Friday - November 25, 2022

Once Again, The One And Only Post

November 25, 2022

So we survived the holiday. Me, just barely. Too much to eat and waaay too much to drink. Bit of a hangover this morning.

I am going to swear off the booze for a while. I drink too much. I developed a drinking habit during the lockdown, and it might be approaching a kind of alcohol dependency by now. I’ve been having 2, sometimes 3 or 4 drinks every evening. And sometimes when the panic attacks hit over the stress of this home improvement project, I’d get up in the middle of the night, solve whatever the latest problem was, and have another belt to get back to sleep. Sometimes I’d have another belt to get to sleep. And that’s too much. I think it’s impacting my judgement and my emotions at this point, even when I’m not having any. Time to stop.

So I’m cutting myself off. I’ve made it through 27 hours now, and the urge isn’t really there. Some things are habit forming because you build a habit around them. It’s like smoking. Half the cigarettes you have, you have because you always have one or two at this point in the day. If I’m outside grilling, I always have a Manhattan. Or two. Habit. Break the habits. We’ll see how I fare in another couple days, but I’m going to take it a day at a time. And if it gets real itchy, an hour at a time. But I can beat this. And it’s probably less of a habit than I fear it is, so beating it can be done. I hope. Big words now after just a day. If I can go a couple months without any of it, then I’ll feel I’ve beaten it. And if I start really going crazy, then I’ll know the situation is worse than I thought, going from regular use to dependency to addiction. And that will mean fighting the fight every day, forever. But I’m worth it.

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Bowling Blogging!!
First position round at No Longer Cheap league. Which means we’re 12 weeks into the season of 35 weeks, and we have 13 teams on this league. So we played the Management team, who we rolled against on the first night of this season and beat them 7-0. They seemed to be having problems in the first 2 games, so were we, but to a lesser extent. So we won those. We were up by 179 at the end of G2. Then they somehow “remembered” how to bowl. Yikes. But we pulled it out a bit too, and in the end, while they won G3, they didn’t quite take wood. So we won 5-2 tonight. They’re still in 3rd place, we’re still in 4th place, but we’ve closed the gap to just a point or two. It’s nice to not be in dead last place for a change. Hope this lasts.

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November 24, 2022

I’ve been at work in the kitchen since 6am. I’ve got two pies done and cooling, and the bread is on it’s second rise.

And that’s it. Nothing fancy this year. I made the excuse that our house is torn apart, and my mixer broke. Both are true. But then she brings home a new mixer. So I came up with a recipe, and messed with it until it came out right. So the final version uses a bit less whole wheat flour, replaced with a little AP, a 65% hydration rate, activated yeast, bakes at 450 for 20 minutes in the Dutch Oven with the lid on after being spritzed with water, 20 minutes with the lid off, then comes out to cool for a couple minutes while I give it an egg wash that has a small pinch of salt in it. Back in a 400 oven for 10-15, then onto a cooling rack cantilevered over the slightly open oven door to cure as the oven cools. And all that gives a nice firm and tall loaf with a really crisp crust, nice and shiny.

This is where I do my annual Thanksgiving gripe. The pie recipes all call for a pie shell considerably larger than the joke things they sell in the grocery store as “deep dish”. They ain’t. Not even close. Made pumpkin pie this morning, the standard Libbys recipe: one regular can of pumpkin (used to be 16oz once upon a time) and one can of Carnation condensed milk. Makes 1 pie. Um, no. It now makes a pie and a half. So I made another iteration, and baked 2 pies, and have enough filling in a covered bowl in the fridge to make a 3rd pie. I was going to take a picture of how the commercial pie crust is lost inside an actual glass deep dish pie pan, but if you bake then you already know.

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November 23, 2022

Personal humor

As I sit here at my PC, isolated behind a mountain of boxes containing all our new kitchen cabinets, the new sink, and other kitchen bits, Home Depot sends me a sales email titled “Your New Kitchen Is Within Reach”. Yeah, no kidding. It’s only inches away from my left elbow actually.

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Getting ready for Thanksgiving. We’re going to her dad’s place, so I’ll make a pumpkin pie and a loaf of bread. Wifely picked up a new mixer so I’ll use that, but then it’s going back to the store. Although the motor is nice and strong and the unit doesn’t vibrate or walk across the countertop, the dough hook does a very poor job of getting dough off the bottom of the mixing bowl, and the beater height is not adjustable. So fail, which means take it back. I’m ordering the safety gear for my KitchenAid. Maybe I should buy 2, because I know it will fail again. This is all my fault, because I’m using an aftermarket dough hook made from a 1/2” bar of stainless steel that weighs about 2 pounds. That’s more mass than the mixer can handle with another 2 pounds of dough, and it’s just too much at the higher speeds I use to get that “slap and fold” kneading action.


I should do a couple loads of laundry so I have clean clothes to wear.


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Meanwhile the contractor is off until Monday. The building permits should be ready by then. I hope. Get them, and schedule inspections.

Meanwhile we have no finished floor in the bathroom, as he’s starting on the tile, and removed all the old stuff. So it’s pretty raw in there. And cold. At least he cleaned up pretty good, so there’s no chips or concrete dust.


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I have to spend quite a bit of time today organizing project parts and their receipts, to try to take them back to the stores. I think there are bits from about 4 orders at this point, but as the ductwork is complete, I don’t need the extras. And HD was slow with an order, so I have to cancel that in person, as it came in after the contractor took an alternate approach to get the job done. Can’t really blame this on “supply chain issues”; the parts were in stock at their central warehouse. They just took too long to get them to their local store for me to pick up. So, too bad. No sale.


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Plenty of other clean up tasks to do here too. The entire house is a rolling disaster area, and things need to be put away, thrown away, put back in the garage or in closets ... heck, we need to put the hall closet back together for the 4th time now, as that’s where the hatch to the attic is, and he’s done up there. For now.


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I’ve got to get up to Walmart to get a few things. Cat food, refill prescriptions, etc. Not much of a trip, and the place is hardly a mile away. I just have to make the time to get over there and get it done.




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Did you see this one the other day? Local school board elections, most of the Berkeley County SC schoolboard is now members of Moms For Liberty members. They came in on day one, took over, fired several people and replaced them with conservatives, banned CRT and trans BS, explicitly sexual books in the school libraries, and so on. Too bad, so sad. Let’s see how this plays out.

Heck, maybe they’ll go so far as to set a pro-America scholastic agenda and cut out all the Marxist nonsense. Wow.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/moms-liberty-berkeley-county-school-board-superintendent-rcna57528?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

On Tuesday evening, the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina swore in the board members who were elected last week, six of whom were endorsed by the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty.

Within two hours, the school board had voted to fire the district’s first Black superintendent (replaced by another Black superintendent BTW), terminate the district’s lawyer, ban critical race theory and set up a committee to decide whether certain books and materials should be banned from schools.

In addition, the board voted to replace the chair with Mac McQuillin, a local attorney and one of the board members backed by Moms for Liberty.

The rapid moves Tuesday in the Berkeley County district, the fourth largest in the state, showed the impact of Moms for Liberty’s focus on electing conservative school board members, and prompted uproar among some community members in attendance.

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Too Big To Fail, But Not Too Big To Bail Out

US FED pumps billions into Credit Suisse. Company is going belly up anyway. >88% of the money has been pulled out this quarter so far.

