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Late summer and the bloom is off the vine. The hummers are short on sugar, so are hitting the feeders again. Consumption has doubled in the last couple weeks.

Tanking (solid state) power supplies are mostly oblivious to frequency or voltage variations. Harmonics are high frequency harmonic noise and can be filtered cheaply with an autotransformer/line stabilizer that chokes the harmonics while letting low 60 hz. frequency through. For me, the big...

My thought too. An irrigation pump does not need a pressure tank or pressure switch. Turn the pump on when you want to irrigate, turn it off when you are done. Put it on a timer for convenience. For freeze protection, put a pinhole in the pipe 10' down so it drains down when the pump is off. It...

If you check the technical data sheet, you find:  Not recommended for polyethylene, polypropylene, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)/ Teflon® or metal-to-metal (one surface should be porous) or rubber  Not suitable for applications with prolonged water immersion  Not suitable for use on...

I wish I had known about this years ago. I had to re-plumb my house last year because the old copper had gotten paper thin and was springing leaks. Yeah, calcite is slightly basic, and the pH should run about 8. I have no idea how you are getting a pH below 7. Maybe the flow rate is too high?

Not silicone as far as I can tell. The cured product is smooth and hard. The refrigerator vegetable crisper fix was a butt weld and seems strong enough to hold together as I slide a loaded drawer in and out. Locktite says it's some new formula. I haven't tried painting it. I think it's flexible...

Good time to sell them, with the recent runup in steel prices. My dad bought a scrap radio tower years ago, and we are still making things out of it.

I tried their web site, which had no info. Is there a list of available stations? Other local streaming platforms don't carry my locals. What about YouTube premium? I understand they have locals too.

Many unheated warehouses have dry line sprinkler systems. They are common anywhere a line might freeze.

Loctite Stick'N Seal Extreme Conditions, Clear. Good stuff. I have used it to repair plastic refrigerator drawers, a chipped double glazed window I did not want to re-glaze. I'm going to keep some around for those times when Gorilla Glue, cyanoacrylate, and Elmer's won't do it. I am very...

Yes, it sells in many states, and yes, it is pasteurized. Unpasteurized beer has a shelf life of about 2 months if refrigerated, and very short unrefrigerated.

You can't ship unpasteurized beer across state lines either.

When I was a kid you still saw hunchbacks on the street, infected with bovine tuberculosis in milk when they were children. Pasteurization put an end to that.

They got sick long ago and have forgotten.

I get really disgusted at people who pick and choose their "religious freedom." Let their customers drive their horse and buggy up the driveway to pick up the food. That's pretty typical of food regulations. I ran a fair food booth for years that would never have passed restaurant inspection...

I'm the same way. The TV goes for days without getting turned on. They say that elders sitting in front of a TV is a great way to rot both your mind and your body, leading to early dementia and physical disability.

One weird thing is that Preparation H is great for removing bags under your eyes. Use the cream, not the ointment, and let is sit under your eyes for an hour. Bag-B-Gone. Makes you feel like a real S*** Face. :sick:

Nice design. A shallow firebox puts more heat into the room.

I like them because you don't have to stop at intersections. Having to stop when you can see that there is no traffic is nonsense.

A friend of mine built this one himself.

Heinlein was wrong. The polite part didn't work out so well.

Justification for high capacity magazines. 50 rounds should slow them down.

The stores here carry it, but this is poison oak country. Everyone keeps it around. This is wild blackberry season, and this will be a primo year. It's about impossible to pick the berries without touching poison oak.

I have a bar of Fels Naphtha in my shower. It gets used when I have been wading through poison oak.

With rapidly dropping prices, desalination may be a major market for solar panels. Running the plants is the big expense. Desalination takes a lot of energy. https://www.desware.net/Energy-Requirements-Desalination-Processes.aspx

In my neighborhood we sometimes get cattle drives taking over the road in front of my house. Reading stories like this I am so glad humans prefer to huddle together in cities no matter how horrible conditions get.

Ah, Johnny Carson. He was the last of the great late night hosts. His monologs were funny. His guests were intelligent and interesting. I remember Carl Sagan, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, David Horowitz, and he gave early breaks to famous acts like George Carlin. When Leno took over, he turned it...

