Tractor Pipe Project Nears Completion

I need to go to a car parts store and return a borrowed tool, and it’s raining, so I’m stalling. Yesterday when I picked the tool up, it was raining much harder. I parked 30 feet from the door, and I used a golf umbrella. I still got soaked. I didn’t know it was possible for it to rain that hard, and I’ve been through hurricanes.

I went to a car parts store because I needed a tool to expand an elbow on an exhaust part I bought. I am replacing my John Deere 430’s $256 muffler with some Amazon stuff I cobbled together, and the elbow would not slip onto the tractor’s exhaust pipe. They are both 1.5″ pipe. In order to fit over the exhaust pipe, the elbow has to be expanded. Some online genius suggested using a tailpipe expansion tool.

This tool is made up of a bunch of long steel pieces surrounding a screw. You insert the whole rig into your pipe, and when you turn the screw, the long pieces push outward. I learned something interesting: the Chinese make these from pot metal, not steel. If you buy the Harbor Freight version, you will be lucky if it works even once, because pot metal snaps like graham crackers. You need an American tool, or at least a good Chinese one. Car parts stores will lend tools if you leave a deposit.

The tool did not work for me. It’s supposed to work for pipes as small as 1.5″, but apparently, that number refers to the inner diameter, not the outer diameter. That’s pretty stupid, since pipes are sold by outer diameter. At least mine were! There is no way to get the tool into my Amazon elbow.

I was pretty bummed out when I saw that the tool wouldn’t go in. I would like to visit Tennessee, and I can’t go while my yard is a mess. I guess I could mow the yard with no muffler, but I want to defeat the tractor and make it eat its liver.

People said I should go to a muffler shop, because they expand pipes all the time. I did that. The lady up front said, “of course,” when I asked her about it, but the guy who ran the shop basically said “no” and waited for me to leave. They didn’t have a machine that fit the pipe, and they didn’t know of any shops here that did fabrication. My guess is that he did know, but he was just mad that I came in with a weird job. Or maybe he always looks that unhappy.

You run a muffler shop in a small town for decades, and you don’t know any of the fabrication shops in the area. Yeah. I buy that.

I decided to pray for them when I left, as well as the Haitian lady who was in front of me in line with a bag from a loaf of white bread on her head. Rain, you understand. I could tell right away she was Haitian. A Jamaican would have a nice hat or just let the rain hit her. She wouldn’t put a bread bag on her head.

When I got home, I tried to come up with other answers. I considered heating the pipe and beating it onto a brass bar, but it didn’t sound like it would work.

I needed a short piece of bent pipe made to fit on another 1.5″ pipe, and it had to have an expanded end that would take a clamp. I pondered this as I stood in my shop, near my discarded muffler, which had a short intake pipe that was bent and had an expanded end that would take a clamp.

Eventually, I saw the obvious.

I took one of my 4…or is it 3…angle grinders and cut the intake pipe off John Deere’s $256 can. I ground the burrs off of it. I cleaned it with dishwashing liquid, and then I hit it with my new old buffer, which has an 8″ wire wheel. When I was done, I had what you see in the photo.

Bosch, Bosch, Hercules…I think it’s three.

I made sure I wore a face shield while I used the wire wheel, and after I was done, I realized I had it in the up position, so basically, all it did was mess up my hair. I did squint, however. A popular Youtube tool guy refers to this as “safety squints.”

I combined it with my other parts, and it worked great. Better than the Amazon part would have. Unfortunately, my new Amazon exhaust clamp wouldn’t fit on it.

Here is what the muffler stuff looked like when I tried to put the Amazon pipe on it.

When I first tried to put all this mess together, the clamp seemed way too big. It’s one of those clamps that has a lock nut and a T-bolt. I thought the end of the bolt hung out so far it would make the clamp hard to install, so I cut it off. Now the clamp won’t go around the expanded pipe.

It’s always something.

I felt sort of bad about borrowing the tool from a store where I had no intention of buying anything. I thought their $25 fee was a rental charge, but as I said above, it turned out to be a refundable deposit. Now that I need a clamp, I have a way to reward them. I’ll go in there today and spend, possibly, over three dollars. They will be repaid handsomely for their generosity.

