Where Were You When the Wave Hit the Beach?

Last week I started watching a Youtube creator whose channel is called “Tsunami Dream.” He has an extraordinary testimony. He was hooked on dextromethorphan cough syrup, and he became homeless. He started hearing God’s voice, and he went through some remarkable experiences on his way to recovery.

I have been wondering why he called his channel Tsunami Dream. Today I decided to see if he had any videos I wanted to watch, so I searched Youtube for “Tsunami Dream.” A lot of things popped up, from a bunch of channels. They were videos about dreams of the rapture. People saw giant waves in their dreams, and they realized the waves symbolized our extraction from this world.

He has a video which is about his channel’s name, but I didn’t go to that first. I haven’t seen it yet.

When I saw that people were comparing the rapture to a tsunami, I realized something: I had had my own tsunami dream. It happened on October 24, 2016. My dad’s father’s birthday, not that I think that means anything.

In the dream, I was in my grandparents’ home. I mean my mother’s parents. My dad’s father died before I was born, and his mother was a big nothing in my life. She had no interest in me or my sister.

We were in the living room. I was sitting on the floor. My mother was sitting up in a recliner. She wore work jeans and a work shirt; I don’t think she owned jeans or a work shirt in real life. Her hair was very long; she never had long hair here on earth.

I had a dish of pesticide granules in front of me. Bait granules with poison in them.

I heard a very loud horn blow. It was loud, but not painful to the ears. I could tell it was making the entire earth rumble, and that everyone on earth was hearing it. I had the impression that whoever was blowing it was somewhere west of California, over the Pacific. It was a single note which went on and on.

The sound would have been pleasant, but the pleasing vibration was overshadowed by a powerful sense of dread and finality. I don’t mean I felt dread for myself, personally. I just knew this was a moment of judgment for many people, and that there was no longer any way for them to avoid suffering through repentance.

We started to rise into the air, as though the room were filling slowly with invisible water. The poison rose out of the dish, and I tried to cover it with my hands in order to keep it where it was. We rose up to the ceiling of the room, and we were about to pass through it when I woke up. Some things in the room rose with us.

I wasn’t afraid, but I felt very sober. This was a very serious moment for the world.

I knew we were experiencing the rapture. I couldn’t wait to see Jesus. I was very relieved to know I would never have to touch the burdens of this world again. I didn’t think much about the suffering other people were going to face in the tribulation. There wasn’t much time to think, and I had other things on my mind.

I’ll be honest. I hope that when I leave this earth, I no longer think about the people who are still here. I have had to put up with them for a long time. They are responsible for themselves, and I am not God, so my entanglement with them should not be prolonged in heaven. How can it be heaven if we still suffer because of things that happen on earth?

Until today, I never thought about the similarity between the rapture and a tidal wave.

The Bible is full of events which involve water and resemble the rapture. The Hebrews under Moses walked across the floor of the Dead Sea, between walls of water, with dry shoes. The Egyptian army took the same path and drowned when the water returned to its place. Noah and his family were lifted up on water that came suddenly and drowned the rest of humanity. Peter was able to stand on water and walk on it when Jesus took his hand. Jews were told to purify themselves with ritual immersion. Christians do this and call it “baptism.”

Water is a cleaning agent. It separates filth from things that are worth preserving.

The Bible says we will meet Jesus in the air. That’s exactly what would happen if we rose as though lifted by rising water.

To see how many Christians are having tsunami dreams, click on this link: Google Search for “Tsunami Dream.”.

Here’s an interesting thing about the dreams: they’re not old. Youtube has been around for 14 years, but the tsunami of tsunami dreams appears to have begun about two years ago. Some took place earlier, but the bulk of the dreams are more recent.

God has a pattern of moving people to higher ground. He moved me from Miami to Ocala, and I feel he is telling me Tennessee is next.

Here’s a passage of Psalm 32, which is a psalm about the importance of confession and repentance:

For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.

Many Christians–most–will be left behind when the rapture takes place, and they’ll have to endure the tribulation. They think of salvation as a license to sin, so they don’t confess or change. They love saying, “God knows my heart,” and, “Judge not,” but they get angry when people talk about repentance and the importance of being holy (set apart for God). When the rapture comes, it will be like a flood of great water, and most of us will sink, pulled down by the weight of carnality.

If you haven’t set yourself apart for God, why would he set you apart for him when the rapture comes? You’ve chosen your side.

Jesus described carnality as a millstone tied to one’s neck. He said that if a preacher caused someone to be offended by the gospel, it would be better to have a millstone tied around his neck and to be thrown into the sea.

The sea represents this world, full of voices and words that don’t come from God. When you’re complying with God and led by the Holy Spirit instead of your flesh, you float above the world, like Peter on the Sea of Galilee. When you’re carnal, and you rely on your own strength or the strength of any created being, you sink into the water, and that’s where you live, at the mercy of every wave.

I had a very carnal pastor at Trinity Church in Miami. His name was Rich Wilkerson. His testimony was always borrowed. This happened to this person. That happened to that person. He, himself, had no testimony, and he bore no fruit. He was a physical wreck. His church was, and is, a financial wreck. He taught lies in order to get poor people to donate more money.

He never took the stage and said he got a miraculous healing. He never had a revelation to share. He believed in hard work and positive thinking, which are not Biblical concepts. In the Bible, hard work is a curse. It’s one of the first curses God pronounced on people. When Samson fell, one of his punishments was hard work. He walked in a circle, turning a millstone, grinding grain for other people to eat. He never went anywhere. He just circled, like the Hebrews in the wilderness after they defied God. Wilkerson and his church walk in circle after circle.

It makes sense that Wilkerson ended up in Miami, because it’s a carnal city full of people who are a lot like him. It’s a terrible place to live.

Miami is lower, in every way, than Ocala. Tennessee is higher than Ocala. I don’t think you can beat Tennessee without going to heaven. I suspect it’s as good as earthly locations get.

People who are getting rapture dreams and visions are telling us the world is out of time. They speak with great urgency. Naturally, I wonder: will I get to Tennessee before the rapture? It seems pointless to start preparing for a move when I can’t possibly make it in time.

I believe God is telling me I’ll make it. If that’s true, then the rapture must be at least, say, 9 months off. It takes time to sell two houses, buy one, and move.

I need to get rid of my dad’s house in Miami, and I will also have to sell this one. I refuse to get a mortgage, and I don’t want to be short on cash when I leave.

Maybe I won’t make it. The rapture will come at a time when we think not, according to Jesus. People in Noah’s time were carrying on their normal lives when the flood took place, and God told the Jews in Babylon to build houses and plant things even though their stay was temporary.

It seems to me that things have not gotten bad enough, or good enough, to bring about the rapture. I think technology will destroy free will before Jesus comes for us. Surveillance and data collection will be so pervasive, you won’t need to be righteous to behave well, because Uncle Sam will be staring over your shoulder all the time, coercing you. Also, the church is very weak and ignorant. Even the people who seem to be in the remnant that will go in the rapture don’t seem ready. The world isn’t quite bad enough, and the church isn’t quite good enough.

I would guess, and it’s only guessing, that we have several years left. It will take a while to reach the point where freedom is completely dead. It won’t take decades, but I think it will take years. I can’t see God returning until leftists get their way and America is a socialist authoritarian (I repeat myself) state.

The existence of humanity is pointless without free will. God can’t judge us if we have no freedom to choose. God loves free will so much, he prefers putting people in hell and burning them forever to taking free will away. Once it’s gone, his business here on earth will cease to be profitable, and he will end it. God’s profit is saved souls–children–who go on to live with him forever. The saving of souls necessarily involves temptation and freedom.

It’s remarkable how God shows all of his children the same things.

My Fancy Sheath Gets Fancier

My leathercrafting adventures have not ceased.

I bought some sheath knives because I really wanted…I mean “needed”…them. The sheaths didn’t work for me because they were made for belts. I wear suspenders. I wanted sheaths that would fit in the accessory pockets of Carhartt jeans.

I got me a 12” square piece of leather from Amazon and made two sheaths, and they turned out to be perfectly okay, except for one thing. My Entrek Beaver…I mean my Entrek Roid-raging Mega Jaguar…fell out the other day.

The Mega-Jaguar (I can’t accept “Beaver.”) is a heavy knife with a heavy handle. I made a sheath which was tightly molded around it, hoping it would click into place and stay put. The weight of the handle apparently overcame the tightness of the sheath, and the other day I heard a tinkling sound while I was walking on my concrete driveway. The Mega-Jaguar had fallen out. I didn’t see anything wrong with it right away, but later on, I discovered a mashed place on the handle, and later still, I found microscopic chips on the edge.

I had to either make a new sheath or fix the old one.

The answer was a retention strap with a snap. I got on the web and looked up snaps.

Here’s how snaps work. A snap has four parts. It’s really two rivets. One rivet is the male part, and the other rivet is the female part. You have to get a rivet-setting tool, which is a steel rod with a little rounded tip, and you also need an anvil, which is a little bar of steel with several round depressions in it.

The whole business, including snaps and tools, is probably under $20. I can’t recall exactly.

You punch a hole in your leather. You take one your rivets, and you put one part of it on each side of the leather. You rest one side of the rivet in the anvil, and then you bang on your setting tool. It flares a little metal thing in the rivet, and you have half a snap, permanently attached to your leather.

Yesterday, having dropped my beautiful handmade knife in the driveway, I finally got around to making a strap. I also removed all the stitching from the sheath, removed the cheap aluminum Chicago screws I had used to attach the pocket clip to the sheath, and replaced everything. The first time I stitched the sheath, I did a job which was perfectly sound, but it didn’t look all that great, so I wanted to improve it.

Here is what I ended up with.

If you’re planning to use Chicago screws in leather, buy Tandy brand screws. Don’t fool with the crummy aluminum ones. I bought a bunch from a company called Grizzly, and they seem to be pretty bad.

I had a problem finding screws which were the right length to go through two pieces of 8-ounce leather. My solution was to make a little leather washer for each screw, to take up the excess length. It worked extremely well. The washers don’t slip at all when I tighten the screws.

The sheath is perfect now, and by “perfect,” of course, I don’t mean perfect. It’s not an example of great craftsmanship. But it’s only slightly worse than many store-bought leather items, and I was able to design it my own way instead of buying some piece of junk off Amazon and trying to make it work.

Last night, I worked on the knife’s blade. I have very nice DMT diamond stones, but I used cheap diamond hones from my kitchen. They’re easier to use, and the knife can’t tell how cheap they are. They put a perfectly fine edge on it. If you put on your reading glasses and squint in strong light, you can detect the places where the chips were, but they will disappear after one or two more sharpenings.

I had a piece of 300 sandpaper on my indoor workbench, so I grabbed it and polished the dented place on the knife’s handle. It looks very good now. I may polish the other side of the handle to make it match perfectly!

To hone the blade, I took a great tip from a reader. I used a leather strop with diamond spray. I bought the spray from a business called Sharpening Depot, I think. It’s a tiny little bottle full of a milky substance which contains 1-micron diamonds.

Initially, I charged my strop with green honing compound, and it worked perfectly well, but these days, people go for the diamond spray, and I can see why. The green stuff contains wax, and it accumulates on knives and interferes with the cutting action until you remove it. I had to stop stropping and use acetone on my knife every time I wanted to see if I was done sharpening.

