Never Mind

My dinner took place under unusual circumstances tonight.

I went to get a much-needed haircut, and while I was out, I bought groceries. Ordinarily, my dad goes with me when I get groceries, and I don’t like to cut him out of the experience, but I put in a lot of time dealing with him and his problems today, and I needed some relief.

I am never going to take him to my barber shop. I enjoy the barber shop, and he would ruin it for me. I have never told him its name or where it is. He tried to pin me down once, and I was evasive. He will never see the inside of that place. If he wants a barber, I’ll take him to the Mexican place on Highway 484.

When I got back, he started trying to get me to take him out for food. The kitchen was full of newly bought food, so he didn’t need anything. He was just bored. That’s understandable, but it’s not justification for adding to my burdens.

My dad pesters me when he’s bored. He comes up with strange projects, or he brings me trivial problems. These things are pretexts for disturbing me. He finds it entertaining to deal with these things in partnership with me. The problem with this is that he comes up with many of these things every day, and almost all of them are a waste of time, not to mention somewhat stressful for me.

He would like to go out for food at least twice a day, and that will never happen, because I would not be able to stand it. He will have to settle for three times a week.

Today he started telling me we should eat meals together. No, no, no, NO. Not possible. His table manners are unbelievable. I have to be careful where I look. If there is no music playing, I have to listen to a lot of mouth sounds. That’s bad, and worse spectacles are not out of the question. Also, conversation can be a problem. He says things he knows annoys me, which is not great for my digestion.

It’s a job, not a meal.

I had to tell him I need a certain amount of time to myself. I had to let him know that whenever I’m with him, I’m working. If he’s present, I’m not relaxing. I’m taking care of him. I can’t do it 24 hours a day.

He said I didn’t take care of him. He said he looked after himself, and he asked me what I do for him, so I gave him a list. I clean his house. I change his bed. I launder his clothes. I take care of his business and his taxes. I take care of his health problems, including going to the doctor with him. I mentioned a lot of things. I didn’t do it in an angry way. I said it with patience.

He said I benefited from all these things, because I would inherit everything he has. I told him changing his sheets didn’t benefit me, and I listed other tasks that don’t benefit me, either. It really doesn’t matter whether what I do benefits me. It’s still burdensome.

Then he said, “Is it all right if I just kill myself?”

This is how his personality works. My sister is the same way. They try to put you on the defensive. When it doesn’t work, if they have to accept any responsibility or blame, they go off the deep end and accuse you of attacking them.

In his mind, by saying I did a lot for him and needed time off, I was saying he was a worthless, selfish piece of two-legged excrement who ought to be executed.

He said I was complaining. Complaining would be 100% justified, but my motive was not to complain. It was to make him understand why I can’t spend more time with him. I told him having to do things for him was just part of life.

I haven’t done anything wrong. Not one thing. I know better than to pay attention to the emotionalism and histrionics.

I went to my private lair to eat, and a few minutes later, he called up the stairs. He said he wanted to have a talk with me. I told him I was eating. He asked if we could talk when I was finished, and I agreed.

He wanted to correct me. He wanted to sit me down and badger me and demand answers until I admitted I was wrong to not enjoy spending every waking moment with him. That sounds like a joke, but it’s exactly what he wanted to do. He also wanted to cross-examine me until I admitted he didn’t have dementia. He tries that a lot.

I finished eating maybe 20 minutes ago. I’ve been relaxing with Youtube. I have no intention at all of talking with him. I never did. I’m waiting for him to forget.

It’s the smart move. Talking to a demented person with unfounded grievances is a complete waste of time and an emotional drain. There is no possibility whatsoever that I’m going to agree to spend more time with him; if anything, I will have to spend less and less time with him in order to preserve my sanity and get things done. Even if I lost my mind and agreed with him, it wouldn’t matter, because later today, he would forget all about it.

I’m not sure why I treat him with so much respect. It’s just a habit, I suppose. People who deal with demented individuals and mental patients generally patronize and say whatever helps at the moment, no matter how fanciful it may be. I don’t do that. I usually talk to him as though he were of sound mind, and I try to help him understand things. Sometimes it’s not possible to treat him like an adult, but when it is, I indulge myself. When I told him spending time with him was taxing, I was treating him like a rational person.

He has to come to understand that he has a terminal illness and serious mental problems that are going to get worse. Even a demented person needs to know what’s happening to him. I suppose that isn’t true of profoundly demented people, but my dad is still capable of understanding what’s going on with him. He refuses to come to terms with it because his style, all his life, has been to get emotional and angry and deny his problems.

It’s disappointing.

When my mother found out she had given herself lung cancer, she didn’t lash out. She didn’t deny it was true. She never blamed anyone else. She didn’t cry and scream and curse God for picking on her. I suppose this is the long way of saying she didn’t act the way my sister acted when she got her own lung cancer diagnosis.

My sister lost her mind. The universe, which was created solely for the purpose of displaying her magnificence to a supporting cast of billions, was about to end with her demise. She went into denial. She burdened other people. She felt wronged, even though she had smoked a hundred pack/years of cigarettes and had not bothered to get medical insurance. She borrowed money for treatment and never offered to repay it. She openly demanded pampering and special privileges. My dad isn’t that bad, but he’s not exactly taking it like John Wayne.

It would be nice if everyone took misfortune in a way that increased your respect for them. My mother proves it can be done. Lots of people handle fatal diseases well. I would love to be able to tell people how tough my dad is. That must be nice.

Last night, my friend Mike told me things about hospice care. He has his own medical staffing company, and he is starting a hospice. I learned some surprising things.

I thought a hospice was a sort of bed and breakfast where you go to die. That’s true, but hospice care is more than that. If you’re a mess, and like my dad, you’re going to get worse and die, you can be evaluated and found eligible for in-home hospice care. They will send people to your home several times a week to bathe you and so on, and they will free up your caregivers. Medicare and insurance will cover it.

Hearing the word “hospice” was a little sobering. It was the first time anyone had mentioned it with respect to my dad.

My dad is dying. His heart keeps pumping, and he looks surprisingly good for his age, but his brain is coming to pieces, and at a certain point, it will no longer be able to keep his body going. I tend to think of my dad as a senile person who has to be managed, but in reality, he’s in the same boat as people like John McCain and Charles Krauthammer. He has a fatal disease.

I tend to think in terms of maintenance instead of preparing for death. Maybe that’s because maintenance is so challenging and time-consuming. If I had more time to think about it, I suppose I would be trying to plan more. I know how to look after the man my dad is today, but what about the man he will be next month? That person may not be able to use the toilet or get out of bed. What will I do?

I’ve been thinking about moving him to assisted living in the future, but that’s probably wrong. Assisted living is for people with physical problems. If your brain is fine but you can’t get out of bed without help, assisted living is for you. I don’t think it’s right for someone who is losing his mind rapidly. I’m told there are “memory centers” for people with memory issues. I don’t know if they’re for people who are sinking quickly or just relatively stable people who aren’t as sharp as they used to be.

A few days ago, I took him to lunch, and he got a doggie bag. As he walked out into the parking lot, he blew his nose without a handkerchief. He held the bag of food in his cane hand as he applied a finger to his nostril. A thick glob of snot about 4 inches long swung out of his nose and onto the bag and his hand. It would have filled a shot glass halfway. He didn’t care who was watching. He didn’t remember the many times I’ve cautioned him not to do what he was doing. The worse his mind gets, the less he’ll fit in with able people. He’ll have to be isolated from them in order to avoid making them suffer.

I am not a fan of people who inflict their disabled relatives on the public. If you have an autistic son who screams over and over, you don’t take him into a movie theater. It’s that simple. If your wife has an illness or disability that makes her revolting to watch, you don’t take her to Ruth’s Chris and put her in a prominent seat where other diners have to see her. You have to have consideration for other people. I’m not going to ask waitresses to clean up urine or mucus. I’m not going to ruin people’s meals just so my dad can enjoy a night out. When things get really bad, he will have to have a change in environment.

This will make him unhappy, and there will be nothing anyone can do about that.

Some people have to be unhappy. Welcome to Earth.

It’s a shame he has been so defiant and spiteful about bad manners all his life, because now he is stuck with habits that will shorten the time he can spend among able people. He needs to be around other human beings, and his young self has fixed things so his helpless older self will get less contact.

When he was a powerful lawyer, he could force people to put up with whatever he did. He could call younger attorneys things like “fart sack” in front of other employees. Things are not the same now. No one has to put up with a dementia sufferer with a durable power of attorney. He can’t adjust to having to show consideration. When his extraordinary behavior offends other people, he gets angry and thinks they’re wrong.

I’m going to go down and see what he remembers.

I’m back. He’s fine. Happy as a lark. I gave him some clean shirts and socks, and he’s putting them away. He doesn’t remember wanting to have an argument with me.

I wish he had been able to let things go this quickly when I was a kid. He never forgot or forgave anything, and he could yell at a person about the same thing until dawn.

I am engaged in the weirdest experience in my life. No one can prepare you for this.

In Defense of the Burn Pile

I am waiting for the truck from Habitat for Humanity.

I was stupid when I decided what to take to the new house. I should have left everything except my bed in Miami and given it away. Instead I saved some things that were heavy, expensive to move, and destined to be discarded. I paid to move things 300 miles so I could throw them out.

My dad has a Thomasville entertainment center from maybe 2005. See if you can guess why I’m getting rid of it. Yes, that is correct. It was made when a 30-inch TV was considered enormous, so it will not hold a typical 2018 TV. It’s about 5 feet tall, with two big doors in front. The living room TV, which is only 42″, is on top of it. I never, ever watch TV in that room. My dad spends most of his time there, and he has to look up to see the screen.

I also have a huge pair of dresser things. They form a complex that looks like the Petronas Towers. There are two tall dressers joined by a suspended desk in the middle. My mother bought them from an estate liquidation shop.

The truck interrupted me while I was writing this. The junk is now gone. I could have sold it on consignment and gotten a couple of hundred bucks, but I just did not want to see it any more.

The reason I started to write is this: I wanted to talk about how hard it is to give things away.

Ocala has Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Goodwill won’t pick up furniture. That may sound incredible, but it’s true. I shouldn’t have to point out that picking up free furniture is profitable. If you don’t think you can sell it, you turn it down. If it looks good, you sell it and make money. For some reason, Goodwill Industries can’t make it work, even though other charities can.

The Salvation Army makes it work, or at least they claim to. They have a truck that picks up furniture, but you can’t get them to show up. They take phone messages. They say they’ll get back to you. Then they vanish.

Someone mentioned Habitat for Humanity, and I jumped on it. I was sick of the furniture. I would have given it to Annoying Vegans for Mandatory Nudity on Mass Transit, had such an organization offered to take it.

