08:56 – The lead headline in the paper this morning says that 24% of Winston-Salem residents live in poverty. Says who? How can anyone define poverty to include people who have plenty to eat, including meat every day if they want it, heated living quarters, television and cable service, their own automobiles, money in their pockets, and even cell phones, all provided at taxpayer expense? Living in real poverty means you have none of those things, and by that definition more like 0% of Winston-Salem residents live in poverty.
Enough is never enough for these clients of the state and the politicians who covet their votes. Neither will be satisfied until tax-consumers enjoy a better standard of living than the taxpayers who support them.
Email from Jen. One of the men in her extended group had suggested that they do their second trial run over the Christmas holiday, a suggestion that was quickly vetoed by all of the women and most of the men. Instead, they’re going to do a four-day second trial run starting on Thursday, 12/31 and running through the holiday weekend. They figure that’ll give them enough time to digest the results from the Thanksgiving trial run and make any fixes necessary.
Here’s what I did to prep this week:
- We’re just about finished packing up the seed containers. We got germination on all the seed species, although in some cases we almost literally needed a microscope to see evidence of germination. All that remains is to bin them into sets and do the final packaging in foil-laminate Mylar bags. Well, that and I have to finish the planting guide, create and print the main package labels, and make up the PBS saline for the Rhizobia culture and bottle it. My original goal was to ship the kits in mid- to late November, and getting that done shouldn’t be any problem.
- I put in several hours on the prepping book. I think another thousand hours will do it to finish volume one.
- I read William Forstchen’s One Year After, the sequel to his earlier One Second After. I won’t link to either book, because the ebooks are priced outrageously. I wouldn’t have read either if readers hadn’t sent me copies. The second book is better-edited but no better-written than the first, which is to say it’s second-tier. And that’s grading on the not-too-demanding curve that I apply to PA novels. Rather bizarrely, the sequel opens exactly TWO Years After the first. Not only can’t Forstchen write, he apparently can’t count, either. I also started reading John Ross’s Unintended Consequences, a massive tome that’s larger even than Crawford’s Lights Out. Ross’s book is apparently out of print, although you can buy used paperback copies for $28 and up. The book appears so far to be a collection of snippets that relate in one way or another to America’s “gun culture”, presented as a spirited defense of the 2nd Amendment.
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.