Well…if there is a traitor in our midst named Tucker Carlson…and there is if you have read the 12 page memo leaked from a Russian intelligence service by Mother Jones magazine that instructs all of Russian media to play clips of Tucker and his support of Putin all day every day and that China has jumped on, too…my next question about this traitor is: “is he getting instructed by Russian intelligence to do the spots on his show so Putin and his cronies can use the propaganda to hurt the US?” How about the next question: “is Tucker or fox news getting paid to spread the propaganda so the Russians can use it?” How else do you explain Tucker’s crazy support of the Russian dictator and the un-American bullshit he spews every day? As I made the comparison before, what tucker is doing is worse than what Tokyo Rose or Axis Sally did in world war two since Tucker has a built in audience of millions that believe everything he says and he is damaging the US so much more than those two traitors that he needs to be fired right now…and Rupert Murdoch and fox news need to be fined or shut down since there is no first amendment protection against treason against the US. Some enterprising lawyer should sue them right now for another billion dollars and put them out of business….geez…
Monthly Archives: March 2022
Hope this is the last time I have to shovel…
Well…darn, it’s the middle March and I shouldn’t be out there digging through foot deep drifts and getting my toes frozen…I really do hope this is the last time I have to shovel this spring….but, I said that two weeks ago and most of the snow had melted until today…now it will be another two weeks before I can get out on the trails and it looks like I’ll have to keep getting my miles in downstairs…and with that, I may be able to get to 600 miles on the inside bike since I am almost at 500 today…and two more weeks will get me there…as I get older, I like the cold less and less…or I don’t dress for it more and more…not sure which it is but the rubber garden shoes I have been using are only good for about a half hour until it’s like not wearing shoes at all…I am going to buy a nice pair of winter boots for next winter…maybe some winter hikers that have good tread for the snow and ice…at least I didn’t have to buy a snowblower this winter but the day is coming where I’ll have to…cripes, I hate getting old….oh, well….time to watch some soccer and get ready to make some pork tacos for lunch….more later….
March 13th
Well…that was strange…just went out to get the paper and it was probably the most snow I’ve driven in all winter…and it feels like the depths of January instead of March….we must have gotten 4 or 5 inches of snow last night and with the wind out here, there are frickin drifts that I think I’ll have to shovel later….and it’s only 15 out here…again…and I am damn tired of the cold….oh, well…that’s Michigan for you…slept really crappy last night with my allergies acting up and I could barely breathe all night even with the allergy meds…and that is not a good omen for how it’s going to be when the trees get going with their pollen….even with that, I feel okay today with being good for 10 weeks now and I am getting to the point that I will stop mentioning that since it is the new normal for me….didn’t do much yesterday and today will be the same since I am making weekends weekends again…Sunday is actually the only day I plan to take off but yesterday was a bonus day and it felt good to veg out instead of work…but I did make some decisions on the house and will do the bathroom next but then move on to the big bedroom so I can move in there permanently….it is so much larger than the room I’m using that I can actually put furniture in there…but it needs a lot of work to get it ready to paint that I probably won’t be done with it til May or so…but, it has a door that I can close to keep the dust controlled when I repair the plaster….and I may even try to remove the old wallpaper they painted over so I don’t have to have wallboard installed….it looks like a big job but the kitchen did, too, but that only took me a couple of months and there is less work in the bedroom….I am still thinking of putting in one of those pull down stairs to give me easy access to the attic but that may be a job for a contractor….haven’t really even looked at that yet….not much to do today…just going to have more coffee and get to the news that I haven’t even started yet….and there are soccer and races on today that I can play in the background as I read…a new normal Sunday….more later…..
