Look Where I Spend my Afternoons

When my wife and I pray, we always ask that God turn our homes into places of abundance, peace, and order. He is certainly doing that here at our house in Florida.

My workshop is a wonder to behold. Four months ago, you couldn’t walk across it without turning sideways, making a lot of turns, and stepping over things. I didn’t know where many things were. There were oak leaves all over the floor, along with metal filings.

I kept my tractors and my utility cart outdoors because I didn’t think I had room for them. I got an estimate for a second shop because of this.

Now you can walk through the shop. The filings are gone. The leaves and other debris are gone except for certain areas that are not easy to access. My belt grinders are on a gorgeous 46″ tool chest with a beautiful attachment that holds tooling arms and a VFD enclosure. My mini lathe is on another tool chest, and all of my mini lathe paraphernalia are in it.

The tractors and cart are in the shop, and there is still room to work.

On top of all these things, I replaced the carb in my big chainsaw and got a new part to fix the oil pump. The small saw is running correctly, I cleaned out the carb on the utility cart, I installed a new choke cable on the cart, and I pressure-washed the cart so I could work on it without getting filthy.

I have all the steel I need ($198) to turn my old chain-on brush forks into a quick attachment. My tractor is almost completely reassembled, and I fixed the pedal so it reverses at full speed instead of crawling.

I took some of the drawers out of my old Craftsman tool chest and fixed them so they stay closed again. That box is very high quality, and it’s stainless, so I’m glad it works again. I have been cleaning the drawers out and organizing them.

My workbench was buried in random junk. It’s all gone now. There are a few things I leave on it, but I can use it again. I took mineral spirits and turpentine and cleaned it so using it doesn’t make me filthy any more.

The old foam cart I that used to hold my belt grinders is now cleaned up and sitting next to the mill where I can keep my rotary table on it and use it to hold things while I machine.

I put a long drain hose on the big compressor, and I put a weight on the end of it. Now I don’t have to crawl to open the valve, and the hose can’t whip around and hit things.

My arbor press, hydraulic press, planishing hammer, dry saw, and metal band saw are all in one corner now, and that corner has its own air drop with three quick connectors so the hammer and hydraulic press can both be connected at once.

It’s beautiful. And the weather has changed, so now I can use the shop. It still hits 90 in the daytime, but it takes a lot longer to get there, it’s dryer than it was a week or so ago, and it cools off in the afternoon.

I find myself sitting in the shop at times when I would have been in the house in the past. My dream is to live in my shop and sleep in my house, and it seems to be coming true.

Here are photos from a week or two back. The shop looks even better now.

With all this new space, I’m tempted to get a bigger welding table. I’m crazy about my three-foot-long Northern Tool table, which was a tremendous bargain, but I’m about to start work on a 5-foot-long project which will probably weigh 250 pounds when the main weldment is done. I don’t think I can rationalize a table that long, but three feet by four feet would actually make sense.

I may put a new engine in the utility cart. The original engine is a 350cc Subaru Robin, and while it’s a very good engine, Subaru has abandoned it. New parts are hard to come by. A dubious Chinese rebuild kit costs about $400, and a rebuilt engine is over $600, not including the cost of sending my old engine to the rebuilders in trade. My engine smokes, and I’m not looking forward to the day when it poops out for good and I can’t find parts.

I found new surplus Subaru engines in a different configuration for $355, shipping included. Yes, they will be orphans too, but presumably, because they are newer, Subaru will provide parts for them a little longer. I can get an engine and a rebuild kit right now and save the kit until I need it. If Subaru runs off on the new engine, I will still be able to keep it going.

Honda makes nice engines, too, but I believe they need a lot of parts to make them work in carts.

I can get Harbor Freight Predator engines, but I think they would require a lot of fabrication or the purchase of an expensive installation kit. After all was said and done, I’d have a questionable Chinese engine instead of something made by a top Japanese manufacturer.

Some people put big Predators in carts and make them do wheelies. I think I can live without that kind of performance.

My goal is just to avoid buying a new cart. They are incredibly expensive for what you get, which is nearly nothing. A crummy little engine, a simple steel box, and a couple of axles. My cart is extremely useful, so I need to have it running, and I don’t want to drop over $10,000 on a new one.

It’s amazing how much carts cost when you compare them to tractors. A tractor will last 40 years and do all sorts of amazing things, it will have a wonderful diesel and hydraulics, it will have a PTO, and it will be extremely sturdy, and tractors aren’t that expensive. A cart, which is a flimsy piece of junk by comparison, will struggle to haul 700 pounds. And it will cost nearly half as much as the tractor.

Rhodah and I pray for things that are obviously important. We intercede for people who have problems. We always ask God to help them get right with him, because handouts without personal improvement are a waste of time. We ask God to help us to be improved. I think we know what’s important, and a big shop full of tools is not high on the list, but it’s still very pleasing to have him come through with regard to things that aren’t necessities.

Kubota Resurrected

The Mach V is running again. I got the tractor put back together. Nearly.

What a rotten experience this has been. I installed a quick attach adaptor without help, and then I did a lot of welding and cutting on the bucket so it would fit. I felt invincible. Then my steering blew out. Then I found out removing the cylinder for repacking was major surgery. Then I got the silly thing out and got it fixed, and when I put it back in, I cracked the engine’s front cover, resulting in over $2000 in repair costs plus months of life with no tractor.

Now I’m back where I hoped to be a couple of months ago. I thought I would begin working on a new set of quick attach brush forks back then, but I found myself plunged into the horror of cascading parts failures and extremely slow repairs.

Things are going incredibly well now that I have an organized and roomy shop. The weather is terrible; hot and humid with intermittent torrential rain. Because I can get the tractor into the shop, I was able to fix it anyway, in relative comfort.

You wouldn’t believe how fast work goes when you have 6 tool chests and you know what’s in every drawer. I think I got a lot less exercise than I usually do in the shop, because instead of walking around for hours looking for things, I went straight to the chests and got what I wanted.

This morning, I had a tractor with no sheet metal forward of the dash, no battery, no radiator, a gallon of dirty oil, and a two-gallon hydraulic fluid shortage. By around 5:30 p.m., everything was fixed but the sheet metal. No point in buttoning a project up until you see if it works.

When I fired the tractor up, it ran fine. After giving it time to circulate the hydraulic fluid, I used the steering and the loader, and everything worked. My bucket was lying in the driveway where it had been for a couple of days, and I was able to reattach it.

Tomorrow I should be able to get the sheet metal on, and then I’ll order a few screws to replace the ones a battery spill ruined before my time.

I plan to make the battery area better than Kubota did. I’m putting the battery in a plastic tray to catch leaks. I wire-wheeled the bar that goes across the top of the battery to hold it down, and after minimizing the rust, I painted it with a special rust-blocking paint. I put anti-seize on all the screws near the battery so they would’t corrode again.

The original battery tray is a pitted mess, so I replaced it, and I am not spending $60 on a third one. I am determined to keep the acid where it belongs.

I was going to replace the hydraulic fluid, but it seemed like a stupid idea, because I wasn’t sure the tractor was okay. I thought I should run it first. While I was thinking about this, I realized I needed two filters, not the one filter I originally thought I needed, so I didn’t even have the option of replacing the fluid.

I decided to take my two-gallon jug of Tractor Supply fluid, which many people say is bad for Kubotas, and top off the system to get everything running. I think it was a good move. I can’t say whether Tractor Supply fluid is really harmful, but it won’t hurt anything if I use a little to keep the tractor working while I check it out and wait for a second filter.

A fluid change for this machine is pretty cheap. Only around $500, depending on which fluid and filters you use. Chicken feed.

Glad I won’t have to do it again for 200 hours.

I can see why a lot of people never change their hydraulic fluid. If you use a machine for work, you could put in a thousand or more hours per year, so $2500 per year for a compact Kubota and much more for something like a backhoe.

I’m not thrilled with the dealership that fixed the tractor. It came back with an empty tank, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t empty when I sent it. They took a very long time to fix it, and they charged me for things that were not mentioned in the estimate. Could be worse, though. A local diesel place charged him almost $100 for a small hose Mercedes sells for $20, and then they charged him over $14 for hazardous waste disposal. Man, that hose must have been dangerous.

I had a fantastic day working on the tractor, but the joy is blunted by the knowledge that I can’t use it for anything until I make brush forks. The old ones are awful, and they don’t fit the quick attach adaptor. I have to get a new plate that fits the adaptor, and then I have to cut it up and weld the old forks to it. Another couple of hundred dollars. On the plus side, I’ll be doing it myself instead of relying on people who keep telling me it will be done by the end of the week. Every week.

One thing I hated about my old forks was that they moved around all the time. They could not be made to stay rigid, so impacts from things I hit turned them this way and that, and I had to get off the tractor over and over to line them back up. Now that I want to make a new attachment with forks, I’m concerned that rigid forks will send all that torque back to the bucket and cause problems with the hydraulic cylinders.

I guess that won’t happen. The bucket itself has hit a lot of things, and the cylinders are fine. I suppose I could rig up shear pins, but it’s probably unnecessary.

I looked into buying steel for new shop shelves. The quote was $350. That’s around $150 more than I hoped, but even though steel prices are dropping, steel is a lot higher than it used to be. Perhaps that will change now that the recession is picking up momentum. Once China’s real estate collapse finally breaks through the measures the CCP has taken to hide it, steel should be very cheap indeed. As should copper.

Seems like God is making things easier and easier for me. Things I couldn’t do before get done. Hope it continues and increases.

When China Fails, Cambodia Comes Through

Once again, Harbor Freight’s army of Chinese factory workers has come to my rescue. Or has it?

Some years back, I decided to turn a mini lathe into a CNC lathe. I bought a set of plans and went to work, and I got it to work, sort of.

I highly recommend not doing what I did. The plans I bought said to use a long piece of a peculiar type of threaded rod instead of a ball screw, and I ended up with a great deal of backlash. They say you can program it out, but I moved on to other things before I did that. I have considered putting a ball screw in it, but I haven’t done it.

It is possible to make one of these project lathes work, but it may not be worth the effort once you get done. Depends on what you want to do. Lathes are inferior to mills, regardless of what most hobby machinists believe, and this is the reason why CNC mills are much, much more popular than lathes. If you absolutely have to make your own CNC machine, it should be a mill.