Habitat for Humanity gave me a date about ten days off. That was the best they could do.

They were supposed to come today between 2:30 and 4:30. At 12:15, I got in the car to take my dad to a notary public, thinking I had time. The Habitat people called and said they were on the way over.

Unbelievable.

They wanted me to meet them in half an hour, or about 12:45. I told them about the original appointment, and I said I couldn’t be there until 1:00. So 15 extra minutes. The driver started telling me he didn’t know if that would work. He said he would have to call the shop.

I pictured myself using the tractor to put Thomasville furniture on the burn pile.

I called their shop myself, and they apologized and worked it out for me. Under the new agreement, the truck was supposed to be here at 1:00. They arrived 10 minutes later. So 1:00 was too late, but 1:10 was fine.

Call me cynical, but my assumption is that the driver really, really wanted to get to lunch early. People had canceled appointments, and he had visions of a short day, followed by a trip to Sonic, dancing in his head.

Maybe I’m wrong.

I had to move a desk into the entertainment center’s place to hold up the TV and keep my dad happy until the new TV thing arrives. While I was doing this, I found a huge grey smudge on the wall, around an imperfection in the paint. I know what caused it. I can guess. My dad has been rubbing spit into the wall ever since we got here, trying to rub out a place where the paint has been gouged.

He does things like that. Spit won’t make new paint magically appear, but he tries, and telling him to knock it off is pointless. Rubbing spit on things is a compulsion for him.

I didn’t know spit could make a dark shadow on a wall.

I told him not to rub the spot any more, and he denied that he had. Par for the course.

I got some paper towels and so on and cleaned the hand-sized spit varnish area off the wall, and then I got a Post-It and a marker. I put up a little sign reading, “Do Not Rub This Spot.”

The house is full of signs. “Do not wash dishes by hand.” “Stay off porch.” “No underwear in trash.” It looks pretty odd, but there is no other way to help him avoid causing problems.

I have several notes in his closet, telling him to put his dirty clothes in the hamper instead of hanging them up, and he hangs them up anyway. He doesn’t realize his clothes smell bad. He has no sense of smell. He thinks we are somehow losing money when we wash dirty clothes, just as he thinks it’s more expensive to wash 20 things in the dishwasher than 10.

I have other things to get rid of. I’m going to get rid of my aunt Jean’s living room chairs. My mother took them after Jean died from lung cancer in 1994. They are horrible chairs, and my mother chose a very loud paisley fabric for them. I almost threw them out before we left Miami, but I knew my dad would need something to sit on.

I want to get rid of my parents’ double bed and dresser. These were the first pieces of furniture they bought after they married. My dad has consistently refused to get rid of them, even though no one uses double beds now. Now that I’m in charge, they’re going. I used to sleep on that bed when I was a kid, during the worst years of my life, and I used the dresser. I don’t want to think of those days.

I’m going to get rid of my dad’s books. He has some quality stuff, but I wouldn’t want to touch his books. I don’t want to think about urine and mucus when I hold a book. Every time I read one of those books, I would think about the hygiene problems that caused my family so much suffering and made us all feel violated. Also, a lot of his books are about history. I’m never going to read that. Even if I change my mind, I won’t want his books. If I want to read history, I’ll buy my own books.

My dad used to have a book rack on top of his toilet. Enough said about that.

I’m out of here. I’m off to the barber shop, AKA the Testosterone Lounge. Hopefully everyone will be comparing carry pieces and talking smack about Hillary Clinton.

If Reality Calls, Say I’m not In

I had an interesting experience this week. I came up against a startling example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

In case you don’t know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, I will tell you. It’s a strange syndrome in which people who aren’t bright or capable believe themselves to be smarter and more capable than others. I run into it all the time, and I’m sure you do, too.

You could also call it the Appleby Syndrome. In the novel Catch-22, the character Orr says character Appleby he has flies in his eyes. He says, “How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?”

I don’t know if Dunning-Kruger is a form of projection or what, but it’s exasperating. It’s annoying to get in a squabble with a person who is not smart enough to be right about anything and not smart enough to know it.

I can understand lacking intellectual power. What I can’t understand is going through life getting C’s and D’s, getting a 900 on your SAT’s, ending up running a backhoe for a living, and still thinking you’re smarter than doctors and scientists and everyone else. How can you fail to notice your limitations?

People like to blame tests. “They’re biased.” No, they’re not. Unless you mean they’re biased in favor of smart people.

All over the US, there are slow black kids who sincerely believe they’re brilliant and that white people have rigged tests to keep them down. They go on social media and write about the intellectual superiority of the black race, and they call white people “Neanderthals.”

Educators tell them these things. Maybe I should put “Educators” in quotation marks. White kids are lucky they have a less-powerful excuse-making industry working on them.

Dunning-Kruger people aren’t rational. Lack of intelligence isn’t their real problem. There are lots of slow people who don’t try to tell the rest of us what to do. Dunning-Kruger people have psychological problems. They bully and pout and control, because they are crazy and insecure.

I was participating in an Internet forum. Someone asked a question about physics. Incredibly, a bunch of ignorant people started weighing in, as if their wild and pitiable guesses, which they presented as fact, were anything but ludicrous and useless.

You may be the smartest layman on earth, but if you haven’t studied physics, you don’t know the first thing about it. When you talk about physics, it’s as if you suddenly decided you could play the cello or speak Urdu. You’re going to make a fool of yourself, and even worse, you lack the ability to understand people who try to explain why you’re wrong.

If you say stupid things about physics, you then need to take at least two semesters of calculus and two semesters of university physics in order to be able to understand why what you said was stupid.

I decided to chime in on the forum, and I gently said people who didn’t know anything about physics should be quiet and let people who knew some things talk. One forum member is a physics major, and he was trying to be helpful, but an insecure, bullying blowhard kept interjecting with infantile nonsense.

Naturally, the blowhard homed in on me, and he made a bigger fool of himself than he already had. He was so determined to find something to be right about, he even “corrected” my English. I referred to electrical engineers as “EE’s,” which is correct. When you refer to something by its initials, and you pluralize it, you put an apostrophe before the S. It’s not mandatory, because people keep getting dumber and grammarians are now dumbing down the rules to suit them, but it’s right.

Soon writing will disappear entirely, and we will simply grunt and point.

He finally managed to get his milligram of flesh. I said “EE’s” was an acronym and told him to look up the rules, and after what must have been an all-night Googling session, he said it was an initialism. Hooray. Victory. But he was wrong about everything else, including the apostrophe. The apostrophe rule applies to initialisms.

He sent me a private message, as if he thought I craved even more exposure to him, and he filled it with links on initialisms. I told him never to bother me again, and I blocked him by all means possible.

Some people are just too crazy to live. This guy is more obsessive than an ex-girlfriend who can’t handle rejection. This must be how James Woods felt after he dumped Sean Young.

The enemy likes anger and conflict, so he sends annoying people to God’s children. The way to handle it is to take the supernatural approach. Forgive them, speak defeat to them and the demons that run them, and pray for God to help them and also keep them away from you until they shape up. Unfortunately, I did those things after he had already started to dig into my skin. I didn’t get into a flame war or sink to his level, but I put things in the wrong order. I responded first and took the supernatural approach afterward.

I hate to say it, but I just realized Dunning-Kruger has blossomed in my dad. My biggest problem with him is his belief that he can win arguments and be the leader. He can’t accept what he has become. He even hits on women. After a certain point in a man’s decline, all women are out of his league. All of them.

Nobody will date a demented man who is pushing 90, apart from sociopathic whores and possibly demented women.

Romance, sex, and marriage are out of the question for demented people because they lack the capacity to consent. It’s like statutory rape.

My dad is mentally hobbled, but he is still smart enough to realize it, and he is able to yield to me and stop questioning what I do. There are times when he defers without any hesitation and admits I have to be in charge. Unfortunately, there are many times when he gives in to his habits of pride and bullying.

I should be able to get cooperation by saying, “We have discussed this many times, and you have forgotten, but it’s taken care of, so please let me handle it.” If he truly respected me in his heart, he would accept that.

The other day he decided he wanted to write short stories on the computer. He can’t use a computer. I wish he could, because he needs activities, but there is no way. He used to use Wordperfect and Word to write legal briefs, but now he asks if there is a “machine” he can use for writing or to “look things up on.” That’s how little he remembers. I showed him his laptop and reluctantly agreed to spend some time showing him how to use it, but when the appointed time came, he had forgotten, and I didn’t remind him.

If he had remembered, I would have been put through an hour of hell. “Goddamn it, stand here next to me and show me how to do this!” Pardon the language, but that’s what used to happen before he gave up using computers.

“Just show me.” “I did show you.” “No you didn’t!” “I did; you just don’t remember.” “Just give me a chance, damn it!” “Dad, we’ve done this many times, but you forget later.” “Just try it this time, and if it doesn’t work, to hell with it.” “Dad…that’s what you said last time.”

Most of the time, he doesn’t tell me to go to hell, but sometimes he does. Then he forgets about that. He forgets he was angry. He resets so the process can start over again. One of my challenges is to break cycles of futility.

My dad cannot write fiction. He never could. He has never written a book or short story, as far as I know. He has STARTED stories. He has always wished he were a writer, but you can’t write unless you have something to say. Like most people, he does not, and even if he did, he is demented now. If I don’t help him use the word processor, I’m not preventing him from having a good time writing. I’m preventing him from driving both of us crazy while he wastes his time.

He couldn’t write even if he used a pen, and he can’t use the computer for any purpose. He can’t save files. He can’t open applications. He can’t do it.

He quit using the computer long ago, on his own.

I have never understood people who wished they were writers even though they were not motivated to write. Such people are much more common than actual writers. Go figure.

“Writer” doesn’t mean “person who identifies as a writer.” It doesn’t mean “person who wears a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, smokes a pipe, and lives in New England.” It means “person who writes.” If you don’t write, you’re not a writer. Best to admit what you are and look for something else to do.

I write, but I don’t tell myself I’m going to write novels or short stories, because I know I’m not.

While the forum discussion about physics and Dunning-Kruger issues was going on, there was some mention of engineering and how it differs from physics. One big difference is that physicists can’t do anything. An engineer may be able to fix a broken lawnmower. Most physicists wouldn’t stand a chance, because we study variables and chalkboard models, not real objects.

If a physicist is able to do anything practical, it means he went beyond his education. It’s that simple. Physics prepares you to understand engineering, but it’s not engineering.

I feel I should have majored in mechanical engineering with an EE minor. I was not cut out to unravel the mysteries of the universe through physics, but I’m smart enough to design and build a guitar amp or a tractor implement.

I decided to take a look at ME major curricula on university websites, to see what ME’s (apostrophe) had to learn. I was surprised at how basic it was. When I was in school, I had to take a bunch of advanced stuff undergrad ME’s never have to conquer.