I prayed for the lady at that store, too. I am trying to develop the habit of interceding for random people I meet.

Someone has to do it.

If my new muffler works, I’ll be as happy as a BLM protester watching someone else’s business burn down on Christmas Eve while high on medical marijuana I smoke for stress.

How can it not work? It’s a pipe. It has to be big enough. It’s the same diameter as the 20″ of exhaust pipe that connects to it.

Still can’t believe the price of the new muffler. I can’t believe they still sell it with that design, given that they fall off all the time. It’s like they want to charge me to punish me. I’m trying to think…is there some conceivable incentive to buy anything else, ever, from John Deere? They act like the thought of selling you something is offensive to them. “Okay, we charge four times what the part is worth, plus it will break and knock other parts, also overpriced, off your tractor, so you will have to buy another one later. Cash or credit card?”

If I get a new tractor, ever, I should get a Kubota or an RK tractor. “RK” stands for “Rural King.” They went into the tractor business not long ago, and they undercut everyone else pretty badly. Their tractors are Korean TYM tractors, and they’re no worse than anyone else’s. Supposedly, they lift more than comparably sized tractors from other makers, and that’s a big deal to me, because lifting and moving stuff is a huge part of a tractor’s job. A $20,000 tractor that lifts as much as a $40,000 tractor is a tempting item.

Kubota is about like John Deere, only they can’t charge quite as much for parts. It’s still a cult, but it’s a lesser cult.

I better get on the road. I have to get the tractor running so I can see what will break next.

God is Like a River, not a Lake

If you don’t have a new testimony every day of your life, I have good news for you. What you are experiencing is not normal for a Christian. Something is wrong, and when it’s corrected, God will show you something every day.

I have a great tip for you. If you’re being influenced by a Christian who doesn’t have fresh testimony all the time, you need to stop listening to that person. Anyone who is connected to God will be a spring of fresh testimony.

The last two churches I belonged to had a number of pastors, and none of them had much to testify about while I knew them.

I’ll start with Rich Wilkerson of Trinity Church in Miami. He had kidney stones, a rare blood disease, some sort of stones in his chest, diabetes, and, if I recall correctly, at least one new knee. He had back problems so severe he gave cries of pain that disturbed people. And he wasn’t that old. This was a decade ago, and he’s not 70 yet.

He never got healed of anything while I was a member of his church. If he has been healed since, I am unaware of it.

One of his best friends was a self-styled healer named Ted Shuttlesworth. Ted used to come to Trinity and claim to heal people. Someone I know says he witnessed a healing that didn’t involve a shill, so I suppose some people were healed. Somehow, Ted never healed Rich.

I remember Ted having people walk by him so he could touch them. People were getting “slain in the Spirit,” which means that after he touched them, they fell down as though God had taken their strength. He smacked me in the forehead, and I kept walking. I was totally open to the Holy Spirit, but I knew I didn’t have to fake anything.

It seemed to me that he was looking into my eyes, expecting me to fall over.

I don’t think being slain in the Spirit is a real thing. I have had the Holy Spirit’s presence envelop me to the point where I didn’t want to get up, but I could have gotten up if I wanted.

There was a kid named Alan at Trinity; he put a post on Facebook. It said something like, “Six pastors just pushed me down.” That kind of thing happens when preachers are determined to see people slain in the Spirit. There is a kind of silent coercion.

Alan used to make pizza with me in the church kitchen. He came out of the closet several years ago, and as far as I know, he has never returned to God. It’s hard to get over the sour taste the Wilkersons leave in your mouth. When you see so much fakery, how can you believe anything is real?

Rich never came to us with a vision or a prophecy. As far as I know, God never told him anything, or if he did, Rich didn’t hear it.

God did tell him things, now that I think about it. A number of people told Rich what he was doing wrong, and some also told him off when they left his church. He never listened. He encouraged the shunning of God’s messengers, and he plotted against them behind their backs. He had secret meetings about me when I left. Of course, people told me about it.

