Assisted-Living Facility Responds to Government’s Boot in Rear, not Conscience

I finally found out why the assisted living facility which cheated my dad finally came around and tried to make it right.

Background: I sent my dad to a facility for four days. I paid in advance. I started getting bills. They told me it was a computer error and that I should ignore the bills. Then they turned a collection agency loose on me, and the agency, in addition to making huge errors and lying a fair amount, demanded $900 in additional fees. It turned out the problem arose because the facility lost my check, but they and the collection agency did not see that as good reason to refrain from taking $900 from my late father’s estate.

The other day, the business office coordinator for the facility called me and apologized repeatedly. This is the same lady who refused to return my calls for weeks. She told me they would accept a check for the original cost of the stay, minus two stop fees I had to pay on checks they and the collection people lost. She even sent me an email admitting fault and saying they would accept the original charge minus the stop fees.

That email put an end to their hopes of cheating me. She admitted fault and accepted my terms, in writing. I have a new email in which she admitted receiving my final check, so the contract they have made with me is complete. Only a lunatic would take me to arbitration now.

Today everything became clear to me. I think I know why she called. I just received a letter from the Department of Agriculture. I turned the facility in after they tried to cheat me, and it looks like the department followed up. The letter I received today contained a copy of an email from the business office coordinator to the department, saying she would work with me to fix the problem.

It seems clear from the dates of the email and her call to me that she was responding to pressure from the department.

People amaze me. Before I filed my complaint, this woman wouldn’t even take my calls. After she relented and called me, she didn’t mention the complaint. What are the odds that she decided to contact me simply because it was the right thing to do? Slim.

I had considered the possibility that she was simply an honest person who wanted to right a wrong, but it sure doesn’t look that way now.

How do you live with yourself, if you provide assisted living for old people and disabled people and you try to cheat them? How can anyone even consider going into that kind of work?

I’m trying to come up with a benign explanation for what was done to me, but I can’t. I called this woman repeatedly and gave her over a week to get back in touch with me, and she didn’t make any effort until about the time she was corresponding with the department. I can’t see how a decent person would let a call about a billing dispute go unanswered for days, especially since I left detailed information in voicemails.

Do they treat other people this way? Are there weak old people out there with liens on their homes because the facility routinely cheats customers? I hope not. I want to think there’s an explanation I don’t know about.

When I think about disappointing people, I think about Rich Wilkerson, the pastor of Trinity Church in Miami. In my mind, he has become the face of human crookedness. Seems like every time I talk to former members of his church, they have another startling story about his disgraceful behavior.

I’m not a good person, but there are many bad things I can’t imagine doing. Because I’m not capable of doing the things the Wilkersons do, it’s very hard for me to fully absorb the realization of their utter lack of class. I’m always tempted to think, “They can’t really be that bad.” Then someone comes and tells me a new story.

I’ve started praying for God to destroy their ministry and raise up someone better. Some people can’t be fixed because they refuse.

In other news, I soldered my first pipe today. It was quite an adventure. I had a leaking hose bibb outside my workshop. I had fixed the leak in the past by tightening a nut that apparently squeezes the internal washer tighter to make up for wear, but it wasn’t working any more. No problem! I’m a tool guy, right? I would just replace the washer.

To replace a washer in a hose bibb (corruption of “bibcock,” if you’re wondering), you pull out the bibb stem, remove the washer, screw a new one onto the stem, and put the bibb back together. It should take two minutes (literally).

I loosened the nut around the bibb stem, but the stem refused to come out of the bibb body. There was a plate attached to the body, and it had to come out. I tried to turn the plate, but it was seized.

This is a great example of poor execution nullifying a clever design. If the bibb had been installed by a responsible person, there would have been something between the brass bibb and brass plate to prevent them from galling together and seizing. This is obvious to anyone who knows anything about tools. By putting the parts directly against each other, you create an assembly which might as well be welded.

I decided to remove the bibb. I had never used a torch on plumbing before, but I figured I should be a man and get it done.

I got the bibb off, and I mounted it in a vise. Then I put a wrench on the plate that held the stem in the bibb. It was not coming out. No way. In retrospect, it might have been possible to get an impact wrench on it with some difficulty, but it seemed to make more sense to go get a new bibb.

I made the mistake of buying the $3.99 blister pack of flux and solder instead of the tub of flux and spool of solder I really wanted. I tried to be frugal and responsible. I also made the error of buying lead-free solder, which is hard to work with and totally unnecessary in a hose bibb.

When I started trying to attach the new bibb, I had a problem. Water would not stop dripping from the pipe. The pump was turned off. Other faucets were open. Still, the water kept coming out. You can’t solder wet pipes. At least I don’t think you can. The water draws too much heat out of the metal.

I had to drain my pump’s pressure tank. That finally did it. By the time I got around to this, I had soldered the joint badly once, and I had taken it apart and fluxed it again. I had fiddled with it so much and lost so much flux, I was worried that if I blew it again, I’d be calling a plumber at 5 p.m.

I finally got the bibb installed. The solder looks bad. I cleaned the metal until it gleamed, and I fluxed it heavily, but I didn’t get the nice solder flow the Youtube guys get. I assume that’s because lead-free solder is so awful. I was amazed when the joint held pressure.

Before I installed the bibb, I took it apart and put pipe dope on the threads. Now when the washer fails, I have some chance of changing it successfully. I guess this makes me a genius, because it seems like no one else does it. Where is my Nobel Prize? I certainly deserve one more than Barack Obama, who, before receiving his, had done…let’s see…literally nothing.

Personally, I wonder if the fuss about lead solder in pipes is realistic. Before I really knew anything about lead, I used to chew lead split shots while fishing because I liked the taste. I must have had internal lead levels which would have made history, but I never had any lead poisoning symptoms.

A 1/2″ pipe joint contains how much solder? Half a gram? How much of that is lead? A quarter of a gram? How much is exposed to water? Maybe 5% of that quarter of a gram? Seems to me that a joint would have to be a monstrosity in order to expose more lead than that. Nonetheless, lead solder in plumbing is forbidden now.

A split shot weighs at least a gram, and it’s pure lead. And I chewed on them.

If my other hose bibbs have problems, I’m using lead solder. If you come to my house and you’re a snowflake, do not make patchouli tea with water from the hose.

I can’t believe I had to remove a perfectly good bibb instead of changing a 5-cent washer.

Now you know how my day has gone. I accomplished nearly nothing, due to someone else’s irresponsibility. The best way to redeem the evening is to grill a steak.

Off I go.

My Help Cometh from the Lord, Which Made Heaven and Earth

It looks like my guests for this weekend are postponing. They have some work to do around the house, and they have a guy coming over. I can’t complain. Having overnight guests three weeks in a row throws off my routine.

Sensing that things are slowing down, I spent the morning looking at Tennessee properties on the web.

It looks like buying in Tennessee will be more complicated than buying in Ocala. The population density is lower, so there are fewer properties and sales. That means it’s harder to put a value on a piece of land before you buy it.

I’ve been using real estate websites, obviously. Some of them assign value estimates to properties. It’s alarming when a property I like has a price of x and an estimated value of x/4.

Nobody wants to end up like Mr. Douglas. Remember him? He and his wife bought a farm in Hooterville, which is a town in a state bordering Tennessee. Their realtor, Mr. Haney, assured them they were getting a great deal on what turned out to be the old Haney place. Then they found out they were getting a lot less than they bargained for.

One of my favorite Youtube evangelists, Tom Fischer, made a sudden move from South Florida to Tennessee. One month, he was talking about his arrival in South Florida, and it seemed like he would stay there. I thought he had made a huge mistake. The next month, he was wandering around eastern Tennessee. While he was there, someone gave him a piece of hillside property, and he said he was planning to build on it.

The other day, I saw a new video in which Tom said his lot had turned out to be unsuitable for construction (hence the gift, one surmises). That’s not surprising, but I was startled when he said the property was in Townsend, Tennessee. That’s the area I’m excited about.

Coincidence? Probably not. God is moving Christians to that area.

Sometimes I start to worry that I’ve waited too long to look for a place. Property values are going up in eastern Tennessee. God is on my side, though, and if he told me I’m going to have a nice Tennessee home, then I’ll have it. No one can call him a liar and get away with it around me.

This week I have gained a deeper sense of the importance of knowing God. This is something Christians don’t emphasize enough. Jews and Muslims don’t emphasize it at all. They consider God very distant. I know God isn’t distant. I communicate with the Holy Spirit every day, and Jesus visited me twice. Distance is for limited people. God can treat every Christian like an only child. He isn’t busy.

Christians are taught that God is their father, and we are told to ask him for things, but what kind of child asks his father for things yet doesn’t socialize with him? The purpose of creation was reproduction; God wanted children. If you have children, obviously, you want to spend time with them so you can enjoy each other’s company. If your relationship with your parents consists of obeying rules and asking for support, you have a very sick family. God must want more than that from us.

Many times, I’ve cooked for friends, and more than once, people have left my house right after they finished eating. It’s one of the reasons I got tired of cooking. I was being used. I don’t want to treat God that way. I want to spend time with him without asking for anything. I want to love him for his personality, not just the things he does for me. I believe this is where favor comes from.

If God wants to show his favor by leading me to a nice property in Tennessee, I’m all for it. I hate relying on my own guesswork.

I may visit Tennessee very soon. I have no strings on me. I want to look around before the leaves fall.

High Occupancy even in August

My bed and breakfast continues to attract customers.

This weekend, I played host to friends I got to know at Trinity Church and New Dawn Ministries in Miami. I will call them Fred and Ginger. Fred is half Nicaraguan and half Puerto Rican. I think Ginger is Puerto Rican, but I’m not sure. Their 13-year-old son Rupert came with them.

I have a list of people I pray for. I pray that God will move them out of areas where his people are weak and the spirits against them are strong. I ask him to give them homes in places where his people are strong. I ask him to use those properties for prayer and gatherings. So far, I’m the only one who has received these things. Fred and Ginger are not doing too bad, though. They lived in Little Haiti when I met them, and they had to deal with voodoo parades on their street. Now they have a townhouse in Pompano. A step up from Voodooville, AKA Miami.

Fred and Ginger drove up in June, and we had a long prayer session the day after they got here. We prayed a lot during their visit. Someone I know was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and since then, she has been praying in tongues a great deal, which means her life is going to change tremendously.

Fred got fired from a job he had had for a long time, and he got a similar job which didn’t pay as well. When he came in June, he and Ginger wanted prayer for a new job. Fred was also unhappy because he was mismanaged. He wasn’t trained well, and the company didn’t back up employees. They had very lofty expectations, but they didn’t do the groundwork to support them (much like the churches we attended).

I have been praying for God to rid people I know of things that aren’t pleasing to him, including jobs. This weekend, I realized I might have had a hand in Fred’s firing. I didn’t feel too bad, because he hated the job. He was at peace with what had happened, because the job was so unpleasant.

