Absence Makes the Heart Grow Harder

I have to point out that there is nothing as great as living in the South. It’s like a big playground for adults. If you’ve ever watched Ducky Dynasty, you’ve seen exactly what I’m talking about. You may think that show is all fantasy, but the truth is that it shows exactly how Southerners live.

If you’re jealous, take heart. You can always move. My Uncle Jim was born a yankee, but he moved to Kentucky, and in a few years, he was totally healed.

Today I went to the heterosexual barber shop where I always get my hair cut. I wore a MAGA hat, and I thought I might stand out among the customers. A couple of guys who only spoke Spanish were in the chairs when I arrived, and they kept quiet. Soon afterward, another man arrived.

The barber said, “It’s Mr. Trump himself.”

The man was about 5’11” tall and weighed maybe 135 pounds. He was wearing a MAGA visor, the sides of his head were cut close, and on top of his head, he had a puff of orange hair that looked like a pom-pom.

Best of all, he had a Bush tall boy in his hand. And no intention of getting a haircut.

I told the barber I didn’t realize alcohol was allowed, and he asked me if I wanted a beer from the fridge. I turned it down, but the gesture warmed my heart.

I could not drink; I had to drive to Harbor Freight. Also…Busch.

Mr. Trump told us about the rallies he had been to. He said there was one in The Villages–the giant retirement complex to the south of me–drew over 10,000 golf carts. I don’t recall the exact figure. Golf carts! How Southern is that? And of course, he had a story about an idiot who grabbed someone’s Trump flag and ripped it. The perpetrator ran off in a pickup, but his triumphant escape was cut short by a traffic accident. Remarkably, no one in the shop gloated.

Only one person–another quiet individual who could have been Mexican–wore a mask. The rest of us criticized coronavirus hysteria and talked about the horrors of a Biden administration. The barber said if they tried to lock the shop down or pull any more shenanigans, he would just go to jail instead of cooperating. Of course, jail is one of the few places in this county where you’re highly likely to catch the bug.

If Biden wins and the rapture doesn’t come this year, at least I picked a great place to die.

By the way, Harbor Freight has a 15% coupon on tool chests. That’s pretty rare. It expires tomorrow, so strap one to your golf cart and take it home.

Scratch That off the List

Three projects are behind me now: my welding cart, smoked ribs, and mac and cheese. Well, four projects if you include my new kitchen blackboard. I put a list of things to do on it. “Paint cart” is at the top.

The ribs are fine, except I think I should decrease the salt and avoid using too much rub. The mac and cheese was gritty in spite of using starch instead of flour. I’m melting the cheese too fast. The cart is just about perfect. Here it is.

I was going to wait for the paint to cure completely before assembling it, but it looked like it would hold up, so I moved ahead.

I already put two welders on it. I need to get a bigger C25 bottle. Perhaps tomorrow.

Once I get things settled, I’ll decide where to put cord hangers.

I hate to sell my Harbor Freight Vulcan cart. It’s a great tool. I just don’t need it any more. My Eastwood carts are okay, but they’re cumbersome, and they always seem to be in the way.

I plan to build a second cart as soon as possible. The workshop has to be tamed, and welding carts are central to the plan. Today after I finished this one, I experienced a taste of my future. Some Vise Grips and other tools were lying around in the way, and I grabbed them and put them in the cart’s drawers. It felt wonderful. I couldn’t see them any more.

I should probably be building a bulletproof cart with rifle ports so I can welcome uninvited Biden supporters (undocumented guests) in November and December, but maybe they’ll be too busy killing Republicans and running over cops in their own cities to visit me out here.

I wore my MAGA hat while running errands today and yesterday, and it seemed like I couldn’t go to a single store without being accosted and congratulated on my good taste. A guy who was rounding up grocery carts told me we had to keep praying.

I have 48 cans of tuna, my own well, and enough ammunition to kill a small city. I hope the rapture comes in December. If not, I think I will still make it through January.

Jim Beam and Corn Starch Trial #1

Our nation is hurtling downward toward chaos, BLM is trying to kill cops in Philadelphia, Christians are predicting a 2020 rapture, and what am I doing? I’m smoking ribs.

I’ve been eating cheeseburgers for lunch. There is nothing wrong with that, but I don’t want to eat a big cheeseburger every day from now on. When I got my new smoker, one of my hopes was that I would be able to increase my protein and fat consumption in style, while–I told myself–reducing refined carbs. Ribs and many other smoked meats aren’t served with buns.

I’m going to try to smoke once a week. That will cover me for three dinners.

Yesterday, I went to Walmart to buy motor oil. You should know about Walmart’s oil prices. Advance Auto Parts had a sale on oil, and it would have cost me about $40 to do one change, with a dubious filter included. I bought 6 quarts of synthetic oil at Walmart yesterday for about $16, and I bought a Fram Titanium filter at Advance. My total cost will be around $28. Not bad.

Anyway, Walmart’s price for St. Louis ribs was pretty good, so I picked some up. They’re smoking right now.

I wanted to marinate them, but I don’t like wasting marinade. I like to use liquor, so a pint costs a lot. Today I tried a new strategy.

Ribs come in shrink wrap. I have giant cattle hypodermics. I made a mixture of Jim Beam, sugar, and salt, and I shot it into the rib package through a tiny hole. I tried to cover the hole with tape, but it wouldn’t stick. I should have tried a waterproof bandage. Anyhow, it was not a problem. The plastic confined the marinade close to the ribs, and none spilled. I was able to rotate the package and distribute the marinade, and I put the package on the counter, meat side down, for half an hour.

It worked really well.

I used around half a cup of liquor. I can’t think of a better use for it. I wish it wasn’t a brand promoted by Mila Kunis, a well-known proponent of the murder of unborn babies, but it will do the job.

Last year, Jim Beam (part of a Japanese company) suffered a huge warehouse fire and lost 45,000 barrels of liquor. They told the press the lost whiskey was “young.” Eerie.

Smoking meat with a rub is not hard at all. I make my rub, put the meat on a towel, apply the rub, put the meat in the smoker, shake the towel out in the yard, and put the towel in the laundry. No mess to speak of.

As for my carb intentions, things are not going as well. The other day, I was starving after a long fabricating session, and I decided to throw some old stuff together and make macaroni and cheese. I got to thinking about it, and I wondered if putting flour in the sauce was a good idea. Flour doesn’t convert completely into a gel. Even in gravy or a roux, it’s slightly gritty. It occurred to me that starch might work better.

I Googled around, and sure enough, people do use starch. I’m going to try it today. I’m also going to use a block of cheese instead of shredded, because shredded cheese has tiny cellulose fibers in it.

The trick to making ribs part of a healthy diet is to stop thinking of them as special-occasion food. Ordinarily, when I eat ribs, it’s a big deal, so I want Texas toast, beans, mac and cheese, and dessert. The key is to think of ribs as just another protein.

Clearly, I have not met that goal yet.

The Smokin-It smoker is a joy to use. Highly recommended.

Workshop-Destroying Decluttering Project Nears Completion

The welding cart project is 95% done.

Today I welded some upright tubes on the tank platform. I thought they would be useful for holding little bars for hanging cables and cords. I haven’t welded any bars to them because I want to put the machines on the cart first. I thought that would give me a better idea where the bars should go.

When I was done welding, I separated the project from the chest and shot truck bed paint on it. It’s drying now.

Tomorrow, I plan to bolt the project onto the cart, put the machines on it, stuff it with welding tools, and clean up the shop. Then I’ll make decisions about welding hangers on it. I’ll have to grind some of the paint off in order to weld them on, but I thought it was better to do some of the paint over than to have to cut bars off and move them. That would require removing paint anyway.

I managed to flash myself while doing a tack weld. I had reading glasses on. Presumably, they absorbed some of the UV rays, but how much? I’ve been praying and using my supernatural tools to prevent pain and discomfort from developing.

It’s not a big deal. Every welder flashes himself sooner or later. Flash injuries are fleeting. Still, it’s frustrating to forget something so important.