I may try to learn a few things. I found a Youtube Ph.D. who teaches engineering, and I looked at his solid materials course, which is one of the first courses engineers study. I found out I was supposed to be familiar with a topic called statics, so I dropped solids and looked at that. In maybe 45 minutes, I was up to lesson 21. I kept skipping lessons. Statics is very, very simple for a physicist. Even a bad one.

I don’t know how far I’ll go. It’s nice to see how accessible it is.

Tractor = Superpowers

This is a momentous day. I finally got the big rock out of my front yard.

My property has a fair amount of rocks under it. It’s not full of small rocks. You can dig a hole without hitting rocks. The problem is big rocks. Some that have already been dug up are the size of couches.

I have several rocks sticking up in the lawn, and I have hit them more than once. I decided to try to get rid of them. I dug around one with a shovel, and I couldn’t do much with it. I tried the tractor, but all I had were a bush hog and a frond end loader with forks, so I had to come up with a new strategy.

I decided to get a subsoiler. This is a very sturdy hook that goes into the ground. It has a rectangular plate on it at the bottom. The plate gets pushed through the ground, and you end up with a deep, narrow slit. You can use a subsoiler for digging slits for pipes. You can also use it to dig up your existing pipes and destroy them, but that’s off topic.

My subsoiler arrived a couple of days ago, and I installed it today. I hooked it to the rock, and the rock would not move much. It was stuck on various things under the ground. I turned the tractor 90 degrees, and the rock popped right out and slid on the lawn.

It was a little hard to get the hook out of the rock, because I had the hook facing forward. It kept pulling the rock toward the tractor. Next time I’ll reverse the hook.

If I had known what I was doing, this would have been a 5-minute job. As it was, it was probably 10 minutes.

I have guests this week. A couple of large friends helped roll the rock into the tractor bucket, and I moved it to the area of the yard where all the other big rocks have been dumped. It’s not laziness. It’s landscaping. No, really.

Now I have a gaping hole and some torn-up grass. I can fill the hole with dirt from my berm.

This is sweet. I hate those stupid lawn rocks. They are all going to pay. At least the ones that aren’t too large to be moved.

The subsoiler cost about $160, and I’m sure paying other people would eventually have cost a lot more.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am. I can’t stand those hidden rocks. I’m wondering what kind of mess I’m going to see the next time I take the deck off the mower and look at the blades.

I was able to put the subsoiler on the tractor by myself, easily. The Pat’s Easy Hitch made it simple.

The low point of the day was lifting a hydraulic lever too far and dropping my new ballast box on its rear. I nearly squooshed my friend Mike, who was helping me remove the box. The box ended up on its back, and some sand fell out. The paint job I spent two days on is messed up somewhat. Not a big deal, apart from the near-fatality.

I know Mike would want to go out like that.

There is nothing like having the right tool. Always remember that.

More

Got a few more rocks out. The subsoiler is fantastic. I’m not sure, but I doubt I could do better without a backhoe attachment.

Leftists Choose Criminals Over Victims

Interesting news: Michael Drejka has been charged with manslaughter.

This is not a surprise to me. I predicted it a while ago.

Michael Drejka is a Florida man with a disabled parking permit. He was brutally attacked by a younger, larger, and stronger man, Markeis McGlockton. Drejka shot McGlockton, who then died.

Drejka is white. McGlockton was black.

Drejka has a history of arguing with people who park in handicapped spaces without permits. He saw McGlockton’s girlfriend parked in a handicapped spot by a convenience store, and he scolded her about it, peacefully. While the conversation was going on, McGlockton rushed at him from the side and shoved him down on the pavement.

While Drejka was on the ground, unable to flee, he pulled a pistol and fired. Before he fired, McGlockton–a coward and a bully–saw the gun and turned away. He was brave enough to attack a smaller, weaker man without provocation or warning, but when he realized his victim could defend himself, he went yellow and became a pacifist. Too late.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri refused to arrest Drejka, claiming Florida’s “stand your ground” law (“SYG” for convenience) barred prosecution.

Our SYG law says that when you’re in a situation calling for deadly force, you don’t have to flee. You can go ahead and defend yourself. It’s an excellent common sense law. Unfortunately for Mr. Drejka, it does not appear to apply in his case. People in the press want it to apply, because the shooting looks bad on video, and they want to get SYG repealed. Ignorant journalists are citing SYG with regard to the case, but they’re wrong, just as they were wrong when they said it applied to the Zimmerman railroading.

SYG says you don’t have a duty to flee. The law may kick in when you’re standing up and you have a path away from your assailant. It does not kick in when you can’t get away. George Zimmerman could not get away, because Trayvon Martin, a larger, stronger, younger person who was in good condition because of his status as a high school football player, was sitting on his chest, beating his head on a concrete sidewalk. Michael Drejka could not flee, because he was on his knees with an angry criminal standing nearby.

No escape route, no stand your ground case. It’s that simple.

The Zimmerman case was a textbook case of self-defense. The law applying to that case comes straight from England. It has been the law for centuries. If you REASONABLY fear DEATH or SERIOUS BODILY HARM, you may use deadly force. When someone is sitting on you, beating your head on concrete, you can shoot them. There is no need to think about SYG, because it’s not involved. You’re doing something you were allowed to do before SYG existed.

This is not rocket science.

Even in messed-up jurisdictions where there is a duty to flee if possible, Zimmerman would have been within his rights. You can’t flee when someone is sitting on you.

The Drejka case is different. Drejka could not flee, but the criminal who attacked him chickened out when he saw the gun. By the time Drejka fired, it appears that brave McGlockton was cowering. Drejka did not have a duty to flee, but he did have a duty to refrain from harming a criminal who was no longer a threat. Once McGlockton’s knees turned to water, Drejka was obligated to hold his fire.

You can shoot a thousand people in a day, if they’re coming at you. You can’t shoot people who are running away, no matter what they’ve done. The only exception would be a case in which you had a reasonable belief that your assailant was going to resume his attack. We don’t see that in the Drejka case. McGlockton’s cowardice was on full display. He probably would have licked Drejka’s shoes had he been asked.

It appears that the shooting was a crime of revenge. Drejka probably knew he was safe when McGlockton started cringing. He shot anyway, and the best explanation is a desire to punish. The law doesn’t allow that.

If it seems like I’m angry with the deceased, well, I am. He behaved like a savage. He was a bully. He would never have gone near his victim, had Drejka been as big and strong as he was. He had no justification for touching Drejka, let alone for attacking him viciously. A person like that deserves to get shot, even if the shooting is illegal. He could have killed Drejka with that hard landing on asphalt. The fact that Drejka didn’t sustain a fatal head injury is a testament to McGlockton’s luck, not his good intentions.

I’m disgusted by McGlockton’s attack, and I have no sympathy at all for him, but I think Drejka is a murderer, and I believe he should be prosecuted. The charge is manslaughter, but the shooting looks like second-degree murder to me. It was not premeditated, so it can’t be murder one, but it appears to have been a deliberate killing evincing a lack of regard for human life. That’s second-degree murder. I don’t know why he was charged with manslaughter. Maybe the state’s attorney knows most jurors will agree that McGlockton got what he deserved. It may be easier to get a conviction for manslaughter because the penalties are not as harsh.

One wonders what the state will do. In the Zimmerman case, Governor Scott became afraid of bad publicity that would follow a refusal to indict, so he got prosecutor Angela Corey and her underlings to perjure themselves in order to get Zimmerman charged. Right now, journalists are trying to gin up a new publicity threat surrounding SYG. Will our elected officials put politics above the truth again? Prosecutors should charge Drejka, but our legislature should leave SYG alone. It’s a beneficial law that only hurts criminals. Like most laws, it will be abused from time to time, but that doesn’t justify doing away with it.

Imagine a world without SYG. Picture an angry, dangerous criminal attacking you on the street. If there was any possibility of escape, you would have to run away and hope he didn’t pursue you. If he followed you, you would have to keep running until the police arrived. That’s unreasonable and impractical, and that’s why we have SYG. Without it, criminals could chase us around at will and drive us out of public places.

Anyone who persists in trying to harm you needs to be incapacitated quickly, by whatever means you choose. You shouldn’t have to play hide and seek with criminals, or die or be raped, in order to avoid a prison sentence.

Journalists want us to believe that SYG is a quirky law passed by nutty Florida extremists. In reality, it’s the law in most states. Most of the states where the doctrine doesn’t exist are in the northeast. Even California, which doesn’t have an SYG law, applies the doctrine in practice.

Journalists also want to get rid of the castle doctrine, which says you don’t have to retreat in your home or any other legally occupied place. Imagine that. A group of criminals rush into your living room, and you have to leave! No civilized society would hold innocent victims to that standard.

Our journalists are pro-criminal extremists. Maybe they’re trying to disarm us because they know most violent crime in America is committed by black people. Blacks commit most violent crime, and Hispanics are much more likely to commit violent crime than whites. The sad consequence is that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to die in self-defense shootings, but the answer to that problem isn’t to let criminals hurt the innocent. It should be noted that blacks are much more likely to be crime victims than whites, and when we disarm the innocent, we put innocent black lives in danger.

To sum up, McGlockton was a violent criminal who would have been jailed had he not been shot, Drejka appears to be a murderer and should be prosecuted, and SYG is a good doctrine that needs to be preserved. It’s sad to see so many people standing up for bullies.

McGahn’s Weird Ethical Boundaries

Today I read that Don McGahn, our White House Counsel, is attracting spitballs for talking to Grand Inquisitor Mueller. At first, I didn’t understand the fuss. After all, White House Counsel is a government job, and from the title, one would think he was the attorney for the White House, not the president. If that’s true, then he shouldn’t be worrying about Donald Trump’s personal accountability or the accountability of any of his underlings. Those people would not be his clients.

I checked the all-knowing (!) Wikipedia, however, and I found that the WHC’s job (“White House Counsel” is so hard to type) is to “advise the President on all legal issues concerning the President and his Administration.” That’s very broad. It would appear to encompass efforts to impeach or prosecute the president or anyone who works for him.

Wikipedia also says the WHC is not supposed to get involved in the president’s “personal” legal affairs.

I’ll just say it. I don’t care if other lawyers say I’m stupid. I believe it is impossible for the WHC to “advise the President on all legal issues concerning the President and his Administration” without getting involved in the president’s personal legal affairs. It will not always be possible to disentangle them.

What if the president is indicted or threatened with indictment by a partisan prosecutor, based on things the president did in the course of his duties? Is the WHC supposed to sit on his hands with a sock in his mouth? I don’t think a good lawyer would be able to stand that. A threat to the president that may result in impeachment or conviction in court is certainly a threat to the administration itself and to the institutions of the White House and executive branch.