A week or so before they arrived, I had a dream in which Fred showed up at a table where I was eating. His head was shaved. To me, this always symbolizes a lack of prayer in tongues. I relayed this info to Fred, and as he talked to me, he essentially admitted he hadn’t been praying in tongues enough. That was a relief. If someone comes to me and says he has been praying in tongues for two hours a day and still suffers a lot, I don’t have much to offer him. If he hasn’t been praying, I know what to recommend. You can’t have a really blessed Christian walk without it. You will have problems you should not have.

I don’t know if Fred will jump back into prayer in tongues or not. Sometimes he is slow to take advice.

It was wonderful to have them here. There is nothing like having Spirit-filled Christians to pray with. I have two more coming this weekend.

While they were here, I dreamed about my dad. He generally symbolizes Christian leaders. I dreamed we were walking down a street. He was telling me a story from his days of practicing law. When we got to the end of the street, we came to a wooden dock. I stopped on the dock. My dad walked right off of it and sank to the bottom.

I didn’t jump in. In the dream, he was pretty healthy, and he was capable of swimming. I figured he would pop right up. He didn’t. He was under the water for 5 or 10 long seconds before I saw his head emerge.

I started guiding him toward a ladder about 10 feet away. Two women showed up. One had short hair and extremely large breasts, like soccer balls. She was distressed by my dad’s predicament, and she seemed angry at me. She jumped in the water and pushed him toward the water.

When he reached the ladder and climbed out, it turned out the ladder was nearly on land. He rolled off and onto dry land covered with green grass.

I took the dream to mean that I don’t need to sink to the level of frustrated Christians in order to help them. That would be enabling.

Water represents the water of the world, which is the bad ideas and words of spirits who are against God and of people who don’t know God. When you don’t have authority that comes from time spent with God, you sink below the water and lose. My dad represented anointed Christians who don’t spend enough time with God.

The ladies represented feminine insurgency in the church. Women are not supposed to lead churches, period. Sorry, but that’s how God has set things up. These days, churches are feminized. They don’t talk much about judgment and consequences. They gloss over personal accountability. They teach us we’re supposed to wallow in other people’s problems and coddle them, which is nothing like what Jesus did.

The lady with the big breasts had short hair because she didn’t spend enough time with God. She didn’t hear from him, so she took charge inappropriately instead of submitting and letting me handle things. Abnormally large breasts represent compassion which is out of hand and not balanced by logic.

The ladder represents Jesus. He was Jacob’s ladder (or stairway). The dry ground with grass is where God wants to put us. In Psalm 23, he says he makes us to lie down in green pastures. He doesn’t make us plant green pastures or hoe weeds. We just lie down and eat.

The lady sank into the water with my dad and got herself wet. Her pushing didn’t help my dad at all. He was almost at the ladder when she got full of pride and took over.

I was saved from the striving and fussing. I stood on the dock, dry, and watched a confused person act up and make a fool of herself.

The message is that we don’t have to carry people like babies. We’re supposed to be helpful, but not to the point where other people’s failings eat into our blessings. Example: if your son is a compulsive gambler and tells you someone is going to break his legs for money, you’re not supposed to mortgage your house for him. He needs to repent and go to rehab. It’s not on you if he refuses.

I have a responsibility to warn other people when they’re blowing it, but I don’t have to get involved with their carnal efforts to save themselves. If they’re not doing what God has told us to do, they need to get back to that before bothering me and spreading their problems to me. I am available to pray and guide and so on, but I don’t have to pay off your student loan (although I got roped into doing that for one defeated person).

When people fall off the dock, I’m not supposed to dive in and wrestle them to shore. They’ll just fall off again, unless they change their ways. I’m supposed to stand on the dock or the shore and tell them where the ladder is.

When Peter sank in the Sea of Galilee, Jesus didn’t sink with him. He stood on the water and reached down to him.

I woke up after this dream with a new understanding of favor.

I was my grandfather’s favorite grandchild. My mother was his favorite child. I was my parents’ favorite. I’m the smartest person in the family. Now that my grandparents and parents are gone, God favors me. He doesn’t favor everyone. There are many people he does not favor, and many are Christians. I’m not supposed to feel bad about this. It’s a good thing. It has to be good, because God ordained it. Anyone who demands an explanation needs to demand it from God, not me.

To be favored is to be a favorite. This is what God offers you, if you turn to him. Joseph was a favorite. Jacob and Isaac were favorites. David was a favorite. Daniel was a favorite. It’s okay to be a favorite.

I tend to think of Psalm 91 as a psalm of protection, but it’s more accurate to call it a psalm of favor. It’s about a person who escapes the problems other people have, because he is close to God. Diseases don’t touch him. He is delivered from problems. He watches while thousands of people fall around him. He is set above spirits that reject God. No evil befalls him.

It’s okay. If God makes you one of his 1%, you have nothing to feel guilty about.

If I get to stand on the dock while proud, carnal Christians who don’t pray strive and resent me for refusing to jump into the mosh pit, it’s okay. It’s right.

Remember Mary and Martha? Jesus was at their house with guests, and Martha was working her butt off to serve everyone. Mary sat at Jesus’ feet instead. Martha told Jesus to order her to get up and help her. Not only did Jesus refuse; he told Martha what Mary was doing was better.

It was better–more righteous–for Mary to sit at the feet of Jesus and do nothing than for her to help her sister.

It is believed that John was the only one of the 12 disciples who did not die a violent death. Ancient sources say the emperor Domitian put him in hot oil in a stadium full of people and fried him alive, but he felt no pain and was not injured. His deliverance spurred a lot of conversions. Sure looks like John had favor, and what does the Bible call him? “The disciple whom Jesus loved.”

When Jesus was murdered, he turned his mother over to John, not Peter, to be looked after. That says a lot.

We are not responsible for what happens to other people unless we fail to speak the truth to them. If we warn them, whatever happens later is their fault. Completely. Not one particle of responsibility adheres to us.

If good things happen to people who are close to God, while other people suffer and lack, it’s fine. It’s what’s supposed to happen. The Bible says, “The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.”

People ask why God created the world, knowing spirits and people would end up in hell. The answer is that he’s not responsible for what anyone else does. The fact that he created you doesn’t mean he’s to blame for anything you do.

I’m not responsible for other people’s suffering. I don’t owe anyone a single word of apology or explanation if I do well. It’s unpleasant, to say the least, to watch people fail unnecessarily, but it would be worse, and it would not be God’s will, if I chose to share their misery and abandon his favor.

My beliefs about personal accountability have firmed up a great deal since my dream. When you and I stand before God, he won’t let you tell him what I’ve done wrong, and he won’t let me tell him what you’ve done wrong. We’ll be expected to account for ourselves and no one else. He won’t care if you didn’t get slavery reparations or student loan forgiveness. He’ll want to know why you didn’t spend time with him and give yourself to him.

The entitlement crowd is pathologically deceived. I’m so glad I don’t live near them. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to move back to Miami, or if God sent me to live in Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, St. Louis, San Francisco, or any of the other envy hotspots. Cain murdered Abel because of envy, and his descendants are no better.

I hope I’ll be dead or raptured before the rot gets to the place where I live!

A Gas-Powered Brush Cutter Beats a Herring Every Time

The joy of the Lord is strength. It will help you get up and get things done. I am learning that firsthand.

Every day, I say something along these lines: “In the name of Jesus Christ, who is God, I speak the Lord’s opposition to every created being who is against the Lord, me, or his children on this property and every other property that belongs to me. I speak victory to the Lord, to his children, and to me, and I speak the glory to Jesus Christ. I am a son of God, and this is how things are supposed to work.”

When I do that, I have strength to get up and do things. When I don’t, I may or may not have strength.

Today I tackled some lingering tasks.

The lady who used to live in this house made some unfortunate landscaping choices. She put some sickly hedges beside the house on one side, and some were beside the driveway. They looked awful. They were diseased. They grew too high for the area. I decided they had to go. The lady who came out from the university’s extension office agreed fully.

I started ripping them out with the tractor this week, but I learned that they were not as easy to remove as other hedges I had destroyed. They had stubborn roots, and they liked to slip out of the rope I used to grab them. I found out there is a device called a grubber that grips shrubs securely so a tractor can remove them, but grubbers are made in China, and they tend to break, so I went outside today and used a sharpened hoe. It was not pleasant, but it worked.

I pulled every visible trace of the shrubs, and then I planted two dwarf podocarpus bushes. These bushes look great, and they’re indestructible. They require no fertilization and no pesticides. They won’t grow higher than three feet. I’m starting to think every shrub should be a podocarpus.

I filled the area in with bagged soil, and then I added melaleuca mulch. Hopefully, I’m done with that particular spot. Now I have 15 more feet to do, beside the house. I may buy that grubber after all.

I found a cable while I was digging the shrubs out. I had been afraid of that. Intelligent people bury cables a couple of feet deep, but not everyone is responsible. I found what appeared to be a phone cable about six inches down, right next to a shrub root. I didn’t cut it with the shovel. Not at that point, anyway. I may have cut it elsewhere, because I was using a sawzall on roots. I don’t care. I don’t use the phone cable. If I ever decide I need it (very unlikely), I can run a new one myself and do it right.

Yesterday, I hosed the old shrubs with 2,4 D, which is a weed killer. I figure any bits I leave in the ground will be less of a problem if they’re already dead. If I don’t kill the shrubs before pulling them, I may leave living roots which will try to come back.

Yesterday was weed-and-feed day, which is why I had 2,4 D on hand. I sprayed the whole yard. It does a dandy job of killing things I don’t like. This is an incredibly weedy region, so heavy applications of chemicals are mandatory unless you want to live in what looks like an abandoned lot.

I had a hard time getting my Fimco motorized sprayer to work. It refused to prime itself. I replaced O rings. I replaced hose. Finally, I realized Fimco just makes bad products. The design of the equipment, not the condition, was the issue. It does not seal very well, no matter what you do. I had to open the system up, pour water into the pump, and then turn it on. Now I have a new project. I’m going to add a T to the system with a hose and valve for priming the pump. I’m not going to let bad engineering force me to take the pump apart every time I want to use it.

Today after I fixed the shrubs, I got the pressure washer out and bleached the hidden side of my workshop. I bleached the house and shop a month or two ago, but I didn’t get around to the side of the shop that faces the woods. It was pretty bad. Today I went through more than half a gallon of high-powered pool bleach, and I still need to bleach the shop one more time.

I like using the pressure washer, because I brought it back from the dead. I installed a new hose. I fixed the carb. I put a new muffler cover on it. I have a cover for the cylinder head, and I’m going to replace that. I even have special paint to fix the rusty frame. I found out where to get cheap replacement pumps, so when the original Chinese pump dies, I’ll be able to keep the pressure washer running. The motor is a nice Honda, so I should be able to keep the pressure washer going for a very long time.

Later on, I grabbed my portable pump-up sprayer and wandered through the woods by the house, hosing everything down with glyphosate and Dawn. Grape vines, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy are taking over, and I’m not having it. I must have blasted a third of an acre by hand today. I also got out the gas brush cutter and cut away a lot of the shrubbery by my water pump.

I have complained that every tree here is a trash oak. Today I noticed that the same principle applies to weeds. Every weed is a grape, Virginia creeper, or poison ivy. It’s not completely true, but it’s true enough. When you look out through my woods, you see grape leaves everywhere. The plant life here has almost no variety.

