I’m running a little late with the Christmas card. Ideally I’d post it a week before Christmas so it stays up as the last entry for a while, and I’m busy doing Christmas things. This year I had a few other concerns that aren’t terribly Christmassy, and it rained and rained and last night it was clear. Instead of an actual Christmas card, I’d been checking out this house down the street, and I finally got my chance to photograph it.
This is extravagant. I like it. I can't say I'll ever do it.
I can’t say when was the last time I had ham. I avoid it. However, we had an amazing Christmas pot-luck with so much food, there were even leftovers at the end of the day.
So, I brought home some of the tiny pieces of ham that fell off into the pineapple juice down in the bottom of the pan. I just kept finding them and dropping them in my bag, until I had quite a few. And I am eating them right now. It’s dam good ham.
I don’t have a cholesterol meter or anything so I can’t watch what’s happening with my LDL or whatever, you know. I figure if this ham kills me, it’s a worthy cause. I haven’t had ham like this in a long, long time. Gosh this is good ham.
Sometimes, WordPressers, I do this. If Benjamin Franklin had a blog, he might post this, about Congress:
“They are of the people, and return again to mix with the people, having no more durable preeminence than the different grains of sand in an hourglass. Such an assembly cannot easily become dangerous to liberty. They are the servants of the people, sent together to do the people’s business, and promote the public welfare; their powers must be sufficient, or their duties cannot be performed. They have no profitable appointments, but a mere payment of daily wages, such as are scarcely equivalent to their expences; so that, having no chance for great places, and enormous salaries or pensions, as in some countries, there is no triguing or bribing for elections.” –Benjamin Franklin, letter to George Whatley, 1785
Ponder that stuff while they decide how they’re going to screw us next.
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Once again, North Korea is out of line. This time it’s a missile strike on an island where people live. How long is South Korea supposed to tolerate this aggression?
I have no ESPN but it’s reported that Phillip Rivers threw four touchdown passes last night. Chargers 35 Broncos 14 ahahahahaha.
The outrage over the latest TSA screening process is getting funnier and funnier. Can I get a female screener? Are female screeners in big demand? What do they think of all this? Do they compare junk? My own mother 80 who never flies anywhere claims she would strip naked if approached at a TSA checkpoint (this will never happen).
Note from the Future: my female TSA screener fantasy came true. I was at the airport, shortly after all this touch my junk, and behold, there are TSA screeners who are sooo hot. I’m sure she could read what I was thinking… come on, touch my junk. And she gave me that look… you’re a sick puppy, aren’t you… and waved me through to the x-ray detector booth without a word. I was so disappointed. All this time they promised us an intrusive grope, and I got radiated instead.
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People in the foothills are without power as this series of winter storm activity winds down. Snow is down to 2000 feet or less. Tonight there is a freeze warning for the valley. I went out and wrapped my pipes last night. Most of the pipe insulation is still in place from last winter. Frozen pipes suxxs.
Everything is going to be just fine.
Some people wait until they have enough cool stuff to post. I just like to write. I have learned from other peoples’ mistakes in the blogosphere. I wish never to pay an attorney for anything ever again.
I’ve reached a comfortable plateau. I could blog about it, but then I’d run the risk that I first learned about from the example of QueenOfSky. Feel free to Google that. Ellen is a legend now, still living a life, and working on a screenplay about her experience. She had some quiet online notoriety for her adventures until some suits decided to fire her over the content of her blog.
That kind of excitement is something I prefer to avoid. Let’s just say they’re paying me more than they were paying Ellen. While that event may have catapulted her into a whole other realm where she’s thriving, I am adverse to being catapulted by anything. I like my stuff right where it is. Some changes you can’t avoid, but some you can. And I like pictures.
She lived to be 21.
Some things are harder to refuse than others.
I wish this could be the view from my living room window.
I just opened the can this morning, and I had to say it’s good. Raley’s has put their brand on a black and brown can of ground coffee they say is 100% Colombian.
I think it is. It’s much better than the Hills Brothers and the MJB Premium Roast. It’s about as good as the MJB Colombian used to be.
I have weekend coffee and during the week coffee. This Raley’s brand 100% Colombian is going to be my new during the week coffee. I save the really good stuff for the weekends, when I make the time to grind the beans myself. This is really good for coming out of a can.