There have been times in the past when I thought I had flashed myself, but I never had any pain later, so I was wrong, I was healed by God, or I didn’t get enough radiation to cause problems.

Once this thing is up and running, I’ll use it to make a second one for two other machines. Two new tool chests will really free up storage space.

So Close

I’m here to give an update on my welding cart project.

As usual, I am spending a lot of time trying to get materials and tools, and I am also making errors and changing the design. As a result, I’m not finished yet.

The cart will have an upper restraint for the bottles, and it will be steel plate. It will have 4 holes in it for TIG wire tubes. Today I drilled the holes.

I decided to make 2″ holes. I can’t see myself using tubes any bigger than that. I did not have a 2″ hole saw, and my hole saw arbor was lodged pretty well in a 2-1/4″ saw. I would guess it took me 20 minutes to get the arbor out, and then when I went to Tractor Supply to buy the saw their website said was in stock, I got skunked. Had to drive to Ace Hardware, miles away. I’m glad I did, because they had a saw with carbide teeth.

I measured carefully and started drilling holes. Then I looked at the finished work. I had drilled one hole about 1/4″ away from its intended location. It’s not easy getting a hole saw pilot drill into a small pilot hole, and apparently, I missed.

I wasn’t having it. I took a disk of steel I had just cut out of the plate, welded it back in, and ground it fair. Then I drilled a new hole. I guess I added 45 minutes of work to my day. Polishing the holes up took a while.

After that, nothing important went bad.

I made two tabs to attach the restraint to the cart. I drilled holes in them and attached them to the cart. Then I held the restraint in place and marked the locations of the tabs. After that, I had to weld them to the restraint.

With that done, I needed something to prevent the bottoms of my TIG tubes from sliding around. I bent a piece of flat bar on the finger brake, but I could only put one bend in it, and I needed a U-shaped bar with two bends. The required bends were too close together to work on the brake. My solution was to heat the bar with a torch and bend it in a vise.

I welded it to the bottle platform, and it came out pretty well.

I still needed two restraints for the outboard tubes. I cut 1″ pieces off a length of angle iron, cleaned them up and welded them down. Two of them are only tacked. It’s not possible to get behind them to weld, so I’m waiting until I take the platform off to weld them.

What remains? I plan to drill four holes in the upper restraint. I’ll use false links to attach chains to two of the holes, and I’ll use snap links to attach them to the other two. Then I’ll put tabs on the bottle platform to keep the bottles from wandering.

After that, I have to think about brackets to hold cables and cords. I may paint the existing work and finish it first. Once I’ve used the cart, I’ll have a better idea how to handle the cable brackets.

That’s about it. It’s going to work. The next cart should go much, much faster. I’ll know exactly what to buy, and I’ll have it on hand. I’ll also have a finished plan.

My workshop is in chaos. There are chips and filings all over the floor, along with cardboard from the tool chest box and bits of fallen metal. Tools are all over the place. I can’t wait to start shoving things into the new chest.

I may put the Titanium welder and the plasma cutter on this cart. I was thinking of putting the AC/DC TIG on it, next to the Titanium, but I seem to use plasma a lot, and I want this to be my number one cart. I don’t need two bottles for a welder and a plasma cutter, though. Maybe I can use the current shelf on the next cart and make a different one for this one. I could set it up for one bottle and use the extra space for a bracket to hold the plasma cutter’s air filter.

Anyway, success is fun.

Project Revived by Dose of Plasma

I got myself some more metal today, and I went back to work on the welding cart project.

This project should take a day, plus time for paint to dry. I had problems locating bolts, however, and then I decided to make the job harder than it had to be. I could have made a very simple top bracket for the bottles, but I’m making a fairly nice one that will hold TIG wire.

I had to make a plate with round recesses for the tanks. I didn’t HAVE to; I could have put something simple together from flat bar, or I could have made square or V-shaped recesses. But I wanted round recesses. That meant cutting steel.

I decided to use plasma. That meant I would need something to guide the torch. I thought a lot, and then I remembered I had several large cans of pizza sauce. They’re just the right size. If you press a torch against one and go around it, you get a cut just right for a 7″ bottle.

I won’t go into the complicated workholding solution needed to make this work, but I found a way to fasten the metal down, and I made the cuts. I left a little steel uncut to hold the plate together. Then I cut out the unnecessary steel and used the flap wheel to clean everything up.

Here is the result.

Should be perfect. I just need to weld brackets to it to attach it to the cart. I also have to drill the TIG-wire holds.

It should take half an hour to weld brackets on it, and if I don’t blow it, cutting the holes should be another 15 minutes. Then I have to add chain attachments and paint.

It’s basically done. Not hard at all.

Some carts like this have widened wheelbases under the bottles. I don’t see a need for that. You could knock it over with a car if you tried, but then you could also do that if it were 6″ wider. Short of a vehicle collision, nothing is going to topple it.

If I decide I’m wrong, adding a little steel and moving casters will be easy.

I can’t wait to get finished. The more I work on this thing, the more I realize I need it. There is clutter all over my welding table. I can barely see it. Most of that junk would be inside the tool chest if it were operational.

As soon as this thing comes together, I plan to fill it up and move one empty cart outdoors. Then I plan to get another tool chest and do the job over again, for my other MIG and my plasma cutter. Then I can sweep about 50 pounds of chips, steel filings, and grit off the workshop floor.

After that, I may actually buy a real welding table.

I’m in a frustrating position. The shop is a mess because I’m doing a project, but the finished project is needed to conquer the mess.

The pizza sauce can was not harmed. Thank God for that. That stuff is gold.

I Have a Panic HOUSE

Today I am having my roof fixed. I’m paying $1000 for something I could probably do myself, but I am not interested in rolling off the roof and becoming a permanent yard ornament. I’m also not excited about having my ceiling fall because I didn’t know how to do roofing correctly.

I wanted to put blinds in my former dining room before the roofers showed up. Why? Because it’s a workshop/gun room now. I have a lot of ammunition in that room, and anyone looking into a window would know what it was. These days, ammunition is like gold. You can buy it, but if it’s a popular caliber, you’re likely to shell out three times what it cost last year.

Roofing companies are a top resource for released prison inmates. If you can’t get a job anywhere else, a roofer will probably take a chance on you. Good information to have, if you’re a homeowner or, perhaps more importantly, a homeowner’s wife or daughter. The thought of an electrician or plumber seeing my stuff doesn’t concern me all that much. Roofers are different.

Sadly, I signed a contract before buying blinds, and I didn’t think I had time to get them installed before the roofers showed up, so I didn’t do anything.

Today the roofers showed up without warning, so moving my ammunition out of sight, one container at a time, was not an option. Someone was looking out for me, however, because I had my ammunition loaded on a wheeled shelf unit. I rolled it into a hallway, and I was all set.

I should have bought these shelves a lot sooner. I cheaped out at first. I bought plastic shelves from Home Depot. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. They run $40 each, and when you overload them, they bend. Mine bent. The shelves I have now are fancy chromed Seville Classics jobs from Amazon. I have two units. One is mostly dedicated to ammunition. The other is for reloading components and other items. I have hundreds of pounds on the first one, and it’s not sagging at all. Wish I could say the same of myself.

I moved one of my plastic shelves to the laundry room, where it has become my paranoia storage area.

I went to Walmart yesterday for dishwashing powder and salt, and I bought a big, heavy bag of jasmine rice. I also picked up 4 pounds of great northern beans, canned salmon, two large jars of Skippy, and 6 pounds of pasta. This is a lot of food. One person could probably go a month on it. I also have 6 gallon cans of Stanislaus pizza sauce.

You would think a long-term food supply would take up a lot of room and cost a lot of money, but you would be wrong. My shelf unit is maybe 25% full. My total bill at Walmart was around $80, and I bought a lot of things unrelated to preparation.

I plan to add more rice and maybe some different beans. I have 48 cans of tuna on the way. I want to dry apples. When you’re from Appalachia, not having dried apples is uncivilized. Ordinarily, drying apples is a pain because of bugs, but I have a screened-in pool, so no flies.

