MAGA intensifies

I take enough that I have an organizer for them.

I had to come back here specifically to thank you.

We have a “rainfall” showerhead that has been a huge disappointment since we installed it. Your comment popped into my head today as I was about to jump in the shower. All I had to do was remove a little o-ring and now it works fantastic! It also cut my shower time in half.

This is just an educated guess, but since there doesn’t appear to be a meter attached to it, I’m going to guess it belongs to the electric utility and is part of their AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) network.

There’s a device at the substation that can read all the meters fed from the sub. Some utilities use AMI over power lines, some use a wireless mesh network, and some use a combination of different technologies depending on a few things.

Source: used to run the department that handled the AMI system.

Cook’s Venture (an Arkansas poultry processor) went bankrupt practically overnight. Then the state came in and killed all the chickens at each farm, leaving the farmers to deal with all the dead and rotting corpses.

What did our wonderful governor do? Well, as I recall, her administration refused to declare a state of emergency and pretty much told all the poultry farmers to go fuck themselves because it’s “not the government’s job to bail out private businesses” or some bullshit like that.

Doesn’t feel so good when you’re the one getting told to fuck off. I hope all the people who voted for Trump and Sarah Sanders are happy since this is exactly what they voted for.

I’m glad someone got that.

Land of the free!

If I were in your shoes, I would not think my relationship is “great” because there seems to be a very basic lack of honesty and honesty is the foundation of a good relationship.

If this was a situation you and your wife discussed and came to an agreement on, that would be one thing. There are all kinds of couples that have unique “arrangements” and yet they have successful marriages because they communicate openly and honestly.

Being dishonest, especially about something as big as an affair, only leads to more dishonesty. Lies to cover up lies. Before you know it, you don’t even recognize the person you’ve become. I know this from personal experience.

“Gorilla Ladder step stools. Now at your local Home Depot!”

4242 4242 4242 4242

I was listening to Terry Gross interview some broadband experts about broadband legislation the other day and they mentioned that the White House added a Starlink connection to “boost the WiFi signal.” The White House. Probably the single most well connected building on the planet, added a shitty Starlink connection. It was not lost on Terry or the panelists that the whole charade was nothing more than the President of the United States abusing his position to effectively advertise one of his cronies’ products.

I, too, am extraordinarily humble.

2008 General Election. Voted for McCain. I would change that if I could go back but I didn’t know any better at the time. And yet today, I would gladly take John McCain over our current President.

I only recently discovered that not everyone can do this. I was telling my teenager to “just pop your ears” when she was swimming under water and neither her nor her mom had any idea what I was talking about.

…aaaannnndddd I’ve just stumbled into a rabbit hole that’s going to eat up half my day.

CRT TV’s emit a high frequency noise while in operation. Apparently there must be a significant number of people who can’t hear frequencies that high. My wife can’t hear it and had no idea those TV’s made any noise at all.

19 year old me was dirt poor and thought everything was expensive. Now I spend more on my mortgage than he made in a month. 🥲

The short version is that my father was both a victim and perpetrator of the cycle of abuse. When I was a kid, he was an angry man who would often explode in a violent rage. I ran away from home when I graduated from high school because I hated him and didn’t want to be around him anymore.

Eventually I learned that he wasn’t a bad person at his core. He genuinely wanted to do the right thing. He never had much of a chance. His own father destroyed him. Some of the stories he told me about his dad, when I was a kid, are horrible and sad. I think realizing that he was just a very broken man made it easier to forgive him.

We’ve talked about it a lot over the years. He is genuinely sorry for the way he treated me and my siblings and has lots of regrets. He’s not perfect but he is a good “Papa” to my kids and we get along pretty well nowadays.

I am more like my dad than my 19 year old self probably thought I would ever be. But I managed to mostly hang on to the good parts and get rid of the bad ones. My kids will never learn to fear me the way I feared my dad.

P.S. The time I called him a dick to his face.

I was in my mid 20’s. I called him on the phone to confront him about something he had done. All of a sudden, he blurts out, “why don’t any of my kids want anything to do with me?” At this point, I was very angry with him and didn’t care what his response was. I said, “Dad, we want to have a relationship with you but you make it really hard when you’re being a dick all the time.”

When I was a kid I would have paid dearly for saying something like that to him. The beating would have been fierce and merciless. When I said that he kind of just stopped and I could tell he was considering what I had said. I don’t know why but I think he actually took it to heart.

“Whoa. You actually talk to and get along with Dad? I can’t stand him. He’s such a huge dick.”

Yeah. Your going to call him that to his face at some point in a few years. It goes over better than you’d expect.