Anyway, I brought the lathe up here from Miami either 5 years ago or 3 years ago, and I plopped it on the same Black & Decker Workmate it occupied in Miami. And as it did in Miami, it collected dust and sat in the way.

I considered building a wheeled cart for the lathe, but I never did it. I also considered selling it, but it seems like I always have a hard time drawing people who will pay reasonable prices for things. And I kept thinking the lathe might be worth keeping if I put a good screw in it and learned how to program it better.

Okay, I hate selling tools. There. Now I’m being honest. Happy?

I’m glad I didn’t build a cart, because I just put a new acquisition under it. I bought me a FOURTH Harbor Freight tool chest.

My first two chests are the small US General kind, and they’re Taiwanese. They are holding up my welders now while sitting on custom welded bases I made. The third chest is a bigger US General. It’s Chinese, even though it looks like it was made in the same factory as the other ones. Only the wheels are different. The one I bought today turned out to be from Cambodia, of all places.

I didn’t know the Cambodians made anything. Harbor Freight is certainly playing the field these days. I wonder if the Chinese know they sell Taiwanese products.

The line my new chest belongs to is called Yukon, and it’s supposed to be one tier lower than US General, which produces very, very good chests at excellent prices. I looked the new one over, and my verdict is that there is very little difference in quality, if any. I would say the sheet metal is slightly wavier in places, and the chest is only 18″ deep, whereas the US Generals are 22″ deep.

I wanted a chest that took up less room and consumed less cash than US General, so Yukon’s chest fit the bill perfectly.

The nice thing about Yukon chests is that they have solid hardwood tops, which US General doesn’t provide. It’s easy to screw stuff to hardwood, it’s more ridgid, and it’s easier to replace than steel.

The neat thing about this story is that I used another Harbor Freight tool to get the chest out of my car. Ordinarily, I would have drafted my friend Mike, but he’s out of town.

The employees at my local store assumed doubtful expressions when I told them I had an SUV with no trailer outside, but I had measured the car, so I thought I had a good chance. By way of encouragement, I told them they could just refund the money and take it back if it wouldn’t fit. That didn’t seem to excite them much.

Anyway, the Harbor Freight guy and I shoved the chest into my car, and when I got home, I removed it by pushing it onto my Harbor Freight Central Machinery hydraulic cart. This thing will lift 500 pounds from about 9″ from the ground to maybe 30″.

Everyone needs one of these. Or the bigger one, which lifts 1000 pounds. They are unbelievably handy. And they can be modified. You can put a big table top on one and use it for a workbench. You can attach ramps to one and push or drive mowers and so on onto it. I have repaired and installed wall ovens singlehandedly with one.

I got one end of the chest on the cart, and then I put a $17 Gorilla collapsible aluminum bench behind my bumper. I got the box out so one end was on the cart and the other was on the bench. Then I managed to lower one end onto the floor by myself. The box weighed about 170 pounds according to Harbor Freight’s site, so handling one end was not impossible.

Putting the casters on a heavy tool chest by yourself is an interesting experience, but I came up with tactics that worked, and I didn’t put a scratch or dent on anything.

Getting the lathe off the Workmate was a joy. I didn’t enjoy lifting it, because with the stepper motors, it probably weighs over 100 pounds, but I was glad to put it onto a wheeled platform so I could move it around instead of killing workshop space permanently with it. Also, a lot of junk and crud had accumulated in its part of the shop, and I got to clean it all out. The filth was amazing.

Now I have good access to the lathe, and I can put all my mini-lathe tooling and parts in handy, spacious drawers instead of using the ridiculous toolbox I bought years ago. Toolboxes tend to cling tenaciously to shelves and the floor and discourage the use of whatever is in them. Chests are warm and giving. They practically throw their contents into your arms. In other words, they’re convenient, and convenience is at least a third of getting any job done.

I now think I need to get a ball screw, and I should also think about putting Mach 3, the CNC program I used, on my ancient 2005 laptop. I have never been able to make myself throw this laptop out, and now I have a valid use for it which it is well able to perform.

The big controller box I made for the lathe fits in the chest’s bottom drawer, which is fantastic. It won’t be able to collect any more crud there.

I am now up to…let’s see…SIX tool chests. And I regret nothing. Storage is extremely important if you actually want to get anything done in a shop. Without it, things get damaged and lost, and the things that aren’t lost are impossible to find. Instead of working, you spend half your time walking in circles looking for what you need.

As the photo shows, the chest I bought is blue. I am making a real effort to add color to the shop.

I am now planning to put in a split unit for cooling, and I will have to add a ceiling and insulate the doors. Once these things are done, there will be nearly no reason for me to ever go in the house.

I credit God with my success. When you can’t get things done, there is usually a supernatural reason. Rhodah and I have started seeing things returned and restored.

Now I have to finish putting my tractor back together. That’s easy now that I managed to put it in my shop. It seems like we have torrential rain here every day now. Well…we DO, actually. But now that the tractor is indoors, it’s no big deal.

In other news, I got trolled after my last post. I wrote about the vision my wife had, in which God said the royals would have a funeral soon. The vision occurred on June 22, and I wrote about it a couple of days later. Some guy showed up and made fun of us, and he also ridiculed the gift of tongues and the vision, so he blasphemed the Holy Spirit Himself.

I decided to publish the comment because sometimes when someone does something they will later be embarrassed about, it’s best to see to it they get the exposure they wanted at the time. What he said will not age well.

It’s strange that he ridiculed a documented vision that clearly came true, but I guess he wasn’t concerned with being analytical. I can understand ridiculing people whose predictions fail, especially when they insist they didn’t fail. I’m thinking of the people who still predict a 2020 Trump win. I don’t understand ridiculing someone whose prediction came true, especially when that person’s husband revealed the prediction without making any claims about the source and without asking for money or a new jet.

Anyway, we have prayed for him. As I heard a preacher say recently, everyone will believe in God eventually. Here’s hoping my commenter comes to believe before it’s too late.

Russia and Japan Next?

On June 24, I wrote about a couple of predictive visions my wife had a day or two earlier. I wrote about them in case they turned out to be from God. No one with any brains has any respect for a prophet who predicts the past. If you think God told you something about the future, you should reveal it before it happens, not after.

This week, one of her visions came to pass.

Here is my description of her first vision:

In one vision, she went into Buckingham Palace. There was a small table there. On the table, there was a small tree. It was not a real tree. It was jewelry. It appeared to be made of white gold, and it had pearls on it, like fruit. One of the pearls dropped off, and God told her there was going to be a funeral soon.

That would have been on about June 22, and Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8. That means she died 78 days after my wife had her vision. That’s “soon.”

Am I saying this means the vision was from God? No. I’m just saying it proved to be correct. My best guess is that it came from God. We know Satan can give people visions. Anyone who did drugs in college can tell you that, and Mohammed created a false religion which was based on a vision from Satan. Assuming he actually had a vision and didn’t just make it up.

Was the funeral vision inspired by news about the queen’s physical condition? If you Google, you will see there was very little news about the queen’s health during the week before Rhodah had her visions. People knew her health was deteriorating, but the news wasn’t flooded with stories about it. Also, news stories don’t cause visions. You can have a dream inspired by a news story, but visions happen when you’re awake.

The news that the first vision came true concerns me. Do I really care about the deaths of foreign monarchs? Is that why I’m concerned? I’m not a royal watcher. That’s for women and homosexual men. I’m concerned because of the second vision.

In the other vision, Russia attacked Japan. She was surprised, because she thought Taiwan, not Japan, was in danger, and everyone thinks China, not Russia, will attack.

To be specific, she said Russia was bombing Japan in the vision.

After Rhodah had her visions, I Googled, and I learned that Russia and Japan don’t get along. They have battled in the past, and because of World War Two, Russia now claims some islands which seem to belong to Japan. These islands have a lot of strategic importance, because they give Russia Pacific ports that don’t freeze over. Russia’s access to the Pacific is not good.

We don’t make money from religion, so unlike most–well, ALL–of the false prophets who said God told them Trump would be reelected in 2020, we have no motivation to make up prophecies. We don’t try to manufacture them. That makes us somewhat more credible than the offering-dependent charlatans. On the other hand, even a sincere Christian can be misled by hostile spirits.

I am not predicting that Russia will attack Japan, based on what my wife saw. Just relaying the information so it will be documented one way or the other.

Little Shop of Horrors no More

While my wife and I wait to be permitted to see each other in Ireland, and while what we hope are the last days of our wait for a green card pass, I continue to work on my shop.

I finished my belt grinder cart. Photo below. It’s almost as great as it looks.

Is any project ever really finished? I still want to put some kind of arm on it to hold a shallow container of water below the 2″ by 72″ belt. It will catch sparks and keep crud out of the drawers.

Today I have been emptying boxes that have been on the floor since 2019, when I moved my big tools up here. I am also getting stuff ready to throw out. As I work, the shop gets bigger and bigger, and my ideas about building a new shop seem more and more ridiculous.

My next project will probably be shelves.

I have a huge 4-tier 4′ by 8′ set of shelves against one wall. I am not happy with it. It used to have the long side against the wall, making it very difficult to use because of the reach. Now both long sides are exposed. It’s still not great, because it juts out into the garage and takes up too much room.

I figure it has almost 128 square feet of storage, not including the floor. I would like to create a similar amount of shelving on the walls. This would open up the center of the shop.

I got an idea from Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. You would think a person like me would be a big fan of the show, because it’s all about tools and a sort of engineering, but I’m not. I don’t have the attention span for it. It drags a lot while they’re building things and explaining. I’m always thinking, “Come on man. Blow something up.”

Also, the chemistry of the hosts is somewhat off-putting. Everyone knows they don’t like each other, and it shows. When I watch, I always feel like Hyneman is trying hard not to sock Adam Savage in the mouth, and while I can see how Savage would get on a person’s nerves, I think most people would get along with him better. Just a guess.

Anyway, Hyneman’s primary business is in a terrible building which is about 100 feet long and 12 feet wide. I assume he must have gotten a great price. To cope with the shape of the building, he created his own shelves. They cover one wall. He could have gone out and bought prefab shelves and attached them, but they would have been expensive, and I don’t know if anyone sells appropriate shelves. His ceiling is very high.