I checked into generators. Not a great option, unfortunately. I would have to spend close to $20,000 to get a whole-house rig that would cost me $5 per hour to run. That’s about $3600 per month for electricity, assuming diesel would even be available, and the price would go way up in a crisis. Unless you have your own natural gas well or hydroelectric plant, I think you can pretty well expect to do without power in a hard core prepper scenario. Maybe you can run your laptop off solar panels.

I wonder if people are buying manual pumps for their wells.

There is zero fresh water near me, unless you count swampy ponds.

I suppose I’ll have to hope we still have power during the civil war.

The Internet says my power company uses a mix of coal, uranium, “biomass,” and natural gas. What is “biomass”? Chicken manure, maybe? Is there anything chicken manure can’t do?

Let’s see. Coal comes from the South, so that may still be available after the North turns on us. Natural gas comes from the South. I would guess that biomass comes from the South. Would we still have nuclear power? The plants are in-state, but would we be able to get uranium? Maybe the Chinese would sell it to us on Alibaba or Banggood.

There is a lot of oil in Jesus-friendly areas, and there are also many refineries. That’s good.

If you would like to dry your own apples, I have the ultimate tip. Spend $25 on an apple peeler. They really work. You can core, peel, and slice an apple in 5 seconds. I should go get apples today. You can dry them by setting them on a window screen.

I don’t like factory dried apples, because they put a chemical on them to keep them white. It kills the flavor. To get the real flavor of dried apples, you need to avoid that stuff. Real dried apples taste like apple butter. Factory apples taste like air.

The future is uncertain. Are we looking at a few weeks of pro-Biden terrorist riots followed by a crackdown and resumed calm, will we have a full-blown civil war complete with drawn borders, or will we simply move into an Israel-type situation in which terrorism is a normal part of daily life? Actually, we’re already in that situation, except that the acts of terrorism committed here haven’t been as serious as the ones Israelis face.

A full-blown civil war with new borders would be a catastrophe, because leftists would freeze or simply steal the bank and security accounts of conservatives and centrists, and they would also cut off our access to phones, the Internet, and credit. Leftists would probably be massacred routinely due to their inferior capacity for violence. They’re pretty good at throwing bottles of pee, but they would do poorly while trying to familiarize themselves with firearms, camouflage, tactics, and so on. Jesus people have been shooting, hunting, and serving in the military for centuries.

My hat is off to people who think they can do well after a total breakdown of society. It would be very hard to prepare sufficiently well to guarantee that. I figure it’s realistic to prepare for a bad month or two, tops, and I see no hope of providing my own electricity over long periods. I will have to bank on a future in which companies in my area adapt and continue producing power.

Should I cut some firewood? Arrgh. Anything but that.

In my area, I would probably need wood for maybe 45 days. That’s a lot of wood. To prepare it, I would need to create huge snake-infested piles which would eventually attract termites and rot.

I have a lot of downed wood already. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens. I can cut it into firewood if I have to. I was going to burn it, but maybe it has value.

In any case, there is no possibility my ammunition will get the roofers excited today.

Harbor Freight Makes Dreams Come True

A major welding project crossed a big threshold today. I finished principal welding on my new welding cart. I’m making it from a Harbor Freight tool chest.

This job should have taken one day, but the chest takes metric fasteners, and I’m using the original threaded holes, so I can’t jam standard bolts in. It took me about 4 days to round up 16 bolts. I had to go to three different stores. Metric may be here to stay, but Home Depot and Lowe’s haven’t gotten the news.

I’m planning to make a second cart, so I’ll need 16 more bolts. I ordered a box from Ebay, so when I get started on the second cart, I’ll have bolts waiting.

Yesterday, I welded the cylinder platform to the two tubes that form the new base, and today I welded two casters to the tubes and painted the area around the casters with truck bed coating. Why didn’t I wait until the project was done to do the painting? I could have painted everything at once. The reason is that I wanted to get the welding over with, and I need to have the cart assembled, on casters, before I can do that. I need to weld tabs on the platform to keep the bottles from moving, and I want to put bottles on the cart when I do this, to see exactly where the tabs should go.

I put everything I have together. Feast your eyes.

That platform is 11-gauge steel, which is slightly under 1/8″ thick. I was concerned it might flex if I put two bottles on it, because there is no transverse member to make it rigid. It sits on two 1″ x 3″ tubes. I got on it and jumped up and down, and it didn’t move at all. I guess it’s okay.

Why did I put the casters way out behind the bottles? On the one hand, it increases the turning radius, which is bad. On the other, it gives 200 pounds of bottles direct support instead of hanging them out on a steel diving board. I suppose a cantilevered platform would work, but I didn’t like the idea. If I change my mind, moving the casters will be a one-hour job. Maybe half of that.

I still have to create an upper bracket to restrain the bottles. There are two bolt holes made for a handle, and I would like to use them because they’re threaded. The problem is that they’re so high, I would have to make a pretty strange bracket to hold an 80 cubic foot tank. I may get rid of the small tank and buy another 125. You can never have too much gas. Maybe I could trade the 80 for something exotic, if I can think of a gas I might use on rare occasions. Or maybe Airgas would give me an allowance for it if I buy a new bottle.

My tendency is to buy small tools and upgrade later. I’m always afraid to buy things I can’t lift, and so on. Maybe I should never have bought a small C25 tank.

Once the bracket is done, I have to make some doodads to hold cables, and I have to attach them to the tool chest. I hate to drill holes in it, but I will. After that, I just have to paint and move everything to the new cart.

This will be great. Two machines will fit on it, and they’ll sit at eye level, where they should be. A great deal of welding paraphernalia will go in the drawers, so I won’t keep leaving junk on my table. I hope. It will be a big cart, but it will hold way more stuff than my old carts, and they have about the same footprint.

It’s always great to reach the point where you know a project will work, especially when you’ve sunk hundreds of dollars into it.

Trump Milkshake: Existential Threat to Mankind

Two huge stories are in the news today. It’s hard to decide which one to write about.

For a long time, I felt God was telling me to avoid looking at the news. That was pleasant. Now I feel he is telling me I have to look at it. What’s the difference? I believe the difference is in me. It used to be harder for me to look at the news without being provoked or discouraged. Now, with better supernatural tools, I am more stable, so the news is not as dangerous to me.

“Dangerous”? I must be a Bible-thumping climate-change-denying mask hater! How can information be dangerous? Actually, it can. The informative value can be exceeded by the damage it does to your heart. This is one reason why God tells us to be separated from the world. Merely witnessing what happens around us can tempt us in ways that can be destructive. You have to limit your exposure to the cursed, God-rejecting world in order to avoid being overwhelmed.

Here are the big stories: President Trump has proven his unfitness for his job by ordering a milkshake, and Pat Robertson has “prophesied” regarding the near future of America.

I know it’s hard to believe that a grown man with responsibilities would order a milkshake, but Trump did it. He was in a security briefing, and he called a waiter into the room and offered everyone a malt. We can’t say for sure, but there is no proof he didn’t tell the waiter to hold the nuclear button while he tweeted. There is no proof it didn’t happen, so we can assume it did. When will this man be stopped?

“Journalists” are enraged. They are offended, so they must be right. The theory is that our elected and appointed officials would continue spewing dangerous information while a waiter was in the room, because, well, THERE IS NO PROOF THEY DIDN’T. There is also no proof they or the waiter renounced white supremacy.

I guess I’m a feckless optimist, but I can’t help thinking top officials would stop blurting out sensitive intelligence while ordering milkshakes from a person with a low security clearance.

If hackers take out our missile silos as a result of Trump’s milkshake gaffe, it will just be more proof Trump isn’t groovy. Bush II wasn’t groovy, and now we have another non-groovy chief executive, and I just can’t stand it one more second.

I should rejoin Tiktok just so I can get in the car and do a meltdown video.

As for Pat Robertson, he says he “thinks” Trump will be reelected. Prophets don’t “think” things will happen. God tells them things will happen. God will never tell you he “thinks” this or that, because God knows. There are no opinions in heaven. There are only facts no one there questions.

