Rainy and Green and Rainy

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I’m currently siting in my easy chair with my trusty old ThinkPad R61 laying upon my lap (instead of the cat for once) and gazing out of the sitting room windows at a very green, very rainy day. Much like yesterday was and the following two days will be according to the forecast. The lawn needs mowing of course, but that will obviously have to wait.

Fine with me.

It’s been a most gorgeous Spring around these parts and life of all types, from trees to bees and everything in between seem to be in unusual abundance. More blossoms on the trees and bushes than I have ever seen in my area to date, more birds of differing types and, as usual, a plethora of hornets which I will have to do battle with eventually. All in all a most beautiful Spring indeed.

For instance. This is just a sample of the view from my deck from the other morning when I went out for a breath of fresh ~~pollen~~ air. I can’t include the sound of the river across the road, the birds singing in the trees or the sound of the woodpecker peckering on the ridge–you’ll just have to use your imaginations for that part.

The camera doesn’t do it justice of course, but you get the idea.

Thankfully, the weather is supposed to clear up and give us a sunny albeit chilly (50s) Memorial day weekend but hey, this is Vermont after all. This means the tourists who will pile into the area as usual will probably be wearing coats and complaining about “how cold it is” while the natives will all be standing around in shorts and T-shirts eating ice cream at the local ice cream shoppe and having cookouts and barbecues and saying what a fine weekend it is.

For myself, it will be a fine cool time for going outside and getting some work done or at least as much work as my body will allow anyway. Either way, if the current Spring is any indication of how the coming Summer will be, I have no complaints whatsoever.

Have a fine day.

Still here–I think. And more coming up.

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Just in case anyone was wondering, I’m still here. I haven’t left for a long trip nor have I decided to give up blogging (sorry, you still have to put up with me–or not). But the warm(er) weather has arrived in my little corner of the Northeast Kingdom and there’s several projects that need to be completed. Among those are the taming of 100 foot, badly overgrown hedge, preparing the lower garden for planting and the replacement of a 100 foot long, 6 foot high stockade fence and I have to remove the old one first before the fencer can put up the new one. There’s also the burst pipe in the wall that feeds the outdoor spigot that needs to be fixed as well.

And, of course, the never ending mowing.

All the above requires a bit of preparation as you might well imagine. Things like taking the old beast of a lawn tractor to the shop for the usual going over, the purchasing of a gas powered hedge trimmer for the 100 foot, 6 foot high, 6 foot wide hedge, and buying a rototiller (the days of shovel and hoe are long over for me). This also means hooking up the equipment trailer and running to and fro like a mad man in an attempt to get everything done when it needs to be done. Timing is everything you see.

The problem always lies in the fact that I only have so much energy per day and once it’s used up–I’m done. There’s no taking a half hour break, a snack, a glass of water and I’m ready to go again. Once my allotment of “get up and go” is used up for the day, that’s it. So again I say, timing is everything.

So the blogging has been put aside in favor of “things to be done” and all that, but not to worry. There’s plenty of changes afoot in this town we live in and there’s pictures to be taken of the “before and after” type that will provide plenty of posts over the next couple of years at least. That plus the inevitable shots of my nicely mowed lawn, 100 foot hedge and (hopefully) the new 100 foot, 6 foot high stockade fence.

Have a fine day, all.

Thoughts on living off the government dole

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There are many aspects to being a (rated) 100% disabled veteran (physical) and having to live off the federal government, some of these aspects you might imagine and others you may not. One of them, surprisingly, is the idea of the “permanent vacation” from those who are not disabled and out there still working for a paycheck. Many I’ve encountered seem to think that would be just grand but believe you me, it’s not. Especially not for a working stiff who, no matter what he did to help matters, finally found himself unable to work. However, when I was healthy and employed at least I was depending on my myself and not the government to pay my way through this life. Sure, the amount of disability compensation from the VA allows my wife and I to “live” rather than just “survive”, albeit frugally, but the one thing that constantly preys upon my mind is the hard fact that I’m completely dependant on the “system” for my well being–especially monetarily.