Rich’s son, who was called “Richie” by older people at the church, didn’t have a testimony, either. Richie, now known as Kim Kardashian’s pastor, had a gaggle of young preacher friends who were trying to become famous, and they fed each other sermons. He even joked about it. He preached about the difficulty of coming up with sermons, and he said he would call his friends and ask them to send him material. He called these sermons “microwave sermons.” You reheat them and serve them.

Imagine going to a restaurant, ordering from the menu, and having them serve you leftovers from a restaurant down the block. This is what he confessed to, and he didn’t understand that he was criticizing himself.

Anything God tells you is like bread from heaven. In the Bible, bread symbolizes God’s word. That’s why the Bible says we shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. When manna fell from heaven, it was like receiving bread straight from God. The big problem with manna was that it had to be eaten right away. When people tried to store it and eat it the next day, they found worms in it.

If you’re connected to God, you get fresh manna every day. If all you do is reheat the old stuff, you become corrupted and stuck.

When Rich had problems, he turned to human beings. He formed attachments to money preachers and patterned his ministry after theirs. He worked hard to get close to Steve Munsey, who made up a set of packaged lies intended to persuade people to make excessive donations on Jewish holidays. Rich knows these stories are lies, and he has admitted it privately. When a friend of mine asked him about it, he said he continued to teach the fables because Trinity needed money.

Rich is not a good person to rely on. No one is supplying him with anything good, so he has nothing good to give others. If you follow him, you risk becoming like him.

At New Dawn, the church I attended after Trinity, the pastor (Albert) was much more open to the Holy Spirit than Rich, and I think he heard from him, but he closed his ears to things he didn’t want to hear. His false “house prophet,” Jorge, was allowed to stand on the stage and shout for 20 minutes at a time, because he predicted nice things that never happened. When other people went to Albert with helpful suggestions that could have saved his church, he shunned them and told people not to associate with them. He did that to me. He had a screaming fit and physically assaulted my friend Travis in the parking lot of his church, trying to get information about me. Travis threatened to give him a beating.

Albert had a bad weight and blood sugar problem. His wife, who was very brassy and assertive, had gallbladder disease, and she had had a breast cancer removed surgically. He never got any better. His wife lost her gallbladder, and then her cancer returned and killed her.

Albert was eventually exposed as a child molester. He started abusing a girl when she was 6 or younger, and he continued for years. He didn’t repent until he was exposed. The girl’s mother offered him a chance to handle things privately, as long as he stepped down. He agreed for a short time, and then he went back to preaching, She turned him in, and he’s in prison.

Being sent to prison for preaching the gospel or healing people may be a sign that you’re serving God correctly. Going to prison for child rape is not. It shows that you lost God’s protection because you were off course.

Albert had a strange doctrine. He said only certain people in the church could lay hands on others. He said it was particularly important not to let the wrong person put his hand on people’s heads, because demons could enter. Albert laid his hands on people’s heads, while he was molesting a child regularly.

Albert had very limited testimony, even though he did hear from God. Pride made it hard for blessings and deliverance to reach him. Jorge was a big problem, because he made things up, and people relied on them.

It took me a long time to see through Rich for a couple of reasons. First, I wasn’t praying in tongues a lot when I started attending his church. God tells you things when you pray in tongues, and he eventually told me Rich was a mess. Second, people Rich had hurt were very quiet. We have a funny new doctrine in many churches. You’re not supposed to criticize preachers. People leave churches quietly, and they think they’re pleasing God. The problem with this new doctrine is that it allows predatory preachers to attract new people who haven’t been warned.

If a Christian goes to a restaurant and gets food poisoning twice, he’ll tell his friends to avoid that place. Why aren’t we just as protective when it comes to toxic pastors?

It was harder to see through Albert. He lied a great deal. He and his wife pretended to care more about the Holy Spirit than money, and I thought they were serious. I kept praying in tongues, and God showed eventually showed me their problems. He showed me they were childish, greedy, highly manipulative, completely resistant to correction, vindictive, and very addicted to admiration and obedience. They had never had much, so when people started following their orders, parking their car for them, and sending them on cruises, they became extremely infatuated with themselves.