Anyway, Robertson says there will be post-election bloodshed followed by a 5-year period of peace in which people will serve God and pray together and so on. He says God will resolve people’s disputes. Then there will be a big war, and I believe he said the second coming would come after that.

Can’t buy it. It doesn’t seem to line up with the Bible or the dreams and impressions charismatics have been having this year. I have not seen a reference to a 5-year Messianic age in which the world gets straightened out. The Bible says there will be a millennium of peace, not 5 years. I don’t know where Robertson got his timeline.

I keep saying I have a very strong impression that the rapture will be this year. I don’t call it a prophecy. I haven’t found any ways in which the impression conflicts with the Bible, and it makes sense in too many ways to list. But I make mistakes, and God didn’t hand me a scroll with a detailed prediction on it.

I “think” I’m right. I’m just about sure Robertson is wrong.

He claims to receive information from God about people’s problems, and viewers have called in and said they’ve been healed while watching him. They idea is that God told Robertson these things but did not attach names to them, and when Robertson says “someone” has this or that problem, people who are watching realize he’s talking about them. There is considerable evidence that this actually happens, and I don’t get supernatural information about strangers’ medical issues, so who is more likely to be right about the future?

Just putting it out there.

I’ve decided to buy a little food. You never know. I ordered 48 cans of tuna at a great price, and I’m going to load up on dried beans and rice. I plan to lay in some canned salmon. Canned fish lasts forever, and beans and rice are good for at least a couple of years. Maybe I should get a big jar of compensational multivitamins, too. For maybe $150, I can set myself up with food for several months. I’m not very excited about it. I don’t want to be here to eat it! I heard someone is throwing a big party in heaven, and the food there should be a lot better.

I should dehydrate apples. Imagine life on beans and rice without anything to help push them through the colon. Apples could save my life.

My ammunition situation is good. Example: a couple of days ago I found 1000 rounds of 9mm bullets I had forgotten I had. I need to put them in cartridges.

I bought lead semiwadcutters and started loading them, but I found the overall lengths were not consistent. People said it might be that compressed air in the cases was pushing the bullets back up. The recommended answer: coated bullets. I bought more semiwadcutters coated with plastic. I don’t recall how plastic solves the problem, but I’ll try it. I believe the coated bullets have less grease on them. The uncoated ones left lube all over my dies, to the point where I was afraid it interfered with reloading.

I have no desire to be part of the upcoming civil war, but I like to shoot, and I don’t want to be deprived. And maybe someone who is part of the war will need my ammo.

I want to be ready for whatever happens. These days, I battle demons, literally. I evict them from my presence several times a week. I tell them I will not host them. It’s a very strange thing. After going after a few spirits–let’s say murder, the spirit of antichrist, and laziness–I’ll start to fall asleep. It happens over and over. I think this is because hostile spirits speak into your mind all the time. When you drive them out, you get some quiet.

It’s a very real thing. Everyone has demons. Jesus had Satan himself and had to drive him off more than once. It’s strange that Christians think they can’t have demons, but Jesus could have Satan. Are we better than Jesus?

I now pray for God to bring the rapture ASAP. The more I think about it, the more I realize humanity has had ample chances. The Bible says stripes are for the fool’s back. Some people can’t take gentle hints. Maybe the tribulation will bring a bigger harvest than the rapture. Maybe billions of scoffers will yield once they’ve suffered enough. God has been kind, and things have gotten worse, so maybe it’s time to put away the carrot and bring out the stick.

The thought of being in the lifeboat and encouraging the captain to paddle away from people floating in the water is a little scary, but look at what the world has become.

I don’t want to be here when I can be fined or jailed for refusing to call a man a woman. I don’t want to live to see wealth taxes and “reparations”-based land confiscations. I don’t want to see Christian and Jewish families massacred and raped. I’m very content with the evil I’ve already seen. It will suffice.

When the Tiktok car-meltdown people are in charge, it’s time to be somewhere else. Ask a Cuban or a white South African.

Today I plan to work on my new welding cart. I have to do something while the world burns, and I can’t play the fiddle.

Masked Fascist Strikes Again

The election is over for me. I just voted.

Here’s a shocker that will have people chattering for weeks: I voted for Donald Trump. I guess this means Keith Olbermann’s fans will be marching up the driveway soon to kill me. Hopefully, they will use the gate. It would make a nice choke point.

I voted at a public library. A northerner was standing out front with a Biden sign, yelling, “Thank you for voting.” I don’t know if he lives here or what. His accent and his sign made him stand out like a bar of soap at an Antifa rally.

I took a couple of face diapers with me. I have cloth masks made from cotton, and I have a stretch camo gaiter for confusing squirrels. Until recently, they were telling us gaiters actually made the spread of disease worse. Then about three days later they said it was not true. Let’s be honest: none of these things work to any significant degree. I just wear them to shut people up.

There was a sign out front saying face coverings were “encouraged.” I love this county. The election worker minding the line was not wearing a mask. The line was outdoors, so even if masks worked, they would have been unnecessary, but most people wore them anyway.

Before I walked to the voting place, I removed my gun and knife from my pockets, and I switched my MAGA hat for one from Rural King. I figured I might get in trouble for “electioneering” if I wore the hat. Then I saw an old guy walk out of the building wearing a Trump hat. Again, I love this county.

I did my job. I voted for Trump, against a minimum wage hike, for a law making it harder for referendums to change the constitution, and for a bunch of Republican-appointed judges. Now that my part of the work is done, the only question is whether my vote will make it to Tallahassee.

Two people behind me said they had had their Trump signs stolen. Anyone who steals an election sign should do 5 years in a federal prison. It’s not a trivial thing, attacking another person’s right to express his political opinions during an election season.

The intimidation and censorship are rising to startling levels. Antifers attacked a few pro-free-speech activists in San Francisco a few days back, and one of them punched the leader from behind and knocked two of his teeth out. He wasn’t rioting. He was just walking. The activists were not promoting Trump. They were just protesting censorship from the tech giants. Predictably, Twitter banned the victim.

Oddly, the persecution gives me hope. People are reluctant to express their support for Trump publicly, so there are many hidden Trump supporters who won’t wear a hat, put up a sign, or respond to a poll. I live in an extremely conservative county, and there is no way I’d put a Trump sticker on my car. Getting the car repainted would cost a fortune. Most Trump supporters live in areas where they have to be careful not to even say his name. Obviously, they will be considerably more cautious than I am…until they vote.

Berserk leftists have put themselves in a funny position. By censoring, stealing, firing, banning, and committing acts of violence, they have turned a lot of people into Trump supporters, and they have also driven many people to conceal their support. Inevitably, the Trump vote will be bigger than leftists expect, and that is largely because of their Krystallnacht tactics. They are going to get a surprise that will make them even more berserk, and it’s 100% their fault.

Does that mean Trump will win? If I had to guess, I would say he will. I pray about it a lot, and I curse the Biden campaign all the time. I keep feeling God is telling me Biden will lose. But I could be wrong.

We really are going to have a civil war of sorts, and something is needed to set it off. A Trump loss would not be a very good blasting cap. A Biden loss would be definitely work. It appears the red horseman of the apocalypse is about to burst out of the gate, and there have to be severe temptations to make his mission work, so it seems to me a Biden loss is likely. It would fit in perfectly with Trump’s original victory and the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

Conservatives believe in laws, and we just do not riot. Rioting conservatives are as rare as Antifers who will make it in the rapture. I don’t think a Biden victory could throw the nation into a state of war, because Republicans would just stay home. A Trump victory would likely send armed terrorist mobs into residential areas.

My best guess for the future is that Trump will win, and leftists will start a war. It just makes sense.

Who will win? Well, we have all the land, food, and oil, and we own most of the coasts. We are much better fighters, and we have lots of weapons. Military people will generally side with us. On the other hand, we may not have the Internet, cell phones, credit cards, or bank accounts. Leftists can probably take those things away. What’s worse? Being effeminate and whiny and not having weapons or crops, or being poor and deprived of the ability to communicate?

What can a conservative do if his leftist New-York-based bank confiscates his accounts? What can we do if our cell phones and Internet connections stop working? I wonder.

