09:27 – I see that David P. Goldman believes that Ted Cruz is our last, best hope. Wishful thinking, boy. I agree that I’d rather see Cruz as president than Trump and certainly than Clinton or Bern the Commie. But I don’t believe it would make much, if any, difference to how things unfold over the coming years. Things might be a bit better under a Cruz presidency, but all it would really mean is that our slide into dystopia would be a bit slower. Nothing can stop it now.
Barbara is going to cut my hair this morning, and then we’ll do more work around the house.
Barbara’s drink of choice has always been sweet iced tea, which she makes up in gallon pitchers. I’d always drunk mostly Coke, but I’ve cut way down on that. I used to go through maybe ten 2-liter bottles a week, and now I’m down to more like one a week. Instead, I’m drinking iced tea, so Barbara is now making at least twice as much as she used to. One of the things she picked up at Costco the other day was two boxes of tea bags, 624 total bags. That’s enough to last the two of us three to four months at our current consumption rate. It also cuts down on our cost for Coke by about $500/year. From Barbara’s point of view, the major advantage is that we won’t be adding to the hundreds of empty 2-liter bottles that I save for LTS food and water.
14:21 – What a relief! I can finally work normally again. I now have Linux Mint running on a new hard drive in my old Core i7-Extreme system, with all of my data migrated over and all the programs I use installed. The sticking point was these damned powerline Ethernet adapters, which I simply couldn’t get to work between the WiFi router and my little corner in the dining room that’s now my office. Just now, I installed the D-Link DWA-140 USB WiFi adapter, which Linux Mint recognized automagically. All I had to do was enter the password for the WiFi AP. Our Internet service is nominally 20 megabits/s down and 2 up. I just ran the HTML5 speed test from bandwidthplace.com, which tells me I’m getting a 21 ms ping with about 11 Mb/s down and 4 Mb/s up. Not bad, given how far I am from the AP.
We finished watching the final season of Justified the other night. Like the other seasons, it’s set mostly in Harlan County, Kentucky, which is only about 160 miles WNW of us in Sparta. As Barbara said, she’d be as careful back in the hollows around here as she’d be if we were living in Harlan. My attitude is that pretty much everyone around here minds their own business, so if we mind our own business we should be fine, but Barbara does have a point.