It reminded me of something I already knew: the woods in Florida are not friendly or particularly useful.

In Appalachia, you can walk through the woods without problems. You can sit down. You could take a football and play catch under the trees if you wanted. There’s a lot of room, because weeds don’t take over. There is also a huge variety of plants, and many are useful. Ginseng, blackberries, teaberries, sassafras, various mints, and huckleberries come to mind.

Florida is not like that. It’s grape, grape, grape, Virginia creeper, grape, grape, poison ivy, all day. And the grapes don’t bear fruit. Almost all of the plants are male. When you find grapes on a female vine, they’re about the size of garbanzo beans. Mostly skin and seeds.

So, to recap, the trees are useless and tend to fall on expensive things, and the plants are worthless and annoying.

I think I need to rig up the sprayer and blast the woods with 2,4 D or glyphosate. Hunting season is coming, and I don’t want to be buried in grape leaves while I punish squirrels for existing.

I love it here, but I can see that when I try to make this a substitute for Appalachia, I am jamming a square peg in a round hole. It’s never going to be Tennessee or North Carolina. I can see why so much of the land here was undeveloped until fairly recently. It’s not like settlers could come here, build log cabins and barns from quality wood, make furniture, grow crops, and gather berries and herbs. The land doesn’t have much to offer unless you’re an animal.

This is a neat place to live, in the age of concrete block houses, air conditioning, and grocery stores. Before technology tamed this place, it was not hospitable.

That’s my impression, anyway.

I’m glad I have the Lord’s joy, because I am working a LOT. I have a lot to do. Because so much of the landscaping is screwed up, I’m doing much more than maintenance, which is a big job all by itself. Things should ramp down once I get the shrubs fixed, a couple of trees planted, and some rocks removed.

Unfortunately, I’m doing these things during the summer.

I hope the place looks better, not worse, when I’m done. If I move, I’ll have to sell. I don’t want buyers to show up and grimace at the landscaping.

All Self-Made Men go to Hell

I have an interesting testimony today.

Recently, I wrote about a dispute with a collection agency. My dad stayed in an assisted living facility for four days, we paid in advance, and then they started sending bills. They told us to ignore the bills because they were computer errors. Then their collection agency started calling me. I found out the facility had not deposited the check, and I had to stop payment. The collection agency wanted me to pay them about $900, plus the original $600 bill, plus an additional $150 for an imaginary fifth day.

I contacted the Secretary of Agriculture and filed a complaint about the facility. That’s what you do in Florida, believe it or not. I contacted the Secretary of State and filed a complaint about the collection agency, which was making insane claims about me, losing documents, and refusing to deposit a new check I sent them as payment for my dad’s stay.

I tried to deal directly with the facility, but their business office coordinator would not take my calls. The receptionist flat-out told me she had accosted the business office coordinator and informed her of my efforts to reach her, but she didn’t respond. I told them I was considering going to the facility and sitting in the lobby across from her office, but when I prayed about it, I felt that God told me not to do that.

This was a stressful business for me. I didn’t want to have to go to court or arbitration. Courts and arbitrators can be very stupid. I didn’t want to end up paying someone else’s lawyer when I was in the right.

Long ago, I received a word from God. I don’t talk about it much, because it’s not the kind of thing other Christians receive gladly. He had me say, “From now on, I will have total victory, because you are for me.” I think about that when I have problems with people who treat me unfairly.

Speaking to Jews who were under the law, Jesus suggested that if they were sued, they should give the plaintiffs more than they sued for. I talked to God about that. I’m not under the law, and I have this word from God. Giving dishonest, irresponsible people nine hundred bucks for making errors and lying doesn’t seem like “total victory” to me. If I paid them, how would God be glorified for keeping his word?

I told God I would pay them what they wanted if it would make him happy, but I felt strongly that he didn’t want me to do it. Eventually, I started asking him if I was permitted to pay them, just to get them off my back. The sum was not very significant to me, and my peace of mind was. Still, I felt that he didn’t want me to pay.

Yesterday, the business office coordinator called me out of the blue. She was contrite. She kept apologizing. She said they would be happy to close the account for the cost of my dad’s stay, minus whatever stop fees I had to pay on the two checks I had already sent. I was shocked.

I was so happy, I didn’t bother to ask her to take the cost of my return-receipt mail off the bill.

I told her I wanted an email so I would have some kind of record of our deal. Here is some text from the email:

I just wanted to follow up from our phone conversation we had yesterday regarding your account.

Thank you for taking the time to help me understand, that most of the outstanding balance is due to a check that was lost here at the community.

As we discussed, the total due is currently showing $915, of which only $570 was actually owed (lost check for $600 minus $30 stop payment fee). Plus at this time, you probably would want to place another stop payment, on the check you sent to collection agency saying “Paid in Full”, which they are not willing to cash.

If you are willing to pay the $540 that you agreed that was owed, I will credit the remaining $375. After your payment and my credit adjustment, this will leave the account at a zero balance, for a paid in full status.

Please mail the check to my address below. I also will let the collection agency know as well, to consider this a closed matter.

I do apologize for all the confusion and thank you for helping me to get this taken care of.

You can’t make things like this up.

I kept feeling that God was telling me they were going to accept what I had offered, and they did better than that. I should have had faith.

I can’t figure out what’s going on at the ALF. Is someone over there an alcoholic? Is somebody in the business office having a mental breakdown? Why would you lose a check? Why would you call a collection agency instead of sending an email or picking up the phone? Why would you refuse to talk to someone and then call him, apologize repeatedly, and do everything he asked you to do?

I hope I haven’t caused unnecessary problems for someone whose life is falling apart.

I made sure I prayed for all of the people who caused this mess, and I used my supernatural tools to reject anger and worry. Something bad must be going on, for them to behave as they have.

The main thing is this: I felt God was telling me a certain thing, and that thing came to pass, improbable as it seemed.

I didn’t always behave as well as I should have during this fight. In my second letter, I told the collection agency to be very sure they didn’t lose my new correspondence. I suggested they pin it to someone’s sweater. Still, God didn’t cut me off for that.

We are supposed to hear directly from God, and this is how we’re supposed to live in the staggering promises he makes in the Bible. If you don’t have the Holy Spirit, you’re flying blind, and you will make disastrous mistakes. God told me certain things, I chose to believe him, and he proved I had really heard from him. Traditionally, Christians have operated through guesswork, and that’s why they land in the soup so often. Life can be much better than it is for most Christians.

You need the baptism with the Holy Spirit. You need to pray in tongues a lot, because it will bring you information. You need to learn to prophesy. You need to start now, while life for Christians is still reasonably good. It will take you time, and you don’t want to start on the day you need to hear from God.

Remember the parable of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins. The foolish virgins didn’t refuse to get oil. They just waited too long. By the time they got started, it was too late, and they missed the arrival of the bridegroom as well as the wedding.

The wedding is the rapture, and the oil is the Holy Spirit in his fullness. Yesterday I heard Perry Stone say the oil can’t be the Holy Spirit because the foolish virgins bought the oil. He says you can’t buy the Holy Spirit, so the oil can’t represent the Holy Spirit. He’s wrong. The Bible describes the kingdom of heaven as a pearl of great price, which a man bought after selling all he had. If you can buy the kingdom of heaven, you can buy the Holy Spirit. You buy the Holy Spirit by trading yourself for him, just as Jesus bought us by trading himself for us.

God isn’t going to send angels down here and have them hold signs and cue cards. He’s not going to speak to us through greasy televangelists who wear $7000 basketball shoes. You have to be able to hear from him personally. You need this for yourself and your family.

This is the way God has chosen to communicate with us. He gave us the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues, and prophecy. Once in a while he speaks in an audible voice, and he has occasionally had angels speak to people, but you shouldn’t expect those things to happen often enough to save you.

I’m not doing as well as I should be, but I’m getting better fast, and most people I know haven’t even gotten started.

Don’t think you can count on people who are in touch with God to help you. They will have a hard enough time looking after themselves and their families. God isn’t going to let them be so burdened with lazy Christians that they can’t receive his victory and deliverance. You can’t climb onto someone else’s shoulders and ruin what God is doing for them. You need to do this for yourself.

Buying Tools is Never Wrong

I know the entire world is wondering what happened when my jackhammer arrived.

My back was bugging me last week, which is one reason I bought the jackhammer. It arrived on Friday, and I felt good enough to break it out and use it. I only had time to run it about 45 minutes, but that was long enough to convince me everyone needs a jackhammer.

I guess it sounds stupid to say a person whose back hurts needs to buy a tool that weighs over 40 pounds and has to be held up while it rams a huge piece of steel into hard objects, but you have to consider the alternatives, including doing nothing.

I was trying to get a giant rock out of my yard. I pulled on it with a strap attached to the tractor, and as far as I can tell, I was able to rock it about a quarter of an inch. I bought rock-splitting wedges, and they worked great, but splitting chunks off an oddly shaped rock requires contorting yourself into odd positions while crouching in a hole in the ground, and you will have to do repeated splits. I used my rotary hammer to break up the rock, and it works well, but it’s much slower than a jackhammer, and because it’s only maybe two feet long, a certain amount of contortion is still needed.

The only other choice I had was to do nothing. I could put the dirt back in around the rock and continue trying to remember to drive the lawnmower around it for the remainder of my stay on this property. I wasn’t having that. That rock needs to go, and besides, I like using tools to make problems go away.

I bought a refurbished hammer from CPO Outlets, which is known for selling refurbs. Sometimes their deals aren’t all that great, but they sold me a thousand-dollar hammer for under $600. That was hard to pass up. I’ve bought other refurbs from them, and I think it’s smart business. A refurb, typically, is a tool someone bought and then returned because he didn’t like it. The manufacturers have to look them over and make sure they’re up to new standards. They are basically new tools, but they can’t be sold as new, so you get a break. You are likely to get a full warranty, so it’s hard to see any reason not to go for it.

I could have gotten a Chinese hammer for a lot less, as I have said, but it would have been Chinese, so it might have crapped out quickly, and I doubt I could have gotten it repaired.

Interesting thing: the manual for the hammer I bought bragged that it wouldn’t need to be serviced until I had 300 hours on it. That surprised me. None of my other tools have manuals saying, “Get ready for this tool to die at 300 hours.” Made me wonder if Chinese was the better solution. I don’t know how much money it costs to get a jackhammer serviced, so right now, I can’t judge. For all I know, it just means I have to take out a couple of screws and replace an O-ring.

CPO Outlets enhanced its profit margin by not including a bit for the hammer, but that’s okay, because I didn’t want the bit it would have come with. They come with pointy bits. I wanted one like a big flat-bladed screwdriver. When I checked them out online, I saw startling prices. Like $40 each. Then I noticed a DeWalt for $15. It was exactly what I wanted, and it was from a real company, so I ordered it. It works fine, and I can’t find anything wrong with it. I feel like I scored.