Paul called bad preachers out by name, and so should we. God isn’t going to hit you with a lightning bolt, believe me. He will probably bless you, as he has blessed me. Just be sure you’re obeying God when you do it.

You can’t sit around and wait for everyone in your area to start praying in tongues and have the Holy Spirit warn them about poisonous pastors. It will never happen. When you know the truth, you have an obligation to share it with others who are not as fortunate.

Here are some very bad preachers you should avoid: T.D. Jakes, Paula White, Joel Osteen, John Gray, Keith Craft, David Crank, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, the Pope, John Macarthur, Steve Munsey, Rod Parsley, Richard Roberts, Oral Roberts, Richie Wilkerson, Carl Lentz, Judah Smith, Jerry Savelle, Jimmy Swaggart, Keith Craft, Marilyn Hickey, Eddie Long, Creflo Dollar, Fred Price, Robert Tilton, Jentezen Franklin, and Jim Bakker. There are lots of others. I would avoid the Bethel people, too. They have testimony about the supernatural, but it seems to be from the wrong side.

Andrew Wommack has a lot of good teaching, but he pals around with prosperity preachers, so he doesn’t have his eyes completely open, and you can’t trust him too much. Same goes for Perry Stone. Stone has a wonderful gift for teaching about hidden things and the supernatural, but he is not the best when it comes to teaching you how to live as a Christian. His dad, Fred Stone, was better.

I’m digressing, I think. My point is that God is supposed to do very obvious things for you every day. If he’s not, then you need to make some adjustments and question the doctrine you’ve been taught. Also, if your pastor isn’t seeing signs and wonders, make sure you test everything he tells you. He is surely wrong about some important things.

I’m glad to say my testimony has not dried up.

I’ve gotten back to fasting. I refrained for quite a while. I didn’t like fasting, even though I knew it was powerful. Some people say they feel close to God and so on when they fast. Generally, that has not been my experience. Fasting used to make me feel weak and crabby, and it gave me a headache. It made me feel like God was farther away. Now, however, I’ve started to feel close to God during fasts, so I’m grateful for that. I’ve started to feel more authority, and that’s what I was after.

I should point out that I didn’t refuse to fast. I would ask God if he wanted me to do it, and I kept feeling that the answer was “no.”

I need to subdue my body. It still causes problems. Fasting is the best-known way to do it. Recently, I felt that God wanted me to start fasting again, so I did. I was happy about this, because I wanted more authority over demons and my flesh.

Demons work through our bodies. They try to fill us with evil desires and feelings. Our bodies love this, because they are stupid. A person’s body is like a dog. If you don’t keep it on a leash and train it, it will run off and roll in feces every chance it gets. If you don’t control your body, demons will.

I fasted yesterday, and this morning I woke up and started the usual supernatural warfare. I felt a knot in my belly, below the sternum. I can tell you from experience that when a demon is upset, this is one way he may show it. You may feel slight nausea and a pressing sensation, as though someone were pushing a fist against you a few inches above your navel.

I cast out every spirit I could think of. I spoke defeat to them. I asked God to pull them out. Then I went back to sleep for a while. I didn’t feel a lot of deliverance at the time, but I knew that sometimes you have to wait.

I woke up again at around 9:30, which is strange for me. Generally, I can’t sleep late even if I want to. I noticed that I felt better than I usually do. I felt like a balloon that had had all the air let out of it. I feel like I’m better able to be gentle, which is something I’ve been wanting. I don’t want to go through life kicking and biting.

I may start fasting several days a week. I have to get my house in order.

I’ve learned something encouraging about fasting. You don’t necessarily have to go all day. I used to fast for between 48 and 72 hours sometimes, taking nothing at all, or nothing but water. God may not ask you to do that. Believe it or not, fasting until noon has an effect. Cornelius the centurion was fasting when he saw the angel that announced Peter’s impending visit, and the angel appeared at 3 p.m., not midnight or dawn.

Lately, I’ve been fasting until 4 p.m. Before starting, I asked God when he wanted me to stop, and this is what I received. If you can’t fast until 4 p.m., you have a serious character issue. It’s just not that hard.

