And it’s likely to be a hot one too, like the last week. We are seeing ~100F in the afternoon, and the humidity is crazy high too. If there’s no breeze, you’re dripping in no time.
I spent the afternoon and evening working on moving my storage unit to the shop. Only got one trip in, but I did get more shelves set up and I’ll be able to hit it hard today. It is crazy hot in the shop without the fan blowing air in. I’m going to have to do something about that if I hope to do any real work in there. Can’t be dripping sweat on everything.
I was dripping sweat on everything yesterday and I’ll probably be doing it again today. I did try to keep up with the water loss, and added gatoraid mix to my water bottles. I think it helped. I was still getting leg cramps last night though.
Considering I’m 60 years old, I think I’m still in pretty good shape, and my ability to handle heat is probably back to normal. Took a long time after my heat injury though. Better to avoid getting hurt.
Today is more moving, stacking, sorting, and restacking. At some point I need to be listing, selling, and shipping, but getting the stuff out of storage is a first step.
At least I’m making progress and building momentum on this.
Until I’m not.
Stack what you need.
nick
Monday. Good morning!
We had a little rain overnight, and it cooled off a bit. Still too hot for me, but no longer to the point that I can only lie in a dark room and hope it stops. I might get some productive work done today. I might even address a couple of my own projects.
Wishing you all a good week.
If that White male is over 40, virtually unemployable.
Paul, listen to the others. Unless you were a trained paramedic with a full ambulance’s loadout in your living room, there wasn’t much of anything that could have been done. And maybe not even then.
The numbers mentioned yesterday seem about right: if you have a major heart attack, odds are you’re going to die. And defibrillators are not magic “stop death” boxes. They do any good only with some kinds of heart failures, and only some of the time with them. Massive tear? Nope, no good at all.
My wife currently has a crash pad in San Antonio where she lives during the week to work at the VA clinic there because Muslim Colonists dominate the agency in Austin. Things are worse in Dallas and Houston from what she hears through unofficial channels.
Ironically, it is my continued employment and paycheck which may allow her to keep her job long enough to collect full pension with benefits.
Like most of my generation of white males who are still working in tech, I’m on mop duty. The future of the workforce is Colonists managed by a female personality type from a Fancy Lad school who is best described as “president of the Mathletes”.
I passed on training a poster child for that personality type last year due to the blatant age discrimination involved, but a “white adjacent” male (read Chinese) with a MechE degree saw it in his best interest to take on the task.
“White adjacent” is in serious trouble too.
Slighly cooler here today. No rain, and it is desperately needed. All the fields are brown. Weirdly, although irrigation water is available, only a couple of fields have been watered – our local farmers are not very competent. Having failed to irrigate, they have nothing to cut for hay or silage. So they will have to buy in winter feed. And then complain that farming is such a tough business…
Reminds me of one of my uncles. His best farming years came when he got his land into a federal program that paid him to leave it fallow.
Got about a square meter of wall done. Answering a comment from a couple of days ago: yes, it is a dry stone wall. No, it won’t fall over. I’ve built a lot of walls by now: they lean into the slope about 10 degrees. That not only eliminates any danger of them falling over, it also is necessary for them to resist the pressure from the soil over the years.
What I’m not doing, is making an artwork. I have built walls with very small gaps between the stones. That means endless work with hammer and chisel to make them fit perfectly together. Looks really nice when it’s done, but it takes many times as long. The walls I’ve built here (at our “new” house) are a lot more rustic. Very little hammer-and-chisel, mostly just looking for the right rocks and stacking them up.
Older son is a white male around 30. Trying to change career directions and having very little luck.
It’s a shame. He is really good with kids, and loves working with them. But the salaries totally suck, and he’s tired of being “working poor”.
Plus, I’m the poster child for B*tchy Doctor’s Wife these days
I had to be in full-on B*tchy mode this weekend at a gathering of my wife’s Austin VA co-workers.
When one lifer VA nurse badgered me about when we were going to sell our house and commit to San Antonio, I looked at her and literally said, “I’m the ultimate B*tchy Doctor’s Wife, and I don’t give up my house or my job without seeing a lot better out of the management in the new place.”
Nurses. The group at the VA are unionized and have their own agenda/view of the agency.
At least we’re not being hunted down and killed–yet.
16:00, so I am having lunch. I found trofie, so I decimated W1’s basil plant, added oil, pine nuts, garlic and Parmesan.
Pasta with fresh green pesto. Sublime, and I really needed something properly salty after the perspiration of the last few days.