If Barack Obama had molested a 12-year-old, the WHC could have stayed out of it with no qualms. But what if one of his male aides had sued him personally for sexual harassment on the job? Hmm. That would be tied very tightly to the safety of the entire administration, and it could raise constitutional issues. It could be an attempt at voter nullification (like the frivolous attacks that drove Sarah Palin to quit), and the power to vote is a pillar of our political system. Is that purely personal?

Here’s what I think will happen. We will find out more about what Don McGahn said to Mueller’s flying monkeys, and it will turn out that McGahn did his best to walk a thin line between representing Donald Trump the president, plus his administration and the executive branch, and Donald Trump the man. Prosecutors being what they are, it will turn out that Mueller’s goons asked a lot of improper questions that were relevant only to things that were not closely tied to Trump’s presidential activities, and it will also turn out that McGahn refused to divulge anything.

I don’t know, but I’ll bet Trump would not want a government lawyer representing him with regard to personal problems. Government lawyers tend to be mediocre (judges in particular are notorious for their stupidity), and Trump can afford the best. On the other hand, he did pick Michael Cohen, and he is also relying on Rudy Giuliani, who seems to have forgotten how to practice law.

Place your bets, and we’ll see how good a fortune-teller I am.

More

Looks like I am not alone in wondering about the obligations of the government lawyers surrounding the president. Chris Christie has opined.

Chris Christie may be annoying, but he is also extremely sharp, and he was a federal prosecutor. That means he knows what Mueller is trying to do, because he used to do it to people, himself. Christie says Trump’s legal team is “C-level.”

Christie says Ty Cobb and John Dowd, who handled things early on, waived privilege unnecessarily. That’s malpractice, people. It’s a major thing. Christie thinks McGahn is now obligated to reveal things he could otherwise have kept to himself.

Alan Dershowitz also piped up. He is more gentle than Christie, saying Trump’s lawyers made “a tough call” that didn’t work out.

Dershowitz may be a legal genius (if such a thing exists), but Christie is no lightweight (oops), and unlike Dershowitz, he was a career attorney, not a professor who occasionally appeared in court.

Interesting stuff.

Well. Interesting for legal matters. That’s like saying “more interesting than a test pattern.”

I am not Responsible for Anyone Else’s Reward

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences coping with my dad’s dementia. I stood up for myself, and I said I was putting myself first for practical reasons. I wondered how people would take it. It would certainly look better to say, “I don’t care what happens to me; I will sacrifice everything to make sure he has the best experience possible.” But I am not suicidal, nor am I obsessed with making other people think I’m a saint.

It’s perverse and unnatural for the young to sacrifice themselves for the old. The old are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the young. That’s one reason why abortion is an aberration. New generations are the future. The old are supposed to set the young up to survive. Parents don’t throw their kids in front of cars to protect themselves. They lay down their lives for their kids.

So far, I have only seen three responses, and they were all positive. I thank the two commenters who backed me up. The third response came as a text message.

I’ll tell you something about the way my family has always worked. My dad and my sister have always gotten their way by putting other people on the defensive. If you don’t like the way things are going, accuse someone else of selfishness or some other shortcoming, and keep the pressure on until they give in. Come to think of it, even my mother, who was a much nicer person, was not above this. I faced a constant stream of accusations when I was a kid, and after I grew up, the flow didn’t completely stop.

There is a word for this: “gaslighting.” If you have a problem, make someone else think he’s the one who is screwing things up. If you succeed, you skate away, and the person you gaslight is left with the burden and self-doubt, not to mention the burden of disproving the slander.

Leftists are great at this. If you believe in Jesus, it’s not humility or a desire to see God’s love spread. It’s hate. Somehow. Christians have to defend themselves against ridiculous hate charges all the time. Refusing to bake a cake is now considered hate. I wish refusing to bake me cakes were the worst thing my enemies could think up for me.

It’s good to have people who back you up against gaslighters. Even if you know you’re being libeled, it’s helpful to have someone else confirm it.

I’m pretty good about goaltending, when it comes to gaslighting. When my dad accuses me of things, instead of responding, I’ll say, “Don’t try to put me on the defensive. I know you like to do that, but I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m trying to fix a problem you caused.”

Try that with a gaslighter some day. It’s like a karate kick that sweeps their legs out from under them. They collapse. They usually have nothing left to hit you with. They don’t expect you to go on the offensive against their unfair tactics, so they don’t prepare.

This is a great tip. You won’t understand how great it is until you try it.

Putting innocent people on the defensive is a powerful tactic for narcissistic, selfish people. When you do it, you put the burden of proof on the other person. Instead of discussing the real issues, the victims feel like they have to put energy into defending themselves. Don’t fall for it. The fact that someone else goes off on a tangent doesn’t mean you have to go with them. Keep talking about the subject at hand, or bring up something the accuser is desperate to keep off the table.

Jesus was great at this. He was the king of the non sequitur counterpunch. People would make crazy accusations against him, and he wouldn’t respond to them. Instead, he would say whatever he thought people should hear. It made him a very unpleasant person to accuse.

If you have a jealous sibling, whom we’ll call Bob, and he accuses you of, say, using hints to get your parents to help you buy a car, there is no reason why you can’t say something like, “I don’t need a thing, mom and dad. Don’t worry about me. Maybe you could help Bob out, though. He needs a lawyer to get a DWI dismissed.”

Yesterday, my dad said something off the wall. He said I didn’t do anything for him. That’s serious, jaw-dropping gaslighting. He didn’t mean it. He knew it wasn’t true. He was just looking to knock me off balance and make me defend myself.

I decided to respond, since it was a softball. I said I drove him to restaurants, stores, and doctor appointments. I said I did his laundry and cleaned his house. I said I changed his bed for him. I said I took care of his business affairs. I said I maintained his property. I didn’t mention hauling bags of goods covered with reeking excretions to the dump.

It’s kind of hard to think of anything I don’t do for him. He makes himself meals, bathes, and dresses himself. That’s all he does. He can’t do anything else.

A gaslighter will say nearly anything, whether they can prove it or not, so sometimes they really step on a landmine.

Here’s a great moment in gaslighting. Maybe I’ve mentioned it before. My grandmother was around 90. I knew she loved country ham, but she was no longer able to cure her own. I ordered her a great ham from a website. One day I was at her breakfast table, and my sister, who was about 40 at the time, said, “Why don’t you fix some of that country ham Steve bought so you could cook it for him?”

That’s a beauty. She banked a gaslighting shot off my grandmother in order to hit me. No one saw it coming. Everything was cordial up to that point, and then BANG! There it was. JFK couldn’t have been more surprised when the first bullet hit him.

Of course, everyone in my family knew my sister was a fool and a liar, and I took care to respond and set things straight, so I came out unscathed. Still, you have to marvel. What kind of person even thinks of saying a thing like that?

I appreciate it when people tell me the gaslighting is nonsense. It helps.

I am not especially militant or selfish when it comes to looking out for myself when dealing with my dad. I could have said worse things. Here’s something longtime reader Ed Bonderenka said this in a comment, about someone he knows:

I pray he goes peacefully, and if God won’t heal him, soon.

I didn’t go that far. I didn’t say anything like that about my dad, but it’s perfectly moral and acceptable. It’s not selfishness. It’s love.

Sometimes I feel like I blew it by looking after my dad so well, because had I allowed him to keep drinking and sleeping without a CPAP, both of us might have been spared these years of destroyed dignity and disgusting sights, sounds, and smells. The only profit he can get out of life now is salvation, so that’s all I ask for. I used to pray for healing every day. I quit a long time ago. God cut my dad off because of his stubbornness, and I respect that. I just want him to make it to heaven.

My dad’s sister’s dementia went quickly, and she died after a couple of years. She suffered less than he will, and her kids and grandchildren suffered less than I will.

I don’t push things any more. I accept his mortality. I take him to doctors and give him his pills, but if he wants to eat ice cream and cookies every day, I let him. I couldn’t stop him without extreme measures and a lot of fighting. I don’t look for supplements for him. I’m not looking for experimental dementia treatments. If he exercises, great. If not, equally great. I’m not going to struggle to keep him alive in this state. I’m not required to try to make up for someone else’s decades of willful self-neglect.

He apparently agrees, because when I got him his own lawyer, he got himself a living will, rejecting extraordinary measures to support life. I was surprised. In the past, I could never get him to come down on one side or the other; he always told me to decide for him when the time came. I kept telling him it was not my place. Now I don’t have to worry.

I am trying to look after myself today. No restaurant trips. No long conversations about my crimes and failures as a son. No doctors. No business. I hope it pans out. If not, I’ll move it to Sunday. In any case, I will make sure I get what I need. I’m the only one here who has to go on living.

You Can’t Debate With Dementia

I had an interesting conversation today.

I left The Compound without letting my dad know. I wanted some time to myself. I had an enjoyable time at Home Depot, and then I returned. When I got back, my dad said he wanted to discuss “our situation.” He didn’t say so, but he was angry because I went somewhere without him.

A few days ago, he said he wanted information on vascular dementia, so I wrote up a little report consisting of information from the web plus things from his own history. Then he read it, accepted the truth, and thanked me for my help. After that, elves and fairies flew out of my ears and sang the national anthem.

Be serious. Here is what he actually did: he demanded a second copy so he could make notes on it in order to prepare his defense. I am not kidding. He scribbled a bunch of stuff on it, and today he wanted to discuss it.

He was also upset because I was out of his line of sight for an hour. This is something new. He now feels I must be available all the time so I can respond to his summons within seconds. He says he could fall down and die in a ditch, and I wouldn’t know.

He is correct, to an extent. If he went on a walk and fell down in a ditch, I might not know for a while, but I would figure it out pretty soon, because I can track him on my cell phone. I have told him this dozens of times, but he always forgets. It goes like this:

Me: I’ll know if you have a problem because I track you on my cell phone.

Him: What?

Me: I’ll know if you have a problem because I track you on my cell phone.

Him: Did you say on your phone?

Me: Yes.

Him: How do you track someone on a phone? [his way of deriding me for not knowing what a phone does]

Me: It’s complicated, but trust me. It tells me where you are.

He doesn’t like it when I say things are complicated, because it means I know he can’t understand them.

Him: A phone? You use a phone to talk to people.

Me: I track you on my phone.

Him: What if I need to call you?

Me: You have a phone, but because of your dementia, you can’t remember how to use it, so you have to rely on me.

Him: I don’t have a phone.

Me: You have a phone. It’s on your belt.

Him: You mean this? The Samsung?

Me: That’s it.

Him: That’s not a phone. That’s a device for contacting people.

Me: It’s a phone.

Him: How do I use it?

Me: You don’t need to use it. Just carry it with you.

