hours. Imagine what I could get done in a world without ethanol.

Bring on the electric era. We’re already starting to see a few electric products that are actually practical. The greenies are making the use of fossil fuel such a torture, I’m starting to look forward to an electric car. As soon as we reach the point where you can get a charge in 5 minutes instead of half an hour or more, I will be ready to join the dance. Make me an electric chainsaw that will run for 5 hours on two batteries and then get out of the way and take my money.

Pain is Tempered by Expectancy

I keep getting great comments on my experiences with my dad’s decline and death. I want to thank everyone again.

I’m not wasting a second, getting things in order. Today I went to visit the cremation people, and I made all the arrangements and paid them. The total was $945. That includes everything, plus 10 death certificates. They would have provided an urn free of charge had I not bought one already.

I’m also getting the house and grounds fixed up. I keep my house very clean for the most part, but disorder is a problem. The yard is a mess. I started mowing again this week, and today I sprayed glyphosate on the weeds.

I may have people come here to observe my dad’s passing, and I don’t want to embarrass myself too much. I know I live like an eccentric, and that will always be true, but I have to try to make things as normal as I can for guests.

I stopped by the ALF today and dropped off what remained of my dad’s special supplies. They told me some of the residents were poor, so this stuff could be helpful. I don’t want it near me. That part of our lives is over. I could take them his shower chair, but I don’t want to go to the ALF again.

I miss going to the ALF, but I have to move on and get a feel for my new life.

One of the ALF staffers asked if we were having a service. She said they would like to come. I was very touched. They only knew him for a few weeks.

My neighbors called and said they would watch the house and care for my birds if I had to go to Kentucky. That was wonderful. The people here are tremendous.

Social Security has been notified. The insurance companies have been told to stop billing. When the death certificates roll in, I can deal with banks and so on. We…I…still own my dad’s house in Miami, and as of today, it’s for sale. His death put an end to my huge capital gains problem.

The grief is maybe 70% as intense as it was yesterday. I don’t mind it. I’m glad he became the kind of person I can miss a lot.

Yesterday I did something a little strange. I didn’t feel good in the evening, emotionally. I also felt I needed food. I decided to have breakfast. Breakfast is the most cheerful meal of the day. We eat it while we still are still full of hope. It reminds us that life is full of new beginnings. I had a fried egg, toast, and decaf. It made me feel a lot better.

A close friend asked how I felt today. I said I felt a mixture of grief and eagerness. I don’t have to explain the grief. The eagerness comes from losing the burden of caring for him. Now that he’s gone, there are many things I can do that I couldn’t do before. I can get on top of my responsibilities. I can sell things I’ve been wanting to sell. I can travel when I need or want to.

I’m dying to get my tools moved here. As much as I hate Miami, I may drive down this week, check things out, and make some decisions.

It may sound crazy, but I’m considering building a workshop. I have a house and a shop for the tractors and some of my tools. I have been planning to put my machine tools in my garage. It would be ritzier and more ergonomically sound to put them in a separate building.

I’ll need to find out what it would cost. I think the best thing would be to contact the builder who built the house, since they did such a fine job.

I think about things like this, and then I think about how much I love and miss my dad. When you lose someone you love, emotions come and go in waves. I know I’ll feel better tomorrow than I do today, and by the time we bury my dad, I should feel very good about everything.

I heard from some of my relatives today, and we had a great conversation. I feel like some members of my mother’s family have drifted off, and others are still on board with me. I should make an effort to tighten things up with the ones who are still interested.

I also had a long call from a young friend who is in law school at FSU. I remember meeting her when she was 17, at Trinity Church in Miami. She found out I was a lawyer, and she started asking me if I could write recommendations to help her get into school. She was already sure she wanted to be a lawyer, but she doubted herself. She thought the work might be too hard. Now she’s doing great, and her second year is coming to a close. I give her the best advice I can. Anyway, if I hold an event here, she wants to come. I told her I’d pay her fare.

She’s funny. Calls me “Esteban.”

My friend Amanda said she was going to bring food tonight, but she has a fever, so that’s off. She and her kids are sick all the time. They used to come every weekend. I believe something is trying to keep them away, because I tell them about God. I would appreciate it if people would pray for them.

Sometimes I feel like my dad is still alive. For example, I come in the house, and I feel like I need to start preparing for my daily ALF visit. Sometimes I feel like I should check my calendar to see if he has any medical appointments. Then I come to my senses.

I don’t want his memory to fade. I don’t look forward to a time years in the future, when he seems to be part of a distant past, as my mother does. It will happen, if God allows me to live. I can’t prevent it.

I don’t want to think of him as a dead person.

Things will get better, and I suspect God has someone who will appear and fill the void. Maybe a wife. Maybe new friends who will be involved in some kind of ministry with me.

I’m extremely glad my dad didn’t die in Miami. I was afraid he would end up in a home run by calculating mercenaries, surrounded by old Cubans who didn’t speak English. The people who care for him were great, for the most part, and everyone I have dealt with here since he died has been warm and helpful.

The funeral home director from the cremation place told me he wasn’t sure all of my dad’s remains would fit in the Amazon urn I got him. I told him I wasn’t going to be difficult to deal with. I said we could take whatever wouldn’t fit in the box and scatter it here on the farm. He said that was exactly what he was going to suggest. Very thoughtful.

Dad used to sit in a chair on the front porch and read his newspapers and do his puzzles. I would scatter the ashes on the lawn around the porch.

If I hold an event here, that’s what we’ll do. It’s a little unorthodox, but I don’t care.

That’s how things stand. I am still here, so I have to go on. My dad is in heaven, without a care in the world, surrounded by love and complete protection. I have to stop feeling sorry for him and start living.

Escaping the Pull of Planet Gilligan

Do people get bored when I write about my TV problems? I hope not, but…no, I don’t care. I write what I want.

I killed DirecTV a while back. It was very expensive. The interface was torture. I could not download new programs. The channels were so bad, it was worse than parody. I made a great decision. I will never have another cable or satellite provider. I hope.

I tried the upgraded Youtube. It wasn’t worth the money. I killed it before the auto-renew kicked in.

I tried Hulu with live TV added. It seemed great at first, but after I had been watching a while, I started running into blocks of ads that seemed to take up about half of my time, and they could not be dodged, even with their “ad-free” add-on, which is a farce.

I complained on Hulu’s forum, and they deleted my complaint and lied, saying they had “merged” it with another thread. I asked about the complaint, and they refused to answer.

That wraps it up for Hulu. I killed it today. Actually, I left the cheaper part of it, without live TV (never used it), but I think I’m going to go back and kill that, too.

I have been watching Youtube and Amazon Prime exclusively for a while. I never felt tempted to look at Hulu, so I now realize Hulu is a waste of money.

Why does Hulu treat customers this way? No idea. Youtube’s management of ads is far superior; you can click away from them so you don’t have to hear about Grammarly or resources for AIDS patients 300 times a week. Also, the targeted ads Youtube provides are actually interesting sometimes. My guess is that Hulu’s few advertisers are aware that people hate their ads, so they force Hulu to shove them down our throats.

