Jethro Takes His Self a Trip

I’ll tell you what. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a 30-hour plane trip.

I got home from Singapore this morning, and I haven’t slept in quite a while. My wife and I had a great time there, but the flights were really something.

Singapore is so far away from me, it doesn’t matter which direction the jets take. They could go north, south, east, or west and get there in about the same amount of time, as long as they didn’t run into fuel problems. My flights to Singapore flew east, and so did my flights home.

The web says Singapore is around 10,700 miles away, so it’s pretty much on the opposite side of the globe. The time difference is 13 hours in the fall. Until this trip, I had no idea two time zones could differ by 13 hours.

My first international flight took off from JFK and landed in Doha. It took off pretty late. It should have been empty, right? Well, it turns out Doha is hosting an event you may have heard of: the FIFA World Cup. An event of which I took no notice because I’m not the kind of person who cares about millionaires kicking a ball into a net.

People from Latin America were shoehorned into the plane’s every crevice. The aisle seat I had carefully chosen in hopes of getting an empty row turned out to be a waste of money.

Actually, I didn’t get to sit next to an empty seat on any of my flights. Not even the 15-hour one from Singapore to San Francisco.

I was spoiled when we traveled during the covid statistical hump. I got to lie down across rows of seats. People were terrified of flying, and Rhodah and I reaped the benefits. It looks like those days are gone. We flew on the slowest days of the week, and every plane was still packed.

I know this will sound insensitive, but I miss the slow tourist traffic of the pandemic. We flew on empty planes. We didn’t have to wait in line at restaurants. We had the Great Pyramid to ourselves. Looks like those days are gone, unless the black death makes a comeback.

What can I say about Singapore?

I was afraid it would be unpleasant because I hear bad things about Far Eastern destinations. I thought it would be like Blade Runner crossed with Slumdog Millionaire, sort of. I was afraid the people would be hard and selfish, and I was concerned about the weather. Singapore is nearly on top of the Equator.

Here is how I would describe Singapore now: it’s a little bit like Miami would be if the people were vaporized and replaced with better ones.

Singapore is very orderly. The streets are clean, and there is a great deal of beautiful, meticulous landscaping in public areas. People obey the traffic laws, which seems weird given the large number of ethnic Chinese. Everything is built well. Signs are in English, probably because there are three major ethnic groups, each with its own language. Or languages. Whatever.

The people in Singapore are very polite and helpful. We experienced nearly no rudeness. There is nearly no crime in Singapore.

Singapore is also wealthy. They have stores like Chanel and Bulgari everywhere. They have impressive skyscrapers. The cars are generally clean, dent-free, and relatively new.

There is food everywhere in Singapore. There are so many restaurants, it’s hard to understand how they can all make money.

The hotels are very nice. Ours was just about perfect. Spotless and quiet, with several restaurants and a gym. I think there was also a pool in there somewhere.

I just realized I forgot to tip the maid. Dang.

That’s okay, though, because tipping is not customary in Singapore.

Here’s something weird: the weather in Singapore is better than the weather in Miami. It doesn’t get really hot, and the island is in a breezy location.

Now I will digress and tell the world about a high school history teacher who told me a tremendous number of baldfaced lies. His name was Morgan Kelly. I guess it’s okay to mention his name, because he has surely been dead for at least 20 years.

My prep school taught grades 7 through 12, and when I arrived in grade 9, Mr. Kelly was already a legend among the core group of students who had started two years earlier. He was an amateur sailor. He had a lanyard with a spliced monkey’s fist for a keychain. He wore green coach’s shorts every day. He sounded like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. He taught history.

Mr. Kelly impressed the younger kids by telling the time by looking at the sun. He claimed he could nail it within a few minutes. He would point at the sun with his extended left hand, look down his arm, pause briefly, and make his estimate. Over and over, he amazed the kids by proving to be right.

By the time they were sophomores, they started to realize his watch was on his left wrist.

Anyway, Mr. Kelly told all sorts of lies.

He claimed he was a tail gunner in World War Two. Ordinarily, I would not doubt a claim like that, but because I know he lied about other things, I don’t know whether he was really a tail gunner or even if he served.

He said that when he arrived at the place where they sorted out bomber crew trainees, the men were told to form a long line ordered by height. I would guess Mr. Kelly was about 5’4″ tall. Everyone at Mr. Kelly’s end had to become tail gunners because only short people could fit in the gunners’ stations.

Is this really how tail gunners were selected? I wonder. Maybe it’s true. Mr. Kelly had thick glasses, which means he wasn’t capable of the job, but maybe his eyes went bad after the war.

How likely is it that my school checked his military record? They might have checked to see if he had an honorable discharge, but I can’t imagine them asking for anything beyond that. I doubt they checked his record at all. They would have asked for his college credentials, but they wouldn’t have needed his military information.

I don’t think he was ever in a bomber, because he would have told us war stories.

He told a huge lie about the Chinese military.

He said he was on a troop plane going over the Himalayas, and there were Chinese soldiers on board.

Okay, right away you can see some issues.

Why would they fly troops over the Himalayas? It would be unbelievably expensive, not to mention dangerous. They would have moved troops with ships and trains.

Why would Chinese troops be on a plane with American bomber crewmen?

Okay, so now we get to the part I am sure is a lie. He said several Chinese were playing a game of chance. I think he said they were throwing down cards. He said they would play a round of their game, look at the results, grab one person who was playing, and throw him out the side door. While the plane was in flight.

We believed it. We were kids.

Of course, the Chinese military did not permit soldiers to murder each other in card games. This should not have to be explained to anyone. You can’t win a war by throwing your troops out of airplanes. Also, even if the game were permitted, how would you find people willing to play? If you did, how would you get enough men onto one plane to play the game? If you have to throw a man out after every hand, and you have 20 men, your game will last around 20 minutes. Not a great way to kill time on a plane.

Even if all the obstacles mentioned above were overcome, why would American servicemen sit and do nothing while people were thrown out of a plane?

So, yes, he was a big liar.

Here comes the lie he told about Singapore.

The British were building a bridge in Singapore. It was 120° Fahrenheit every day. The workers had to work outdoors, obviously, but at night they slept in air-conditioned barracks.

They were only able to cool the barracks to 90°, but it seemed so cold after working in 120° heat, the men had to wear winter coats indoors.

Lie number 1: 120° heat in Singapore. It doesn’t happen. It rarely goes above 92°, and that’s something you can’t say about Miami.

Lie number 2: men who found the 90° temperature in the barracks too cold would solve the problem by wearing winter coats. No. They would adjust the temperature.

I don’t know why Mr. Kelly lied to kids so much. I took Ancient History and Ancient Chinese History with him, and I guess I can discard everything he taught us.

I didn’t sweat much at all in Singapore. It was surprisingly comfortable. Rhodah, however, was shocked by the humidity. Apparently, Zambia doesn’t have any. In the past, she had heard me complain about the humidity in Florida, but she had no idea what I was talking about until we went to Singapore. We went to Egypt, which was hot but dry. We went to Turkey and Ireland, where the weather was cool. In Singapore, she suddenly understood why people buy anti-perspirant.

I just remembered another lie Mr. Kelly told.

Americans needed to land planes somewhere in China. There was no runway. The ground was covered with rocks. Fortunately, China was incredibly full of human beings. Their numbers were astounding.

The mayor of the city where the runway was needed told the people who lived there to go and stand where the runway had to go. Then he told them to pick up one rock each and leave. They did, and the runway instantly appeared.

I don’t know how we fell for that one. Having a lot of people doesn’t really get you past the problem that you can fit hundreds of rocks into the area one person takes up. Pick up one rock, and you still have hundreds more.

Man, that guy lied.

Another Mr. Kelly lie just popped into my head.

Some ancient Chinese pottery manufacturer had a slave, and one day, the slave got trapped in his kiln and burned to death. When the kiln was opened, the pots had a magnificent red color. The manufacturer couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the color, so he decided to throw a slave into the kiln every time he made red pots.

I’m starting to think we were really stupid.

Okay, Google and see if you can find this story, or any story about the ancient Chinese having a really gorgeous and highly prized red pottery glaze. I couldn’t find anything like that on the web. After that, try to find a story that mentions the part about murdering slaves.

Then ask yourself how many pots you would have to sell to pay for one expensive slave. And why use a slave when you could use a dead body or a pig or goat? Dead bodies would have been pretty easy to come by in ancient China or ancient anywhere.

How does a slave get stuck in a pottery kiln? Why wouldn’t he yell for someone to let him out?

I knew someone who served in Iraq, and he had a photo of himself shivering in a sleeping bag in a very hot room. He said the hot room seemed cold to him. Soldiers there wore a lot of hot gear, and the daytime temperatures sometimes broke 120°, so for all I know, the photo wasn’t a gag. But it never happened in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Soldiers love jokes and pranks.

The food picture in Singapore is interesting. Nice restaurants and well-known restaurants there are unbelievably expensive, like $40 for Five Guys or $400 for two at Ruth’s Chris. On the other hand, there are cheaper places where locals eat, and they are real bargains.

It appears there are three types of restaurants in Singapore. Independent establishments, food court restaurants, and food center restaurants.

By “independent,” I mean restaurants that are separate from other restaurants. Food courts are about like American food courts, except the restaurants are jammed together very tightly, and a typical food court will have a huge number of them.

A food center is a concrete building with a roof and no exterior walls. Inside, there will be long concrete structures broken into stalls. Each stall will be around 8 feet wide, and most food center restaurants occupy one stall.

Between the rows of stalls there will be sturdy plastic tables and seats which are fixed to the floor.

You can get an incredible assortment of foods and beverages at a food center. Malay. Cantonese. Sichuan. Indian. A typical entree will run around 5 Singapore dollars, and that amounts to about 4 US dollars. Some stalls sell excellent food. Some sell food that is merely good. Some sell stuff you will prefer to discard.

If you want to eat well and adventurously in Singapore while saving a ton of money, food centers are the way to go. The trick is to keep ordering things until you find things you like. The initial investment may be $20 or so per person, but it will pay off in the end by helping you avoid unnecessary experimentation.

One tip: don’t go to the stall Anthony Bourdain recommends. His photo is still on the window. Bourdain was not a great cook, as he admitted, and his advice about food is not reliable. He went to the stall in question and ordered something called Hainanese chicken rice. He raved about it as though it had made the earth move for him, and Gordon Ramsay’s face also appears on the window on a sticker.

The stall usually has a long line of people waiting for chicken. There was a line on the day when we stupidly listened to Bourdain and Ramsay.

Hainanese chicken rice is basically a boiled or possibly baked chicken cutlet, skin on, sliced, and dumped across rice made with chicken broth. It is served lukewarm. It is limp. It tastes not quite as good as what you would get if you boiled chicken in Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I am not exaggerating. It is worthless.

It may be that Chinese people who are raised on it like it. There is a big difference between authentic Chinese food and much of the Chinese food Chinese people make in America.

After we tried the chicken rice, I bought myself a Tiger Crystal beer (very good) from another vendor and told him the food was basically garbage. He agreed. He said all the people in line were tourists who had been fooled. He said the chicken rice was no good. He very kindly led me to another stall, where he recommended laksa, a pho-like dish with rice noodles, shrimp, and some kind of meat. Much better.

We liked the Maxwell Food Centre and the Albert Food Centre. There are others.

If you go to a food center, buy a package of paper towels and a package of antiseptic wipes first. Food stalls don’t provide napkins, and the tables and seats are often in need of cleaning.

I would advise avoiding fancy American chain restaurants. We tried Lawry’s, for example, and it was just plain bad. I think Asians sometimes copy the appearance of American food without capturing anything else.

We had Egg McMuffins in Singapore, because we had to, and they were good but not quite as good as American. They don’t toast the bread enough. We tried Five Guys, and it was better than American because they made the fries correctly. I think the reason is that they hire conscientious Singaporeans instead of American high school slackers who can’t be bothered to follow the formula.

We didn’t go in for sights much. The famous Marina Bay Sands, which is three buildings joined by a pool that runs across them at the top, did not get Rhodah excited enough to pay the $23.50 cost of going up for a look. She was pretty excited about the high-end mall at the bottom, however, much to my chagrin.

We visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens. If you want to see what Asians can do with gardening and landscaping, this is the place for you. All sorts of perfectly-tended plants and trees. They also have some weird wildlife. We walked right up on some kind of monitor rooting for food, and it didn’t mind us being there at all. We also saw some red jungle fowl, which are supposedly pre-domestication chickens. There are otters in the gardens, but they didn’t show.

The gardens has a huge orchid area. Pretty impressive, if orchids are your thing.

We went to the National Museum. It’s very small, and you can get in and out in less than an hour. They had some interesting exhibits, but not a whole lot has happened in Singapore, so there was a limit to what they could do.

We had a very satisfying trip in spite of Singapore’s limitations. It’s an extremely comfortable city to stay in. It will spoil you.

While I was there, I came to a crazy realization: I don’t actually hate cities. I hate AMERICAN cities, because of the people who live in them. Our cities accumulate the worst we have to offer. Singapore isn’t like that. You don’t have to be bullied by entitled homeless people or frightened by potential muggers. People don’t ignore you or abuse you. You can walk around at night and not worry that you’re in a neighborhood where your presence is considered consent to beatings, robbery, racist behavior, or rape.

There is no Antifa in Singapore. There are no self-pitying street murals that condemn the police while ignoring the people who do nearly all the damage.

I could live in Singapore without going crazy. I could even stand not being allowed to carry a pistol.

While the subject of bad behavior is on my mind, I may as well mention a remarkable conversation I had today. My aunt said a bunch of horrible things about me.

My aunt is in charge of some things related to my grandparents’ estates, and I am not very happy with the job she is doing, or, in my view, not doing. Everything should have been sold and distributed many years ago, but a few assets are sitting around doing nothing, and I would like to have my financial connections to my family cut. I’m just tired of being involved in it. I’m not very concerned about the money.

My aunt has Parkinson’s, and dementia is one thing Parkinson’s can cause. I can’t diagnose anyone, but I am wondering if she is getting close to the point where some decisions have to be made regarding her care and that of her husband. Today I had to tell him over and over who I was. I told him his wife had three sisters and I was the son of the eldest. I told him I was his nephew. I told him I was his wife’s nephew.

Anyway, she started the conversation by angrily criticizing me for being unavailable to discuss a deal involving a property. I received a text from her in Singapore, and I responded when I saw it, saying I was in the process of flying home and would try to get back to her the following day. She was very angry at me for taking the trip! This is someone who has never spoken angrily to me until this year, so it was strange to hear the tone of her voice and the openness of the hostility.

I didn’t get that at all. I said I had taken a vacation, and she demanded to know who takes a foreign vacation in winter, as though it was a hostile act no decent person would perform. She was seething. Why? She said, “I hope you had a nice time!” Still angry. I said, “I did!”

I have complained to her this year about her failure to take certain steps to get things sold. I have never been nasty to her, and I have never insulted her. I have been blunt, though, and Southerners don’t always take that well. It’s a serious failing we have. Often, we prefer to be passive-aggressive and treacherous. Smile in your face; stab you in the back later. Being blunt is like violating an unwritten code or something. It’s not done.

She said she needed to apologize for saying nasty things about my religious beliefs. She said she apologized wholeheartedly. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said so, and that I accepted her apology anyway.

So has she been making fun of my beliefs to the family? I don’t know. When I have talked to her about my beliefs in the past, she has generally given me the impression that she was right there with me. I took her expressions of agreement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t have any reason to think she contemned my faith.

I don’t really care about this stuff. A bunch of family members are long dead, and the rest greatly reduced their involvement with my dad and me over a decade ago, so I haven’t been part of their circle in a very long time.

I wonder if we see things differently. Maybe it would bother her a lot to find out I had criticized her faith to the family, so she assumes I would be upset if she had done the same thing to me. I don’t really think or care about what they say about me, though. I have so many things to think about.

I’m just guessing here. Maybe there is no rational explanation.

Bizarrely, she accused me of taking off to Egypt to see if I could find a wife to come home with me. She, whose son is on wife three, was saying I was a loser with women. I was amazed. Where did that come from? How long had she been holding it in? Why did she pick Egypt? Does she know I went to Egypt? Why would anyone go to Egypt to get a wife? I can’t imagine a worse place, unless it’s the area where my family comes from.

I now know she doesn’t know I’m married. I didn’t correct her. I didn’t think it would help.

I have tried to get her to list properties on the web for sale, and I have mentioned the fact that I manage properties and have sold some. I guess she did not like that, because she blurted out, “My property is worth much more than yours!” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her what she meant. I think she was saying she had a bunch of rental properties that were worth more than what I have.

I don’t have any idea what she has, and she has no idea what I have.

She said everyone else in the family had planned for retirement and I had not. Where she got this idea is a mystery.

Apparently, she thought I was trying to get her to liquidate things because I was desperate for money. I said, “Do you think I’m poor?” She said, “Fine. You’re filthy rich!” So first she wanted to insult me by saying I had nothing, and then, I think, she wanted to make me feel bad for bragging about being rich. Which I didn’t do!

She said she had her treasures, which were her grandchildren, and she said I had no one, except my sorry dog. What?? I didn’t know where to go with that. I said I didn’t have a dog.

I never said anything rude. For example, I didn’t try to come up with a snappy comeback about her pets.

She said the family was going to do whatever it wanted with or without me, so of course, I asked her why she had called me. What is the point of asking for my support when it doesn’t matter? She said I couldn’t do anything about it, which is not true at all.

I told her I would never sue or contact the attorney general or anything along those lines, because I’m a Christian and I don’t intend to live that way. But I’m not going to say things are going well when I think they’re not.

I said she needed to advertise properties on the web, like everyone else does now. She said she was in “the hot spot,” meaning the frantic world of undesirable Eastern Kentucky rural real estate. She wanted me to know she knew more than I did. She then told me I was ashamed of my people and my culture, which seems irrelevant. I think she was telling me I did not understand the mysterious and unique methods of selling property up there.

I AM ashamed of my people and my culture! Every mature person who has come out of Eastern Kentucky is ashamed of the people and the culture. I used to be proud of my roots, but I was deluded. Immaturity, racism, illegitimacy, toothlessness, violence, adultery, drugs, generations of welfare recipients, hatred of learning…yes, of course I’m ashamed of my people. I didn’t say so, however.

I’m ashamed of being like them in counterproductive ways.

I used to love Eastern Kentucky, but the smart people left a long time ago. For years, my aunt has tried to promote the area as unappreciated and full of brains and talent, but that’s not even a little bit true.

Think about Singapore. In 1965, it had to start out as a new nation. It was poor. It was in the middle of nowhere. Now they call it the Switzerland of Asia. Money everywhere. A harbor full of ships. A highly educated populace. Skyscrapers. Safety.

Now think of Eastern Kentucky. It’s loaded with coal. All they had to do was keep their mineral rights, sell the coal, develop other industries, and invest, and it would have become the Kuwait of Appalachia. Instead, they sold their inheritances to outsiders and became their laborers. They never built a decent university. No infrastructure. No industry other than coal. They kept their corrupt politics and courts. They held onto racism. They fell in love with handouts. They planted marijuana patches full of booby traps. Since 1965, Eastern Kentucky has gotten worse.

Yes. Sure. I’m ashamed of it. Why would I not be?

Maybe “ashamed” is the wrong word. I’m critical of it. I am honest about it. I reject a lot of it.

She went on to accuse my parents of being ashamed of it. That’s true. They were. They didn’t try to disguise themselves or cure their accents, but they were realistic. My dad used to quote Kentucky author Harry Caudill, who said that everybody who had any get-up-and-go got up and went.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew or knew of. He flew all over the country representing companies like PPG, UPS, and Nabisco before the NLRB and the federal appellate courts. He was the head of litigation in one of Florida’s top firms at the age of 33, three years after joining as an associate.

My mother loved classical music. She read. She loved good restaurants and trips to Europe.

What were they supposed to do in Eastern Kentucky? My dad wrote a brief for my grandfather once, and my grandfather told him it was too good for the judges up there.

Since my beliefs have been mentioned, I’ll talk about some of them.

I am certain everyone has demons. They are around us all the time, influencing, or trying to influence, our hearts and minds. Many of the thoughts, desires, and emotions we think are ours really come from demons, and some, in some people, come from the Holy Spirit.

Demons use people to express themselves and fulfill their desires. They give us habits and leanings. Some try to turn us into the people they would be if they had bodies. They get us to wear things they like. They get us to cut ourselves up and get tattoos.

They manifest in things like overeating, pornography, rage, depression, delusions, to name a few.

I believe that when people become demented, the demons get promotion. Before dementia sets in, people resist them to a certain extent. They also cover their influence up, pretending to be nicer and better than they really are. Once the host loses the ability to steer things, he or she becomes more like the demons.

My grandmother liked to boss people. She covered it up when she was young and able, but she became demented, and one day, she announced, “I want to be the boss!” I believe that was her demons talking. Sometimes my dad, who had vascular dementia, would curse me for no reason and then forget instantly. I think that was demonic, too.

Now my aunt is fading, and she seems like a different person. Maybe she is a different person. Maybe other beings are finally getting to spit poison at me, after veiling their feelings for decades. She used to tell me she admired me. She tried to impress me, probably because I grew up in cities and had more sophistication than the rest of the family. She’s done with that now.

God has told me all kinds of brilliant things, which makes sense, because he is God. He told me this: “Things get better, or things get worse.”

It sounds extremely simple and obvious, but it’s important. Every day, you improve or deteriorate. You never stand still and remain unchanged. Nothing does, except God. Troubled people who don’t know the Holy Spirit deteriorate. Whatever is wrong in their hearts and minds gets worse.

God brings improvement and order. Where God is absent, rot and chaos are unstoppable. God told me this: “Bring order.”

I’ve talked to Rhodah about my family, and she feels the same way I do. Don’t sue. Don’t turn anyone in. Don’t wade into the food fight. The amounts at stake are too small to make a real difference in our lives, and getting into unforgiveness and juvenile squabbling would take all the joy out of life.

Paul said it was better to suffer wrong than to take another Christian to court. I would only call one or two of my relatives Christians, but I think Paul’s advice applies anyway. If anything is taken from me, God will repay it with interest, and He will be pleased that I’m pursuing his presence instead of playing verbal laser tag with people who are in real supernatural trouble.

We have been praying for my family. It doesn’t seem to help them. I don’t know what else we can do. I thought about contacting relatives to raise awareness about my aunt’s condition, but they know already, and nothing is being done.

It seems likely a very abrupt move to assisted living is in her near future, and I am told nothing is being done to prepare. If she’s angry with me for questioning her actions as my fiduciary, you have to wonder how she will handle assisted living staff telling her what socks to wear.

It’s very unfortunate. I used to have a great relationship with her. I don’t see that being restored any time soon. If my grandfather had done a better job planning his estate, maybe the family would still be whole.

At least I can say I never took advantage of any of the others. I’m not the world’s finest person, but I have managed to avoid that.

Approved

It is time for an update on my wife’s immigration status.

At some time during the last 24 hours, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a document known as an I-130 approval. This means they have signed off on our application for Rhodah to join me in the United States.

So now she just jumps on a plane, and I meet her in Orlando!

Actually, no.

The case now moves to the National Visa Center at the Department of State, and they arrange for Rhodah to be interviewed in Zambia. Assuming she convinces them she’s not a problem immigrant, she will then be issued a visa, and THEN I will meet her at the airport.

Along the way, I will have to show I can support her.

This process takes a while, but nothing like the 384 days it took for our petition to be approved. Really, we need a little time to get things in order, so the additional delay isn’t a big deal. She has to dispose of her car and whatever possessions she isn’t bringing. We have to make travel arrangements. I have to make any necessary changes here at the house.

I don’t know how many more trips we will take before she arrives here. We are all set to visit Singapore, and there is no point in canceling. We intend to visit Israel, and I would like to take her to Europe, if only to spite the bureaucrats who kept us out this year.