One month ago, weeks before the crypto sector was shaken by the crushing FTX bankrun which led to a quick and painful bankruptcy, and revealed that one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges and its “JPMorgan-esque” owner were nothing but hollow shells of fraud, another bank was suffering from a far bigger bank run.

Readers will recall that in mid-October we reported that the Fed was quietly wiring increasingly greater dollar amounts to the Swiss National Bank - which eventually peaked at around $11 billion weekly - which in turn was then using these dollar swap lines to plug USD funding holes within one or more Swiss commercial banks.

One didn’t need to be a rocket surgeon to figure out that the bank in question was Credit Suisse, which had seen its stock tumble amid a relentless barrage of scandals, corporate mistakes and the occasional fraud (that we know of), and which we said was likely suffering from a painful behind-the-scenes bank run.

Fast forward one month, when this morning the 2nd largest Swiss bank confirmed our worst-case speculation, admitting that it had just gone through a staggering bank run in which clients pulled as much as 84 billion Swiss francs, or $88.3 billion, of their money from the bank during the first few weeks of the quarter, underlining ongoing concerns over the bank’s restructuring efforts after years of scandals.

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Yeah, when the environmental destruction is in the far corners of the world, it doesn’t count.

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November 21, 2022

Hi blog. Not much new to report. I’m really tired and my knees hurt like mad. I don’t think I’m sick. Feel ok, just the knee and thumb joint pain really drag me down. Hard to walk more than 50 yards. A couple Aleve and a swig of Polish blackberry brandy helps a lot.

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project update

OTOH, we now have 3 fully completed ducts in the attic. Sealed, taped, insulated, properly suspended, and of the right diameters to meet the darn IRC codes. Plus vent caps, spray painted to nearly match the vinyl siding. Installed “good enough” for now - it’s really cold out and vinyl can shatter if you cut it when it’s too cold - with a promise to put in the J channel when it gets warmer. Not that anyone here really cares. But I do. I want it done perfectly.





The little bit of blue tape along the shingles marks the point directly across the breezeway from the vent cap on the neighbor’s unit. So we got pretty close, but there’s no headroom in the attic at that point. And they’re further down the roof than we said we’d try for, so everybody better be happy.

I know, this looks like nothing, and my excitement seems meaningless. But all this is the result of 4 days of work, a week of neurosis over the building codes, several hundred more dollars spent on duct, mastic, tape, hangers, etc., plus cutting, fitting, and crimping. And it’s code compliant from one end to the other, all 3 lines. (the little fan in the laundry room has a proper vent cap on it with a flap, but it’s mounted underneath one of the roof vents in the attic, so at least in theory it also vents directly to the outside. That one is a rarely-ever-used fan, so good enough. The dryer and the bathroom vent come out the side wall).

So when the permits come through, we ask for an inspection. Which we will pass. Then we can put in the switches, the ceiling, the walls, the tiles, etc, and actually make them into rooms again. Trust me, I am SO tired of looking at raw insulating and wiring, while using a shower with great big sheets of heavy plastic hanging on it.

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November 20, 2022

We, all of us, are living in whacko world. The inmates in charge of this asylum get crazier every day. I could on and on, but if you even graze the news, or any commentary site online, then you’re already aware of it, in every aspect of the world and phase of your life. And it’s only going to get worse before it gets better, but that won’t be until a few generations after the Great Die Off. I mean great reset, and the inevitable purge, wars, starvation, vax effect aided deaths and birth rate declines, the ever increasing stupidification of everyone, and the next several engineered killer pandemics.

Human population passed 8 billion the other day. That’s 2 and 2/3 as many humans as when I was born. Maybe we do need a massive culling. Problem is, the ones that will be culled won’t be the right ones. The hordes of useless hungry mouths will the ones that survive. The ones who work, create, and try to improve things will be the first to go. So bye bye. And then another 1000 years of darkness will ensue. There’s no escaping that. The poor, stupid, and starving won’t be able to even use, much less maintain the existing systems or improve them or think up anything new. In 100 years, clean running water from a pipe will be a miracle. We will fall, just like Rome. The barbarians always win.

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We won 4-3 in No Long Cheap league Friday night, missing out on total wood by 5 points.  Ouch. I was a little under average all night, 503 series. But everyone else was having a hard night too. But we’re actually in 4th place, so that’s not bad. Position round next week.

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Project update:

The vent caps have been painted to as close to the “pebblestone clay” color of the siding as we could find. We got a few lengths of J channel from the maintenance guys to make the install look nice. Our contractor has finally had his license renewed by the state, and he’s filing the building permits for us Monday. That’s about as backwards as it gets, but it’s good now. Hopefully he’ll have a contract written up for us to sign as well.

We’re pretty much ready for plumbing, electrical, construction, and fire code inspection at this point, at least at the first “pre-closure” level. Which means the code guys come over and look at stuff, say yes or no, and if they say yes we can start putting up wallboard and tiles, and start putting down flooring. So who knows, we may have a finished bathroom and laundry room by Christmas.

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November 17, 2022

Bowling blogging!!

Well, we took 5 at Old Guys league last night. It wasn’t easy, but we managed. I was a hair over average in the first 2 games, and the only reason I did as well as 3 hairs under average in the last game is because I went X XXX in 9 and 10 and put another 60 points on my score. I just couldn’t find the right line, couldn’t even get a mark, and just gave up and slammed the ball down the lane in the last frames. And it worked. I finished with a pathetic 157 for a 508 series. Everyone else on my team rolled over 200 for Game 3.

More importantly, we won the beer frame, which is truly a rare thing for us. So we move up to 11th place, and we’re facing a really tough team next week.

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The contractor is up in the attic all day again, running the 3 ducts and hopefully doing things right. At some point he’ll have to drill through the outside wall to mount the vent caps. Not sure if that’s going to happen today or not. Like everything else in this project, half the job is figuring out what the problems are and how to solve them. Then, once I run out and spend more money for more stuff, they can be solved. Mostly.

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November 16, 2022

Busy time here, as usual. Ducting going in up in the attic space. Waiting on deliveries is becoming the norm, and that slows everything down. A fair number of standard materials and items are not in stock anymore. Oh sure, we can order you some. And they’ll be here in a few days. This is why I purchased as much as I could ahead of time, and that made me take a bunch of guesses on what would be needed. And I didn’t always guess right. Doing the best I can.

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So Donald Trump has declared 2 years out that he’s running for President again. Well that will shake up a lot of people, and it gives him a long time to put out his ideas and views, which hopefully will convince people to put this country back together the way it ought to be.

My secret hope is that he puts together a panel of smart folks behind the scenes, and develops and tests (at small and large scale) abuse resistant voting methodologies and systems. Make it for 3 cost levels. Shouldn’t be that hard; the ideas have been out there forever. Then he needs to go on and on about it everywhere every day. Find people from every county in every state, have his people learn each local system. And point out the problems publicly. But try to do it the nice way, not the loud mouth grating NYC asshole way. More flies with honey, right? My point is, if masses of people learn the frailties of their local voting and counting system, and have it brought to their awareness often enough and publicly enough, then maybe they’ll want action. Of course, if the entire GOP picked up an election integrity plank, would it hurt?

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November 13, 2022

What kind of detergent do you use to launder digital money?

a href="https://ensign.substack.com/p/second-best-sugar-daddy-for-the-democrats">The first huge scandal to blow up in the face of the Democrats after the midterms has happened even before all of the votes have been counted - as I write this, only 72% of the votes have been counted in Alaska and only 88% have been counted in Arizona.