I don’t know if Hulu can compete with Youtube’s ad system. It may be an unprofitable. Perhaps Youtube loses money because of its ad policy, but Google pumps cash in to keep things working. Hulu wouldn’t be able to compete with a subsidized competitor. I doubt it works this way, because Youtube is paying creators a fortune. There are people who make millions of dollars every year. I don’t think Google would fund that without some kind of return.

There is an alternate explanation, which, of course, is Hulu incompetence. This is the one I’m betting on. When your guess is that someone else’s bizarre actions are caused by incompetence or dishonesty, you will be right maybe 95% of the time.

Youtube gets better all the time, which serves to prove my point, in a way. Youtube now has content which is far superior to the stuff big companies have been feeding us for decades. If the pros were not incompetent, how could little guys making videos in their basements with cell phones stomp them so easily?

When you have cable (let’s lump satellite into “cable”), here is what happens. You sit down and turn on the TV. You find 900 channels. You can’t find anything good to watch. You settle for garbage. There are PPV channels. There are shopping channels. There is an abundance of porn. There are Spanish channels. There are endless sports channels. There are pay channels featuring silly movies and creepy shows. There are Kardashians and Jenners, with their horrifying, incomprehensible TV slut academy. If you’re intelligent and even a little bit moral, there isn’t much out there.

Let’s say you have Youtube, and you want to learn about, oh, the history of Russia. It’s there, trust me. I won’t even check, but it’s there. Shakespeare? It’s there. Sewing? Plumbing? Computer programming? You name it; it’s there somewhere.

If it’s not there today, it will be in a year. Content and creators continually accumulate.

When TV was created, people floated a lot of BS about how it would be a conduit for education. TV was going to make ignorance a thing of the past. Look how that worked out! “Now sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale…” But now that TV has merged with computers, the prediction is coming true, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the hacks who used to control the system. We are also receiving more garbage than ever, but at least now there is some relief.

One nice thing about Youtube is that it’s helping decent people connect. Christians who post videos on Youtube network outside the system now. Also, the people I watch (tool and gun people) are networking. It’s turning out that many of us share a conservative Christian outlook. Sometimes when I’m watching a guy do machining or something, he’ll let the cat out of the bag. He’ll say something that confirms his status as a deplorable. That’s nice.

Leftists don’t seem very interested in tools, although they’re big in IT. Leftists are about taking, not making.

One of the bad things about Youtube is that it’s encouraging good people to rely on it for money. If a famous slut starts a channel and makes money, she can count on getting paid for as long as Youtube exists. Satan runs the Internet, and he is fine with sexual sin and female rebellion. If a Christian or conservative starts a channel, it’s another story. They will eventually ban us. A bunch of guys who thought they had careers will find out they were suckered by Satan. Wait and see.

Youtube recently had an event called “Adpocalypse 2.” It’s very strange. In today’s world, sexual perversion is rampant. It’s like the days of Noah. Perverts who want to have sex with little kids are EVERYWHERE. A bunch of them roam Youtube, making sexual comments on videos. If you post videos, and your young son often appears in the frame, these future inhabitants of hell will gather to make smutty remarks about him. Youtube decided to fight back. They found channels that occasionally featured kids, and they demonetized them. They took away the money. One day, your video is bringing money into your house, and the next day, it’s dead, and Youtube doesn’t answer questions. There is nothing you can do.

Meanwhile, your old job is gone, and you still have to pay for cameras, editing software, and whatever else.

It shows how quickly Youtube can change a person’s life, and with how little accountability.

No one seems to be talking about the risk. Everyone wants to become a full-time Youtuber, but no one asks whether the job will exist in 6 months. It will hurt, crawling back to Tractor Supply to talk to your former boss after giving him the finger and doing doughnuts in his parking lot.

The government has to abide by a constitution and statutes. The tech kiddies are much freer than the government. They can discriminate very freely without having to answer for it.

I’m on a tangent. I don’t know where Youtube is going, but for now, it’s the best source of video entertainment and education, and it’s free with your Internet service. Hulu, on the other hand, is shady and disappointing. It seemed good at first, but I seriously suspect they suppressed their horrible ads until I started paying for the service.

It’s remarkable, how little I miss cable. When I say I don’t miss it at all, I’m not exaggerating. I never feel myself wishing I could turn it back on.

Movies and network TV seem very stupid to me now. When I watch movies and non-reality shows, I think about what’s really in front of me: maladjusted adults playing make-believe, following scripts written by mercenary, cynical fringe nuts whose parents wish they had gotten real jobs.

Harrison Ford has never been on a starship because there is no such thing; he’s just an old man who carries a plastic gun. Robert Downey would be among the most useless people to have with you in a terrorist attack, and his suit is plastic, too (when it’s not 100% CGI). Hugh Laurie isn’t qualified to freeze a wart, let alone cure mysterious diseases, and he isn’t a genius. If Gal Gadot got in a serious fight with a random middle-aged man on the street, she would lose in two minutes or less, and she would need to be hospitalized afterward.

Historically, actors have generally been shiftless, unaccomplished, unscrupulous people the rest of society shunned for good reason. Nothing has changed, except for the way we see them.

Acting talent is extremely common, and it has no relationship to intelligence. There are very unintelligent people who can play smart people convincingly. It’s just mimicry. Birds do it. Many of our actors are of below-average intelligence, yet we esteem them as though they were the sharp, invincible fantasy characters they play.

When you watch a show and see characters living out adventures, it’s entertaining. When you see neurotic, narcissistic ignoramuses playing make-believe, it’s different.

I don’t know how long Youtube will continue to provide good content, but until it poops out, I’m going to stick with it. George Clooney and Chadwick Boseman (“Yes, daddy dresses like a cat for a living”) will have to make ends meet without my help.

I might conceivably go back to upgraded Youtube to kill ads, but that’s as fancy as I plan to get.

Repetitive Ads You Can’t Skip Rival Waterboarding

I am now weeks into the cable-free lifestyle, so I guess I’ll report.

I do not miss cable (in my case, actually satellite) at all. I have Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Youtube. I watch Youtube for the most part. I watch Hulu maybe 5 days per week. I watch Amazon Prime rarely, but since the video portion of Amazon Prime comes with the free shipping at no extra charge, I plan to keep it.

Here is the breakdown.

Youtube is far and away the best source of video entertainment and education, and the price is right. I can learn about absolutely anything on Youtube. I could become a very credible engineer or mathematician using only Youtube and used textbooks. Youtube is packed with tool videos. If you want to do any type of metalworking or woodworking, Youtube should be your second stop, after joining an online forum. Youtube is also the best source for religious material. No contest.

Hulu is not as good as DirecTV for my purposes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t cost $200 per month. I have no use for nudie channels or network TV. I don’t watch sports. I like Motor Trend, TCM, History, and Discovery, and that’s about it. For a person like me, Hulu fills in all the non-Youtube blanks.

There are problems with Hulu. First, the ads are a horror. They charge you something like $50 per month for the basic service, and then they nail you for a few more dollars to get rid of ads. Then they give you ads anyway.