I have sweat eczema on my neck, it’s like a bad sunburn. Don’t like.
Lunch is good, though.
Yep – kinda like the SEI union pushing California billionaire tax.
IIRC, SEI represents the VA nurses.
HFS!
I woke up to 71ºF in Vegas.
Hell Hath Frozen Over.
Something like 120K In Calif and some other western states.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-JKa_3K9O8&t=766s
And the guys running the unions are millionaires with a world view that others must be held back to their level. Hence the support.
———–
99.5F in the sun, 96F in the shade. And there is a lot of sun.
I have parts of me that are very sore today. Ordinary movement causes spikes, pinches, and pain. I was hoping to avoid that but the measures I took didn’t work fully. Low back is good, so at least that worked.
Still gonna have to get back at it as soon as the shadows are fortuitous.
n
@greg, is this the female type? (with the testosterone treatments, gym, etc?)
https://i.dailymail.com/1s/2026/06/26/23/109633329-15933713-But_beyond_the_chart_success_and_celebrity_circle_Abrams_also_co-a-36_1782514399629.jpg
The one on the left has a look I see often, although she’s more of a poster child for it.
n
Is “German broadcaster RTL reported that investigators do not believe it was connected to ‘clan-based organised crime’.” what the germans always reflexively say, like US saying “it’s not terrorism”? ‘cuz it seems REALLY specific to me, like that phrase should call to mind exactly what sort of people they are referring to.
n
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15938263/Several-dead-mass-shooting-Germany-Police-order-people-stay-away-area.html
Speaking of old white men.
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15938885/Ford-rehires-veteran-engineers-AI-failed.html
What is surprising about the article is that Ford admitted they were wrong and reversed course. That almost never happens. It must have been REALLY bad.
I can only hope the “‘significant talent refresh’, including bringing back veteran engineers.” means cutting out low talent subcontinent, DIE, and union deadwood too.
Ignore the guys who actually do the work at your peril.
n
Friday: Pick up a 50 foot boom lift at Home Depot. String 5000 feet of cable, set up 8 antennas, a generator, 12 transmitters with power supplies, 10 computers with monitors, mice, keyboards. Two trailers and a few truckloads of gear.
Saturday: Test and fix all the setups, find missing parts, get it all working. Required reloading Windows on one of the computers. Begin 24 hour radio “contest”. Cook Breakfast, lunch, and dinner for all the operators and volunteers and guests. Include snacks for overnight operators.
Sunday: Cook Breakfast. At 1:00 PM, begin the teardown. Actually started early, 40 meter antennas not needed in afternoon.
Teardown and cleanup not complete until 6:30. It takes 4 men a couple of hours to reel in a mile of coax cable.
Return 50 foot boom lift to Home Depot at 7:30, just before they closed.
Average age of volunteers is about 70 if you drop the one 22-year old outlier.
A club of 300+ members, and the bulk of the work was done by 5 members and the president’s family that he drafted.
We’ve got to do better.
Conehead Barrett sides with the Liberal SCOTUS justices that you can count mail in ballots after the election, as long as you want I guess, as long as they are post marked before the election.
Gee, faking a postmark would be trivial. Election integrity is fading fast.
So Barrett is another freaking disaster.
Payola seat. Ginsberg crossed the Liberals on occasion, particularly on overturning National Bellas Hess.
I believe that the post office keeps a ledger of when things were deposited and stamped.
So the ballots have to be cross referenced against the official ledger, a fairly trivial requirement that no-one could object to, amiright?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/06/fafo-italian-locals-pummel-african-menace-after-he/
Whips it out and starts choking it… and the men respond. What’s wrong with society is the woman at the end of the video asking the man if he’s alright…
n
That is Faux Geek which is completely different. The type dominates the entertainment industry C suites,
Jar Jar Abram’s and Mrs. Jar Jar along with their nepo baby. That picture captures what is wrong with Hollywood and the music industry.
She is pretty masculine.
n
This seems somewhat appropriate to today’s discussion:
‘Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded–here and there, now and then–are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” ’
Robert A. Heinlein
I’m sure the ballot counters check the postmark and preserve it and link it to the ballot. Nah.
Now I’m off to be broiled and heated until done.
n
If voting by mail, I would have thought it your responsibility to ensure it arrives on time?
Really weird decision.
Over the Hedge: George The Lawn Ranger
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2026/06/28
He rides again! And again, and again, and again.