FTX, a crypto exchange, has filed for bankruptcy, with only $900 million in liquid assets and $9 billion in liabilities. Among the list of dubious other “assets” held by the exchange is a $7.3 million bet for Trump to lose the election in 2024. This bet is a real head-scratcher, as Trump has not officially announced that he is running in 2024, which presumably would be a prerequisite for him to lose in 2024. It is also odd, even for Wall Street, for bets on election outcomes to be listed as assets owned by companies.

[ follow this link and watch the video.

FTX was being run by children. Ok, youths in their early 20s, who broke all the rules, and dressed like campus bums ]

The head of the company, until he resigned on Friday, was Sam Bankman-Fried. He was the second largest individual donor to the Democrats in the 2022 election cycle, with total donations to them of $36,793,956. Only George Soros, with a total of $128,475,971, gave that party and its candidates more money.

This is a really weird thing. And another crypto currency that went belly up, this one just after the mid-term elections. which is likely to have funneled millions to the DNC. Through Ukraine of course. And Brinkman-Fried may have run off the Argentina. SSDD.

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Your Daily RACISM !!

subtitle in internet-speak: play stupid games, win stupid prizes
categories: media-bias, minorities, you were trying to create a situation, and everything is racist to you

Nine-year-old Bobbi Wilson was hoping to do her part in the state’s battle against lanternflies. Using a home remedy she’d discovered on TikTok, the girl went out in her Caldwell neighborhood to fight the invasive species, spraying the trees and sidewalks with a solution of dish soap and apple cider vinegar.

Yet that simple act got the police called on Bobbi, who is Black, after a neighbor dialed 911 saying he was suspicious and scared, according to her mother, Monique Joseph.

On Nov. 1, Joseph appeared at a Caldwell Borough Council meeting and told her daughter’s story, saying she hopes it will spark a conversation in the Essex County community about racial bias, diversity and equity.

“Racism, intentional or not, is still racism,” Joseph told borough leaders.

In the Oct. 22 police call, the neighbor told dispatchers, “There’s a little Black woman, walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees. … I don’t know what the hell she’s doing, scares me though,” according to Joseph’s account to the council.

“I’m not here to label anyone, only to share my point of view as a Black woman, a Black mother and a Black resident in this town, to bring awareness on racism and implicit bias that we experienced on the very street that we live on,” Joseph said.

Joseph said her neighbor, Gordon Lawshe, used triggering words during the 911 call when he reported he was “scared,” and that Bobbi was wearing a “hood.” Those words have resulted in the deaths of Black and brown people at the hands of police before, Joseph said.

The neighbor, Gordon Lawshe, lives right across the street. With that name, my guess is that he’s white. You’d think he’d recognize the kid who lives right across the street, and maybe venture out to ask her what she’s doing? Or maybe he took the “safe” way out, having been the recipient of the death glare, the mouth, and buckets of attitude from these neighbors in the past? We’ll never know. His lawyer says he wasn’t doing racial profiling, merely providing a description. In the video you can see that at least 3 cop cars showed up.

And if some kid was spraying unknown stuff on my trees and sidewalk, you’re damn right I’d call the cops. WTH. Did she have a permit? Did she have adult supervision? Probably not.

And it turns out that Lawshe is a local politician. A Republican. And a white guy. And I’m sure you’re aware of the acts of violence and protests etc that have occurred at politician’s homes. Remember a year or so ago when “an abundance of caution” was the watchword? [ pull up 15 Elizabeth Street on Google Maps Street View. Note the “Love Lives Here” sign in his front yard ] Lawshe, the “politician”, had been a councilman for the community, a position that he resigned from more than 12 years ago, and then took a job as the sports membersjip director at the local community center. Yeah, he’s a big political player for sure.

But no, let’s make it about race. Because we’re always the victims. And some of us are professional victims, going out of their way to provoke situations they can cry about.

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an instant before the P-36 fighter hit the B-17 bomber

Two World War II-era planes collided and crashed while performing a flyover at a commemorative event in Texas on Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how many people were on the planes.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra were participating in the Air Force’s Wings Over Dallas air show when they collided mid-air near the Dallas Executive Airport just before 1:30 p.m. local time, the FAA said.

Many short videos of the collision on social media:
https://twitter.com/breakingryan1/status/1591519673450958850
https://twitter.com/DavidSFOX4/status/1591522623376211968?s=20&t=ePUkBKdKdcETeTrIXtRLxg

Tragedy has struck at a Texas airshow, with two antique aircraft colliding in midair.

A World War II-era P-63 Kingcobra fighter struck a Boeing B-17 bomber during the airshow in Dallas on Saturday, according to KXAS-TV.

Cellphone video of the catastrophic crash reveals the fighter approaching the bomber from above, possibly out of the bomber pilot’s line of sight.

Both planes plummeted to the ground in pieces after the collision and exploded on impact.

And the ace reporters at MSN get things exactly backwards of course:

The Wings Over Dallas Airshow was on full display when a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crashed into Bell P-63 King Cobra from behind. Both planes immediately went into a nose dive before crashing into a runway and exploding.

There were six crew members in the planes that did not survive the crash, according to a report. Fatalities have not been verified by local authorities.

[ I’m not expecting anyone to be a history buff or a plane spotter or anything like that, but if you don’t know what a B-17 is and what one looks like, you are not an American. ]

There were two things going on in the air at the time. The bomber was doing a slow flyover, and the fighter was doing a high speed pursuit fly-by with another plane.

Both airplanes were at low altitude. The fighter came down from 8 o’clock (relative to the bomber) and was executing a banked turn up and to the left. Due to the long nose of the fighter and it’s low mounted wing, it’s possible that the pilot never even saw the bomber. The impact was just at or aft of the B-17’s left wing root; the collision shattered to fighter to pieces and cut the bombers fuselage in half. Both planes hit the ground less than 2 seconds later and fireballed. I don’t think anyone in either airplane survived.

There are very few B-17s left and almost no P-36s.

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November 12, 2022

So, what’s new with you? I turned 62 yesterday. And I was feeling every one of those years. I really wanted to go find some kids somewhere and yell at them to get off my lawn. Instead I tried on some ill fitting pants and pulled the waistband halfway to my armpits to see how it looked. Sadly, it’s not a fashion statement I’m quite prepared to embrace. I am at the stage though where I feel my New Balance sneakers (official old guy shoes) can go with everything.

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We lost 3-4 at No Longer Cheap League last night. Conditions were unbelievably bad, due to a freshly laid odd oil pattern and very rainy weather. The approaches were super sticky and the lanes were dead most of the way down and then the back end just ahead of the pins was hyper reactive. To get anything to happen with my (freshly cleaned) ball, I had to stand 4 to 6 boards left of my usual spot and target my throw 1 -2 boards right of my usual. And still the ball would rip too far to the left most of the time. It was like open bowling on a Sunday afternoon when the lanes are totally burned up. It was a good night to use your spare ball or your least reactive strike ball. Sadly, I only had DV8 with me, and that one is a hook monster. So I did what I could to spaz throw it as flat as I could. And that mostly worked; my first game was only a couple under average but my next too were in the 190s, so I pulled a 550 series for the night.

One of the other really challenging parts of bowling is learning how to quickly adapt to nasty lane conditions. I’m not there yet, but at least I’m no consistent enough that I can spot them.