I took the hammer out to the hole, put the bit against the rock in a place where I thought it needed to be hit, and went to town. Right away, I was surprised to see how pleasant jackhammering was. I was nervous when I started. I thought the bit might jump around and put my feet in danger. I thought I might be jarred a lot. I equipped myself with safety glasses, a respirator, and ear plugs because I was concerned about noise and flying quartz chips. In reality, the bit stayed nearly where I put it, I was not jarred at all, nothing the bit broke off flew anywhere near my face, the machine was quiet, and if there was inhalable dust, there was so little I could not see it.

When I think of jackhammers, I think of fat guys on city streets operating huge air-powered hammers that seem to make them bounce around like toys on top of a washer full of towels during a spin cycle. It was not like that at all for me. It was more like having a pleasant belly massage. I guess the four fat springs on the hammer suck up nearly all of the pain.

Hammering made me wonder if I understood how rocks work. I think of rocks as things that exist in two states: shattered and not. I don’t think of them as things that can weaken gradually, like fatigued metal. When I hammered on my hard quartz rock, I found that sometimes the bit would stay in one place a long time, seeming to do nothing, and then the rock would suddenly give way, as though the prolonged hammering had softened it up. That was strange.

I had some problems with the bit getting stuck. Sometimes it will go straight down, making a tight hole, and then when it gets too deep, I’ll have to pull it back out. The hammering action doesn’t work when you’re lifting the hammer, so the machine doesn’t help at all. Also, you’re not supposed to pry with the bit. The hammer isn’t made for that. Which is a shame, because the bit alone probably weighs 8 pounds and could certainly pry as well as a typical pry bar. The hammer and bit, together, are about four feet long, so I would have a lot of leverage if I could pry with them.

It seems like I need to keep the sledge and rotary hammer nearby, in case the jackhammer gets stuck. I can beat the rock with the sledge or chisel the jackhammer it out with the rotary hammer.

I cracked a lot of big chunks off the rock in the short time I spent using the hammer. I can see that one of two things will happen. I may crack enough junk off the rock to make it small enough to tear out with the tractor, or I will simply remove stuff until the remaining rock is so far below grade I won’t mind burying it and moving on with my life.

Was this a stupid buy? I don’t know. I didn’t need to remove the rock at all. I could have painted it day-glo orange and driven around it. The house is 19 years old, and the previous owner never had to remove the rock. On the other hand, the rocks are annoying, and they really should be removed. It would cost me maybe a grand to get them removed with a bulldozer, and it would tear the yard up even worse than I have. After all that, I would not have a neat jackhammer and splitting wedges, or the ability to use them, in my tool arsenal. I would just have a bill and a messed-up yard.

It’s fun tormenting the rocks, and I have amassed a very big rock collection which I could conceivably use for decoration.

In other news, my friends Freddly and Freddelle visited this weekend, along with Freddly’s children Noah and Grace. Noah is my godson, and he is 4. I think. Grace is 10 months old. Freddly’s husband couldn’t make it.

Freddelle is a law student at FSU. I have known her since she was 17. We met at Trinity Church. She found out I was a lawyer and immediately began grilling me for advice. Over the years, I have been able to be somewhat helpful to her. She calls me a mentor. I would say I’m just a guy who gave her advice a few times. She had doubts about even getting into law school, and here she is, coming up on graduation, with one solid job offer already in the bag.

Freddly was an armorbearer at Trinity. The code name she gave herself was “Oreo,” which I found extremely amusing. I was somewhat instrumental in helping her reattach with God after the Wilkerson family and Trinity disillusioned and discouraged her.

When they started talking about visiting, I wasn’t sure what two Haitian girls who were suburban at best would do here, but things worked out very well. We went to a barbecue place and a great Italian restaurant, and on Sunday, we went on a glass-bottomed boat at Silver Springs. Noah was beside himself. You would think he had never seen a fish before.

Noah likes trucks and tractors, so that’s what he gets for holiday presents, and he was well-prepared for my farm. He has a Tonka John Deere, so we got the real John Deere lawn tractor out, and he helped me drive it around the yard.

Noah loves Marvin and Maynard, and I think they enjoyed his company, too.

The ladies and I talked about various Christian topics. They seem much more well-grounded than I had thought. I told them I was thinking of moving to Tennessee, and I mentioned the strange trend of Christians moving to that state. Freddly told me something crazy. She had had a dream in which she visited Tennessee. This was before she knew about my plans, and she has no Tennessee connections. She said she visited to see if it was okay for black people move there.

Something is going on in the supernatural.

My back is at about 95% now. I don’t know what I did to it, but it was not serious. I almost never have back problems, so a week of limited activity was a strange and unwelcome experience. Today I went out and did a few things. A three-trunked oak fell over for no reason at all, so I had to go out in the woods and cut all three trunks to take pressure off the trees it was leaning on. There was poison ivy everywhere. I had to walk like I was in a minefield. Before I started my saws, I hosed the whole area with glyphosate. I may have to go back in there, and obviously, it’s harder to get a rash from dead vines than big juicy leaves with oil all over them.

I noticed something interesting: when you cut a lot of wood and throw sawdust everywhere, it covers up poison ivy and makes an area less dangerous. I don’t think I’m very sensitive to poison ivy, because I have eaten mangoes with sap on them for decades with no problem, and I worked in the poison ivy before I knew what it was without getting rashes, but I don’t want to be exposed any more than I have to. When I came home, I used a brush and dish detergent to scrub the soles of my boots.

Cutting leaning trees is dangerous and difficult, especially when you can’t stand wherever you want. I relied on bore-cutting, which means cutting the middle out of a tree before you sever the remaining strap or straps on the outside. It prevents the tree from splitting, which can throw a trunk in your face. I was not able to get the tree down completely in the time I had, but I severed it from its roots, ensuring that it will dry up and rot faster, and I cut enough off the trunks to give substantial relief to the trees holding the fallen tree up.

I can get more done once the ivy is dead.

I am no arborist, but from watching Youtubes, I can tell I know a few things a lot of the old pros don’t. Some of them don’t know much about bore-cutting, for example. I’m not afraid to cut a leaning tree which is hung on other trees, because with a bore cut and two or three wedges, I can fix it so the tree can’t split in a dangerous way or pinch my saw. I can also fell a leaning tree that isn’t hung, as long as I’m okay with it falling in the direction of the lean. I don’t know enough to log or take down rotten trees that are still vertical, and cutting free leaning trees so they fall away from the lean is too much for me, but I know enough to do what I need to do on this farm.

Cutting leaning trees that are not hung is very dangerous. If you leave the wood in the center of the trunk, the torque from the lean may make the tree split up the middle, and then you get what’s called a barber chair. It’s a heavy trunk supported on a springy bit that has split away, and the trunk may bounce and swing unpredictably. They kill people all the time.

Here’s a video of a tree barber-chairing.

This shows why you should always wear a hard hat when you cut anything taller than you are. You can cut a tree a foot from the ground, but if it barber chairs, the base of the trunk may rise up over your head and then come down on you.

A barber chair ruins a lot of the wood in a tree.

I’ve noticed that some of the techniques loggers use are designed to spare the wood. For example, they often cut almost flush with the ground. My wood is worthless, so I don’t care about any of that. When I look at videos and read about tree felling, I discard the stuff that doesn’t apply to me and could cause problems.

Cutting a tree flush with the ground is hard on your back, and if something goes wrong, it may be hard to straighten up and run. You also end up with a stump you can’t pull out with a chain or rope. I have had to deal with stumps people cut this way (stupidly), and I wouldn’t dream of cutting them like that. The higher you cut a tree, the more leverage you have when you pull the stump with the tractor. I try to cut low enough to be safe and high enough to leave me with something to pull on.

It’s funny, but the oaks here rot like crazy while they’re alive, but once you cut one, the stump lasts forever. It absolutely will not rot. You really have to think about stump removal when you cut an oak here. You can always have a flush-cut stump ground, but it’s expensive, and then you end up with a permanent mass of wood just under the ground, where you had hoped to plant something.

It’s dumb.

I had a maple struck by lightning, and because it was not a dangerous tree, I ended up cutting it about six feet up. After that, I had no problem pulling it out. Took about three minutes. It was nothing like the flush-cut stumps that required hours of digging and hacking.

I guess the world has read enough about my doings for one day.

I’ll try to post some jackhammer photos eventually.

It’s Easier to Replace Money Than Body Parts

Sometimes I wonder which of the following two things are true.

1. I spend too much money on tools, and I should just tough it out with what I have or pay other people to do things.

2. I don’t spend enough on tools, and I make my life unnecessarily difficult.

I just bought a 35-pound jackhammer to bust up rocks in my yard, and Juan Paxety said this in a comment:

The car guys on npr used to say the stingy man pays the most. He buys low and buys up until he gets what he originally needed. You know you need a Cat D-8.

I responded and said I wasn’t listening, but of course, I am.

Over the last day or two I’ve been thinking about one of my basic principles, which is that you should never risk hurting yourself when a tool purchase or hiring a tradesman can keep you safe. How true have I been to this principle? Maybe not true enough.

I strained my back twice in one week, removing boulders from my yard. I didn’t think I was exerting myself too much, but I did pick up a couple of fairly heavy rocks. I spent a good deal of time shoveling smaller rocks and dirt. For some reason, shoveling seems to be hard on my back, even when I’m not lifting a lot at any given time. I think it’s impossible to shovel with good posture. It’s just the nature of the activity. It seems to invite problems.

I got myself some splitting wedges and feathers. I don’t think I harmed myself by using them, because they don’t require much effort, but I did have to get down in the dirt and hunch over in order to install them, so it may be that I aggravated whatever problems the shovel caused.

Now I’m about to start using a jackhammer, which is what I should have used to begin with. I should be able to crack the rock up quickly without a lot of bending. If I had bought the hammer to begin with, would my back have been strained? Maybe not.

I have been considering the big chunks of rock I’ve been pulling out of the hole. They need to be moved. Even if I use the tractor, I’ll have to lift them onto the forks or into the loader bucket somehow, and lifting large objects that are very close to the ground is a bad idea. When I thought about the problem, it reminded me that I don’t have a decent hand truck.

A long time ago, in Austin, Texas, I bought myself a Home Depot hand truck so I could load a U-Haul and move back to Sodom. I mean Miami. It’s a great thing to have, but it’s not perfect. One of the Chinese welds on the crossmembers broke, and I had to redo it. It has inflatable tires, and that means they’re always empty when I need the hand truck. Inflatable tires on a hand truck…very bad idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reinflate them.

I want to get a new hand truck that works better. I figured I’d go to Home Depot and spend eighty bucks. Then I started looking at reviews and complaints. There are a lot of problems with cheap hand trucks. First, you have to eliminate all hand trucks with inflatable tires. Then you have to look at reviews and see what people say about hand trucks falling apart. I read up, and the conclusion I drew is that a person should invest, once in his life, in a good hand truck.

I wanted to spend less than a hundred bucks, but I think I’m going to blow over $300 on an aluminum hand truck made by a company called Magliner. They’re made for daily use. The one I want can be opened up so it holds things at a 45-degree angle to the ground, or horizontally. It has fenders on it to keep things from rubbing on the wheels, which are made from foam and can’t deflate. It has a thing that lowers to allow you to put bigger objects on it. It will stand up to hard use, and because it’s aluminum, it will be easier to lift than a steel hand truck.