Last night, I put acetone on a paper towel and used it to clean the strop instead of the knife. I pretty much obliterated the green compound, but it wasn’t helping anyway. I sprayed it again with diamonds, and it worked very, very well. It’s also fast. When you give a clean strop 8 or 10 strokes, it begins to turn black from the steel that’s coming off the knife.

Now what do I do with the green compound?

I would like to put diamond spray on an MDF wheel and strop using my buffer. It would be much easier to maintain the correct angle on a buffer. I could also put a cork belt on my 1×42 grinder and charge it with diamonds. That would probably be better.

Of course, I already have the cork belt.

The knife cuts like crazy now. It seems to want to bite into things.

I like the kitchen hones because they’re quick and easy to use, and they’re also light and handy. Diamond stones are heavy steel plate. I won’t even consider a wacky machine like a Tormek. I don’t want to have to run for a machine every time my knife gets dull. Maybe a Tormek is better. If so, hooray. I still don’t want one. My knives are sharp enough to scare me already. I don’t think it would do me much good to make them sharper.

When you sharpen a knife as much as possible, you end up with a very fine edge, and it sort of disappears as soon as you start using the knife. You start out with a knife that’s freakishly sharp, and after a few cuts, it’s merely very, very sharp. Is very, very sharp really that bad? It’s the best you can do unless you want to sharpen your knife several times a day. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

I’ve sharpened plane irons until they were like razors. Use them for a very short time, and they’re not like razors any more, but they cut very well nonetheless. The whole game is not about perfect sharpness, which disappears quickly. It’s about excellent sharpness which lasts a long time.

People buy crazy things these days to get things sharp. Waterstones. Tormeks. In the old days, when a woodworker wanted to sharpen his plane or chisel, he didn’t have nutty sharpening tools, and he didn’t sharpen anything to 8000 grit, but he still did excellent work.

I’ve made two sheaths. Now I need one for my Benchmade Bushcrafter. It’s quite a knife. My hat is off to Benchmade.

I want to buy more knives, because if you like knives, that’s what you do. I think I should make my next knife, though. I can buy all sorts of high-tech steel, and I can send knives out for heat-treating. I should be able to make a stainless knife as well as anyone, and now I can also make sheaths.

I have to force myself to use my expensive knives, because I’m afraid to ruin them. If you can make your own knives, that fear goes away. There are a lot of $300 knives out there, but I consider a $150 knife expensive. I should be able to make knives from excellent steel for between $50 and $100 each, and I would get exactly what I want.

The ability to make knives and sheaths is pretty neat. If you have a reasonably well-equipped garage shop, you probably have nearly everything you need. If you have a drill press, an arbor press, and a 2×72 grinder, you’re most of the way there.

I don’t think any shop is well-equipped without a 2×72. It’s an incredibly useful tool. It’s amazing that they’re not more popular.

When I get the Bushcrafter sheath made, I’ll post a photo.

More Toxic Items for the Trash Heap

When you’re a Christian, you’re supposed to have testimony. God is supposed to do supernatural things for you and around you all the time. If that’s what’s happening to you, be of good cheer, because it means your life has the potential to get much, much better. Once you get hooked up to the power source, good things will happen.

I had an interesting experience night before last.

I’ve been cleaning up my home, getting rid of objects which give evil spirits power. This is an extremely important thing to do. Praying for help with your problems while living in a house full of demon doors is like bailing out a boat without plugging the giant hole in the hull.

If you don’t cleanse your house, expect problems, and don’t be surprised if God refuses to help you with them. That’s the bottom line.

Recently, I threw out a bunch of literature I considered problematic. I threw out works by Plato and Homer, as well as some other Greek idolaters and/or sexual degenerates. Night before last, I realized I had two items which might be just as bad.

A couple of years ago, before my dad became so demented he could not drive, I got him a gift certificate from Barnes & Noble. I don’t recall the occasion. Maybe Father’s Day. He complained that he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to read, but he decided to drive to the store anyway. He came home with some neat bookends: heavy plaster casts of Homer and Socrates. He liked them a lot.

The bookends came with us to Ocala. I put them in my storage room along with a lot of other things I didn’t know what to do with.

Here is what occurred to me: if Homer’s pantheist works aren’t fit to be in a Christian house, and Plato’s praises of homosexual predation shouldn’t be here, why should I keep images of Homer and Socrates?

It bothered me to think of throwing the bookends out. I pitied my dad. He was once a big, strong, forceful man with a high IQ and power over other people, but in his last years, he was confused, and he needed help. He seemed to shrink. He used to walk around with his pants rolled up, just as the poem says.

I remember when he showed the bookends to me. He was very pleased with what he had done, and he seemed to want me to approve and share in his pleasure.

My dad doesn’t deserve pity. He is an immortal being with a perfect mind and eternal youth. He is invulnerable. He lives in a realm of joy and love. I forget this, and I feel sorry for him. I felt like throwing the bookends out would be like throwing my dad out and forgetting him.

I decided to get rid of them anyway. I didn’t hesitate for a minute. God has a problem with hellenism, and that means taking part in it, even in small ways, creates serious, annoying problems for me. It creates obstacles for God. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want the channel to be wide open.

I can’t take garbage to the dump on Thursdays, so I got out of bed and put the bookends in the garage with things I intended to take later. I have found that God will honor this just as well as taking things to the dump or destroying them.

I went to sleep, and hours later, I woke up suddenly. I heard a male voice yell, “BOH!”, as if someone had been kicked very suddenly and very hard from behind. I don’t know if “boh” means anything. It means “where” in Hebrew, but that may not have any significance. It may just have been an exclamation of surprise or pain.

Anyway, right after this happened, I felt a very powerful change.

I have a problem with my nose clogging up at night. It’s nowhere near as bad as it once was, but it happens. Right after I heard the sound, I realized my head was wide open. Not only was I not congested; I felt completely open and empty, as though someone had gone in with a tool and enlarged the passages in my head.

It was so extreme, it made a great impression on me.

It’s as if the bookends had been giving power to a spirit that wanted to take away my air.

I’ve had a little congestion since then, so I can’t say I was permanently delivered, but it was very, very odd.

Today the bookends go to the dump. My dad won’t care. They’re not his, and he doesn’t care about them in heaven. If he could come back, he would throw them out, himself.

I don’t want to suffer needlessly all my life and then get to heaven and find there were painful problems that dogged me to the end when I could have gotten victory simply by throwing unimportant things out.

My ideas must sound crazy to lukewarm Christians. Most Christians have convinced themselves of some very stupid notions. They think Satan and evil spirits aren’t real and shouldn’t be discussed, which is remarkable, since Jesus is a spirit, and he cast out evil spirits here on earth. They think they can melt into the world’s culture and still please God. They see nothing wrong with exposing themselves to poisonous entertainment created by people who hate Christianity. They use drugs and fornicate and expect God to give them every blessing in the Bible.

The earth is a battleground, we are at war, and we live behind enemy lines. We’re surrounded. It’s very serious. A lax attitude brings greatly diminished results, and it can result in damnation, even if you think you’re a Christian and you’ve been baptized.

We sleep with our eyes open, every day, like Samson on the lap of Delilah. We cuddle up to our enemies and expect them and God to treat us well.

God is throwing many, many people into hell every day, and we act like everything is fine. Most people go to hell, and things are not fine.

I keep asking God what else I should get rid of. I look forward to more protection and help, as well as a closer relationship with him. I don’t care about the things I lose. They’re snares and stumbling blocks. I want the pearl of great price.

I find I don’t miss the things I discard. For example, I don’t miss my blues or jazz CD’s at all. I am very slightly unhappy about throwing out a collection that took so long and cost so much to put together, but it’s not a big deal. I wasn’t listening to the disks anyway, so what have I lost?

Getting rid of things can be very empowering. This week I took the tractor and ripped out a bunch of shrubs beside my house. They were old and tough and hard to deal with. I took ownership instead of continuing to defer to former owners who have zero authority here. I’ve installed smaller shrubs that will look better and be much easier to care for. I should have done it sooner. This is my house. It’s not their house. It’s not my dad’s house. I own 100% of it.

I’m strongly inclined to get rid of my mother’s crystal. She liked Waterford. As a heterosexual man, I don’t see much appeal in expensive crystal, and even if I did, Waterford is heavy and lacking in elegance. I feel like selling every piece, just so I won’t have to carry or wash it again.

I want to get rid of my mother’s china. She had two sets. My sister got the newer, nicer set, and I got the old set. It’s very tasteful, but when am I going to use china? She had two sets of silverware, and I got the Fifties-looking set that looks dated and a little tacky. I think it clashes with the china. I’d like to get rid of the silverware, too. I don’t like silver flatware. Polishing it is a nightmare.

My mother was a wonderful lady, but her taste was not everything it could have been. She grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and she never got completely past it. There were a lot of hits, but there were also a lot of misses.

I have a huge fruitwood china cabinet. It’s about 6 feet long, and it’s extremely heavy. I do not like it. It’s in a room–my unused dining room–where I should really put some tools and a bench. I’m contemplating putting it in a consignment store.

My grandmother had a lot of nice stuff, because she and my grandfather never divorced, and my grandfather, who was very well off, let her spend money on her house. My dad was extremely cheap with my mother. She bought things from estates and outlets, and it showed. Their marital problems led to losses. The only items of any quality that remain are the crystal, the china, some silver, a filthy Chippendale chair, and the china cabinet. It’s not worth curating, to put it mildly.

Dysfunctional families start over, again and again. They don’t build. Often, the things they pass on are not worth keeping. It’s better to dump this depressing stuff and start from scratch.

I don’t think spirits have attached themselves to my mother’s paltry collection of feminine treasures, but bad memories have. Also, I really believe I’m going to be living in Tennessee before very long, and I can’t stand the thought of paying movers to haul junk I don’t want.

You probably have toxic objects in your home. There are plenty of Christians out there who have testified to the importance of getting rid of them. I hope you’ll consider it. It’s not our imagination. The things you possess can ruin your life.

Grey Steaks are for Prisoners and Old Women

Today I adjusted my new Pit Boss portable propane grill so it was fit for a MAN to use, and I already have the results of the experiment.

I hit Walmart today because I needed a tackle box for my leathercraft stuff, and while I was there, I found a fat rib eye on sale. They were dumping it because it was too old. A sticker on the package said it should be cooked no later than tomorrow.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

If you know anything about steak, you know that aging only makes it better. Walmart aged a steak for me and then charged me LESS for it. Unbelievable.

Steaks are aged in two ways: dry and wet. A dry-aged steak is allowed to age while exposed to the dry air of a refrigerator. It loses water, concentrating the flavor, and supposedly, enzymes naturally present in beef tenderize it. I don’t know if that last part is true. Of course, bacteria will work on it while it’s aging, and my opinion is that as long as they’re friendly bacteria, they will improve the flavor.

Wet-aging is the same process, except you wrap the steak so water can’t evaporate. It produces a juicier steak which is not quite as tasty. Women have pushed the market toward wet-aging, because they have bad taste in food and like things that are soft and juicy.

Walmart wet-aged my steak for me. If you want to wet-age a steak, here’s how you do it: leave it in the refrigerator. That’s all there is to it. Leave the plastic on it, and check it from time to time to make sure it’s not turning green.

I’ve been eating frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with my steaks lately, because I have a bizarre fondness for the dish, but today I decided to man up and prepare something better. I bought a big red pepper and a white onion. I cut the pepper in half. I cut the onion in thick slices. I smeared both with cheap (not extra-virgin) olive oil, and I salted and peppered them. Extra-virgin olive oil is not for cooked foods. Heat ruins its flavor.