Him: Write me some instructions so I can use it.

I’m not falling into that trap. He will never be competent with a cell phone again.

Me: You have a manual you carry with you.

Him: Where?

Me: You keep it in your pockets.

Him: Where?

Me: I don’t know.

Him: I don’t have it.

Me: You must have lost it.

Him: Where is it?

Me: I don’t know. I didn’t have it.

Him: Can you get me a new one?

Me: I may be able to download it, but it will be bulky because it will be on typing paper.

Him: Jesus Christ! Can’t you get me a new one that’s the same size?

Me: I don’t know. I can find out.

Him: I’m asking you for something, and you’re giving me an argument!

Me: I’m not arguing. You asked if I could get you a new manual, and I told you the truth. I don’t know.

Him: That’s arguing!

Me: It’s not arguing.

Him: You’re still arguing!

By this time, he has sort of a point. I am now arguing that I’m not arguing. But I was right before he went in this interesting direction.

Me: I’m really not.

Him: Can you show me how to work the phone?

Here’s the thing: he will never be able to use the phone. On a good day, he might be able to read the manual and manage to call me, but most of the time, even with a manual, there is no hope, because he won’t realize he has the phone in the first place. He will never learn how to use the phone and remember it. If he could do that, he’d know how to use it now.

We had the argument about the manual maybe 6 times, and every time he asked the same questions, he behaved as though he had no idea he had just asked them minutes or seconds earlier.

Am I wrong to let him out of my sight for brief periods? No. I can’t sit and stare at him all day because I’m a human being with limitations. There is only so much I can do without losing my mind, and I have other things to do. He might fall down and die, but then he might do that right here in his own bathroom, 50 feet from me. Life will always be dangerous. You can’t make it perfectly safe. You decide what you can do with a reasonable effort, and you hope for the best.

He could fall down and die in a nursing home. It happens every day. The only way to keep him safe is to strap him to a bed.

After we talked about the phone, we had a long, pointless talk about the dementia report. He went through the list of causes of vascular dementia, and he asserted that he couldn’t have it because he didn’t have diabetes and didn’t smoke. He believed it was not possible for a person to have vascular dementia without every risk factor present.

I spent about 20 minutes repeating myself, explaining that he didn’t have to have every risk factor. Lawyer that he is, he focused on the word “your.” The article mentioned factors that increase “your” risk, and he concluded that “your” referred to him personally. He thought the article said he had all the factors. Since he didn’t have every factor, he believed he couldn’t have dementia.

He also denied he had other risk factors, such as high blood pressure, obesity, and high cholesterol. He takes several blood pressure pills every day, he’s nearly 50 pounds above his army weight (he used to be heavier), and he’s on a statin. He seemed to believe that as long as he took pills, the illnesses didn’t exist, and he said he wasn’t fat. While wearing a size 40 belt.

He kept misstating the definition of dementia. He insisted it meant he was “crazy.” That’s absolutely true, if you want to put it in the harshest terms possible, but most people wouldn’t see a dementia patient as crazy. They are forgetful. They sometimes have mild delusions. They can be combative and paranoid. But they don’t run up and down the streets naked, claiming to be Napoleon. Until things get really bad, they can speak and interact with others fairly well. When my aunt finally lost it, she started speaking gibberish and expecting people to understand it, but my dad isn’t there yet.

Most of us think “dementia” means “insanity” until we have to deal with demented relatives. My dad still holds onto the popular definition. “Demented” simply means “afflicted with a reduction in mental faculties.”

He kept insisting we couldn’t have the conversation we were having if he had dementia. I had to let him know that it wasn’t much of a conversation. I told him he kept asking the same questions over and over and forgetting the answers. I said we were talking about things we had talked about many times in the past.

I was very direct, because he needs to accept his diagnosis. If I go overboard unintentionally and hurt his feelings unnecessarily, it’s okay, because he’ll forget it later, and I can adjust my behavior next time. I’ll tell you something incredible. I could put on a chicken suit and walk around the room clucking and flapping my arms, and a week from now, it wouldn’t mean a thing.

The end of the document was a list of his recent hospitalizations. It was fairly long. He said he remembered two of them, but I know that’s not true, because he usually says he doesn’t remember them. He didn’t remember battling the staff at a nearby hospital at 5 a.m. and having to be restrained by security. I remember that just fine, because I had to drive over and try to help.

We have all heard of the 5 stages of grief: 1. denial, 2. anger, 3. bargaining, 4. depression, and 5. acceptance. It appears that dementia screws them up. How can you progress from one stage to another if you keep forgetting what’s wrong with you?

My dad is the kind of person who is generally angry, so #2 is a given. Beyond that, he seems to be stuck on #1. He’s trapped in an eddy, and from time to time, I get sucked into it with him. He decides I’m crazy because I say he has dementia, and then he expects me to defend myself, as though I were the one who diagnosed him and coined the term “dementia.”

My hope is that writing things down will reduce the time I spend going in circles. I want to be able to hand him a document when I see we’re in line for the same ride again. I know it will have some effect. The little notes I put up around the house work, and they’re documents. If, “Stay off the porch,” works, maybe the dementia report will work, too.

There is another strategy, and that’s walking away and telling him I don’t care if he wants to talk (i.e. argue), because we are going in circles and it’s a waste of my time. It works, but I try not to use it unless I have to.

His belligerence is a problem in more ways than one. It wastes my time and tires me out, but it also cancels out any possibility that I could spend time doing something enjoyable with him. If I’ve spent two hours cajoling and being bickered with, I’m not going to suggest we go for a drive. I’m going to go off to my sanctuary for the rest of the day. You only get a certain amount of my time per day, and how you use it is up to you. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back and do something else with it.

Yesterday we spent two or three hours with a physical therapist. When she left, my dad wanted to go have lunch. No way! I was done. My daily quota had been used up. I had to recharge. To him, her visit was a good time. He got to talk to a younger woman, about himself. They did exercises together, and she taught him things. He was the center of attention. That’s fine, but to me, it was work, so when it was over, I was ready for some recreation.

He doesn’t understand that being with him is work. Every minute of it. There are no exceptions. If we have lunch, it’s work. If we drive to Home Depot, it’s work. If I’m working on the tractor and he wants to stand there and ask questions, it’s work. Work, work, work.

You can’t relax and enjoy life around a dementia patient. They ask questions and make demands nonstop. I can’t even order at a restaurant without problems. He demands that I tell him all about the menu, which he holds in his own hands. I say vague things like, “I’m sure it’s all good,” so I’ll get a few seconds here and there to look at the menu for myself. He likes to have me choose his food for him, so I pick things that won’t cause a problem. I have dishes memorized so I can toss them out without thinking.

I never say, “Gee, it would be nice to do something with my dad.” If I saw him once a week, I would look forward to doing things with him, but I’m always doing laundry, changing sheets, sitting in waiting rooms, being argued with about the same old things, and cleaning up filth which is extremely abundant even by demented-person-house standards. My dad’s hygiene habits were established long before he got dementia, and they are very bad, so they make him a more trying patient.

He has talked about traveling to Eastern Kentucky, for a final visit to the place where he grew up. Can’t do it. You can’t imagine what it’s like to travel with a demented person. He will never travel again, although I don’t tell him that. If I had three siblings to help, maybe.

When the therapist was leaving, I made her spend a few minutes with me alone. I made sure she understood how things were. I told her what unpleasant things to expect from him.

I said he would forget at least 80% of what she had told him (turned out to be 100%), and I said he might forget the whole visit (he did). I told her what he would be like when the company manners wore off. I told her what to expect simply because she was female. I also asked if I could leave them alone together. She understood completely. She said it was important for me to get away.

If she had told me I needed to supervise them, there would have been problems. He may end up having two therapists visit him every week. I can’t take care of him, haul him everywhere, and then sit at home and watch him get therapy. Too much. I would have had to choose between an intolerable new imposition or depriving him of helpful treatment, and I would have chosen myself, because without me, the ship sinks.

One of my challenges is to find a balance between letting an incompetent person run my life and treating another human being like an object. Some days I go too far one way, and other days, I go too far the other way.

It sounds horrible, but it’s not. The more control I get, the smoother things run. Most days, I manage to get enough time to myself to make life pleasant. My dad isn’t happy, but he never has been, and you can’t really be happy when you’re too demented to do anything but still competent enough to wish you could. He will feel better when he comes to accept his situation.

If you’re caring for a demented person, take my advice. Look out for yourself first. If you don’t function, nothing functions, and besides, you still have a life to lead. The person you’re caring for is really just a shell. He has no future, but you do. Your job isn’t to fix him or make his life perfect. It’s to mitigate his suffering until he dies. That’s it.

My dad will be gone soon, but I will not. I put myself first, because in my dad’s case, there is no longer anything there to invest in.

Demented people are like kids that get weaker and less intelligent instead of bigger and smarter, and at the end, they die. I have to keep living and working to improve my future. Sounds harsh, but it’s just reality.

To Haft or Haft Not?

It’s nearly impossible to walk into a hardware store, grab a tool, and know that you’ve gotten a quality item. China has done us in.

When I was a kid, I did not realize I was living in the golden age of American tools. We made great tools of all types. Machine tools. Hand tools. Power tools. Most of the stuff sold in stores was made here, and the quality was very high. Now we have stores full of great-looking tools that don’t work very well or last long.

I have a stump near my front door. I want it to go away. I got myself some saltpeter, and I opened the stump up and poured it in the holes I had made. The saltpeter will weaken the stump, and then I’ll be able to remove it with hand tools and so on.

It’s very weird how saltpeter will mess up a stump. Hard to believe, but it works.

I want a good mattock to break up the stump. I want one or more axes, too. No problem, right? You go to Home Depot and buy a mattock and an axe or two. Simple.

It doesn’t work that way.

I have a Home Depot cutter mattock. This is a mattock with one vertical blade and one horizontal blade. The vertical blade is very nice. The horizontal blade is so flimsy, you can twist it while pulling it out of a stump. You could grip it in a vise and put a 45-degree twist in it, easily.

Where was the mattock made? I don’t know, but I’ll bet you three fortune cookies I can guess.

Why would anyone put a non-hardened, easily bent blade on a mattock? It defeats the purpose of the tool. A mattock is for tough digging jobs. It’s for hacking up stubborn roots. You can’t do that with a blade that bends.

I looked into axes. It turns out the American axe industry is nearly dead. We used to have a bunch of great axe companies. Collins, Kelly, Plumb, Sager, and others. They made top-notch tools. You could find them anywhere in America. You didn’t have find a special store that sold to professional lumberjacks. You didn’t have to know a password or a secret handshake. The axes people saw every day in every hardware store in America were very good axes.