It seems crazy to me to spend that much money on a hand truck, but then I thought about the product’s main purpose: to prevent idiots from hurting themselves. Injuries are not fun, and they can be expensive. They can be permanent. If I hurt myself seriously trying to move something, I would feel great about receiving a successful treatment for $300, so why not pay that price in advance to avoid the problem?

There are some tools I can live without. I didn’t need the Harbor Freight planishing hammer I bought because they had a crazy sale. I didn’t need my third angle grinder, really. Tools for moving things are different. You need them. They are safety equipment. I see now that it’s important to put safety gear in a class by itself when I think about obtaining new stuff.

In a way, the jackhammer is safety gear. It will reduce hazardous exertion. My pole saw is safety gear. It allows me to put six feet between me and trees when I make risky cuts, and it allows me to cut from a ladder or cut over my head without risking death. Jackstands and chocks are safety gear.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before.

Now that I see things correctly, a $300 hand truck doesn’t seem like a silly impulse buy. It seems like a prudent investment in continued wellbeing.

I should go ahead and put a 1000-pound electric hoist in the shop. They’re cheap, and one would certainly make it easier to yank the 300+-pound deck out from under my mower. I could lift the front of the mower and pull the deck out with the tractor, like an intelligent person.

The difficulty with installing a hoist is finding a way to support it. I have flimsy truss chords in my workshop, so it’s not like I would trust one to hold a hoist up by itself. I’ve read that you can sister them (fasten additional pieces of wood to either side) to prevent disaster. I don’t know if it works.

My garage in Miami had stronger trusses which were 5 feet shorter. I threw a 2×8 across three and hung my chain hoist from the middle of it. No trouble at all with loads over 500 pounds. I think that would be risky here.

Northern Tool sells a 2000-pound gantry crane cheap, and they also sell electric hoists. I suppose a mature person would buy a gantry instead of hanging a hoist from trusses. I don’t like gantries. They have feet, unlike a truss-mounted hoist. Always in the way. It’s probably a smart idea, though, because I could lift a ton instead of a few hundred pounds, and it could not pull my roof down.

I’m looking around the web as I write, and I just saw a great suggestion for moving relatively small things around: a Hoyer patient lift. This is something I should have had the common sense to buy for my dad. It’s like a garage engine hoist for a person. They will move 400 pounds from 30″ off the ground to 78″. That’s hard to beat. Someone on Craigslist is trying to get rid of one for $50, and they ordinarily sell for close to a grand. That’s a perk of living near Ocala. I hate to say it, but people die at an enormous rate here because of all the retirement and assisted living communities, and their stuff has to be liquidated.

I look forward to receiving my jackhammer, and I plan to be more open to spending money on things that will protect me from exertion.

Man, a bulldozer would be fun.

When all Else Fails, Spend More Money

The giant rock in my side yard is proving to be a stubborn and clever foe.

I have lots of rocks on and under my property. The other day I pulled a 6-footer out of the yard with the Kubota. I got cocky and started working on another rock. The more I dug, the more rock I saw. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve stumbled upon one of the longest roots of the country of China.

Last week, I shoveled and lifted quite a bit. I try not to lift anything heavy, but I still managed to strain my back. I felt bad on Saturday, but I prayed and did my thing, and on Monday morning, I felt great. So I went out to do more work, and on Tuesday, I strained my back again.

This time, I decided not to pray alone. I made sure I contacted my friend Amanda. She has been getting a lot of miraculous healings, and she prayed successfully for her son when he cut his toe very badly. It occurred to me that I ought to be contacting her whenever I had a physical problem. I believe in investing in success.

Last night little voices kept trying to tell me I had a serious problem which would not go away, but I got up this morning and felt fine.

When you help other people develop in Christ, they tend to come back and pay you dividends. Preachers don’t talk about that much, because most of them don’t know much. It’s a little bit like raising kids. If you raise successful kids of good character, you’ll have help when you get old. Same principle.

I had pastors who did me some good, and I tried to do good things in their churches, but they couldn’t be blessed. They wrecked whatever I gave them. Many people complain about the way their lives go, and they don’t realize they have turned themselves into people who are only capable of being cursed.

You can’t bless everyone. Curses bounce off God’s children, and blessings bounce off the children of darkness. It’s another example of the symmetry of the supernatural. You could give my sister 10 million dollars tomorrow, and in three years, she’d be broke, and she would also have made a lot of people suffer.

When we involve ourselves too deeply with cursed people who refuse to listen, they become parasites to us. Good things leave us, go to them, putrefy, and are lost. When Satan can’t get a grip on you directly, he may be able to use a cursed person you pity as a handle. This is the essence of enabling.

My back feels good, but I am not interested in a routine of injury and prayer, so I decided to invest in a jackhammer.

So far, I’ve been using a rotary hammer and some splitting wedges. The wedges work very well, but in order to use them, you have to have a rock of a suitable shape, and you have to be able to get at the part you need to split. Also, when you’ve split a rock, you have to be able to get the pieces out of the hole. A jackhammer should allow me to break the rock up into pieces which are light and easy to pick up.

I considered getting a Chinese jackhammer. They’re bargains. You can buy one, including an extended warranty, for less than a third of the price of a name brand. I found a refurbed Bosch for about twice the price of a Chinese model, and I felt like it was a better choice. It’s less likely to break down, and if I decide to sell it, the low up-front price, combined with the Bosch name, should permit me to get out with a very small loss.

I don’t know what I’ll do with a jackhammer once my few troubling rocks are gone. You can use them for other things. You can drive grounding rods with them. I don’t see that happening. You can use them for general destruction of annoying objects.

It will be nice to have. It was nice to have my little-used rotary hammer around when I needed it. I don’t know how easy it will be to use far from the house. My portable generator will power a welder, and it should run a jackhammer, but I can’t say until I’ve seen it.

The big rock moves very slightly when I yank it with the tractor. Maybe if I cut enough off of it, it will come out of its hole before being broken to tiny bits. I hope so.

I’m already using one rock from the job as a landscaping decoration, and I plan to use others. Bonus!

Sometimes I wish I had a skid steer. I suspect a skid steer is a better tool for this farm than a tractor. Skid steers are more powerful. They lift more, too. A skid steer can rip out stumps a tractor can’t even move. I think a skid steer would have enabled me to remove every annoying rock I have in a couple of hours.

If you’re wondering why they’re called “skid steers,” it’s because their wheels don’t have any steering mechanism. They’re always aimed straight ahead. To turn a skid steer, you move one pair of wheels one way while moving the other two the other way (or stopping them completely…I think). The result is that one pair of wheels may skid across the ground while the others turn.

Now you know.

I will post humiliating photos of the defeated rock when I have them.

You Owe Because We Say You Owe

I just spent at least two hours proving a condominium association owes me money. I do not know why people keep trying to bill me for things I’ve already paid for.

I own a rental condo. I pay the association every month for maintenance. Every so often, they send me a threatening letter saying they’re going to put a lien on the condo if I don’t pay up fast. The last letter said they would sue if I didn’t respond within 10 days of the date of the letter, and I received it on the 10th day.

You don’t send someone a letter that says they have to respond within 10 days of mailing, because you have no idea how long they’ll take to receive it. You don’t say they have to respond within 10 days of receipt unless you can prove they received it. In any case, you don’t send someone a letter demanding a response by a certain date and then mail it so late it arrives after the deadline.

I don’t know why they do this, because when you talk to them on the phone, they admit it’s all a bluff. I’m sure they would eventually sue me if I got far enough behind, but they don’t really do it after 10 days. They’re not obnoxious. Just weird.

I had to sit down and make a table listing all the checks I had sent. Four of my checks had been deposited yet were not credited to my account. This is not the first time. Someone at the association deposits my checks to other people’s accounts.

They wanted about a thousand dollars. Turns out they owe me over a hundred.

I really hate accounting. It amazes me that there are people who like staring at tables of figures. I had no trouble with real math, which involves variables, not filthy, naked NUMBERS. Actual figures are mind-numbing to look at. How can people stand it?

I would rather pay these people a hundred bucks I don’t owe than look at their ledgers. I hope they don’t know that.

An assisted living facility is also trying to get me to pay money I don’t owe. They kept my dad for four days last year. We paid in full, in advance, and they gave us a copy of the check. Then I started getting bills. I called them, and they said not to worry about it. I should ignore them. They took a long time to deposit checks, and their computers sent out bogus bills until the deposits were recorded.

Then they turned an incompetent and seemingly dishonest collection agency loose on me. They want me to pay the original bill plus $800, plus the cost of an additional day. My dad stayed for 4 days, their paperwork shows it, and they’re billing me for 5.

I eventually found out the facility lost the check. It wasn’t deposited. I had to pay to stop it.

The collection agency told me to send a dispute letter, so I did, with very clear exhibits plus a check for the original stay minus the cost of stopping the first check. They said to call in a week. I did, and they said to call in another week. The next time I called, which was maybe two weeks later, they said I hadn’t sent a dispute letter. They said I had refused to pay. They said they didn’t have a check.

During the same call, they admitted they had the check, which they refused to cash. I pointed out that it was mailed in the same envelope with the letter. They said someone must have failed to put it in the file.

They record all calls so they can use them against people in court. In their conversations with me, they provided a lot of evidence that they don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think that helps their case.

I wrote a new letter, attached the old letter and exhibits, made a PDF of the whole thing, sent it to them by certified mail and faxed it to them twice, on different days. I may fax it a few more times. I wonder if they plan to acknowledge its existence.

I don’t know what they plan to do now. They can’t put a lien on anything I own. They can’t sue, because the facility paperwork calls for arbitration. They can’t arbitrate, because they’ll look like idiots and lose, and then they’ll have to pay the arbitrator.

They can’t hurt my credit rating, which I never use, because I don’t borrow.

I guess I do use it. People with good credit get lower insurance rates. But one crazy, disputed bill from people who are clearly inept will not hurt me.

You have to wonder why they don’t take my money and go away. I’m doing my best to pay them.

I freely admit, I should never have listened when I was told the bills would stop coming, and I delayed dealing with the collection people for maybe a month because my dad had just died, I was busy, and it didn’t seem urgent. But I don’t owe these characters $800 as payment for making errors.

I called the assisted living place several times, and I know their bookkeeper (probably the person who lost the check) has been told I want to talk with her. She refuses to return calls. I told them I might come and sit in their lobby until she comes out.

I don’t know if that’s a good idea. The roaches might climb up my legs while I waited. The insect life was one reason why I took my dad out of that place. I visited while he was eating, and I saw two roaches in the dining room. One was wandering around on a picture frame, surveying the room. I pointed it out to a worker, and she said she would have to notify the maintenance people. Didn’t bother the roach, mind you. He went on observing.

I reported them in to the state, so maybe that’s why they don’t want to talk. I also turned the collection agency in to the Attorney General. I don’t know if they ever do anything to help anyone, but it made me feel like I was striking a blow for old, feeble people everywhere. This is not how you treat the elderly. Okay, I’m not quite elderly, but my dad was, and if he were alive, they would be going after him. If he were alive and I weren’t around to help him fight the collection agency, where would he be?