They're asking the wrong people. All scientists and archaeologists can do is stand around with their thumbs up their butts. Give a few skilled stonemasons a few thousand helpers, and they would figure it out in pretty short order. The really precise work was done in South America by Incas and...

Shoestring potatoes. Not an order, but they were in every grocery store.

One of my idle fantasies is to hook a windmill to a heat pump and use it as a chiller in the summer and a heater in the winter. However, my county has the lowest average wind speed in the USA. If you want a windmill to work, you better put it on top of a mountain around here.

Too bad you don't live on the coast. They would make great crab bait. Two pots would run you into a marmot shortage in a month.

Boraxo is blacksmith flux.

We have been cleaning feeders by putting them in the dishwasher. This has washed off the paint around the flowers, making it hard for the birds to locate the feeder hole. We bought a bottle of fingernail polish and used the little brush to paint the flowers. Problem solved.

Norway is a lot like Alaska. If you want to drive there, don't count on using a road.

Does anybody know when Velveeta quit being packaged in wooden boxes? When I was a little kid, Velveeta boxes were a common small part holder in the shop.

I knew two people who died from riding in an open pickup bed. One was a teenage cousin, who died many years ago when he fell out and hit his head. The other was a neighbor farmer who was transporting a refrigerator and standing in the bed to hold it vertical. He hit the pavement at 50 mph, and...

I loved our '62 Rambler Classic, with the seats that folded back into a double bed. At the same time, the only place you could buy rubbers was at the drug store, and they were behind the counter where comparison shopping was impossible. I was in my 20s before I learned that there was such a...

Are people who evacuate really going that far? What's the typical evacuation? 50 miles maybe? Unlike an ICE, an EV does not use power unless it's moving, so getting stuck in a huge traffic jam is just a delay.

Laws are only needed because of the failure of personal responsibility. Remember when it was as easy to buy dynamite as it was to buy a shovel?

25 years from now, $2500 will be about enough to buy a burger and a beer. Index it to the CPI and the rent will double every 5 years.

That must be an east coast thing. I was always confused when I heard that as a boy. There are places where moss only grows on one side of a tree?

I learned years ago to stack it for air circulation in the summer. One year I threw everything in a pile, and the wood on the bottom of the pile was still wet when I went to load the wood shed. It is impressive how much heat you can get out of a piece of wood if you are not boiling a bunch of...

Just to show I really do cut and split my own firewood, here are a couple pictures. The first one is maple in the pasture, plus some madrone that has been down long enough to bleach out. The second one is wood that fell off of trees in my yard during snowmageddon last December. There is oak...

Which of that cast of characters were climate scientists? One warrior who is an object lesson in climate change is Genghis Khan. The grasses failed in Mongolia, so they saddled up and conquered a big part of the world. Some wars begin from necessity. It seems foolish to keep pushing that...

It's not quite as restrictive as all that. https://beachconnection.net/news/sutip122409_421.php

Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Gravity is real. If you don't like it as a geodesic in space-time, you are welcome to come up with your own explanation, but relativity explains it so well that it has never failed an experimental test. Anthropogenic global warming was predicted a...

That paper cherry picks its data in an effort to discredit it. Fortunately for those of us who respect reality, NOAA and NASA have satellite data that is not subject to local variations. https://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_science/data/ I have no idea why the denialists are so dedicated to denying...

Sitting next to the Cascadia Subduction Fault, I can tell you that 1000 year events leave plenty of traces that can be analyzed and dated. Thinking you have to shuffle through old newspapers for records is nonsense. The Earth speaks.

Religion aside, denialism is a classic case of not getting the message. How many 1000 year storms per year will it take to change your mind? I doubt it will ever happen. As long as you stay in the shallow end, you should be fine.

The reasonable thing to do if you challenge one nation's conclusions is to look for others. http://www.climatecost.cc/images/Policy_brief_1_Projections_05_lowres.pdf

Harden your heart, Pharaoh.

Which government? It's a global problem, you know. Climate doesn't stop at the border. Other countries take it much more seriously than the US does. We waffled out of the Paris Accords because of the denialist movement in the US.

Ah. It's a secret. No wonder I had not heard of it.

This is the first time I have heard this claim. What data was falsified? It seems pretty clear to me, and has for years. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4549

Many people feel a profound responsibility to future generations. Others do not.