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Project Update: The happy rainbow after a dark night of despondent insanity and panic

The bathroom plumbing passed the leak and pressure test, so that’s all good. The wiring is nearly all in, as far as it can go before inspection, although we do have to put in a couple circuits and they need AFI/GFCI ($$) breakers, as bathrooms and laundry rooms are damp environments. So a 20 amp 120v one for the washer circuit, a 30 amp 240v one for the dryer circuit, the whole bathroom becomes a 20 amp 120v circuit, and probably a 20 amp 240v one for the electric baseboard heater, which is only a foot away from the side of the bathtub but not in a water spray direction. Still, that GFCI will make the code guy more complacent, even though there is no actual code for electric heater distance from a water source. It’s just Best Practices. OTOH, the only other location is behind the door up against the wall, and that’s a fire hazard. We have the slightly charred door to prove that.

But the really good news is that I have figured out the IRC 2015/2019/2021 codes and how to meet/beat them. And we got permission from the condo board here to put the duct vent caps on the opposite outer wall of our unit. This has been driving me crazy, giving me an ulcer, destroying my sleep, and giving me panic attacks. I am not exaggerating. This entire project is predicated on getting the washer/dryer upstairs, and that is contingent in getting the dryer duct properly laid out. And there are a bunch of rules and regulations for that, which it didn’t seem possible to understand. But now I do, and we will win this game.

Dryer vent ducts are limited to 35 feet effective length, with every duct elbow counting as 5 feet. We were always going to have a longer run than that, so I bought a booster fan. Then it gets worse. This place was built with the dryer vent cap only 18” above our front door. Big no-no; it has to be at least 3 feet, and that rule has been around forever. Many decades. ( I swear, the only way this condo park passed inspection when built was through bribery ) And any new work you do, even if it hooks up to old work, has to meet current code. So I had to get “emergency permission” from the condo board to put in a vent cap in a legal location. And I got that, and one for the bathroom ceiling fan too.

But the effective run was still quite long, and code says residential units cannot use booster fans. Nightmare time, especially since the wickedly expensive one I bought a while back is past the return-by date. (I bought it early to avoid inflation; the price has gone up $100 since then) But there are several caveats in the IRC code, if you read chapter after chapter and connect all the dots. No, booster fans are not allowed. But power ventilators are. What’s a power ventilator? It’s a booster fan. But a well made one, with all the modern bells and whistles ($$$). IRC code specifies that these must be UL code, UL 705 DEDPV specifically. DEDPV is an acronym that means Dryer Exhaust Duct Power Ventilator. What it really means though, is that this new kind of booster fan a) be of a no lint clogging design, b) not be made of plastic, c) have a motor that plugs in, not hard-wired, d) have a temperature sensor that shuts the thing off if it gets too hot, e) turn on and off based on an air pressure activated switch, f) have a cool down circuit that runs the unit for a few minutes after the dryer stops, g) has a remote LED status panel you mount near the dryer that shows you on/off/fire/clog conditions, with it’s own label that says the unit is UL 705 DEDPV compliant, and h) you have to stick up a permanent sign that states how long the duct run is, how long the effective duct run is, and that there is a UL 705 DEDPV unit X feet downstream.

And it turns out that the Tjernlund LB2 booster I purchased meets all of those criteria. Sadly, the stubborn Scandis up there in Minnesota who make the thing still call it a booster fan, and only mention that it meets IRC2018. This is a bit confusing to a clueless homeowner like me. Call it whatever you want, but change your webpage so that it says “This is a DEDPV machine, meets IRC 2015, 2018, 2021” or something like that.

So, given that, the 3rd caveat in the code says that I can if I used one of these DECPV units, installed according to the manufacturer’s instructions, I can run the ducts as long as the booster fan spec says. Which is 160 effective feet for this model. I only need 43. So I’m golden.  And of course, the dryer duct will be galvanized steel, assembled without screws, held together with both fire code compliant duct mastic and top of the line fire code compliant ducting tape, fully insulated with fire code approved sheathing, and supported far more frequently than the minimum once every 12 feet. That’s a lot of hurdles to clear, so you can see why it’s been giving me fits. OTOH, a better contractor might have been more conversant in the building and residential codes and just explained things to me.

Compared to this, meeting code for the duct run for the bathroom ceiling fan is easy. Turns out there’s a table, the ever popular M1504.2. Which says that, at the “high” 110CFM setting our dinky little ceiling fan can run, my 4” duct allowable maximum length is a bit under 10 feet. Dude, it takes 10 feet just to get past the bathroom and the laundry room. BUT, and it’s a really big but, if I use a larger diameter pipe I can run a longer duct. I could do the job with 5” duct. But 5” vent caps are impossible to find. 6” ones are becoming ubiquitous. And 6” duct will fit between our ceiling joists, and only cost a few cents more than 5” ducts. And with a 6” duct there is NO LIMIT on how long the duct can be. Yeah, because there will never be any pressure in the duct. Fully insulated and connected the same way as the dryer duct of course. So I’ll get an4"-6" adapter cone, 10 or 15 feet of 6” rigid duct, run that across the joists and into the attic, and then switch over to insulated flex duct (table allows me 91 feet of that) and run that over to the wall cap. Which of course has to be screwed and adhesive silicon caulked to the outer wall, and then have official fire block foam where it’s pipe comes inside.

The laundry room fan, which counts as “whole house ventilation”, can vent to the attic just 2 feet away, but we’ll run an insulation 4” flex duct up to one of the attic roof vents and fashion a plate under it to mount the upper end of the flex duct. That one is easy.

So it’s time to go shopping again, and spend a few hundred bucks more.

See, meeting code is easy. [ Drew you sarcastic bastard ] All you have to do is go crazy, then study the heck out of all the code books, then throw another ton of money at the problem. Ta freakin Da.

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November 10, 2022

Bad day today. Running up against conflicting building codes, chapping my ass. May have a solution. Might not. Have to wait on the condo board, meeting Monday night.

We won 5-2 Wednesday in Old Guys league, against the 2nd place team and with 2 no-shows on my team.

Rib roast is cooling. I want to sleep. Please God send me a solution to the vent duct problem.

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November 09, 2022

i don’t want to talk about the election defection inflection. WTF happened? Who knows? But let’s face it, half the country hates this country, are communists but don’t even know it, wants the freebies and no responsibility, and can’t do basic math, or write cursive, and never reads a book. Zombies, sheep, morons. Your choice.

cheating? Oh please. How many DECADES has this country - all parties, all levels of government - had to develop, test, and implement a more foolproof system? It never happens. In other countries, you get a purple finger when you vote. In other countries, you get shot for voting illegally. In other countries voting is seen as your civic duty (if not required by law) and you go and do it. They don’t have mail-in ballots, early voting, same day registration, voter IDs (which nobody considers racist) or any of that “it’s soooo hard to vote” BS. Heck, Brazil counted up all their ballots in one day. And 90% of those votes are on paper.

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November 08, 2022



It’s Election Day !!

We got over to town hall first thing this morning and voted, so we’d have that out of the way before the contractor gets here. The place wasn’t crowded, but there were several early birds in there casting their ballots before work.

And then we found out that we have new voting machines. I never had a problem with the old machines, which had touch screens and allowed you to vote quickly. But they didn’t print out a receipt or a paper copy. And the new ones do.

I just learned that our old machines were from Dominion. That’s all the reason I need to approve their replacement.