Now if you want a good axe, you have to search. You may have to buy something made in Sweden, Germany, or Switzerland. The Aryans apparently have a gift for axe-making. You may have to pay $200 or more. How many Deutche Marks is that?

Wait! You know the answer! Buy a used American axe on Ebay! Yes, you can do that. You’ll be surprised, though. People are selling heavily rusted axe heads for $50 each. They are selling axes that have been sharpened so many times they’re practically sledges. A really good used axe head will run you a hundred bucks or more.

I think I found a decent answer. An American company called Council Tool still makes axes. They claim to be hardened to 1-1/4″ back from the ends, so you shouldn’t have to worry about soft cutting edges.

I found an appealing (new!) double-bitted Council Tool axe on Amazon, and I decided to take a chance. It wasn’t expensive at all, and it’s made out of a real, known type of carbon steel (not random melted Chinese scrap). A lot of people who bought it criticized the handle, but I noticed they seemed happy with the head. Hey, I can buy a new handle. The head IS the axe. I think it’s worth a shot. It certainly beats shelling out $250 for something from Sweden.

An axe handle costs a maximum of about $15. If the Council Tool head is good, and I have to get a new handle, the total outlay will be $75 or less. These days, that is a screaming bargain for a lifetime axe.

I also decided to buy a maul. This is a sledge with an axe bit on one end. I think it will work well on stumps. I got the double-bitted axe for more general axe jobs.

I am not buying my maul on the web. Fiskars makes a maul people adore, and I can get it at Lowe’s. It can’t be all that bad, if over 4,000 people rave about it on Amazon. I hope.

I’ve already bought one Fiskars axe since moving here. It’s a Fiskars hatchet. I had used Fiskars products in the past, and they seemed okay. The hatchet does what a hatchet is supposed to do, but the metal seems way soft. It sharpens very, very quickly. Too quickly. It does not inspire confidence; I don’t know if it’s a lifetime tool. I’m hoping the maul will be better.

I don’t know a whole lot about axes, but I have a great tip for people who use them. When I was a kid, I used one a lot. My parents had a cabin in the mountains, and I loved using an axe. If you want to use an axe without making yourself miserable, get yourself a pair of cowhide gloves and soak them in neatsfoot oil. You should never use an axe or mattock or similar tool without a leather glove. If you like blisters and calluses, go your own way. I don’t like them.

The neatsfoot oil will soften the gloves and make the interior seams less abrasive to your skin.

I used to wear Wells-Lamont Trucker’s Special gloves, with adjusting straps that had little red balls on the ends. It looks like they still make a modernized model without the little cartoon trucker on them. I’d love to have a pair for old time’s sake. But Chinese leather gloves from Home Depot work fine, and they have reinforced palms.

I made the mistake of buying deerskin gloves when I moved here. Deerskin is funny. It’s soft and thick, and it sort of gloms onto your hand in a way that feels confining. The inside is very fuzzy, like a caterpillar turned inside-out. Give me cowhide any day.

I will report on the axe and maul eventually. I can’t wait to see the stump disappear.

The Only Trump Critic the MSM Won’t Touch

Someone help me understand why Donald Trump hired Omarosa Manigault-Newman.

I keep turning it over in my head. He knew she was…eccentric. That’s a nice word. He had no reason to think she could accomplish anything. She had no skills. There was no evidence that she was bright.

The most likely reason he chose her was her viability as a diversity scarecrow. He could point to her, along with people like Katrina Pierson and Ben Carson, and he could say, “I gave black people important positions.” Omarosa was exceptional, however, because she wasn’t really able to do anything.

Dr. Carson is a celebrated surgeon who has separated Siamese twins; as far as we know, none of them have grown back together. Pierson had her issues during the campaign, and she screwed up, but she did her job, and she was considered sufficiently competent to be rehired.

Omarosa had no track record. She was not an achiever. She became the “director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison,” which is sort of a nothing position, and during her time there, people say nothing is what she got done.

I suspect that “director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison” is sort of like “executive producer.” In Hollywood, “executive producer” means “person someone important slept with” or “relative of someone important.” It’s a job moviemakers give to people who aren’t expected to do anything. The White House has a press secretary, and that person is the President’s face before the public, so one wonders whether Omarosa’s title meant anything at all.

Maybe Omarosa’s hiring was Trump tossing her an affirmative action bone. On the other hand, maybe he was keeping an enemy close. Maybe she knew things he didn’t want to see revealed, and he figured giving her a high-paying, do-nothing job would shut her up.

Maybe Trump really did use the dreaded N-word. Or maybe he simply said things that were, as Penn Jillette puts it, “racially insensitive.” Maybe Trump gave Omarosa a job because he couldn’t have her dumped in the Potomac.

I don’t think Trump used that word, unless he was doing something silly like quoting a rap song or jokingly calling someone “my nigga.” Trump is a loose cannon, but he’s not a moron. Also, he says someone from The Apprentice has backed him up, saying no recordings of the radioactive word exists.

I think he gave this woman a job because he felt like it. She was someone he knew, and he likes working with his contacts. It looked good, giving a black woman with no qualifications a big title. I don’t think there is anything more to it.

It was a mistake to hire her, obviously. If she didn’t have dirt on him before she was hired, she certainly has it now, even if it’s imaginary dirt. Because she worked for him for a good while, she can make nutty claims about him, and they can’t be dismissed instantly. They have to be researched and debunked, and even if they’re disproven, many people will choose to believe the worst. There are millions of people who think Bush II dynamited the levees in Louisiana. No lie is too stupid to take hold in the minds of certain people.

One of the problems with keeping a vindictive, dishonest person close is that you give that person new opportunities to gather ammunition, and when you finally fire that person, her poisonous merchandise may be worth a lot more than it was when you hired her. Trump bought Omarosa’s loyalty for $180,000 per year, but she surely got paid more than that to write…I mean “dictate”…her book. It is said that she was offered a new job when she was fired, but the pay wasn’t substantially higher than what she got at the White House, so it’s no wonder she went for a book deal instead.

I’m not too impressed with Penn Jillette. He says he, himself, may not be a reliable source. If I were to paraphrase his remarks, I would put it like this: “Trump either said the N-word or other things that were highly racist, and I heard him, but you can’t believe me because I might not tell the truth, so I won’t say exactly what he said. But I feel sufficiently confident in what I’m saying to issue this bizarre indictment of my own credibility.”

Does he have Alzheimer’s now?

If you’re not sure what Trump said, you keep your mouth shut, don’t you? Or you say, “I’m not sure what he said.” You don’t say, “I heard him say really bad things, but don’t trust me.” That’s ridiculous. Either you know or you don’t. If you don’t want us to rely on you, what is the purpose of opening your mouth?

What is “racially insensitive”? It’s nothing. It’s a weasel’s way of saying, “Anything ranging from, ‘All blacks should be executed’, to, ‘I think classical music is better than jazz.'” It means nothing at all.

Ross Perot caught hell for using the phrase “you people” to address blacks. Maybe Trump said, “you people.” Maybe he said, “I think forced busing was a bad idea.” What does “racially insensitive” mean, in the absence of the actual words? It means Penn Jillette wanted to say something bad about Trump, but he wasn’t willing to be specific or be pinned down so Trump could defend himself.”

These days, “insensitive” is a useless phrase. The threshold of sensitivity has been lowered to the point where nearly any remark can be construed as insensitive. Also, our self-anointed liberal bellwethers have decided that all insensitivity is bad. It’s always wrong, and it’s almost always a firing, career-ending offense. That’s crazy. Sometimes insensitivity is just what the doctor ordered. Jesus said a lot of insensitive things, deliberately.

Sometimes, when a person is offended, it means that person is a jerk. Your state of offense is just as likely to highlight your own failings as those of the person who offended you. Being offended doesn’t speak well of you. It says nothing, without context.

The worst people I know are offended all the time. They use offense to control other people. They get furious over things the rest of us would barely notice. They cry like babies with diaper rash until they get their way. More often than not, the people who offended them are in the right.

Wife-beaters and child abusers are people who are easily offended. Bullies of all types are easily offended. We ought to quit using offense as a measure of a person’s moral rectitude.

When Penn Jillette says Trump said “racially insensitive” things, it means absolutely nothing to me. What were the things he said? Who considered them insensitive? All we know is that Penn Jillette felt like commenting.

Whether intentionally or not, Jillette is teasing us. Do you have something? If so, you should spill it or shut up.

I wonder if Jillette has financial troubles. Nearly all of the people who appeared on Trump’s reality show had career problems. We never saw George Clooney or Mark Zuckerberg on the show. Jillette has made a ton of money in his life, but a lot of entertainers have made fortunes and died broke.

Maybe he made some dumb investments. Maybe he needs free PR now. He hasn’t had a lot of big-time projects in the last 10 years. He does a lot of reality TV. He’s a giant among magicians, but they don’t seem to do all that well compared to actors and musicians. They have to keep clawing for work and coming up with gimmicks in order to hold our attention.

There has to be some explanation for his appearance on the show and his weird remarks.

This thing will play out eventually. Either the N-word will be confirmed, or it won’t. The one thing I feel safe in predicting is that Omarosa will have a very hard time finding work from now on. She’s getting a dead-cat bounce from her firing and book, but she is clearly poison to employers and coworkers, and she has nothing to offer to counterbalance the potential for trouble. She’s so crazy and unreliable, even left-wing news outlets are refusing to back her up.

Maybe she can become Jillette’s assistant. I know Donald Trump would love to see someone saw her in half.

Manual’s Method Actually Works

I’m sure no one who reads this blog will care about this, but I’m blogging it anyway. If you have a Savage A22 rifle, and you can’t get the dust cover back on, I am here to help.

I had this problem. I took the dust cover off my gun, and when I tried to put it back on, I had lots of problems. It didn’t seem to want to go back on. I finally managed.

I must have done something wrong, because the last time I shot the gun, the dust cover came off and hit me in the face. I called Savage, and they sent me a new one. To the wrong address. But still. They backed up their product.

Today I decided to put the new dust cover on the gun, and I had problems again. I felt sure it couldn’t be done. I thought maybe the stock was interfering with it. Maybe it needed to be relieved with a Dremel tool.

It turns out you do it exactly the way the manual says to, but you have to apply a huge amount of downward pressure. The little grey cap on the end of the recoil spring has to snap upward into the cavity inside the dust cover. There is no other way to get it in there.

Squeeze like crazy, and the dust cover will go back in. You have to apply so much pressure, I wonder if female Savage owners are able to pull it off. You will think you’re breaking it.

If you came here after Googling “How to get Savage A22 dust cover back on,” you now have your answer.

How to Survive Internet Shopping

I come from white collar roots. My mom’s father was a judge. My mom went to law school and ended up getting a degree in social work. My dad was a lawyer. His dad was a bookkeeper who later became a sheriff. I know a little bit about some of my ancestors, and I don’t know of any who were tradesmen. Not one.