My understanding is that a US green card makes it easier to get tourist visas from other countries, but they have been pretty irrational so far, so one wonders how it will pan out in practice.

We’re not going to keep going to second-tier and third-tier destinations. Not unless God sends us.

It will be very strange being together with Rhodah 24 hours a day. We’ll be able to do normal-life things together all the time. We’ll be able to travel, go to restaurants, shop, look after our properties…no cell phones or email accounts required. We’ll get used to going various places together. We’ll get used to certain meals. We’ll visit the dump as a team.

It will be great not to have to do every little thing for myself as well as looking after another person from thousands of miles away.

When the visa process is over, I will post the news.

Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.

Storm Update

God, as always, has been extremely gracious, and the corpse of Hurricane Nicole has done no damage here. The putative center of the former storm is now as close to me as it will get. It’s breezy, and there is a little rain, but even the Weather Channel’s trained actors couldn’t make this look like a real tropical storm. At least not so far.

I am now seeing one outlet predicting stronger winds later today. That is new. I hope it’s just the usual over-reaction. If not, I’ll be moving to the Red Roof Inn.

My prediction, which is worth what I paid for my meteorology diploma: things will get better, not worse. As the storm moves to the west, winds will have to go over most of the lower half of the state to get here, and that should cut their speed. Also, the storm is getting weaker with time.

I guess this theory won’t work if the winds in the bottom half of Nicole are stronger than they are up north. This doesn’t appear to be true, though, because if it were, Sarasota and Orlando would be having high winds now, and they are not.

Winds can’t just materialize magically in the middle of dry land. The storm circulates. Before the winds get here, they have to be somewhere else.

The same site that says we’ll have 33 mph base winds 45 minutes from now says we’re at 15. So an 18 mph increase in 45 minutes? Doubt it.

A friend in the northern part of the county says she lost power, which is surprising, but the properties where she live are maintained pretty badly. Maybe that’s the explanation.

She also managed to get a broken window, which is a bigger surprise. It’s a good idea to protect windows during hurricanes, but even if you don’t, the odds of losing one are low. And this is no hurricane. It was barely a hurricane when it WAS a hurricane.

My power company, which is one of two in this county, reports 489 customers with no electricity, county-wide. Not bad. Duke Energy, the other company, reports around 6 times as many, which is much worse but still nothing compared to Irma.

Maybe Duke Energy doesn’t manage trees well. My company went on a trimming binge last year.

In other news, I am very happy with the batch of Texas trash I made. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. A1 sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
4 tablespoons Crystal sauce
10 cups cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups Spanish peanuts

You just mix it up, spread it in a pan, and bake it at 250° until it drys out. I stir it every 20 minutes for the first hour, and then I quit.

MSG might make it better. MSG is the reason it’s so hard to eat only one Dorito.

For some reason, idleness sets in during a storm, so you do trivial things to kill time. Yesterday I put a new diode in my Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I installed one a year or two ago, but I did a bad job, and it pooped out.

These ovens have 120V AC wires going straight to the heating element, and there is no way to adjust the heat. A clever guy realized he could reduce the heat by cutting off half the AC signal.

AC is positive half the time and negative the rest of the time. A diode will only permit current to flow one way. If you cut off either the positive or negative part of an AC signal, you reduce the power by half.

I stuffed a questionable diode in there, and it was great until it frizzled due to lack of heat sinking. This time, I used the same diode as the guy who came up with the concept. It’s enormous and should require no heat sinking.

I had to cut wires and put in spade connectors, a selector switch, and shrink tubing. I had to find a way to cram the giant diode into the oven. Now it’s done, so I should be able to slow-cook rotisserie meat.

These ovens are wonderful. It’s hard to believe a TV huckster could invent something that really benefits mankind, but Popeil did it. My only big complaint was the lack of adjustability. If you don’t like things browned well, or you want certain things to cook very slowly, you have to wrap them in foil or try other tricks. Now that my oven is modified (again), I can throw a glazed pork roast in it, slow-cook it for a couple of hours, and then turn the heat up to brown the glaze.

The newer ovens are made in China, and there are complaints. Mine is Korean, and there is really nothing wrong with it. I’ve been through every part of it, so I know how it’s built. It’s not the toughest oven ever made, but it’s not junk, either.

Starlink is working fine, except for one thing. We had a one-second power flicker, and the system had to reboot. Starlink can take a very long time to start working after an outage. I put a battery backup on it, so I should be okay now.

The verdict is in: I’ve decided I’m a big Starlink fan. There are little annoyances, but it works, and it’s a great deal better than my old system. Once it becomes more mainstream, there will be more help available for users, so maybe people like me will not have to crawl around in their attics and drill holes in their walls. Tradesmen will be ready to help.

I also like my VPN, but it isn’t perfect. I get a lot of security puzzles now, and sometimes a site will refuse to load because it’s convinced I’m a hacker.

Hmm. We just got a couple of pretty decent gusts. Hello? Am I still here?

Guess I’ll post this using my mobile hotspot. Come on, Starlink. Get it together for daddy.

MORE

It’s 4 hours later. We are supposed to have winds of around 50 mph. It’s not happening. I’d call it 10 mph.

Never trust a weatherman.

Looking Forward to Newsmen Doing Their Marcel Marceau Impressions

Tropical Storm Nicole is turning out to be pretty lame, so I am optimistic about tomorrow.

The center of the eye is west of Freeport, around 70 miles from our coast, and the NHC says the wind speed was 75 mph an hour ago, making it EXACTLY equal to the minimum speed of a hurricane. Suspiciously, some would say. A remarkable coincidence. Maybe they round to the nearest 5 or 0.

Weather Underground, a well-known weather site, is saying some remarkable things right now. It says 1) Nicole is a hurricane situated over Grand Bahama, and 2) a wind gust of 61 mph was recorded there tonight. Like, now.

Okay. Here is how storm speeds are measured. Storms are measured by “maximum sustained winds,” and a maximum wind is “sustained” if it maintains speed for at least one minute. So in order for Nicole to be a hurricane, it has to produce winds higher than 74 mph for at least one minute, right where it is, which means Grand Bahama. If a gust of 61 mph is so significant it made the news, how can Nicole have maximum sustained winds of over 74 mph?

Gusts are faster than maximum sustained winds, so it seems bizarre that a gust of 61 mph made news in a storm which is supposed to have maximum sustained winds of at least 75 mph.

I saw a site claiming there would be “coastal flooding” all the way to North Carolina. Uh…no. Flooding is when water comes in under your front door, way above the high tide line, at the very least. Right now, the worst-hit areas are expecting a maximum storm surge of 6 feet, and it could be as low as 3 feet. If Florida, right in the crosshairs, is going to top out no higher than 6 feet, North Carolina is not going to have “flooding” by any honest definition. In all likelihood, anything resembling flooding will be confined to some barrier islands in Florida. We are not going to see people in Atlanta paddling kayaks in their front yards. Not unless CNN or the Weather Channel shows up and fakes it, as they are known to do.

Here’s a quick video of a Weather Channel reporter getting ready for hurricane season.

Maybe you can see why I don’t trust the dire predictions we always get.

The storm is now moving at 13 mph, which is good news. Better than the 8 mph they quoted earlier. You want a storm to move as fast as possible so it doesn’t sit on you and blow trees down for two days.

At this speed, the eye, if one still exists tomorrow, should pass by me roughly 24 hours from now. By that time, the storm will be broken up pretty badly. My county will probably get nearly no wind damage. My opinion may change if the storm’s track moves significantly. Things could be worse than I now expect. But the future looks good right now.

The NHC says I am well within the tropical-storm-force wind area right now, but it’s not bad at all. I would call it very breezy with no rain. The longer the dry conditions hold out, the stronger the trees will stay.

Weather Underground still thinks my area will get 2″ of rain, which is wet but not disastrous. When I was a kid in Miami, we got 14″ one day. I remember, because my mother went into cardiac arrest at a doctor’s office and failed to pick me up from school, and my sister and I had to walk home in it. Supposedly, the county I’m in right now got 10″ during Irma. There was water standing in my woods.

Palm Beach County is supposedly about to be hit with very, very hard rain. I got that from a TV newsman, however, so it may be a gross and intentional exaggeration. The NHC is number one in terms of reliability, and news people are right up there with mood rings, Miss Cleo, and Democrat pollsters.

Weather Underground predicts winds of 25-35 mph here tomorrow, but they also predict them for…right now. If there is any basis for their predictions, then I am already seeing the best Nicole has to offer.

I gave in to storm paranoia and bought sugary cereal, Pop Tarts, and the makings of Texas trash, one of my favorite party snacks. I rolled Cheddar Chex mix and Spanish peanuts in Worcestershire, A1, butter, Crystal hot sauce, celery seeds, brown sugar, and a couple of other things, and I baked it at 250 until it was dry. Really nice.

I guess I will be overindulging today and tomorrow. Ordinarily, I go out on the patio at lunchtime and fix a big cheeseburger on my dangerously-modified propane grill, but I don’t want to deal with the rain and wind, if it comes. Looks like it will be Frosted Mini-Wheats instead.

Rhodah and I have been interceding regarding the storm, and I hope you will, too. Nicole is not a scary storm, but it has the potential to cause fairly serious problems for some areas, and there are always people who do dumb things that turn mild storms into killers. A guy on the West Coast decided to stay in his beachfront home during Ian even though he knew he couldn’t swim, and now he’s dead. He posted commentary on Facebook, and the last posts were very sad.

Hurricane parties and “riding it out” were popular activities when I was a kid. There is something exhilarating about having drinks with friends on a screened-in patio by Coleman light as a storm whirls around your house.

Years ago, people could be forgiven their bad judgment. We didn’t know as much as we do now. These days, there is no excuse. When the government tells you your storm surge will be “unsurvivable,” and they tell you to write your name and Social Security number on your body so it can be identified when they find it later, you should get in the car.

There is no “riding it out” where I live, because we don’t get hurricanes. We get tropical storm winds at best. Storm surge can’t come near this county. This is not the coast, so unless you live in a mobile home under a big tree, you don’t have to leave home. Coastal people have to be more careful.

I truly hope I still have power tomorrow. Otherwise, look for me to blog from a nearby hotel until it comes back.

New Storm Drives me to Buy Pop-Tarts

Once again, a friend and I are in what we jokingly call THE CONE OF CERTAIN DEATH. Unbelievably, the devil has managed to scrape together a tropical storm after the end of hurricane season, and he has tried really hard to get it to go right over my house. The National Hurricane Center’s prediction cone is looming ominously, like the strong possibility of Kamala Harris becoming president when Biden finally forgets who he is.

This threat, Tropical Storm Nicole, is not too bad. It’s below hurricane status now, and it has very little time to build speed before it hits the coast and starts falling apart. They are predicting 75 mph upon arrival, which sounds like perverse hurricane optimism to me, because that’s the exact number where storms become hurricanes. It sounds like the forecasters took a look at it, figured it would be somewhere in the mid-70’s, and said, “What the heck. Let’s say it’s going to be a hurricane.” The storm is also somewhat dry compared to others. Rain makes hurricanes worse because it soaks the ground and loosens up things like trees and power poles.

The unfortunate thing about Nicole is its size. It’s really wide. On the NHC’s current map, it looks like the tropical-storm-force wind field is 5 times as wide as Florida. That means you can be pretty far from the center of the track and still be in the storm. Is the map correct? Well, if it was, I would be experiencing sustained winds of at least 40 mph, and I’m not, so draw your own conclusions.

Looking out the window, I’ll call it 10 mph with gusts to 25. Best guess. Safe to drive in. Nothing flying around.

Of course, it happened right after I got my Starlink cable installed more or less correctly. I am no longer using a bath towel to cushion it as it runs through an open window. That bath towel is not looking good. It’s amazing how a week of sunlight can bleach a towel. No wonder people get skin cancer.

I would be amazed if my new roof dish mount had problems in this breeze. This will be a good test.

What have I done to prepare? I got gas, and I bought one case of bottled water. I no longer have the big cooler I bought before the last threat. I got it in case the power went out and I needed to use ice. Then I took it back to Walmart. Hope that was not a mistake.