When you fast longer than God asks you to, you make your walk burdensome, and you risk discouragement. You’re not supposed to try to out-holy God. It doesn’t impress or please him.

I found another neat Youtuber. His name is Kenneth Boork, and he’s in Sweden. He goes around healing people, and he does some teaching. Wonderful stuff. I can’t help wondering how many other good channels there are. Youtube promotes stupid content very hard, but since Google is an evil corporation, I’ll bet it suppresses or slow-walks a lot of good Christian material. Maybe there are dozens or hundreds of channels featuring people who are out there healing and teaching.

Boork’s doctrine seems to be in line with that of The Last Reformation, but I haven’t seen him mention them. People who hear from God are going to sound pretty similar whether they know each other or not.

I like The Last Reformation, but let’s face it: it’s a denomination. They would probably deny it, but they have branches and a website, plus a name. They ask people to “join” and do what they do. I know a denomination when I see it. I will never join one again. I’m going to stay free to walk away when things go bad.

Boork has a playlist of videos in which he says he left the church because of his love for Jesus. I can relate to that. The age of the big church is over. Big churches get corrupt way too fast. When I think about going to church, I think of slavery and kissing up to pastors with inflated heads. It’s off-putting. Psalm 23 says God is our pastor, and there is freedom when you’re under perfect leadership.

Pastors can be real tyrants. I was just watching a video in which Boortz appeared to be about to point that out.

I’ll post one of his videos here.

I hope God helps me to go out and heal people. When I went to a Last Reformation kickstart (they really mean “jump start”) to get baptized, my small group didn’t go out to minister, as we were supposed to. That was okay with me, because I was very focused on laying a good foundation with a new baptism. Also, I didn’t like the idea of chasing strangers around malls, trying to lay hands on them. Now I feel better prepared. We’ll see what God does with me.

I found another channel called “The Normal Christian Life.” More healers. They prayed for a guy who had had no success with healers in the past, and they got such good results for him, he became nearly hysterical.

I don’t have people around me to work on, so right now I’ll work with what I have. My pets and myself. What works for strangers will work for us. Good practice is good practice.

It seems that practice is important. Doug Collins, the healer from Windsor on Fire, says he has to go out and heal at least once a week, or he loses power and has to be built up again.

I don’t see any reason not to command my own body to be healed. After all, I have to ride around in it. I repair my house and my vehicles. What’s the difference? I’ve healed myself many times, but I never thought about working at it systematically, like a bodybuilder using the gym regularly. I was reacting as problems arose. I was not proactive. It looks like we need to be proactive in order to be strong. That makes sense. We are supposed to be the head, not the tail. Proactivity is a time-tested, essential part of successful warfare. Look at Pearl Harbor.

My back bothered me for several weeks, but I have been commanding it to be healed, and I have asked other people to pray. I can barely feel any problems now. Two days ago I had to pull the 300+-pound deck out from under my garden tractor again, and my back actually felt better at the end of the day than when I started. I am going to work on my other nagging issues every day.

I think God allowed me to have this problem so I would think about all the people out there with serious disorders. There are people who have been in wheelchairs for half a century. There are people who have spent decades on pain drugs, unable to do things like carrying a bag of groceries. It would mean the world to them to get healed. I feel imposed upon because I went a few days without being able to use my jackhammer. People with serious problems that have been in place for years must be desperate for restoration.

I hope this material is helpful.

It’s not Good to be Angry at a Tractor

My John Deere problems continue.

I am trying not to be crabby about the unpleasantness of working on my John Deere 430. When you let yourself get crabby about every problem in life, the net result is that you are crabby a lot. Other than that, the impact is low. It doesn’t make things better in any noticeable way. It just assures that every time something bad happens, you will go into a bad mood.

Bad things are sure to happen, but bad moods are optional to a great extent, so the best thing is to try to opt out. You still have bad experiences, but at least you don’t have the additional burden of intense, prolonged annoyance.