I salted the rib eye heavily, added a touch of pepper, fired up my souped-up grill, and made myself dinner. I’ll post some photos.

Here, you can see flames curling around the heat diffusers in the grill. Yesterday, there was no way to make that happen. The grill had polite little flames just barely big enough to cook a steak. When I adjusted the grill today, it was hard to tell how much of a difference it made, but now that I see the grill in action, I can tell it’s much, much better. It turned the heat diffusers red hot. I love it.

Actually, maybe you can’t see the flames from the burner all that well, because they’re much smaller than the flames from burning fat. Anyway, the flames are way higher than they were yesterday.

Here, you can see the steak after I turned it. There are some issues that need to be dealt with. The employee who cut the steak for packaging made the disgraceful error of trimming the fat off of most of it. That left it with a pointy end that had more fat than the main part of the steak. The pointy end dripped a lot of fat on the heat diffuser, and the resulting flames burned the pointy end too much. I need to work around things like that in the future.

Mind you, the pointy bit still tasted wonderful, but it would have been better with a bit less carbon.

Here is the steak on my plate. I charred it as much as possible without going all the way to medium. It was not perfect, but it was very good. There was nothing at all wrong with it, but there could have been more that was right.

The steak had a medium-rare appearance, but because it was cooked on high heat, it was surprisingly hot inside. That’s much, much better than hot outside, cool inside.

Resting steaks is very stupid, so I don’t do it. I eat herd creatures; I do not behave like one. I dug into this steak as fast as I could. The outside of a steak should be very hot. If you really wanted a perfect steak, you would have to eat it right beside the grill, when the outside is hottest. This steak, although consumed a few minutes after coming off the flames, was nice and hot outside. Just as it should have been.

Steak chillers…I mean “resters”…complain that failing to rest a steak makes the juice run out of it. When I was done eating, there was probably less than a teaspoon of beef juice on the plate. I know, because I kept staring at it. I wanted to drink it. It was beautiful.

The whole resting nonsense is a ludicrous myth that claims millions of victims every day.

The vegetables were magnificent. That’s the thing about grilling. Everything is good when you grill it. I took a ferocious, sharp-tasting white onion and threw it on the flames for a few minutes, and it came off the grill sweet and juicy. The pepper was equally tasty. They really complimented the taste of the meat.

The increased heat didn’t hurt the grill at all. Nothing melted. Nothing that should have been cool got hot. The grill can take it. I got a winner here.

Now that I’ve conquered the grill problem, I can quit eating steak every day. Maybe I won’t even grill tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll grill something small and tame, like a chicken quarter. I can get some more vegetables. Maybe squash sliced lengthwise. I don’t know if it would hold together, but I can find out.

Very nice. Outstanding.

Don’t let the grilling nannies hold you back. Don’t rest until your grill will burn the outside of a steak while leaving the inside a glorious, intense pink or even red. Life is too short to eat lame food foisted on you by a food industry comprised mostly of people who cook very poorly.

Grill Hack Plus Powerful Testimony

I have been a very, very bad boy.

I got myself a stainless portable grill from Pit Boss. Very nice grill. It will make a credible rib eye, IF you let the fat burn off the heat deflectors and add additional heat to the meat. Otherwise, it’s not quite optimal. You have to play around a little to make it do an acceptable job using the racks, and it’s definitely too weak to heat a cast iron griddle for steaks. The propane flames are not very high when you use the grill as adjusted by the factory.

I got myself a Loco-brand high-pressure regulator to increase the flow, but when I tried to use it, the burners wouldn’t accept the additional gas. The flames blew out. I figured it was time to take the regulator back to Lowe’s.

Today I Googled, and I learned something great: gas grills have carburetors.

A carburetor mixes air and fuel in the right proportions. You can’t just pump propane through a burner and hope for good results. You have to have the carburetor (“air shutter”) adjusted correctly.

Guess what I did?

An air shutter is just a metal sleeve that’s open on one side. Air flows through the open space. You rotate the sleeve to get the right size space. Sometimes grills need adjusting, and you’re supposed to adjust the air shutter to fix them. You’re supposed to do this while the grill is on low heat.

Right. Low.

Again, guess what I did?

I got me a Philips screwdriver, LIBERATED the air shutter on my right burner, turned on the gas, and adjusted it until the burner would support a really decent flame. When I saw that this worked, I did the other side.

Will my grill still work on low heat? Who cares? Why would you want a grill to work on low heat? What possible benefit is there in that? Are you planning to heat baby food on the grill? Grills are for charring meat and other food, period. If you’re cooking things on moderate heat in a grill, you made a mistake. What you really wanted was a toaster oven.

This is exciting. I may be able to produce correctly cooked steaks on the grill now, both with the rack and with the griddle.

I hate the way hippies and lawyers ruin grilling. I know they’re behind the pathetic limitations on gas grills. They’re behind everything that ruins fun.

A grill that doesn’t heat up enough is like a Mustang with a 4-cylinder engine. What is the purpose? There is none.

I was going to try to have something other than steak for dinner tonight, but you can probably guess what I’m going to do. I’m off to the store shortly.

I’m not one of those people who think all meat has to have a black, crunchy layer of carbon on it, but grey steaks or brown steaks with a few wimpy black grill marks are just wrong. Burgers should also have some charring.

I admit, I like fried burgers from Wendy’s and Five Guys, even though they’re not really cooked correctly. Somehow, these chains make grey, well-done burgers work. But a good grilled burger with some charring is a whole lot better.

I am really pinning the Smug-O-Meter today.

Will the excess heat destroy the grill? I don’t care. The experiment is too important to drop for the sake of a grill. This is for science, people.

In other news, I have a testimony. My friend Travis got released from probation, unexpectedly. I have his permission to tell about it.

I can never remember whether I’ve revealed his name here before. Often, I use fake names for people, and I can’t keep track. Anyway, he is house-sitting in my dad’s old house while I sell it.

A few years back, he did something that wasn’t very clever. He tried to move a car across town with an expired tag. These days, cops have scanning machines that look at license plates, and when a scanner sees a bad tag, it lets the cops know. Travis got pulled over, and because he had some license issues already, he panicked. He took off. That’s a felony. The cop claimed he tried to hit him, which is a great way to pump up the charges. That’s also a felony.

Travis got five years of probation, and it has been very hard. He can’t travel without permission. He had to do miserable manual labor at a park. He had to meet with his P.O. over and over. His P.O. and the other people with oversight kept screwing up and causing problems for him. For example, the people at the park failed to record a bunch of his hours.

His P.O. violated his probation because he failed to meet with him. Travis had gone to his office and called him many times, but the P.O. wasn’t there when he was supposed to be, and he didn’t return calls. Travis had to go to a hearing today. The big danger was that they would revoke his probation, give him a felony conviction, and put him away.

Of course, I have been advising him all along. I don’t give him legal advice, per se, but I tell him obvious things. Never complain. Never look angry. Always sound grateful. Be polite. When you have to go to court or to see your P.O., be on time. Keep records of everything. Take responsibility for what you did. Do everything they tell you to do. I also gave him all sorts of spiritual advice.

We have been praying about his hearing. Today he called me while I was planting dwarf podocarpus shrubs, and he gave me the amazing news. The judge terminated his probation instead of revoking it. He is done. No conviction. No more meetings. No more working at the park.

He said he was nervous because the judge was crabby. She had been laying the smackdown on people before his turn came. When he was called, he had all his papers. He was polite. He didn’t interrupt. She told him his probation was terminated as of today.

Sounds good, right? It gets much better.

His dad has MS. He is in a bad nursing home. He has been steeped in bitterness, pride, and anger for years. When his son got a scholarship to the University of Miami, he did virtually nothing to help. Sometimes he told Travis he wanted him out of his life.

We have been praying for his dad ever since I can remember. Travis was afraid he would die before he turned back to Jesus. This week, his dad was hospitalized for an infection caused by a catheter, and he was intubated. It looked bad.

I asked God about it, and he seemed to say Travis’s dad would repent.

We prayed and spoke blessings and curses, and yesterday, unexpectedly, Travis’s dad repented and gave his life back to Jesus. Now they pray together. You can’t imagine Travis’s relief, but I can. My dad finally gave in this year at the age of 87, a few weeks before he died.

Pretty good week, wouldn’t you agree?

As Travis said on the phone today, this stuff really works.

I’m amazed that God has been able to make good use of me. I think of myself as a selfish and solitary person with few human interactions, but somehow I have found myself at the center of a small group of people who listen to me, and when I tell them about the things God has used to change my life, he changes theirs, too. God used me to help Travis, and he used Travis to reach his dad. Travis has a lot of friends he’s influencing, too.

The Bible says people will know God’s children by their fruit, and people misinterpret this and say it means their works or their personalities. In reality, it refers to other human beings they reach. Jesus said he was the true vine, and we were the branches. He said any branch that didn’t bear fruit would be cut off and burned. What is the purpose of a branch? To bear fruit. What is fruit? It’s a means of reproduction. God uses us to reproduce his nature in human beings.

This is a good day.

I’m off to Winn-Dixie. Hope they have some nice cheap rib eyes.

Quit Whining About Enemies You Feed and Arm

I’m enjoying my adventures with the propane grill and my new Coleman propane burner.

The first rib eye I prepared using the grill was very good, but I felt it needed more heat, and I also wanted to see if I could fry with the grill. I have been experimenting.

I bought myself a cast iron griddle from Walmart. I have cast iron skillets, but I prefer to have a dedicated piece of cookware for frying steaks, because they leave residue behind. I figured I would lay the griddle on the grill, turn the grill up, and see what happened.

The short version is this: the grill will not get hot enough to fry a steak. When you fry steak in butter, you need to be on the verge of burning the meat. When you get the heat right, it puts a dark brown crust on the steak, without ruining the inside. By “ruining,” I mean medium-well or better. Anything past medium is a catastrophe. The griddle I bought fits the grill like it was made for it, and it would do a bang-up job on a huge mess of eggs, but for meat, it won’t work, even when you remove the heat deflectors from above the burners.

It may be possible to lower the griddle farther if I remove the rack, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I also tried making the burners hotter.

My grill came with a propane regulator that’s not adjustable. You get the pressure you get. I looked around on the web, and I learned that there are adjustable regulators that improve grill performance in some cases. I went to Lowe’s and bought one. It’s a Loco-brand regulator, and you have to admit, that sounds promising. It’s for a turkey fryer. When I tried to use it on the grill, I found that the flames went out when I turned it up. I don’t know if leftists have somehow managed to rig grills up so they can’t be hacked, or what. It’s the kind of thing they love to do. Anyway, I haven’t managed to get more heat yet.

I also got a Coleman butane stove. This is a single burner the size of a phone book. You insert a tiny can of butane in it, and you get 7200 BTU’s. It’s very light. Maybe they realize people will put them in backpacks.

I had a hard time getting fuel. For some reason, Walmarts run out. I got around this by ordering it for pickup at a local Walmart. That way, they had to hold it for me. Today I tried it on a porterhouse. I couldn’t find a good deal on a rib eye.

Summary: it’s fantastic. It’s more than hot enough to put a good crust on a steak. Zero complaints. I need a small griddle so I can stop using my Griswold skillet, but other than that, I’m ready to go. The stove is a blast to use. You can carry it (and its fuel) in one hand. You can put it on any flat surface while you cook, because it won’t heat anything under it. It’s stupendous. Now I can fix steaks without cleaning the kitchen.