The hydrogen ions are freed from the water molecules by combining with SO2 to make H2SO3. It's not the sulfur, it's the sulfur dioxide.

Sulfur compounds have to be in the stratosphere to limit insolation. Volcanic explosions lift them up there. At ground level where vehicle exhaust and smoke stacks are, they contribute to acid rain.

California gets demonized a lot. It's the mass social equivalent of an ad hominem attack. I don't know the Latin for that, but California gets to solve it's own problems and reap its own profits. Nobody else gets a vote. I have family living in California, Texas, and Florida. Not my kettle of...

Some areas in California are putting water back down the wells during the rainy season to recharge the aquifer. Lack of regulation is limiting that. Why go to all the trouble and expense of recharging an aquifer if the golf course a mile away is going to pump it out for free?

That's good. If some whacko survivalist starts shooting people and stealing supplies, the neighbors have to get together and put him down.

Maybe in Arkansas. Here in the West, we have things called water rights. Water on your property is not yours unless you have title to it. By state law, every home has water rights for domestic water and 1/4 acre of garden or lawn. Anything more than that requires senior water rights, and you can...

That's not a lawn, that's irrigated pasture. Plus, your side of the Rockies gets summer moisture. Your lawn is not relevant to areas that do not.

I think the TEOTWAWKI preppers are a little extreme. When I have mentioned disaster prepping on some groups, I have been derided as a "weather prepper," and told that I was not a real prepper. I have had visitors during disasters who were convinced we still had power when the light was an...

I think prepping is an urban phenomenon. On the farm, it's the way things have always been done. It's the difference between being a consumer and being a producer. Other than canning, pickling, smoking, and preserving, my primary prep has been economic. No debt. If they want to dig me out of...

What crops do you raise?

An acre foot is a lot of water, and irrigators have been pumping "free" water out of the ground without much incentive to adopt more efficient methods. The water table is dropping, and if irrigators don't start conserving they will drain the water table entirely. Some small towns that rely on...

I have a standard poodle. She was aspirated a foxtail that kept burrowing through the lung until it got into the pleural cavity. This caused a gangrenous infection called pyothorax, that required a $12,000 surgery. I had to rely on a GoFundMe to come up with the bucks, which covered about $9000...

In the winter you can always put on more clothes. In the summer, once you are naked, you are done.

How are you going to vent it in the summer? Power vents? Blocking the north wall with insulation and 50 gallon drums full of antifreeze will cut the winter heating bill.

The oil drilling is offset by flushing toilets.

When I was young I got a job at a traveling show. Every kid should run away with the circus when they are a teenager. It's a special world, or at least it was 60 years ago.

The mountain glaciers are melting and the water is returning to sea level. Just like a skater pulling their arms in during a twirl, the redistribution of mass makes things spin faster.

I don't care for most of the commercial exhibits, but love fair food and the 4-H livestock show. The Fisher Scone booth is my very favorite, and never leave without having at least one elephant ear, AKA fry bread. Many years ago I was a 4-H kid and staying with my animal at the fair for 10 days...

How are you doing for nesting sites? I have plenty of hummers because I have a lot of snags along a creek where woodpeckers excavate nesting sites. By familiarity and preference, birds will return to a location where they had a successful nesting the year before, or where they were born. My...

I wouldn't want to eat fish out of that creek for a while. The thing I missed in that video was the sound of chainsaws. There won't be any shortage of firewood for a while.

I'm OCD about staying within the household budget. I do not want to be old and poor.

We have a 30' mimosa in the yard that just burst into bloom. You can hear the tree buzzing, but very few hummers at the feeders. They like the butterfly bushes too. When the blossoms drop they will be back to the feeders. Late summer before the migration they swarm the feeders like crazy.

I was thinking about that this morning. A common refrain during economic downturns is that consumer spending will lead us out of recession. High inflation will kneecap that. It's hard to spend when your dollar doesn't go as far as it used to. I think the floatation device right now is people...

The death toll is up to 30 as of this morning, including four children, and will probably go higher.

I was horrified by the death toll in Kentucky. Apparently the water rose in the night while people were sleeping, by the time they woke up there was no way to get out. 26 people and counting. I can't imagine the terror of awakening to that, even for the survivors.