Hulu is EXTREMELY DISHONEST about ads. When you watch a Hulu show, you can bring up a bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar will contain long unbroken stretches which represent programming. The breaks represent ads. The breaks look very small compared to the unbroken stretches, giving you the idea that ads don’t take up a lot of time. In reality, a typical stretch of programming runs maybe 7 minutes, and ads will often go three minutes. I haven’t timed programs with a stopwatch, but it appears that maybe a third of a typical program’s running time is ads.

You can’t fast-forward past Hulu ads. If Hulu says you have 170 seconds of ads to sit through, you will darned well sit through them. Also, because Hulu isn’t a highly successful company, the ads lack variety. They don’t have a lot of advertisers. This means you will generally see the same ad several times during a show. It’s a form of torture.

Hulu has a DVR feature. You can record shows and watch them later. You only get 50 hours of cloud time, which is not much. If you record a show, you also record the ads. Then when you replay it, you get the recorded ads PLUS the Hulu-inserted ads. You can blow through the recorded ads, but you are still stuck with the inserted ads.

How do I know Hulu needs to fix its ad problem? Simple. When I watch a Hulu show that really tortures me with ads, I switch to Youtube or Amazon in frustration. Hulu is conditioning me to watch other services which beat them on price, so clearly, their methods are not smart.

It seemed like I didn’t get many ads when I first started using Hulu. Maybe they ramp them up once you’re hooked. I think Hulu is a crooked company, so it would not surprise me.

Other companies have better ways of handling ads. Cable and satellite companies let you fast-forward through recorded ads. Youtube generally allows you to opt out of ads after the first 5 seconds, which is brilliant. You may conceivably see an ad you like, and you are free to watch it in its entirety. On the other hand, you don’t have to watch the same ad about living with AIDS 900 times in one week.

Youtube is convinced I have AIDS. I keep seeing the same two AIDS ads.

I think you can pay for ad-free Youtube, but the ads on Youtube are so painless, I see no point in it.

Amazon doesn’t have ads, unless ads for Amazon shows count. Those ads play before your chosen programs, so your programs don’t get interrupted.

Hulu has a forum where you can complain and make suggestions. If they don’t like your posts, they delete them. When you ask why your posts were deleted, they pretend they can’t hear you.

I may dump Hulu. Nearly all of my TV shows are Motor Trend shows, and I can get the Motor Trend channel, ad-free, for $5 per month. I watch a couple of shows from other channels, but there are honest ways to get those programs without Hulu. I still have an Xfinity account, for reasons too boring to go into, and I can use that to get online access to some of the stuff I watch. I like Turner Classic Movies, which Hulu offers. Guess what? TCM movies are available online, free of charge.

Amazon Prime has a lot of mediocre shows I don’t want to watch. It also has The Grand Tour, which is nice, but you can go through a whole season in 4 days, and I’m already done with season three. There are some good “free” things on Amazon Prime, but generally, you have to pay if you want quality.

I like Better Call Saul, which is an AMC product. AMC puts all of the episodes on the Internet. There goes that problem.

I think shedding Hulu is a good idea. I may kill it and see how it goes. I can start again whenever I want. I could put part of the saved money into killing Youtube ads.

Final thing…I may be about to get fixed wireless Internet. I have DSL right now. Wireless speeds are much better. I have been waiting for unlimited wireless data, and it has finally become available. It’s not cheap; I would pay around $100 per month. I think it would be worth it. Life on 1.5 MBps is not normal.

The company that would sell me wireless access would use towers provided by Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. Verizon would be optimal, because they give me 35 MPps on my phone on this property. Problem: Verizon is greedy. They throttle data after a certain point. After three days of TV, I would be cut off. That means I need to find out what the other towers can do for me.

The phone rep for the reseller said I might get 8 MBps. Hey, that’s four times what I get now. Hard to complain.

The more I think about it, the less I feel I can recommend Hulu. Their practices seem shady, and their ad policies sometimes make watching TV very unpleasant.

To sum up, Youtube is great, Amazon is okay, TCM is free, and the Hulu honeymoon is over. DSL is a horror. Fixed wireless is in my future, once I find a good way to get it.

Anything, including most diseases, is better than DirecTV.

God’s Presence is my Quantum of Solace

If you use the email address on my blog to get in touch with me, you may be disappointed. For some reason, it likes to put people in the junk folder, and it marks messages read, so I have no idea they’re in there. Last night I happened to check the folder, and I found a message from a college buddy. I think we last communicated in the 90’s, but I’m not sure.

We were classmates at Columbia College, back before the internal combustion engine, cell phones under 20 pounds, and lolcats. He’s a successful radiologist, which is a little funny, because he used to despair of getting into medical school. He came up with some kind of improvement in the bone marrow transplant procedure, and he was then accepted by Columbia’s medical school. I believe his invention was a very big deal, because he used to appear in TV interviews. If I recall correctly, he went to Australia to talk about it.

I don’t know why anyone worries about getting into medical school. I have high school classmates I wouldn’t trust to take a splinter out of a rat’s butt, yet who are now successful physicians. One is the son of a former mayor. I remember him as kind of a goof. Nice guy, but not someone you would bet on if he appeared on Jeopardy.

One day while I was walking around drunk during a free period, I saw him leaning against a classroom door. I had no idea what was going on. I figured he was playing a joke on a girl. He told me to hold the door for him, so I did. After he ran off, I let go, and Mr. Bond burst into the hallway. Mr. Bond was a teacher, which is why I call him “Mr.” He wasn’t all that interested in my explanation, so I soon found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office. I guess the headmaster didn’t respect Mr. Bond any more than my classmate did, because we never got past the waiting room. Mr. Bond gave me a lecture, and off I went.

Later on, he caught me in a school parking lot, riding drunk on the trunk of a friend’s car. That, I want to stress, was not my fault. Being drunk was my fault, but my friend decided to hit the gas on his own. I had no control over that.

I feel like I got framed both times. I couldn’t tell who was behind the door. It certainly felt like a girl.

My college friend is considerably smarter than the mayor’s son. Generally, doctors aren’t all that smart, so my friend should have realized he was better than the competition.

My friend gets most of the credit for getting me interested in science and math. I had entered college as a verbal person.

When I took the SAT’s, the chairman of Columbia’s English department sent me a letter, asking me to apply. I can’t understand that at all. Yes, I had a high verbal score, but how does that translate to an aptitude for studying literature? A high verbal aptitude makes you really good at crossword puzzles. It doesn’t mean you automatically want to become a leading authority on Chaucer.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that extreme verbal aptitude is useless. Maybe it’s good for cryptography? I don’t know. Nobody pays anyone to do crossword puzzles, and most English professors are middle-of-the-road intellects. You don’t need to be smart to teach people about J.D. Salinger. I don’t think brains would even be helpful.

At some point, I got the idea that I would rather be a doctor than a useless English major, and my friend…I will call him “Stan,” since I need a pseudonym…was the perfect resource. His dad was a podiatrist, and he was taking really neat classes. He told me about vertebrate anatomy, and we both signed up. Each of us got a dead cat and a dogfish, and we worked side by side at a dissection table. Stan’s dad generously supplied real scalpels so we didn’t have to use the junk most students used.