When I was young, it really bothered me when other drivers refused to dim their headlights. They made it hard for me to see the road, and it’s also a little bit painful to be blasted with high beams. One day I realized most of the discomfort of high beams came from the fact that I stared into them. When I learned to look away from them, about 75% of the unpleasantness went away. That meant I, not other drivers, had been causing it. You have to train yourself not to focus on the things that cause you to feel bad.

While trying my best to avoid being crabby, I will tell about my latest John Deere problem.

After I installed the linked belt on my tractor’s alternator and water pump, I had to remove the mower deck. I had dropped a bolt on it. I used a magnetic tool, my hands, and a leaf blower to try to find it, but nothing worked. I didn’t want to remove the deck. I think the manual says it weighs 345 pounds, and while John Deere claims it’s a breeze to remove, the job is very unpleasant because of John Deere’s poor engineering.

I got the deck out, and once it was in full view, I noticed the tractor’s muffler, lying on top of it.

I investigated and learned a few things.

First, the muffler had a hole in it. I thought this was made by a numbskull…I mean a mechanic…who was trying to improve the muffler in some way. I now believe the cheap steel simply tore away from a mount, making a very nice rectangular hole.

Second thing…no clamp. If there ever had been a clamp on the muffler, it was long gone.

Third thing…the muffler had what looked like mounts on the side, and one had snapped off. The steel was very thick, so it had to be low-grade steel in order to do that. Another mount had a little object attached to it. I never figured out what that was, but I think it must be a fragment of a structure the muffler used to be bolted to.

I could not get the muffler back into the space from which it had fallen. Not sure what the problem was, but there was no putting it back.

Eventually, I started the tractor and drove it indoors, and I noticed that it was no louder than it had been when I bought it. I have always worn hearing protection when running the tractor above idle speed. It’s pretty loud. Because the loss of the muffler didn’t lower the noise level, I concluded that the muffler had never been attached. Not since I bought it.

I found out a new John Deere muffler, which is a can with two pipes sticking out of it, costs $256. You can get big mufflers for farm tractors for 50 bucks or less, so I kind of suspect John Deere is gouging just a little.

I also found out that the muffler is a weak point on the 430. They break and fall off a lot. If I blow $256 on a muffler and somehow manage to repair all the damaged bits that it attaches to, it may fall off a month later.

Because I’ve been running the tractor unmuffled for two years, I know I don’t really need a muffler. This engine supposedly doesn’t need back pressure in order to work right. I would like a muffler, however, because a little less noise would be nice, and it just seems less bubba-esque to have a muffler.

I found out it’s hard to come up with a new exhaust solution. No one has found an easy answer. The neatest solution I found was a car resonator. Some guy bought a foot-long resonator and attached it directly to the exhaust manifold on top of his engine. The manifold is on the right, and it points to the left, horizontally, behind the fan. He made a hole in the left side cover of the tractor and ran the resonator through it. He put a shiny tip on the end of the resonator, and it looks great.

The resonator is supported only at the end where it attaches to the manifold, but it’s so light, it isn’t going to snap anything. The guy who did the mod referred to the original muffler as a monstrosity.

I can do what he did, but I would have to cut my tractor’s side cover. I would also have to find or make an exhaust flange for the resonator. Square flanges for 1.5″ OD pipe, with 2″ bolt centers, appear to be nonexistent. I would have to weld the flange to the resonator, and I’m not a great welder. Welding thin metal is especially hard.

I came up with a new idea.

A company named Gibson makes pretty tips that go on the ends of exhaust pipes. They clamp on, so they’re easy to install. My muffler is gone, but I still have a 1.5″-OD pipe beside the engine, pointing straight down. I can put a Gibson tip on it and direct the exhaust out under the tractor. I can get a bent tip to make it go sort of sideways.

My exhaust pipe points down toward some heavy items. The pipe needs to be offset by about an inch. That’s not a problem. I bought a small stainless pipe elbow. I’ll fasten one end to the exhaust pipe and the other will go into the Gibson tip.

What about noise? I don’t care much, because I wear protection, but why not try?

I found baffles that go inside motorcycle exhausts. They’re wide at the ends and skinny in the middle. You push them into pipes skinny end first, and then you use screws to fasten the fat ends to the pipes.