That was the purpose of primary education. The 3 Rs. Secondary education was always intended to be vocational. Ag was Vocational Agriculture, that taught wood working, mechanical skills, crop selection, water and erosion systems, etc. That morphed into shop classes, but many high school...

I used to work at a medical school, and they said that when I questioned dumping radioactive tracers down the sink. The translation was, "We don't want to deal with safe disposal and they will never catch us."

Try emailing the researcher. They only publish because academia requires it, and get nothing from the journal publisher. Often they are happy to forward a copy on request. It's hard to convince people that the weed killer chemicals are much safer than spreading diesel around. Remember the old...

Persistent toxin, though. Diesel is ugly stuff.

My rule of thumb has been that house prices should reflect 3x the neighborhood median gross annual income, but that was from the days when a 7% or 7.5% mortgage was the norm. Higher incomes can exceed that because other expenses don't increase rapidly as your income rises. The sensible thing...

We have to fire up a generator to shower, but can get a bath pretty easily by heating a 12 gallon laundry tub of water on top of the wood stove, then tempering it with cold water in the tub. I don't mind running a generator for a couple hours a day for electrical stuff, but hate generator noise...

One of my pet peeves is people who use the wrong pronunciation of homographs. Audio book narrators sometimes do that. Secreted and secreted are particularly irritating. No, you do not hide something with a glandular squirt.

The only thing that irritates me is the proliferation of acronyms. Refusal to spell out words is simply laziness. People speaking a street patois often ads color and vitality to discourse that would be otherwise stuffy and boring.

Yep, I'm a country boy for sure. I don't abandon 19th century and early 20th century technology because it requires a little work. The nice thing about solutions invented before electricity is that they always work. My wood stove is a home utility that provides many kw equivalent of energy any...

When we bought this place in '94, I bought a propane camp stove for when the power goes out. In all those years, I have never used it. We cook on top of the wood stove. I do have a really nice propane single burner hot plate that I use for canning, but I take it outside. It's big enough to be...

Now they are finding out psychedelics are helpful for cases of PTSD and depression. After all these years, it turns out Timothy Leary was right all along. Hoyt Axton was one of his patients, and wrote this song about the experience.

OMG, you blew up an Apache hood? For my money, the classiest pickup ever designed.

Just about anything uses propane as a propellant nowadays. Even pit spray will make a satisfying bang.

Where I live, VOIP is the only phone service. If you don't have internet, communication is almost nonexistent. With a Wilson signal amp, the cell phone will send and receive texts but not phone calls. With WiFi it behaves like a normal cell phone.

If your house floods during hurricanes, sell out and move. The places that will get wet are the Gulf Coast and Atlantic. Florida, in particular, is going to mostly disappear. However, if you have a typical rocky coast where you have to climb down a 40' cliff to get to the beach you have nothing...

How do you make a fluorine molecule unstable? It's not like it's going to oxidize. The big advantage of the new tech is that it runs on a fraction of the energy required for RO.

100,000 gallons is literally a drop in the bucket. Practical desalination needs to produce 100,000,000 gallons a day.

I had a small inheritance a while back, nowhere near a million, but I spent it on things I could use that added to my net worth. The big thing I could use was turning the master bath from a 5' wide closet into a wheelchair accessible bathroom, looking toward ageing in place. The other thing I...

I ran across this article this morning. Why was it not headlines in every coastal newspaper in the US? Desalination may become the default fresh water source on coastlines. https://interestingengineering.com/fluorine-nanostructures-desalinate-faster

I'm not as well off as you, but a million would not make much of a change in my lifestyle. My retirement planning was to do what I want while paying the bills, and that has worked out well.

Paregoric is still legal in Canada, I think.

The real change was the job. Around here, every kid had a summer job picking crops in the field or irrigating. You could go picking unaccompanied at 12, and get a job irrigating as soon as you were big enough to move pipe. I had my first hourly job at 12, planting skips in strawberry rows...

We refinanced years ago and went to Wells Fargo. They wanted us to jump through all sorts of hoops, despite having 50% equity and both of us long term employed. We went to a mortgage broker instead. One look at our financial statement and we got the mortgage, in less than 24 hours, with no...

For international private sales, the International Postal Money Order will get you across the border without currency exchange fees. I think the max amount is $700.