Sadly, I had no study habits, and I was clinically depressed because my disintegrating family drove me nuts. I was a real mess. I ended up bailing out and taking the class a second time. I bailed on a number of classes. I didn’t finish the class the second time around, and then I dropped out of college.

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t end up in medical school. Doctors tend to be unhappy, like lawyers, and they used to suffer a lot on the way up. I don’t know if I could have survived the long shifts and systematic abuse that characterized the system back then.

I couldn’t survive the pre-med experience, so I think it’s silly to even suggest that I could have made it through a residency.

Law school was a joke. Drink all you want, hang out with your friends, and then work hard for one week at the end of every semester. I quit taking notes during my third year. It was a good fit for me.

When you get out of law school, you don’t work 36-hour shifts. You go to work at 9, and you leave by 6. On the weekends, you stay home. If you work harder than that, you’re working for the wrong firm. Truthfully, I think the hardest workers are people who should not have gone to law school. If you’re not talented enough to get a good job, you would be better off doing something else.

Stan also helped me get hooked on tools. In his room in our suite, he had a special drawer with lots of fascinating items in it. Stuff from Brookstone and so on. Weird little hand tools I had not realized I needed. He may deserve a lot of the credit or blame for the fact that I own several tons of tools. He would probably like the little tool station I’ve set up in my man room.

I had a sort of family of 5 friends. Four of us shared a suite. Stan was the resident leftist, although he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t chain himself to anything or take part in marches. He was just farther to the left than the group average. He used to have long political discussions with my friend (and fellow blogger) Aaron, who was also part of the group. We used to call Aaron “Point” and Stan “Counterpoint.” Or maybe it was the other way around.

When Stan got in touch with me, he did it through this blog, so I knew he had seen some of my writing. I wondered how a person like me could fit into his world. I’m a far-right religious nut.

Stan surprised me. He apparently has a carry permit, and he’s a fanatical bird hunter. He says he’s upset because Californian invaders are ruining Colorado, the state where he lives. My take on this is that he’s a closeted conservative. Maybe he’ll have a Dennis Miller moment and come out one of these days.

It was nice to learn he wasn’t a transsexual vegan in a micro house with hemp walls.

I think Stan and Aaron had more influence on me than my other college friends. Stan helped me rediscover my STEM roots, and Aaron got me into blogging. He also got me interested in Israel, which is why I spent four life-changing months on a kibbutz.

I don’t communicate with a couple of the guys these days. One, a Jew who went through college with a very low opinion of Arabs, became a hard core anti-Israel activist, and he seems to be an extreme leftist. Another simply wore me down. I eventually realized I was not satisfied with the way he treated me or his influence on me, and there were some things about his character that made me uncomfortable, so I let him go.

I haven’t heard from the fifth guy in some time. He was always different. I always knew he was gay, but when we were in college, he was trying to make heterosexuality work. Years later, I found out his mother had died, and I called to express my sympathy. I heard another man’s voice on his answering machine, saying “we” were not home. I knew what had happened. I had always expected him to come out once his mother was gone.

I eventually wrote him. I told him I was a Christian, and that I couldn’t exactly congratulate him. I said I still considered him a friend, and I probably said I hoped he understood. He did not. He thought I was rejecting him or putting him down. I don’t recall, exactly. Anyway, we didn’t communicate for a while after that.

We eventually reestablished contact, and we got along fine once we cleared things up. I don’t know what he’s up to now, though. I pray for him sometimes. No matter how much you care about someone in that lifestyle, as a Christian, there is a limit to how close you can get. I’m very open about my concerns about the way homosexuality and sexual confusion are being used to as tools of persecution, and I would guess that my positions would not go over well with him.

Friends are friends, but God is God. When there is a conflict, you don’t have to weigh things and make a decision. There is only one choice.

The anti-Israel guy called me after I sent the letter to my gay friend, and while ostensibly trying to catch up with me and rekindle our friendship, he told me my letter was “evil.” That killed the relationship for me. It wasn’t his disagreement that bothered me. It was the arrogance and rudeness, combined with his incomprehensible belief that the matter was any of his business. It was startling to be confronted with such nonchalant condescension and close-mindedness.

Also, it showed how much he had changed. In college, he had been interested in learning more about his Jewish faith, and when he told me my letter was evil, I knew he had given up on the God of Leviticus. It seemed to me that he had allowed politics to become an excuse for venting rage that came from other sources.

That’s how political rage and other types of activist rage usually work. You can’t resolve things with your parents, so you join Greenpeace and go around ramming whaling ships. Activism is a wonderful, classic cover for cruelty and inability to forgive. If you dream of sending people mail bombs, but you’re having a hard time justifying it, come up with a cause, and you’ll be putting tacks and dynamite in boxes in no time.

Columbia was a terrible choice for me. The people were nuts. I have blamed myself more than anyone for my problems there, but the truth is that the atmosphere was sick.

I guess things would have been different if my parents had been helpful. Many people take their kids to colleges to look them over. Most educated people discuss college and career choices with their kids. They look to see what their kids are good at when they’re young, and they spend money on their interests and help them progress. My parents didn’t do any of those things. When I filled out college applications, I only did it because I knew I needed to have something to do the following year. I only got two applications in on time: Columbia and Dartmouth. Dartmouth waitlisted me, so I went to Columbia.

I didn’t do well with girls at Columbia. I used to think that was because I was a maladjusted kid, and there is a lot of truth to that, but I have looked up some of the women I knew, and they’re a mess. I wasn’t wrong about them. Some ended up in extreme-leftist academia or activism. None I checked up on had husbands. They were poisonous. Imagine being married to someone like that and being “corrected” 24 hours a day.

I remember a beautiful young engineer named June. She used to come to my dorm and hang out in the TV lounge on my floor. She talked about rape a lot. She would pop off with gems like, “Rape isn’t a crime of sex! It’s a crime of violence!” Out of nowhere.

Okay, fine, but what does that have to do with General Hospital? Am I supposed to ask you out now, or should I just jump out the window? Very strange. And she wasn’t odd by Columbia/Barnard standards. She was well within a standard deviation of normal.

Then there was Angela. I think she was an engineer. She was a gorgeous (by Columbia standards) Italian girl. She used to hang out with my friend Sam and his pack. She seemed like an airhead when I first met her. I remember watching her stand and grin while Sam slapped her buttocks to make them jiggle. He marveled at the motion. A year or two later, she was a feminist avenger with no sense of humor at all. It was as though an emasculating spirit had entered her body and taken control.

The previous version of Angela had been disappointing because she seemed unaware that she was selling herself cheap. The newer version was a pure horror.

I recall talking to her about a couple of people we knew. I had been speaking to them while they tried to cram for exams. I told Angela the woman’s “pre-med boyfriend” wanted to study. She said, “I find it interesting that you call him ‘pre-med’ but you don’t say what she was studying.” Ouch. Where did that come from? There go all my reasons for ever talking to you again.

She ended up working for one of the networks, helping make soap operas. She made a lot of money, but I don’t think she advanced the cause of feminism. I haven’t change the world, but I’m glad I don’t have to say I spent my life making soap operas.