He got himself some 1″-square tubing and welded it into a system of shelf supports. It’s brilliant. He has vertical tubes which appear to be about three feet apart, and he welded horizontal tubes to them to hold the shelf material. I don’t know what the material is. Probably plywood.

As he pointed out, welding is extremely fast compared to drilling and screwing, and square tubes are very easy to weld together because they have a lot of flat surfaces. I don’t know what tubing costs right now, but steel prices have been dropping, so it may be possible to get 12 feet of tubing for around $10. If that’s true, I could put up a framework for maybe $120. Two shelf units 9 feet long with 4 shelves each would give me 108 square feet of shelf. It would be better to use 6 shelves per unit, because shelves that are too far apart are wasteful. This would give me 162 square feet.

Plywood is expensive, but not like it used to be, and I could cannibalize the plywood in my existing unit.

As part of the project, I would like to get a small shed for materials. Then I could keep more tubing and plate and so on. Grabbing stuff you already have is always better than driving to buy more.

The shop has gotten so much bigger, I am once again able to park my garden tractor and utility cart in it. The big tractor is too much to ask for, but with all the new space, I should be able to forgo a new shop and put up a smaller shelter for the tractor and a few implements.

Guess I better get back out there. Those dead roaches aren’t going to sweep themselves out into the yard.

Doing Your Best Doesn’t Always Help

Some people are impressed by surgeons. Some people are impressed by gymnasts. I am impressed by painters.

I don’t mean all painters. Painting a picture is easy. Painting a house is easy. People who can do these things are a dime a dozen. I’m impressed by people who can paint THINGS. Even a mailbox is hard to paint well. How people manage to paint cars and motorcycles is beyond me.

I made myself a nice tool arm rack for my belt grinder. I created it to fit on the side of a Harbor Freight tool chest. It wasn’t hard. Just cutting, welding, and grinding. Then I tried to paint it. What a nightmare.

I figured I would use Rust-Oleum farm implement paint in John Deere green. Truck bed paint is tougher, but it’s always black or a color which is repulsive. I got myself a can of primer and a can of paint, and I figured I was on my way.

First problem: it rains here every day now. Torrential rain. It starts in the afternoon and goes on for hours. Sometimes it starts again at night. I don’t have a shed where I can hang things to paint them, and painting them in the shop is a problem, so I ordinarily hang them from a limb of a magnolia tree I plan to cut down. Finding a time to hang this project was difficult. Seemed like every time I went outside, it started raining.

I finally got it primed, and I found a way to paint it in the shop. When I painted it, the paint was rough. This was a new problem. I have gotten better results with earlier projects.

It turned out to be a couple of things. First, spray paint is harder to apply smoothly than brush paint, which I have used in the past. Second, the primer I picked was a high-build primer. I thought it would cover imperfections. Instead, it provided imperfections of its own in the form of a sandy surface.

I took an angle grinder and removed all the paint and primer. I chose a new primer and started over. By this time, I had lost days.

I didn’t take chances. I sanded the new primer before spraying, and then I added the paint. The result was adequate. It could really use more sanding, but it will do, and I can always wet-sand the paint and add another coat.

I planned to put a sheet of 3/4″ plywood on top of the cart to distribute the weight of the grinders and give me something to screw them to. Yesterday I made the sheet. I cut, sanded, and primed it. I used a roller to prime it.

Before I could prime it, I had to deal with the primer that shot all over the table saw, the project, my drill, my apron, the floor, and me, among other things.

I had obtained a tool for stirring paint. It goes in a drill. I lowered it into the can and used the low gear to stir. No problem. Very controllable. I figured it was so easy, I could go ahead and use the high gear.

When I changed gears and pulled the trigger, half of the paint went up, out of the can for good, and onto everything around it. It happened instantly. No possibility of controlling it.

An hour later, after learning that turpentine is the only really good thing to use to clean up spilled latex paint, I took my 6″ mini roller and painted both sides of the plywood.

Then the bugs took notice.

A june bug flew in from my left, did a spiral, and corkscrewed into the fresh primer, where it lay kicking its legs. A swarm of little flies showed up shortly thereafter.

I fixed things by putting a fan next to the plywood to prevent bugs from landing.

Today I got another 6″ roller cover. Cleaning roller covers isn’t really possible. You can squeeze enough paint out to keep them usable for a couple of days, but you will never be able to clean a roller cover to the point where you can use it to paint a new color. I picked Home Depot’s best cover, supposedly. I didn’t want to take chances.

I stirred the paint successfully and started applying it. Then I saw a big cluster of fibers stuck to the board. I thought it fell from somewhere, but I was wrong. It came from the roller. All over the board, there were little hairs that came from my expensive “professional” roller cover.

Now the board is drying. It has one coat of paint on one side, and that coat has fibers in it. I can’t do anything to it until tomorrow, when I hope I can sand it and make the fibers vanish without destroying the primer and paint.

I can’t believe Home Depot sells this terrible product. It is also extremely irritating to try to do everything right and then be let down by a product which is not merely worthless but destructive. It’s bad enough when a product doesn’t work. When it destroys other things and ruins hours or days of work, it’s a catastrophic product.

It should take two days to paint a board well. I figure I am looking at 4, minimum. Sand and paint tomorrow. Paint the day after. Paint again the day after that.

Other than that, the project is going well. I attached the rack I made to the cart, and it fits perfectly. It will hold 4 tool arms very well. There is a holder for a 5th arm, but it has limited potential because the enclosure for the VFD is under it and prevents the holder from allowing a long arm to slide the whole way in. I put the holder in anyway because I may get a new VFD some day, and the holder might conceivably have a use for a shorter arm.

Adding the 5th holder at this point was easy. Adding it later would have required removing paint, welding, grinding, painting again…

If I get a different VFD that doesn’t require a platform, I’ll still need to do some of these things, but it will be a much simpler job.

After all this, I have to put my table saw on wheels. The base I have on it now is an add-on from Amazon or somewhere, and it’s about 1% as good as one I could make myself. I’ll go back to truck bed coating. It’s very easy to apply.

I’m wondering if I should keep my little Rockwell 1×42 grinder. It’s a nice tool, but I have a 2-HP motor and a spare VFD sitting around. That’s maybe $1000 worth of hardware. It’s the parts of a grinder that make up most of the cost. I could probably make the rest for $100. Two pulleys, a spring, and a body made from a small amount of welded tubing or plate. Couple of other things. A cord.

I could make a second 2×72 grinder that rotates so the belt is horizontal. Or I could just make a grinder which is fixed in a horizontal position. There is no reason to have a rotating grinder when you have them in two orientations.

At least I don’t think there is.

If you have two grinders, you can put different belts on them so you can go back and forth when you’re doing different jobs.

Anyway, I hope to see this project finished this week.

No Munich for You!

I will say this for the Germans: they may not be helpful, but they are fast. My wife applied for a tourist visa last week, and she was turned down early this morning. Why? Because they think she wants to stay in Germany as an illegal alien.

This is different from our experience with the Italians. Their representative in Lusaka lied to us, convincing Rhodah she would get a visa if we bought airline tickets in advance. She was extremely rude and insulting, too. The Germans were polite and truthful and simply said no.

I have been reading about the problems Africans have getting visas in Europe. It appears to be a systemic thing.

I read a remarkable story about two African scholars. They helped put together some kind of scholarly gathering in Europe, with lots of academics. They visited Europe once and went home. Then they applied to return for the event. Their presence was vital to the event’s success. Excluding them would have been like excluding the Rolling Stones from a Rolling Stones concert. They were clearly employed in their own country. They had all sorts of proof they intended to return. They were turned down.

Boris Johnson, former prime minister of England, acknowledged the problems Africans had with visas. A couple of years back, he got so upset, he spurred reforms.

Some people say the problem is racism. I don’t think that’s accurate, although it may be. I think it’s just incompetence and institutional prejudice.

Prejudice is not the same thing as racism. You can be prejudiced about anything. It doesn’t have to be race. To be prejudiced means you make judgments without knowing the facts. The people who grant European visas are very clearly prejudiced against citizens of African countries. Even the nice countries. Not just Nigeria.

A baboon could look at Rhodah’s history of travel to foreign countries, as well as her husband’s assets in America, and realize there is no possibility she will try to stay in Europe and clean people’s toilets for cash. The Europeans, who are known to be smarter than baboons, didn’t really look at our applications. They just stamped them. African? No visa.

This makes me realize there is no point in trying to find Zambian employment or buying Zambian real estate for Rhodah. The Europeans claim they look for such ties when granting visas, but they are obviously lying. If two university instructors can’t get in, with a horde of European academics vouching for them, and a history of visiting and then going home, a crummy Zambian house and a job won’t get Rhodah in.

Why should a house or a job help? You can move to Europe and then sell your house. You can move to Europe and quit your job in Zambia so you can get down to toilet cleaning and hiding from the government. Sure, if you’re the president of Zambia, or you own a huge emerald mine you have to manage personally, you would need to get back to Zambia fast. Other people with normal jobs and properties would not.

A normal Zambian job would not be a big motive to get back to Zambia, because an illegal alien would be trying to get away from a life of normal Zambian jobs.

I don’t think a Caucasian would have been approved, either, but I can’t say for sure. Rhodah said the lady at the Italian embassy sucked up to a white family during the same visit when she was snotty to Rhodah.

The Germans were polite and respectful and still turned her down, so maybe the demeanor of embassy employees doesn’t mean much.

We are not upset with the Germans, because they didn’t abuse us. They were just following orders.

Sorry.

We are back to looking at destinations.

Oddly, Hong Kong is now open, and we could both go tomorrow without visas. It would be an interesting destination, even if it’s small and not likely to keep us entertained for more than three or four days. The big problem with Hong Kong is the quarantine rule. We would have to sit in a special hotel for three days and pass covid tests. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it’s a consideration. What if one of us failed a test? Imagine two weeks in a hotel room, with the same room service menu in front of you the whole time.

Singapore and the Philippines are open and will let Rhodah in immediately. Both hot, humid places. Singapore is tiny, so again, not much to sustain our interest. The Philippines are poor and don’t have much to offer.

We can go to a whole bunch of sweaty beach destinations. Lots of Caribbean islands. Bermuda. The Seychelles. Beaches only appeal to shallow people who don’t have a lot going on upstairs, though. Lie in the sun. Get drunk in the evening. Parasail. Lie in the sun. Get drunk again.