Forty years ago a 12 ounce beer was 25 cents during happy hour. Bar food like peanuts and popcorn was free as long as you bought beer. There are tiers of liquor licenses, and a tav gets breaks if they sell a lot of food. There was a place called Humpty's Dump that used to sell bag lunches for a...

There's a huge ignorance tax.

People need to know that big national charities spend their money on fundraising and executive salaries, leaving little or nothing to those who need help. Give locally. There are local food banks, animal shelters, homeless shelters, and rural clinics that will spend the money providing services...

You might be able to buy cutover stump farm for that, but nothing with any timber on it. If you figure $50/year/acre for a plantation, that's $1500/acre, plus the land cost. If there is mature timber on it, the price is determined by a cruise. A local mill paid $8 million for a single section...

True that. Any big iron will put a big dent in a megabuck. What does a D6 run? A quarter mil plus extras?

I hate to break it to you, but a million bucks is not "big money." If you stick it in retirement savings and pull the standard 4%/year, that's $40,000. A nice boost to spending money, but it's not going to make you rich. You can't even afford a new pickup unless you kick in some earned income.

My wife and I discuss this occasionally. She wants a house at the coast. I tell her if she wants a house on the coast, painting it every other year, keeping the weeds mowed, fixing the roof, etc. is on her. I'm not going to maintain her albatross for her. Then she decides making reservations at...

It was a different world. 1964, duck hunting with a buddy, jump shooting the creek that ran north from my folks' farm. When it got too dark to shoot, we climbed out of the creek, mud to our belly buttons, and thumbed a ride home. The first car by stopped for us, two unkempt teenage boys carrying...

It has been sad to see the retailers pull men's products out of their stores. Granted, women conduct 80% of retail sales, but they eliminated 20% of their customer base when they closed out power tools, guns, men's magazines, and the in-store deli. I bought my first shotgun at K-Mart, and along...

I bought my first hunting rifle from Montgomery Ward. It was a 7.65 Argentine Mauser. It cost me $25. I was 12.

Drip irrigation and plastic mulch. I scored rolls of 30" mulch from the local forest products company. It's white on one side, black on the other, and opaque to kill the weeds. I use it white side up.

No beneficial plants left in Illinois?

Speaking of dog food...here is a picture of my pack. The springer is the finest field bred springer I have ever met in my life. If I don't go hunting, she will retrieve birds anyway, and it's not uncommon to come home with more birds than I shot. She has brought me 6 doves in the last 2 months...

A piece of 8" stove pipe will protect small shrubs and trees from overspray. Even a hunk of cardboard will protect plants you don't want to spray, though you need three hands, one for the wand, one for the sprayer, and one for the cardboard.

We cook our own dog food in large batches (20 quart) and freeze it. A local butcher grinds mixed scrap meats into dog food that contains beef, pork, mutton, turkey, horse, venison, etc. We cook it up with $0.88/lb frozen vegetables, cheap fresh produce like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and whatever...

I use Crossbow on woody plants. The bane of my existence is bindweed, known to urban dwellers as morning glory. Roundup won't kill it. Dicamba won't kill it. 2,4-D won't kill it. Digging it out by hand won't kill it. I have one flower bed I have abandoned and just let the bindweed be a ground cover.

I have a couple, and never use them. I carry a toolbox behind the driver's seat of my pickup, so where I am there are tools. I also have a house toolbox and of course there is the shop. They're like the Swiss Army knife - tries to do everything so doesn't do anything very well.

Buildings are most likely to burn down during construction. Blame the plumbers, though PEX has eliminated a lot of solder work. Even so, piles of sawdust, exposed wood, and a cigarette butt can put a crimp in the project. Homeowner insurance will not insure a construction project.

I think you are thinking of HSUSA.

Any dog with a good hunting drive will wreck themselves regularly working briars. I have a springer that has had stitches four times in 2.5 years. The worst part is keeping them in a cone until the stitches heal.

For the money they are talking, they had a church, a school with a gymnasium and hardwood floors, and a six manual pipe organ.

That's a product of another century. I doubt any destroyed houses get rebuilt with fish scale siding. If you want a church, build a church. If you want a museum, build a museum.

