Minuteman

World Wide Delivery in 30 Minutes or Less

We still have a 400 Minuteman Missiles ready to go at a moment's notice.

Breakfast

Kitchenette

This is the kitchenette in our basement. My wife and I used this for a year while the main floor was being remodeled. Now it serves me breakfast, snacks, and popcorn in the evenings for my wife. We picked up the microwave at Fred Meyers a couple of years ago for something like $100. I bought the toaster from Amazon for $25 three years ago. The food scale has been around forever. You can buy something similar from Amazon for $25. The glass pitcher to the right of the sink is an old hot pot that quit working. I use it to refill my coffee maker and our hot water pot. Next to the pitcher is a hot air popcorn popper. I have no idea how old it is.

At the other end of the counter is our first refrigerator we bought sometime in the late 1980s, 86 maybe? It's still going strong.

What else is on the counter?

• bottle of ginger ale for when I am feeling poorly. Pour a couple-three ounces in a cup and fill it with hot water. Good for what ails thee.
• Small bottle of Dawn dish soap that gets used like once a week.
• Scrubber sponge and brush for cleaning.
• Coffee cup used to support popcorn bowl so the popper doesn't spew popcorn hither and yon.

The coffee maker is not here because there just isn't enough power or room for it. It's around the corner in the workroom, which means I get another few dozen steps in every day just going to get coffee.

Breakfast

This is my typical breakfast. I have this more days than not. 620 Calories. Costs $4 and I can prepare it in five minutes in my kitchen. I mix two eggs with a splash of milk in a Corning Ware bowl and microwave for two minutes. The precooked bacon gets 15 seconds in the microwave. The red on the eggs is Heinz Ketchup.

Breakfast				Total	4.04
Item	Package Price	Items/Ounces per package	Cost per item	Items/Ounces per serving	Cost per serving
Bacon	14.79	50	0.30	2.0	0.59
Butter	3.99	8	0.50	0.1	0.05
Catsup	4.99	32	0.16	0.2	0.03
Coffee	43.98	100	0.44	2.0	0.88
Eggs	6.89	12	0.57	2.0	1.15
Mandarin Oranges	5.49	48	0.11	4.0	0.46
Milk	4.02	64	0.06	6.0	0.38
Toast	8.00	16	0.50	1.0	0.50

The Corning Ware gets very hot in the microwave. This has the advantage of keeping your food hot for a bit. Microwave safe dishes that don't get hot start sucking the heat out of your food as soon as it starts getting warm.

Update a few minutes later fixed error in spreadsheet.

Houseless

Comment from MOTUS A. D.

 MajorKong64 (dinna fash)

So yesterday, I wanted to take a ride to a popular place near here. I was unaware how popular it was until we arrived. For several years, people have been living off grid, buying travel trailers instead. Our site, Travel Trailer living has over 12k members.

it is easy to do the math. My truck and trailer cost about 60k. I can ditch our housing costs, 3k property tax, house payment 1000 a mo, homeowners ins 1000 a year, city tax 1500 a year. This saves me 1500 a month.

Thus I pay for the truck and trailer in 3 years and actually own something. Here are pictures of all the people who said screw it. They live here for 20 a month, free water, solar for electricity, portable tanks to dump gray and black water. Free dumpsters.

Imperial Dam long term parking area.




maybe this is the future once the aristocracy owns everything

Update: Travel Trailer living website.