I hope I’m not here to see it.

The Revelation says the church of Philadelphia will be spared the season of temptation. It’s not a literal reference to an ancient church. It’s a figurative reference to those Christians who will be close to God when the rapture comes. The season of temptation is the tribulation. The whole thing points to a pre-tribulation rapture.

The unfairness, dishonesty, verbal abuse, physical violence, workplace sabotage, and various crimes of the left are infuriating. They are provocations no one should have to endure in America, and they will get worse. Provocation is temptation. There is no good reason for God to keep subjecting faithful sons and daughters to severe temptation, after they’ve already shown they are firmly on his side. Hypocrites, on the other hand, still need purification by fire.

I have good news for people who think Christians will be here during the tribulation. They’re right. Many Christians will not make it when God calls us home. Their hypocrisy will tie them to the earth, like a millstone pulling a man down to the bottom of the ocean.

I want to be gone when things get worse. How can I secure a place for myself? Jesus says he wants to find people serving meat in his house. “Meat” means the deep truths of God; the things you will never hear from cowards like Joel Osteen, who don’t have the guts to upset people. Jesus’ house is the people who belong to him. He must want us to give strong teaching to Christians. I hope blogging qualifies as serving meat. I certainly do not have any stadium crowds to address.

Time to sit back and watch things unfold.

Pork, Guns, and God

I barely survived the weekend.

Two friends of mine drove up on Saturday morning, and they left yesterday. I’ll call them Diamond and Silk. They’re sisters. Diamond is a nurse, and Silk is a newly-minted prosecutor for a Florida county. They’re Haitian. I met them when I was going to Trinity Church in Miami.

We made a deal. I would fix ribs, and they would do all the cleaning up.

I bought two racks of spare ribs, which were twice what we needed. I found a Youtube video on turning spare ribs into St. Louis ribs, and I followed the directions.

Spare ribs have little ribby bits on one side, and the other side is a large piece of boneless meat. When you cut that piece off, you get a piece of meat you can smoke, along with a rack of ribs that are somewhat like baby backs, only fattier and more delicious.

I didn’t really know what was inside spare ribs. I never bothered to figure out where the bones stopped. I was afraid I would need a saw to make St. Louis ribs. Not so. You just cut where the ribs join the cartilage which connects to the sternum. I’ll post a very helpful video.

I think this is a great move. It gives you small ribs that are easy to handle, plus a large piece of meat which is good in its own right.

I smoked the ribs with 2.5 ounces of hickory and my own rub, after hosing them down with Jim Beam. They were spectacular. It should have been illegal to put sauce on them. But we did.

I also made Texas toast. I made a loaf of sweet white bread with butter and sugar in the dough, and then I dipped slices in strained garlic butter (no garlic pieces) and browned them in a skillet. Unbelievable.

I also prepared a blueberry cheesecake. I’m glad I don’t have any of it left, because this stuff is just too good to not eat.

We also had corn on the cob and barbecue beans with smoked sausage bits.

I think I can safely say that no one in Florida ate better than we did this weekend.

We talked a lot about the rapture and the tribulation. Diamond is taking it seriously. She has bags of rice and beans. She had a dream about moving to Tennessee, even though it’s not what you would call her natural habitat. Silk is not all that aware, so she is still a Democrat. She’s baptized with the Holy Spirit, though, and I have confidence she’ll come around if she speaks in tongues as much as she should. Nothing turns people conservative like prayer in tongues.

We got to shoot a little. I have two arrays of steel targets, welded together by yours truly. Diamond has a Ruger EC9, which is a plastic compact 9mm, and Silk has a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard in .380. Unfortunately, they are not integrated tightly into the 2A cult, so they were not ready for the ammo shortage. Diamond had one 50-round bag of ammo, and Silk had nothing.

Luckily for them, they know a guy who was watching the wind. I have .22 ammo to burn, so I used some of it to teach them to shoot. We used an SW22 and a Colt Woodsman. At first, they were shooting all over the place, but by the end of the day, they were hitting the steel most of the time at 7 yards. I also let them shoot my bright stainless Colt 1911 in .38 Super.

Now maybe there is a chance they’ll be able to defend themselves instead of pulling a Pulp Fiction scene and filling walls with wasted lead.

Watching over Diamond and Silk is like looking after 6 hyperactive kids in a mall, so I was pretty worn out when they left.

Today, I got back to my routine.

I had ordered 5 pounds of smokeless powder, and Fedex failed to show up when they promised. To take delivery, I had to sign in person, so I had to either sit at the house and wait or go to the Fedex hub and pick up the package. I was afraid they would send the powder back, and in these times, you can’t afford to lose any powder. Today I went to the hub and picked up the box.

I also went to get my new .22 pistol. It’s a Browning Challenger I, made in Belgium. I think I already wrote about it. I found it on Gunbroker. It looked very good, an excellent specimen is worth $700, and no one was making reasonable bids. All told, including a transfer fee and shipping, I paid about $477.

This is a marvelous pistol. The trigger is magnificent, the bluing is in very good shape, and it shoots beautifully. A real addition to my collection.

I thought it was in near-mint condition from the pictures, but that isn’t true. I can see it has been fired a lot, and the bluing on the forward side of the grip has thin places where two fingers rested on it, but still…$477.

I hope nothing goes wrong with it, because Browning is not good about supporting the model. They aren’t working very hard to make parts for middle-aged pistols.

Yesterday, once I was alone, I assembled some new shelves for the gun room. When I moved my stuff in there, I bought two $40 plastic shelf units from Home Depot and loaded them up. Sadly, they were not up to the weight of ammunition and reloading components. They bowed. I ended up with boxes all over the floor, because I had nowhere to put them. I broke down and ordered two Seville Classics (really Shanghai Classics) rolling steel units. I got them for $150 each. For some reason, the price fluctuates during the day, and I caught them on a dip. They were $168 when I first put them in my cart.

These shelves can hold 4000 pounds if you put feet on them. If you use wheels, the capacity drops to 500 pounds. I guess the spindles on the wheels bend. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious the shelves are not the weak points, so it’s okay to put a great deal of weight on a couple of shelves per unit, as long as you don’t overload the remaining shelves. I filled the lower shelves with ammo and brass. Then I put other junk on the other shelves. No problems. They roll around just find, and nothing is bent.

I was able to keep one Home Depot unit for light objects, so now I have a lot of storage, and I can see the floor. I can actually find things now.

I’m going to get back to work on my tool chest welding cart conversion. I should go ahead and buy a second tool chest.

The year 2020 keeps getting better. I hope it’s a trend that continues through the rapture.

The Biggest Scandal Your Neighbors Will Never Know About?

If you’re not conservative, you may be amazed to learn that Rudy Giuliani has a copy of a laptop hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden. People who watch Fox and get their news from the Internet instead of TV and newspapers are well aware of the story, but the leftist press, including Facebook and Twitter, is actively censoring it.

Hunter Biden is an influence salesman. Whose influence does he sell? One likely name comes to mind. Hunter Biden is a drug addict who was discharged from the Navy because of his problems, he fathered a son with a stripper, and he’s a Yale-educated lawyer who doesn’t seem to be able to make it as an attorney. It’s hard to imagine bigwigs other than Joe Biden lining up to work with him.

I am not on a first-name basis with this man, obviously, but in order to distinguish him from his father, and to avoid typing “Hunter Biden” over and over, I will refer to him as Hunter.

The hard drive contains disturbing photos of Hunter, along with an 11-minute video of a man who appears to be Hunter, engaging in a sex act with a woman. One photo shows Hunter with a crack pipe in his mouth. Text in the hard drive suggests Hunter sells access to his father to the Chinese.

Democrats are calling the data “Russian disinformation,” and they’re saying Giuliani–the star prosecutor who took down the mafia–is an unreliable dupe who is easily taken in by fake evidence. The problem with this theory, as Giuliani has noted, is that a person claiming to be Hunter’s attorney demanded that his client’s property–the hard drive–be returned. If the hard drive is fake, it’s not Hunter’s property, and it would be unethical for an attorney to lie in order to get it.