My situation reminds me of a story about Eliezer, Abraham’s servant. He visited Sodom for some reason, and while he was there, a Sodomite hit him in the head with a rock. The Sodomite sued him, claiming a rock in the face was medical treatment. He said he was owed a fee for the therapeutic bloodletting. The judge, also a Sodomite, agreed.

Eliezer hit the judge in the face with a rock and told him to pay the other man what he owed.

I have conversed with God about the matter. I didn’t want to pay these characters for their collection “costs,” but I said I was willing to do it to make this matter disappear. I said I would do it if it pleased God. I even asked if it was okay to do it, but I feel like he doesn’t want me to.

I wonder what else I’m going to be billed for. Maybe reparations. I might be willing to give all the wealth my slave-owning ancestors, if any, passed on to me. Of course, that amounts to nothing. I’m willing to pay cash.

I already paid reparations. I’ve paid it many times. I paid it when people with lower grades and test scores got scholarships and I didn’t. Do I get credit for that?

The message here is this: never listen to any potential creditor when they say, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.” They won’t take care of it. If they took care of things, you wouldn’t be having a problem to begin with.

Someone should have made me read this blog entry in January.

I spent so much time today working on a bill I don’t owe, I forgot all about bills I do owe. Guess the checkbook won’t be coming out until tomorrow.

Time for an ice cream sandwich.

My Boulders are Calving

Today I had fun with some new tools. My feathers and wedges arrived from Amazon. I bought a set of 10.

A wedge is really basically the same thing as a masonry nail, except it’s bigger. A feather is a tapered piece of metal that flanks the wedge. There is one feather on each side of the wedge, and the wedge slides between them.

You drill a hole in a rock you want to split, and you push your wedge and feathers into it. After drilling several holes in a line and putting wedges into all of them, you bop the wedges with a small sledge. As they tighten up, they force the rock apart. Before you know it, the rock splits. It’s hilarious. It’s not hard at all. A long-handled sledge would be too big for the job. You use a little one, like a blacksmith’s hammer.

I have a lot of rocks in my yard, and I hate them, so I am removing them. The other day I pulled a six-footer out of a hole with the Kubota. I am now working on one which is apparently considerably larger. I haven’t been able to budge it. I put a strap on it and yanked with the tractor. A piece of the rock snapped off, the strap slipped, and the strap came flying at me at considerable speed. The end of it missed my head by less than a yard. I didn’t think I could stretch a strap over three inches in width that much.

People say a flying strap will kill you. I can tell you from watching this one fly by my head that it wouldn’t even have bruised me. Nonetheless, I was not pleased to observe its flight. I was trying to use common sense, and I had read a lot about safety in these situations, but the strap took off anyway.

The rock is oddly shaped. It has big projections on it. My theory is that if I split them off one by one, the rock will eventually give up. Picture a fat guy using his hands to hold onto a doorframe while you try to pull him out of the room. Cut off his hands, and he will come flying out.

The rock has, or had, a big wing pointing north. I put 4 wedges in it and bopped them with the hammer, and a crack opened up, severing the wing. Unfortunately, it was still pinned by the main body of the rock. I moved around 6″ closer to the rock and made another cut. Now I had three rocks. The big rock, the wing I couldn’t move, and a piece between them. Oddly, the middle piece was easy to move, even though it was stuck between two rocks that refused to budge. I picked it up with my hands and threw it out of the hole.

I used my Makita rotary hammer to drill the holes. Everyone should have a rotary hammer. It’s in between hammer drills and demo hammers. My hammer is about 1-1/6 horsepower, and it will do three things: hammer, drill, and hammer-drill.

I needed to make 5/8″ holes for the wedges, and when I got started today, I found out my only 5/8″ carbide bit was for my little hammer drills. My cordless hammer drill is very nice. It will push a 1″ auger through oak as though it were cheese. I tried it on my rock, and after maybe a minute, I was probably only 1.5″ in. I was not having that.

I drove to Ocala, bought a 5/8″ SDS-Plus bit 18″ long, and got out the rotary hammer. I would say it cut roughly twice as fast as the hammer drill. Well worth the drive. I am sorely tempted to get a considerably bigger rotary hammer. Makita makes one that hits with 4 times as much energy as mine. That would be a joy to behold.

It’s really hot and muggy these days, so I can’t work hard for more than maybe 90 minutes. “Won’t” may be more accurate. I made two cuts, and my clothes were already heavy with sweat, so I called it a day.

The rock is defeated. I don’t know if I’ll continue until the whole thing comes out, but I can definitely knock the top off, and if I do that, I can bury it again, and it will be well below lawnmower range. The challenge of removing the entire thing is tempting. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist. I enjoy mocking the rock too much.

Once I get the rock removed or beheaded, I’ll be able to clean the area up, add soil and mulch, and plant my blackberry plants. Then I can move on to shrubs that need to be murdered and replaced.

It’s surprising to me to see such hard rock in Florida, which I think of as a giant sandbar. Parts of the rock are hard and glassy like flint, and other parts are basically sandstone. They’re mixed together, along with empty voids. I wouldn’t have expected to be able to drill it so easily, but it shatters readily, so the drill goes right in.

After this, I have one more rock to go. There are others, but they’re in areas where they don’t cause problems. I have a big ridge of very large boulders on the west side of the property. Some are as big as several couches. They’re fine. They look good, and they’re not in the way of my lawnmower.

Don’t let rocks push you around. If they try to intimidate you, show them your drill and wedges. You don’t need expensive equipment to turn them into pebbles.

Slouching Towards Bugtussle

Today I surprised myself. I contacted a realtor about a property in Blount County, Tennessee.

One of the problems I’ve had since my dad died is a reluctance to take ownership of things. For example, sometimes I say “we” when I’m talking about things we used to own together. “We have two wells.” “We have a pool.” Things like that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just managing things for my dad. I have even been reluctant to change the bad landscaping at my house, just because I feel like the previous owners knew something I didn’t and would disapprove.

I can tell you something that has helped me. Sometimes I say, “My dad moved to a far-away country and gave me everything he owns here.” This is true. He owns nothing in this world.

The idea of selling properties and moving to another state by myself is slightly intimidating. I wouldn’t be asking anyone’s permission. I would just go. I didn’t think I’d start looking for a new place so soon.

I was waiting for God to give me ideas about where to go. The older I get, the more I realize we screw up our lives by putting ourselves in traps God had nothing to do with. We choose horrible husbands, wives, careers, and homes. Then things go badly, and we’re stuck. You can’t just drop a spouse like a bruised peach at the supermarket. You can’t make a better career appear instantaneously. If you’re in the wrong home and the wrong area, you probably have a mortgage, and that means you’re stuck like a coyote with its paw in a trap. I don’t want to “follow my heart” or “go with my gut.” I don’t want to trust my ridiculous judgment. The world tells us to do those things, but worldly people live in defeat and regret. I want to get guidance from God.

I felt he was telling me to move to Tennessee, but I couldn’t figure out where to go. I knew I didn’t want to be in a flat area or a city. I wanted to know I was in Appalachia. I didn’t want to be in a county where they still had Klan meetings. I didn’t want to be close to Gatlinburg or the other tourist traps.

This morning I started to think he wanted me to move to Blount County.

I read up on it after I got this impression. It seems like a nice place. Good climate, nice hills, and real stores within a reasonable drive. Land prices are cheaper than they are here. I could set myself up on hundreds of acres of woods.

This week the nightly lows will be in the sixties in Blount County. That would be nice. I love Ocala, but it’s up around 95 degrees every day right now, and it’s only going down into the upper seventies at night. Working outdoors during the day is nearly impossible. You can put a couple of hours in, pausing frequently, and then you have to quit.

The human body is funny. When you overheat, you get tired, even if you’re not working hard. Your body will refuse to give you full performance, and it will make you breathe hard as if you were exerting yourself. It’s not helpful when I’m trying to cut downed trees or dig up a boulder.

I contacted a couple of real estate brokerages online about a property, and in my messages, I said, “No calls, please.” Both called within seconds. They apparently refuse to deal with me over the web like normal people. I sent the calls to voicemail.

Real estate agents are really annoying. When you call about a property, they don’t see you as a person who wants to buy that property. They see you as a lead. They want to turn you into “their” customer. Then they get 3% of the sale price of any property they tell you about.

I wanted to see what the property was shaped like. A lot of big properties are long and skinny, and I’m not having that. It doesn’t do you much good to have 300 acres if your neighbors are 100 yards away in both directions. I found the property on a government website, and it’s shaped like a lizard. No good. Oh, well.

I see where the term “gerrymander” comes from.

I got tempted to stray from Tennessee, and I looked at a place in North Carolina. It’s remarkable. It has two well-kept, very livable buildings. One is the main house, and the other is a sort of shop with its own kitchen. Really nice. It only has 40 acres, though. The number 300 keeps rolling around in my head. I really like big pieces of land. I always have. My favorite of all my grandfather’s farms was around 300 acres.

I am sorely tempted to spend a few days in Tennessee, just looking around.

In other news, I made real progress with my grilling. I went to Home Depot and got me a Bernzomatic TS8000 torch. I already have a Turbotorch, but it’s for the workshop. The Turbotorch was recommended to me as the best torch of the type, but it has been balky ever since I bought it, and it doesn’t seem to burn any hotter than the one I just got.

Today I made two 6.5-ounce burgers (because I had exactly 13 ounces of meat) and put them on the grill at its highest post-modification setting. As I grilled, I applied the torch to scorch the outsides of the burgers. It worked very well. I got some deep browning as well as a little crunch, and the insides of the burgers were hot and juicy. One had very little pink in it, and I always shoot for medium, but burgers are not steak, and medium-well is still very good. Medium can actually be a little mushy.

I have a Searzall tool on the way. I think I wrote about it. It’s a torch attachment for searing food evenly. Once it arrives, I should be all set. Regardless of the appalling shortcomings of propane grills, I’ll be able to put a good sear on the outside of every piece of beef I cook.

It’s amazing that the grill industry makes such feeble products.

I sound like I’m knocking my new grill. I think it’s an excellent product, as propane grills go. I believe it cooks as well as a $2000 grill. I should know; I had one. I just think the entire industry should be doing better. A $2000 grill should make amazing steaks, and when you buy a $100 grill that cooks as well as a $2000 grill, it should produce the same result. I have a $100 grill that, as delivered, cooked steaks just as well as an industry-leading, yet disappointing, $2000 grill.

It would be nice to have an electric salamander some day. That would put an end to the striving.

I still plan to get a square cast iron griddle for the butane stove. Frying puts a magnificent crust on a steak. I guess I could fry and then touch up with the Searzall! That would be interesting.

The feeling I get is that grilled burgers need to be at least an inch thick before cooking. Otherwise, the insides cook too fast. It’s just physics. I think the torch allows me to do a better job with thinner burgers.

I wonder how a propane knife forge would do. Someone needs to try that. It sounds stupendous. I guess the melting fat would be a problem, because it would run into the insulation and burn.