If you love frying meat on the stove, but you hate the mess, check the Coleman stove out. You won’t be sorry.

For under $150, I can barbecue as well as anyone, and I will never have to touch charcoal.

In other news, I threw some books out today. Nice segue, I know. God keeps showing me that I have opened doors for Satan, and one way I do this is by holding onto objects Satan likes. I threw out my blues CD’s a while back. I have since thrown out most of my jazz. Today I got rid of books that were unsavory.

Satan has a really neat way of getting us to approve filth. He tells us it’s culture. Example: the incredible obsession with nudity during the Renaissance. Most parents would have a problem with a son who put photographs of naked men on the wall in his room, but how many would complain about a picture of Michelangelo’s David? Right now, you can walk into a chapel in the Vatican–a Christian church–and see a vast array of naked figures on the walls and ceiling. Imagine going in there and trying to hold up a Playboy centerfold. They’d throw you in the street. Imagine trying to go in naked. The cognitive dissonance is thunderous, but no one seems to notice.

The word “renaissance” means “rebirth.” Europeans idolized the ancient Greeks, and they copied them slavishly. The Greeks loved dirty art, and Europeans revived their trashy passion. While rediscovering science and math, Europeans gave a new birth to some things that were better left dead.

Europeans revered Plato and Socrates, even though they were, by any reasonable standard, perverts and sexual predators. They revered Homer even though his work glorified paganism and kept its false gods before the public eye.

A couple of years ago, I decided to go back over some books I avoided reading in college. I took a course called Literature Humanities at Columbia University, and I didn’t do much of the reading. My professor thought I was an eccentric genius, so he didn’t fail me, but I did very little work, and I didn’t go to class. Another reason I didn’t fail: along with a huge percentage of my peers, I cheated on the final exam. Some of the instructors released the questions in advance, and naturally, people got together in groups and worked on the answers before taking the test.

I used to feel bad about cheating. I only recall one definite instance of cheating on tests in my life. I may also have cheated somewhat on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilazation final. I can’t recall. Through the irresponsibility of the instructors, many people had the test questions, so things happened.

I never cheated in order to do better than other people. I only cheated to avoid failing a course. Maybe that’s not as bad.

Anyway, I bought horrible books by people like Homer and Aeschylus, and I forced myself to read them. I bought Plato’s Symposium, which is about a bunch of homosexual predators getting together to see who can be the most pedantic. I bought a number of things. I bought Vergil.

God has been telling me not to expose myself to occult materials. He even told me to quit watching Marvel movies, because–let’s face it–characters that defy physics are using occult power, even if Stan Lee blamed gamma rays. I shouldn’t watch movies about occult phenomena. I should stay away from entertainment involving witchcraft, curses, and so on. A day or two ago, God asked me something: how are works by pantheists any different from movies about witches and vampires? They’re not. They celebrate false gods and magic.

I decided to get rid of Homer, Vergil, Aeschylus, Ovid, Euripides, and whatever else seemed problematic.

I have my dad’s old Great Books of the Western World set. This is a bunch of classic works, in a collection like an encyclopedia. I hated to pull Homer and Vergil out of it and put them in a trash bag and ruin the set, which had been preserved for 50 years, but I did it.

I felt some small twinges of misgiving about discarding the works themselves. It seemed strange for an educated, cultured person to throw out Homer and Plato. Satan had part of me convinced that it was somehow wrong for a person with a proper respect for humanity’s accumulated knowledge to throw out ancient books. I was right to throw them out, though. The fact that trash is thousands of years old doesn’t turn it into treasure.

Plato and his pals used to adopt kids and sodomize them repeatedly until they got too old to be attractive. The compensation was tutoring. This was considered okay in ancient Greece. I’m sure parents were ecstatic when they learned that great men wanted to use their sons like women. It must have been a tremendous honor. How can centuries of tradition turn such perverted, Satanic notions into things we should keep on our bookshelves in Christian homes in 2019?

It’s all at the dump now. No going back.

It’s very strange that we’re so comfortable with nude art. I’ll tell you something that may amaze you: it’s possible to create great art without nudity. It’s okay to paint a woman with her clothes on. It doesn’t make you less of an artist.

I’ve taken a number of figure-drawing classes. We used naked models. It wasn’t actually helpful for people to be naked before us. It’s not like clothing on a model will prevent you from learning. The body is very simple. Clothing is complex. We would have learned more from drawing clothed models. Drawing clothing takes skill. Leonardo used to do studies of fabrics so he would be prepared to paint clothed people. This type of art is called “drapery.” You can look it up.

Arty people sometimes claim nude art is somehow pure, and that it’s abnormal to be stimulated by it. Yeah, okay. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

I recall reading Chuck Jones’s autobiography. He told a huge lie in it. He wrote about going to art school. He said he was very excited when he accidentally saw part of a girl’s upper leg outside of class, but he didn’t feel anything when he saw totally nude models. What a crock! Regardless of what men who have taken art classes may have told you, a naked woman is just as exciting to look at in a class as she would be in a bedroom. I’m pretty sure I was never late to a figure-drawing class, and it wasn’t because I was naturally punctual. I wanted to see who was going to show up naked for us. Whenever the model turned out to be a man, I was very unhappy.

The earth is a dirty place, and we are very used to uncleanness. Much of the time, we don’t even notice it until someone points it out to us.

Yesterday, I found a new Youtube creator. He’s a guy who was homeless for a long time. He was addicted to cough syrup, of all things. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, causes hallucinations. That’s kind of sad, because it was supposed to be a harmless alternative to codeine. Anyway, he had a very, very hard time getting free, even though demons were cast out of him more than once.

He mentioned a problem he had with a poster. He was living in a Christian shelter by choice, to avoid temptation. One day he bought a Beatles poster in order to decorate his wall. He said his peace disappeared. He had to get rid of the poster.

He talked about a famous exorcist named Bob Larson. You can see this man on Youtube. I don’t endorse him, because he’s a showman and he makes money from exorcism, but he may still know a few things. According to the former cough syrup addict, Larson says demons draw power from objects. He says a man who was being exorcised kept looking at an object, and the demon told Larson it was because the object gave him power.

Whether Larson is generally sound or not, I can’t tell you, but he is probably right much of the time. Even the worst preachers are mostly right.

The man who made the video says you need to do an inventory of your house and get rid of anything that isn’t godly. How about that?

I had never thought of objects giving demons power. I think of them as things that stink and draw flies (as in “lord of the flies”), or as signs that advertise openings to demons, or as doors. I suppose it makes sense to see evil objects as sources of power for demons. A lease gives a tenant power to stay in an apartment, so if an object gives a demon the right to stay in you, it gives him a kind of power. Authority is power.

The Beatles, in case you didn’t know, were very evil. They promoted drugs and heathen religions while fighting Christianity and Christian morality. Rock and roll really is the devil’s music. It’s not just something ignorant people say.

You can’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Not unless you’re okay with very serious problems God refuses to solve for you. Grow up and get rid of it. Stop holding onto a dead lifestyle that won’t even exist in heaven. You’re never going to hear a Beatles song up there, so why hold onto them now?

I don’t want demons in my life. I don’t even like roaches, and roaches are much nicer than demons.

I expect to see an improvement in my life now that I’ve discarded the writings of perverts and pantheists. There has always been a conflict between Hellenism and Christianity. Christians are supposed to be holy, and “holy” means “belonging to God.” We can’t have everything defeated and lost people have. They can watch TV shows we can’t watch. They can smoke things we can’t smoke. They can go places we can’t go. That’s just how it is. They get to do these things because they’re going to hell.

To keep one foot in the world is to give your enemies power over you. We do this, and then we cry to God when things go wrong. “I’m a good person. Why did this happen to me?” Often, it happened because you invited it.

You may wonder why God doesn’t tell us about the dangers of forbidden objects, explicitly and repeatedly. That’s simple. We were supposed to be full of the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, people knew this. They were supposed to pass it on. Each generation of Christians was supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues every day, and God was supposed to teach every one of us through tongues and other gifts of the Spirit. Our forebears gave the Holy Spirit up, so we weren’t taught. This is why we’re ignorant. God held up his end of the bargain. He gave us the Holy Spirit, and he promised–look it up–that he would teach us all things. Human beings are the reason it didn’t pan out.

God doesn’t automatically fix everything we ruin. He has done enough for us already. He is 0% responsible for our problems. That’s something we really need to learn. No one is even a tiny bit responsible for what other beings choose to do. God is not obligated to run around behind us, saying, “You dropped this.” He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for us. That ought to be enough. It’s a wonder he does anything at all for us.

Look how most American Christians live. They listen to evil music. They fornicate. They watch filthy entertainment. They get drunk and high. They participate in astrology. They worship athletes and entertainers. They celebrate Halloween, which is tantamount to begging Satan to hurt your children. We put idols in our houses because we think they’re art. We carry good luck charms. We amass big collections of recordings by musicians who belong to Satan. Then we wonder why we get cancer. We wonder why our kids become addicts.

My sister is a drug addict, and she is as full of hate as anyone I have ever known. She has no impulse control. She is sadistic. She abuses other people. She is the worst liar I have ever known. Being around her is torture. Nonetheless, when bad things happen to her, such as losing her home or winding up in a homeless shelter, she feels like a victim and tries to find someone else to blame. Here’s what I say: “What’s happening is normal and right and to be expected. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you do these things.”

The other day I realized I would much rather see her die than be subjected to her abuse ever again. That’s really something. The family is unanimous. My mother, who was very kind, asked God to take my sister if she wouldn’t change, and my dad said it would be better for her to die than to go on as she was.

To some extent, virtually everyone is like my sister. We cause our own problems, and then we tell everyone we’re victims.

I am not a victim. I’m a bad person who has done stupid things, and I have suffered the natural and correct repercussions. I may have been a victim when I was very young, but that was a very long time ago, and it has no bearing on my guilt or innocence today.

Even if other beings have sinned against me, and they will be judged for those sins, I still deserved what they did. It doesn’t mean they didn’t sin. It just means I should have expected to be sinned against.

I should not say, “Why me?”, when things go wrong. I say it when things go well.

Anyhow, the Greek rapists of boys are no longer featured prominently in my library.

Maybe this will be helpful to you. If you have a curse you can’t get rid of, maybe you’re the one doing the cursing.

After ranting about the horrible state of the pool hardware industry, I’m glad I have something positive to write about. My Pit Boss portable grill arrived today, and it’s a keeper.

I’ve been frying steaks in a cast iron skillet on the stove, and while they taste fantastic, it’s a bad method. Wife-designed kitchens like mine don’t stand up well to heavy doses of greasy smoke, and cooking a decent steak without making smoke is not possible. You have to burn the meat a little, or else you’ll ruin it.

I decided to get a gas grill, but when I started looking around, I remembered something: there are no good gas grills. It doesn’t matter what you pay. They all fall apart in a relatively short time. Spend $5000 on a grill if you want. It will have problems just like the ones from Home Depot.

I considered getting a grill from Home Depot or Lowe’s for maybe $200, figuring I would take it to the dump when it started to fail, but then I saw the Pit Boss grill on Amazon. For a hundred bucks, you get enough room to cook 6 big steaks at once, which is plenty, if you’re honest with yourself. The grill is about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, and it has a handle, so you can close it up and take it wherever you want. It’s all stainless, so it won’t rust enough to matter. How could you not want a grill like this?