People who have a Raley’s nearby are probably the luckiest people in the world. But that’s another topic.
Welp, sometimes we run out of time in the morning for this stuff.
I want to use this somewhere.
This is the guy who invented three-flavor ice cream.
Keeping in mind that it’s almost Halloween.
I could never pull off a Napoleon Halloween costume. None of his clothes would fit me, except maybe the hat. I don’t know. It just wouldn’t look right.
Anyway, I hope y’all get well soon. I know I’ll be happy when these clowns stop sending me all this election propaganda. Great Googly Moogly. I already voted. There’s nothing quite as irrelevant as election propaganda when you already slam-dunked your ballot.
And they lie, too, boy, they lie like a dog trying to get out of the situations they helped to create. Like a dog, I say.
Arbeit Macht Frei! Now get on with your bad self.
It hasn’t been a week since Alexander Piggee ignited a fire that all but destroyed the Roseville Galleria, Sacramento’s most monster Westfield shopping mall, into which I have never set foot. Since then, our presumptuous MainStreamMedia has been giving his name a French-sounding pronunciation, like, “Pe-jay.” Apparently at his arraignment he corrected everyone. It’s Piggy, not Pe-jay. Thanks, dude.
Well, he was tired of trying to get by on his own, at 23, so he learned how to start fires. He’s goin’ down. Just like the roof on the Roseville Galleria.
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Wall Street Journal reports a meeting of small business owners debating the value of Facebook as a marketing tool. Proponents say it humanizes their business, while the rest of us agree we don’t have time for any more media. My own issues with Facebook stem from the way it harvests your e-mail addresses to see if they match any of their members, but back to the small business owners’ meeting, where some of the participants used their smart phones to photograph other participants so they could post them on their blogs.
I’m reiterating things you may already know. People have been fired for stuff they posted on their blogs. Facebook is notorious for this, as some members “forgot” they “friended” their boss before they started ranting about how their company’s policies are all fucked up. Law enforcement used to monitor activities on MySpace, where they discovered enough stupid things people posted to get warrants to raid peoples’ houses.
My point is that sometimes things you post may come back to bite you in the ass. And you knew that.
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Almost exactly five years ago, my father passed away peacefully in his own home. He worked, he built, he innovated, he accumulated, he deteriorated, and he assumed room temperature. And in all that time, he never had an internet connection at home.
That’s still true today. If you mention the internet to my mother, she responds with a desire to assemble an amateur radio station with the equipment that remains shelved in the garage. She has an FCC license, ya know.
They never had cable TV, either. No dish, no satellite. TV is free. All you need is an antenna, HD or otherwise. My father illustrated this point rather by accident one day. The neighborhood had been wired for cable, but the installers didn’t bury the cable very deep. He managed to sever the cable with a shovel. No great loss. They have never owned a cellular phone.
So when my father passed away, I went to my blog on journalspace and began writing what I could remember of chapters of his life. This wasn’t the wordpress clone journalspace they have now. This was the journalspace that lost six years of data when a disgruntled employee overwrote everything on the server.
I posted three to five long entries about my father. It meant a lot to me to do that. I let others in the family know where to find it, in case they had the interest and ability to do so. The mom wanted to see it, but she doesn’t do the web. So she persuaded a cousin to find it, and print it, and mail it to her.
When the package finally arrived, I was stunned to see that the cousin had not only printed the entries about my father, but had printed Every Single Entry since the beginning of time, starting with the experimental ones about beer can kites and the Frito effect. So my mother, who has no net, came into possession of my entire blog from beginning to end on journalspace.
I guess my point is that whatever we post may be retrieved in ways that we might never imagine. We’re essentially talking to the press here. We are Paris Hilton, and we have paparazzi we don’t even see.
Somehow this ties into the bad decision I had to make on Sunday, but my good discretion tells me I shouldn’t say anything about that.
Instead, I might say something about my sisteh, who isn’t really my sisteh, since I don’t care if it comes back to bite me in the ass. This one time my sisteh was offering up excuses for the way she is. I think she’s pretty normal, but she does have some inexplicable traits that I’ve always found to be disturbing. So she says, well, she’s that way because her mother was that way.