We are looking into the UK because of Boris Johnson’s efforts. We are also going to apply to Ireland again. It’s not the destination of our dreams, but it’s pleasant and welcoming. The Irish treated us very, very well, both at the embassy and during our visit. We will never forget that, even if we do get tired of tourist-grade fish and chips.

I have never had any interest in visiting England or Scotland. Ugly architecture, no mountains, mediocre scenery, bad food which is in some cases frightening…not exciting. I have no interest in going to “the old country” and looking up my ancestors. I have no ties whatsoever to Great Britain. I don’t care about my ancestors. I’d be over there eating disappointing meals and wishing I were in France or Austria.

I don’t understand people who want to poke around in courthouses and libraries and look for their own surnames. Maybe that would be interesting if I had noble blood or something, but my ancestors were pretty much owned by nobles and did absolutely nothing to make the world remember them.

Even if your ancestors were a big deal, should you really be proud? Here’s something you can say to most people who have impressive ancestors: “If they were so great, what happened to you?”

I’m not interested in getting to know the British, because I have seen such disappointing things. Unbelievable coarseness. Rudeness. Arrogance. Hatred of Christianity. Maybe the media and the web show the worst side of England, but I don’t want to bet thousands of dollars to find out the truth.

Maybe I’ve watched too many Guy Ritchie movies.

The French are rude, and that is fact, not bigotry, but I still want to go back. The food and sights are worth putting up with the percentage of French people who are offensive. When the British grow a Mont Blanc and invent things that can compete with croissants and Napoleons, I might change my mind and put Great Britain on my list beside France.

I’m harder on Americans than anyone, in case a British person is reading this and feeling feisty. American places I would pay not to visit: Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, New Orleans, Miami, Cleveland, Atlanta, Houston, Miami….

I would rather spend a month in London or even Glasgow than a day in Miami.

Many of our cities are snakepits. It amazes me that foreigners are willing to pay to see them.

I think I really depressed a guy in Ireland. He was looking forward to his Miami vacation, and I made the mistake of giving him my views. Dude…you live two hours away from…EVERYTHING…and you want to go to Miami, sit on one of the world’s worst beaches, and spend half your vacation stuck in traffic, listening to rap through the closed windows?

The nonexistence of Miami will be one of the key benefits of the Messianic Age.

Think of the places an Irish person could go for a fraction of the cost of a Miami mistake. Rome. Athens. The Tirol. Paris. Marseilles. Istanbul. Vienna. Norway. Zermatt. It makes me sick.

I should have kept quiet, though.

Okay, whatever. We’ll pick a couple of places in Ireland we haven’t seen yet, we’ll get really nice hotels, and we’ll tough it out. Maybe we’ll see London if things go our way. First world problems, right? The best kind of problems to have.

I am the Grid

I’m not sure, but I think I’ve debunked the “sealed attic” craze as a scam, at least for existing houses that need new roofs.

My roof is 22 years old, and it’s time to say goodbye. When I got an estimate, the roofer suggested a solar roof. This is a roof with “solar shingles,” which are not actually shingles. Solar shingles come in prefab arrays, and they lie pretty flat on your roof instead of standing above it like panels.

They don’t really look like shingles. I’m talking about the product GAF offers. Others are somewhat different. Tesla offers a whole roof made from little solar panels that look like shiny black shingles. There is no point in discussing Tesla, however, because their system is wildly overpriced, and it’s unavailable until the Tesla fanbois who are backing up the system get their roofs.

Anyway, if I get a solar roof, most of the additional cost will be covered by a huge tax break. That’s nice. Also, the roofers say my power bills will go to zero. A roof can produce more power than I need. The excess power goes back to the power company, and they have to pay me for it, at full price, for the life of the system. I may actually make some money every month. Yes, I have checked.

At current prices, the roof would save me at least $60,000 over 20 years. That doesn’t include potential income.

I was thinking about this, and I also started thinking about improving my insulation.

My attic is designed well by 2000 standards, because the house was built in 2000. That means it’s way more efficient than a 1950 house, but it’s not as good as a 2022 house. It has vented attics with complicated shapes that don’t lend themselves well to modifications.

These days, many houses have sealed attics. They shoot spray foam onto the undersides of the roofs, and they don’t put insulation on top of the ceilings. They don’t put air conditioning ducts and air handlers in the attics, because these things lose energy by heat exchange.

My ducts are in my attics. Nothing I can do about that. Moving them would probably cost a hundred grand, and it would deface the interior of the house severely.

A lot of my attic space can’t be foamed at all, and the rest has ducts that can’t be moved. On top of that, if you foam your roof, you will probably lose your shingle warranty, because your shingles will be hot all the time. Also, if your foamed roof leaks, the foam will conceal the leak until it gets really bad. Foam people deny these things, but GAF, the big dog in the shingle business, believes them and will not give full warranties to homeowners with foamed roofs.

Another problem with hot shingles: heat reduces the output of solar cells. If I had a solar roof and foam, my roof would generate less power.

I have seen people brag that they cut their AC bills by a third using foam. Whoopee. For me, that would not be much money. Even if my entire power bill, not just the AC part, were cut by a third, it would only run around $1000 per year. That’s not a great return in exchange for losing solar power and your shingle warranty.

It seems to me that if I decide to get solar power, efficiency shouldn’t matter to me at all. If my power bill is zero, what do I care about efficiency? It doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help Mother Gaia, who is just a ball of dirt anyway.

Even if there were some tiny environmental benefit, I wouldn’t care. Environmental problems have to be significant in order to matter to me. I’m not going to inconvenience myself over miniscule improvements. When it comes to a choice between me and the environment, the environment will have to take the hit every time. Like I always tell my wife, the environment can drop dead.

There is another option: solar panels that sit just above the roof. I could get these and also fix my insulation, and the output would be somewhat better than shingle output. Problem: they are incredibly expensive compared to solar shingles. It looks like I would have to spend around $20,000 more up front.

Experts (who are trying to sell things) say panels are much cheaper, but that’s only true if you compare 1) adding a panel to an old roof and 2) buying a new solar roof. Obviously, the added cost of fixing the rest of the roof makes a big difference.

In my case, panels would cost exactly as much as a conventional shingle roof, all by themselves. I would have to pay twice the cost of a roof in order to get panels and a new roof, and I would get no tax break on the roof.

If your roof is already kaput, you’re going to pay to replace it anyway. You can’t factor that cost in. The intelligent comparison is between a new roof plus shingles and a new roof plus panels. A roof plus shingles is cheaper, and you get a tax break on the entire cost, not just the cost of the panel.

This is how things look to me now. Of course, I have only had about 10 days to become an expert.

What about batteries? I am looking into it. If I go solar, I want my house to be wired for batteries. I want to be ready if I ever need them. I don’t know if I want a battery right now. I think they will get cheaper, and they wear out with age.

The big plus of having a battery is that it will allow me to have power during outages. Solar alone won’t work during outages, because it shuts down to keep power workers safe. Also, it dies at night. You have to have a battery if you want power while you sleep.

A serious battery system that will run more than a toaster costs tens of thousands of dollars, and the batteries have to be replaced eventually. It’s like buying a car.

The roof is a given. Solar shingles seem to be the only intelligent choice. That leaves me with the battery question. For the cost of a car, I could forget about outages, and if Biden really wrecks the world and everything goes dark, I would have full power for the life of the batteries.

How long do batteries live? The web says that depends on how many charging cycles they endure and how deeply you discharge them. If I go off-grid and use them every day, 5 years is the lower limit. If I only used them when needed, they would last at least 10 years and presumably longer, since virtually nothing would be going on inside them while the grid was working.

If I had a solar roof, I would have no reason to rely on the batteries until Biden succeeded in destroying civilization and the power grid became useless. I would just use the grid at night and make my own juice during the day to save money.

A diesel or propane generator would get me through short outages, but they are completely useless for prolonged energy starvation. The cost of running them is astronomical and would get worse during a crisis. Fuel would increase in price and perhaps become unavailable. And a month is over 700 hours long, so a generator would wear out fast. A tractor with 3,000 hours is old.

It’s a shame so many people think diesel and propane will fix their apocalypse problems. It makes no sense at all. Electricity from free sources is the only answer.

Imagine spending $20000 on a new diesel generator and feeling smug, only to learn you had to rebuild it after a few months.

Anyway, solar is looking good, thanks to the tax break and the income from generation. Foam will never work. A diesel or propane generator will only be good for occasional use. Batteries are the best choice for zombie scenarios. These are my conclusions as of today. We’ll see how they age.

Shop Growing Less Chaotic

My newest metal fab project is taking shape. I’m making a cart for my belt grinders, and the basis is a Harbor Freight 44″ US General tool chest.

Here is what I have so far.

The more experience you get with fabricating, the faster things go. I think I got all the metal together around a week ago.

When you have a 2×72 grinder, you have long metal arms holding various types of tooling. As of now, I only have a flat platen and a small wheel holder. A platen is a flat thing that sits behind the belt so you can grind things straight, flat, and true. You can do a lot of other things with it. A small wheel holder holds several different wheels that allow you to grind small semicircular recesses into projects.

I should buy a large wheel and a medium-sized wheel as well. Each of these will need its own arm.

The two main features of the cart are the arm holder and the platform the grinders will sit on. The holder is done. The platform will be a piece of 3/4″ plywood, and both grinders will be screwed to it. It will sit on top of the cart.

I was considering buying a dustproof variable frequency drive (VFD) to replace my old VFD and the big shopmade enclosure I made for it. In the end, I thought I should avoid spending $430 for nearly nothing. When you can fabricate, you don’t have a lot of excuses for refusing to improvise and save money.

I had a piece of 11-gauge steel plate which was scrapped because I made some mistakes altering it for another project, so I cut a 6″ by 10.5″ piece out of it and made a little shelf for the enclosure to sit on. I welded it to the lower horizontal bar on the cart attachment. The box seemed floppy when I bolted it on, so I welded a little arm onto the vertical part of the attachment and ran a bolt through it into the enclosure. Now it’s rigid.

A $430 dustproof VFD would look better, but it wouldn’t do anything this one won’t do.

Wood prices are crazy. They went up, and then they crashed. Some things are getting cheap. Others are still expensive. I found I could buy excellent hardwood plywood, precut to 2′ by 4′, for not much more than low-grade plywood, so I bought it. I could have bought an entire sheet and saved a little, but I am tired of keeping large pieces of material around for no purpose, and bringing a big sheet here would have meant a certain amount of exertion.