I was so excited when the grill arrived, I drove to Tractor Supply and got a propane tank. Their propane system was not available, so I had to go to a hardware store for gas. I took the tank home, fired up the Pit Boss, and threw a cheap rib eye on it.

The grill has some kind of battery-free ignition system on it. It has two burners, and each burner has a knob. You turn the knobs to open up the gas and light the burners. Very easy.

The grill part of the grill is very nice. It’s 1/4″ stainless rod. If you buy a Home Depot grill, you get porcelain over something that rusts, at best. No comparison. The rack on the Pit Boss reminds me of the rack on the $2200 DCS I used to have.

The instructions say to run the grill for 30 minutes before putting food on it. I don’t quite understand that. I probably ran it for 5 minutes before adding the meat. It looked hot to me, and the built-in thermometer said it was hot, so I didn’t see any point in wasting time and gas.

Here’s how the grill works. It has two oval burners. Over each one there is a bent sheet of stainless. The burners heat the stainless, and the stainless radiates heat to the meat. I didn’t want to use the sheets. I like some charring on my steak, and I was afraid the metal wouldn’t radiate enough heat. I decided to try the sheets anyway, to see what would happen.

I have no doubt that the meat would have failed to char enough, but for the fact that fat dripped on the stainless sheets and caught fire. The fire charred the steak pretty well. Some people don’t like it when fire hits their beef. I don’t get that. If you don’t want a charred taste, why would you use fire to cook your meat? You can just bake it, have a grey steak, and save yourself the trouble.

The steak had a good charred flavor, and it was nice and hot under the charring. That’s how it should be. I hate a rested steak. Resting is a myth that won’t die. A steak should be very hot on the outside, and you lose that when you rest a steak. People claim a steak won’t be as juicy if you don’t rest it, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, it will only lose a teaspoon or so of fat, and second, you don’t really lose it. It stays on the plate where you can dip your steak in it.

You know what you’re really doing when you rest a steak? People claim there are secret channels inside the meat, and the juice runs around through them and redistributes itself. Laughable. Cut a steak open some day and look for the secret channels. What you’re really doing is letting the fat get cold so it’s thicker and less runny. Hot fat tastes much better than cool fat. This should be obvious.

The other day I saw something posted online by Ruth’s Chris. They claimed resting was great for steaks, but guess what? They don’t rest theirs. They come out fast, on super-hot plates, still sizzling from the salamander. They actually brag about their hot, sizzling plates.

A plate removed from a salamander will not be sizzling-hot after 5 minutes of resting. Physically impossible.

The nonsense they posted about resting was clearly written by an ad copywriter who had no idea what Ruth’s actually does. It’s a lie.

I’ll post a photo of the food. For some reason, I really like frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with steak, so that’s what you’re seeing. I wouldn’t eat it if it were a special occasion, but for a Monday night with no one else around, it’s fine, and it’s a lot easier on my stomach than a big potato. I’m convinced potatoes are poisonous. Not that I plan to quit eating them. But when I eat a big dose of potato, I feel like I swallowed a beach towel.

I plan to try two other methods of cooking. First, I’ll try it without the stainless sheets in the way. After that, I’ll try it with the sheets removed and a cast iron griddle on the rack. I love a steak fried on cast iron.

I found a very nice cast iron griddle at Walmart. The brand name is Ozark Trail. Lodge quit making the griddle I like, so I had to switch.

The grill is terrific. It makes me wonder if anyone needs a big grill. You could feed 10 people with this thing, no problem. If the size worried you, you could spend a grand total of $200 and use two grills. It sure beats spending a fortune on a large grill that’s a pain to use, doesn’t work any better, takes up more room, and doesn’t last any longer.

The grill doesn’t heat whatever it’s sitting on, so you could set it up on a plastic table or a cooler if you wanted. The legs fold up, and it has latches to keep it closed while you’re traveling.

I highly recommend this grill, but I can’t promise it will last. I’m assuming I can get at least two years out of any grill. When it finally dies, I fully intend to keep the rack. It’s way too nice to throw out.

It’s going to be so nice to be freed from the chore of cleaning beef fat off the stove and hood.

I should use this grill and my little butane stove as much as possible for messy cooking. They’ll be lifesavers until I get a glass-topped stove.

Another Triumph From the World’s Worst Engineers

Today’s fun project: finding a new pool pump.

Here’s something everyone considering buying a pool should know: it’s a mistake. You’ll use it 25 times in the first year. The second year, you’ll use it twice. After that, you’ll hate it, and you’ll miss the nice, trouble-free grass you gave up in order to have it built.

Thinking your kids will love a pool slide? Wrong. Can’t have one. You will not be able to get home insurance. Diving board? Can’t have one. Anything fun will not be permitted. Tort lawyers have seen to it.

Without a diving board, a pool is just a hole full of water.

You may also have to build a ridiculous fence around your pool to keep the local brats out. Yes, even if they’re trespassing, their parents can sue you if they get hurt in your pool. Man, there is nothing more fun and aesthetically pleasing than a pool with a high aluminum fence five feet from the edge on all sides.

Pool hardware is garbage. I don’t care who makes it. The big names like Pentair and Hayward make stuff which is basically Harbor Freight quality.

You can pretty much expect a brand-name pool pump to puke its last in two to three years. The motor will die, because they’re cheap and they have open frames and crummy seals that let rain in. People in most industries have managed to figure out that you don’t put open-frame motors outdoors where it rains, but pool engineers are a special breed.

A motor will run you a minimum of $200. Assuming you get lucky and get two full years out of each new motor, you’ll be paying $100 per year or more in new-motor expenses, in addition to the cost of installation if you don’t feel like doing it yourself.

A pool pump will cost you at least $500 to replace, and if your state forces you to get a variable-speed pump (which probably won’t be cheaper to run no matter what they tell you at the pool store), you can expect to pay a minimum of $750.

I don’t know what pool service costs where you live, but I would be paying over $1200 per year here, and that’s cheap. It doesn’t include “special” expenses that occur from time to time. “This month we need to add stabilizer (because we only use cheap non-stabilized chlorine).” “This month you need a new skimmer basket (because they’re made of plastic comparable to that used in disposable forks).” “This month you need a new filter cartridge (because you weren’t smart enough to get a sand filter).”

I take care of my own pool, and I never, ever use it. I have been in it ONCE, and that was because the power was out due to a hurricane. I had to bathe in a bucket of pool water, and I needed to rinse the soap off. Sometimes I come in from doing landscaping or cutting trees, and I’m soaked in sweat and covered with things like sawdust and dirt, and I think, “Man, that pool looks good.” Then I come to my senses and take a shower instead. A tiny 35-foot pool with no diving board is just not worth the effort.

I do not see the appeal of tiny pools. You’re always standing right next to everyone. My parents had 40-foot pools. To me, that’s the minimum size for pool usefulness. If you can get from one side of the pool to the other in three seconds, you might as well go to Walmart and get one you can blow up. You always look like you’re standing up in the bathtub. You’re determined to enjoy yourself, even though you know the experience is lacking.

My parents had a pool built when I was in elementary school, and I enjoyed it, but I had a diving board plus a tree next to the pool, so there were things to jump off of. These days, swimming is a total waste of time. I can’t understand why kids love it so much. They scream and hit each other with things, and apparently, that’s a good time. When I was a kid, we did cool things like diving for stuff, using my dad’s scuba equipment, turning live lobsters loose, long jump contests, swimming with my enormous dog, and leaping from the avocado tree. The screaming and hitting didn’t even occur to us.

My pool has a screened enclosure. On three sides, there is about 5 feet of concrete between the pool and the screen. Barely room to pass someone else. You can forget about running up to the pool at top speed to see how far you can jump. The side near the house is bigger, but it’s not really big enough for a decent barbecue. Basically, it provides a place for adults, who are not having fun, to sit and yell, “DON’T DO THAT,” and, “FIVE MORE MINUTES.”

If your income is over, say, $500,000 per year, go ahead and get a pool if you really want to. You can afford the maintenance, and you can afford the insane cost of construction. If you’re a normal person, you will hate yourself every time you look at the pool, especially when relatives you don’t really like come to see you just so they can use it. Especially when you write a monthly check to the bank to pay off your pool loan!

Maybe you can tell I’m not happy today, or is it too subtle? I just ordered a new pump from Amazon, because my old pump is making a noise like a phaser on overload. It’s going to die in a few days, even though I installed the motor after I moved here.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to replace another motor, in a Miami home I’m trying to sell. It was installed in 2017.

The old motor here in Ocala died from age. The one I replaced it with died from design problems. The filter developed a strange issue which took a long time to diagnose and repair, and as a result, the pressure was high. A product not sold by scammers would have had no problem with 40 pounds of pressure, but a pool pump housing is another story. Scammers are the only people who manufacture them. My Pentair developed pressure cracks that had to be patched with epoxy. Little streams of water shot onto the new motor. Even though I managed to plug some and divert others, the water hastened the day the motor would croak.

The new pump will arrive in a few days, and I will have to go out in the very unpleasant July heat and install it. This will take at least two hours. Then, in two years, I’ll have to do it again.

The pump I ordered is a Hayward Super Pump. Hayward is a top name. Doesn’t help. I have had two other Hayward Super Pumps. They both died young. They’re just no good. The motors come from Mexico. Do I need to add anything? Name something Mexicans build well, apart from pinatas and tunnels.

Why did I buy a third one? Very simple. Hayward’s big competitor, Pentair, refuses to warranty pumps installed by amateurs. With Hayward, I’ll get an 18-month warranty. Amazon sold me a three-year warranty on top of that. Now I’m all set. For 4.5 years, I should be able to force someone else to pay for new Mexican motors. I figure I saved myself $350. Ole!

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go near an extended warranty. Generally, you should never pay to insure anything you can afford to insure from your own funds. There are exceptions, however. Cell phones. Laptops. And pool pumps.

With Hayward and Amazon, I got a bad pump and a very good warranty. If I had gone with Pentair, I would have gotten no warranty and probably a worse pump. The Pentair I’m replacing is basically fiberglass-reinforced cheese.

My new portable grill just arrived. I think I’ll have a steak and not think of the pool.

Additional Links for People With the Temerity to Disagree With Me

5 Huge Reasons I Hate Swimming Pools

A Swimming Pool is a Terrible Investment

10 Reasons You Will Regret Buying a Home With a Swimming Pool

Even More

An industry source tells me single-speed 2-HP pumps will be illegal NATIONWIDE in 2021. How about that? If I can’t replace motors as they die, I’ll have to shell out at least 50% more per pump, and there will be NO energy savings.

More

This would be a dream come true.

How Much Does It Cost To Remove & Fill In A Swimming Pool?

Pawn Shop Beauty Purrs Like a Kitten

Today has gone well.

A while back, I bought a Baldor 332B buffer with a Baldor G14 stand. I paid $250. You could probably buy this combination new for $1100, not including the safety switch that was bolted to the one I bought. I felt $250 was a very good deal.

When I got the buffer home and turned it on, it rumbled. It didn’t squeal, which is what I would have expected from bad bearings. It just seemed unbalanced, like it wanted to move in a circle in the plane of the wheels’ rotation.

I put a dial indicator on it and turned the shaft, and it showed less than a thousandth of runout. When I turned the motor on, the indicator went nuts, suggesting something was seriously wrong. A bearing that causes problems at 1800 RPM may work very nicely at 20.

I ordered myself some stuff from Caswell Plating, which is a magnificent website for anyone who wants to buff or plate things. I now have assorted good-quality compounds plus enough wheels to allow me to avoid mixing compounds on the same wheel. I also ordered some sealed NSK bearings.