Maureen Ferguson is a right wing hack…
Well…just read an opinion piece in USA today that has me pissed off that they would allow this right wing hack, Maureen Ferguson, to spew her right wing nonsense in a national paper. In the piece she goes on to essentially cheer for the defeat of a bill in congress that would enshrine women’s right to control their own bodies by federal law to take it out of the right wing supreme court hands…and she goes on to frame it as the women’s rights supporters not believing in democracy since they don’t want to allow the repub controlled states to codify their hate into law…hate of women, hate of minorities, and hate of the LGBT community and to restrict the rights of people they don’t like. She is living in the 19th century and using the same state’s rights arguments that were used to support slavery and ensuring that black people don’t have the right to vote…so I guess to this hack it is against democracy to try to protect everyone in the US…even those who live in states that have been rigged so the repubs control them and she is just fine with that rigging….again, this is the same bullshit argument that has been made since before the civil war…and it reeks of pushing her religion (catholicism) on everyone since she works for a catholic organization whose purpose is to outlaw abortion in this country….it is specifically because of people like ferguson why protections for all the groups she and her repub counterparts hate have been federalized…if we left it to the states she so reveres, slavery would still be a thing and women would still be property to be controlled by men….and minorities would still not have the right to vote…and she can’t deny that with the continuing efforts of her beloved repub party, that right is under attack in 2022….what a right wing hack….
Sometimes old school works better…
Well…with adopting all of the new cooking technology that has become hot over the past few years like the instant pot, we sometimes forget the methods that we used to use that worked great and sometimes the old school stuff works as good or better. As you know, a couple of days ago I made an 8 pound pork shoulder in my instant pot, cooking it for over an hour and a half under full pressure…but, I wasn’t really happy with how it turned out…it was not really the fall off the bone tender that I was expecting and that others had come out before….it didn’t look or feel tender or done even with adding an extra half hour to the recommended cooking time…now, I could have put it back in the pot for another hour but I was done with cooking and didn’t want to put in any more time…but yesterday, I got a brainstorm to take the partially cooked pork and put it in my big slow cooker that I haven’t used since I got the instant pot….so this morning when I got up at 5:39, I took the pork and put it in the slow cooker along with some celery, garlic, and onion along with some veggie broth and let it cook on high until almost noon…and it came out so darn good…tender and tasty and it broke up all of the huge pieces that were left after the instant pot so I now have two big containers of shredded, tender, tasty pork that I can use with the gravy and mashed potatoes I made Thursday and will make much better pork soft tacos than the undercooked stuff did….I just have to remember that the old school stuff still works great for some things…especially if you have the time….
Weekends are starting to feel right again….
Well…it you’ve been here at all, you have heard my laments about weekends not meaning anything in the long time I was unemployed and now with being retired…and I complained quite a bit that I didn’t care what day it was since they were all the same and there was nothing special about them and no reason to think they were…but, in the time I have been working on this house for hours every day, it has become kind of a job and I am trying to recreate the patterns I lived by my entire life to….and by taking weekends off from that work, I am starting to feel that weekends are special again…after the Saturday bike ride, I am making a conscious effort to limit the amount of work that I do and the guilt that I feel by not working…and the possibility of doing what I want instead of what I have to do is really pretty cool and I am looking forward to the freedom that it gives me…but, it’s more the languid feel that I get from this new attitude that is getting me back to normal a bit….for the first time in forever, I’m not rushing around here being so task oriented that I don’t enjoy life and I am finally just letting the days happen…it’s like I’ve shifted down a gear and I don’t have to be wide open anymore…okay, that’s a car analogy that I use and I hope you understand it since it is a good description of what I feel…I just hope I can sustain it….but I’ll take this small bit of progress if I can’t…
I do like how the new F1 cars look….