In other news, Rhodah and I are finally going somewhere. Italy lied to us. Germany wasted our time. Ireland let a new employee deny our visa application. The Czechs came up with a ridiculous document demand probably intended to prevent us from applying. Now we’re headed to Singapore, where they never turn anyone down. They wouldn’t care if Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey arrived in the same flight kennel with Steven Seagal.

I really, really do not want to visit the Far East. Ever. I have never been very interested in visiting the Orient, and traveling is such a bad experience now, I dread visiting any place with a flight that takes more than 15 hours. My flight to Singapore will take around 30. The stuff of nightmares. Jonah went 72, however, so perspective is important.

These days flying is physically extremely unpleasant, and it’s also humiliating. They process everyone like Jews at the gate of Auschwitz. The service is terrible. The seats are like clamps. They nag constantly about masks, or at least they did in the past. I don’t know if they’ll do that this time. Anyway, it makes you wonder if the TSA hired the guards from Abu Ghraib.

Singapore is so far away, one of my flights will go east, and the other will return from the west. The airlines do it both ways. It’s nearly half the circumference of the world away. Vietnam is substantially closer.

On the up side, Singapore is supposed to be crime-free, clean, rich, and full of great restaurants. It’s certainly free of chewing gum, because they confiscate it at the airport. Good for them. I can’t imagine what it’s like to reach under a restaurant table and not feel globs of gum left behind by women and girls.

I may not want to visit Singapore, but if I had to live in the Far East, I would beg to be given citizenship.

Back in ’07, famed investor Jimmy Rogers said Singapore was the place to be, and he loaded up his truck and moved there, never, so far, to return. A long time ago, he decided the US of A was washed up, and he predicted a rosy future for Asians. I wonder if he made the right move. I don’t like the idea of living in a non-Christian country, though. I mean more non-Christian than the one I live in now.

I was surprised to learn that Singapore has a lot of American chains. We already have reservations at Lawry’s The Prime Rib and Ruth’s Chris. I also found a promising barbecue joint, and we’re booked.

So I’m a typical American, wanting to stay at the Hilton and eat steak? Yes. Go ahead and shame me, like I care. No apologies.

Actually, that’s not totally true. I have other reasons for choosing these restaurants.

Rhodah loves meat, and she has not yet been able to have steak or barbecue in a top American restaurant, so I picked a few places in Singapore in order to give her a special experience that will prepare her for life in her new home. We do want to eat the local stuff, but come on. It’s all Chinese food. We’ve seen that before. Call it Chinese. Call it Indonesian. Call it Thai. If it ain’t Chinese, it’s all close enough for jazz. Here’s your pile of white rice. Here’s your bowl of meat and vegetables in sauce. Here’s your funny sticks. Dig in. Chinese.

We need to find a good Indian place. Singapore might be the only city in the world that has clean Indian restaurants. Actually, there’s an extremely clean Indian place in Ocala, which is odd, because nearly all the American restaurants here are dirty.

We also plan to go to a Scottish restaurant. McDonald’s.

What about activities? Hey, it’s Singapore. No Eiffel Tower. No Rhine to cruise on. No Big Ben. No Renaissance art or architecture. No museums worth discussing. No alps. No Vatican. No Taj Mahal. No pyramids.

They have a couple of really neat buildings, and I think there’s an aquarium.

Truthfully, it sounds a lot like Vegas.

We will have great food, a nice hotel, safety, and each other. We are extremely blessed. A lot of people in our shoes can’t be with each other at all, and most of those who can get together don’t have trips as nice as ours.

It’s a whole lot better than the other places where Rhodah can go without a visa. Hong Kong arrests sick tourists and imprisons them until they test negative, so it’s almost as oppressive and backward as Australia. The Philippines are apparently extremely squalid, because Filipinos who live there advise tourists not to come. Malaysia is Singapore under oppressive Muslim rule. African countries are African. More or less like Haiti.

We should be going to places God chooses, to do things has planned for us. That would make the nature of the destinations less important. Remarkably, Rhodah has been counseling a new Christian in Singapore, so maybe we’ll meet him, and that will redeem the trip.

I guess I should go to the store and pick up a few items of face-ready food, just in case. You never know what a storm will do.

Hope I am still online tomorrow night.

Blazing Internet Speeds Take me Back to 2005

I guess anyone who still reads my blog is pretty bored with the Starlink stuff by now, but here I am with more.

Today I finalized my dish location efforts.

The dish was originally on a short J-mount that used to hold up a Dish dish, and the mount was on the first-story roof about 8 feet from a second-story wall that runs north to south. The wall cut off a big percentage of the dish’s view of the southern horizon.

When you get your Starlink dish, which Starlink whimsically identifies as Dishy McFlatface, the app tells you all kinds of needlessly alarming things. It rants about the necessity for a clear view of the horizon.

Nobody has a clear view of the horizon. Maybe if you live in the desert or on a ship. Or on top of a mountain or skyscraper. Other than that, no.

I learned about Starlink’s somewhat neurotic horizon obsession when I opened the Starlink box for the first time. Prior to that, I had no idea. I just assumed Elon Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him, had some idea what he was doing. If the dish were hard to use in a normal location, he would have told me before sending it to me, right?

Yeah, okay.

It was because of the horizon obsession that I was reluctant to do a serious installation to begin with. I thought I might have to send the dish back in a week. I couldn’t believe it would work here in the woods.

Starlink needs to see the northern sky, and I have tall trees to my north.

When I did my preliminary installation, I got okay performance compared to my old cellular link, but I thought there was probably room for improvement. After all, in addition to the tree problem, there was a vertical wall at a bearing of around 330° (west of north), so my horizon was far from perfect. It was because of this concern that I started moving the dish around and ultimately got a new mount.

I decided to put the new mount on the edge of the second-story roof. This idea was based on some misconceptions. I thought it would be fairly easy to run a wire through the second story wall into the attic from the dish, and from there to another part of the attic where I could get access to a stretch of hallway wall near my desired router location.

I had this ridiculous idea that the southern edge of the upper roof terminated abruptly above a wall, so it would be easy to install the mount on the edge and run the cable a couple of feet down past the eave and into the attic. In reality, and I have no idea why I didn’t check this first, the upper roof slopes down toward the south, so to put the mount on the highest part, I would have to climb up the slope.

Ordinarily, I am not afraid of roofs, but mine is covered with gritty shingles, and the grit comes off under your shoes when you walk on the roof. I can walk up a slope that doesn’t have grit on it, but when you add loose grit to the equation, it’s a different story. I’m not sure how roofers do it.

I walked part of the way up the slope, and I decided it was time for plan B. I was not going to risk rolling off a roof.

I ended up putting the new mount near the old one, a couple of feet farther from the vertical wall and a couple of feet higher. The new mount is around 20″ longer than the new one, so I would say the dish is maybe 4 feet higher than it was yesterday.

Here’s the really irritating part: I turned on the app to see what it thought, and it declared my dish was free from obstructions. So as far as Starlink is concerned, my location is perfect.

If I can get an A+ in a location which is partially blocked, why make so much fuss about obstructions? For all I know, the old location was fine.

I would have checked the old location using the app, but even though I had used the app before, I was not aware it had an obstruction-check feature. I can’t explain this. Maybe the app looks different the first time you turn it on.

So I failed to scout my own roof properly, and I failed to use the app correctly.

Anyway, now I have a dish location that is beyond reproach.

I thought I would have to cut a new hole in my house, but I found I could shove the Starlink cable through a grommet from the old Dish installation.

I pulled the cable through the grommet into an attic space. Then I drilled a hole from the hallway into the attic. I ran the cable over some trusses to the hole, shoved it out of the hole, put a new RJ45 jack on the end, and hooked the router back up. A while later, after Starlink stopped pouting over my impudent interruption, I had the web again. Starlink likes to shut down for a while after you fiddle with it. Perhaps M’s way of wagging his finger at us.

I still don’t have my shielded jacks from Amazon, so I was not able to install a wall plate. I want to have a grounded dish, and without a shielded jack, that means using a jumper to connect the cable’s grounding wire to the shielded plug from the router. I can’t run a jumper through a wall plate without mangling it.

Now I have a router sitting on the hall floor next to a little pile of drywall dust, with a cable hanging out of an unfinished hole. I will fix everything up in three days when the jack arrives.

Here is the big takeaway for other confused Starlink people: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE AN UNOBSTRUCTED HORIZON. Pay no attention to the nonsense Starlink tells you. Put your dish in the best location you can find without a lot of effort and expense and let the app tell you what it thinks. If the app likes it, leave it alone. If not, move it to different locations in increasing order of installation expense and difficulty. When you get one that works, leave the dish there.

Another important lesson: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THE STARLINK APP’S LOCATION-SCOUTING FEATURE. I mean the one that tells you to point your camera at the sky and stand there like an idiot. It is unnecessary, hard to use, and worthless. It will just discourage you. Set your dish up, turn it on, and rely on the app to tell you how the dish feels. The feature you want to use is called “Visibility.”

Right now, Ookla says I am getting download and upload speeds of 83 and 6, and Starlink’s app says it’s 42 and 12. I’m sure both of these results are wrong, because past experience says both tests are stupid and unreliable, but I think they work for comparison purposes. My old cell connection ran around 12 and 1 on Ookla, so whatever I am actually getting now from Starlink is a lot better.

Why do I say the tests are stupid and unreliable? Well, I just got 83/6 and 42/12 about a minute apart. How can that happen if the tests work?

Being able to use the web 20% as well as a normal person in, say, Bangladesh or Malawi is a heady experience. It’s weird, seeing so little of the swirly Youtube waiting symbol while I try to watch videos. I can’t imagine what real Internet speed is like, though. You people with 300 Mbps must live in a different world.

My next Starlink project will be a cable running under the yard to the shop. I have the Starlink ethernet connector, which should have been built into the router. Elon. I just need to install another wall jack, find the path the old cable used to get out of the house, run a new cable through it, dig a slit in the yard, bury the new cable in it, run it into the pipe leading into the shop, put in a wall jack, and hook up the PC.

In other Musk news, my wife tells me Kathy Griffin and some other celebrities and demi-celebrities have decided to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. They are fighting the system. They are determined not to pay him $8 per month for their identity-verifying blue checks. Some are threatening to leave.

There are problems with this movement. Apart from the obvious triviality of the dispute.

First of all, if you leave Twitter, no one will care, and you won’t have a voice any more, so no one will hear you if you continue to criticize. A lot of celebrities are basically washed up, and Twitter helps people realize they still exist, thereby helping them get jobs. If it weren’t for Twitter, who would know people like Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli were still alive? Until today, I thought Griffin, a cancer victim, was probably dead.

Griffin and Bertinelli changed their Twitter names to Elon Musk and put up tweets supporting left-wing political candidates. They said they did this to prove the blue check process is flawed. Seems to me they proved Musk was right.

Bertinelli says the blue check makes it harder for criminals to impersonate celebrities. So she’s saying the system she describes as flawed works. What? So how does charging for the check make impersonation easier? Is she saying she can’t scrape up $96 per year? Is she saying criminals will pay but celebrities won’t?

If the system works, how come she was able to call herself Elon Musk without losing her blue check? It was still there when she pulled her prank. Shouldn’t blue-checkers be prevented from changing their handles? After all, the check is supposed to be proof they’re who they say they are.

Maybe I don’t understand her argument. She says the system is flawed, and then she says it works. Somehow, charging makes it less likely to work? Maybe I missed a vital tweet that reconciles these claims.

Okay, I’ll clear things up for everyone. First, a disclaimer: I don’t care what happens to Twitter. Second, blue checks should be screened well, and screening should be continuous so blue-checkers can’t change their handles. Third, everyone with any self-respect should get off Twitter and try to regain some dignity.

Who really cares? It’s all junior high to me. It’s amazing that human beings are willing to hiss and claw at each other like this in public. Over $96 per year.

Maybe they do it because celebrities aren’t busy. They have long periods (sometimes multiple decades) of inactivity. What better to do than caper and prance for attention on a free service that brings them attention from lots of people?

I like what Dave Chappelle said about Twitter, but for the profanity: “Apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a ___, because Twitter is not a real place.”