The ES&S ExpressVote XL. They bought the whole system, not just the voting machines. No more paper voter roll log books; there’s an electronic sign in system. You get issued a notched strip of paper, rather like the old-time punch cards (Hollerith cards), but larger and without holes. That card gets fed into the slot on the side of the voting machine, and just like depositing checks at your ATM, it gets pulled right in. And you can see it through the clear window. So now you vote. Touch the buttons, choose your candidates and your position on any bond issues etc. Look it over, press the Cast Vote button. And it asks you if you’re sure, and reminds you that once you say YES you don’t get to change your mind. So you press Yes, it tabulates the vote, and prints it all out on the paper card too. There may have been a “Is the paper the same as your vote? Y/N” choice, I don’t remember. But there’s your choices, printed right on the card, along with a quick-scan barcode. Tap the ACCEPT button and the card goes in the hopper and you’re done. As I was voter 43 this morning, it’s my hope that the cards get shuffled before they are processed.

So it’s electronic tabulation, and there’s a scanable paper backup which can also be read by hand. So it’s triple redundant. And the machine is only plugged in; it’s not online to anything. So it seems pretty good to me.

Heaven knows how much these things cost. Plenty, I’m sure.

[ sorry, snipping off old posts sometimes me to sses up the html. trying to stay on top of it ]

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November 06, 2022

Fly with precision. Crash with precision. Die with precision.

Precision Air flight crashes in Tanzania. Exactly half the passengers are dead.

5H-PWE is sister ship to 5H-PWF, the one that crashed. To get sequential call signs, they were both purchased and delivered at precisely the same time 12 years ago.

Precision Air flight PW 494 crashed landed into Lake Victoria on November 6th. The flight was approaching Bukoba Airport, situated on the shores of one of Africa’s biggest lakes when bad weather and subsequent problems ensued. Rescue efforts by local fishermen and the police are underway to evacuate everyone onboard.

On its Twitter account, Precision Air confirmed the news of the crash but said that further details would only be given approximately two hours later as rescue efforts continued. Photos from the accident scene showed the aircraft nearly entirely submerged in the lake, with only its tail partially visible.

Photos of the crash scene show just the tail and the very top of the fuselage above the water. So it was precisely just deep enough to drown everyone.

[ from an earlier report ] A plane carrying 43 people has plunged into Lake Victoria in Tanzania during bad weather shortly before it was due to land in the north-west city of Bukoba, police have said, as rescuers search for survivors.

Three people were known to have died in the crash, the state-owned Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation wrote on Twitter.

“There was an accident involving a Precision Air plane which … crashed into water 100 metres from the airport,” the regional police commander William Mwampaghale told reporters at Bukoba airport.

The regional commissioner, Albert Chalamila, said 43 people – 39 passengers, two pilots and two cabin crew – were onboard flight PW 494 from the financial capital, Dar es Salaam, to the lakeside city in the Kagera region.

The little turborop airliner bellied into the very shallow water precisely 100 meters from shore. The “scuff zone” of the Bukoba Airport runway begins 145 feet from the shoreline, and the runway proper begins 265 feet from there.

Flight 494 took off from Dar es Salaam to Bukoba via Mwanza. The aircraft crash landed in Lake Victoria while attempting to land at Bukoba. Photos and videos circulating on social media showed the plane almost fully submerged, with only its tail visible above the water line. Of the 43 people on board, 19 were reportedly killed.

The aircrew survived. Precisely half the passengers didn’t.

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November 05, 2022

Arguing over what finish to use on the pine pocket door. Whatever kind of pine this door is made of does not take stain hardly at all. The pecan stain came out almost like clear. So we tried a stain/poly in the same pecan. It also did just about nothing. So we got a much darker poly one, Antique Walnut. And that isn’t doing much. And the Mission Oak one was so dark brown we rejected it after just a little test swipe on the back of some other old pine door. This sucks. But we’ve got one side of the door coated with the Antique Walnut poly, and it is sort of in the realm we want. So let it dry for the day, and tomorrow maybe we can try the Gunstock stain on the other side. Of course, that one she rejected as being too red after a small test area on that same other old door. But the other side of the new door is still raw wood. And naturally, if the Gunstock gives us the tone we want, it will require a couple coats of plain polyurethane over it. Good news is that we can put the side of the door we don’t like on the inside of the closet/laundry room.

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We won 5-2 last night at No Longer Cheap League, even though we had to give up 155 points in handicap, as the other team are raw beginners. So we and a couple guys from the team on the next lanes over spent quite a bit of time trying to coach one of their players, who has trouble getting the ball to the other end of the lane and even hitting the pins. Told her about swinging the ball, how to hold her hand, how to walk - bowling is a very short dance of 4 or 5 steps and you have to coordinate your arms and your feet - but none of it did any good, mostly because she didn’t actually do a single one of the things we asked her to.

So thus endeth the lesson IMO: don’t waste your time if people won’t listen. I saw the same thing with a newbie woman over the summer. “Tell me what to do, I don’t know anything!” and then not try even once a single part of it. Same thing with the woman who used to bowl with us. Stubborn or stupid, I really don’t care.

I mean, it was “complicated” stuff: swing your arm along your side, let go of the ball at the end of the swing.
The first move is called the push away. Start that with your first step. Elbow here, hand here, other hand underneath. Push out until your elbow is fully extended, let gravity pull the ball in a pendulum motion as you walk forward. Showed it to her in slow motion several times. Nope, she kept right on carrying the ball to the foul line, practically dropping it, then yanking her arm forward and across her body while looking at the pins instead of reaching for a target point. And the ball goes left, into the gutter, just about every time.

We had a nice time, and hope these folks stick it out and improve enough to come back next season. And they’ll just have to figure things out themselves.

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November 04, 2022

Sorry blog, but it’s been another super busy week.

Project is getting complicated. Contractor ran into a couple of “minor” problems, like there being no floor beneath the closet wall he took out to put in a pocket door. I tried to stain the new door but the stain either was old and didn’t take, or it had no dissolvable solids, so it didn’t take. Have to go over it with mineral spirits, then I’ll apply that combination stain/polyurethane stuff, which is actually a varnish with coloring. It doesn’t soak into the wood, it goes on like paint. Some good news there; we have approval to put the ceiling fan vent through the sidewall, but we have to buy the vent cap. And ... drumroll ... we have a functional shower.      Ok, it’s not tiled yet, but the backer board is in and it’s got 2 coats of membrane on it, so the contractor hung a plastic sheet around the alcove and we put up the old shower rod. Granted, it’s a bit primitive, but it beats the heck out of sponge baths in the kitchen late at night.

Had my annual physical, and I guess I reached that certain age ... a couple of not-so-great results on the tests, so I have to go to a couple specialists. Fun fun fun.

A miracle happened Wednesday. I cleaned my DV8 ball real good, took off loads of oil, and then bowled great on Cheap League. Not super great, but I was throwing properly for a change. Can’t get a good grip on a greasy ball. And we won all 7, even though we had to give 55 pins in handicap. This wasn’t enough to move us up in the standings, but it did raise our margin from the next team down the rankings.

Back to the project, because that’s all I live and breath these days, we have a solution for the dryer duct. Turns out that there’s a joist in the ceiling where I wanted to run the duct, and then the end vertical from one of the roof trusses once we opened the joist cap into the attic. So the duct has to move over a bit, which means it has to go on the other side of the radon pipe, which means a soffit will have to be built around it, which means there will be somewhat less storage space in the laundry room/closet when it’s done. Oh well.