If I had bought cheap plywood, I would have had to spend time filling in voids and sanding it to prevent splinters.

I usually paint my workshop creations with black truck bed coating, but this time I decided to go with tractor paint in John Deere green. Tractor paint is not as tough as truck bed coating, but it’s very tough by paint standards, and the cart will look nice with a green attachment. I may paint the wood green, too. And the enclosure.

Drab colors are customary for tools, but I am moving away from that. I guess it’s because I have three Harbor Freight tool chests, and they come in vivid colors. A little color makes a shop look less like an archvillain’s lair. Also, when you get old, color helps you see what you’re working on.

After this, I have to finish the rolling kitchen island I started. I also need to paint two tool stands and a mobile base, all fabricated by yours truly. Then I should put a real mobile base on the Powermatic 66 and get rid of the one I bought.

With those jobs behind me, I should get rid of the silly 4′ by 8′ shelves in the shop. The previous owner used them to hold materials and so on. Shelves that big are stupid. It’s hard to reach the middle, especially on higher shelves. They kill a quarter of the shop and don’t provide a good return. I think I may buy steel tubing and make cheap, strong shelves for the south wall. Jamie Hyneman, the Mythbusters guy, did this in his shop, and it works well.

I thought I needed to build a new shop, but the more I get this one in order, the more I think I should wait. This shop is now so efficiently arranged, I can get the lawn tractor and utility cart inside. I should probably get a cheap shed for materials and certain outdoor tools, since they don’t need to be in the shop, and then add a pole barn for the tractor and pickup.

The real dream is air conditioning. I already have enough power. I just need insulation on the doors and roof. One of my doors is a roll-up, and that’s a problem. It’s not possible to insulate an old roll-up. You have to buy a new one with insulation built in. That would run about $4000.

If I had air conditioning, I would never leave the shop.

Maybe later today I’ll put primer on the cart attachment and cut the plywood and prime it. Paint takes forever to dry properly, so I will be lucky if I can get this project truly over with in two days.

I feel like God is helping me get this place together. I’m making progress much faster than before.

Help from Unlikely Source

Today something odd happened.

As I have said here before, my wife Rhodah and I meet in other countries while we wait for her to be allowed to move here. I have no interest in taking an expensive 35-hour flight so I can visit Zambia, and she wants to see new places.

We tried to get visas from various Schengen Area countries in Europe. Sweden and Italy rejected us. The lady at the Italian embassy was extremely rude to Rhodah and also lied to her, telling us we needed to buy airline tickets in order to get a visa and that if we did, the visa would be issued.

We bought the tickets, and she didn’t even get back to us. Rhodah had to go to the embassy after the customary processing time had passed. Once again, the lady who worked there was rude. She didn’t have the courtesy to leave her office. She sent out an underling who spoke no English, along with a bilingual Zambian, in order to tell Rhodah she had been rejected. Through an open door, she shouted at Rhodah from her office without leaving her chair.

We lost over a thousand dollars because this woman lied to us, and while Rhodah was at the embassy, the same woman fawned on a white family.

The form that “explained” our rejection appears to have been prepared frivolously. It said they found our expression of the purpose of the trip unreliable. In other words, they did not believe we were tourists. They thought Rhodah was going to abandon her house, car, friends, family, and move to Italy, where she wouldn’t be able to speak the language. Instead of the life she leads now, which involves receiving checks, shopping, and doing nearly nothing else, she would presumably find a good toilet-cleaning job in Naples and share a room with 15 Nigerians.

It’s pretty obvious they made no effort to investigate. I believe the lady who lied to us simply put the application in the trash and issued a standard explanation for rejecting it.

Upon reading our materials, even a monkey would have known we were trustworthy tourists. We made the mistake of buying tickets for both of us. This was not required, but it showed we were sincere, because it gave me powerful motivation to go to Italy. What kind of fool would think an American with a cushy life, real estate, and a nice house would want to move to Italy and have a much lower standard of living, combined with political instability, corrupt courts, and extremely poor government?

Maybe there is a constant flow of American retirees, moving to Naples to take advantage of Italy’s unreliable economy and its history of borrowing billions and not paying them back.

Italy is a wonderful country in many ways, but if I wanted to move anywhere for economic reasons and stability, it would be Singapore or Switzerland.

Italy is a sexy girl you date and then forget during your gap year. Singapore and Switzerland are girls you marry.

We decided to try the Czechs. Czechia is known to be easy when it comes to visas. They seemed encouraging, and they told us to make an appointment. Then they stopped responding to our inquiries, which they had told us to make.

After this, I learned that Austria is liberal with visas, so we decided to give it a shot. Then we learned the Germans handle applications in Zambia. That did not sound good, for reasons too obvious to explain.

Rhodah went to see the Germans, with no appointment, and they told her what to do. Then she made an appointment for this morning to bring them the required…PAPERS!!!!

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

The Swedes supposedly handle visas for a number of Schengen countries, but in reality, they hand the job off to an apathetic, unhelpful company called VFS Global. Rhodah wasn’t given an embassy appointment when we tried to go to Sweden. She had to go to VFS Global, where she dealt with low-level employees from Zambia, not Europe. It was not a quality experience.

We went to Ireland this year, and the Irish process visas at their embassy, because, I guess, Ireland is a real country that doesn’t delegate its responsibilities to McVisa. They treated Rodah like royalty, even though Ireland is very strong economically and a much better destination for illegal aliens than Sweden or Italy.

Ireland gave us no trouble at all. We got our visa in around two weeks, I believe. There was a delay because someone in the US failed to communicate with them when they checked to see if we were really married, but Rhodah helped the Irish get proof, and they were apologetic about the wait, which was not their fault.

Now you know what Rhodah experienced in her visits to various outfits that provide visas. So what happened at the German embassy?

First of all, the building is very nice. Much nicer than the one the Italians occupy. Everything is kept up well, too. Clean and orderly. The Italian embassy was disorderly and generally gave a bad impression. Rhodah said it was easy to tell Germany was rich and Italy was poor.

Second, the lady who worked with Rhodah is German, not Zambian, and she was very kind and polite. The official German policy is that if your application materials aren’t perfect, they send you home. The German lady found a little issue with our papers, and instead of rejecting them, she told Rhodah we could fix it and email them a file. That’s what we did.

She didn’t shout at Rhodah. She didn’t try to get her to buy airline tickets. In fact, the Germans advise people not to buy them before approval. She also told her she should receive a decision very quickly. They have 15 days to get it done, but we could have a decision much sooner.

Here’s the best part: as Rhodah left the embassy, this nice lady said, “Have a blessed day.”

I don’t know about Germany, but in the US, “Have a blessed day” is something Christians say. It’s not something you hear from unbelievers. Here in the most conservative county in Florida, people say it all the time. I believe God steered us into the hands of a German Christian, and that’s remarkable, because Europe is overwhelmingly against Christianity. Some countries give lip service to the pope, but Catholicism isn’t really Christianity, and one of its big appeals is that it allows people to do whatever they want as long as they go to mass and confess every few years.

I don’t know whether we will be approved or not, but at least the Germans treated Rhodah like a human being. The Italian embassy is a disgrace.

In order to maximize our chance of success, we tried to make our application as palatable as possible. We were concerned the Germans would be rigid and hard to please, and that they might be more reluctant to approve people who intended to spend most of their time in Germany. This is probably not true, but we factored it in anyway. We created an itinerary which puts us in Austria about 60% of the time.

I don’t know a lot about Austria. I have visited Salzburg a couple of times. That’s about it. Austria is very beautiful, and it’s full of alps. I really, really want to see the alps again. I recall the food being very good, with the caveat that you have to watch out for the stuff that’s overly Teutonic, like piles of beans covered with sausages and melted cheese.

I have never seen Vienna. It looks great on the web, and it’s a practical place to fly into, so we will be spending a few days there. It appears to be very much like Paris in that it’s packed with history and excellent sightseeing. It seems to have a similar feel, with cafes and so on. It looks like a place a person could enjoy for months, not days. We will see whether my impressions pan out.

We also chose Salzburg and some places not too far from it.

We are set to visit Munich. I am not sure about that one. The hotels are extremely expensive given the second-tier status of the destination. Munich is fine, but it’s not London or Rome. Let’s be honest. I’m not sure Germany has a big city which is a truly top-notch destination. It’s loaded with incredible smaller towns, though, and the natural beauty of the countryside is extraordinary.

When we started looking at Munich, I didn’t know Oktoberfest was a threat. For some strange reason, I thought Oktoberfest took place in October. Turns out that is not the case. It’s really Septemberfest.

In case you’re wondering how “September” is spelled in German, it looks like this: “September.”

My understanding is that Oktoberfest is mainly about getting kneewalking drunk on beer. They set up tents all over the place, and you have to have a reservation to sit in a tent and get hammered. This sounds insane to me, but it’s what I’ve read. A reservation to sit in a tent.

I don’t see the appeal. I could see going to one beer garden and having one stein of beer with the wife, but that would take maybe an hour. How do you kill most of a day with nothing to do but drink beer? Yes, I did it when I was young, but I was pretty stupid back then, and Germans are not stupid.

Like Jesus and the disciples, I am not a teetotaling Christian. I used to make my own beer from my own recipes, and with reference to all other beers I’ve had, it was incomparable. I like a really good beer. Thing is, Germans are not that high on the list of good brewers. Americans are at the top. AND bottom. We make unbelievably bad fake beer like Coors, and we also make the best beer in the form of microbrews. Belgians are probably next. After that, I would give third prize to the Irish. German beer is extremely well made, but it doesn’t taste all that great. It’s bland. Like drinking the 5-series BMW with the small engine.

People think the Germans make the best beer, but that has never actually been true. They make boring beer to exceedingly high standards. Like they’re making it for NASA.

They make some very nice beers, but good luck finding anything as impressive as Flying Dog Snake Dog Ale or Chimay Triple.

I’m not knocking a good Spaten lager or the nice weissbeers that come out of Germany, but if I had to present an alien ambassador with the 10 best beers of Earth, it would be American, all the way.