The gate opener acted weird last week. No lighting storms. It would open a bit and stop with the control box beeping. I checked the hinges and pivots for blockages. That wasn’t it. It finally opened and I turned the system off.
And thought about it for a few days. Ah! Low battery. The battery that was in it had been fine for over a year. A cell gone bad? I don’t know. I had a spare battery and that fixed the problem. For almost a week.
What can I say? I bought two 12v7amp batteries from the feed store. Like $14 each. It’s been a while. I had a UPS dying. I had replaced the batteries in a different UPS a few months earlier. So new batteries. Weekend project. The UPS that had had the batteries replaced died.
So I didn’t bother. Just buy another UPS. Get new electronics, too. And the new batteries just sat on the counter for a few years. I did think to connect the 1 amp motorcycle battery charger for a few hours a few years ago.
Today I bought a new battery from the feed store. $24.90 with tax. No core charge.
The gate is fixed. If not, I’ll have to buy a new system.
The LED on the control board shows the solar panel is charging the battery.
You can’t buy just the control box or just the motorized arm. Ok, yes you can. On eBay. Someone’s used part? For half the price of a full system? I’m gonna pass on that risk.
Fingers crossed.
Another 1000# of xeriscaping this morning.
The doctor called me last night (Sunday), they want more heart tests (CT). But the links then sent for lab work don’t work, and the video-conferencing notification for 8:30am arrived at 12 noon today.
Logging on to the K website and there are no notifications for the last week.
Ah, Kaiser…
What could possibly go wrong with trusting your health to the largest corporate medical industry player, working hand-in-glove with the politicians in charge of California’s water, energy, fire control, roads, high-speed trains, etc.? to bring DEI and H1-B doctors and nurses to the top tier.
One of these days, historians will figure out that the worst thing to happen to health care in the US was Obamacare. Even worse than coupling health “insurance” to your employment. Damn FDR.
On second thought, if we hadn’t had FDR’s madness, we probably could have skipped Obama.
How are we going to survive this? It’s obvious that nationalized health care and Medicare-for-all is a death trap, leading inevitably to death panels and waiting lists. OTOH, what we do have really sucks as a system.
At least they don’t kill us for simple depression. Or hangnails. Yet.
I dipped my toe into concierge medicine this year. Really, pay-as-you-go cash-only on demand rather than concierge, but potato potahto. It worked ok and I got the service I wanted.
Nick talks about Hungry Man TV dinners. I looked. If the veggies are peas and carrots, pass. I bought a couple of fried chicken dinners. Mashed potatoes, corn, a brownie.
This store doesn’t have a big variety. Two or three kinds with chicken, one with turkey and dressing and peas and carrots, Salisbury steak. Seems like a spare selection.
Yesterday I ate the Chicken Nuggets meal. About 3 pm. Then I spent the rest of the day burping it. Still burping it this morning.
The potatoes are well, instant. Edible. The corn, I liked, it’s not that super sweet stuff in the cans. The chicken was good. Not mushy nuggets. Solid. Good seasoning.
Reading the label this dinner has about half of my daily need for sodium. Yeah. I salted and peppered and buttered the corn and potatoes.
I ate a chunk of cheddar this morning to settle my stomach.. I’m still not hungry beyond that snack.
Anyway. I can cook better stuff. Not fried chicken, though. For the price, heck, have a couple in the freezer for super lazy days.
97f, and sunny with some breeze. Guess who wants out for a potty walk? That would be Mr. Buddy the Beagle. It won’t take long, he doesn’t like the heat.
Good luck with your tests, EdH!
Monday bedtime. End of a very busy work day, followed by a sprint to get to a distant range to attend students taking their shooting licence exams. One passed, despite a bad attack of exam nerves. Had I been the examiner, he would not have passed, but I am perhaps rather strict. The other was a no-show. I am not amused, as that reflects poorly on me as the instructor.
Germany is trailing Paraguay in the soccer world cup. W1 is anxious. I am going to bed, regardless. She can tell me the good, or bad, news in the morning.
Goodnight!
Very likely. Current reporting on that incident is that a German citizen of Turkish descent seems to have murdered his estranged wife and staff of the safe house for women and children in which she was hiding, as part of a dispute over custody of a toddler daughter.
Jar Jar is not very tall, and Mrs. Jar Jar is doing that “heavy sunglass frame as single vision lenses” look.
Millie (Sarah Hagan) from “Freaks & Geeks”, the girl at the piano, is the poster child of the type I was thinking about.