And the American Standard Princeton bathtub is narrower inside than we realized. Oh sure, it has a nice “luxury edge” you can sit on comfortably and put various bottles and bath bits on, but it’s not very room in the actual tub part. So we might decide against the shower doors and just find one of those arced shower rods that give you more shoulder room. I’m kicking myself in the head a bit over this, but at the time it seemed like this tub was the right choice. Especially as a wider one is very hard to find made from steel or iron in a standard depth, and usually costs double or triple what we spent. And it’s “just a condo” after all.

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I’m Calling A False Flag Op On This One

“Dragophobe" Torches Tulsa Donut Shop With Molotov Cocktail

Those radical, violent, extremist, domestic terrorist everything-phobic Trumpsters are at it again!!

Perp was covered head to foot for his midnight arson, but he remembered to wear his MAGA hat. Wasn’t that just genius of him?

Around 2:30 a.m. Monday, Sarah Swain and Brian Hunter were jolted awake by a phone call from the fire department. The doughnut shop the couple owns in Tulsa had been targeted — again — just two weeks after they’d hosted an art exhibit featuring drag queens.

Early that morning, a person in a dark hoodie, red cap and gloves was captured by a security camera quickly walking toward the Donut Hole with a baseball bat and a note in one hand and a bottle in the other. The assailant, who still hasn’t been apprehended by police, posted the note on the neighboring business’s door and then stood before the Barbie-pink facade of the doughnut shop. They took three thundering swings at the glass door until it shattered, then lit the bottle on fire and threw it inside.

The damage from the molotov cocktail was minimal, the owners told The Washington Post.

Election day is just 4 days away ... I question the timing on this one. Hell, no question about it. False flag.


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Feral Chickens Taking Over Hawaii !!!

There’s a barnyard invasion coming into Honolulu’s urban core, as Hawaii’s colorful jungle fowl increase their unprecedented migration into downtown areas. Long a staple of country life on the island’s rural fringes, feral chickens are moving uptown. ...

An increase in numbers is causing some city residents to consider the intruders as a kind of conquering army. Honolulu has a small pilot program that is aimed at trying to reduce the number of feral chickens, but a state initiative to take stronger action failed in the last legislative session, and some people, exasperated by the scope of the problem, are calling for more militant action.

Solutions involving nets, pellet guns, birth control and drug-laden bread crumbs are all being considered.

Birth control. For chickens. Well, roosters. I have a better solution ...

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November 01, 2022

And another month flies by.

Actually October lasted about a year for me, housebound all day long while our contractor tears our place apart.

Been double extra busy here the past 4 days. We had an Oktoberfest party here in the Village, so I made a few dozen of my Bavarian soft pretzels; altough I ran out of spelt partway through, my 50lb sack of Sir Lancelot got delivered, so I had the right heavy duty flour to use. And now I’ve got 47 pounds of it in airtight food storage buckets. So I’ve got flour for a year, if things go belly up and the fearmongered food shortages hit.  I found a German meat market no too far away, but I ran out of time so I made Johnsonville Bratts instead. I’d tried these before, and found them pretty tasteless. So this time they got simmered in onions, beef broth, and beer for an hour, then browned up on the grill. And they were great. Sadly, people are finicky, so I brought home more than half of the ones I brought. Good. Fine. More for me, and into the freezer they went.  But we had a good time, and it was nice to get out for an evening and to get away from the project for a night.

Ah, the project. Today’s setback was found yesterday, when he opened the closet wall where the pocket door is going to go. Turns out there was no floor under the wall, just a gap in the concrete. The left 3’ of that wall was resting on 3/4” of the edge of the concrete, and just 1 2x4 on end in the middle of the 31” deep hole. At least this hole is inside our unit, not a hole to the outside like we discovered last week and had to seal. So making a base that filled the hole ate up half of today; maybe, please, he’ll get around to painting some of the liquid waterproofing membrane on the bathtub alcove walls. That’s the first step towards finishing things there. 2 coats, let it dry, then it’s time to do tiles.

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CDC Boss Rochelle Walensky Has The Covid. AGAIN.

2 jabs, 2 boosters, a shot of the new updated bivalent booster, and a couple weeks later she gets the But Covid. So they dose her up with Paxlovid, a nearly worthless treatment. A few days later, she tests negative. Then a week after that she gets Covid again.

Yeah, trust the jabs. Trust the boosters. Trust the CDC. Trust the Science.

So now Biden, Fauci, and Walensky have all had all their jabs and boosters, all got the covid, all got the approved treatment, then all got the covid again. Talk about restoring your faith in government and medicine.

Crivens.

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Not The Headlines!


DeSantis trying to end vote gathering in Florida black communities. Because if you don’t vote in person, drop your ballot off in person, or mail it in, who knows what can happen with it? Hmmm .... I wonder if the implication here is that disenfranchisement could be coming from within the black community? The people being played, and their votes messed with by a political cabal of people who “know better than they” but look just like them?

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TLDR version: Let Alex Jones tell you the same stuff in his excitable way. The Thought Police are large and in charge. No kidding.

Elon Musk Finds Twitter Colluding With Federal Government To Control “Disinformation”. Which is essentially thought control. First Amendment? Who wants that old thing??


Similar: It’s all down to controlling the cognitive values, which means making you think and believe what they tell you to. Like how everything is pedophilia and LGBQT+ these days. And you love it. (or else)

Mostly similar: Shades of Ben Tre*: Western Values: Destroy the culture to save the culture

*  Peter Arnett, reporting from Vietnam during the war, on the action at Ben Tre.

Bottom Line: This is Fascism, pure and simple. Mussolini quote “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

When the government is using Big Corporate as it’s plausibly deniable agent, that agent can and does operate outside the bounds of the law, knowing that they are fully protected. So they gain great power and influence, and the government’s reach is extended many fold. And they line each other’s pockets with gold, while you go without.

So when the DHS shifts from hunting terrorists to being the Gods of RightThink, and the FBI shifts from hunting criminals to criminalizing regular citizens who don’t hold the leftist views, and both of them can control the content of Social Media, and from there, MSM, then you have far more of a fascist state then you ever realized. And this is what is out there right now. And that reach extends all the way into nearly everything. Politics, thought control, capture of the media, the military leadership, the entire educational system, the entire medical system, the financial system, on and on. It’s far worse than you could ever imagine.

#headsonspikes

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October 28, 2022

Love it

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October 27, 2022

Everything is a cascade. I gave in the other day and ordered a 50lb sack of Sir Lancelot high gluten flour. It’s simply the best flour out there for making hearty breads. And Bavarian pretzels and bagels. OK, need a place to store it. So I bought 3 food grade 5 gallon buckets and 3 airtight screw on lids. And of course they need to be cleaned before use. Which means the other stuff in the kitchen sink needs to be washed and go into the dishwasher. Which means the clean stuff in there needs to be put away.

And we should get the garbage, recycling, and a half dozen huge cardboard boxes out to the garbage corral. And then I need to sanitize the countertops, rinse and dry them, and make more room in the fridge for my dough buckets. I’m going to make 3 batches of pretzels for the Oktoberfest event our village is having this weekend. And Saturday morning is road trip time, as there is a great German deli up in Warren County, about a 45 minute drive from here. So I can get a few pounds of proper meat salad, 3 dozen good sausages, and 4lb of sauerkraut. Plus try some of their landjäeger sausages, which we both love. Landjäeger is what a Slim Jim pretends to be, a spicy dry sausage that keeps for months that you can put it your pocket. Hunter’s sausage, also once used as military rations.