She was 50 years old when she said that. I tried to wrap my head around what she said, and all I came up with was, look: you can blame your mother for the way you are at age 50, but it’s not going to fly. It’s not your mother’s fault you are the way you are, if you are 50. It’s your fault. You can keep blaming your mother but none of us are going to buy it, at this advanced stage in your life. You are the way you are because you chose to continue to be that way. And if you’re only 49, it’s still your fault. You see where this is going.
At some point, you are responsible, even if you want us to believe that 40 is the new 18.
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The barn is telling me that winter is here. Not too far off. I am going to be good friends with the gas company real soon.
We can’t do this stuff in real time. But if we could, you’d see that northern California’s Doppler radar is extremely green right now. I’d take a picture but I don’t want to get the camera wet. (good excuse) But it’s real wet out there.
Last night I fired up the wood stove and brought the barn from 70F to 75F. It’s not that cold out. I had the kitchen window open the whole time. I seasoned both cast iron skillets with olive oil and heated up a can of chili. I’m a big fan of Stagg’s chili.
Bob the Cat let me know he thought it was cool, that I fired up the wood stove. He likes it.
Around here, Bob is the original Fire Cat.
Ion Television was running a good movie called The Siege last night. It’s about radical Islamists raising hell in New York City, with Denzel Washington as the FBI agent who’s trying to figure it all out. And Bruce Willis as an army general rounding up suspects. And Annette Bening as a CIA agent who knows a whole lot more than she’s telling anyone. Released in 1998, this pre-nineleven thriller is sure to open blind eyes to the possibilities of jihad in our midst. Get your liberal friends in front of the TV for this one. (“Silence! I kill you!” No kidding.)
I was going to give an honorable mention to the stove nazis. They have a website. I think it’s http://www.sparetheair.com/burncheck.cfm but it’s not active yet. It’s active from November thru February. They go out and measure the particulate matter in the air, see how it stands up against federal guidelines, and then tell us whether or not we can burn wood in our stoves.
There are four stages. One is “burn if you want.” Two is “oh please don’t burn.” Three is “you can only burn if you have an exemption.” Four is “you better not burn at all.” They can fine you fifty bucks. I’ve never been fined. My exemption is that my stove is EPA2 compliant.
How do they enforce this? I don’t know. I think they count on people turning their neighbors in who burn when they aren’t supposed to burn. They could fly over with a helicopter and infra-red, though, if they wanted to, and see who’s burning.
I just call them the stove nazis. We have to check the website to see if we can burn or not. So if you have a stove and no internet, I guess you’re living dangerously.
This morning I went through the stack of mail that’s been growing all week and found Notice 1400 from the Department of the Treasury (headed by Tim Geithner, tax cheat) Infernal Revenue Service. Apparently the trillions dollars deficit has caught up with the IRS and they want us to know. Notice 1400 reads:
“With the continued growth in electronic filing and to help reduce costs, the IRS will no longer mail paper tax packages that typically arrive in January of each year. If you still wish to use a paper form, the IRS has several options available to help you obtain paper copies of individual forms and instructions, including:
“Accessing our forms and instructions online at IRS.gov. You can quickly download the latest products from our site.
“Dropping by your local IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center.
“Going to your local post office or library (if they participate in the federal tax products program).”
Gee, thanks for letting me know. Every year since the dawn of time I can count on finding IRS Form 1040 with pages of instructions in my mailbox on or about January 1 with address labels as if you know who I am, and now you’re admitting you can’t even send the labels that you said were so darn important all those years.
Some of us maintain tax records for seven years, in the event we are to be audited by the Infernal Revenue Service. If you’ve noticed, some digital storage media does not last for seven years. Files on disks get corrupted, the program you use to open the files gets superseded, obsoleted, unsupported, the computer you used got a virus or the hard drive crashed, and you flat out admit there are terrorists trying to corrupt the bitstream every day. Every single American who files taxes and has heard the horrors of an IRS audit keeps paper files.
All you’re saying is that you won’t come to us in our mailboxes any more, and that we have to go to your offices to get the forms and instructions. You are saying that you no longer serve the people.
If this isn’t the biggest single campaign statement of 2010, I don’t know what is.
"Somebody has to pay for our mistakes, and we won't even send you the forms to do it any more."
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