What is the other problem with celebrities SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER? Well, they ARE power. Liberals are the establishment. Conservatives and Christians are the counterculture. Elon Musk is an insurgent who just happened to get very rich. Musk is the rebel and protestor. Griffin and Bertinelli are establishment stooges. They’re on the side that slaps down the little people. They’re organs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Insiders. Swamp creatures. They’re sith lords. Musk is Luke Skywalker.

I had a thought recently. What if Instagram starts increasing its word limit and giving people checks for nothing? Instagram is a leftist organization, very much in favor of ending free political speech, and it already has a big base. I wonder if Instagram could kill Twitter.

I can’t predict the future, but I know what’s happening right now. Liberals all over America are calling each other and meeting, trying to find a way to end the existential threats of free speech and blue check fees. They really think these phenomena are disastrous for the world. Satan has convinced them up is down and down is up.

Projection. That’s what it is. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Controlling, abusive people who can’t tolerate dissent project. A delusion comes over them, and they think they people they hurt are the real oppressors. They think they’re victims. When you manage to prevent them from abusing them, they think what you’ve done is abuse.

My dad and sister had this problem. It is truly a mental illness. A state of bona fide delusion. Not far from psychosis.

My sister used to accuse me of having her own faults all the time. It was bizarre. I’ll give you the weirdest example. She used to walk around the house in her underwear. It was trashy and very rude. She would do it in our house and even my grandparents’ house. She would spend the entire day that way. It was normal for her.

One day she was abusing me for some imagined offense, and while she was listing my crimes, she said I walked around in my grandparents’ house in my underwear all the time. Never, ever, EVER happened. I would have been mortified if I had accidentally walked through the house like that. It’s something white trash people do. Decent people have the courtesy to wear clothes.

I think this was the moment when I understood how crazy projection is.

It made me realize why my sister hated other people so much. She thought they were like her. And even more unbelievably, she thought she had their good qualities and the moral high ground.

Maybe that’s why she loved and admired herself so much. I wonder.

Projection is slander and accusation, so no wonder Satan’s children do it. He is the devil, and “devil” means “accuser” and “slanderer.” Look up the Greek.

Sometimes they know they’re slandering, but a lot of the time, they really believe the insane things they say about the people they’re abusing. They hate us because they think we’re like them.

It’s an important thing to understand. It’s a big mistake to treat a crazy person as though he were sane. You waste a lot of time. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a stump.

It’s so weird, seeing the people who run the world acting like they’re the French Resistance. So brave, agreeing with all the people around them. Agreeing with the people who pay them. Agreeing with most people in our government. What kind of rebellion is that? What kind of revolutionary props up the ruling regime?

The Nazis shot resistors without trials. Here, the people who think they’re rebels get to go to the Oscars.

It’s all incredibly interesting to watch.

The Twitter squabble. Not the Oscars. They’re ridiculous. A bunch of insanely wealthy people, patting each other on the back for playing make-believe.

As of Thursday, I should have a real Internet wall jack, and by next week, I hope to have Starlink in the shop. You can keep Twitter, though.

New Tools and Spending Money are Always the Answers

I feel like posting information for other Starlink Junior users.

First of all, what I have isn’t called “Starlink Junior.” It’s “Best Effort” Starlink. Mr. Musk apparently wanted to reach customers and build a base as soon as possible even though he might not be able to give them the full Starlink treatment, so “Best Effort” is what he offered.

It’s kind of sad, because it makes it sound like they’re really trying, and here I am, calling it “Starlink Junior.”

On the other hand, Mr. Musk has rolled out a new surprise that makes me feel less bad. He is going to throttle everyone. EVERYONE.

By that I mean everyone will be given a data limit. Actual throttling will not occur until you pass it.

I got an email saying anyone who uses more than one terabyte per month will be throttled. This is called the “Fair Use” policy, which is unfortunate, because “Fair Use” is a legal term applied to copyrighted material.

I think it would be more accurate to call it the “Backpedaling to Save Starlink Money” policy, but I am not on the board, so there you go.

I have no idea whether I will use a terabyte per month. Let’s see. That’s around 33 gigs per day, right? Seems a little heavy. I know from using Verizon’s severely-limited “Unlimited” plan that it takes considerable surfing to break through Verizon’s 15 GB cap. That’s how much I get in a month, and during the months when I’ve had to use Verizon because of problems with my ISP, it has taken at least a couple of days to get in trouble.

Mr. Musk says fewer than 10% of users will be affected. My guess: that means about 9.9%. If it had been 8%, to choose a lower number at random, he would have said 8% to make it sound better.

The obvious problem is that web designers are constantly trying to pump up the data they send us. Websites are full of ridiculous garbage we don’t want or need, and it jacks up our consumption. This will probably continue, because when has it not continued? So Starlink’s cap may look a lot less generous in a year or two.

Nerds like to redefine words. I really hate what they’ve done to “unlimited.” Words are not their specialty. They should stay out of the definition business.

Second thing…I got my Starlink cable spliced.

I have to splice my cable because Mr. Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him suddenly, because he is the world’s M, no…wait, he’s the world’s Q. Dang. Well, I’ll call him M anyway. He’s kind of like M. He calls a lot of shots. M has decided to put proprietary plugs on his ordinary Cat5 shielded cables. Starlink cables look all mysterious, but they’re just like the ones you have in your house, only harder to work on.

The plugs are enormous, so in order to put a cable through a wall, you have to cut a 1″ hole. And you can’t decide how long your cable will be. M only sells them in certain lengths. Splicing is the obvious answer. If you can cut your cable and splice it, you can run your cable through a 5/16″ hole instead of an unsightly 1″ hole which is likely to leak and let bugs in even if you try to seal it.

Yesterday, I put an ordinary RJ45 plug on the side of the cable that goes to the router, and I put an RJ45 jack on the other side, intending to mount it to a wall plate later. The idea is dish -> hole in exterior wall -> attic -> rear of interior wall -> RJ45 jack -> wall plate -> RJ45 plug -> cable -> router.

I got okay download speeds after installing the jack and plug, but my uploads were, for practical purposes, motionless, and I got a lot of download errors.

I started researching and asking around.

The Cat5 cable M uses is shielded. It contains 8 conducting wires that do the data stuff, and it also has a bare wire and some foil shielding that goes around all the wires. The bare wire is supposed to be in direct contact with the foil. The foil and bare wire are ground conductors.

Most RJ45 plugs and jacks are not shielded. I can get shielded plugs locally (Lowe’s), but jacks have to come from Cyberia.

I tried to find out whether the shielding and ground had to be intact in order for the system to work. Some guy claimed they did, but he’s a guy who put Starlink in a truck, so who knows whether he knows anything?

I was afraid one or more of the following things were causing a problem: a) failure to reconnect the ground wires on my new ends after splicing, b) failure to reconnect the shielding on my new ends after splicing, and c) a really bad job of putting my new unshielded RJ45 plug on the cable.

I did a bad job with the plug because I did not have the right tool.

Putting Catx plugs and jacks on cables is much more complicated than it has to be. The tools you use for plugs don’t do the same things jack tools use, and different brands of plugs and jacks don’t work with every tool made by every company.

You can put a jack on a cable using a simple tool called a punch down tool. These range in price from $10 to at least $60. You can also use a screwdriver and knife, but don’t. Just do not.

You can also use a special crimping tool which is sort of like pliers. These things appear to start at about $50, unless you want to take a chance with low-end Chinese.

Plugs require crimping tools, period. You can try faking it with whatever you have on your bench, but it’s a bad idea.

When it comes to things you can find today near your house, you are probably limited to Ideal and Klein. Klein makes a crazy-complicated tool that will do jacks and plugs, but it only works with Klein stuff. Ideal’s plug tools only do Ideal plugs, and they don’t do jacks.

You can see what a mess it is.

Want some help? Here you go. Buy a package of Ideal shielded plugs. Buy an Ideal FT-45 crimping tool. These things will run you over $80, but it beats hiring some slacker who will charge a lot more and not care how much he damages your house.

Now you can do plugs.

For a wall jack, buy a trueCABLE Cat6 toolless keystone jack from Amazon. These things are shielded. I have not been able to find shielded jacks locally. I don’t know what “keystone” means, but I know that local stores sell wall plates that fit keystone jacks.

You can get a pack of two jacks for $13. I don’t know how to buy a single jack, or I would have.

Now you can do jacks.

When you attach your jack and plug, use the T-568B wiring standard. The wires in your cable are colored, and the standard tells you which wire goes where. There is also a T-568A standard, which only the government uses, because the government has to be an idiot.

The good news: you only need shielded stuff on the cable that goes from the router to the dish. In your walls, if you choose to have hardwiring, you can use plain old plastic jacks and plugs. I only need one shielded jack and one shielded plug. I’m going to use shielded plugs all over the place anyway because I had to buy a bag of 10.

What is shielding? It’s a conductive barrier that reduces the amount of electrmagnetic interference your cables pick up. When your cable tries to pick up the local rap station instead of your data, it feels like you when you use a cell phone in an elevator. It gets nowhere, so your precious data, which could, ironically, be rap MP3’s, passes through unmolested.

Why isn’t all Catx cable shielded? I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t need it.

The cable that Starlink uses doesn’t just carry 1’s and 0’s. It carries power to move the dish. This, I have learned, is called PoE, or “power over ethernet.” Why the mixed-case letters? Because nerds have no verbal aptitude; they don’t know it’s wrong. Is the juice the reason your cable is shielded? Is M running the juice through the foil and grounding wire? No idea, but why take a chance?

Will using unshielded stuff really let bad interference in? Again, no idea. My guess: not. My connection is still unshielded for about an inch, and it seems to be working fine. The ground is continuous, but the shielding is interrupted.

Today I used an Ideal FT-45 tool to install a shielded Ideal RJ45 plug on my cable. I left my unshielded jack alone. I ran a jumper from the ground on the jack to the ground on the plug, just in case. Now everything works. And I’m stuck with a $50 tool.

Will M void your warranty if you splice your cable? No idea, but it sounds like something he would do. I do not care. I was willing to bet the $600 cost of the router and dish that I could splice my cable without ruining anything.

Today my wife was laughing like crazy because M was trying to charge people to use Twitter. I don’t look at the news, but I will make an exception to comment on this story.

As you probably know, but I barely do, Twitter has a caste system. There are verified users who have blue check marks next to their handles, and there are the lowly, unwashed users who have no check marks. My understanding is that people are so stupid and immature, they actually look down on folks who have no check marks. Junior high never really ends.

M said he wanted to charge Twitter brahmins $20 per month for check marks, which is reasonable, since a lot of them get paid, and they also feel like they’re cooler than everyone else. Kim Kardashian is said to receive seven figures for every slutty, vacuous tweet.

My wife says there has been a hilarious tweet battle between a bemused M and his sincerely enraged brahmins. They are saying M should be paying them to tweet. Hello? Who said this about Huffto about a billion years ago? Me. Ariana Huffington, in an action harking back to Tom Sawyer’s ploy to get his friends to paint the fence, got people to write content for nothing, and they thought it was a privilege.

Anyway, it sounds like billionaires and the nearly so, like Stephen King, are losing their minds over eight smackers a month.

I think M is making a mistake. Social giants can push conservatives, Christians, and other decent people around, because we don’t run the Internet or Silicon Valley. When Facebook or Twitter pushes us around, we can bluster and leave and form pathetic, doomed alternatives like MeWe. Truth, and Parler, but they never go anywhere. Liberals, on the other hand, created Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Instagram, Youtube, and the good Lord only knows what else, and they can create new giants. And Twitter isn’t going to be around forever. Social giants fail.

The conservative giants, or, more accurately, anemic midgets with peanut allergies, will all fail completely or remain unimportant. This is my bold prediction, which isn’t all that bold, because it’s already happening.

A new leftist giant might make it.

Some think Trump is the troll king, but M is on a far higher level.

Anyway, I can totally see M voiding my warranty over a splice. Go see what he has done to Tesla owners.

If you take my advice, you can splice your cable and avoid buying new proprietary cables and cutting large holes. And maybe your router will explode. I’m not an engineer. Anyway, I hope my advice helps.