Actually, the Turks make a truly wonderful lager. It’s called Efes, which is the Turkish name for Ephesus. It has a marvelous balance of sweetness and hops. On the dark side, leaning toward amber, and rich for a lager.

I’m starting to think we should forget Munich and fly into and out of Vienna.

What ever happened to Switzerland? That was our original dream destination, after Israel. We might be able to go there during this trip, but as of now, it seems safer to leave it off our application materials.

After the horrible experience with the Italian lady, we are very grateful to be treated better by the Germans. Granted, they made intrusive demands for the most private documents imaginable, short of medical records, and that was clearly unnecessary, but I think that’s just the Germans being German. There is nothing they can’t overthink.

After the abuse Rhodah suffered at the Italian embassy, I felt God was showing us to stop involving nasty people in our lives unnecessarily. We listened, and now we’re dealing with someone who appears to be a Christian.

I hope we get in. Otherwise, it’s back to Ireland, perhaps with a side of Turkey, depending on the breaks.

Parts of Shop Floor now Visible

It’s a momentous day. I finally finished my second welding cart.

Last year, I took a Harbor Freight US General tool chest and turned it into a cart. It is the greatest cart imaginable, so I decided to make a new one for my Lincoln MIG and Hypertherm plasma cutter. I believe I have written about it before.

While the pandemic was making prisoners of us all, I barely did anything, apart from getting married. Things here deteriorated. My projects languished. Over the last couple of months, I have gotten back to work, and making a new cart was a priority.

The factory-made Eastwood cart I’m replacing is great, but it has no storage apart from a couple of tiny trays and 6 tubes for MIG rods. It has no drawers. It’s also hard to move. Something about the wheels. It holds two machines, and they are both too low. It put my welder’s controls at belly-button height, and the controls on the plasma cutter were at knee level. Very inconvenient.

The cart I just made will take two 120-cubic-foot bottles, and it has a mount for what is known as a toilet paper filter. This is an air filter that uses something that looks exactly like a roll of European toilet paper for a filter.

Maybe it is toilet paper. You may be familiar with the European stuff. I wouldn’t say it’s rough, but I would guess it’s about 120 grit.

The new cart holds the filter at eye level so it’s easy to hook an air hose to it.

I have not yet made any effort to create hangers for cables and so on. I don’t think I’ll need them. Once I put a bottle on the cart, I’ll be able to drape my welding stuff on it. This sounds sloppy, but in reality, it’s extremely convenient, and it’s neater than a bunch of hooks hanging out in the way. I should be able to wrap the plasma cutter’s wiry things around the filter mount.

All the weldy things I haven’t shoved in my other chest will go in this one, so I can forget about the toolbox I’ve been keeping small items in.

If you’re wondering about those huge, neat-looking welds, you should know they’re not welds. I welded first and then molded epoxy putty around the welds. It gives a nicer look and provides the impression that I closed things up completely with weld. Using too much weld is stupid for various reasons.

It’s amazing how much space I freed up with this thing. The Eastwood cart was much smaller, but somehow it took up more space. I can almost walk around the shop now.

I really like Eastwood. They sell stuff that actually works, at modest prices. They make working on cars accessible to ordinary people. Nonetheless, my cart is better than theirs. It should be. Their cart now costs $206, I’m putting around $400 in mine.

My next similar project is a grinding cart. I bought a bigger Harbor Freight tool chest, and I’m going to put my belt grinders on it. I plan to make some kind of extension to hold grinder tool arms. They are just too bulky to go in drawers.

My old grinder cart is a two-tier plastic job from Northern Tool. It serves well for an $89 cart, but it’s open, so grinding stuff falls into the bottom tray, and it’s also sagging. Northern Tool says it will hold over 500 pounds, but I have way less than that on my top tray, and it’s bending downward in the center. The new cart will give me a place for tool arms, and I’ll be able to put belts and other junk in the drawers.

I may splurge on a KB Electronics dustproof VFD for the big belt grinder. Right now, I’m using an ordinary VFD in a fancy but inexpensive enclosure I built. It works, but the box is roughly as big as a shoebox, it’s heavy, and putting it on the new cart would make considerable fabrication necessary. A dustproof VFD could be placed on a stalk next to the grinder, mounted on the same board.

Then I would have a 3-HP VFD in a dustproof enclosure and nothing to run it with. Hmm.

A big belt grinder is pretty much indispensable if you really want to get anything done with metal.

After this, I just need air conditioning and insulation, and I’m done.

Someone Needs to Abort the Antichrist

My last blog entry was about homosexuals teaching children to do erotic dances on a stripper pole. I thought this was another reminder that the end is here. Then Ruth from Rockport Conservatives left a comment directing me to something even worse: a video of a leftist woman advising women who kill their children to create altars and put the remains on them.

It works like this: first, you kill your unborn child. Then you obtain the corpse or the pieces that remain after the baby is ripped up. Then you put the remains in a container and place it on an altar in your house. Then you use your altar when you do yoga or meditate or do whatever else leftists do instead of honoring the God who let himself be tortured to death for them.

It’s hard to make my mind accept knowledge like this. Based on my knowledge of the way sane people behave, it’s hard to make myself believe the video is serious.

I’m not alone. A conservative who drew attention to it on Twitter made sure he informed people the video was not a parody. He knew they would not be able to prevent themselves from looking for a reasonable explanation for it.

Last night, we got another reminder. The FBI raided Donald Trump’s home and broke into his safe. Journalists are saying they did it because they suspected he kept classified material after leaving office, and they also think he destroyed documents that were supposed to be preserved.

Think about Hillary Clinton. She was not a president. She was a Senator and Secretary of State. That means the feds should be much less likely to hesitate to raid her home. She kept classified material in her house. She also violated the law by using a secret email address to do official business under the table. When they asked for her computer, she had the hard drive wiped clean before handing it over to them.

She also took a $90,000 bribe before she took office. She had a trading account, she invested $1,000, and successful trades were credited to her until her account was worth about $100,000.

Obviously, Hillary Clinton is no trader. Someone saw to it that she did extraordinarily well, absorbing losses and attributing gains to her, and then her trading career ended. Ordinarily, a person who can generate 9000% profits over short intervals will keep trading and build a fortune.

We know Hillary and Bill love money. They do everything they can to profit from their status. If she could have continued generating 9000% profits every 10 months, she would have.

It’s like the roulette scene in Casablanca. Rick feels sorry for a married couple fleeing the Nazis, and he knows the husband is trying to raise money at the roulette wheel. He directs the croupier to do a couple of bogus spins, the husband gets the travel money, and then Rick tells him to quit.

The FBI didn’t break into the Clinton home. They politely requested evidence, and Hillary destroyed it. Like Trump, she was in a position which made trusting her to comply a very bad idea, but they effectively gave her permission, and time, to destroy evidence.

One of the clues that a relationship has gone past the point of reconciliation is that hostility and dishonesty are brought out into the open. The adversaries stop caring about hiding their hatred and misdeeds. This is what’s happening to the world now. The DOJ, including the FBI, no longer cares about preserving the appearance of integrity. They are now in an open war on non-leftists.

We have seen it coming for years. Leftists filed 84 ethics charges against Newt Gingrich, and only one stuck. They tried to get the IRS to charge him, but he was cleared. They got Tom DeLay arrested, and he was cleared. They impeached Trump twice for some things he hadn’t done and some things that were not even illegal. They filed bogus charges against Sarah Palin until she became so busy fighting them she could no longer serve.

Democrat politicians are more corrupt than Republicans, but we don’t see the same things happening to them.

No one who has lived a long time and had any kind of a life can survive intense, prolonged government scrutiny. Sooner or later, everyone does something that can be used to destroy his life. Leftists know this, so they hammer away at conservatives until they find things they can hang charges on.

As Horatio Hornblower said, “Each of us can find a maggot in our past which will happily devour our futures.”

You may think there is no maggot in your past. Ever drive home from a party drunk? If you’ve looked at Internet porn, are you positive every model was over 18? Are you positive you can’t be connected to any images or videos? Did you ever sell a friend weed or coke when you were in college? Have you ever walked into a prohibited place with a concealed weapon? Have you lied about your drug and alcohol use on a background check form? Keep thinking. You’ll find your maggot.

Why is all this happening? The answer is simple. Satan is the false god of this world, most people serve him, and he is using them to castrate the political allies of Christians and Israel. The human race has chosen Satan over God in the most important election of all, and God is letting us suffer the consequences.

Politics belongs to Satan. Too many conservatives don’t understand that. Most of us think politics will save us, and that in a democracy, we will eventually win because there are so many of us. These things are not true. Only God protects us, and many, many nations have been ruled by unpopular minority factions. The Japanese ruled China.

American democracy isn’t like the laws of physics. It’s not necessarily permanent. It can be taken away. It can be nullified, as events surrounding the 2020 election show.

I don’t think Trump will be tried, but the raid is still very damaging, because it will surely bring us a big step closer to civil war, which is our ultimate destination. It’s a sure thing. You can only treat people unfairly so long before they snap. Satan wants us to snap, and we will. Cruelty to conservatives will increase without restraint, we will be tormented, raped, robbed, and killed by mobs in our own yards, conservatives who don’t know God will grab their rifles and try to fix things, and streets will run red with blood.

We will descend to the level of our adversaries, and that’s Satan’s real goal.

People think civil war is a far-off thing, and that we are not in immediate danger. That’s not true. The US is full of leftists who are not merely willing, but eager, to cut our throats, steal everything we have, and pile us into mass graves. When the hot war begins, it will be sudden, and those who hate us will come after us very quickly.

In part, their haste will be motivated by a classic drive of looters and rapists: the desire to arrive early and get the best of everything. It serves no purpose to loot a store or a home two weeks after a hurricane. The people who get there fast take all the good things. Looters, which is what leftist revolutionaries are, know this.

The video about the dead-baby altar is chilling because, like our new mob crime epidemic, it harks back to ancient times. In the ancient Middle East, parents, including Jews, murdered their firstborn male children, put them in jars, and put the jars in the walls of their homes to please false gods. They also burned them as sacrifices to Molech. Murdering your baby and using his parts to create a shrine is essentially the same thing.

Spirits are immortal. We are still corrupted by the beings who corrupted Eve, Cain, Noah’s neighbors, the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Benjamites, the ancient Jews who worshiped Ashtoreth and Molech, Solomon, the communists, and the Nazis. These spirits miss the old ways, and they are bringing them back in forms we will accept. They love being worshiped again. They love seeing beings God loves, who resemble God, march into hell with big smiles and rainbow flags.