I ordered a short baffle. I can’t fasten it to the end of a bent tip, but I can drop the entire thing into the tip from the tip’s upper end. I don’t have to fasten it to anything because the bend in the tip’s end makes it impossible for the baffle to fall out.

For less than $60, I should have an exhaust which directs gases away from the inside of the tractor and could conceivably make it possible to use the tractor without ear protection.

I just don’t know. Maybe it’s better to spend $256 plus shipping and spend hours fighting with a new muffler, only to have it snap off a month later. I mean, this is a John Deere! Modifying a John Deere with infidel parts is an outrage!

I think it will be fine. In fact, it would be fine if I did nothing at all to it.

The OEM muffler is a spark-arresting design. I had to read up on that. Diesels throw off a certain amount of hot material, and it can cause fires. Hmm…I live in a place where it rains a lot, and I’ve been using my non-spark-arresting tractor for two years without any problems. I think I can forget about sparks. If I sell it to someone who lives in Arizona, I’ll warn him.

They make spark-arresting screens for exhausts. I would have to figure out how to adapt one to my shopmade “muffler.” I’m not doing it today. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

My garden tractor problems have me thinking about a new machine. I can afford it. I know I don’t want John Deere. Other people say they’re hard to work on, and my own experience has been bad, so I am willing to take a chance on something else. Kubota makes garden tractors. They also make subcompact tractors which will mow. My understanding is that the subcompacts are so much better, you should buy one instead of a garden tractor if you can.

I could go for a zero turn (a phrase which makes no sense). They mow better, but having a second tractor is a great thing.

I talked diesel with my buddy Mike today, and he gave me a great idea. If I move to Tennessee, I should sell my Kubota tractor to someone here. I want a bigger tractor, so why pay a lot of money to ship this one and then sell it? I could sell the Kubota and John Deere down here and buy something else up north. Clean start. The Kubota has been fantastic, unlike the John Deere, but there are things you can’t do well with 37 horsepower.

Of course, I could put a finish mower on the Kubota and use it on my lawn. It would be clumsy, though, and I would need to follow up with something smaller.

I’m very happy with my muffler scheme. I don’t like dealing with John Deere at all, and the thought of paying $256 for a can really bothered me, especially when I considered the likelihood that it would fall apart quickly.

I think John Deere is like Snap-On and Mac. You get people addicted to a mythology, and then you can charge them whatever you want. I don’t have to have machines that are all one color in order to feel good about myself. That’s a sign of mental illness, not good judgment.

I’m not the Only One who Deserves a Belt

It seems like every time I try to do a two-hour job on the farm, it turns into a ten-hour job.

This time it was the garden tractor. I wanted to mow the yard. I was putting along on the old John Deere 430 when the temperature light came on. Steam came out of the overflow hose. I stopped and Googled.

I read that you have to clean grass out of the radiator frequently. This was news to me. I cleaned the radiator as well as I could, added coolant, and took off. The tractor heated up again, and the battery light came on.

I started reading about all the things that could be screwed up. The thermostat. The head gasket. The water pump. Thermostats are cheap, but the other items are not, and replacing them would be hard.

My solution was to post questions on forums. I figured other people had run into the same problem. The answers I got were not useful.

Today I took the thermostat out. I assumed that if it had failed in the shut position, it would explain the heat problem. Running the tractor without a thermostat in August in Ocala wouldn’t be a terrible thing, because the tractor was going to warm up no matter what.

God bless the guy who installed the thermostat. Of course, he torqued the bolts down about four times as hard as necessary. Manufacturers and dealers do that a lot. I think the purpose is to destroy fasteners and make products impossible to work on. It forces you to take your machine to a mechanic, and they hope you’ll use a dealership. Of course, dealerships of all types are notoriously overpriced and dishonest.

I had to use a breaker bar to remove the thermostat. A strong impact driver wouldn’t budge it.

I took the mower out again, and it heated up. Frustrating.