Unless Giuliani is making the story up, Hunter’s legal representative has conceded the genuineness of the hard drive.

Emails in the hard drive say an interest in a foreign deal was set aside for H, and a source confirms that H is Joe Biden. Another message in the drive informs Hunter’s daughter he won’t take half her salary like Joe Biden would. The implication is that Joe Biden is receiving half of Hunter’s profits.

That would be a little sick. Biden became rich through his political position, and everyone who knows anything about taxes knows you do NOT let your children give you wealth. You should always look for ways to transfer wealth to them in order to avoid inheritance taxes. A rich parent who skims money from a less-wealthy child is like an animal that eats its young.

Twitter is banning mention of the story, which appears in The New York Post (a reputable mainstream outlet), and so is Facebook. Twitter’s rationale is that they don’t publish “hacked” material. Unfortunately for Twitter, Hunter abandoned the laptop at a repair shop, and he signed a waiver saying it would become the shop’s property if he did not pick it up. You can’t hack yourself. The people at Twitter know this. Technology is their thing, and they have lawyers. Twitter is censoring the story because they know it hurts Biden’s chances of being elected.

We have reached a predictable (and predicted) point in history in which a big percentage of Americans get their news from social media. Because social media firms are not bound by the First Amendment, they are allowed to restrict speech arbitrarily. We saw this coming, and our legislators did nothing to protect us. As a result, a few kooky, spoiled, far-left tech kids now have the ability to keep legitimate news from tens of millions of irresponsible Americans who make no effort to find reliable news.

It certainly looks like Biden (the elder) made a lot of money from selling influence or at least access through his son, after saying he never discussed his son’s business with him because of the conflict of interest. That, unlike the fake Russian Trump dossier financed by Hillary Clinton or the debunked collusion scandal, would be a very big deal. But if you ask your Democrat or swing-voter neighbor about it, he may have no idea what you’re talking about, even if he watches the news twice a day.

For a few years, I’ve been disturbed to see conservatives gloating about their political successes. We barely got Bush elected, we lost the presidency to a previously obscure mediocrity twice in a row, and then we barely got Trump elected. Somehow, many conservatives thought this history showed that we owned the world. I’ve seen people on the web talking about the death of leftism, as though it were a done deal. I wondered how anyone could be that dumb.

They’re even smug about the Supreme Court. Well, guess what? Clarence Thomas is fat, old, black, and fond of tobacco, Roberts is unreliable, and there is no legal barrier to packing the court. If the Democrats want to put 150 liberal judges on the court, leaving 6 conservatives to oppose them, they can do it.

America becomes less conservative every year, we don’t have the House, we are close to losing the Senate, Biden is ahead in the polls, and if Trump loses, the Supreme Court is Biden’s for the asking, as soon as next year. We are on the edge of a precipice, and many of us are too stupid to see it.

Now leftists in the information industry are doing what smart people predicted years ago. They’re choking conservatives out of public forums. Because we rely on their platforms so much, they can destroy our ability to speak and amplify the voices that oppose us without committing a technical violation of the law. The First Amendment still exists, and it’s still the law, but it no longer matters much. It protects us from the government, but the government isn’t the aggressor.

Having the right to speak means nothing if you’re speaking to three friends in your backyard and your opponent is reaching a billion people on Facebook, with help from Facebook’s promotional algorithms.

It will be very strange if Biden is elected, the laptop story finally gets to the public, and Biden is impeached and removed. I suppose impeachment will be impossible, however, because Democrats in the House will not hold one of their own accountable. They have no integrity.

Hunter is the most interesting part of the story. His father is aggressive, mean, dishonest, highly ambitious, and ruthless. Hunter does not seem to be cut from the same cloth. He appears to be unambitious, nonaggressive, sensitive, and easily dominated. The impression one gets from reading his communications and seeing his photos is that he was raised by a domineering, selfish dad who pushed him around and wrecked his self-image. It’s just an impression, but it makes me wonder.

He seems like a more honest person than Joe. He has admitted he probably wouldn’t have gotten where he is but for his dad. Joe would never admit a thing like that. Joe is not bright. He graduated near the bottom of his law school class, at a low-ranked school. He plagiarizes because he can’t have original or clever thoughts. Joe compensates by lying and bullying. If you questioned Joe’s merits, he would challenge you to a pushup contest, make a patently false claim of high intelligence, call you a name, and accuse you of being some kind of plant.

Here is a sad excerpt from a text Hunter sent:

my brother and I were
required to go to mass
every sunday growing up.
Just the three of us-Bean
my Dad and me. It was an
event-as long as we had
on a clean shirt and pants and
combed our hair we were ready to go. But
it was mandatory. And the
truth is U hated moss for
the post part. It always
seemed hollow to me. more
a an exercise in commitment than an act of
spirituality.
We were almost always late. We always sat in
the back or stood against the back wall if
there wasn’t room for the three of us to sit
together. And for some reason I always remember
it being hot regardless of the weather the hemi
lp at st. Joseph’s on the Brandywine rarely
spoke to me in anyway, and I spent most of the
time between standing, sitting, kneeling repeat
over and over lost in thought about what way
ahead or what was behind
There were only two parts of
the mass that I enjoyed.
The first was the “sharing of
peace.” IIn that monent
while the rest of churchgoers
would be shaking hands
with their peep neighbors, Bea
Dad and I would turn to one-
another and we each would
hug and kiss. No matter what.
It orbit mattes if Beau and
I were arguing up until the
moment we entered the
church, or if Dod way
pissed at one of us for
whatever reason. We would
give each other a hug and

I can’t read minds, but that seems like it came from a man who is much more honest than Joe Biden, at least in his personal life.

The feeling I get is that Hunter disappoints his father. Maybe his average mind and talents bother Joe because they don’t fit in with his fairy tales about himself and his brains. Biden has made crazy claims about his academic achievements and his IQ, and we all know smart, talented people produce smart, talented kids. Joe is a blue-collar impostor in a white-collar realm. He pretends to be something his genes could never have produced. A man like that wants a son who gets into Yale because of his grades and test scores, not because is dad is a Senator.

Hunter’s eyes look distant and haunted in his photos. He looks like he’s just there because he has to be. Maybe for his dad.

Quite honestly, he seems like the Holden Caulfield of the Democratic Party. That sums it up better than anything else I could say.

As happy as I would be to see the laptop keep Joe Biden in his basement and assisted living for the next 4 years, I feel very bad for Hunter. How can you read the story, read the texts and emails, look at the pictures, hear about the drugs, the sex video, and the pornography, and not wish this hadn’t happened to him? Situations like his drive people to kill themselves.

I don’t know the truth. Maybe I’m completely wrong about Hunter Biden. I have impressions; nothing more.

This is what happens to families when church is a lifeless place where effeminate men putter around in robes instead of introducting people to the Spirit of the living God. As a politician, Joe Biden knew he had to go to church regularly even if they were sacrificing virgins on the altar, just as he had to marry and have kids. It looks like he dragged his sons along just for optics.

Boredom and alienation are normal in Catholic churches and other churches where the Holy Spirit is stifled.

Arriving late in church is something proud people who don’t know God do. People who know God, and who know other people’s time is valuable, show up on time. It’s disrespectful. It’s also a way to make sure people see you when you arrive.

We should pray for Hunter Biden, while we’re praying his dad loses and Kamala Harris never becomes president.

The rapture can’t some soon enough for me. I keep praying for God to call us as soon as possible. Freedom of speech is dying. So is freedom of assembly. Restraints on disinformation are being removed. Hatred and cruelty are now fashionable. If it’s this bad now, I don’t want to be here to see what it’s like in 2030.

I Love to Work at Nothing all Day

I’ve had a somewhat arduous couple of days. I bought another gun, and there were problems. On top of that, my car’s air conditioning went out, and I became obsessed with fixing it. Finally, I have two guests coming for the weekend, so I’ve been cooking and trying to make the house presentable.

Why did I buy another gun? Because I could, mainly. Also, I had no deer rifle. I had a couple of Eastern-bloc guns that could be used for deer, and I also had an LR-308, a PSL, a Saiga-12, a Ruger Precision Rifle, and a K31. I didn’t have anything a normal human being would use.