Imperial Dam Long Term Parking

Cuban Rum

Havana Club Rum

Guy I used to work with showed up at lunch today and told us this story about the time he went to Cuba ten, maybe twenty years ago. He went with a Cuban friend of his who wanted him to bring back some Cuban rum as it was really cheap, like $7 for a liter. So he stopped at the duty free shop and picked up a couple of liters and they wrapped them all up in official looking red tape and he got on the plane. He got to Miami and his flight to Dallas was delayed so much that he when he got to Dallas he found his flight to Portland had already left. The airline offered to put him up in a hotel, but what's he going to do with these two bottles of liquor? This was before the TSA, so he had just carried them on the plane in Havana. He didn't have any checked luggage, so he was kind of in a dilemma. If he left the airport, they wouldn't let him bring the liquor back in, so he's desperately trying to figure out what to do. He could buy a suitcase and send them as checked luggage, but that would have meant paying the airline $30 to check a bag, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. He asks the guy at the airline counter and he asks the cashier at the knick-knack store, but they can't help him. Then he spots the chapel. There is nobody there and there is a cupboard in the back of the room, so he stashes the bottles there. He spends the night in the hotel and when he returns the next day he finds that the bottles are still there, so he picks them up and is on his way.

As I was writing this, I realized that the only way that this story makes any sense is if he didn't leave the secure area of the airport in Miami. He would have had to clear customs there, but he might not have left the secure area. But it's also weird that Cuban security would let him on the airplane with two bottles of hooch, and he was concerned that American security wouldn't.

Severance — Apple TV Series

Severance — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

Very creepy, very weird. On the inside, we have a sterile corporate environment with just a few people, endless hallways and apparently meaningless tasks. On the outside the world is normal. Problem is that people who have elected to be severed have no memory of the other side. Once inside, their only memories are of life on the inside. When they leave, a switch is thrown in their brain and now their only memories are of their life on the outside. Naturally, one guy has managed to reverse his severance and now we've got trouble.

Now that I think about it, most jobs require you to keep your work life and your private life separate, so this show is just pushing that idea to the extreme. Along with this we have all the worst aspects of corporate life, rewards that are less than trivial, opaque procedures, concealment of basic information behind alleged concerns for 'privacy', innocuous punishments that are apparently designed to drive people mad. Some of the characters thrive in this environment, others tolerate it, but Helly hates it and gets crosswise immediately.

Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette are the actor's names I recognize. Britt Lower is a lovely woman.

Main cast:

Actor	Surname	Character	Surname	Severed	Lumon Employee	MDR Dept.	Notes
Adam	Scott	Mark	Scout	X	X	X	former history professor
Zach	Cherry	Dylan	George	X	X	X	enjoys company perks.
Britt	Lower	Helly	R.	X	X	X	rebellious
Tramell	Tillman	Seth	Milchick		X		Deputy Manager of the severed floor
Jen	Tullock	Devon	Scout-Hale				Mark's sister and Ricken's wife
Dichen	Lachman	Ms.	Casey		X		wellness counselor
Michael	Chernus	Ricken	Hale				author and Devon's husband
John	Turturro	Irving	Bailiff	X	X	X	stickler for company policy
Christopher	Walken	Burt	Goodman	X	X		head of Optics and Design (O&D)
Patricia	Arquette	Harmony	Cobel		X		Manager of the severed floor, outside of work uses the false identity of "Mrs. Selvig" and is Mark's next-door neighbor.

MDR is the Macrodata Refinement department

Severed employees only use the first letter of their last names when on the inside.

Spreadsheet here.

The SeveranceWiki cast list has over 100 entries.

Creepy atmospheric Soundtrack by Theodore Shapiro. No tunes as such.

Season 1 has 9 episodes about 50 minutes each. There is a second season.

Fridge

KATSEYE for FLAUNT Magazine 2025 - Lara

Our brand new Chinese Insignia mini fridge is on the fritz. To assuage my misery, I looked for a jigsaw puzzle of a refrigerator and this pile of nonsense showed up, so naturally I had to put it together. It's a cover for a magazine. Somehow this ridiculous scene and my stupid fridge seem to suit each other.