No big. Get all that out of the way and I can get down to making a mess with the mixer. Will have to go get some more spelt, or just do without it. I have enough for one batch.

Right. Let’s get moving.

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Bowling Blogging!!

We took 5 last night. I rolled Ok. We would have won the 3rd game too, but Captain Gutterball threw an anemic and horrible 106, more than 30 under his already low average. And we lost that game by 40 pins, but still managed to take wood.

The lanes were difficult again. Worse, the approach was a mess. Leagues aren’t getting much preference these days, as the alley uses the lanes to within half an hour of the league starting, and then runs out and oils just the ones we’ll use. So there were a whole bunch of kids rolling before we started, and they made a mess, which didn’t get cleaned up. Oh well. With recession looming, I completely understand any business trying to make as much now as they can, because it might all go belly up in a few months. Which is the other reason I bought all that flour.

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October 26, 2022

Not so clean after all.

Recall On Pine-Sol: Bottles Contaminated With Dangerous Bacteria

Oops.

On Tuesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced that the Clorox Company has recalled certain Pine-Sol cleaning products in connection to a bacteria exposure risk.

Safety regulators said consumers should “immediately stop” using certain Pine-Sol cleaning products, due to the possibility of them containing bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause sickness and disease in humans and animals. They advise consumers to take pictures of the barcodes, UPCs and date codes before they discard them.

Exposure to the bacteria for people who have weakened immune systems or use external medical devices carries a “risk of serious infection that may require medical treatment,” according to the CPSC.

Consumers should immediately stop using Pine-Sol Scented Multi-Surface Cleaners in Lavender Clean, Sparkling Wave, and Lemon Fresh scents, CloroxPro Pine-Sol All Purpose Cleaners, in Lavender Clean, Sparkling Wave, Lemon Fresh, and Orange Energy scents, and Clorox Professional Pine-Sol Lemon Fresh Cleaners that have date codes printed on the bottle beginning with “A4” and followed by a five-digit number less than 22249, which represents products produced prior to September 2022,” the organization said.

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October 24, 2022

In a shocking development, Klaus Schwab and the globalist WEF cabal have selected a Goldman Sachs banker as the next UK Prime Minister. Shockingly, he is strongly in favor of Central Bank Digital Currencies. They aren’t hiding anything anymore. It’s out in the open and they are daring you to stop them.

As we predicted yesterday following Boris Johnson’s decision to quit the race to regain the British Prime Minister title after his thunderous fall from grace just… three months ago, it was a foregone conclusion that former Goldman banker Rishi Sunak would become the next UK prime minister. Moments ago that’s precisely what happened when his last remaining rival, Penny Mordaunt, pulled out of the race for 10 Downing Street.

“We all owe it to the country, to each other and to Rishi to unite and work together for the good of the nation,” Mordaunt said in a statement on Twitter. The ruling Conservative Party confirmed Sunak, who is due to address rank-and-file MPs at 2:30 p.m., has been elected leader.

As Bloomberg notes, it has been a remarkable turnaround in Sunak’s political fortunes, after the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and former Goldman banker quit Boris Johnson’s government in July and then lost out to Liz Truss in the last Tory leadership contest over the summer. But his repeated warnings that her plans would trigger economic chaos proved correct and put him in pole position when Truss’s premiership imploded.

Even so, Sunak - who many have speculated is “willing to sell off the UK to his banker friends” - was no shoo-in given the bitterness and division in the Conservative Party. He’s still tarnished in the eyes of many Tory MPs for his role in Johnson’s downfall, and the former prime minister’s flirtation over the weekend with what would have been an outrageous comeback just months after being ousted briefly threatened to derail Sunak’s hopes.

Yet in the the end, he won after Boris Johnson withdrew without ever showing he had the support of 100 Tory MPs needed to formally contest the leadership. Likewise, Mordaunt pulled out on Monday shortly before influential Tory MP Graham Brady was due to announce which candidates had surpassed that threshold.

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October 22, 2022

Life here in the jungle

Mr. Fox takes care of any leftover kibble finicky outdoor kitty won’t eat.

“There’s a wolf at our door!!”

“Yeah, but only a tiny one.”

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October 21, 2022

Will posts actually work today? That would be nice.

Woo hoo !!

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Project Update

Progress slow, but problems solved. And these walls can talk and tell stories

We moved the delivery date up for the new washer and dryer we purchased earlier, as the old washer was leaking gallons every time we ran it. So the new ones came, the delivery guys took the old ones away. A couple days earlier I had our contractor unfreeze the old valves, but we didn’t notice how corroded one of the old water hoses was. We didn’t notice that it had a steady drip either when it was turned on. Could not get one of the old hoses off to put the new ones in for the new washer in the old location. But after running 4 loads of laundry last night, trying several of the new machine’s cycles, I noticed that drip. And it was enough to saturate a dishtowel in 15 minutes. So I had my guy try to fix it today. He had to use a Sawzall to cut the old hose off, and then found that the old valves needed to be rebuilt at least. But the new ball valves from the Oatey valve box were the right size to screw right in to the old valve’s base nut, so problem solved. But it’s never one thing. That drip - which has been going on for months actually - had saturated the wallboard and was leaking under the old (made from cardboard, wood pulp, and a plastic veneer) flooring. So that had to come up, and a good chunk of the wallboard cut out. That area is going to converted to a coat closet and this wall is coming down anyway, but let’s get the wet stuff out now so it doesn’t get too moldy.

Creative plumbing! A peek inside the wall in the old laundry alcove. Pipes come up out of the slab, branch off, and go right back down again. Water hammer arrestors run up the side of the old Oatey valve box, new valves installed. 2” ABS Ptrap and drain line with 1.5” ABS vent and clean-out port just barely mostly inside studs. All of this inside a 2x4 stud wall. Which means the dryer flue is a bit squished too. The new valves are the ones I tried to take back to HD but forgot my receipt (fortuitous!); the ones we’ll use upstairs have the water hammer thingies built right in, and are made for PEX pipe. Bathtub plumbing has them too. So we should be immune to water hammers. Which is a good thing.

Ok, the bathtub plumbing doesn’t leak, nor does the tub drain or the Ptrap assembly. Tub is bedded in thinset, level and plumb, screwed to the wall, silicon caulked to the ledger board. Tub full of water will stay in there a day or so until the beddding thinset is cured.

And I think I’ll take a nap. Put the kitchen back together later, after she gets home with some mold spray I’ll put on the wet stud and on the kitchen floor now that I’ve ripped up half the (damp saturated) flooring. Cats will just have to eat somewhere else for a while.

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Seems right to me!

Hey protesters - don’t mess with the Germans!!

Climate Protesters Deface VW Corporate In Germany, Glue Themselves To Floor

Germans turned off the heat and lights and left them there.

Protesters cry they weren’t given food, water, or a bedpan.

Climate protesters who glued their hands to the floor of a Volkswagen exhibit in Wolfsburg, Germany, were upset that the car company refused to provide them with bowls to defecate and urinate into during their protest.

Protesters with “Scientist Rebellion” began the protest on Wednesday, but they didn’t plan for what would happen once they needed to use the bathroom.

“[Volkswagen] told us that they supported our right to protest, but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating. People in support can’t get out of the building,” tweeted one of the protesters identified as Gianluca Grimalda.

He went on to clarify that they were allowed to leave but would not be allowed to return if they did.

Seems the Jerrys have their response act together better than the Tommys. Same group here as the one that threw soup on the Van Gogh in London.