Anyway, most of the women were highly maladjusted and completely unacceptable, and their nature said a lot about the institution itself.

As for the academics, there was no way I could have made it in the liberal arts, even if I had studied. To make it among liberal intellectuals (a tragic misnomer), you have to join the club, and I would not have done that. I would have been blackballed right and left for years before figuring out what was wrong.

The chairman of the English department should have added this sentence to his letter: “If you’re not a leftist nut, you are still welcome to study here, but you should forget about the possibility of making a living in academia or the arts afterward.”

Who wants to teach English or literature anyway? Could anything be more boring?

If I had had a sharp person to mentor me (instead of no one at all), I would have gone into a STEM field from day one. I would still have been in a hostile environment, but I could have gotten my degree and gotten out.

My parents didn’t introduce me to God. They didn’t prepare a path for me with prayer. I was not sharp enough to get connected on my own. Things went pretty well for me, considering. I didn’t end up dead or in prison.

I should have taken up STEM pursuits in high school and forgotten all about things like writing. Then I could have gone to a relatively normal technical college and minimized the friction with the more corrosive elements of the left.

When I look back on the opportunity I had, I can’t believe I dropped the ball. Columbia, for all its problems, was the equal of Harvard or Stanford. I could have been a mechanical engineer, an EE, or a physicist. I could have done medicine, had I chosen and prepared correctly. I had a horrible attitude, and I was not prepared at all. I wish I hadn’t gone to Columbia, but once I was there, blew a gigantic opportunity. What percentage of American 18-year-olds get four years at a top-10 university, with no student loans?

I busted my butt when I went back to school for physics. I was a different person. It’s too bad it happened so late, at the wrong school. I’m glad I got my degree, and I will always be grateful to the University of Miami for giving me a chance, but it would have been great to study at Caltech or MIT instead. Or Georgia Tech. A somewhat normal place.

Interesting stuff, at least to me.

It was good to hear from Stan, and it’s great to know he did well in life. He really got me thinking, too. Maybe now I’ll have more useful input the next time a young person who is not a leftist asks me for advice.

It’s Amazing What we Take for Granted

Today’s exciting event: installing a new toilet seat.

The neatest toilet seat I ever saw was in France. I was on a train. It was 1984. The restroom in my car had a seat with a spring in it. The spring kept the seat in the up position unless someone was sitting on it.

That was brilliant. No one likes to touch a public toilet seat, so men usually leave them down, and bad things happen. I am told that women like to hover over them, which also causes marksmanship errors. When the seat has a spring in it, both problems are eliminated.

Women probably hated the seat, but then women have a real entitlement issue in this regard. If one woman shares a house with 10 males, she will insist that everyone leave the seat down so she can sit down without looking. It’s a bad policy, but it seems to be universal. Anyway, I thought the seat was wonderful. I know what it’s like to share a bathroom with a man who doesn’t raise the seat.

The second-neatest toilet seat I ever saw was on a Japanese Toto brand toilet. The Japanese make the best toilets in the world. It’s actually a little sick, if you ask me. They go way overboard. They have seats that wash and dry you and do God knows what else. Anyway, the Toto seat did not bang into position when it was released. It fell slowly. The hinges were built so they applied friction on the way down. Genius.

I had to put a special seat and bars in my dad’s bathroom a few months ago. It was very recent. I signed him up for hospice service late in 2018, and they made suggestions. Now that he’s gone, the special equipment makes no sense, and it was hard to clean around. I replaced the seat with a slow-close job from Amazon. Apparently, the Japanese no longer have a monopoly. The manufacturer is not Toto. It’s Bath Royale.

I feel like there should be competing manufacturers named Journey, Foreigner, and Cheap Trick.

I give the Bath Royale people credit. They came up with a doozy. When you install the seat, it essentially aligns itself. When you want to clean, you push a button, and the seat pops right off.

It’s important for me to get the bathroom in order so I can fully accept what’s happening to my dad. If I left the handicap accessories there “just in case,” I would be fooling myself, and I would feel stuck emotionally, unable to inhabit my new role in life.

I suppose there is some possibility that his health might take a turn that would make it desirable to bring him home for his last few days, but I’m not going to leave things as they are just because of that. If it happens, I can restore the equipment in a day.

I use the master shower now, just to make myself move forward. I ripped out the flow restrictor, but it didn’t improve things enough, so I got a better shower handle from an upstairs bath and moved it to the master. I ordered a new handle which is supposed to be very good.

I don’t care about water flow. I have two wells and dozens of acres. My toilets and showers are going to have no impact on the local water supply no matter what I do.

It’s bad enough that my hipster washing machine doesn’t get clothes clean. I’m not putting up with substandard showers.

The people who like “high-efficiency” machines (deluded hippies at Consumer Reports) claim they get clothes cleaner. That’s far from true. It may be that they remove stains better, but that’s not the same thing as getting clothes clean. If you take a pair of poopy drawers and put them in a machine, and it smears the poo around really well and then leaves the diluted poo in the fabric, the stains will be gone, but the poo and bacteria will remain. If you wash a pair in an old-fashioned machine that uses a ton of water, you may end up with a tiny amount of poo pigment in a stain, but the generous rinsing will assure that there is virtually no poo anywhere else in the garment. Which pair would you rather wear?

Greenie washing machines don’t even get big loads wet all the way through. Try one and see. Put 6 bath sheets in the washer and turn it on. Chances are, the load will be dry in the middle when you’re done. If you’re washing things that are really offensive, it’s very bad when they don’t get wet. You’re just sending filth on a carnival ride, and then you’re putting it in your dryer, so it can coat the inside.

I found out how to defeat the problem with greenie washers. You use the “bulky” cycle. It’s typical leftist hypocrisy. You make a “green” product which doesn’t work, and then you add a feature that defeats the purpose yet makes the product function. It’s like low-flow toilets. You buy a toilet which uses half as much water, and then when you use it, you flush twice.

When you use the bulky cycle, the machine gives up and uses more water. Then it punishes you by refusing to spin it well, so you have to leave it in the dryer twice as long. Which consumes…more energy.

Greenies never seem to get anything right, yet their smugness and self-righteousness continue unabated.

I replaced 11 compact fluorescent bulbs in my ceiling recently. These are the curly bulbs Al Gore forced on us prematurely. They’re full of mercury, and they take around two minutes to start working. You go in a dark room, turn on the lights, stumble around in the dark, walk out, and turn off the lights. They’re worthless. My ceilings are at least 10 feet high, and my CFL’s were starting to crap out, so I had to get a big ladder and drag it from room to room. I only needed two new bulbs, but I was not about to get that ladder out 9 more times, so I threw all the others out, too. I replaced all the bulbs with LED’s. The LED bulb is the product Al Gore should have been patient enough to wait for.

The CFL’s have to be disposed of carefully because of the mercury. That means you have to make sure they’re hidden deep in a bag when you put them out with the regular trash. Virtually everyone puts them in the regular trash, so there is no point in making a drive to the special place where they take in scary garbage. If most people were disposing of CFL’s properly, I would, too, but since they’re not, my rigid observance of the law would accomplish nothing except to inconvenience me.