Honey Doing

Starlink Junior, my slow version of Starlink, has worked out so well, I have dumped my old Internet provider.

I suppose I would have had the courage to make the break sooner had Starlink felt like including real instructions and some kind of user support. I didn’t know how to install the dish. I didn’t know how to rout the cable. I didn’t know how to tell if the dish was pointed the right way or located where it should be. Starlink gives you cartoon instructions and a terse app, but you have to figure a lot out by yourself.

Starlink is one of those companies that causes its customers to work harder by trying to shut them out of the technical side of things. It’s a bad approach. Real black boxes that do everything perfectly the second you pop them out of the UPS package are rare. My feeling is that Elon Musk thinks he has done all the thinking for us already, and frankly, he’s not that good. There are a lot of things he and his team have not thought of.

I had a Dish Network dish on my roof, so I put the Starlink dish on it, and I added an 8-foot pole from Ace Hardware. Starlink insisted I needed extremely clear horizons, so I thought I was going to have to get the dish as high as possible. My roof is irregular, and I’m surrounded by trees.

Today I took the pole out of the system and left the Starlink dish in the Dish dish mount, and it seems to work about the same. I don’t know what to make of it, but stabilizing the long pole will take some metalworking and carpentry, and I don’t want to continue working on these things if they’re a waste of time.

I decided to order a new J-mount (this is what you call a thing that holds a dish or antenna) and put it on my topmost roof section. Because of the geometry of my roof, this is actually a very easy place to install a J-mount. I don’t want to use the old J-mount because I would have to move it, and removing it could tear up the roof.

The new mount will go on the roof next to the edge. The cable will go over the edge and through a hole in the wall below the soffit, into the attic, unless I decide to put it through the roof. Going through the roof could be a problem, because I would have to seal the new hole, and it would see a lot of rain. A hole in the wall under the eave would never get wet, so caulk and a coax grommet should fix it easily.

I was not very familiar with the part of my attic where the cable will go, so I took a look. I had put it off because I was afraid of what I would see. Roof rot? A horrible space to work in? Dead roaches and rats? It turned out to be in great shape, well organized, with hardwired lighting and a convenient switch.

When my new mount comes, I’ll have to go up in there, work my way 30 feet to the south, grab the cable, and feed it to the location where the router will go.

My house has ethernet cables, but I have never used them. I have been able to get along without them, and also, I had my wireless router in a place where there was no port. Now that situation is changing. I want to connect my TV’s and computers to the wiring, and I want to revive the long-destroyed Cat5 wire to the workshop. I have a computer there, but I have to use my phone as a hotspot in order to get a connection.

I have to find out where the ethernet cables originally joined. There had to be a router somewhere. Then I can use an adaptor (I will resist “adapter” until people start writing, ‘rapter,’ ‘capter,’ ‘recepter,’ and ‘intercepter.”) to hook my dish up to the house wiring. This will give me the best possible speeds.

I don’t have to have perfection. If I could get 20 Mbps down and 10 real Mbps up every minute of the day, I’d be the happiest person on Earth.

Right now, speed tests say I get 6-120 Mbps down, but when I actually download things, the best I see is about 1.6. I suspect Musk is secretly throttling me because I’m not one of the cool kids in a real Starlink coverage area. If the router can get 100 Mbps, I ought to be able to do a lot better than 1.6 when I download a file. I don’t think the connection is the problem.

Starlink told me it wouldn’t have satellites set up for my area until next year, but apparently, that’s deceptive. They made it sound like they couldn’t give me high speeds without new satellites, but it looks like they can give me lots of speed, and they just don’t want to. Maybe speeding me up will slow the cool kids down.

Starlink isn’t the only thing I’m working on here. I’m getting a ton of stuff done. Jobs that used to intimidate me are falling like dominoes. I started out by fixing my shop, but now order is spreading to the house, as I almost didn’t dare hope it would.

I got my keychain rack made, and it’s a much bigger help than you would think. I cleaned out the freezer where ginger ale exploded. I put my bedroom in order. I started moving things from the dining room workshop to the real workshop. I blasted the house, including all the attics I can get to, with pesticide. For a long time, I couldn’t get the filters out of the range hood, and they were getting nasty, but yesterday, they came right out, and they went in the dishwasher. The laundry room and its closet are nearly in order. I got the burglar alarm upgraded to 4G. I’m getting flu and shingles vaccines tomorrow. Today I mixed salt and garlic into 5 pounds of ground chuck and turned it into patties, so now I have lunch waiting for me for the next 12 days.

I’ve taken a lot of annoying things to the dump. I started converting my storage room fluorescents to LED’s. I got a wireless printer.

I can’t remember all the other things I’ve done, but I can sure tell when I walk around the house.

Disorder bothers me now. I take pleasure in straightening things sitting on tables and counters, even though it doesn’t matter.

A few days ago, I was praying, and I heard, “Order my life,” over and over. I asked for it, of course. I’ve been praying prayers similar to that for years. It looks like the words came from God, because I can’t stop ordering this place.

My mother went through something similar when she was several years younger than I am. She started telling me how great it was to have everything in its place. She organized things for the first time in her life. Then she learned she had cancer, and she died.

The ordering I’m doing makes me wonder if God is preparing what I have for my wife’s arrival or for my departure. In April, I’ll be as old as my mother was when she died.

It’s wonderful to find out that things you think you heard from God really came from Him. It means you can trust what you hear in the future. It also helps you to be unified with Him.

In June, my wife had two visions, and one came true when Queen Elizabeth died. In the other vision, she saw Russia bombing Japan. I wonder if it will happen. A quick Google says Japan just expelled Russia’s ambassador, and relations are at a new low. Russia and Japan are still hashing out World War Two, and Russia has just abandoned peace talks. I don’t know much about Russia’s relationship with Japan, but things sound bad.

I love having order in my life. It’s not completely pleasant, finding yourself compelled to do things you used to put off luxuriously, but overall, it’s exciting. I hope it continues. I always say good habits are like slaves. They get things done for you, and they don’t cost anything.

Speaking of habits, I also heard, “Your habits are important.” I think about that when I’m about to put something off or do it badly. I feel that if I give in and let things slide, I’m spitting on something God gave me; a treasure. How many people get express advice from God? That’s not something to take for granted. Elon Musk and Bill Gates don’t get it. The president of the United States doesn’t get it. Famous musicians and Hollywood stars don’t get it. Nobel prize winners don’t get it. I get something only a tiny percentage of people get, and it’s something you can’t buy. If you could, the price would be astronomical. I have to take it seriously.

I believe whether I can hold onto my gifts and receive more depends a lot on how much my actions show how much I value them.

Tomorrow another big load goes to the dump, and I’m sure I’ll find several other fossilized obligations to move out of my own way.

Because I keep getting bogged down in things Rhodah could do if she were here, what I’m going through reminds me how good God’s plan for marriages is. The man handles certain things, and the woman handles others. I can take care of the shop and grounds, but I keep getting pulled backward by problems in the house. If Rhodah were here, she would deal with those things, and I would get my own work done much better, in much less time. She can’t wait to get here to run the house.

Feminism is filthy. It destroys our potential as couples and families. The benefits we get from women pursuing careers is trivial compared to what we lose by having God’s order in our homes destroyed. Thank God my wife has no interest in feminism. I look forward to the day when I don’t have to concern myself with housewife responsibilities.

You’re not Imagining it; They Hate You

Jesus told us the world would hate us, and the closer you are to him, the more obvious the hate is.

I quit social media, and I live like a hermit, so I don’t have a lot of involvement with strangers, but I still find that unsaved people get mad at me for no reason. They come up with pretexts to justify hostility they can’t really explain. They gaslight, saying I’ve done this or that wrong, but the truth is that there is one standard for me and another for other people. I will always be judged unfairly.

Spirits that hate God work strongly in people who aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, and they turn them against us no matter what we do. The good we do is forgotten or characterized as evil, the wrongs we do are grossly exaggerated and overpunished, and we are accused of many things we haven’t done.

Christians who don’t know this will blame themselves, taking the side of their slanderers. That’s a big mistake. Never let them gaslight you. Look at the things you have actually said and done, compare the treatment you get with the treatment others have gotten, pray for guidance, and appraise things correctly.

Today some character came up with a totally new jab for me. I went to a forum and asked for input from people who owned a certain product. Things were going fine, and then a forum moderator said he wondered why I hadn’t posted a link to the product. I said it was because I was asking for comments from people who actually had it and didn’t need to be told what it was. He came back with accusations, saying it would be helpful for other people, and he said he had noticed this “same attitude” from me in the past.

“Attitude”? The attitude that people who own something don’t need to be told what it is? What?

How can that be an attitude?

Another member quoted his post and described it as “caustic.”

I looked over old things I had posted, wondering if there was even an atom of history he could be relying on, and of course, there was not. And who gets angry at people for not posting links to things? When did that “become a thing,” as millennials love to say? He could have posted a link himself in less time than it took to try to provoke me.

I responded with something like, “So it wasn’t a question,” and I posted the link.

I don’t know if that seems snippy or what, but it’s hard to think of something I could have said to make him happy without being dishonest. I tried to come up with the least offensive response that would, nonetheless, express what any reasonable person would think. Of course, now he looks stupid and passive-aggressive, but I don’t think I was in a position to prevent that. He was well on the way before I responded.

Perhaps you have had this experience, as I have: a person makes a stupid and unfair attack on you, they end up looking really dumb and childish without assistance from you, and then they get even madder at you. It happened to me a hearing when I was being cleared to join the bar. One of the examiners accused me of something or other, and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him to show me, and of course, he could not. The other two examiners must have been bursting, trying not to laugh at him.

I wasn’t trying to make him look like an idiot. I really didn’t know what he was talking about. But he set himself up.

Anyway, people who attack without thinking often end up exposed as fools.

Internet forums have private message features. The moderator who got mad at me could have sent a message letting me know about his weird new rule and asking me to post a link. This is assuming it was too much trouble to post it himself and be done with it. Or he could have posted to the forum, saying, “Can you post a link to that?”

I would have posted the link. That solution is obvious. He was looking for an excuse to flex his Karen muscles, but he wanted me to feel as though I were the problem.

I didn’t get into an argument. The whole thing is trivial in the extreme.

When I was younger and less aware of the permanent hostility carnal people feel toward people like me, I would have blamed myself. Now I understand what I’m looking at. It’s not a reasonable criticism from someone who has identified a blind spot I have. It’s a bite from a supernatural mosquito. A spirit, or spirits, pushed this person to say something aggressive and unfair in order to try to get me into a silly argument and unforgiveness.

I used to take the bait and obliterate people’s arguments with no sensitivity at all, and I insulted people. As time passes, I am better able to resist. Getting into Internet spats is like fighting with children. Nothing to be proud of.

Here is how the universe works: the saved are God’s favorites. We are like pampered younger children who came after older children who turned out to be losers with tremendous senses of entitlement. That’s just how it is. We receive “favor,” and a person who receives favor is a “favorite.”

The older creatures–the spirits who are disinherited and headed for the lake of fire–really hate us, even though we didn’t take what was theirs or wrong them in any way. They are full of envy.

They can’t take our favor away, so they punish the one who gave it to us and who hates them. They want to hurt God for giving them the rejection they deserve. Sniping at us is the best they can do.

It doesn’t matter what you do or say if you’re a favorite. You will be hated. The older ones will keep pushing their pawns to abuse us. They hope they can bring us down to their level. If they can make us angry and unforgiving, they can drag us to the lake of fire with them.

The older spirits are heaven’s leftists. They want to destroy a hierarchy which justly puts them at the bottom. They want to take from those who are blessed and give to the wicked. They want God’s very throne. They’re just like BLM and Antifa, which they created. “You have more than we do, so you must have wronged us. Inequality of outcome equals unfairness.”

My wife had a vision of Satan once. She saw him sitting on a beautiful golden throne. Excrement was falling on him as he sat. It had been happening so long, he was used to it. There was nothing he could do. A big piece of poo would smack him in the face, and he would flick it off as though it were lint. He wanted his golden throne, and it looks like he got it. No wonder the Bible calls him the lord of flies and the lord of feces. He must be sitting somewhere now, fantasizing about the higher throne he thinks belongs to him. Hatching leftist plots that will only make things worse for him.