Small communities that have been destroyed by a disaster lose a lot of social equity. It's becoming clear that the communities here that were wiped out by the wildfires in 2020 will never be the same. People were left with bare dirt and mostly inadequate insurance coverage. Even so, I think...

The switch has been flipped on the housing market. It's now nobody's market, on its way to being a buyer's market. Nobody is offering over asking price for a home, and inventories are rising everywhere. Mortgage rates have doubled, which scraped a lot of people off the qualification stack...

Everything is in blossom. They'll be back when the plants set seed.

And if they cut you off during rush hour?

Yeah, monkey pox is essentially an STD.

Don't buy lineman pliers, buy rebar pliers. Longer handles, with a hook on the finger handle for pulling on stuff. Other than that, they're the same tool. If you want to use them as left handed sidecutters, you will have to swap hands, since you can't flip them over.

Not many things as peaceful as a corpse.

There are limits. Failing to maintain a single lane of travel is a violation. Have your excuses ready.

I can't remember the exact numbers, but a vehicle loses energy to air friction, rolling friction, and mechanical friction. Modern lubricants have done a lot to reduce mechanical friction. I was doing a long commute in the early '90s, and my mileage went from 23 to 28 mpg in 4 years, simply...

I treat that situation as an opportunity for an object lesson. I will speed up enough that my rear bumper clears, then change lanes in front of him and resume my normal rate of speed. When I finish passing and move back into the right lane, they will be frustrated enough to put their foot in it...

So let them. You will get there just as fast.

Tailgating is one of the things I have seen arise in my lifetime. I still follow the 2 second rule from when I learned to drive in the '60s. People think they can stop just as fast as the car in front, until the car in front hits something. My younger sister's best friend died that way.

2" is pretty close to be mowing hay or pasture grass. It grows from the crown, and will regrow faster and stay green through droughts better if you leave 4" of crown. Of course if you just want to beat back the vegetation, mow as close as you can.

Dykes are short for diagonal cutters, an entirely different tool from side cutters.

That explains to me why receiver hitches are rated so low for tongue weight. I think the tongue rate on a Category III is something like 500 lbs, maybe a quarter of the structural strength. Maybe it's for stability, not breakage. Speaking of breakage, I pulled a Bardon bumper off the rear of a...

Some years ago I figured out the difference between the social life of men and women. Women will make plans to meet for lunch. Men will buy a half rack and hang out in the garage.

My dad rarely got angry, but not putting his tools away roused the wrath of Jove. I'm still using tools he stamped with his initials in the 1950s. Come to think of it, I need to buy a new pair of sidecutters. I still have his old ones, but they are almost worn out. You have to use sidecutters a...

I have the same mower, though not as rusty as yours. Probably 30 years newer. :rolleyes: I like the tubing welded onto the front. I carry chain underfoot, which is a nuisance. Being able to toss it on the mower without it falling off would be a great upgrade, and would only take a few minutes...

I was thinking about this thread today. Yo, Rinty!

It's going to be tough on me when I buy a new vehicle. I carry keys in my pocket, and the fob is too bulky to be comfortable, so I never use one. After a few years, I have no idea where I put it. Maybe I'll stitch a little pouch into my hat. If I can't drive away without my hat, maybe I wouldn't...

If I have a nut that fits a bolt, they get stored screwed together. It saves a lot of time and frustration trying to find the nut that fits, thanks to multiple thread pitches in SAE and metric.

I like the lights on the cab. I had to install lights on the ROPS bar because the bucket kept blocking the headlights on my Kubota. Is there an implement light on the business end of that tractor too? I'm glad you took pictures. It will never be that pretty again. :)

What is your hourly rate for sitting on your butt watching NFL or NBA games? Then there is TV golf, one of the weirdest things imaginable. It's amazing how many non-productive ways people have to waste time nowadays. Many of those ways will put them in an early grave.

With energy costs going through the roof, the thumb is on the wood heat side of the scales. If you have your own wood and cut it yourself you can't heat a house cheaper.

A logger explained to me how to cut wood in a deck, after it had been yarded and picked up dirt. - Sharpen the tooth so it is more perpendicular to the bar. Don't completely eliminate a point, but don't make the point do the whole lead. - File down the rakers so the tooth takes a deeper cut...