In the distant past, we waited for technology to improve before we abandoned tried and true ways of doing things. Not any more. We gave up incandescent bulbs and killed thousands of American jobs before we had a decent alternative, just so hippies could feel superior. LED’s were coming with or without input from greenies; the free market loves superior technology.

Imagine what it would have been like had we banned horses in 1895. Horses were considered unsanitary, and cars were the new green option. If greenies had been around back then, Americans would have been forced to buy a lot of really terrible cars or just walk.

To leftists, government coercion is always the first resort. They never wait for people to do the intelligent thing on their own.

I get cranky when I have problems caused by bad green technology. I acknowledge that. It’s exasperating, having a $1000 washer which is vastly inferior to a $400 washer made 20 years ago. It’s even more exasperating, knowing there are no good new washers. There is nothing I can do to get around the problem of the bulky cycle and moldy clothes, until engineers find a way to create an effective washing machine hippies can’t ban.

Anyway, the toilet seat is installed, and my high-flow shower handle is coming. It’s only a matter of time before I use that bathroom for everything. Eventually, I’ll use the bedroom as well.

I better get on the road. My dad will be finishing his dinner in about 35 minutes, and I haven’t seen him yet today. It’s best to see him an hour before a meal, so he will have something to do when I leave, or immediately after he eats, so he won’t be hungry and I won’t have to sit in the dining room while he finishes. It seems like they’re always eating. They have three meals a day, and bedtime comes early.

“We’ll Put the Bendpak Over by the Breakfast Nook”

I am having a man moment. I am asking myself if there is any reason why I should not move my TIG welder to the living room.

I got a TIG early in 2017, and then we moved north. I was terrible at TIGing when we left. I didn’t get a lot of time to practice. My welder has been in my workshop ever since. It has been idle.

I planned to get 240V service installed, and I figured I would TIG once I got it hooked up. The electrician I contacted for an estimate flaked out repeatedly, so nothing has been done.

The other day, I was surfing and learning about TIG, and I realized my welder doesn’t require 240V service.

One of the welder’s selling points is its ability to work on 120V power. I discounted that, because I assumed it would only weld very thin metal. I looked into it, and I was wrong. I can weld 1/8″ metal, which is what I was welding back in 2017. Now that I think about it, welding very thin metal would be a good strategy, because it would be easier to prepare for welding, it would be cheaper, and it would require more skill. If I can weld thin metal, I can weld thick metal. If I learn on thick metal, I will still struggle with thin metal until I get used to it.

I thought about this, and then I made the next jump of logic. If I can weld on 120 in the workshop, I can also do it in the living room. With air conditioning and a big TV. Close to the fridge.

I have some concerns about damaging the hardwood floors, but TIG is not very messy. MIG throws crap around, but TIG is neater. I have never had molten metal leave a workpiece.

This could work. I’d have to move the birds to another room when I welded, in order to protect their eyes, but I could make it happen.

You know what? I’m a single man. I could move LOTS of my tools into the main living area. Maybe my ideas about getting real furniture were stupid. I have no woman to stomp around, giving me a hard time. What am I waiting for?

In other news, my dad and I shared a great experience today. The Veterans of Foreign Wars like to go around pinning medals on veterans in assisted living, and my dad’s hospice works with them. Today three people showed up at my dad’s ALF and held a pinning ceremony. They played the national anthem and God Bless America. We recited the pledge of allegiance. They gave him a certificate and a stand with three flags (American, Florida, Army).

The guy who ran things is a marine. He served in the 1960’s. His wife came too, but she forgot some things, so we had to wait while she went to get them. That gave us time to talk. My dad had a surprising conversation during that time. He and the marine had been to a lot of the same places, and because my dad’s military experience took place so long ago, he still remembered a lot of it well enough to be able to discuss it. They talked about Nevada and San Francisco. My dad was in the army band, and he served in San Francisco with Tony Bennett and Chet Baker.

It was shocking to see my dad speak so lucidly. He wasn’t completely on top of things, but he didn’t sound completely demented, the way he usually does. I didn’t know what to make of it.

My dad is not the same man he was a year ago. He got very emotional during the ceremony. He kept saying he didn’t deserve it. He talked about how moved he was. He kept telling us how much he loved America. I wondered what our visitors would have thought, had they known him when he was young. God has done wonders in my dad over the last couple of months. I hardly know him.

They’re going to have a bigger ceremony with more honorees soon, and my dad will get to enjoy being honored all over again.

The marine told us this county has the nation’s biggest military population, apart from counties that contain military installations. So apparently, Marion County is one of the world’s great military powers. We should invade somebody.

I have to think about the welder idea. It would be pretty hilarious, TIG welding in front of the TV.

If You Want to Fit in, You’d Better be a Nonconformist

I watch a lot of car shows. I don’t care that much about cars, but I like watching people use tools. I love metalworking. Car shows are full of that kind of thing.

The other day I sat down to watch, and I made a remark to myself about how it was time to watch more guys with black T-shirts and creepy beards. Then I thought about what I had said.

The people who customize and restore cars on TV tend to fall into a certain demographic. They really do wear black T-shirts, and many of them have very creepy beards, like convicts. Many are covered with vulgar tattoos (redundant). Quite a few have fallen prey to the fad of body mutilation modification. They are neck-deep in modern hipster culture. Most are not what you would call devout Christians, although there are exceptions. There was a show called Fat & Furious which featured Christian car builders.

I’ve noticed something else. Many of them like to preach. They talk a lot about family, warmth, and doing the right thing. At least a couple of the shows (The Ride That Got Away and Overhaulin’) make a pretense of building cars out of altruism. They find people they claim are especially deserving, and they build cars for them (oddly, one free-car recipient was wealthy then-Depp-wife Amber Heard). One show modified a car so a disabled vet could use it. Another fixed up a car so it would lift a cancer patient up to the seat.

These shows feature what I call “the alternative righteousness.”

Christians are demonized in today’s American culture. We are seen as bullies and haters. Non-Christians love using homosexuality and sexual confusion to beat us up. When we offer correction, intending to help people get out of the clutches of Satan, we are characterized as vicious bigots.

Non-Christians love giving us Bible lessons. They have decided they own Jesus. They have learned one phrase from the Bible: “Judge not.” They have discarded everything else, including the verses condemning perversion and fornication, as well as the verses obligating us to warn people who are in sin. They tell us they’re more like Jesus than we are. They think Jesus’ entire message was this: “Be nice and never criticize anyone.” They aren’t interested in the Bible passages that say the lustful will not enter the kingdom of heaven and that Jesus will return and make his robe wet with the blood of sinners. He is returning, and what he will do will not be nice at all.

Many non-Christians have decided they’re better than we are, because (in their minds) they’re nicer than we are. To them, this is righteousness. They’re not interested in God’s righteousness, which includes justice and obedience. Whether they realize it or not, they think they’re better than God.

Satan has lots of gimmicks, which he recycles. If you don’t fall for one, he brings out another. The alternative righteousness is one of his current projects. He intends to convince unbelievers they don’t need Jesus, because they’re so good without him.

Today God showed me what’s behind all this. It’s the spirit of Antichrist.