I guess it makes sense. If he sits on a throne with poop raining down on him, of course he would send his kids to throw poop at us on our thrones of favor.

My grandfather was rich, and he had 8 grandchildren. I was the favorite. I didn’t plot to get that. He just liked me. Night before last, I dreamed of him. He took me into his basement and showed me strange little objects worth millions of dollars each. He said they couldn’t stay there. The danger of theft by my relatives was too great.

While I was with him, I remembered I had never told him how I felt about him until he was unconscious and dying from a heart attack. In the dream, I told him everything. He brushed it off, laughing. He was not offended, but he said his descendants were liars, as though I were trying to butter him up. I was a little hurt, but I was glad I said it. I wish I had said it to him instead of a figure in a dream.

I thank God for favor all the time. I really want to have the right attitude. I can’t bring my grandfather back, but I can try to have a pleasing attitude toward God.

I have learned to accept favor without guilt. Zero apologies. Sorry if the old ones don’t like it. Let them take it up with God. Favor is God’s plan. I didn’t invent it. I agree with God, always. I don’t question his decision to put me in the upper class and them in the lower class. When I suffer, I will agree with God, so I will certainly agree with him when he blesses me.

My sister was spoiled very badly. When I showed up in the world, she was very angry. She hated me even when I was a baby who couldn’t have done anything wrong. My mother caught her torturing me in my crib. She never changed. From my sister, I learned what Satan is like. He used to be the center of attention, or close to it. He felt special. Now the saved have replaced him, he is headed for eternal agony, and he will be forgotten, which is a horrible fate for a huge ego.

My sister made my parents suffer, and in comparison, I was pleasant, so after a while, I became the favored child. That wasn’t my fault. I shouldn’t be penalized for better behavior, and bad behavior has natural and fair consequences.

My parents and everyone else suffered when my sister was around, so when my parents were with me, it felt like rest. How could that not give rise to disparate treatment?

I hope I am somewhat more pleasing to God than Satan and the human beings who hate God, and I am thrilled to receive better treatment than they do when I can get it. If I have better health, more peace, more money, an attractive and pleasant wife, and whatever else God has decided to give me, so be it. If you’re out in the streets trying to burn police buildings, promoting perversion, calling Christians “christofascists,” and blaming white people for inventing evil, you should expect to be poor and miserable. You invested, and you’re getting your return.

James thought separation from the world was so important, he chose it as one of the two things he emphasized when he told people how to please God: “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”

We are not part of the world, so we will not be treated fairly by it. People will always get angry at us for no reason. You have to blow it off. Realize you’re dealing with insane people. You won’t get anywhere by compromising and currying favor, and bickering will just draw you into the the mess your accusers swim in every day.

Rising to the Occasion

The workshop is becoming more and more orderly and less dysfunctional every week. Can the rest of my life be far behind? The other day, I was praying, and I heard myself saying, “Order my life,” over and over. Yesterday or the day before, I heard, “Your habits are important.” Little words and phrases that come from God can make big changes in your life.

I bought myself a big ice cream maker with built-in refrigeration, and I also got a deep fryer and a Ronco rotisserie. As a result, my counters look like Fred Sanford’s yard. I started building a kitchen cart to hold these things, but I got distracted, possibly by the unexpected courtship that led to me marrying my wonderful wife. I had built most of the frame of the cart, but it sat and rusted after that.

Rust was never a problem in Miami. I was led to believe that things rusted quickly in warm, humid places, but the opposite is true.

Rust is caused by condensation more than above-average humidity. When you have sudden temperature swings, things that are cold collect water until they warm up. Then they rust. Sudden swings happen all the time in most of America, but the closer you get to the tropics, the rarer they are.

Where I live now, I have to cover bare iron up or spray it with greasy concoctions unless I want rust.

This week, I started working on the cart again, and I had to begin with about an hour of knocking rust off with an angle grinder and a paint-stripping wheel.

As of last night, I had the frame nearly done. I have to weld one more piece of tubing into it, and I also have to add two attachments to set one pair of wheels farther apart than the other two.

When I started working on this thing, I was under the impression it had to be very square. I was planning on welding 4 plate casters on the bottom, and if you have 4 wheels on a rigid object, and they’re not in exactly the same plane, the object will rock or one caster won’t touch the floor. I welded it up carefully, but it’s still off by almost 1/8″. Since starting the project, I have realized the answer isn’t perfect fabrication; it’s casters with stems.

A lot of products have casters or feet on threaded stems. The reason is that you can adjust their height to make up for small errors in the construction of the products.

Yesterday, I made three little pucks of steel, and I drilled and tapped them. I’m going to weld them into the bottom of the cart and use stem casters.

I have also learned that every 4-wheeled object should have one set of wheels that are farther apart than the others. Or closer together, if you look at it that way. A trapezoidal footprint makes it impossible for an object to rock. It can fall over, but it can’t rock back and forth, and rocking can lead to tipping. Also, increasing the length of one axle will make tipping harder even without considering rocking. It puts the center of gravity farther inboard from the wheels.

To increase the width of one set of wheels, I made these things out of 1″ by 3″ tubing:

I will weld them onto one pair of vertical tubes on the cart, and I’ll put the caster nuts I made in them, as far out as possible.

I have also replaced all the lights in my shop. LED’s are improving at a furious pace.

Where I used to have two relatively expensive 4000-lumen fixtures that were built in, I now have 4 3000-lumen jobs from Home Depot, wired to trusses. They cost me $17 each. They don’t have tubes, so they cost less. I can’t replace dead tubes when they go out, but the fixtures cost about the same amount of money as two tubes, so it doesn’t matter. I hardwired them pretty easily.

I had two somewhat dim 4-foot LED lights over three areas in the shop. I went to Harbor Freight and got three 5000-lumen replacements for $17 each. The quality appears to be about the same. China is China.

I bought my self 16 feet of white LED strip lighting, and I put it in my shelf complex.

These things come with an adaptor that plugs into one end. This is a problem if you want to have the adaptor and switch in the middle, along with a stretch that doesn’t give off light. If you run a strip through two cabinets, you don’t want light between the cabinets. I figured there had to be a way to splice them.

Turned out I was right. I put 42″ of wire between two 8-foot sections. Now the switch is where I want it to be, and I don’t have a useless strip of light running across the wall.

You can splice them with a soldering iron and shrink tubing. Look it up if you’re interested. It’s simple. They also make clips to splice LED strips, but people say they are unreliable.

I got the strip lights as a lark. They’re not a permanent solution. LED strips are pretty tacky if you can see them, and I can see mine. They’re best for indirect light, so the strips are concealed. They’ll do for now, though.

I got my smallest leaf blower running. It’s a tiny Husqvarna I’ve had since Miami. It would be worthless for cleaning up a yard, but it’s perfect for a workshop with big doors. At the end of a session, you vacuum up anything that can damage concrete (steel filings=rust stains), you fire the blower up, and you blow everything else out into the yard. My big electric blower would actually be better, but the Husqvarna is light and convenient, and it’s important to run small engines frequently because leftists have ruined the world with ethanol gas that kills carburetors and other parts.

I was thinking of putting up a second building, and I got an estimate. Now I want to make the most of my existing building first. To that end, I am considering building a loft and an elevator.

You would think putting an elevator in a workshop would cost thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t. An OSHA-approved elevator with all the bells and whistles would probably cost as much as a Cadillac, but you don’t need that kind of equipment in a home shop. You just need a platform that goes up and down without killing anyone.

Somebody came up with a way to combine a cheap winch, steel struts from Home Depot, rollers, and plywood to make an elevator that will move a person and maybe 350 pounds of stuff, depending on how fat the person is. I’ll embed a video chosen at random.

I had thought about building a loft, but a loft usually means stairs or a ladder. I am not going to carry things up a ladder, and stairs would take up maybe 30 square feet and make it hard to get around the shop. With an elevator, I can put things like a pressure washer or generator on the platform, get on with them, and ride up in comfort. An elevator would only take up maybe 12 square feet, and it would be against a wall, out of the way.

The added bonus of an elevator is that you can leave it about three feet from the floor and use it as a workbench.

If I had a loft, I could get some big things off the floor. I have a portable table saw, a pressure washer, and a sliding miter saw. I could also put shelves in the loft and use them for things that are rarely used but too good to throw out. Big jugs of machinery oil, for example.

My walls are only 12 feet high, so in order to get a reasonable height under the loft, I would have to make do with around 5 feet between the loft and the ceiling, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing, and I wouldn’t be playing basketball up there.

I would have to add a built-in ladder in case the power went out while I was up there, but that would take up almost no room.

It can be done. It has been done.

The only question is how big to make it. I’m thinking maybe 6 feet by 16. I don’t want to put a whole wall in the shade. If I change my mind, adding more loft space would be simple.

There are a lot of Youtube videos featuring shopmade elevators, and there is a lot of negativity in the comments. “Kids will hurt themselves.” “You’ll get your foot caught between the elevator and the stuff beside it.” “The cable will break, and you’ll fall.” A smart person put up the obvious response, saying shops are already full of dangerous things. A band saw can take a finger off in a hurry. Grinders can kill in an instant. A lathe can roll an arm up like a sock. Somehow these things are okay, but an elevator is too perilous? Not listening.

The fall hazard can be negated pretty easily. They make contraptions that catch things when they start to fall.

It looks like an elevator can be installed for well under a grand, and it’s not a really big job.

I may also build a shed. I can buy a little one for $600, but I would like to have one big enough to put the utility cart and garden tractor in when I’m using the shop. Just to keep the rain off. I think it would be a simple matter of installing 6 four-by-four poles with concrete slugs and running boards between them, with steel roof panels above.

When the loft and elevator are done, I can put in a split AC unit. I have until about mid-April to get that done. The weather should be acceptable until then. I’ll want a drywall ceiling with insulation, as well as an new insulated roll-up door and insulation for the conventional garage door.

That’s about all the shop news. If I go through with the loft plan, of course I’ll post photos.

Think I’ll go Fire up the 8-Track

I’m so old, I am even behind the times when it comes to hanging pictures on the wall. Technology has left me in the dust again.

The people who built this house put a coat rack in the entrance beside the door to the garage, but they were not smart enough to put up a keychain rack. I have three gates, several vehicles, two tractors, and a bunch of locking tool chests. I also have door openers and gate openers. I was not happy with the mess and the time I lost looking for things. I decided to make a rack.

I thought I would just go to Amazon and order a Chinese rack, but Amazon’s racks are not very good. Generally, they have 4 or 6 hooks. That wouldn’t even get me through my vehicles.

Back when I was in Miami, one of the few perks was free mahogany. Mahogany is native to South Florida. It was not introduced. The wood looks very good. There are tons of mahogany trees along the roads, and they fall over a lot, so it’s not unusual to find free logs in trash piles. This happened to me. I found a bunch of logs and cut short boards from them. I had no choice about the length. Tree trimmers don’t leave long logs.

I brought a few of the boards with me when I moved. I thought they would be nice for making boxes. A pretty box doesn’t need sturdy, uniform wood. It needs figured wood with lots of colors in it. That’s what I got.

I rummaged through the boards looking for something I could use to make a key rack, and I found an oddly-shaped piece that was highly figured and partially spalted. Spalting is rot, but it’s rot that doesn’t completely destroy the strength of the wood. It is often used in things like boxes.

I planed and jointed the board down to about 3/8″ in thickness, and I decided to use it as it was instead of cutting it up and using it in a fancy rack. As much as I hate Miami, I felt the board had history just as it was.

Ordinarily, I don’t like wood projects that are described as “rustic” or having “live edges.” I think these terms are excuses for laziness and lack of skill. But sometimes something looks better left alone.

I sanded it, applied Danish oil, and put 15 brass-plated hooks in it. Rack. All that was left was to hang it.