Well. I did have a 16-gauge FUDD shotgun, but that’s an unusual choice.

I went with 6.5 Creedmoor. In my opinion, it’s the new .30-06. If someone tells you to get in the truck and go hunting in North America, and all you know is that the prey is over 50 pounds, the 6.5 Creedmoor will kill it. The .30-06 and its short-action copy, the .308, are pretty much obsolete because the 6.5 Creedmoor does everything they do, better. The 6.5 is very, very popular, and the simple reason is that it made a number of older calibers unnecessary. It’s a great hunting round, and because it’s popular, there are a ton of different factory loads for it. If you don’t like factory loads, there is a world of load data available. It’s the Glock of rifle calibers. It’s common, and it works well.

I decided to splurge this time. I love Savages because they’re very accurate and not expensive, but this time I moved a few links up the food chain and bought a Tikka T3x Superlite. Tikka is a Finnish company, and they do very good work. I believe Tikka is really Sako now, and it’s also Beretta. I’m not sure. Gun companies gobble each other up like crazy; Remington/Marlin is now Ruger, for example, and Thompson/Center is Smith & Wesson. Anyway, the name still exists, and they still make the guns in Finland, so the quality has been maintained. So I’m told.

The Superlite is a real hunter’s gun. It’s very light, as you might deduce from the name. The whole thing weighs 6 pounds. It has a fluted stainless barrel and a fancy plastic stock covered with a camo pattern. It only holds three rounds in the box, so it will be one of the last guns President Harris confiscates, assuming people follow through on their insane threats to vote for Biden.

It still amazes me that people take him seriously. It’s not surprising that he became Vice President, because that’s a position typically occupied by certified cretins, but putting him in the Oval Office and actually letting him sit behind the desk is about like putting an unelected third-rate lawyer in charge of a nation’s healthcare simply because her husband won the presidency.

When I was a kid, sometimes my dad would let me sit on his lap and steer the car, but he never got out and told me to go pick up some bread.

I ordered the Superlite from Bass Pro’s website. I had been looking for a Superlite in a color I could stand, and when I saw it at Bass Pro, I couldn’t resist. The picture on the site showed a nice right-handed bolt gun. When I ordered it, I got an email that showed the same picture. When I looked my order up on the site later…same picture.

You can see where this is going.

I went to pick the gun up, and the girl at the counter asked if she should insert the bolt for me while I was inspecting it, and I told her not to bother. Then I got home, inserted the bolt, and noticed it was on the wrong side of the gun.

I had a $1000 non-returnable left-handed rifle.

I called the local Bass Pro immediately, and they told me not to fire it. They said to wait, and they would call me back. I also called the website’s number, and I got an Indian guy with no authority. All he could do was repeat their no-return policy.

At least I think that’s what he was repeating.

I said I knew there was someone there who could make a return happen, and I asked to talk to that person. That person was not even a little helpful. She refused to even discuss a return, and she said I might get somewhere talking to the local people.

Gun shops do not like to take guns back. The rationale is that once a gun goes through a background check, it’s used. Do you buy that? I don’t work at a gun store, but it’s hard for me to believe the government has people who go around to places like Dick’s and Cabela’s, checking serial numbers to see if they’re selling NICS-processed guns as new. I don’t believe that happens. I think gun stores are just worried about idiots who shoot 100 rounds, get buyer’s remorse, and try to bring back dirty guns.

Change my mind.

I’ve probably returned 25 new items in their original packaging to retailers over the last year, and never once did anyone tell me they would have to be sold as used goods. Not until yesterday, when it really mattered.

Anyway, the local people called back, and they said they would be more than happy to take a return. And they had the right-handed version of the gun at the store, for $50 less. They tried to do the second background check without charging me, but the system would not let them. They accidentally refunded me over $9 for something I hadn’t paid for, and when they caught it, they told me not to worry about it.

God bless them. I think I could actually have made a profit reselling the gun on Gunbroker, but I might also have taken a $300 loss, and I did not want the hassle.

I made 4 45-mile trips between my house and Bass Pro, and I had to wait for two background checks in one day. That killed Thursday for me.

Next time I buy a new gun, I will examine it like an MSNBC grunt trying to find racism in a video of Trump eating a bologna sandwich.

Have I actually hunted for deer? Well, no. But I am determined to get around to it.

On the third trip, I noticed the car’s air conditioning was blowing warm. Great. I also had a problem with the car overheating at low speeds. I believe this is because the water bottle I jammed between the idiotic louvers on the radiator has flattened out.

Many cars now have shutters on their radiators. They make cars slightly more aerodynamic at high speed, and this gets you…get this…a 1% increase in gas mileage. Look it up. These shutters break down all the time, and replacing them is a giant job. Mine failed, and when I realized how worthless they were, I decided the best thing was to prop them open. I plan to put a screw in the frame to keep them open permanently. There is no down side to keeping them open, apart from that gigantic mileage decrease.

This is where leftism, which is behind the radiator shutters, gets us. It gives you a $300 part that saves you $5 per year for three years and then fails.

Wonder where the energy to make the part and ship it comes from. Fairy flatulence, I guess.

I’ve learned a great deal about air conditioning since last night. First of all, my car’s compressor isn’t turning on. The electromagnetic clutch won’t engage., There are a bunch of possible reasons. There is a fuse. There is a relay that turns the compressor on. If the system is low on refrigerant, it refuses to engage the clutch. There is a refrigerant pressure switch, and if it goes bad, the system thinks the gas has leaked out, and the compressor doesn’t turn.

Today I spent a great deal of time fooling with the car. I replaced the relay with a horn relay that was next to it. No joy. I checked the fuse. It was fine. I bypassed the relay, and the compressor turned, causing the air to blow cold. I tried to shoot some refrigerant into the system, because I figured that would tell me whether lack of refrigerant was the problem. It didn’t help.

I’m down to two likely possibilities. Either I failed to get enough refrigerant into it to make it catch, or the pressure switch is bad. In any case, the only way I can get cold air is to jam a paper clip into two holes the relay used to fill. That won’t get it done.

I forced myself to give up on the car. I had to clean up the house. I’m way behind. I also had to make a cheesecake for my guests. Right now, I’m writing to kill time while it bakes (instead of doing more cleaning).

Tomorrow, I’m going to make smoked spare ribs, barbecue beans, Texas toast, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese. And yes, I plan to make my guests clean up the kitchen. Because I expect to be recovering on the floor.

I should have bought smoked sausage to go in the beans. Didn’t occur to me. I bought bacon instead. Still, it should be one of the best meals served in the state tomorrow, barring a mishap.

The cheesecake is now cooling. You are dismissed.

Link Machine Blows with Unseen Wind

Am I the only one who is extremely disappointed in Matt Drudge?

Drudge and President Trump are enemies now, and no one seems to know why. Drudge has a reputation for leaning pretty far to the right, and it is said he was highly disturbed by the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, but for some reason, his site has turned into a news hub for people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve visited a few times lately, but I felt like I was looking at Yahoo News or The Daily Kos, so I quit. The page was full of links to innuendo-filled stories, gossip, and polls that looked bad for Trump. Leftists continue to provide abundant material for right-leaning aggregators, but Drudge doesn’t seem interested in relaying it now.

I used to visit Drudge every day, because he was one of the few promulgaters of legitimate, important news stories that were damaging to the left. They say he broke the Lewinsky scandal. I quit visiting for a few years, so I was pretty startled when I returned a few months back. What happened to him?

What I have been told is that Andrew Breitbart ran the site back when I began reading it. I know a lot of people adore Breitbart, but I thought he was an unprincipled toad, based on things I heard from a source that had inside information. My opinion of him did not change when he died. This is the guy who became Drudge’s lickspittle in order to launch his own site, yet who had no qualms about helping start Huffto for a known hack and turncoat.

Was he a real conservative? I doubt it. I think he was just pro-Breitbart, bought and sold like a bag of fertilizer.