“Antichrist” doesn’t just mean “against Christ.” It refers to spirits and ideas that are intended to REPLACE Christ. People who are caught up in the alternative righteousness aren’t just rejecting Jesus; they’re trying to prove they can do a better job than he would. They think they can give the world love, compassion, and kindness, plus homosexuality, fornication, drug abuse, and pride.

It doesn’t work, of course. First of all, they’re not really all that loving. They pretend to be, but it’s superficial. God wants us to have invincible love that comes from the Holy Spirit living within us. He wants us to have supernatural love. You can’t get that by wearing cause ribbons or getting tattoos featuring the faces of your dead relatives. Second, they’re working against themselves. You can’t indulge your flesh with sexual sin and pride without inviting things like anger and cruelty. Sexual sin and pride are selfish; there is nothing good or altruistic about them. You can’t give yourself to selfishness and self-sacrifice simultaneously.

If you insist on doing a thing your own way, on your own terms, you’re not doing it for anyone but yourself.

The alternative righteousness people are working to create a world in which man creates righteousness without Jesus. They will invite us to participate, while making it impossible for us to do so in good conscience. When we turn them down, we will be condemned for it. This already happened in Rome. The Romans had many false “gods,” and they were perfectly willing to include God himself, but Christians refused to acknowledge the fakes, and for that reason, they were considered divisive and dangerous.

A whole lot of “nice” people are going to try to drive us off the planet. They won’t all wear scary uniforms like the Gestapo. They’ll wear yoga pants and torn jeans and black T-shirts. They’ll be covered in tattoos that say things like, “In Loving Memory of Tito.”

It makes sense. The Antichrist himself is supposed to be a man who brings peace and prosperity to the world. He’ll suck people in by making their problems go away. He’ll be the nicest man who ever lived. When we criticize, people will think we’re against a shiny, happy world with single-payer healthcare, no wars, and no homeless people.

My guess is that the alternative righteousness will morph into open wickedness, including cruelty and murder, once the ball really gets rolling. Think of Islam. In places where Muslims are in the minority, Islam is called the Religion of Peace. In places where Muslims are powerful, they bomb churches and pass discriminatory laws. When the black T-shirts are too powerful to oppose, they won’t have to pretend to be nice any more, and their boss won’t want them to. Satan may pretend to be nice in order to get the upper hand, but he won’t be able to stomach it for long. He loves making human beings, who resemble their creator, suffer. He will want to fly his true colors as soon as the act becomes unnecessary.

People who think Jesus was always nice, or that he only cared about being nice, will make excellent dupes for the Antichrist. They already do, and churches are full of them. They don’t want to hear about God drowning the human race. They don’t want to hear about the time Jesus beat strangers with a whip, or the time Peter fatally cursed a man and his wife. They want us all to be pro-gay vegan Buddhist pacifist Christians who practice mindfulness. They’ve converted most American churches already.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. It’s going to happen regardless of what Christians do. I suppose it’s good to see it coming, though.

I still like watching the shows, but now I remember to pray for the people who appear in them.

God Doesn’t Hide his Face Forever

It’s time for an update on my dad’s situation.

I continue to be very impressed with the ALF where he lives. Every time I mention it to a professional involved with elder care, I am told how exceptional it is. This week, I talked to an attorney about getting VA money for my dad, and when she found out where he was, she told me it was the only ALF in the county with an ECC license. I don’t know what that stands for, but you can Google it and then pretend to be smart in a comment.

The basic idea is that this type of license will allow the ALF to provide care for my dad longer than other ALF’s. ALF licenses mandate that patients be moved to other facilities when they deteriorate past certain points, and all the other ALF’s here would have to ship my dad out much sooner, costing us money and causing disruption.

The lawyer was impressed, and that says a lot, because she was recommended by a friend of hers who runs a competing ALF.

God really looked out for me. I had no idea what I was doing. There are dozens of ALF’s around here. What are the odds I would find the best choice on my own?

Another bonus: just from a free consultation with the lawyer, I found out how to push everything my dad has out of the probate loop, and that saved us a great deal of money plus a prolonged hassle you would not believe. I didn’t know how much trouble we were in, but it’s all fixed now. So far, this has cost me nothing, and when I get together with the attorney again, I don’t expect our remaining loose-end fixes to cost much.

My dad has been stable for the last couple of days. He actually seems somewhat better. Yesterday, he remembered that I had a sister.

He still wastes a lot of our time together trying to work out a way to go home, and that’s unfortunate. By God’s grace, I learned that he changes channels when I talk about people who don’t have his advantages. Many ALF residents don’t get visits from loved ones. Many don’t have relatives looking after them at all. Many are in cheap, dirty, impersonal ALF’s that are essentially warehouses. When I tell him how good he has it, he begins to focus on that, and he regrets complaining. He starts talking about how blessed we are.

He keeps telling me what a wonderful son I am and how much he loves me. It sounds so strange; I haven’t forgotten how the family saw him when I was a kid. He was a scourge. How can that same person be so effusive now? I’m very grateful for the change, however. He could be telling me he hates me and that I’m a terrible son. In other words, he could be like my sister, who has assured me I’m going to hell.

I make sure we pray together every time I sit down with him. It’s something I used to dream about. I am going to do everything I can to make sure he goes to be with Jesus when he dies. That would more than redeem the time and suffering involved in caring for him during his decline.

I’m somewhat less sad about the process of fixing up the house in the wake of his permanent departure. I still don’t like it when I make changes that reflect the fact that he is never going to come home, but I’m getting used to it, and I am comforted by his sudden enthusiasm for prayer. Every parent dies, but not all of them turn their lives around before they go. One day I’ll see him again, in perfect health, with all his faculties.

Because he’s not here, I’m getting on top of things I allowed to slide. I finally got new tires yesterday. I would say the whole effort took over three hours. I had to sit at Walmart and do nothing for much of that time. When he was living here, I would have had to take an Uber to get back to him, and then I would have had to take another one to go get the car.

The first floor of the house is getting cleaner and neater. I can finally say my dad’s laundry is clean. I had to wash all the bedclothes twice, and I kept finding other things, like his bedroom slippers, that needed to be washed. I had to remove the cover from his mattress and wash and dry it over three days.

The living room has been dusted and re-dusted, and I cleaned all the furniture. I shampooed the rugs. Today I opened the fireplace flue to see if I could find out why I kept seeing wasps in the room. A bunch of wasps fell out and landed on me. Thank God they’re not aggressive. I sprayed some poison up the chimney, and I used my new cordless stick vacuum to suck up dozens of confused and possibly stoned wasps. I’m going to make a fire as soon as this hot spell ends. That ought to discourage anybody who is still squatting in there.

Back when I thought my dad’s mattress was hopeless, I ordered a new one from Walmart. When I found I could save his mattress, I thought about sending the new one back, but I decided to keep it for myself. My old mattress is from 1994. Last night I moved the old one to another room, and I put the new one in its place. Very nice.

It must be okay, because as soon as I lie down, I start to fall asleep. I don’t understand that. It may make prayer difficult.

I’m paying more attention to our investments, and things are shaping up. It shouldn’t be long before they become a source of peace as well as income.