I have been through a bunch of hurricanes, and I know the sensation that falls on an area before a storm arrives. There is a strange stillness and a sense of foreboding. There is also a feeling that there is no point in trying to do anything to prepare. I keep having these feelings with regard to America’s future.

When storms used to come, I would get a 300-quart cooler, lunchmeat, bread, ice, batteries, and a keg of homebrewed beer, and I would wait without fear. I knew nothing really bad would happen to me. I might have to go several days without refrigeration in the house, and I might have to move to my dad’s boat in order to have air conditioning and hot water, but that would be about it.

I have that feeling now. I don’t think what I do now matters very much. I think that if I took up cigarette smoking, it wouldn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be here long enough to get sick. If I ran up bills, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be gone before anyone could sue me.

I believe God has told me repeatedly, “Don’t worry about the hard times ahead, because they were not written for you.”

That doesn’t help everyone else, however.

Other people can only be helped through repentance, and repentance comes through listening, and listening is something people no longer do. Or rather, they do, but they only listen to Satan, who tells them what they like to hear so they can burn with him.

I suppose this is what the Bible really means when it says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” If you can hear God, you can believe and be saved, but you can’t hear unless the Holy Spirit speaks the word of God to you and opens your ears.

Most people think that verse means you will have faith if you hear the word of God–the Bible–all the time, but that isn’t true. The world is full of people who immerse themselves in the word and still hate Jesus.

The group that put out the abortion shrine video had a blog. It looks like it’s gone. At the top of the blog, a title read, Gospels of Lilith: Self-Guided Abortion Blog.” Fitting. According to Jewish legend, Lilith is the predecessor of Eve. She hated being ruled by a male God and having to submit to a male partner, so she used the power of God’s name to fly away. She had sex with the archangel Samael (believed by many to be Satan) and gave birth to demons.

I don’t know if Lilith was real, but Eve was not much better. The first known human leftist, because she hated rightful authority. The first known witch, because she served Satan, not God. The first known drug user; the forbidden fruit was a mind-altering drug.

Feminism is leftism, and Satan was the first leftist, so it all makes sense.

The altar video was made private yesterday, but you can see bits of it in videos by commentators.

What’s happening is like labor. I keep wishing it were over. It’s like we are stuck in a doorway.

I guess I will write about new abominations as they develop.

The End of Reason

What do I keep saying about the time we live in? I keep saying that every time I start to get used to it, I learn something new that reminds me the world is really ending.

This week, I learned that homosexuals held a homosexuality celebration in Pennsylvania, and they taught children how to dance on a stripper pole.

It’s worse than you think. A “man” in hot pants and nothing else taught a young boy, and the boy was wearing a skirt. The skirt was colored to resemble the homosexuality flag.

Someone claiming to be the boy’s parent put photos on the web, bragging that the boy was “a natural.”

We are at a stage where there is no point in talking to lost people any more.

It used to be that people understood some things. They understood that sexualizing children was evil and abusive. If another person understands that, you have some hope of making him understand that a child shouldn’t be taught to use a stripper pole.

Poles are for whorish women who exhibit their bodies in order to arouse men sexually and persuade them to give up their money. This is the whole reason stripper poles were invented. Pole dancing was developed in order to excite lust. They’re not for fitness. They’re not for giving women positive body images. They’re for a type of whoring.

It shouldn’t be necessary to tell another person a boy too young to understand sex and attraction should not be put in a homosexuality skirt and encouraged to perform an erotic dance. It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people of these things. People should not get angry when these obvious truths are pointed out.

Pro-homosexuality people may say the rest of us encourage boys to be masculine and girls to be feminine, so it’s okay for them to encourage boys to be feminine and girls to be masculine. That isn’t true, but even if it were, there is a difference between cultivating a gender identity in a child and having him perform an erotic dance in front of cameras.

I was at Bass Pro Shop the other day, and I saw a display labeled “Classic Toy Guns.” A man who shows his son these toys and offers to buy one is encouraging him to be masculine without sexualizing him. For that matter, a misguided person who encourages a boy to try on a dress is encouraging him to be feminine without sexualizing him. Having a child perform an erotic dance in front of other people is very different, and that should be obvious to everyone.

Stories like this one make me wonder if God can vomit.

Any person who teaches children to do erotic dancing should be horsewhipped on national television. Words are an insufficient response. Children are not disposable. What happens to them matters. Treating them as props in a self-indulgent celebration of abnormal lust is not significantly different from taking erotic photos of them.

My dad’s law partner had a son, and he was murdered, raped, dismembered, and buried in concrete by a homosexual pedophile. To his parents, this boy was everything. To the pedophile, he was just a tool for generating pleasure, like a plastic doll or a sex toy.

The pedophile took him to his trailer, spent some time raping him, and then tried to return him, as though everything would be fine after that. He saw police cars outside the boy’s house and took him back to his trailer. When the boy got up and tried to get out of the room, the pedophile shot him in the back. Then he cut him in half and separated one leg from another, as though he were trying to make yard waste fit into trash bags that were too small. Then he buried him in concrete. The boy was just a set of objects to be gotten out of the way. He wasn’t a person to the pervert who murdered him.

Teaching a little boy to do an erotic performance isn’t as bad as rape and murder, but it springs from the same narcissistic mindset. People who use children as props to validate and satisfy their aberrant sexual desires are a lot like the thing that killed my friend’s son. The children don’t matter. They are just disposable accessories. When you get done with one, another one will be along soon.

I guarantee you, there are leftists all over the world who are pressuring their kids to be abnormal. A homosexual or “trans” child is a status symbol to them. A way of gaining favorable attention and the privilege of claiming to be a victim. In their desire to advance a trendy movement, they are denying children their value as human beings.

I have a friend who has a far-left liberal son. The son has a baby daughter. The other day, he sent my friend a photo of the baby dressed as a lesbian. She was wearing jeans and a grey shirt with a homosexual flag on it. She was about 8 months old. Who does that? Imagine a heterosexual dressing a baby in a way that suggested interest in normal sexual relations. Things like that only happen in the sick world of child beauty pageants.

The son and his wife get upset when my friend says the baby is pretty. They try to use ridiculous pronouns, but they slip up, because even the mind of a deluded sexual rebel feels some corrective pressure from common sense.

This world is finished. It will never recover. We can’t learn any more.

Look how we act. Thousands of homosexual men have been hit with a disease that causes pain that one compared to having a red-hot fork in his anus, the disease is transmitted almost entirely by orgies and other forms of promiscuity, and what has their response been? To blame Joe Biden for failing to get them a vaccine in two months. They aren’t taking accountability. They’re not even cutting down on the orgies, which would merely be a nod to logic, not religion. They certainly are not wondering if agonizing anal pain and giant pustules on the mouth and genitals might indicate that God exists and wants them to change.

The entire world, homosexual and straight, has been hit with a plague that will continue making us sick and killing us forever, and very few of us are asking ourselves if it has anything to do with displeasing God.

Those who do connect humanity’s misfortunes with rebellion are persecuted, ridiculed, ostracized, and economically starved. It’s just like the treatment the prophets received. When Jeremiah told the Judeans God was going to destroy their capital and their nation because of idolatry and wickedness, the high priest himself had him put in stocks. The whorish wife of the king of Israel tried to kill Elijah for serving God and trying to help his people. Modern Americans are no different.

It’s too bad America’s population is as young as it is. There aren’t enough people who remember what normal life is like. Most young people probably have no idea there was a great athlete named Bruce Jenner. They don’t know what it’s like not to see profanity on billboards and T-shirts or to have to leave the house to find pornography. They don’t remember civility. They have never lived in a time when pride was considered destructive and foolish. They can’t see the sudden, catastrophic change that has occurred.

We are done. There will be no big revival. The shortages won’t go away. Monkeypox and coronavirus will stay and be joined by worse diseases. Hatred will increase, and war will spread. We are too stupid to change, no matter what God does for us.

The Mission Even Joe Biden Realized was Wrong

I am still stuck in the USA, and my wife is still stuck in Zambia. Almost every day, I turn on the PC and expand and update our knowledge of European tourist visa policies, and it feels like we are swimming in oatmeal.

The Czech embassy has asked her to come in for a sort of interview, so that gives us hope. I also learned something unexpected: Austria is an easy visa. I would have thought the Austrians would have been strict, with their high standard of living and their similarities to the Germans, but evidently, they are not. If the Czechs won’t listen, Austria will be even better, because Austria is higher on my list of potential destinations.

Right now, I wonder if our trip will be postponed by the fortunes of another tourist: Nancy Pelosi. As you probably know, she is in Taiwan. The whole thing sounds bizarre to me. I think of Taiwan as a country that really hates leftism, and it’s all about industrialism and abuse of the environment; in short, my kind of place. Why would the queen of the Birkenstocks-and-socks crowd want to go?

She represents San Francisco, and that city has a big Chinatown. Are the San Franciscan Chinese pro-CCP or pro-freedom? I suppose it depends on where most of them come from. If they generally hate the CCP, it would make sense for Pelosi to kiss up to them with a Taiwan visit.

I used to live in Miami, and there were two kinds of Cubans there. Hard-right capitalists who had been tormented and driven out by leftists, and useless, hostile leftists who supported Castro yet came to the US because they loved money. Maybe California is the same way.

Pelosi says her trip shows our commitment to democracy blah blah blah, so I guess she must have a lot of anti-oppression Chinese constituents. I can’t think of any other reason why a pillar of the party of dictator-lovers would say a thing like that.

I read that a Chinese mouthpiece said it would be “okay” to shoot down her plane. It’s an interesting story. China says Taiwan is part of China, and Pelosi was scheduled to be accompanied by American fighter jets. Whether you support the CCP’s claim or not, sending fighters into a place another country claims puts that country in an awkward position. Imagine how things would go if Jackie Chan, the CCP-loving hypocrite actor, visited Hawaii with two uninvited Chinese fighters.

My understanding is that Chinese fighters are completely hopeless and in no way capable of challenging our fighters, so it’s not surprising that Pelosi arrived safely. Asians hate looking bad, and having American fighters knock their inferior machinery out of the sky would look very bad indeed.