There’s a Youtube video of a lady cooking a steak using a forge. She’s not much to look at, she has a whisker problem, and her miniskirt is too short for a woman of her years, but she may be onto something.

Poor thing. It must be hard landing a man when you look like that. You have to give her credit, though. She’s in there punching. Takes good care of herself. Look at those toned legs.

I’m sure I’ll report on the Searzall when it arrives. Try to contain yourselves.

When You Have Jesus, You Don’t Need a Second Opinion

I have an interesting testimony today.

First of all, I spent some time yesterday working on removing a big boulder from my yard, and now my back is sore on one side, so prayers would be appreciated. Healing seems to be taking some time.

With that behind me, the testimony.

Last night I dreamed I was in some kind of doctor’s office. There were two small rooms in the office, and they were connected by a door. My dad was in one room, and my mother and my sister were in the other. I was with my dad.

My dad was old and in bad shape. He was not like the transformed father who passed away this spring. He was still in denial. Even after his health got very bad, he used to claim his only health problem was a lower back issue, and he would say he ought to live to be 120. In the dream, he was talking about some medical procedure his doctors had recommended, and he was trying to tell me, in so many words, that it would extend his life for a very long time.

My mother and sister listened to him through the doorway, and they started talking about the procedure. They swallowed the pitch. They clearly thought it was a great blessing and that my father ought to have it done. Their gullibility wearied me, and I closed the door on my dad and talked to them. I didn’t ask him to excuse us. I just closed the door.

You shouldn’t be disrespectful to your parents, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t haggle and negotiate with the flesh. Just shut the door while it’s still talking.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but my message was that they needed to snap out of it. He was dying, he was grasping at straws, and they should have known better than to listen. They knew he was a master of denial.

What he really needed was Jesus, period.

I don’t like relying on doctors. The word says God heals all of our diseases–not “some”–and I believe we have medical science because we have failed to walk in divine protection and healing. If I go to a doctor, it’s because I’ve failed to get help from God, and that has to be my fault, not God’s.

It seems to me that the counsel of doctors represents the counsel of the ungodly. If your walk with God is strong, he takes care of you, and you don’t have to look to human beings and painful human effort to get solutions to your problems. God doesn’t get any glory when a doctor’s knife repairs you, and we know that God wants the glory, because he says so, over and over. If he wants the glory, he is definitely willing to do the work, because God would never steal credit for something someone else did.

God doesn’t mind doing things for us. He loves us, and besides, as he has reminded us, nothing is hard for him. It’s not a chore for him to heal you. God doesn’t work hard. He is rich, and he has never worked for wealth. He has infinite power and resources, so when you ask him to do something, you’re not imposing on him. It’s like feeling bad about asking for a teaspoon of water from the ocean. He doesn’t care. He wants you to have it.

The Bible says the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly is blessed. See Psalm 1.

While I was talking to them, a little boy came through the door. He was not like us. I come from blue-eyed people. The boy had dark skin, like an Arab, and his hair and eyes were dark. He was wearing shorts and no shirt. He was very friendly. He was happy. His walk had a little dance to it.

He started telling us about a man with some sort of plastic boots. I can’t recall the terms he used. He used words I interpreted to mean plastic boots. The man had helped him to be saved. He seemed to want to talk to the man. He said, “March the second is my birthday!”

Before the end of the dream, he took my hand, and he squeezed my fingers. His grip didn’t feel like a normal child’s grip. It was as if a grown man were hiding inside him, squeezing with greater strength. It felt like a little version of my dad were inside him, squeezing my hand through his to show me he was there.

At this point, I woke up.

I had to find out what had happened to my dad on March the second. I knew of one thing: my mother died on that day. It’s also her mother’s birthday. The night my mother died, my dad and my sister and I hugged each other in the driveway of the hospital in Miami, and my dad cried, which was something I had never seen before.

I got out of bed and looked at my website to see if I had written anything about my dad that would explain the reference to March the second. I found out it was a pivotal day.

Years ago, when my dad’s memory problems were minor, I used to pray for him to be healed. Then God told me he had cut my dad off, meaning he had lost patience with him and intended to reduce his protection. I quit praying for his memory to improve, because I believed God had made a decision and that I would be wasting my time if I prayed for him to go against it. My dad became demented and had to be moved to a facility.

On February 28 of this year, I talked to God about this. I said I felt selfish. My dad’s declining condition was a financial blessing to me. I stood to inherit everything he had. I also stood to be relieved of the heavy burden of his care. On the one hand, I didn’t want to interfere with problems that were intended to drive my dad back to God. On the other hand, it seemed wrong to let my dad slip without even trying to help.

I told God these things, and he made it clear it was okay to pray for my dad. I started praying for God to heal him.

Before this prayer, my dad had been changing radically. He had been losing his pride and his anger. He had started telling me how much he loved me and what a wonderful son I was. He had become less argumentative. He had prayed for salvation. He had been enthusiastic about getting to know God.

I prayed on February 28, and I visited my dad, as always, the next day. He was a different person, and I’m sorry to say he was a person I knew very well. When I arrived at the facility, he was calling his roommate filthy names. He was in a vile mood. His mind was clearer than it had been before my prayer.

He told me he didn’t really believe in God. He said he had gone along with me and prayed just to make me happy. This was a lie, but it’s what he said.

I asked God what I should do, and an idea came to me. I asked my dad whether he agreed that preparing for the afterlife was the most important thing a person could do. He agreed. I said I wanted to pray for God to do whatever had to be done to help him prepare, and he consented.

I asked God to give my dad whatever he needed to be given, and to take away whatever needed to be taken away, in order for him to be saved.

The next day, which was the second of March, my dad’s mental improvement was gone. So were his anger, rudeness, and pride. He was as he had been before I prayed on February 28.

My dad prayed for salvation without prompting, very sincerely, on March 21, but he began the final, uninterrupted leg of his life on March the second, which was the birthday of the boy in the dream.

Do I think God let my dad send me a message from beyond the grave, to show me he was okay? No. I don’t think my dad was involved at all. Communication with the dead is dangerous and wrong. Sometimes God uses the dead to reach us, but generally, the work goes to the Holy Spirit, human beings, and ministering spirits sent by God. The dead aren’t sent to us often, and we are never supposed to initiate or ask for contact with them.

Just to be clear, God can send the dead to us, but we are never to seek the dead.

The other day I saw a photo of a lady from the Bethel movement, lying on the grave of a dead Christian, trying to absorb his anointing. That’s not okay. It’s necromancy. The Holy Spirit is sufficient for us. She was worshiping a man, not God. Jesus didn’t die so I could go lie on Kathryn Kuhlman’s grave and hope her virtue would rise up and infuse me. He died so I could be infused with his virtue and know him personally.

If God himself lives in me, why would I need to lie on a grave to get his power?

I’m not a Bethel fan. They revere William Branham, a strange preacher who made a number of false prophecies with great conviction. A friend of mine gave me a Bethel book teaching about their “sozo” therapy. The idea is that if something traumatic happened to you in the past, you should ask Jesus where he was. People who have done this claim Jesus came to them and showed them where he was during their trouble, and they claim he heals their hearts. I gave it a sincere try, not wanting to brush anything off without considering it, but when I asked Jesus where he was when certain bad things happened to me, nothing at all happened. God talks to me all the time, but on these occasions, I got nothing.

I get a creepy feeling when I watch Bethel videos.

I just realized I have seen the boy in the dream before. In 1984, I was living on a kibbutz, and I was sent to Nazareth to buy charcoal for a cookout. When I got off the bus, the boy accosted me, and he would not leave me alone. He kept saying, “my FRIEND,” when he addressed me, with great emphasis. He walked in front of me like a herald. He bowed and made gestures ushering me forward, as though preparing a path for me. He told random people I was his friend. His face glowed because he was so happy to see me.

Of course, I am just a person. I am not God’s special, unique anointed one who was sent to fix the world. I am one of many. I am not good. I am not entitled to have my own John the Baptist to go before me proclaiming my arrival. I think people would be pretty let down when I showed up!

When I sat on the bus bench and waited to go back to the kibbutz, he sat down next to me and put his arm around me. He did something even more odd. He licked his index finger and touched my leg. Gross.

In the years before he died, my dad developed a practice of licking his index finger and rubbing things. He thought he was cleaning them. It drove me crazy.

I always thought the boy in Nazareth was demonized. I still don’t know what his story was. I actually wondered if Nazareth had child prostitution. Anyway, he was the boy in the dream.

Could my dad’s spirit visit me on one continent while he was alive on another? Did God send him to me in Israel for some reason? No idea. I know my dad wasn’t making much use of his spirit at the time! I also know the spirit and the mind are not the same. God’s word divides the spirit and mind.

The boy wanted to meet the man with plastic boots. I wouldn’t say I wear plastic boots, but I wear boots every day, and the soles are Vibram rubber, which is rubber molded like plastic. They’re lined with Gore-Tex, which is a fabric made from Teflon, a type of plastic.

The book of Ephesians says we should be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. I have to say that I was so shod when I deal with my dad at the facility.

Interesting thing: in the Bible, feet represent people who are Spirit-led, and Gore-Tex keeps water out. Of people who confess to God and repent, the word says, “Surely in the floods of great waters, they shall not come nigh unto him.” The Bible uses floods to represent the sea of voices of people and spirits who are against God. Most people live submerged in that sea and drown in it. Jude called false preachers, like Rich Wilkerson and Joel Osteen, “raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame.” They speak for Satan and the world, not God.

Jude also called them “clouds without water.” God’s word is also water, as Noah found out, and these people don’t have it in them.

When my dad appears in dreams, he isn’t necessarily my dad. Sometimes he’s the leadership of the church. Sometimes my mother is the church. Sometimes my sister represents spirits that are against me and against God. The other day she appeared in a dream and tried to take things from my house. She appeared in a friend’s dream and tried to move into my house. My friend doesn’t even know her.

In all likelihood, my sister represented a spirit speaking against faith in God.

Why would God use a boy to represent a man who had been saved? God says we have to be born again, and he says we have to enter his kingdom like little children. He said to permit children to come to him, because of such was the kingdom of heaven made.

This is the dream I had. If you think it has value, ask God to explain it to you.

Modern Grills Better at Preventing Lawsuits Than Cooking Food?

I am trying to develop skills with my new propane grill. Today I tried something easy: burgers.

There are a lot of fancy burger recipes. I’ll tell you what I like. Mix salt, fresh garlic, and a little pepper into ground chuck. If you’re not afraid to eat nipples and tonsils, go with ground beef. You want beef with some fat in it. Ground sirloin makes terrible burgers.

My grill is a Pit Boss portable. I removed the wimpy gas regulator and replaced it with an adjustable model made by Loco. I adjusted the air shutters on the gas valves to give me much higher flames.

I decided to grill my 1/3-pound burgers on [what is now] medium heat. I didn’t think I wanted a raging inferno on the first trial, so I used the Loco regulator to keep the flames from getting really high. I would say they were higher than they would have been without my modifications, but I didn’t go for the gusto. The burgers came out pretty good, but they were well done. I wanted medium. It appears the Pit Boss will not give you medium burgers unless you modify it and crank the flames way up. Next time I’ll know better.