I wonder how much of this can be traced back to my baptism on December 19 of last year. Things have continually improved since then. The road has been bumpy, but the upward trend has been consistent. I wonder how many good things Christians have missed out on by settling for false baptisms.

I would still like to get my dad baptized. I do not believe it’s essential for salvation, but it’s clearly essential if you want everything God wants to give you. It would be very hard to baptize him in his current state, especially in the winter.

I watched Derek Prince talk about baptism today. He was a Greek scholar at Cambridge. He said “baptism” meant full immersion or having water poured (not sprinkled) over you. I don’t know if he was correct, but “baptism” is a Greek word, so he may have known something. I can certainly get my dad into a shower and pour a bucket of warm water on him. I don’t want to do it if it’s the wrong procedure. Also, I don’t know if it matters when he’s so close to the end. Maybe we should settle for salvation.

I pray about it. The answer will come.

It’s always sad to think about what has been wasted, and that can’t be fixed, but apart from that, I am very satisfied with the way life is going. I believe it will continue to improve, and whenever I learn something new about God which may help with the process, I will make good use of it.

I think about people who don’t have God to help them. Many people have their lives spin out of control and crash, and they don’t know God will put things right if given a chance. It could have happened to me; I worked very hard to assure that I would be cursed. I’m very glad I received correction. I wish everyone had it.

I’m getting so confident, I may conceivably try to vacuum the pool today, and I may even fix the chainsaw. I can’t wait to be completely ahead of my responsibilities.

If you have problems you can’t get on top of, give God a chance, and don’t quit early. Keep looking for things you’re doing wrong. Keep asking for correction. Don’t mistake obstacles and diversions for permanent defeats; sometimes they mean you’re doing the right thing. God didn’t put you down here to flounder and die. If things aren’t going right, it just means there are things you still need to do.

The Perils of Owning a Tiny Hobby Pool

I feel like a rant. I will try to keep it short.

I do not like swimming pools. I don’t like public pools because they’re full of pee, dissolved feces and mucus and other secretions, hair, band-aids, and God knows what else. I don’t like private pools because they’re for suckers. You give up 1800 square feet of prime lawn, and in exchange you get a tiny patio and a pathetic pool which is, if you’re lucky, 30 feet long and 8 feet deep. Your insurance company won’t let you have a diving board or a slide, leaving you with very little to do on the four yearly occasions when you actually use your glorified kiddie pool.

Pools are a pain in the butt to maintain. The base fee for a service is around $1200 per year, and that doesn’t include replacing things that crap out. If you maintain the pool yourself, you end up spending a lot of time trying to fix inferior products designed by the worst engineers in the universe.

Pool parts are made from cheap plastic that isn’t strong to begin with. It starts out bad, and then it gets worse as solar radiation eats it. The materials are crap, and the designs are so bad, good materials wouldn’t help. O-rings poop out. Handles snap off. Plastic parts that are supposed to be watertight crack. And the replacement parts, which are also garbage, are overpriced. You can pay $20 for a few O-rings to rebuild a single valve. In the real world, O-rings are nearly free, but the people who make the pool junk won’t tell you which sizes you need, so unless you want to guess, you have to pony up.

My pool has driven me nuts. A doodad that lets air out of the filter screens fell off months ago, inside the filter. I couldn’t see the problem because it was internal. The pressure inside the filter kept going up, no matter how much I backwashed. This caused cracks to appear in the pump body. This caused water to spray on the motor. The motor would eventually have failed because of this, so I had to take the entire pump apart and cover the cracks with special epoxy.

The pump’s outlet was the location of the cracks. The outlet is threaded on the inside and outside. You can choose to use a male or female fitting to connect it to the system. Originally, it had a female fitting on it. I replaced it with a male fitting which screws into the outlet. It turned out the female fitting had been holding the pump outlet together, by squeezing it after it was tightened.

I turned the pump on after replacing the pipes and fixing the original leak, and while the old crack no longer leaked, I had water coming out in two more places. Screwing the male fitting in exerted outward pressure on the crap plastic of the outlet, so it either created new cracks or opened old ones.

I spent quite a while cutting and cementing PVC to make this stupid thing work, and now I have to rip it all out, apply more epoxy, and redo the whole thing with a female fitting.

While I was having problems with the filter pressure, I kept using the backwash valve over and over. I didn’t know these valves were junk. You can probably get by with only rebuilding yours once a year if you give it light use, but when you backwash 15 times a week, the O-rings die, and then you have to get new ones. Your local hardware store doesn’t carry the right sizes, so you have to go on the web, find out which ones you need, and order them from Ebay or some other source. Either that or overpay.

I rebuilt the original valve after waiting forever for O-rings to arrive, and it still didn’t work, because the valves themselves get corrupted with corrosion and so on. I had to buy a whole new valve which is more complicated. The design is supposed to be better than the old ones, but Amazon reviews mention quality control issues and so on, so I’m sure it will give me problems eventually.

The manufacturer is a company called Pentair. I think they get their engineers from mental institutions. The worst junk imaginable.

It’s possible to get around the backwash valve problem by choosing not to get a backwash valve. You can design and build a complicated system of ordinary ball valves that will do the same thing, but it may take up a huge amount of space.

My new valve is leaking. Not much, but enough to be annoying. I believe the ends of the pipes that exit the valve are irregular, preventing the O-rings from seating well. No problem. God forbid Pentair should have to make their parts correctly. I’ll just take the whole thing apart, sand the surfaces down so they’ll seal, and make it function.

I figure I only have another 4 hours of work to go, on a system that should have lasted 30 years without repairs.

Pentair isn’t alone. I’ve also used Hayward products, and they were also unreliable. When a pool pump says “Made in Mexico” on the motor casing, you ought to know you’re in for trouble.

Get this: pool pumps have open-frame motors. OPEN, instead of totally enclosed fan-cooled (TEFC) motors. Incredible. What kills pool motors? Water. How does it get in? 1. Seals that die because they overheat if you run them for 30 seconds without water, and 2. BIG VENTILATION HOLES IN THE CASINGS. Am I the only one who sees the issue?

The next time my pump motor dies, I should get myself a beautiful surplus TEFC motor (American made) from Ebay, for $60, and I should fab up a way to adapt it to my pump. Beats paying over $200 for three-year Mexican motor made from old hubcaps.

I have never owned a large hotel pool, but my guess is that they use much better pumps and filters. Pentair makes disgraceful Mickey Mouse products which are designed to fail, and I know hotel owners and universities and so on wouldn’t rely on that kind of equipment. Somewhere out there, there has to be a competent company that makes reliable products which are, sadly, too big for my tiny, shallow 30-foot pool that has no diving board.

If you’ve never had a pool, and you can’t wait to get one, think twice. My dad got our first pool when I was 12. My family has had two relatively nice 40′ by 20′ pools with diving boards. It’s not worth it. You will use your pool rarely after the first year, and after that, it will just be a money suck that increases your insurance rates.

Spend the money on a serious brick barbecue with a pig pit and pizza oven built in. Put in some shade trees and landscaping. Forget the pool. You’ll just be buying a headache.

Okay, I feel better now. You are dismissed.