Asocial

Thought maybe I invented a new word, but no, asocial is in the dictionary. Don't think I've ever heard it used, what I do hear is introvert. I take introvert to mean inwardly focused, and most non-asocial people take that to mean the opposite of extrovert, which is what they are. But I expect that social people, by and large, cannot imagine that a person would be interested in anything besides other people, and since most people, well, at least all the people they know, are sociable, it follows that asocial people are in the minority and might be actual freaks. Weirdos, malcontents, and probably troublemakers to boot.

There is a cult of Do-It-Yourselfers, people who pride themselves on being able to cope with most any kind of mechanical problem that dares to make its presence known. But capitalism has so perfected the creation of mechanical do-dads, you can now live your life without knowing anything about how things work. Of course it's always been possible to do that, you just needed a lot more money. Now you can do it for a relative pittance, well, if you live in an apartment in the big city. 'Course that compartment is going to cost a pretty penny, but with all the money you save on things like repairs and entertainment, it's still very possible for many people. And by saving money on entertainment, I mean digital entertainment is dirt cheap. Any kind of real life entertainment like driving a car, going to concerts, flying to Europe, or even just hiking in the woods, is going to take real money, so you can judge yourself on the social pecking order by how much you can afford to blow on entertainment. Not how much you spend, but how much you can afford, because it is very easy to spend more than you can afford. Don't do that. That is the road to ruination.

Being able to fix broken mechanical do-dads is all very well, but you are never going to get very far doing everything yourself. All our great mechanical contraptions (trains, cars, airplanes) were produced by large groups of people working together. Near as I can tell, the mechanically inept greatly outnumber the mechanically adept, so when you have a large number of people gathered together, most of those people are going to be incompetent, so the task of the leader is to design a multitude of simple jobs that these friendly nitwits can do. Maybe nitwits isn't a very nice label to apply to these people, but most everyone is a nitwit about something. Those who are mechanically adept are sometimes socially inept, and when they commit a faux pas than any right brained (left brained? I can never remember. I mean what possible use is that kind of information?) individual could see was the wrong thing to do, they are also likely to be called nitwits.

There are two ways to make money. You can sell a product or service and if you are successful you could make a large amount of money. The other way is to squeeze the peasants. That doesn't actually work so well, you can't get blood from a turnip, so what you do is you squeeze everyone, so you can say it is 'fair', but you're actually getting most of the money from the big capitalists. Now you've got this big stream of money coming, and make no mistake, it's big, it's like a firehose of money, what are you going to do with it? Well, a big chunk is going to old folks (like me) for Social Security and Medicare and that's pretty much fixed, The rest of it is up for grabs, and that's what Congress is all about. With so much money going through the government, it isn't very difficult to divert a garden hose size stream to any kind of pet project.

So Mamdani won the election for Mayor of New York City. All the press I''ve seen is predicting gloom and doom for New York. I don't think it's going to make any difference. Of course, I'm three thousand miles away, I probably wouldn't notice if New York fell into the sea. In any case, New York is too established. If the bureaucracy is not totally integrated (communication and business wise), the underground good-ol-boy / girl network surely is. 

So what we have here is a guy who is a social butterfly has talked his way into the top position of the New York City Government Mafia. I don't know what he is going to do, but whatever it is, it going entail more of the tax stream going into his, and his cronies pockets. I mean, that's the whole point. Now if you can dress is up and sell it to the peasants, and you can see he knows how to do that, you're golden.

The big shots who are making bundles in the financial markets don't care. So what if your taxes go up by a zillion when you've just make ten zillion? Yes, the streets are littered with little people, but you never go out, all your financial work is done on line.

Broken Ceramic Plate

Chipped Glass Microwave Plate

I was putting a plate in the microwave oven and I was a bit careless and the edge of the plate collided with the glass plate inside the microwave and a biggish chip got knocked out of the plate.

The apparently undamaged plate

Yes, I know you can see the crack at the top, but in real life the crack is invisible. This is actually the broken plate, I have just slid the two halves together.

The plate seemed undamaged, so when I was done eating the plate went in the dishwasher.