Today I put the bearings in. As usual, I made mistakes which taught me new things.

Grinder and buffer bearings are pressed onto armature shafts. They aren’t held on by collars. Baldor will make a grinder shaft a certain size, and then they will install bearings, the internal diameters of which are actually smaller than the diameter of the shaft. The use presses to shove the bearings onto the shaft, and the inner races of the bearings have to stretch to get over it. This creates a tight fit.

I had to push the old bearings off and push the new ones on. I should have used my arbor press, which is a fairly sensitive tool, but it’s not on a stand right now, so I used a hydraulic press. It’s easier to put up a photo than explain.

The first time I tried to press a bearing off, I didn’t clean the shaft first, so the bearing got hung up on the rust and crud. That was a dumb mistake. I put it back in place and reinstalled the armature. Then I ran the buffer and used an old grinding belt to remove the rust. After that, I polished it with emery cloth.

I put the shiny new armature in the hydraulic press and put 3-in-One oil on the armature and let it run into the bearings. They came off with no problems. The reverse procedure shoved them right back on.

Everyone should have a hydraulic press. At $160 from Harbor Freight, they are too cheap NOT to buy.

By the way, that red thing is a plastic case for Taiwanese impact sockets. It’s what all top buffer mechanics use to hold their armatures. The dust is imported from Austria, and it has special protective qualities.

Putting the buffer back together was no problem, and now it runs very smoothly, without rumbling. The bearings were definitely bad.

I stuck a couple of wheels on the buffer for a photo op. Still trying to decide whether I should clean it up. I could remove the pins holding the nameplate on, give it a neat paint job, and put the plate back on.

Now I have to figure out what to do with it. The Baldor stand is not good by itself. I can use it as it is, and I’ll probably be fine, but it’s not a brilliant move. Buffers are extremely dangerous. Unbelievably dangerous, considering how tame they look. I need to have a stand that will provide some resistance to movement.

I am not willing to screw the stand to the shop floor. I don’t have a floor plan together, so I know I’ll be moving the buffer, and I don’t want a workshop floor full of holes. My plan is to make a heavy wheeled base from plywood. I also plan to put a foot switch on it so I can turn the buffer off in a big hurry without reaching toward the wheels. The current safety switch requires you to fumble around with your hand not far from the wheels.

I’m thinking I may also throw a rope over a truss and attach it to the buffer. That will keep it from going anywhere if it decides to ramble. Not ideal, but much better than nothing.

You educate yourself, you do what appears to be reasonable, and you live with the risk. That’s how life works when you have tools.

I read a fascinating safety analysis written by two engineers, and they focused entirely on things like guards. Apparently, buffer movement is way down on the list of dangers. They concluded that guards make buffers more dangerous, which is amazing. They did tests and found that an object tangled in a buffer wheel can go around the buffer several times in spite of guards. It can also reach a linear speed over 10 times that of the wheel, so 420+ miles per hour. The possibility that a buffer might fall over doesn’t seem nearly as scary.

While I was learning about buffers, I learned something disconcerting: it’s unsafe to buff the insides of things with bench buffers. It’s much easier for a buffer to catch something when you buff the inside. If you were to buff a metal hoop, for example, the buffer might take it out of your hands and start spinning it. Bench buffers speed up buffing certain things, but they’re not for every job. When you have things that aren’t safe for bench buffers, you have to look to handheld tools, even though they’re slower.

I only have one really good handheld buffing tool. It’s an air buffer, which is like a die grinder that holds buffing tools. When I say “really good,” I’m not telling the truth. My 17-CFM compressor, which is enormous by home shop standards, can’t keep up with it. You buff and stop and buff and stop. It looks like I need to get an electric die grinder. They’re actually superior. They don’t quit over and over, and they have more torque.

So. New tool. More wheels or buffs or whatever. It never stops.

In other news, something very exciting happened today. I performed a healing. I was alone, so I didn’t get to heal someone else, but still, it was great. I woke up, and my shoulder was sore. It’s a chronic thing. It doesn’t prevent me from doing anything, but it’s annoying. I think it’s referred pain from my gallbladder, which has had minor problems. I don’t think my shoulder has had a physical problem of its own. Gallbladder issues often cause shoulder and back pain.

Anyway, I have been watching all sorts of healing videos. This morning I told the pain to leave, and I put my hand on myself and so on. I felt my shoulder a few seconds later, and the pain was almost gone. I kept working at it. Sometimes when you get a divine healing, you only get part of it at first, and you have to go on. This happened to Jesus, so it’s not a sign of failure. Anyway, I can’t find the soreness now.

The Bible says God will perfect (complete) that which concerns me. That’s in a psalm. It’s true, so there is no reason to stop when a prayer is partially answered or a curse or blessing doesn’t come to pass in its entirety.

I’ve healed myself (sloppy language, since I’m just a conduit) many times, but this time, it was very dramatic and fast.

I keep hoping God will use me to heal other people. I really hate spirits that cause problems that seem incurable, and I hate the fact that most Christians think doctors are better than God.

Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I’ll work on a buffer stand base. I have some ideas.

An Entire Industry That Manufactures Nothing but Junk

I feel like it’s time to buy a grill and a propane burner.

My kitchen is very nice. It has a stove with 4 burners and a grill, and it also has a fume hood. Still, the sad truth is that heating meat until it smokes doesn’t work out well in any home kitchen. Amateur kitchens are not built for cooking. They’re built for women, and most women have very unrealistic cooking priorities. Women want kitchens that look cute and quaint, so there are always a lot of things that look great new yet end up nasty because they’re so hard to clean.

There is a reason why so many real kitchens have stainless or tile walls.

Long ago, I decided the best way to get a great steak, in a home kitchen, was to fry it in butter on cast iron. This sends a lot of smoke into the air, and much of that smoke is really grease droplets. Over time, they accumulate on things. If you fry meat in your kitchen regularly, you will end up with a brown film of grease on your cabinets, walls, ceiling, and vent hood.

My kitchen has painted walls, a painted ceiling, and some kind of paint or plastic coating on the cabinets. The ceiling is very high. I don’t want to have to clean all that over and over. The vent hood lets a lot of the smoke from frying blow right by it, so it’s not that helpful.

I need to get me a propane burner and put it on the patio for frying steaks. It will look bad, but I will never have to clean anything but the skillet. Actually, I should get a rectangular griddle. That’s what I used to use back in Miami, and it was wonderful.

A grill would also be helpful. Burgers also mess up the kitchen, and sometimes you want one that’s grilled, not fried. I like to mix salt and garlic into ground chuck and grill it.

I said my stove had a grill, but here I am saying I want a new grill. Why? Because the stove’s built-in grill is totally worthless. It doesn’t get hot enough to grill anything. Also, it makes a mess.

I’ve been looking around online, trying to decide what kind of grill to get. Part of me says I should blow a lot of money and get a top-notch “professional” stainless grill that will last forever. The problem with that plan is that I tried it once, and it didn’t work. I have some wisdom to share.

1. There is no such thing as a “professional” barbecue grill. Using the word “professional” in a grill ad is fraud. They are all sold to home cooks. You have never gone to a big restaurant and eaten a steak that came off a “professional” propane grill. Restaurants use things like electric salamanders.

2. “Professional” grills aren’t worth the money. I bought a $1200 DCS grill. It was only a 30″-wide built-in, and it was a long time ago, so don’t be deceived by the somewhat low price. DCS is one of the top “professional” grill makers. The same grill costs $2200 today. It worked fine for a while. Then the plastic on one of the knobs melted, and the manifold started leaking. Getting it fixed was impossible. I could probably have found parts had I searched long enough, but I gave up on it.

There were some nice things about the DCS. It had very heavy stainless racks, and there were few if any parts that could rust. Still, it gave up the ghost after very little use. Goodbye, $1200. And the food wasn’t any better than it would have been had I bought a gas grill from Home Depot.

I’m thinking I should get a $179 dollar Home Depot propane grill. If I take care of it, which is not hard, it should last several years.

Let’s say it lasts 4 years, which is a completely reasonable expectation. The DCS grill I bought costs $2200 now. That means I can get over 49 years of trouble-free grilling for the cost of a DCS, which might last 3 years before needing difficult repairs.

Another nice thing about a cheap grill is that if I move, I can leave it here instead of taking it with me.

I may get a small propane grill that sits on a table. Cuisinart makes one, and people love it. They work very well, but sometimes the knobs go bad. There are a million sources for knobs, so I don’t care about that issue. You don’t have to buy the Cuisinart version. There are lesser-known brands that sell for maybe a third less. For a little over $100, you can get a grill that does a great job and doesn’t break your heart if you have to take it to the dump in two years.

The main problem with a tabletop grill is the need for a table. And I suppose plastic is not the smartest material for that purpose, and plastic is what I have.

Anyway, it looks like a good move to consider.

To sum up, it appears that there is no such thing as a quality gas grill, so you might as well go cheap and save money.

To get back to cooking steaks outdoors, I have a pretty good Lodge griddle, which I left in Miami. Of course, they have discontinued it, so I can either drive to Miami (no) or look for something else. Walmart has an Ozark Trail griddle which looks good and costs very little.

I should run up there. I can get a griddle there, and I can pick up a new propane burner and a tank at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Right now, there are two rib eyes in my fridge. The local Winn-Dixie turns them loose cheap once in a while. When I first noticed them in 2017, I didn’t think to look for the words “choice” or “prime” on the packages, because it didn’t occur to me that any mainstream grocer would go below choice. Once I decided to check, I found that the packaging didn’t say “choice” anywhere on it, so I guess the steaks are select or something worse. That’s not a big deal. The rib eye is such a superior cut, a sub-choice example will still probably be an excellent steak, and if you get it for five or six bucks per pound, you have nothing to complain about.

I prepared a standing rib roast from this stuff once, and it was excellent. Prime would have been better, but it was very good. If I had read the packaging more carefully, I would have passed it by.

A choice New York strip is not much better than leather, so I wouldn’t take a chance on going below choice. A rib eye is different. Also, you can look at the meat through the plastic and see if they let a cut with unusually good marbling slip by.

But Wait…There’s More

I just found out Coleman makes a 7200-BTU butane burner. It’s very small, it’s very cheap, and you can set it right down on a table. I think I’ll grab one and wait to make a final and more expensive decision.

Six or Seven Impossible Things After Breakfast

I got another breakthrough today.

I was praying this morning, and I felt something moving around inside me. I felt tension and worry, and I knew they weren’t mine.

Years ago, I was afraid to tell people I had seen or felt demons, but now I’m pretty open about it, because I don’t have much respect for the unfounded opinions of ignorant people who think demons don’t exist. This morning, I experienced feelings I knew did not come from me, and that always means a demon is present.

As I have said before, we all have demons, unless there is someone somewhere who has managed to get so completely delivered he never has to battle them. You may not know you have demons, but they are there. Maybe you have an addiction. Maybe you have a disease caused by a demon. Maybe you’re mentally ill. You’re not special; demons are like ticks on dogs, and they are in your life no matter how holy you think you are.

I started asking God to tell me what kind of spirit was churning my insides, and after a while, I started thinking about envy. I didn’t expect that.