She was about 10-15% of the class in the lecture I attended at MIT a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSzjbYomSWA
Just because they can cut through three semesters of Calculus with an ‘A’ or even competently discuss P vs. NP in a theory course doesn’t make them world class engineers.
Your MBBS will see you now.
Speaking from experience, that is real waste coming out the wrong end.
O Canada! Your suicide booth is calling.
Another studio circling the drain.
Maybe Fox will reacquire Sky for pennies on the dollar.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/comcast-spinoff-nbcuniversal-sky-split-two-companies-rcna352188
O Canada! Your suicide booth is calling.
MAID is calling.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-services-benefits/medical-assistance-dying.html
Tomorrow’s daylight is going to be 19 seconds shorter than today’s.
Winter is coming.
Thirty states’ laws allow a ballot to count if mailed with a postmark dated on or before election day.
Somewhere a while back someone mentioned Revenge of the Nerds. I’ve never watched it, just heard about it.
So I bought it on Big River. All four movies in one DVD case. I’ve watched the first two and they are pure trash movies and I’m loving watching them. They all look to be having fun making the movies. Teenage boy humor. Perhaps the best kind. Hey, the early ‘80’s for me was the best time.
Sure, I was broke and just getting by. I was doing it all by myself. Paying my bills. Going to work. Yadda yadda. And the music was good. Like, The Cars. And Blondie. Supertramp. Pink Floyd.
Good times. Though having enough at the end of the bills each week to only afford a couple of boxes of mac and cheese mix, a gallon of milk, a couple of cans of tuna and a “splurge” of a can of Spam did get old. Yeah and a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs. My cooking skills at the time. And a box of Cheerios cereal.
Anyway. Looking at movies from the ‘80’s, folks just all seemed happy.
Driving home from work today, a Nissan Rogue’s CVT transmission died right in front of me at a light.
The light turned green, and the vehicle moved a couple of inches before coming to an abrupt halt. The hazard lights came on and a hand with a fairly substantial diamond popped out of the driver’s side window to wave me around while she was stopped waiting for … something.
Was she channeling Brie as the Runaway Bride from those commercials?
Four? Geesh.
IIRC, Curtis Armstrong was the consistent presence in the sequels, but I only remember two.
I often cite “Bachelor Party” as being the best Tom Hanks film outside of “Apollo 13”, but I don’t remember discussing “Revenge of the Nerds”.
Yes, “Bachelor Party”. The legend is that Hanks did it so the film would get made and his friend, Wendy Jo Sperber, cast as a successful albeit repressed doctor, breaking her typecasting problem at the time.
Ok, now explain why my credit card bill, mailed 12 days before the due date arrives late and I get hit with interest and a late payment charge.
Election Day is Election Day. If your mailed in ballot is not there, on Election Day, say, by 5 pm, tough shit and your vote does not count. Right into the trash can. Don’t be blaming the Post Office for anything. The entire “count the mailed in ballots that arrive three weeks later” is pure cheating.
Why is all this like the stupidity of folks running for Student Council in High School? Tell me like I’m 10 years old.
Sucks to be you but if you actually really gave a shit you’d be voting in person.
It’s pretty simple. It really is. You go vote in person. End of discussion. Early voting is cool. But you go, you go in person. Show your ID and get a ballot.
Because, about 30 years ago, the credit card companies fought and won the standoff in the last serious attempt to get a bill through Congress which would have required them to use the postmark date.
Scranton Joe, always the best friend of the banking interests, led the charge against the bill.
Bruce Williams led the other side. His program was still extremely popular and influential at that time.
I don’t have an exact date for the Head Nitpicker here, but figure 1995-96. The failure of the bill was among the first hints that the Gingrich “revolution” was not going to be what was promised in the Fall of 1994.
Yeah. After watching the first movie I was like “they made three more movies?”
#2 was decent. Plot was Meh. Make the Three Stooges look high brow. Plenty of pretty girls and shirtless guys. And yeah, we didn’t have Internet back then . Heck, cable was new so nobody had Cinemax.
Well, finding that to avoid the thumbs down from the Head Nitpicker was easy.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/postmark-debated-as-day-of-payment-3125290.php
Scrolling up would spoil the image.
@paul, ROTN was a classic. I’ve rewatched it many times, but the frontal nudity means I’m not comfortable watching it with the kids. “Hair pie!!” It was part of the “teen sex comedy” period of hollywood.