Plate when it came out of the dishwasher

We have several identical plates. I can't be sure it was the same plate that collided with the plate in the microwave, but you know it is.

Chip off the microwave plate

I kept the chip off the microwave plate thinking I might be able to glue it back on, but what kind of glue can survive being microwaved?

So I left the chip of glass sitting on my desk. The next morning I come downstairs and I see what looks like a cellophane candy wrapper on my desk so I pick it up to throw it away and the stupid thing cut me and caused me to bleed all over my electric bill. Stupid piece of glass. Can't be my fault, could it?

The $2 Jeep

The $2 Jeep... How Bad Can It Be?
Low Buck Garage

Vunderbar! Reminds me of my previous life as a mechanic in Houston. Definitely improved my attitude this morning. Low Buck Garage has appeared here before.

Tide

Locked up Laundry Detergent

Stopped by Freddies yesterday and I came across this bank of locked glass cabinets. And what, pray tell, are the precious items that are imprisoned here? Laundry detergent. Can somebody explain why that is? It's not like this is a high crime area, I'm pretty sure nothing else is locked up like this. Kind of nuts.

Save It

StorQuest Self Storage

Save it! It's valuable! has been my sarcastic response any time there is a question about whether we should save some bit of paper that the has potential to be valuable, like receipts, instruction manuals or warranty cards. Problem with that approach is you end up with a heap of papers, most of which are absolutely worthless. Taking the time to evaluate whether a piece of paper really has any value requires thinking, and thinking about stuff that doesn't interest you is work. So the piece of paper gets added to the heap.

I suspect that saving stuff is a common affliction. Just look at the proliferation of storage lockers. These things are turning into giant compounds. I have enough stuff that renting a storage locker and moving some of that stuff into it would give me a little more room in my house. But you know what would happen: I would just accumulate more stuff and pretty soon I would be back to thinking I could use a little more storage space. However, I have a severe dislike for paying rent. It's bad enough paying property taxes, but at least I get something for them. 

The problem I have is that I am an American and stuff accumulates. In order to avoid becoming a hoarder, you have to diligently and repeatedly purge your house of excess stuff. What a pain. The alternative is dying a tabloid worthy death when a pile of papers (valuable! Save it!) topples over on top of you and you suffocate. 

My wife and I both work pretty diligently at getting rid of stuff we don't use. I have half a dozen items that I think might we worth enough to make posting them on Ebay worthwhile, but they've been sitting there for at least a month and I haven't made a single move in that direction. I might make enough to pay for lunch for a week, so I should do it. Of course, the longer I wait, the higher the price will go (because of inflation), but any dollars I do get will also be worth less (because of inflation), so that's basically a wash. More likely the stuff will be worth less because it is getting older by the day.

Then I got a notice from Google that my Google Drive was 3/4 full, and would I like to rent some more space? No thank you, but Google gives you 15 gigabytes. What all have I stored in there that's taking up ten gigabytes of space? So I started taking a look. I've been dumping files in there for 15 years, and there are a bunch. There are hundreds of rinky dink little spreadsheets, but these are only a few kilobytes each. There are some documents, maybe hundreds, but still, only a few kilobytes each. I suspect I started storing photos there. I probably ought to hook up my big hard drive and work on getting all my photos loaded onto it.

If I turn my head I can see my bookcase. It's mostly been taken over with medicine and stuff. There is only a handful of books and maybe one shelf's worth of 3 ring notebooks. My first desk when we moved to Oregon was a big old Steelcase unit I bought used. It had three file drawers, and I filled them with valuable papers. But I eventually found (like after 20 years) that I was only using a small subsection of one drawer. The rest were just sitting there, turning to dust. Something happened that caused a major reorganization and the Steelcase desk was replaced by a spare, wood veneer table from somewhere, Dania maybe? So a bunch of paper went to the recycler and a bunch went in the shredder. That was a pain. I remember that - sitting there patiently feeding a thousand sheets of paper into the shredder two or three at a time. The shredder earned it's pay that day.