Anyway, Breitbart ran Drudge’s site back when it provided useful information. I don’t know who’s running it now. Maybe Drudge is doing the arduous 15 hours of websurfing and linking per week himself. In any case, the site is pretty clearly dedicated to putting Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. If it’s out of principle, well and good, but it sort of looks like Drudge is throwing America under the bus out of pettiness.

Is he being blackmailed? Homosexuality rumors have been in the wind for years. Is there a video in a hard drive somewhere? I would think more highly of him if I knew coercion were behind his new policies.

It reminds me of what Jesus said about hirelings. They can’t be trusted. If your allies aren’t allies at heart, they’re not really allies.

I hope to see Drudge severely disappointed after the election, along with the pagans, perverts, racists, domestic terrorists, fake journalists, and treacherous RINO’s who curse Trump, lie about him and his supporters, and gloat in advance. They don’t just go after the president and his supporters. Many of them mock God himself. They conflate Trump voters with Christians, not without reason. They think Christians are superstitious, illiterate, racist incest enthusiasts, and they look forward to seeing our hearts broken by a nonexistent God who doesn’t come through.

It won’t ruin my life if we elect a senile president credibly accused of rape, and I will survive if his obnoxious, terrorist-coddling vice president takes over and manages to nullify our First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment protections. God, not Donald Trump, is the real source of my safety and dominance. But I don’t want to see God lie back and wait, giving brats and losers who hate him the appearance of victory over him.

We know what Drudge is now, so that’s a blessing.

I wonder what will happen to him after the election. Surely, he has driven conservatives away. Will he be able to hold onto anti-Trumpers in the absence of the cause that drew them to him?

If his new friends turned out to be fickle and abandoned him, it would be poetic justice.

Welding Junk Soon to be Off Table

It looks like my welding cart project is going to work perfectly.

To recap, I saw a kit for turning a Harbor Freight tool chest into a welding cart, and while I thought the idea was brilliant, the kit was obscenely expensive. Instead of spending $310 on a kit I would have to attach to a chest and then paint, I decided to spend more like $85 on metal and truck bed coating to make my own kit.

My plan was to run two rails under the chest and extend them out to support a platform for a welding bottle. I thought I could bolt the rails into the holes for the caster bolts. I found out there was a rim of sheet metal around the bottom of the chest, so I had to put something between the tubes and the chest in order to keep the tubes off the sheet metal rim. I decided to make 4 rectangles of thick aluminum and drill holes in them, but then I changed my mind. I had some tubing lying around, so I decided to use it instead.

I needed 4 spacers about 1/2″ tall, so I cut 1″-tall tubing in half. I decided to use the big angle grinder instead of the plasma cutter, mill, or propane torch. I have had problems making good cuts with plasma lately, and I didn’t feel like confronting the issue in the middle of a job. I have never used the propane torch for cutting, and this seemed like a bad time to figure it out. Cutting thin metal on the mill can be unpleasant, and holding metal while you cut it in pieces can be difficult. The angle grinder, on the other hand, is quick and easy.

I bought my 7″ Metabo grinder for cutting metal. I saw a Youtube video in which the same grinder bested a big band saw, so I snapped one up.

Today I clamped my tubing to the welding table, put a line on it to guide me, and dug right in. I suppose it took 15 minutes to make two 19″ cuts, separating the two halves of the tubing. The cuts weren’t extremely clean, but I was going to clean them on the belt grinder and bury the messy parts in weld, so it didn’t matter. Here is the tubing partway through the job.

Here is the tubing being sliced into 4 pieces.

Here are the pieces after deburring.

Positioning these things for welding was a breeze. I used a Vise Grip clamp to hold the pieces on the tubing, and I bopped them with pieces of metal to line them up perfectly. Then I tacked them at the corners, removed the clamp,and welded them in place.

Once that was done, I had to drill holes for bolts. The kit I didn’t buy leaves the tool chest casters in their original locations. I think that’s dumb. It puts your cylinder way on on a cantilevered platform. I’m going to put two of the casters at the end of the platform. That means I’ll need 24 bolts instead of the 16 the chest came with. I’m going to need 8 bolts for the casters on the side away from the cylinder, 8 to fasten casters to the platform, and 8 to fasten the tubes to the chest, using holes that were originally used to attach casters.

I scribed lines on the spacers, dimpled them with a punch, and drilled the dimples with a #26 drill. I followed with a unibit to open them up. Then I went through all three layers of steel with a 25/64″. I think that was the size. Whatever is one step bigger than 3/8″.

I attached one tube to the chest to see how it worked, and it was perfect. You can see it in the photo.

I forgot to put holes at the far ends of the tubes, so I have to do that tomorrow.

This is not a hard job, but it’s time-consuming because it’s hard to find metric fasteners around here. The original caster bolts are too short for the tubing and spacers, so I had to look for 60mm bolts. I needed 16, but I only found 10. I’m going to leave some of the holes empty until I get the bolts. They are in locations where one bolt per side will do just fine, so it’s not urgent.

I could not find M8 x 40mm bolts for the ends of the tubes, so I bought 5/16″ bolts, which cost maybe 20% as much at Tractor Supply. The diameter is nearly the same. Only the threads are different.

Tomorrow, I plan to attach the tubing to the chest, weld the platform on while the tubing is attached, detach the whole thing, add some tabs to keep the cylinder from scooting around, paint it with truck bed coating, and install it.

Why weld it while it’s attached to the chest? Because that way I know it will fit the chest after welding. The chest will hold everything in just the right position. Much better than clamping it to a welding table.

Once the platform is painted and installed, I can move all my welding junk to the chest and get one or two of my old carts out of the shop for good. Then I can install a bracket to hold a cylinder, along with some cord holders.

I said this was a one-day job, but I made it more complicated by welding spacers in and welding the tubing shut. I probably added three hours to the job that way. Then I had to run around looking for bolts.

Of course, painting adds a day, because you need to give truck bed paint 24 hours to cure. When I said this was a one-day job, I didn’t include time for the paint.

With my tools, I think you could do this job, apart from waiting for the paint, in 8 hours if you were even a little competent. You would just need to have everything ready so you wouldn’t have to run errands.

When I’m done with this cart, I plan to make a second one just like it. Then I can get rid of all my old welding carts. It will make a huge difference in the shop.

I also got rid of some junk today.

I have no garbage pickup, so I have to drive to “recycling centers,” i.e. places where things go on their way to be buried in a landfill. I’m sure a little bit of the waste gets recycled, but we all know greenies are liars. Most of my garbage disappears forever. In fact, if you try to recycle anything at my nearest recycling center, you can be fined. If the guy in front of you discards a beautiful dining room table, for example, you have to leave it in the rain so a truck can come crush it.

I call my local recycling center “the dump.” It’s a better description, because so little recycling happens. It’s just 6 compacting dumpsters and some areas for things like appliances and tires. The dump is great, because they don’t enforce the rules. You can put car batteries in the dumpsters, for example. I actually told an attendant when I saw someone do that, and he didn’t care at all, even though the battery disposal area is 50 yards from the dumpsters.

Here’s the real rule: you can put anything you want in the household garbage dumpsters, as long as it’s in a bag or you get it in there fast without rubbing the attendants’ noses in it.

They don’t let you dump construction waste. That’s a problem. Of course, you can cut it up and put it in bags, but that can be a big job. When you want to throw out things like lumber and old Corian, you have to drive a few more miles and drop it in the landfill. That’s where I went today.

I removed a Corian counter from my workshop, along with a bunch of naily wood. It sat in my yard for ages, behind the shop. I also had a heavy pallet I needed to get rid of. These things were getting on my nerves, but I didn’t look forward to lifting them. Today I finally did it. I put them in the special residential dumpsters at the foot of the landfill mountain, and soon they will be dumped on top, where I hope they will slide into Mother Gaia’s gullet and stick in it, sideways.

I forgot to take the bird bath. That was a big error. But I can probably dump it in the furniture area by the local place if I’m fast. Last time I took a bird bath over there, an attendant asked if he could have it.

That’s the story of my day. If tomorrow is even half as good, I will have nothing to complain about.