The only thing I run Seafoam in is small engines. When I buy 5 gallons of non-ethanol gas I mix Seafoam into it, along with Sta-Bil. Then I mix Red Line 2-cycle oil for air cooled 2-cycle engines. I have a Husquvarna chainsaw that has been running fine for 27 years now. That may be voodoo, but...

Yes, the market has been flashing warning signals for quite a while. I have no idea why people think you can't "time the market." It's like they can't do math. You don't have to sell at the top or buy at the bottom to come out pretty good. All you have to do is dodge the disasters and buy the...

White oak has to be cut and split while it is green. Let it dry and it becomes very hard to deal with. You might file down the rakers on your chain so it takes a deeper cut, but watch out for kickbacks.

There are bonds and there are bonds. Long term treasuries are taking a dump. Who wants a 1% bond when new ones are over 3% and headed up? Short term corporate bonds yield better and churn faster. A short term bond fund may drop a few percent, but it will do very well when things stabilize at a...

If China invades Taiwan, there is a plan to blow up the chip foundries so China can't make a profit. If that happens, the whole world will be back to the Industrial Age, trying to renovate wrecked and rusted factories.

If you are saving 10 minutes a day, you need to think about moving closer to work. If you drive an hour at 70, you go 70 miles. If you drive an hour at 80, you drive 80 miles. Going 80 miles at 70 takes you an extra 8 minutes and 34 seconds. To save 10 minutes, you have to drive 93 miles at 80...

Remember when a cup of coffee was a dime, with free refills?

I have had alligator pizza. It was OK, but would have been better if the alligator had been smoked.

One of my favorites is a tomato torte. Spread the crust with pesto, add sliced tomato and asiago. Bake. I had a roasted garlic pizza in Amsterdam that had no tomato at all. It was delicious. I ordered a pizza in Belgium called the "Four Seasons" that was served warm, not hot, and had a raw egg...

Interesting. We get a lot of Washington drivers here in Southern Oregon. In fact, most of the cars on I-5 are either from California or Washington. I don't have a problem with California drivers. They git and go, though they often do it 10' off your rear bumper. Washington drivers tend to loiter...

I was at the farmer's co-op yesterday when I was accosted by a woman who claimed I had damaged her car by hitting it with my pickup door. First, I don't think she was parked there when I arrived. Second, she pointed to a dent that I didn't do. I opened my pickup door and showed her it didn't...

In Oregon the fuel tax is a dedicated fund that can only be spent on roads.

Safeway has a fresh pizza with a really good crust. I add a few ingredients at home, so buy the cheese pizza and go from there. The deli section of our local market sells end cuts half off, so I diced the butt end of a prosciutto onto it, added some sliced olives mushrooms, and anchovy fillets...

Canned anchovies are variable. I like the Kroger brand. Canned anchovy is a condiment. Like any condiment, you don't put it on every food. It's like someone not liking ketchup because it didn't taste good on their broccoli. A spicy pizza deserves a salty little anchovy, but the fish has to mate...

The new bridge across the Columbia between Portland and Vancouver just got toll funding approval.

There is a lot of light in that gloom. Anybody who bought a house before the bubble and locked in a 30 year 3% fixed is looking like a financial genius right now. They have dodged the severe housing inflation. House prices will go down, but interest will go up. Housing has been, "whatever the...

The West Coast chain called Shakey's made it to my small county seat (Pop. 17,000) about 1961. I assume they started right after WWII, like so many restaurant chains. They served a pretty good pie and, at least in that town, would serve anyone beer with their pizza without checking ID. I suppose...

Once upon a time, when I was a child, the purpose of prisons was rehabilitation. A big part of the American West was settled by men on the lam from the law back east. Given a second start, many of them became pillars of the community. Second chances are a thing of the past, and private prisons...

I recommend you install the Adobe Acrobat Reader to handle .pdf files. It's free. They own the format. They really know what they are doing. Either Firefox or Edge will use the Adobe code to display and print, or you can use the reader stand-alone for more print control over the document...

Private contractors don't build anything. The work is done by labor. According to your logic, whoever pays the labor is irrelevant.

Oh boo hoo, the poor oil companies. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/oil-tax-break.asp

You can prove anything with statistics, can't you? What Exxon is worth is irrelevant, because that's just the total share value. Total share value is what a few day traders say it's worth. It measures neither assets nor investments.