Nonetheless, it seems like the whole business adds fuel to China’s fires of resentment, and they will not forget the humiliation.

My friend Mike is working with a Chinese company to get a product shipped here. I won’t say what the product is. He talks to the same Chinese lady all the time. She must be brave, because she told him tanks are being loaded on ships in the port city where she works. She brought it up because a conflict could affect the deal.

I wasn’t too happy when I heard that. I think this lady is telling the truth, since she has no reason to make such a story up. She must be taking a risk, talking about such things.

Why would a country put tanks on ships? To invade Taiwan, perhaps. On the other hand, China sells tanks to lots of countries. Presumably with 20%-off coupons and short warranties. Maybe the lady Mike talked to saw tanks on their way to Nigeria, and she sees tanks being loaded all the time. But if that’s the case, why did she think this instance was so extraordinary she had to discuss it with him?

I don’t know how China is going to get Taiwan back. Its economic relationship with the US is critical to its welfare. Losing Walmart would probably hurt more than losing Taiwan.

I don’t see how they can afford to start anything.

It Pays to Have Connections

I have some testimony to report.

My wife and I visited Ireland. We did a great deal of shopping for her. In addition, I brought her things from America. I got her expensive Keen hiking shoes, wool socks, MAC cosmetics, an insulated Carhartt jacket, a bunch of wigs, a costly Spyderco knife, and at least two pounds of homemade beef jerky. I can’t recall all the things we bought in Ireland or all the things I brought, but when she got ready to fly home, her checked bag felt like it contained a dead body. The value was in the thousands of dollars.

She used Aer Lingus, Air France, and Airlink South Africa to get home. Aer Lingus took her to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Air France took her to Johannesburg. Then she flew to Zambia on Airlink, which is called Airlink South Africa in South Africa and Airlink Zambia in Zambia.

We checked her bag in Dublin using the confirmation code we received when we bought her ticket from KLM, which is the same company as Air France. The claim ticket said the bag was going to Charles de Gaulle. We thought nothing of it, because routing bags was not our job. For all we knew, all bags on multiple flights had tags that only mentioned first destinations. The airlines knew where she was going, and we assumed they knew what they were doing. When I check bags, I never look at the tags. I rely on the billions of dollars’ worth of computers use to keep track of them.

Before she landed, I got an email from Air France, saying her bag had been delayed. It said we should file a report online. I forwarded the email to her. Her bag was not in Johannesburg when she arrived, so she went home.

I tried to file a report, and Air France’s site would not accept it. It is not possible to use Air France’s global site to report bag problems in South Africa. Air France had told us to do something impossible. When I called Air France, they said it wasn’t their problem. They said we had to deal with the last carrier in the chain, which isn’t really true. They were lying in order to avoid paying for the bag if they couldn’t find it.

Airlines steal luggage all the time. “Lose” is the wrong word. They don’t just lose it. They sell it. If Air France keeps your bag and refuses to file a report, they can sell it for a profit and save the cost of reimbursement. There are companies whose only business is buying “lost” bags and reselling them.

An Aer Lingus employee at its central baggage facility told me Air France was lying in order to avoid responsibility. Aer Lingus also told us Air France had flown the bag to Johannesburg two days after Rhodah’s flight, so we knew Air France had the bag.

When we called Johannesburg, they lied to us. They hung up on us. I got Skype so I could call them, and Skype banned me for life because I called so much. I would call, the system would hang up, and I would call again. Microsoft decided I was some kind of criminal, so there was no appeal.

Airlink’s Zambian employees filed what is known as a “courtesy report” solely for tracking purposes. This kind of report doesn’t include an admission of liability. I was able to access this report online for a while, but then the airlines–probably Air France–locked me out.

We had insurance through another company, Heymondo. They refused to compensate us without documentation from the airlines, which the airlines refused to give us.

Of course, Heymondo knows this happens, so their bag insurance is not very good. If an airline accepts responsibility, the airline pays a lot of money, and Heymondo may be off the hook. If the airline doesn’t accept responsibility, Heymondo doesn’t pay you anything. It looks like their coverage only works after the airline pays its share.

It’s a racket, all the way around.

Rhodah went to the Lusaka airport over and over. I spent a ton of money on calls to South Africa. In the end, nothing happened.

Rhodah had a vision during this time. She saw a strange woman wearing her Carhartt jacket.

We pray together every day. In prayer, I kept cursing the spirits that were trying to keep what belonged to Rhodah. I cursed the people involved with defeat. I felt as though God were telling me the bag would come back, but my faith was nothing to write home about.

I bought Rhodah a new jacket, knife, and shoes for our upcoming trip. I replaced the wool socks she had lost. I told her she should replace what she could in Zambia because we didn’t save much by stuffing my bag, and we could always lose things again.

Today Rhodah sent me this photo.

There is the bag, nearly 4 months after they stole it. Airlink brought it this morning after an unexpected call. The jacket is gone. The knife appears to be gone. That’s about $350 right there. The rest of the things seem to be present, so we have avoided a loss amounting to several thousand dollars. She has yet to comb through the bag carefully. Of course, they beat it up.

We should now be able to force the airlines to pay for her stolen items, and if they won’t, the insurer should have to pay. The fact that the bag came back 4 months late should be good evidence that there was a problem.

I took Rhodah a lot of homemade beef jerky, and it was still in the bag. She got so excited, she started eating it even though she was supposed to be fasting. I’m glad it was in there, because it took a lot of raw beef and time to make it.

I still have to take her the new jacket. I’m putting the new shoes in my closet. The ones she recovered should last years, so there is no point in taking new ones to her. I can’t return them to Amazon because I gave the box to Marvin, and he ate holes in it and pooped all over it. When the old shoes (which have about two weeks’ worth of mileage on them) wear out, she will have a fresh pair ready to go.

I still lost the money I spent on calls.

So who stole the jacket and knife?

I considered the possibility it was a South African or Zambian. South Africans are very violent, and they like to use knives on each other. Zambians are not very inclined to violence. I think most French bag thieves would find knives uninteresting, although there are a lot of criminals in France who come from Muslim countries and Africa, and a really good lock-blade knife would appeal to such people. There is a lot of Muslim knife crime in France.

Rhodah thinks it was a white woman. The wigs in the bag were worth something like $800, and the cosmetics were also expensive, but they were not touched. A white woman would not have been able to use them. A black woman would have wanted them. The jacket was small for a man, so the thief was probably female. Maybe our things were stolen by a Caucasian Muslim woman in France who thought her husband would like a good knife to carry in their dangerous Muslim neighborhood.

People think Muslims don’t steal. Wrong! They steal like crazy when they aren’t afraid of Muslim justice in the form of unneeded surgery. Islam teaches that Allah encourages stealing from non-Muslims. Somali pirates are Muslims.

I think it is somewhat unlikely that a Zambian woman would steal a highly distinctive American jacket and wear it in Zambia, especially in an airport where her coworkers knew a passenger had reported such a jacket lost. A thief in France or South Africa could be certain the victim would never see her with the jacket.

Today we prayed for the thieves and their families.

I have given Rhodah a lot of money for redundant purchases, so this event is a score for her.

When I found out the bag was back, I felt bad for not having more faith. Yahweh is the master of the tiny, weak spirit Muslims worship when they use the name “Allah.”

What happened is remarkable. When a bag is gone for almost 4 months, generally, you can consider it lost.

In other news, I kept hearing something strange last night during prayer: “Rejoice! Your day is here.” I’m grateful for the luggage, but somehow I don’t think God would say my day was here just because my wife got a lost bag back. Either he was talking about something else, or the bag is part of a bigger event, or I imagined everything.

If the words came from God, then whatever has happened is very good, because “rejoice” was in there.

I am ready to rejoice. My life is easy, as is my wife’s life, but I have been rejected and hindered since before I was born, and so has she. A lot of Christians go from acceptance, wealth, and successful marriages and families straight into Christianity. Many people who become Christians are doing very well before the change comes. I had a brief period of fitting in and doing well during and after law school, but other than that, I have always been an outsider, and I didn’t marry until I was old. I have been cheated out of one thing after another.

Yesterday I was thinking of prominent Christians who have been treated very badly, and I thought it was strange that things were going well for Rhodah and me. I wondered if it meant we were not good Christians. Then I thought about all the rotten things that had happened to me when I was younger. It may be that most of my suffering is behind me. I have heard that in prophecy a lot.

I always tell people two things: I wouldn’t go through my childhood again for anything, and anyone who wants to prolong his life on Earth is insane. I have been abused since before I was born, and I am tired of this place even though life is pleasant now. Maybe God’s exasperation with the people and spirits that have mistreated me is greater than his motivation to let me be tested further.

I believe we are also spared because we ask for it. Jesus said we should pray that God would not lead us into temptation and that he would deliver us from evil. Rhodah and I ask for those things every day. They must not be automatic, or we would not have been told to ask.

Satan is a bully, and he has favorites, like any bully. Some people get more of his abuse than others. Surely God will provide favor that outweighs Satan’s disfavor. And eventually we’ll get to see Satan thrown screaming into the fire, which will erase all the pleasure he got from hurting people.

We now have to contact Airlink and tell them our items are lost. I do not have high hopes, given the way we have been treated so far. After that, we will try Heymondo. It would be nice to have a few hundred dollars returned to us.

I am working on getting us into Czechia. I accidentally reserved a hotel room in a place where they are not allowed to install air conditioning. It’s a historic building. Forget that place. I don’t care if King Wenceslaus himself slept there. I’m not going to Europe to sweat.

I sent the Zambian embassy in Rome an email, detailing the way the Italian embassy in Lusaka lied to us and treated Rhodah rudely. They claim they are taking it seriously and following up. I hope so, because the nasty lady who caused our loss needs to be fired or corrected. Someone else should be handling visas. Maybe she can be reassigned to the copier room where she can hurl abuse at the guy who delivers toner.

The Zambian embassy helps Italians the way the Italian embassy is supposed to help Zambians, so they should be very angry to learn how we were treated. I don’t think I have to check when I opine that the Zambians in Rome are much more honest and kind than the Italian lady in Lusaka.

We prayed for this lady and her family, but that doesn’t mean she what she did should be ignored.

This time, I will tell Rhodah to be careful not to pack anything she is afraid to lose. We will photograph everything we pack, and we will check bag tags very carefully.