Okay, so this disability compensation I speak of is part of a contractual agreement and not a so-called entitlement. Yes, I put in nearly 12 years in the US Naval Submarine Force in order to “earn” this disability compensation but it’s one thing to realize that and another to also realize that everything in my life, including the welfare of my wife, is completely dependant on that disability payment coming in at the beginning of each month. Mortgage payment, car payments for 2 rather used cars, bills, food, fuel, utilities all depend on that payment. This means that I have to depend on my country remaining viable. I have to depend on Congress not to make some ludicrous mistake of passing the wrong type of legislation or, more likely these days, digging in their heels and not making any decisions at all.

To me, things seem pretty shaky all over. Anyway…

You think I would get used to this idea of “living off the government” especially in the light that this compensation isn’t Social Security disability nor welfare compensation of any kind, just 100% VA disability compensation for being injured in the line of duty or however they put it these days. But it’s a bit frightening to imagine that if VA medical came up with a miraculous way to give me back my health and hearing, I’d still lose everything. I still would not be able to find employment due to the fact that in today’s world of decent paying jobs, especially in my previous line of work ( computers, peripherals, R&D, etc) there is no such thing as employment for people my age. So it would be Walmart and McDonalds for me and that certainly wouldn’t cut it.

Alright, so it’s an unlikely case at best and I should stop worrying and settle down. Things are as they are but unfortunately, my mind has a mind of it’s own and I’ve never been able to shut it up. I suppose that’s why I started this blog in the first place–to unload the crap my mind thinks up.

Heh, not the best way to put it perhaps?

So enough for now. My mind (and stomach) are now telling me it’s time for lunch so I shall put aside all worries and get to it. Besides, I hear that too much worrying can ruin your health.

New Pope Saves Twinkies?

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So, the world has a new pope. Okay, fine. I’m glad the center seat in the Vatican is once again filled. No telling what would have happened to Catholicism if it had remained vacant. May he rule…er…minister…er…pope wisely. But please, tell me one thing…

What the hell has electing a new Pope have to do with saving the Twinkie?

One can never trust news aggregators I guess. Even Google.

Note: Yes, I know the timing is a bit off on this one but I was delayed due to an inconvenient health situation…which I definitely am not going to talk about. I do intend to talk to my doctor about it though. I simply can’t understand why a chronic health problem should interrupt my writing. Very irritating because timing, as you know, is everything.

Amazon Add-on Items?

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Okay this is just stupid. Why would the world’s most popular online shopping site decide to make it that much harder to buy stuff? Well, hello to Amazon’s new “Add-on Items”.

I guess this has been around for awhile now but Amazon must have rolled it out over a fairly long period of time as I’ve not encountered it before–until the other day. As far as I’ve been able to understand this insanity on the part of the Amazon decision makers, an Add-on item can only be shipped with orders that are a minimum of $25. The kicker is that these orders have to be actually shipped by Amazon and not some other seller who happens to have a “store” on Amazon. Considering that Amazon was specifically designed as an online outlet for other retailers to sell their goods online along with items directly sold by Amazon, this now makes things unbelievably difficult for many buyers. What were they thinking?

Now, I buy most of my online goods from Amazon, especially computer parts, and Amazon’s prices and availability are usually the best for things like that. For instance, last year I needed to replace the hard drive in my wife’s desktop PC. This required the hard drive itself, the SATA hard drive data cable and an older style 4-pin to SATA 15-pin power adapter cable. The cables themselves came to less than $10 for both and were shipped with the hard drive ($60) even though the cables were shipped by Amazon and the hard drive was shipped by another company that sold through Amazon. And the shipping was free due to the entire order being above $25.

This might be a good time to mention that I’m not a Prime member. Just a regular guy who has a long standing Amazon account.