Because of my background, I don’t have anyone I can go to when I need information on things like metalworking, woodworking, and so on. I rely a lot on Internet forums. They’re very useful.

Today someone on a forum tried to make fun of me for buying a tractor attachment on Amazon, so I shut him down pretty good. I was polite, but by the time I finished explaining my choice, he looked silly. People who make fun of Amazon users in 2018 are like the people who made fun of the first firearms. Not smart.

In case you buy stuff online, which is like saying, “in case you live on earth in 2018,” let me tell you why you should use Amazon, Ebay, and Paypal. Some conservatives hate these companies for various reasons. I’m not going into that. I’m just going to write about the ways these companies can help you avoid being abused.

In 2009, I bought a used metal lathe from a company called Plaza Machinery. It’s now out of business. The owner died, which means that legally, I can’t be sued for libeling him. I will omit his name, nonetheless, simply because I think it’s what a Christian should do.

I wanted a Clausing 5914 lathe. He said he had one. He gave me a price. He sent pictures. He said it had seen very little use. He said it had a 3-phase motor. He insisted on payment by check or money order.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER pay for anything using a check or money order if you have a choice. Cash is even worse. Don’t do it. Don’t. You’re begging to be cheated.

I paid by check.

When the lathe arrived, I saw that it was a Clausing 5936. This is a pretty stupid lathe, for various reasons. It had a single-phase motor. It was beaten up. It had been used for decades in a prison, as a teaching tool.

When I complained, the seller was nasty to me. He made some feeble efforts to fix things. He sent me an ancient 3-phase motor. He said he would take the lathe back if I paid for half of the shipping. That’s a hefty three-figure sum, and I’m not the one who caused the problem.

He cheated me. It’s that simple. He may also have committed fraud. If he knew the lathe was the wrong model, and he misrepresented the condition, then it was fraud. Would an established machinery dealer know the difference between two lathe models? Would he be able to tell if a lathe had a lot of wear on it? Draw your own conclusions.

He eventually refused to communicate with me.

I could have sued him, but because of my religious beliefs, I chose not to. I made do with what I had.

Why did he refuse to accept credit cards? I don’t know, but I know that if you pay for something using a card, you may be able to get the card company to reverse the charge or at least dispute it. I wonder if he thought about that when he formed his policy.

It’s just possible.

Anyone who refuses to take credit cards is probably a crook. There is no other solid reason for refusing. Credit cards are convenient. They result in higher sales. They allow for easier bookkeeping. In order for a businessman to choose to forgo the profitable practice of accepting cards, he has to have a very powerful motivation.

Was the guy from Plaza Machinery a crook? Judge for yourself. I’m not taking a position. Maybe he was simply demented, and he really thought he was doing the right thing.

Plaza Machinery. Remember that name. They may resume operations. Put that name on your list of companies to think about if you ever buy machinery. I’m not saying you should reject or endorse them. Just think about them.

Personally, I would not buy oxygen from them if I were suffocating. It would probably turn out to be chlorine gas, and my estate wouldn’t get a refund. You have only yourself to blame if you step in the same anthill twice.

Because I paid with a check, had I wanted to take action, I would have had to go through the aggravation of suing. That would be easy for me because I’m a lawyer, but it’s not easy for most people. It’s a painful process, and it’s slow. Collecting is not fun, either.

Now let’s talk about the tractor attachment I just bought. I could have ordered it through various sites. I chose Amazon because I knew Amazon would make some effort to look out for me. I knew the dispute process would consist of writing a few emails instead of going to court.

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER buy through a little backwater website when you can buy the same product from Amazon or using Paypal. If you want Lulu’s Famous Patented Eyebrow Tweezers, do not buy them from Lulu’s site unless she offers Paypal. Use Amazon, or put yourself at Lulu’s mercy.

The tractor attachment was beaten up when I received it. I complained. The seller took it back. They sent me another one which was beaten up. I complained again. They would have taken that one back, too, but I was tired of the process, so I accepted their offer of a discount.

Why did they do all that? Their company has a dubious reputation when it comes to customer relations. Why did they do so much for me? Simple. The power of Amazon. They don’t want bad reviews because they kill sales. They don’t want Bezos down on them.

Had I bought the same item from a small website, they might have told me to go get bent. Because I used Amazon, I had some leverage.

I’ve bought a lot of things off Ebay. I always use Paypal. When I have problems, I do NOT NOT NOT use the Ebay resolution process. It is completely useless, and it wastes days or weeks. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use Ebay’s resolution process.

When I’ve had problems with Ebay sellers, I have ended up using Paypal’s resolution process. It’s faster. It works. Paypal favors buyers, as they should. Most of their customers are buyers, not sellers. Paypal has stuck it to sellers for me. There was nothing the sellers could do. They had to eat my problems, as they should.

Why is it that some Ebay sellers don’t accept Paypal? A cynical person would say that it’s because they enjoy cheating helpless buyers. I’m not a cynical person, so I won’t say that.

No, no. I won’t.

If you’re shopping on the web, and you see something you want, your first move should be to look for a way to get it on Amazon or pay with Paypal. If you can’t do that, use the biggest, friendliest site you can find. If you have to use a crappy Wix-based site the seller’s nephew put together, make sure you pay using American Express, which has a fairly good system for helping customers. If you can’t use American Express, accept the fact that you’re dropping your pants for the enemy and hope for the best.

Last year, I bought some mulching blades on Amazon. I learned something interesting. While Amazon claims to have a great guarantee, every seller has variations on it, and in order to know what their policies are, you have to locate an obscure page where it is laid out. I found that out after I bought the blades. Think about it the next time you buy something there.

I’m getting off track.

I bought the blades, and then I found out I couldn’t use them. The seller wanted me to pay a very high restocking fee (also known as a “BS fee” or “customer abuse fee”). I sent the blades back, and then the seller didn’t acknowledge it.

I complained to Amazon. Guess that they did? They gave me a 100% refund. The seller had to eat a big plate of festering crow. I was out clean, but for the cost of return shipping. I’m not sure I even paid that.

What if I had bought the blades from the seller’s Homestead or Tripod site? I would probably still have them, or I would have a Priority Mail receipt and no money.

Why am I so pro-buyer? Simple math. Internet sellers cheat buyers all the time, day in and day out. It probably happens 30 million times a day. It’s much less common for buyers to cheat sellers. It’s not easy to cheat a seller. Once you pay, you’ve done your job. Your money can’t be defective or disappointing the way a product can.

Read this carefully, and remember it: when you shop on the web, do your best to use Amazon or Paypal. Never use a check or money order. Always use a credit card. If you read this and don’t do what I tell you, you will suffer, and you will bring it on yourself.

Even my Time is Worth Something

Yesterday I wrote a long piece and then decided not to publish it. Basically, I had noticed something about my dad. He woke me up yesterday, yelling from downstairs. He wanted to go out to breakfast.

When I walked out of my bedroom, he was angry at me. We had not said good morning to each other yet. We had not interacted at all, and he was already mad. That made an impression on me. I thought about his nature; what an angry person he is. Who gets mad at people because they don’t come to the door instantly when you yell for them? That is far from normal.

Also, even if you’re upset, how can you feel entitled to yell at someone over something like that? The fact that you’re upset entitles you to nothing. It certainly doesn’t entitle you to make other people suffer.

When you deal with someone who mistreats others habitually, you have to sit back once in a while and take stock. If you’re not careful, you will start to accept their behavior. You will stop seeing anything wrong with it. That’s not good. When that happens, you sort of decide you’re a toilet for other people to dump in.

I told him we weren’t going to breakfast and went on with my day. He wants to go to a restaurant for every meal, and I want to go to a restaurant about three times a month. I have other things to do. If I let him call the shots, we would spend $20,000 per year on restaurant meals, and dining with a dementia patient is taxing.

I have trained myself to say “no” a lot, and I have also learned that it’s okay to walk away while he still wants to talk. He can turn a two-minute conversation into 20 minutes of confusion and yelling. Sometimes I have to walk off and let him wind down on his own. Later in the day, he won’t remember it, and it will make no difference.

He wants to eat out because he’s bored. I have learned that his boredom is not a crisis I have to respond to and mitigate.

He’s going to be bored a lot for the rest of his life, because he has dementia. That’s normal and inevitable. Even if he were in a home, they wouldn’t be able to hire jugglers and minstrels to keep him and the other patients amused at all times. Sometimes life brings you problems you can’t fix. I make a good effort to spend time with him, but after a couple of hours, I have to rest. I can take a certain amount of exposure, but then I have to get away from it.

I wrote about this, and it turned into a very long essay. I decided to file it. This is why you didn’t get to read anything new yesterday.

Today has been productive. I primed my ballast box and changed the oil in our SUV.

I bought a Titan ballast box for my tractor. This is a steel box that holds sand or other heavy things. You use it to balance your tractor so it works better and lasts longer. I found it impossible to get one of these things delivered without damage, so I got the seller to give me a discount which I applied to paint.

This was by no means a good deal. The box should have been ready to go out of the box. I got a $30 discount, I’m going to end up spending $50 on paint and brushes, and I’ll do a lot of labor in the process. At least I’ll have the box.

These boxes arrive with damaged powder coating, and the hand-done Chinese welds are so bad they may need grinding. If it weren’t for these problems, they would be very good deals. As it is, they’re merely better than the overpriced competition.

You can make your own ballast by putting three-point hitch connections on a block of concrete, but I didn’t want to fool with that. In retrospect, I probably should have. It would have cost $50, and I would have worked less than I’m working now.

I’m painting the box with Rust-Oleum farm implement paint. I don’t know how good this paint is. I was advised that I had to prime the box even though it already had powder coating on it, so that’s what I did today. I sanded all the surfaces I’m painting (except for the inside of the box, which will be full of sand), and I applied primer with a brush. I’ll post a photo.

I’m not going to paint the bottom of the box. At least I don’t think I will. It will not be visible, it’s a pain to get at with a paintbrush, and even if I paint it, it will look bad because every time I put the box down, paint will come off the bottom.

One benefit to all this aggravation: my box will be Kubota orange. The Rust-Oleum people are not stupid. They know Kubota and John Deere own most of the market, so they make paint that matches the familiar orange and green.

I got this behind me, and then I gritted my teeth and changed our Explorer’s oil.

Oil-changing technology has changed since the last time I shopped for oil-changing tools. They have really neat catch basins now. I bought one which holds 5 gallons. It’s a big flat bowl about two feet wide. It has a rim that curves back into the bowl to keep oil from sloshing out. There is a neck molded into the rim, like a jug neck. The neck has a screw cap on it.