Finally, it occurred to me that I needed to make sure I had checked all the belts. Cars (maybe I’m dating myself here) have belts in the front. I didn’t look at the rear of the tractor’s engine. When I checked, sure enough, there was a bare pulley. The belt driving the water pump and alternator had shredded.

Great news, right? I mean, assuming it didn’t shred because the pump or alternator quit turning. You just pop a new belt in there and go.

Guess what a John Deere belt costs. Guess. Here’s a hint. The same belt from Tractor Supply costs 9 bucks.

Wrong. The John Deere version costs $24, and that’s the cheapo Ebay price. Maybe you can get a better price from your local dealer, but I am trying to avoid all contact with mine, for obvious reasons. “You used a ninety-cent Tractor Supply clevis pin on your mower deck? My boy, you’re playing with fire. You need a set of gold-plated John Deere pins, for the low, low price of three hundred dollars!”

I bought two belts in sizes that were likely to fit, and I sat down to work. I got ready to slip the belt in behind the three pulleys on the rear of the engine. Water pump pulley…no problem. Alternator pulley…no problem. Crankshaft pulley…wait…what?

Yes, the pulley went around the crankshaft, and there was no way to install the belt without removing the shaft from the engine. This meant removing the tractor’s entire upper pan, dropping the deck, taking the bolts out of the pulley (surely installed by the same guy who tried to weld the bolts to the water pump housing), and basically killing maybe 8 hours.

A belt, you understand. I have installed belts in 10 minutes.

I should also add that the alternator bolts were just as hard to move as the water pump bolts. You really need 300 foot-pounds of torque to hold a tiny bracket that secures an alternator.

I Googled some more, and I saw that someone out there had used a linked belt. This is a belt made from links that can be added and removed. You can make it as long or as short as you want. One of the big pluses is that if you can’t install a continuous belt because of obstacles, a linked belt can be threaded in without problems.

Guess who had a linked belt on his drill press until about an hour ago?

A long time ago, I put a linked belt on the drill press because the old belt had a flat place in it. It went “whump whump whump” all the time. The linked belt didn’t do that, but it was stiffer and generally not as smooth as a normal belt. I have been planning to take it off for quite a while. Today turned out to be the day.

About half an hour after I sat down to work, I had a running mower. The alternator and water pump turned. I didn’t see any problems. Maybe it’s fixed.

I have the operator and service manuals for the John Deere 430. I should be able to handle anything, right? Well…guess what they say about changing the belt? Here are the instructions: “remove fan/alternator belt.”

I’m not kidding. And here’s the weird part: the fan is on the other end of the motor. The alternator belt isn’t connected to it.

John Deere, like Apple, is a religion. That’s why John Deere is able to charge people so much for parts. Reason doesn’t factor into it. Whenever you use anything not made by John Deere, someone will fuss. I saw some codger on the web warning that using non-John-Deere belts would cause a catastrophe. He didn’t say why, of course, because he had no basis for his warning. It was just doctrine.

People are using linked belts on all sorts of expensive industrial machines all over the world. Maybe they need to switch to John Deere before it’s too late.

Here’s the funny thing: John Deere doesn’t make John Deere stuff. I’m sure they make some of it, but they didn’t make your tractor, unless you bought a huge one. America stopped producing tractors below 100 horsepower decades ago. If you worship at the John Deere altar, you’re really worshiping Yanmar or some other foreign company (which probably doesn’t overcharge for parts).

I hope this belt works out. I see no reason why it shouldn’t, except that it may be a little too fat. The original belt is 1/2″ thick, and I used a 1/2″ linked belt. Maybe I should eventually try a thinner one. We’ll see. I mean, if the pulleys turn, it’s working, right?

What’s the worst-case scenario? Maybe the belt will come off. Oh, boy. Then I’d have to spend half an hour putting a smaller one on. Yeah, that would learn me.

I hate bad engineering. I really hate it. End users are people. It’s not right to put these little time bombs in the products we pay for.

I better try to mow the yard before it gets dark. Here goes nothing.

I haven’t had problems like this with the Kubota. I am going to ask around if John Deere products are generally a pain to work on and buy parts for. I can’t see myself buying another one after this.

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.