Others from the era, Porky’s (although I haven’t rewatched it, iirc the “Lassie” scene was hilarious). And of course, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
For good cult classic movies from the era, Repo Man (great lines, cool cast “Life of a repoman’s always intense” and “Ordinary fucking people, I hate ’em.”) And the best, Buckaroo Banzai (which had an OUTSTANDING cast and was misunderstood by everyone but the fans.)
Falling Down was a great movie, but isn’t fun. Red Dawn is topical…
As for everyone being happy, I think they were. Movies were a fun escape after the depressing anti heros and ponderous “meaningful” movies of the 70s. They were DREARY, and even if they had a hero, he probably died at the end. Plus, the economy was good, especially considering the inflation, unemployment, and arab oil embargo of the 70s.
The 80s were a great time to be young and unattached.
n
Germany are OUT of the World Cup! Paraguay pull off the unbelievable in shock penalty shootout
n
New Poll: Majority of Democrats Would Prefer to Live Overseas Than in the US
Not a problem. I’d fully support them identifying as illegal aliens and getting a free plane ticket to leave.
They can pay off their debts, and take all their wealth over and above their share of the national debt* that their party has been voting for for decades. And their children have to go with them.
Or we could just cut a deal with China and swap them head-for-head for Uyghurs.
*Including using the present value of any retirement plans.
Attack of the mold dogs
There’s a new trend that will make it even harder to buy or sell a house.
David DeMay | June 28, 2026
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/attack-of-the-mold-dogs/
All Eyes On The Tortoise For The Plastics-In-Blood Panic
The hare-like panic is already traveling rapidly through the West, but the tortoise is slowly coming through with different information.
The other day, I argued that the modern panic industry has mastered a single, lucrative trick: detect something, strip away all quantitative context, and declare a crisis before the science can deliver a verdict. The mold-sniffing dog and the Florida government’s botched candy arsenic announcement were my examples. I suggested the playbook was institutional and repeatable.
David DeMay | June 29, 2026
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/david-demay-all-eyes-on-the-tortoise-for-the-plastics-in-blood-panic/
I had the first article in a tab intending to post it here, and then saw the follow-up today.
First, as DeMay points out, a dog is not an analytical instrument and is certainly not qualitative. Dogs are also biased towards verbal praise and treats, and have been manipulated by the police for decades to run the confiscation and punitive fine rackets.
Mold is ubiquitous in the earthly environment and if humans were so susceptible we would have been wipied out long before we tamed fire. If I were selling a house and was asked for permission to have a mold dog “inspect”, my first response would be to ask for certification from a quantitative program for the dog and handler, copies of their insurance and proof of bonding, and then demand reciprocity: I want to have the prospective buyer’s current domicile inspected for mold at my expense.
I’ve seen people get ripped off by unscrupulous buyers in league with unscrupulous real estate agents who “discovered” some defect after closing and made demands for thousands of dollars. Nope.
What passes for science nowadays is mostly crap, but even good science in the hands of the yellow sheet whores is more of the same. Look up polywater. Ask yourself why the “contamination” that spawned so many Superfund sites in the 1980’s–all of which are still Superfund sites with few exceptions–isn’t a concern now that we are 1,000 times better at detecting it?
The 70s saw a lot of comedy talent working on TV.
Comedy also tended to be rated ‘R’ in the 70s where the 80s saw the self-imposed rules at HBO and Showtime of not airing ‘R’ material before 8 PM which gave rise to mainstream PG comedies.
Film comedy is dead right now. We saw “Jackass” yesterday, and, except for “Supertroopers 3” and the latest from James Gluck, the rest of the trailers were horror flicks or Fathom’s “Terminator 2” re-release. The preshow was kinda jarring considering the feature.
“Jackass” isn’t high art but it isn’t mean. The cast does those things to themselves and each other.
No tiny little fire tonight, I’m beat and beat up. Still not done moving out of the unit. There is a lot of stuff there still. To make room I’m having to stack, sort, and build shelves. I’ve got the shelves, just some of them never got built. One of the best value purchases I made was about 30 piles of random wire shelving from one of the school districts. I’ve been able to build a lot of shelf units out of those shelves and poles. There is usually a lot of competition for Metro shelves, but these were all disassembled so no idea what was really there. I sold several to my fun store buddy, some to my neighbors, and used some myself.
It was very hot in the storage unit and at my shop. I had to stop and sit in the airconditioned truck twice to cool down. Having the fan has saved the day. And not working in the sun.
Time for a shower, some meds, and bed.
n
We already have more than enough mohammedans.