Here is how gas-cooked burgers should be: pink in the middle, with a dark brown crust which is caramelized but not crunchy. Dissenters will be ignored. It appears that the Pit Boss ships set up to cook burgers very poorly. If you took a Pit Boss out of the box, hooked it up, and cooked 1/3-pound burgers on the highest setting, you would get light brown burgers with grey insides. You really need to change the regulator and let it rip.

You can’t make a factory-adjusted Pit Boss cook decent burgers. Simply not possible.

My burgers were about 3/4″ thick, which means they cooked more slowly on the inside than all-too-typical skinny burgers. It should be easy to get a nice, charred exterior on a thick burger. The Pit Boss, as delivered, will not even come close, and if you grill tiny, disgraceful, thin burgers on it, you can pretty much count on eating well-done (ruined) meat.

I plan to burger again tomorrow. I’ll increase the heat and see what happens.

I don’t understand the modern phobia of properly cooked beef. Restaurants all over the US serve steaks with pink and red insides, and everyone is fine with it, but burger chains generally fry the life out of meat, and the grills most of us buy generate very little heat, assuring that all beef cooked on them will be unfit to eat.

You can get better performance with lump charcoal, but who needs the aggravation? I have acres of land, but I am not willing to dedicate any of it to a giant pile of charcoal ashes. Propane has been with us for decades. Grill manufacturers should have figured out how to make their products work correctly by now.

Maybe lawyers have advised grill makers to detune their products. When drunken idiots burn themselves and sue, the lawyers can say, “Your honor! Lab tests show our products won’t burn ANYTHING!”

It doesn’t matter for me. By replacing parts and adjusting my grill, I have created a machine that will do what it’s supposed to. But what percentage of consumers will do what I did? Less than 1%, I would think. The rest are stuck with grey beef or the horrors of charcoal.

I’m very happy with the grill. I love not having the clean the stove. I love the added flavor grilling gives meat and vegetables. I don’t have to worry about the smoke alarms. Maybe this is how cooking should be: an outdoor pursuit. Maybe kitchens should be set up so we can prepare food for cooking indoors and then whisk it outside to be subjected to heat.

Women have messed up the American kitchen. It’s all about quaintness and homeyness. A kitchen is really just a workshop for making food, and it should be set up accordingly. It should be easy to clean and hard to damage. Like a real kitchen in a restaurant.

I figured out how to grill chicken without toughness or a 1-hour wait. Yesterday I marinated chicken in orange juice, garlic, salt, and tarragon. I baked it in a Pyrex dish at 300 for two hours. When it was finished, I put it on the grill with vegetables. It was very tender. It worked, and I didn’t have to sit by the grill for an hour.

Next time, I’m going to bake it for an hour and 45 minutes. The chicken I cooked yesterday was good, but it was so tender when it got to the grill, it started to fall apart. It will work better if I bake it less.

I could save myself work by baking it in the oven and omitting the grill, but finishing it on the grill adds a lot of flavor.

I will continue reporting on my propane adventures until I feel I know how to use the grill correctly. I’m very glad I got the grill. It’s liberating to know I don’t have to clean a stove.

Cactus Cooler Cans Under the Cushions

I hate strongholds. Unless they’re good strongholds.

A stronghold is anything that’s hard to change. If you can’t quit overeating, it’s a stronghold. Cancer that won’t yield to prayer is a stronghold. Unassailable faith in God is also a stronghold; it’s just a positive stronghold.

I have rocks and stumps in my yard. I don’t know if they have anything to do with the supernatural, but they are stubborn obstacles to my enjoyment and improvement of the lot. Remember Joe Starrett in Shane? He had a big stump in a field he worked, and he never quit striving to get the stump out, because it drove him nuts. The novelist had the same feeling about stumps that I do.

I got myself a subsoiler for my tractor. It’s a big hook that goes down in the ground. You can hook it to stumps and use the hydraulics to lift them. It works well on small stumps and fairly big rocks, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. There are some big stumps on my land, and I have seen rocks half the size of cars.

I had three stumps and several rocks jutting out of the ground in an area where I wanted to put blackberry briars. I already have the plants. I managed to get the stumps out this spring, but the rocks would not yield. I started digging around them to find out where the edges were.

Today I dug around a couple of really annoying rocks, trying to find where they ended. The rocks were up against each other, and I figured that if I could find a way to move one, the other would then have less to anchor it, and I would be able to extract it, too. I unearthed a sort of horn on one rock. I decided to loop a tow strap over it, put the tractor in low, and pull.

When I took off, I was surprised to see a patch of ground the size of a yoga mat lift up. The two rocks were actually one.

I pulled the rock up halfway out of the ground. Then I propped it up with a piece of 4×4. With the rock in that position, I was able to loop the strap under it. The rock had a waist to it, so once the strap was around it, it could not come off.

The big danger was that if I reached under the rock with the strap, it might fall back on me, and then there I would be, waiting for death with a large rock on top of what used to be an arm. I avoided the problem by using a Johnson bar to shove the end of the strap under the rock. I then pulled it through from the other side.

I am painfully aware that many people die every day from doing stupid things. It’s very important to try not to be stupid when you use tools. That sounds simplistic, but it’s the truth. Most people who go to emergency rooms with horrible tool-related injuries did something stupid. Reaching under a half-ton rock held up by sand and a small piece of wood is very stupid.

When I took off with the tractor, the rock came right out, and I dragged it easily. That surprised me. It makes me rethink everything I knew about stumps and rocks. Maybe the strap is a better tool than the subsoiler.

Now I have a six-foot-long rock sitting in my hard. I’m considering using it for landscaping. I could probably sell it, but it doesn’t look too bad in the yard, and it’s a conversation piece.

The shovel in the photo is 44.5″ long, so that gives you an idea how big the rock is.

I feel fantastic. It’s great when an annoying problem suddenly gives way.

There are still two rocks I really want to uproot. Maybe it can be done. I hate getting in there with a shovel and doing all that exploratory work, when I have a tractor. Sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

If you need a thousand-pound rock, let me know. I am always open to offers.

On the Grill, Beef is King

I am continuing to work on my cheap grilling station.

I bought myself a Pit Boss portable stainless two-burner propane grill. It was fantastic, especially for the price. I put a Loco adjustable regulator on it and adjusted the grill’s air shutters to turn it into a high-horsepower steak-grilling machine. No problems. I also bought a one-burner Coleman butane stove, which works very well for steaks and doesn’t grease up my kitchen.

Obviously, I needed a platform. I had these items on the bricks on my porch, and it made for poor ergonomics.

I decided to buy a $39 folding table from Home Depot. These tables are great. They’re pretty light, you can adjust the height, and they don’t seem to have any glaring defects. Today I put the grill on one side of the table, and I put the stove next to it. Perfect.

I ate a bunch of steaks right after I bought the stove, and I was looking for something other than fat cuts of beef, so I decided to try chicken leg quarters. They were surprisingly hard to find. I guess they’re not trending well with hipsters.

If you like grilling chicken, you’re living in a bad time. Most of chicken’s flavor is in the skin, and it’s getting hard to find good cuts with the skin still on. It’s like castrating your dog. It used to be optional, but now people get self-righteous and freak out if you don’t fall in with the rest of the sheep. They get really angry, as if it’s somehow wrong to not castrate your dog. It’s as if testicles were birth defects or bombs that went off and killed children. You can amputate a dog’s healthy tail and ears, and no one will try to stop you, but if you try to leave your dog alone, people bunch up their faces, cross their arms, and throw tantrums, as if it’s somehow their business. You have to castrate your dog, and you have to eat chicken with the delicious skin removed.

There are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, which is a major health threat to the rest of humanity, and I don’t bother them. Whatever happened to minding your own business?

I know I’m digressing, but now I’m thinking of sailfish. They are very common. I’ve caught a bunch of them. It’s customary to release them, but it’s not mandatory. You’re allowed to eat them, and they’re delicious. Still, if someone in South Florida catches you steaking a sailfish, you can expect a torrent of verbal abuse, even though what you’re doing is legal and ethical. It’s really annoying, dealing with self-righteous herd creatures.

Skinless chicken cutlets are everywhere. They dry out fast, and they lack fat, so they’re not that great. You have to add fat to them if you want them to taste good. It’s kind of stupid. You throw fat out in order to be healthy, and then you add new fat to correct your mistake.

I got lucky and found 4 big leg quarters locally for under $5. I grilled one last night and one today.

I have decided I am not excited about grilling chicken. The results have not been good.

I can prepare a steak in under 15 minutes on the grill. When I grilled my first chicken quarter, it took about an hour. I had to use a thermometer, because rare chicken, unlike rare beef, can send you to the ER. When I finally finished, I found the chicken tasty but tough.

Today I came up with a plan. I nuked the chicken for 6 minutes prior to grilling it. When that was over, the chicken was cooked and safe to eat. It just needed some grilling to fix the skin and add flavor.

It was better than the chicken I ate last night, but still not great. It was not tender enough. Maybe I need quarters from a different type of chicken. Maybe I have roaster quarters and I need fryer quarters. I don’t know.

I have a new plan. If I bake the chicken for three hours at 300 degrees and then grill it, it should be tender. I think it will work, but it’s a royal pain.

My feeling is that I should forget chicken and stick with beef and fish. Chicken is harder to cook than other meats.

The vegetables are working out much better than the chicken. I had forgotten how great grilled vegetables are. I’ve been slicing onions, peppers, and zucchini and grilling them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. They’re not as good as steak, but they’re definitely better than chicken. The grill brings out flavors you wouldn’t think could be found in vegetables.

I think this may not be true for people who don’t like vegetables as much as I do. I’m not sure. Many people–Cubans and Puerto Ricans come to mind–have a bizarre aversion to vegetables.

I need to try grilling eggplant and squash. Maybe I’ll have grilled pineapple for dessert.

I learned something new about my grill. I thought it couldn’t hurt whatever it was sitting on, because the heat didn’t project downward very well. Turns out this is wrong. Since I souped it up, it can project a lot of heat toward the table. I plan to get something to put under it, like a couple of quarry tiles. Glad I figured this out before melting my table.

I’m very happy with my setup. I’m somewhere around $200 in the hole, and I have an excellent grill plus a very convenient stove burner. The whole rig is light and portable, and there is nothing I can’t replace for $120. I can put the whole thing in the car and grill at a friend’s house if I want. I would rather have this than a big, overrated “professional” grill that starts to cough up ruined parts in two years.

I still need a second propane tank. That’s how you deal with propane. You don’t buy one tank and wait for it to die during a cookout. You buy two, and when one dies, you attach the other one.

I wish someone made a portable propane broiler or “salamander.” That would be wonderful for steak. Broiling will char a steak without fat flareups. Maybe there is one out there, if I look.

I have a MAPP gas torch, and I’m considering using it to sear steaks. More than one way to skin a cat.

It’s very sad how the grill industry has convinced people it’s okay to eat grey and brown steaks. Completely wrong. A waste of meat.

I highly recommend this grill and the Loco regulator. Just be careful. Once you take the brakes off the grill, anything can happen.