Anyway, I probably ought to look in those notebooks. Most haven't been opened for years.

Smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

I have atrial fibrillation (commonly called afib). My heart beat is irregular and sometimes very fast. That's what put me in the hospital 20 years ago. They gave me some drugs and my heart slowed down, but it's still irregular. I'm still taking the drugs. Seems like I am getting worn out more easily these days. It could just be because I am getting old, but rumor has it that some of these drugs might be slowing me down. I wanted to see if my heart was always being flaky, or whether it might sometimes revert to a normal rhythm, so I looked at heart monitors. I was looking for one that could record my heart beat for extended periods, but the more I looked, the less I found. Lots of Smartwatches offer heartrate monitoring, but most of them are for people with normal heart rhythms, you know, exercise fanatics. This Samsung watch will record a rudimentary electro-cardiogram which is step up from simply counting the number of beats. It was only $70, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Samsung 30 second ECG

The watch makes the recording, sends it as a PDF to my Samsung smartphone via Bluetooth, I 'share' it via email but don't send it. Now the mail is in my gmail drafts folder. Open this message on my desktop, download the file to my computer. Open the file, take a screenshot, edit it to remove the extraneous noise and then insert it in this blog post.

I have made a half a dozen recordings and they all show an irregular heartbeat.

Then I come across this cool video on YouTube:

Your Smartwatch is even more incredible than you think
Steve Mould

Passwords

Baby Blues - Passwords

This sounds like our house when my wife and I are trying to navigate medical / insurance websites. The problem with using phrases is remembering the phrase exactly. Was it 'for the rest of your lives' or 'forever'? And then there are the password managers offering to save your password for you. Are they any more reliable than websites that offer to 'Remember me'? Shit, any seriously motivated hacker can steal everything on your computer including your passwords. And why do we have passwords on medical websites anyway? Why? Because of HIPAA, that's why:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 establishes federal standards protecting sensitive health information from disclosure without patient's consent. - CDC

There must be some people out there who want to keep their medical records confidential, but I ain't one of them, and I don't understand this overarching desire for privacy. I suppose if you are operating in a contentious environment with people who will use any means, fair or foul, to trip you up or bring you down, you could want your medical records secure. Or you might just be paranoid. In the past I have just removed myself from those situations, but that may not always be feasible.

Quote of the Day

I watched All the President's Men again this weekend. I was thinking to myself that we need reporters like Woodward and Bernstein now but then I realised that we already know all about the misdeeds and the lies but it doesn't seem to matter these days. - Liz

Tweakers

Fentanyl pills on the streets on Portland, where such doses of the great annihilator cost as little as $1 apiece. (Credit: Tara Faul)

IAman is looking to move to Bingen, Washington. Bingen is about 60 miles east of Portland across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon.

The main reason for the move is our neighborhood is the drug / murder epicenter.  3 middle aged good Samaritans murdered in last few months. 

This article captures the bad stuff that I see. 

Oregon’s Drug Apocalypse - Matt Thompson

The linked story is pretty horrofic.

Previous posts about IAman's current residence:

• Witness to the end of Civilization
• The Borg Have Landed

Fun with doctors and plumbing

Yesterday morning I went to see Dr. Schmidt, the urologist. Mom went with me. He listens to my tale of woe and prescribes Oxybutinin. I'm already taking Tamsulosin to cope with an enlarged prostate gland. When the prostate gets enlarged it becomes more difficult for it to relax enough to let urine flow, so the bladder, a muscular organ, has to work harder to push the urine out. The Tamsulosin lets the prostate relax so the bladder doesn't have to work so hard. Near as I can tell, after a long period of having to deal with the recalcitrant prostate, the bladder gets to be in a state of constant tension. So now I've got Oxybutinin which is supposed to relax the bladder. I took this once before, about a year ago, for a month, and it helped, but now the same problems have returned, so it looks like I will be adding one more drug to the handful of pills I take every day.