You slide the bowl under your vehicle, drain the oil into it, slide it out, open the cap, and use the bowl’s neck to pour your oil into a container so you can take it to the auto parts store for disposal. It’s neat.

The Ford is not set up all that well for oil changes. It’s not a real SUV, like an Expedition. It doesn’t have 4-wheel drive, and the ground clearance is not great. The low stance means you can’t get under it very well to reach the oil filter and plug.

I found I could get to the plug and filter if I turned the wheels to the left and crawled into the right wheel well. It was tight, but it beat buying ramps.

The last time this thing had an oil change, I took it to Jiffy Lube. I was having a busy month, and I didn’t feel like changing the oil myself. They must have used an impact wrench to put the oil plug in, because I had quite a time getting it out. Sometimes dealers and mechanics overtighten things in order to discourage car owners from doing their own maintenance. I don’t know if this is a Jiffy Lube policy.

Thank God, they didn’t use a wrench on the filter. I was able to get it out by hand, and that’s as it should be. If your filter won’t come off without tools, it was installed by an ignoramus or someone who wanted you to bring it back for more work.

My Harley received a free fluid change when it was nearly new. I don’t know what they used to install the filter, but getting it off was a Herculean chore. I have read that they do that intentionally. I had to use my machine tools to modify an oil filter wrench into a tool that works on Harleys. There was no way I was going to splurge for an overpriced Harley tool.

Manufacturers and dealers ought to make things easy to work on, because people remember things like that when they buy new products. It doesn’t do you any good to pressure customers to pay you for products and labor if they hate you so much they start buying from someone else.

I bought 5 quarts of synthetic oil for the Ford, and I figured I would dump the used oil back into the jug. When I tried to do that, the oil overflowed. At some point, American car makers decided to go from 5 quarts of oil to 6 quarts, and no one told me. I had emptied a 5-quart jug into the engine, but 6 quarts came out into the pan. I now have a vehicle which is starting out a fresh oil change one quart low. Oh well.

I was highly responsible when I spilled the oil. I don’t think a few ounces of oil can turn a property into a toxic waste dump, but the oil spilled near my well, and what the hell. I got a shovel, scooped up the oily dirt, and threw it out. Rachel Maddow would be proud.

I don’t drink water from my well, but still.

Tomorrow, I hope to get the ballast box painted. I hope to apply two coats of Kubota orange. The next day, I plan to fill it with sand and pat myself on the back a lot.

I have all sorts of jobs waiting for me in the days ahead.

I ordered a subsoiler to help me remove rocks from my yard, and I have a big rock exposed, ready to yank. I have to do some fence repairs. I have to fix the fuel shutoff solenoid on the Kubota. I need to take the mower deck off the John Deere and see just how badly I damaged the blades when I plucked a canteloupe-sized rock out of the ground with them. I have to loosen the bolts on the golf cart dump bed and move the tailgate to where it should have been in the first place.

As the ballast box picture shows, I still have boxes of stuff from Miami which I have not figured out what to do with.

I am starting to get on top of this place. I’m even using an edger now. It arrived last week. One day the farm may look like it belongs to a responsible person.

If I get that big rock out, I’ll post a photo. I know that will be exciting for everyone.

Engineer Stupid Knows no Bounds

Today’s exciting achievement: I got my Pat’s Easy Change 3-point hitch system installed on my tractor. In order to do that, I had to generate another major achievement: I got my bush hog disconnected from my original 3-point hitch.

I’ll put up some photos of the tractor with the Pat’s kit installed. It’s not clear to me why tractor manufacturers haven’t decided to sell tractors with user-friendly hitches, but I have compensated for Kubota’s strange failure, so I don’t care any more.

The yellow thing is a pry bar I used to line the ends of the hitch up.

The kit consists of two cast spring-loaded claws that trap implement pins and hold onto them. That’s all you really need to pick up a mower or baler or whatever. You still have to attach the PTO shaft and the top link, but you don’t have to beat and kick on the lower arms any more, and you can back your tractor right up to an implement and connect the lower arms without an assistant or a nightmare of adjusting and cursing.

It is astounding that tractor makers went a hundred years without making implements easy to change. The stupidity boggles the mind. A tractor is a torment to use if you can’t change implements easily. One of the great virtues of a tractor is that you can use it for a lot of different things. When it takes an hour to change implements, you’re not going to change them very often, and you’re going to lose a lot of the tractor’s usefulness.

Dealing with this thing put me in a foul mood. I need to pray and decompress. I hate stupid engineering. I really hate it.

The Pat’s invention is wonderful, but I have some complaints. The instructions are on a par with Chinese instructions. The diagrams don’t match the parts, either. You have to sit back and say, “If the person who wrote this had known what he was doing, maybe he would have said THIS…”, and then you try your theories out.

Another gripe: the parts are covered in sticky paint that makes them hard to assemble. Some of the tolerances are tight, which is a sign of quality, but the manufacturer ought to let you know you need to use oil or anti-seize in order to get the kit installed. One user says the heavy pins that go through the clamps will actually seize inside the tractor arms if you don’t do something about the paint.

It should take half an hour to get the kit installed, but I took more like an hour, because I had to do things more than once. The instructions tell you to do things in the wrong order, so you have to take things apart after you’ve put them together.

I don’t care. If the invention works, I can stand the one-time pain of poor instructions. It’s better than dealing with the repeated pain of not being about to remove and attach implements.

I had a great time removing the bush hog from the tractor. In a sane world, this would take no more than one minute. I would guess it took me two hours. The worst part was the PTO shaft. This is the implement’s drive shaft. It’s covered with a shield that prevents you from touching the moving shaft. That would be fine, but the shield is very hard to take off.

In case anyone else out there is having problems taking a Eurocardan shaft cover off an implement, I will clue you in. You lift the tabs on the little black collar. Then you slide it back to expose the end of the big yellow shroud. Then you will see the idiotic giant snap ring that holds the big yellow shroud on.

The snap rings are made so it’s hard to get a tool under them to pry them off. Because who would ever want to do that? Only someone who doesn’t want to use the same implement for the life of his tractor.

You have to put a screwdriver under the ring, lift it up, fight with it, and get it to move toward the implement. This releases the compression on the yellow shroud, and then you can slide it back, exposing the end of the PTO shaft. Then you MIGHT be able to push the spring-loaded button that releases the shaft so you can remove your implement. You MIGHT.

It’s so stupid. There are better designs out there. I’m considering buying a new shaft just to avoid dealing with this one again. Or maybe I should put hose clamps where those Satanic snap rings used to be.

The solution they used in the old days wasn’t too bad. Here it is: stay away from the spinning, uncovered shaft. That worked really well. But then lawyers showed up and ruined it. I’m sure.

Now I have a hitch I can use, probably. I hope. That means I can attach my ballast box and quit hauling that annoying bush hog everywhere. Today when I got the bush hog off, I could not resist going for a joy ride without it. I’m going to love having the ballast box back there. It will be good for the tractor, it will keep the rear wheels down, and it will give me a place to put a chainsaw. Perfect.

Next project? Either a new flail mower or a new set of brush forks. The ones I have are a horror to remove and install, so I can’t use the loader bucket. If I can find a better alternative, I’ll be all over it.

Finally, a Use for the Leaf Blower

I conquered some small issues on the farm today.

I have been researching stump removal. It looks like the best option, short of paying someone, is potassium nitrate (saltpeter). You pour it on your stump, wait four weeks, and then burn the stump. The saltpeter eats the wood and makes it porous so it will burn quickly.

There are other options which work faster.

I had a few small stumps, and I decided to burn them without using saltpeter first. That meant I had to have something that would keep the fire going. I thought about it, and I figured charcoal would work. I bought some charcoal at Tractor Supply, soaked my stumps with diesel, added charcoal, added more diesel, and lit the charcoal with a torch.

It works. The charcoal keeps the stump hot, and the stump burns. It may not burn like a torch. It may burn more like a cigar. That’s fine. Burning is burning. The only problem is that a stump that hasn’t been treated will not burn all that well, so you may have to use charcoal more than once.

I’ve seen people on the web use steel drums to confine charcoal on top of stumps. I didn’t see the point. It’s not like charcoal is going to get up and walk away.

I realized forced air would make the whole process go much faster. I would like to get a small electric blower to point at burning stumps. I don’t have one, so I did something amusing instead. I took my leaf blower and blew on the stumps. They lit up like the sun. It was really neat.

I’m going to get some saltpeter. They have it at Tractor Supply. I don’t know how to make a dry powder stay on top of a stump in a wet climate. Maybe I’ll have to use tarps or something. Other people do it, so there must be a way.

My other big triumph: I ordered a quick-hitch system.

Tractors use what are known as three-point hitches to connect to implements. The three-point system is ridiculous. It’s proof that no matter how long people have been doing something unpleasant, they may continue doing it stupidly instead of inventing new methods. It’s very hard to get a three-point implement onto or off of a tractor.

One answer is the quick hitch. This is a bulky steel frame that connects to your tractor. It’s a stupid idea. You use your stupid three-point hitch to hook to a frame that uses hooks to connect to implements. The obvious question: why not put the hooks on the three-point hitch to begin with? There is no reason why Kubota and John Deere can’t do that.

The frame will limit the number of implements you can use, because the lower hooks are a fixed distance apart. If your implement isn’t just the right width, you have a problem. Dumb.

Someone came up with an obvious solution. It’s called the Pat’s Easy Change quick hitch. You put two new receiver doodads on your lower arms, and you connect the top link the way you did before you had a quick hitch. Because there is no rigid frame, the width of your implement doesn’t matter.

I have a hay spike, a bush hog, and a ballast box. I’m planning to get a flail mower. I also want a subsoiler. I have to be able to change implements fast. The current system is idiotic. It’s so bad, it makes it seem worth it to have one tractor for each implement. How did we get all the way to a new millennium without confronting the issue? Amazing.

Once the quick hitch is in place, I should be able to move from the bush hog to other implements without too much pain. Then I’ll be able to tear rocks out of my land with a subsoiler. That will be wonderful.

I hate tools I can’t use. Everyone has tools that are so difficult to deal with, they sit and collect dust. If I have to blow a couple of hundred dollars to make my tractor useful, I’m all for it.

I need to liberate my front end loader. I have brush forks on it now, and that’s great for moving limbs and logs, but it makes the bucket useless. I have to find a solution. The forks are very hard to remove. It would be worth it to buy a second bucket or a different type of forks. That’s how bad it is.

If I had the loader working, I could fix up my berm. I could level my cart roads. I could move a lot of dirt. I have to get it functioning.

You wait and see. I’ll get things working the way they should. I’m not going to put up with this crap. Life is too short!

When I get the big rock out of my front yard, I’ll put up a photo. I want you to share my joy.

The rock is going to lose. Watch and see.