I didn’t want loops of wire sticking out above it where they could be seen, and I needed the rack to be held firmly to the wall. When you hang a picture, it doesn’t have to be held rigidly, but you don’t hang things on pictures. You have to touch a key rack, and if it moves while you’re fiddling with keys, it’s annoying, and it will swing and scratch the wall.

I decided to try Velcro. It would be hidden. It would hold the board firmly. I could put pieces up high and down low so the board would not be able to rock against the wall.

I put 4 little pieces of Velcro on the back, put the rack on the wall, and got to work redoing my keychains. While I was doing this, I heard a noise. The board had come loose. I tried pressing it against the wall harder, but a few minutes later it came loose completely and fell, knocking a chunk of spalted wood off.

Back to the shop.

I realized Velcro’s adhesive would not stick to Danish oil. It stuck to the wall just fine, to the point where I damaged the paint pulling Velcro off. On a board finished with Danish oil, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

I glued the missing chunk in, and it looked like it had never come loose. I went to the web and asked woodworkers for help.

Their answers were really bad. I think most of them were older than I am, and they had no idea how picture-hanging technology had changed.

One said to rout pockets in the back of the board and put little nail receptacles in them. This would hold the board up, but it would move around every time I touched the board.

Someone else suggested using a special router bit to cut keyhole-shaped recesses. These are hard to describe, but basically, one end of the recess is wide enough to let a nail’s head in, and the other end is skinny. You put the nail’s head in the big hole, and when your picture slides down due to gravity, the head is captured in the skinny end of the hole. Google it if you want to understand.

This would have been hard to do on a 3/8″ board, and I would have had to locate the nails in the wall very precisely, which is not easy. Then I would have had a relatively flimsy attachment which would have let the board move.

I started Googling, and I found out there are a bunch of new hanging systems. The 3M company has one called the Claw. It’s a flat piece of metal with two sharp points behind it. You push the sharp bits into the wall and hang your picture on the flat part. There are also tiny metal French cleats now. Look it up. It’s hard to explain. There is also a special Velcro system.

I decided to do it my own way. The problem was that the Velcro came off the board. I could fix that. I took the board and used acetone to remove the finish from parts of the back. Then I applied Velcro in 4 places. Then I stapled the Velcro to the board. Good luck peeling off now, Velcro.

The impact of my staple gun knocked another big piece of spalted wood off the board, bringing me close to cardiac arrest, but I found it and glued it back in.

The key rack is now back on the wall, loaded with keychains. I think it will be there when the sun dies. It’s easy to peel Velcro off if you pull perpendicularly to the surface it’s on, but peeling it by moving it sideways is basically impossible. The force on the Velcro is all parallel to the wall.

If you have stuff to hang on your walls, don’t do whatever you did 40 years ago. You are older and less hip than you think. Things you think happened three years ago happened during the last century. Certain shoes you think of as new are older than law school graduates. Go look up the new hanging technology. I didn’t use it, exactly, but I did something similar to it, and the old methods would have been unsatisfactory.

I hope the rack doesn’t fall off during the night, forcing me to come back and admit failure.

Of course, if I never told you, you would never find out.

It’s looking good right now.

God has helped me bring order to my shop, and I have been hoping it would spread to the house. Maybe it will.

How to Make an $800 Product Cost $1000 and Fail Sooner

Today I’m here to roast Bosch.

The Bosch company makes a lot of nice stuff, and I should know, because I own a lot of it. Big router. Hammer drill. Demo hammer. Bits. Two angle grinders. Sometimes, though, they really blow it.

My first angle grinder was a small Bosch, around 4 amps. It ran fine, and they gave it a nice long cord the way tool manufacturers should. The problem is that the cord disintegrated.

I don’t know what kind of faux rubber they put on the cord, but it started cracking at the boot next to the tool, and latitudinal cracks eventually appeared from one end to the other.

I bought a new Bosch cord, which was surely a mistake. It’s probably as bad as the old one. I didn’t install it for a long time because the old one was hanging in there. And because Bosch, in its wisdom, used a combination of Phillips screws and Torxes.

Torxes fall into the category of tamper-proof fasteners. Tamper-proof fasteners are used on things like Coke machines to keep people from getting into them. Here’s the thing, Bosch: REPAIRING MY OWN TOOLS ISN’T TAMPERING.

At least it wasn’t a second-tier tamper-resistant Torx.

A Torx is bad enough, because you have to buy bits or drivers to turn it. A second-tier tamper-resistant Torx is worse because the fastener has a little nipple in the bottom of the hole, and it pushes your driver out every time you push it in. The other day, I took apart a DeWalt product that had these things in it.

People like to make excuses for companies that use Torxes. They say they’re for ease of assembly. No, they’re really not. At least not the tamper-resistant kind. They don’t stick to a driver any better than a regular Torx. Companies use them to discourage people like you and me from fixing our products. They want us to throw them out or pay for repairs.

I now have just about every known type of tamper-resistant fastener bit. I have so many, the cops should have me on a list. I can open an iPhone, a tablet, a Dewalt battery charger…don’t try me. Companies that use these things didn’t stop me. They just made me waste money. And they made me more dangerous.

I can’t even guess what it would have cost me to send the angle grinder to a repair center. Probably more than I paid for it.

I finally stuck the new cord in there, and if it falls apart, too, I’ll go to Home Depot, buy a quality extension cord that will last 100 years, and stuff it into the angle grinder.

Second Bosch fail: my dishwasher. Overall, it’s okay, except that Bosch has decided I’m not supposed to have dishes or pots over a certain size. Ziss is not necessary, ja? My old Whirlpool or whatever it was would let you wash an ottoman if you felt like it. To use the Bosch, I had to buy a set of new plates. You can probably guess what brand my next dishwasher won’t be.

Anyway, plates: $40 at Bed Bath & Beyond. Dishwasher: $800. No contest.

Good dishwashers have latches. They have hinged handles. To open a good dishwasher, you pull the handle up, the latch opens, and you’re in. My Bosch has a motionless handle built into the top panel that runs across the door. You pull the handle, putting lots of strain on the panel, until something in the dishwasher gives.

A couple of years back, the handle started to rip from the tremendous force I had to apply to it. The plastic was about two millimeters thick, so no wonder it gave.

I could not buy a handle by itself. It was molded into the control panel. I looked the part up, and the best I could do was well over a hundred dollars. This part probably costs 5 dollars to make.

No, probably less. You can buy much heavier plastic products for $7, retail. This panel probably cost less than two bucks to make.

I got myself a type of JB Weld made for structural repairs to plastic. This stuff sticks to plastic very well, and it’s hard and tough. I took the panel off the dishwasher, pried off everything that was in my way, pressed the torn part back together, and pumped in a bunch of JB Weld to make it impossible for the rip to get bigger. I’ll post a photo.

This worked great until this summer. Then the panel ripped in three other places. Parts came completely loose and fell off.

This is the problem with strengthening bad products. When you reinforce an area that has failed, often, you’re just sending the problem to another area that hasn’t been reinforced. The reinforced area will hold up just great, so the flimsy bits will yield. Put a stiff boot on to protect your ankle, and when you stumble, you’ll rip your knee apart because your ankle can’t move. That’s the principle.

I managed to find a new panel for $80. Today I took the old one out, found the places where it ripped, and applied globs of JB Weld to the new one in the same areas. I have the toughest Bosch dishwasher control panel on Earth. It’s probably the only one which is really adequate.

I knew the new panel would be garbage, and it would fail just like the old one. I fixed it so it would fail much, much later.

I have a Hercules angle grinder from Harbor Freight. This is not a snooty Germany company like Bosch. Harbor Freight is a budget tool seller, and Hercules is its top line of budget tools. The grinder is magnificent. If you open it up, you will find very thick glass-reinforced plastic. I think I paid $59. Why can’t Bosch put 3/16″-thick plastic in an expensive dishwasher? Why is there no glass in the dishwasher panel?

I think I paid $78 for the Bosch grinder with the bad cord. It had a motor, heavy steel gears, a tough case, a complicated switch, a guard…how can a crummy, embarrassingly bad dishwasher panel cost the same amount?

The Hercules grinder’s case will last forever. It is nearly indestructible. Same thing goes for a lot of my power tools. Probably even Bosch tools. The Bosch angle grinder looked very tough inside.

The Hercules grinder has a really nice cord, Bosch. I will probably never be able to buy a replacement cord, because it’s Harbor Freight, but then I won’t need one.

Bosch can make a drill with a tough case, but somehow they can’t make a dishwasher with a glass-reinforced handle thicker than two millimeters. No, they made a choice, and the choice looks like an obvious effort to limit the lifespan of an otherwise-durable product.

Meanwhile, they’re probably playing the green game in their ads and on their website. Yes, I’m looking at it now. “Carbon neutral” since 2020. As if it were really possible to be carbon neutral. The whole idea is a farce. Fly your private jet to St. Bart’s for the weekend, but plant two banana trees in Madagascar. No, sorry. The correct thing, if you actually care about carbon, is to plant the trees and skip St. Bart’s.

Making dishwashers that last 5 years instead of 15 years is not green, Bosch. Throwing out a perfectly good dishwasher with a bad handle is not green.

I guess all the big manufacturers are hypocrites. I just bought a new washer for a tenant because the company that made the old one decided to quit making timers. The company is Hotpoint, which is General Electric, which is Haier, which is Chinese. The Chinese own General Electric now. Nice. I’ll know the end is here when they buy Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson.

Haier has a bunch of stuff on its site about how it loves the environment. I’m totally convinced. The environment loves it when you stop making a $20 timer so you can sell a new $600 washer.

I guess I’m blowing the lid off major stories here. “Blogger Learns Company Makes Bad Products Intentionally.” “Florida Man Shocked to Find Hypocrisy Among Green Corporations.” I’ll probably be contacted by major news organizations. No one saw these scoops coming.

Don’t be afraid to improve products you own. You may be a better engineer than you think. There are lots of really bad engineers out there, and there are lots of products that are bad because of accounting decisions. Sometimes a tube of glue or a couple of new wires can make a product way better than it was when it left the factory.

I’m not afraid to wash dishes now. Fear is gone. Now I’m back to plain old laziness. Hooray.

I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

So Let it be Written, so Let it be Done

I do not want to sign up for your cool updates and offers, especially when you sign me up without permission. When I am forced to opt out, I do not want to be asked why I left. Please don’t tell me you’re sorry to see me go. No human being was ever aware I was there in the first place.

I do not want to be part of your cool new community, or worse, “family,” and neither does anyone else. I do not want to interact with you or other users. I do not want other users to know I exist.

If people wanted to associate with you, they would have talked to you when you were in high school, which they did not, because you are nerds.

I do not want a password on the hardware you sold me. I do not care if someone hacks into my Gopro or wireless printer. If your stupid software insists on a password, do not tell me what kind of password it has to be. Allow me to use “1,” which is my all-time favorite. Please do not put a long, complicated initial password with a lot of numbers and capital letters on the product you sold me and then put the password on a tiny label on the bottom of the product in microprint.

Please do not print your serial numbers in fonts only an ant can read.

Please put your software on disks (in the box) AND online, don’t even think about charging me for downloading it, do not put a bunch of junk in it no one wants, and do not make me fill out any forms in order to get it.

Include all the necessary cables. Seriously, what’s wrong with you?

Do not force me to upgrade my firmware or software before using the product. I don’t care if it understands the latest emojis or gets along well with Tiktok. Last year’s stuff is fine.

If your product is a printer, do not write your software so it tries to sell me your toner cartridges and lies and says they’re better than the other ones. I do not want the $100 cartridges. I want the $17 cartridges from China which work just as well, and I am willing to hack your printer in able to use them, because using someone else’s toner isn’t stealing.

Do not include “lite” software which does not work but hits me with ads for the real software I have to pay extra for.

Do not cover your package with ridiculous bragging about how green it is. I do not care. It’s going to the same dumpster, where I will mingle the plastic, styrofoam, cardboard and staples without remorse. For all I care, you can spray your boxes with dioxin and use plutonium staples along with cellophane that has been rubbed all over Ebola patients. Just get your product to me without damage.

Just knock it off, okay? Just sell me what I want, make it quick to start using it, and buzz off.