Well…I finally got the F1 channel to work this morning and with that, I got to see the new F1 cars on the track for the first time…and I like what I see…these new cars are much cleaner looking than last year’s cars with no barge boards or all of the damn little add ons that made them look so strange….they look like race cars again and it hit me watching practice that they look like cars from the early two thousands like the Brawn that was a pretty good looking car…the team that I root for, Mercedes, doesn’t look like they have the speed yet but they normally sandbag during testing so we’ll see when the races start in a couple of weeks…I really can’t wait to see how they race in big packs and whether the huge changes they made to make the racing better actually worked…one thing I don’t like is that once these practices are over, the engines are frozen and no changes can take place for a couple of years…now, F1 is supposed to be the pinnacle of innovation in racing and to tell the best engineers in the world they can’t do anything to make their car better seems to go against that innovation…the same thing happened in NASCAR when they implemented so many rules that your car can be disqualified for a 32nd of an inch in body measurements and everything else is now standard so creativity is gone and the racing is no better for it…in fact, I liked it a lot better when someone could come up with something world beating new that would allow them to dominate until the other teams caught up….I mean do the few people who run nascar have more creativity than a hundred engineers from the teams? No, and the purpose of the team engineers have been ruined by the “parity” that is the goal of nascar….I for one don’t want parity that makes for boring racing…I want people thinking and innovating in both nascar and F1 that gives us something new occasionally that keeps me interested and looking forward to something new…not cookie cutter cars that by rule can’t change over the course of the season…
March 12th
Well…it’s new coffee day! One of those days where I have fresh coffee and it is from a container that I opened yesterday to make the first pot….the bad thing is that this is the best pot of coffee I’ll get from this 32 oz container and it’s downhill for the next 6 weeks until I open the next one….oh, well…I’ll enjoy this one while it lasts…it’s the damn middle of March and it is 16 degrees out here and it snowed last night….where the hell is spring? Okay, that will be my last bitch…for now….I was up and down all night last night starting at 3:02, then 5:09, then 5:39, then I gave up…but I feel okay so who cares? The big pork shoulder I made the other day was not done as well as it needed to be since it was not fall off the bone tender and I probably should have put it back in the instant pot for another hour…but I didn’t…I did come up with an idea that I am doing right now and that is to put the pork into my slow cooker that I haven’t used since I got the instant pot and I am going to run it on high for 6 hours or so to see how that works…and I added some veggie broth to it for liquid to change the taste…do you think I have too much time on my hands? I am in the last two days of my healing week off and my hands are better but still hurt so I guess I’ll just have to deal with it as I get back to work….I am a little excited to get after the bathroom but I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the built in cabinet that is in there…I really like all the storage but it needs to be stripped or sanded and re-finished with a urethane that will hold up to the humidity in there….and there is not a lot of room to move around in there so I think I’ll take the cabinet apart and do the work downstairs like I did for the kitchen….and I may have to wait to work on it until I can open the window and let the fumes out…I think it will be a stand alone project that will take a week or so since it needs to be re-stained before the finish….not much to do today….it’s kind of nice that I have gotten to the point that my living space is pretty organized so cleaning it doesn’t take a lot of time..and that is what I’m going to do today after the bike ride that starts in 18 minutes….more later…
The new strip doesn’t work…
Well…yeah, not a lot of politics today but I did get to taking the hinge back off the bathroom door and soaking it in the new strip that I got the other day….but, it looks like 10 bucks down the drain since I coated the hinge in the strip and let it sit for an hour and it still didn’t strip the hinge clean at all…so, it looks like new hinges are in order and I can get the 3 sets I need for about 16 bucks so that’s not a bad deal…but now I need to figure out how to strip the heat registers since they have the same paint that wouldn’t come off the hinges…I may have to have them sand blasted or commercially stripped and that won’t be cheap but I do want to save them…I guess I’ll need to wait to work on them until it’s warm enough to do it outside since the strip is flammable and you shouldn’t use it inside….I do have a whole can that needs to be used and a can and a half of the 40 year old stuff so I may be able to at least get some of the paint off before I try to figure out how to get them to the point I can paint them black…oh, well….
Seems to be working okay now…
Well…I don’t know if my son has done anything to my site but it seems to be working better now so I will say thank you…when I fired it up this morning…the start pages looked like text and not html and nothing worked…so I opened a new tab and tried the bookmark I have for adding a new post and, after a long wait, it started to work a little…but it still was taking about a minute or more to go from one page to another and at times it wouldn’t go between them at all…especially when trying to add a new post but it just worked fine for the last one and for this one so I am keeping my fingers crossed that whatever was wrong is fixed. Man, I don’t know what to do when this thing isn’t working…it has been such a major part of my life since 2010 and almost 10K posts that it just doesn’t feel right when I can’t do it first thing in the morning and then whenever I get an idea for one of these…so, it looks like at least a five post day today or even more…haven’t even got to much of the news yet and there has to be another topic that will grab me….more later….