It’s embarrassing to talk about envy. Some iniquities are not embarrassing to talk about. It’s easy to admit you’re stubborn or that you have a bad temper, but no one wants to own up to envy. I hate envy. I don’t just hate it in others; I hate it in myself. I would never knowingly let it influence me. I consider it disgusting and contemptible. Still, there is a difference between hating an iniquity and not having it. You can have an iniquity you control, caused by a demon that won’t leave in spite of its inability to rule you. For example, there are bisexual Christian men who have not been delivered yet are faithful to their wives.

“Envy” is a word that isn’t defined well. Many of us think it’s the same thing as jealousy. I’m not talking about jealousy. I’m talking about something hostile. A jealous person will want what you have. An envious person will feel malice toward you because you have it. An envious person is less concerned about having blessings like yours than in seeing you lose what you have.

Leftism is inherently envious. Leftists love the idea of taking good things away from people who are more successful than they are, even if they, themselves, don’t prosper from the taking.

My high school French teacher said there was a difference between a Frenchman and an American. He said an American who saw someone driving a nice car would think, “I’d love to have a car like that some day.” A Frenchman would think, “I’d love to pull him out of that car and make him walk.”

I don’t know if that’s a fair generalization, but it shows what “envy” means.

I felt that God had spoken to me, so I used my supernatural weapons and cursed envy with defeat and told it to leave. Afterward, I felt like a balloon that had been partially deflated. Except for one brief period during which someone tried to provoke me, I have felt very good since doing battle with the demon. I feel somewhat drained, as though I had been expecting a jail sentence and received an acquittal.

The primary thing I felt because of the spirit’s presence wasn’t envy. It was tension. It felt like my insides were being twisted. I couldn’t rest. After the spirit was defeated, that all left me.

After I went through this, a surprising number of good things happened. I got started on some important work involving cleaning up files. I got proof my alarm was monitored, for my home insurer. I went through a ledger for a condominium association, called their management company, resolved a longstanding problem, and put a check in the mail. I made arrangements with my fixed wireless company so I could try a new Internet cell tower. I called Florida’s revenue department and got rid of a $15,000 invoice they sent me because of an error. I contacted the probate division of the clerk of the court and got advice on proceeding with the administration of my dad’s estate. I researched some legal points to help me with the work.

My dad and I worked things out so he had virtually nothing in his estate when he died, and when you have that type of estate, you can avoid formal probate. There was one account, however, that threatened to cause a problem. My dad was in charge of it, and I needed to get him replaced in order to be able to avoid probate. I could not find the papers for the account anywhere. I didn’t think they existed.

I went through his awful files for quite a while, and I couldn’t find anything. I still got a blessing, because I threw out pounds of papers that were just taking up space. I don’t need his correspondence with his old college writing professor, for example. I didn’t need files regarding a union contract he negotiated for a crane and rigging company.

I found emails from a couple of women who tried to hook him after he was past 80. Surprising and disgraceful. I can understand why an old man with dementia would want companionship, but the women have no excuse. Clearly, God protected me from them and saved my dad’s estate for me.

I researched the law in order to find out what to do about the account. I contacted the institution that holds the account. I saw that I really needed the papers.

I took another look in the files, and suddenly, the papers appeared. I found a document naming my dad’s successor, in case he died. I was hoping he named me, because it would make things simpler. His first choice was an aunt of mine. Not a problem. She passed years ago, so she was no longer eligible. The document named her successor. Another aunt. She died this year, a month after my dad. Then I saw the third name: mine!

I’m amazed that he named me. He never told me at the time. This was over 30 years ago, and as far as I know, at the time, he thought I was an idiot. He put two housewives on the list in front of me, which is not flattering, but at least I was in there somewhere.

I was all set. I filled out the proper forms, gathered the required documents, and emailed the financial institution. Within a few days or weeks, the account will be out of my dad’s name, and I’ll be controlling it. As soon as I get notification, I can file for administration without probate, and my dad’s estate will close in a hurry.

If I had gotten the probate mess rolling right after my dad died, my aunt, who was demented, would have been alive, and there would have been problems. She has been gone for two months. The delays I experienced with other estate-related matters took me past the date of her death, and now I won’t have to involve her or her family.

It’s as if a dam broke. So many things that needed to be done got done today.

Here’s something they don’t teach you in church: there are reasons why you have problems you can’t defeat, and usually, you’re to blame. No one likes to hear that. We all want to hear that God will bless us silly no matter what we do, as long as we have faith. We don’t want to repent or confess. The Bible says a curse does not alight without a cause, and the Bible is the word of God.

You may be doing things you shouldn’t be doing, like adultery, yoga, or astrology. Maybe you celebrate Halloween. You may own things that should not be in your house, like occult movie disks, games of chance, erotic materials, good luck charms, or idols. You may be associating too closely with people who are children of darkness; you may be sleeping with one every night and telling yourself you’re going to save that person for God through shacking up. I don’t know what your situation is, but you are definitely blocking God’s blessings in your life, and you are holding doors open for Satan so he can afflict your family.

Unless you’re exceptional, you surely harbor spirits that need to be cast out.

When you fail to clean up your life, curses linger on you. Blockages stand between you and things like health, financial prosperity, peace, marriage, and reproduction. Other people will oppress you. They will control or take what you own. You will have enemies who win all the time, even though you pray.

Every time you cast out a demon or throw out something God hates, you will get a breakthrough. The more you work at cleaning your life up, the more strongholds will fall.

You’re like a ridge of snow, holding back your own avalanche of blessings.

This stuff works. People don’t know about it because most preachers are ignorant and weak.

The other day, I was reading Jude. It describes modern pastors perfectly. It calls leaders who spew fables “clouds without water.” In the Bible, the Hebrew children followed a cloud during the day. Water represents the Holy Spirit, who guides people through prophecy and prayer in tongues. Most preachers aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, and almost none of those who are speak in tongues enough to get guidance.

Jude also said such people were “carried about of winds.” We are supposed to be the head, not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. Most preachers blow with the wind. They let the untutored crowds lead, because the crowds pay their salaries. In the Bible, winds represent spirits.

Jude called such people “trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots.” In the Bible, trees are people. Psalm 1 says a righteous man is like a tree planted by the rivers of water (tongues and prophecy) which brings forth its fruit in its time. Jesus said, “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” You may have heard that “fruit” means “works,” but it actually means people. Bad preachers bring forth bad fruit. “Twice dead” means bad preachers were dead before they were saved and that they gave up their new lives by going back to sin.

Jude uses the phrase “reefs at your feasts” to describe corrupt leaders. The King James Bible says they are “spots,” but it’s a mistranslation. The actual Greek word means “reefs.” It’s perfect. Think of the way a reef works. They don’t stand up out of the water and scare you into steering around them. When you approach a reef, you think everything is fine until it rips the hull out from under you. That’s how preachers like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland are. They make people feel secure, and then those people crash on the rocks because their Christianity is a farce.

My old pastor, Rich Wilkerson, was a major reef. He would pat you on the back and tell you how great you were, while he knew you were destroying yourself. Useless. Worse than useless. A merely useless pastor can’t lead you to ruin.

You have to let the Holy Spirit clean you out. Faith is useless without obedience and holiness. You need real knowledge. You need to learn about demons and get free of them. You need to go through your house and throw a lot of things out. You need to think of all the people you associate with and start cutting people off.

I am very tired. I did a lot of things that were not enjoyable today, but it was a wonderful day of victory, nonetheless.

Today I was thinking about people I used to interact with as a political blogger. Almost none continue to be part of my life. I wonder how many laugh at me and think I’ve gone nuts. I also wonder how many of them are posting the kinds of things I post, saying their lives are beautiful and that things keep getting better. Precious few, I promise you. They’re still chasing their tails, calling liberals “asshats” and thinking posting memes and linking to diatribes will fix America. They’re going nowhere. America won’t be fixed, and the squabbling and vitriol will never cease.

Some people who say they’ve seen hell say the people there never stop fighting. It reminds me of the political fray. It never slows down, and there is never any real progress.

Thanks to God and his patience, I finally live in peace. I don’t punch a clock or go to an office. I don’t drive in traffic. I don’t get acid indigestion from reading the news, because I don’t read it. My financial needs are met, better than I expected them to be. I don’t have a single person in my life who has the power to make me miserable. I spend time in God’s presence every day, and he keeps making my life better.

You tell me who’s nuts.

I was insane to get caught up in politics and online verbal abuse. I was piling hot coals on myself. America is great, but it’s not where my joy, safety, or prosperity come from, and it’s definitely going to go down the toilet regardless of what we do. I depend on a source that never runs dry. I wish I had been smart enough to come around 25 years ago.

The people who are blogging about politics or taking sticks to rallies and having urine thrown on them by murderous Antifa punks aren’t doing anything worthwhile. They’re making things worse. They’re wasting their lives. None of that stuff has has any value. On the list of ways to waste your life doing something you think is important, it may even surpass working as an actor or professional athlete.

Conservatives and Christians come home from fights with Antifa bleeding and in pain. Seems like they always lose. It appears to me that the conservatives who are really defeating Antifa are at home enjoying God’s presence and his help. The best way to beat Antifa is to be a person they can’t touch, who continues to live a blessed life no matter what they’re throwing at people this week.

I expect to keep coming back and posting more stories of progress and increased blessing. You can get on the same track, any time you want.

Don’t wait as long as I did.

Landscaping Tips Put my Worries to Rest

I had an interesting morning. A lady from the university extension came out and told me what to do about my landscaping.

When I moved here, I was very reluctant to second-guess the previous owners. They had been very sharp about designing, constructing, and maintaining the house. Their landscaping, on the other hand, looked crazy to me, but I assumed they knew more than I did, so I didn’t want to cause problems by trying to correct them.

I have three citrus trees. They looked bad to me when I moved here, and citrus is disappearing all over America because of an unstoppable blight, but I gave the sellers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was possible to grow citrus in this isolated area, and I just needed the right chemicals. Guess what? My impression was correct. All three trees have citrus greening. There is no cure, and if I plant new trees, they’ll get it, too. It’s time to cut them and drag them away.

The extension agent agrees that some of the hedge choices were dumb, and lots of the plants are so old it’s time to pull them and get new ones. Now I can quit blaming myself for having crazy hedges. I’m going to rip a bunch of plants out with the tractor and replace them with things like podocarpus, which always look great and don’t get woody and hard to trim.

My irrigation system really is stupid; it’s not my imagination. In Miami, lawn sprinklers sprinkle…lawns. They water everything else, too. My system waters shrubs near the house, a small driveway island, and my front gate. The bulk of the yard gets no water. The agent said I should turn the system off, and there is no point in fixing it so it waters the grass. My grass isn’t thin because it’s dry; it’s thin because it’s a crummy type of grass, growing on sandy soil. My hedges don’t need watering.

This is all great news, because my system runs off the same pump that supplies my house. I don’t want to wear it out, and I don’t want to put so much demand on it that it sucks dirt and gravel into my pipes.

The grass is supposed to look bad, so what I thought was a terrible mess is only a moderate mess.

Areas I thought looked bad because of leaf accumulation actually look bad because of shade. The grass here needs a lot of sun. I can fix the rough areas by planting something called crown grass. It’s not real grass, if you ask me. It doesn’t spread. You get big, discrete clumps of three-foot-high grass that cover up your dirt. You can’t kill it, so it’s perfect for me.

She agreed that I had killed a lot of grass. I put ammonium sulfate on it, and she says it does not like that particular chemical. In more positive news, it will grow back.

I have a bare area among some trees in the front yard. She says I need something called “cast iron plants,” so named because they thrive no matter what. They’ll cover the area so I won’t have to go in with the mower and mow the dirt and few little bits of grass.