Fast forward to last week, I finally decided to order another hard drive for my desktop PC (identical to my wife’s), not because my current one was failing but because the current one is a older, slow 1.0 TB/5400 RPM hard drive that is really meant for storage rather than running various operating systems (I’m a multi-boot type of guy). Besides, I feel the need for speed. Now this should not have been a problem as I had dutifully bookmarked the pages for said hard drive and cables at Amazon from the last year’s purchase. So no problem, right?

Wrong.

Thanks to Amazon’s change in business practices, I was not able to order the cables I needed even though the hard drive that I had selected was $75. The reason being was that the cables were now considered “Add-on” items (see the image above for an example) which could not be shipped due to the total order of Amazon shipped items being less than $25. In other words, the two cables were both Amazon shipped items and together came to a total of only $8 ergo, no ship.

Everyone get that? I had a $75 hard drive in my cart but Amazon refused to ship me cables I needed for said hard drive because of the fact the hard drive was not shipped by Amazon. It was bought from a business who sold through Amazon and was shipped from that business itself. If I wanted the damn cables I would now have to buy another $17 or so of Amazon shipped items I didn’t need just to get the two cables for the hard drive.

In short–order cancelled.

I dug through my paperwork and found my old login particulars for Tiger Direct. I’d been buying computers and computer parts from them since the middle 1990′s when all they had was a mail catalogue. I went to Amazon a couple years ago simply due to Amazon having a better inventory of older style computer parts and accessories plus slightly better prices. Not any longer I’m afraid due to just about every single computer accessory, such as various types of computer cables, now being marked as a bloody “Add-on Item”.

Nice job, Amazon. What else can you do for us?

A short “Goal” post

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Just a short post here about an achievement of sorts that I…er…achieved here on this blog of mine. As of my previous post to this one, I reached exactly 1000 posts.

Yup, 1000 posts in…uh…7 years. Break it down and you have 142.85 posts a year (I don’t recall which post is the .85 one but I’m not going to look for it), 11.9 posts a month and, well, I’m not going to bother with the weekly as it most likely doesn’t matter. Okay, so compared to some this isn’t exactly what you might call a stellar achievement but hey, it’s an achievement for me nonetheless.

Okay, that’s it. Now to back to our regular schedule of sporadic posting…

How wealth is distributed in the US

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So you think you know how the wealth is actually distributed in the old USA? I’m sure a few of you, like myself, have a fair idea but it’s still a bit of a surprise when it’s visually represented like it is in this recent video. Of course there’s a huge difference between actual “income” and actual “wealth” (net worth) but as this video tells us, most of us “average Americans” will never have to know the difference.

Everyone have a fine day now.

Where oh where did my incoming links go?

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Somethings’ wrong. Somethings’ just not right. My “Incoming Links” widget on my WordPress Dashboard, after years of showing me blogs and sites that have linked back to mine, now shows that I have no links at all. What happened? Did all the folks who have linked to my site in a post suddenly decide to go back and remove all those links? What’d I do?

Well, maybe they didn’t do that after all. Perhaps it’s more of a WordPress problem or, more than likely, a Google problem? More to the point, Google changed something (again). Maybe a combination of both?

I noticed that the text inside the “Incoming Links” dashboard widget now reads this:

This dashboard widget queries Google Blog Search so that when another blog links to your site it will show up here. It has found no incoming links… yet. It’s okay — there is no rush.

Okay, this is fine except for one thing. My old blog is 7 years and counting and there’s plenty of links to the darn thing (posts and pages and such) and I know this because when I check via Google it shows pages and pages of incoming links. So where’d they go already?

After much consideration, troubleshooting, researching (to no avail I might add), I finally figured out a solution…

…I removed the damn Incoming Links widget from my WordPress Dashboard–problem solved.

So if I stop acknowledging the fact that you kindly mentioned my site in a post via a link to it, I apologize profusely. But I’m not going to bother trying to fix the stupid thing when I didn’t break it. It’s all I can do to fix things I break these days. It also took me about 20 minutes too long to write this post so I think I’d better take a nap or something. I’m sure my cats are looking for something to sleep on.