Get done with all that and doc asks me if I want a prostate exam, cancer screening you know, and mom says yes. I'm pretty sure I had one of these a year ago, but with the two of them ganging up on me I submit. It's annoying and unpleasant, but it only takes a few seconds and I should be good for a couple of years. I suspect the doc offered to do it because he knows that medicare will pay him $25 for the exam and it will only take a minute. $25 for a minute works out to $1500 an hour, which is pretty good pay in anybody's book.

After 30 years the stopper in the sink in the upstairs hall bathroom bit the big one. Found one on Amazon for $5 and had it delivered. In the drawing above, note how the Pivot rod goes through a little ring at the bottom of the stopper. The ring had broken loose from the stopper but was still on the Pivot rod. The Pivot rod goes through a hole in the side of the drain pipe and is held in place with a nut. Unscrewing the nut allows the Pivot rod to be removed, but when you do that the ring is going to fall off into the P-trap. If might get flushed down the pipe and out the sewer, but it might just hang around there collecting other bits of trash and eventually block the trap. 

P-trap

Best to get it out. Normally, the P-trap can be easily removed, but because our custom cabinets have drawers underneath, there is a shelf directly under the P-trap, so in order to remove it I had to unscrew the down pipe that contained the Pivot rod access hole, which slid into the P-trap and allowed me to pull the whole thing out. Of course water pours out when you open the P-trap, but my brain was operating so I had an old towel on hand to mop up the spill. The back of the shelf had water stains that appeared to come from the shut off valves, but the valves were dry, so I just put everything back together. 

I'm working blind getting the Pivot rod into the hole in the new stopper, but must have I got it right  one because it's working.

This morning we drove out to North Plains to let the shutter man into our old neighbor's new house. They decamped for Palm Desert, and the shutters hadn't yet made it to shutter man, so we got to be the good neighbors. The shutter man got the worst of it. We had a ten minute drive from our house, but he had an hour and a half drive from Oregon City. Morning rush hour through some of the most congested highways. Normally that drive would take half that time.

We stopped at McDonalds and got a couple of breakfast burritos and coffees and it cost like $10. You order from a big flat-panel touch screen. Tap, tap, tap, tappity tap, tap, tap. Every item takes at least 3 taps, and final check out takes several more. It seemed a bit ridiculous, but we got through it. The only people we saw was one person behind the counter, one person mopping the floor and the person who delivered our order to our table. I don't know if I like this, but the food was fine and the price was excellent.

Now we head over to Providence Hospital on the east side where the striking nurses are out in full force. The parking garage was fuller than usual today. We parked on level F and took the elevator down. Sign by the elevator says level D for the skybridge, level C for walkway to main entrance. Get down to level C and find we have to take the stairs down one more level to get to the street level.

Mom gets checked in and the fire alarm goes off. Very loud and very obnoxious and everyone has to leave the building. Me, fearing the worst, suggests we start walking. I mean, who knows how long we are going to be stuck outside, and it's freezing. Maybe we can find a coffee shop. We walk two blocks and indeed we find a Starbucks where we order a couple cups of coffee and a couple of the smallest scones in the world for $15. Meanwhile, mom gets a message from her doctor in the same building, so she calls her back and finds that the fire drill is over and we can go back inside. Seems that was the third fire drill this morning, and it's only ten o'clock. If we hadn't gone to Starbucks we would still be standing outside, freezing, because god hates us.

The dexascan reports that mom's bone density has gone up, which is good. It looks like that her expensive personal training regimen is paying off.

I stop in the bathroom on our way out. I'm sitting on the toilet thinking I ought to send a note Providence to compliment the janitor for keeping the restroom so clean. Then I lean over, the toliet flushes and squirts me in the butt. Dang it! Apparently I leaned over far enough to trigger the automatic flush trigger. Bah. 