She confirmed that a mulberry tree will work here. That would be nice. I have a big area with nothing but grass, and a shade tree with edible fruit would be a big plus.

She didn’t like my idea of putting a bamboo wall between my neighbors and me, but under pressure, she admitted it would work. She recommends against it because some people get stuck with bamboo varieties that spread and ruin everything. If I’m confident that the variety I get is non-spreading, bamboo will be a big enhancement to the property.

I have an irritating horse lady across the fence, and she had the gall to suggest I should not shoot in my backyard because it upset her pets. Like would be better if she were invisible.

Now I have to find the plants the agent recommended and put them in my yard. Of course, Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t have them, so I have to look for nurseries. Once I find the plants, I can get to work, and my yard will be much less bother than it is now.

Tooling up for Buffing

Today I’ve been getting up to speed on bench buffers. I bought an old Baldor yesterday, and I need to get it working correctly. I also need things like wheels and compounds.

I learned a lot this morning. I watched a Youtube video from Eastwood. They’ve carved out a place in the market by selling car enthusiasts pretty good tools for very good prices. If you buy Eastwood stuff, you may not get the very best performance and reliability, but you will also get into the game a lot faster and cheaper.

Eastwood has a lot of educational videos. I’ll embed their buffing lecture here.

Here is what I learned:

1. I should get one spiral-sewn cloth wheel for every abrasive I use, except for emery and polishing. Otherwise, I’ll have to use a device known as a rake to clean the compound of of the wheel every time I change abrasives. That isn’t happening. The video guy says you should store your compound and matching wheels together to prevent mixups.

2. I need a hard sisal wheel, several spiral wheels, a loose cloth wheel, and a canton flannel wheel. Sisal is for emery, which is very coarse. Spiral wheels are for tripoli, stainless steel, plastic compound, and red rouge. The other wheels are for polishing with diamond rouge. I may have this wrong, but I should be close.

3. The basic abrasive compounds are emery (coarse), stainless compound, tripoli, plastic compound, red rouge, and white rouge.

I hope I got this right.

My buffer has 3/4″ arbors. Chinese buffers typically have 1/2″ or 5/8″ arbors. That means it’s not easy for me to find wheels. The answer is Caswell Plating. This is a company that sells plating, polishing, anodizing, and oxide-finishing products. I found what I needed (or thought I needed) on their site. I also bought assorted abrasives.

My buffer does not run as smoothly as I would like. It doesn’t screech, but it rumbles a little. I don’t think it should do that. I looked up the bearings for it, and I have a pair on the way. I don’t know if they’ll improve things, but for $14, it’s worth a shot. I suppose there could be something out of balance inside the buffer, but that seems unlikely. It had to get past Baldor QC.

I checked the runout with an indicator, and it’s well under 0.001″. The bearings make a little noise when I rotate the wheels by hand.

To get the bearings off and back on, I’ll have to use my hydraulic press. That may be awkward. I’ll have to hold a long armature and shaft vertically on steel plates. Ordinarily, you could use a bearing puller to remove a bearing, but I would need one with an 8″ reach and a 2.5″ capacity (diameter), and they don’t pop up when I search for them online. Some guys use hammers to remove old bearings and beat new ones on. That seems stupid. I don’t think hitting a new bearing with a hammer can improve it any.

I found out why the buffer has a magnetic switch. It’s a safety thing. If the power goes out while the buffer is running, the magnetic switch prevents it from turning back on when the power returns. It also has some kind of thermal protection, which I didn’t bother reading about.

I don’t really need the switch, but it’s not hurting anything, and it could frustrate a kid who walked by the buffer and tried to turn it on. You can pull the skin off your hand, like a pink, bloody glove, with one of these machines. I suppose it’s nice to know that will be harder for kids to do.

I am trying to figure out what to do about stabilizing the buffer. I’m resisting drilling my floor as hard as I can. Every time I moved the buffer, I would have to drill new holes. Ugly. But buffers are dangerous, and they need to be secured. I could secure it to a heavy bench or something, but then I wouldn’t have that cool Baldor pedestal under it. I could put the pedestal on my bench grinder, however.

The main thing, when you use a buffer, is not to be an idiot. You have to study up on safety and avoid doing stupid things. Not long ago, a well-known knifemaker was buffing a knife, and his buffer took it out of his hands and threw it back to him, right into his heart. Naturally, he died. Sounds like he was standing in the wrong place and holding a small object in his bare hands while buffing. Those are things everyone knows they shouldn’t do. I read stories like that, and I try to plan ahead.

I don’t know if a buffer can hurt you when you stand to the side. I know it’s a lot safer than standing in front of it, waiting to catch whatever it throws. Before I put solid metal wheels on my bench grinder, I always stood to the side when I used it. I try to stay out of the plane of my chainsaws. When I use a table say, I try not to stand directly behind the wood. You do what you can.

Most people, including professionals, bring tools home and flail away with no training and no common sense. It’s awfully unusual to hear about an accident that didn’t involve stupid behavior.

I believe I’ve watched every episode of Forged in Fire. I’ve seen people hold things under a drill press with their bare hands instead of clamping them. I’ve seen people lean over a container of warm, combustible oil while shoving a red-hot knife into it. It’s startling what people who claim to be experienced will do.

When my bearings arrive, I’ll pop them in and see if the buffer sounds better. It pretty much has to, unless something is unbalanced, and that’s unlikely. I could fix something like that if I could find places to remove metal inside the buffer. I don’t expect a problem, however.

I expect to be fully operational within a week.

I forgot to order a wire wheel! I better get on that.

Hope your Sunday is going well. Mine sure is.

Buffer!

I’ve wanted a buffer for a long time. They’re very useful. You can shine things with them. You can also use abrasive flap wheels and wire wheels with them. Great tools. But I was too cheap to spring for a used American buffer, and I had doubts about Asian. The most promising thing I found was a Taiwan Jet buffer for $400 or so.

The Jet would probably have been excellent, but I couldn’t get past my stinginess, so I waited. Recently, I found a used Baldor (American) online. They still make this model. It’s a 332B, with a 3/4-HP motor. It runs at 1800 RPM, and it takes 8″ wheels. It already had a sturdy steel pedestal on it, with shelves.

I offered $250 for it. I think I could have done better, but these days, I try not to be ruthless when I negotiate. Even if I could have gotten it for $150 or so, the $270 asking price was very modest, and $250 was a great deal.

I drove to Orange City today and picked it up. Here are some photos.

It appears it came from a school in Seminole County. A school won’t run a buffer 24 hours a day, and that’s good. On the other hand, a school will let Beavis and Butt-head impersonators run wild with quality tools, and that’s bad. It’s hard to hurt a buffer or bench grinder, though. Basically, three things can happen. The shaft can be bent. The capacitors can die. The bearings can die. If the shaft is okay, the other stuff is chicken…is easy to fix.

I was surprised to find that the person who was selling it online was actually a business. In fact, he was a pawn shop. Had I known that, I probably would have offered less. I pictured some guy selling his precious tools in order to pay bills. In reality, that guy had already sold the tool to the guy I was buying it from.

No matter. Still a good deal.

The buffer had two wheels on it. One was an abrasive flap wheel, and it looks very good. The other was a 4″ cloth wheel with red rouge on it. I don’t know if an 8″ wheel can be eaten down to 4″. I didn’t look closely. Maybe the previous owner had a practice of using 4″ wheels on an 8″ machine.

Took the wheels off and ran the buffer. I can feel a tiny amount of movement when it runs. It feels okay, but when I turn on my Dayton grinder, I can barely feel anything. I don’t know if the Baldor is running normally or whether it needs bearings. I’m working on finding out. It’s silent, so that’s good.

The pedestal has a base about one foot square. It will not be stable enough for buffing. I think I’m going to get two rectangles of plywood and glue them together to get a platform about 1.75″ thick. Then I can put casters under it, far enough apart to make the buffer stable. I don’t want to screw it to the floor. It would be a big problem, having a tool that big stuck in one location.

The buffer has a starter box. I don’t know why a 3.4-HP 115V tool would have a starter box. I’m trying to find out.

I don’t know exactly what I want to do, regarding default accessories. I was thinking I’d put a wire wheel on one side and a cloth wheel on the other. I suppose I’ll need several wheels and several types of abrasive. It’s very easy to change accessories, now that I’ve knocked the nuts off with an impact driver, so it’s not an important decision.

I would like to clean up and restore the buffer, but it’s pretty cool the way it is. It has an inscription on it, indicating it came from a school system down here.

I think I’ll really enjoy this thing. Buffing and wire-brushing are important parts of shop life. Without proper tools to do these things, life is glum.

It turned out the pawnshop was near the home of my goddaughter, so I went for a visit and took everyone for ice cream. She’s 6 now. Her oldest sister is making plans for college. Time just zips by.

I talked with her dad about prayer and so on. He and his wife are doing very well these days. They had some rough times a while back, but they’ve ramped up their prayer efforts, and it’s paying off. I’m hoping they’ll come up in July so we can pray.

Good tools, good friends, and a very pleasant drive. Hard to think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

Fixed Wireless Transports me Forward to 2005

I must say that this is an exciting day. I now have something resembling real Internet capability.

When I moved here with my dad, all we could get was DSL. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t remember what life was like in 1995.

I probably exaggerate, but DSL is a primitive type of Internet connection that works over a phone wire. At peak speeds, it’s terrible. When your neighbors’ kids are all trying to download porn and free MP3’s at the same time, it slows to a crawl, or whatever is beneath a crawl. My top speeds were something like 1.5 MBPS.

Rural Internet providers don’t have a lot of customers per square mile, so there is no money in running serious cables to every house. This is why the Internet is so slow. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the phone companies are willing to run wires out here.

A somewhat new alternative has become available: fixed wireless. All it means is “cell phone connectivity for your house.” You get a router which is really a cell phone with no screen. It communicates with a local cell phone tower, and you get whatever speed the tower can provide.

For some reason, the big players don’t sell fixed wireless directly here, even though they provide cell service. You can’t call Verizon and tell them you want an Internet connection. Nonetheless, the towers that provide the service belong to real wireless companies. Small companies buy bandwidth from them and resell it. I can choose among towers operated by or for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Verizon has a fantastic signal here, but their data cap is pathetic. I would run through it in three days of Youtube. The other companies have true unlimited data. I had to guess which one would give me the best speed when I ordered my plan.

I knew T-Mobile was hopeless here, and I also knew AT&T had a tower down the road, so I rolled the dice with AT&T. Now I have an Internet connection worthy of 2005. It’s not great, but for people who don’t stream porn all day, it’s fast enough. I may look into Sprint.

There used to be some websites I simply could not use except on my phone. They were written badly or something. They took so long to load, they would simply quit. Very annoying. Now I should be able to connect.

The wireless company sent me a router plus a funny-looking directional antenna. I’m supposed to mount it outdoors. I have to figure out where to put it. I know where the tower is. I assume I need to put the antenna as high up as I can, on the side of the house facing the antenna.

It’s very nice to know that if I absolutely had to, I could upload a video to Youtube. Maybe I could even fix things so my security cameras could send me real-time video with a useful level of quality.

I guess I can finally get rid of Centurylink and DSL. That will be great. In addition to the low speed, Centurylink gave me a router which disconnects from my computer for no reason, so when I sit down at the PC every day, I have to go through a routine to make it connect. I look forward to bypassing that mess.

Wow. I may go watch HD cat videos just because I can.