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October 17, 2022

Putin’s House of Cards nearing collapse?

Russia may be about to lose Kherson, Melitopol, and perhaps the entire “Republic of Crimea”. Which means all of Ukraine seized in the past decade could be lost.

Dig into the real news; Putin’s adventure in Ukraine is falling apart. He has no troops; tens of thousands of Russian youth are fleeing the country to avoid conscription. He has no vehicles, and not that many aircraft left. His Black Sea fleet has taken some major hits and is pretty much in hiding on the other side of the lake. No spare parts, no maintenance, not enough ammo or weapons, unwilling troops forced to fight untrained with WWII leftovers, so much so that they can’t be trusted with live ammo even in boot camp.

Look at the real time map, see for yourself.

Ukraine holds the north side of the Dnipro River. It also holds the bridges at Antonivka and Nova Kakhovka, which means it has shut down all highway access into Kherson. And their troops are just 12 miles away from the mouth of the Dnipro, so they could shut off Kherson’s access to the Black Sea with ease.

But why go for the low hanging fruit? Partisan fighting shows they have reasonable control over a large part of the area all around Melitopol to the east, and that area abuts the bay on the south. It’s just a 25 mile push south along rt E105 to the Melitopol controlled area, and cut off the entire peninsula. A little naval operation to take the bridge at Kerch in the east end of Crimea, and that “independent people’s republic” will have no choice but to surrender, and Ukraine gets it’s territory back that Russia took 8 years ago.

And then it’s over, and Russia has almost no coastline on the Black Sea.

Will help come from Belarus? Don’t count on it, no matter how much noise Lukashenko makes. I think it was Chapter 0 of Sun Tzu’s famous Art of War that states “you can’t have a war without mud”. And the cold rainy season is coming real soon.

Meanwhile in Yesk (Yesyk or Eysk), just 70km across the narrow Sea of Azov from Ukrainian controlled Mariupol, their planes don’t fly so good either. Pilot ejected safely, but his pointy flying gas tank pretty much destroyed the apartment building it hit. Or check here. Not the best idea to build high density housing right at the end of a military runway.

Just playing a bit of What If, but if Ukraine takes back Crimea, then they’ll seriously start thinking about an alliance with troublesome Georgia. It’s only 225 miles from Kerch to Georgia, which could be tempting. And that’s the last bit of Russia on the entire Black Sea.

OTOH, if UKR controls the straits at Kerch, then they have the entire Sea of Azov, which stops any Russian ship from getting to the Black Sea that way.

Putin has built a house of cards, and the wind is rising. When - not if - his Ukraine adventure implodes, the fearsome Russian Bear while have no teeth and no claws left, other than nukes.

So Poland could start looking at Konigsberg, that little bit of Poland the Soviet Union kept after WWII, which was East Prussia when the Germans stole it at an earlier point. But it’s still Poland at heart. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, are the Kuerile Islands, contested by Japan since the end of WWII when the Soviets stole them, after being at war with a nearly defeated Japan for about 3 weeks.

I’m sure Finland wouldn’t mind getting back the other half of the Kola Peninsula either.

So from West to East, north to south, all the border countries could nibble away at the carcass of the bear. Because one card doesn’t fall from a house of cards. They all fall.

And Russia could become a seasonally landlocked landmass. No way to get ships in or out other than the high Arctic. Gee, toughski shitskietski right there. Maybe you shouldn’t have invaded.

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On the bright side, this one isn’t from China.

Boston University creates Covid strain with 80% fatality rate.

Entire world goes “WTF are you doing? Have you lost your @#$% mind???”

And of course, it’s super infectious, and at least as deadly as the original strain. It’s Omicron crossed with the original strain.

Boston University scientists were today condemned for ‘playing with fire’ after it emerged they had created a lethal new Covid strain in a laboratory.

DailyMail.com revealed the team had made a hybrid virus — combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain — that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study.

The revelation exposes how dangerous virus manipulation research continues to go on even in the US, despite fears similar practices may have started the pandemic.

Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: ‘This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire.’

Gain of function research - when viruses are purposefully manipulated to be more infectious or deadly - is thought to be at the center of Covid’s origin.

This is bio warfare, period. And that’s supposedly illegal. Yeah right.

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You Won’t Get The Crabs This Year

No, not that kind. The Alaskan crab season has been canceled. Apparently overfishing and climate change have created very low harvest levels in the past couple years, so the Alaska Fisheries folks have said no to this season. Don’t ask me how the crab fishermen are going to get by.

Alaska officials have canceled several crab harvests in a conservation effort that sent shock waves through the crabbing industry in the region. 

Officials canceled the fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest and, for the first time on record, are also holding off on the winter harvest of snow crab, according to multiple reports. 

The decision comes after stark recent population declines of the animals. Data from an NOAA eastern Bering Sea survey shows a 92% decline in overall snow crab abundance from 2018 to 2021, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game confirmed to USA TODAY. An 83% decline occurred from 2018 to 2022, as some small crab entered the population in 2022, according to the department’s Division of Commercial Fisheries.

Last year’s snow crab harvest was 5.6 million pounds, the smallest in over 40 years. 

Snow crab populations dropped after a 2019 Bering Sea warming, and the causes of the population crash are likely stresses from the warmer water and increased threats from predators.

“Management of Bering Sea snow crab must now focus on conservation and rebuilding given the condition of the stock,” the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said in a Monday statement.

Bering Sea crab harvests as recently as 2016 grossed $280 million, according to the Seattle Times. A fleet of about 60 vessels from Alaska, Washington and Oregon typically pursue the crab, and each boat employs approximately six people. 

“It’s going to be life-changing, if not career-ending, for people,” Dean Gribble Sr., a crab boat captain who has fished for snow crab since the late 1970s, told NBC News. “A lot of these guys with families and kids, there’s no option other than getting out. That’s where the hammer is going to fall – on the crew.”

The fall red king crab harvest was canceled for the second year because of the low number of mature female crabs, which can indicate of the health of the broader population.

Fishermen say a decision to close fishing of two types of Alaska crabs will devastate families who rely on the industry.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced this week that fishing Bristol Bay red king crab would be closed for the second year in a row.

But the biggest blow is the closing of snow crab fishing for the first time ever.

“This decision just destroyed a fishing business of over 50 years and the crew that have a combined 10 years invested in it,” said Joshua Songstad from the F/V Handler, one of those directly affected in a news release from the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. “Our crew of six has a combined 16 children to feed. No fishing model accounts for that.”

ADFG officials said they were balancing the impact on the fishing industry with the need for sustainability of crab stocks.

“Management of Bering Sea snow crab must now focus on conservation and rebuilding given the condition of the stock,” the ADFG said in a news release. “Efforts to advance our science and understanding of crab population dynamics are underway.”

The decision will lead to bankruptcies and layoffs, industry experts said.

And if they can’t catch them, you can’t eat them. I haven’t looked to see if Red Lobster or other seafood restaurants have made any statements.

I also don’t know if these are EEZ protected waters; just because Americans can’t get the crabs there doesn’t mean that other nations can’t. I’m looking at you Putin.

https://www.itshortnews.com/us/alaskas-snow-crab-season-canceled-due-to-dwindling-population-more-latest-news/ (written by foreigners, really poor English)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/billions-of-snow-crabs-have-disappeared-from-alaska-waters/ar-AA133etA ( I didn’t know MSN was associated with Al Jazeera news. Are you really surprised?)

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GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Drew458     on 11/25/2022 at 10:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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