The gummint used to do a lot of stuff on payroll, but that was a poor use of money. Gig workers are disposable. When the project is over, you don't have to pay them any more. Privatization of government services was a big movement 40 years ago. Nowadays some states even have private prisons.

Tallyho8, not a joke. On my old DSL account I had to keep ping running to keep the ISP from dropping my connection.

The government provides huge tangible products. Roads. Airports. Seaports. Shipping channels. Canals and locks. Hydroelectric power. Law enforcement. Emergency services. National defense. Vital statistics. Sewer and water. Land surveys and titles. Courts. Government is vital to the existence...

I saw Hoy Axton's house on the North Umpqua. He was living there when he wrote "Joy To the World." Jeremiah was a chainsaw carving of a frog that sat on the porch. It was a log mansion. We actually looked at buying it, but the necessary maintenance was outside our budget. The bottom two...

Click the windows task bar. In the Search field enter command. That will open a command line window. enter ping -t facebook.com and hit enter. Let it run. Everyone will know you are doing important stuff. If that doesn't work, it's not them, it's you. It might be them. Mickeysoft updates...

I run a 100:1 mix of cheap 2-cycle oil in the diesel.

I more or less prepared for an extended period of inflation. SS is indexed, so will keep up, with a 1-year lag. Housing is paid for, and property taxes are capped at a 3% increase, so I'm out of that rat race. The wife and I both have small pensions have a 2% COLA cap, so we're going to be...

Don't get me started on Jimmy Dean. That stuff is 40% grease. If you are adding fat to wild game, that's about all it's good for.

I just roasted a tri tip for sandwich meat. It costs the same as bologna and there is no mystery meat or strange chemicals in it.

People who don't mask are spitting in your face.

Mask up, and read the riot act to anyone who doesn't. Safety first.

Another factor is people getting resigned to getting Covid. Instead of isolating, they are going out to shows and restaurants. The money is going to social and services instead of consumer goods. Hopefully it will reduce inflation, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's something to do in my retirement. I have a thing for intelligent dogs that started when I was 9 and my parents brought home a border collie. My current springer is the finest field bred springer I have ever met in my life, and I have met several. She will be my last field dog, and there's...

It's hard to tell what will happen with the housing market. They ran all the skilled workers out of construction in 2010, and contractors have been crying about not being able to find help ever since. The lack of labor has contributed to a housing construction slowdown and quality decline that...

The people who really got hurt were residents of the original 13 colonies, with their historic dependence on property taxes to fund the government. People got stuck paying tax on tax.

My dad's farm had a concrete dip tank that was probably built in the 1920s. Even back then they didn't want insecticides contaminating their wells.

Dogs are my hobby. I have a springer that is my bird dog and a standard poodle that is a truffle dog. Recently we have been doing doggy daycare for a Rhodesian Ridgeback. The neighbors work 3-14s, and the poor dog does not take well to being confined 14 hours a day while they are at work. My two...

One of the great things about being in business for yourself is that so much becomes tax-free. Invest in your business. Commuting expenses. Work clothing. Tools. Telephone. Internet. Shop. Insurance. Tax prep. Licensing. There's a whole laundry list of things you pay tax on if you work for...

I tell people if they give me a Caterpillar D6 with 6-way articulated blade and brush rippers on the back, I guarantee to send them a Christmas Card for the rest of my life.

A petroleum economy is certainly convenient, but as we have known for the last 50 years, just about anything can interrupt the supply. Sabotage. War. Corporate policy. National policy. Accident. A ship stuck in the Suez. Pipeline leaks and explosions. Hurricanes. Didn't the SE have a big...

That's not surprising, since I don't watch either CNN or FOX News. Current events are ephemeral.

Could you draw the water circuit, scan the drawing, and post it? What you are describing should not be possible, but it's unlikely that two separate gauges would give wrong information. I'm stumped.

Yeah, I don't have permission to view my own thread.

A trillion bucks.

I tried to start a thread on inflation here a year or so ago. It went nowhere, and I can't even find it in a search. IIRC, one phrase I posted was, "If current economic policy does not cause inflation, we know nothing about the cause of inflation." I have a low opinion of economists. Their...