Wash my hands (at the sink) and reach for a towel. There is an automatic, wave-at-me towel dispenser. It  rolls out six inches of paper towel. Wave again and I now I have two pieces of paper towel, each six inches long, barely enough to qualify as one sheet. Try the other dispenser. It rolls out a nice long sheet, at least fifteen inches. So not all automatic gadgets are junk.

Back home we head to Walgreens to pick up my drugs. It looks like there are half a dozen spaces in the parking lot, but they're all allocated for special people. There is the requisite handicapped double spot, a spot to pick up online orders and two spots to charge your electric car. Is there an ordinary empty parking spot? Oh yes, there is! One. Bueno.

We go inside, I go to the pharmacy to pick up my drugs. They have some, but not the whole order. Serrrano tells me that the rest will be here this afternoon. I know his name is Serrano because he has it written in big letters on his forearm and when I asked him about it he told me.

I'm done and go look for mom. She's waiting in line to buy toothpaste. The only reason we're buying toothpaste here is because because Medicare or our health insurance gives us $25 a month to spend on stuff, presumably health related. Shoot, if you're gonna give me money, I'll take it. You'd have to be in pretty bad shape to need money for toothpaste, but I imagine there are scads of people who have been driven into the ground by effing Biden and his commie cohorts. The line is long, and I'm gonna have to come back anyway, so we head home, eat tuna salad for lunch and write this story.

Ship Spotting

Terrible picture of MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

Driving up Germantown Road from St. John a couple of days ago I noticed a US Navy ship and I thought I'd like to get a photo of that ship. Problem with Germantown Road is that there are very few places where you can pull off the road, and it's busy enough that I didn't want to just stop in the middle of the road. Now if I had a proper camera, I could probably have got a shot of the ship just by pointing my camera out the window and pressing the go button. 

Sidebar rant: But I don't have a proper camera, instead I have a fancy-schmancy smartphone. It takes great pictures, much better than my last smartphone, or maybe I've just subliminally modified my phone handling so I am now compatible with the smartphone's preferred method of behavior. Anyway, taking a picture with a smart phone requires, multiple fingers, multiple touches and the patience of a saint. For someone who grew up with mechanical switches that reacted instantly, all these new-fangled electronic gizmos with their multiple milli-second delays are effing bullshit.

Today I thought I would make an effort to try and take a picture of this ship. First I took off driving directly towards the ship. Big fail. No roads come anywhere near the docks. Most of the land is given over to parking lots for imported cars, it's all private industrial stuff, no ger-finger-pokin-tourists wanted.

Cross the St. Johns bridge and head up US Highway 30. Not a tourist friendly area. Cliffs on the south side of the road and tank farms on the north side. Took the first photo from an entrance to one of these tank farms.

Another terrible picture of MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

Took this from another pull-out a little farther up the road. Not looking good here. Turned around and headed back toward the bridge and found a side road so I pulled over.

NW Hoge Ave

And, oh look, there's stairs going up the hill, maybe I'll get high enough I can get a decent shot. The stairs are something else.

Stout, industrial strength stairs

that go way up the hillside

but ultimately don't go anywhere.

Seriously long stairs that got me high enough up to get the next photo

MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

VesselFinder reports the MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are both in Portland. I only saw the one ship. Looking at Wikipedia's photos, they appear to be identical. I don't know whether the report showing that both MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are in Portland is in error, or the Navy obfuscating their ship's locations, or whether I'm blind and the ships are here.

USNS Bob Hope has appeared here before.

Random Thoughts - High Rise Life

I didn't go outside Monday. Spent the whole in the house. Probably happens two or three times a week. I go to downtown Portland sometimes, and I'm driving around amongst all these high rises and there are hardly any people out walking around. Now it could be that everyone is at work and only unemployed slackers like myself are out wandering around, but it just feels like there ought to be more people out and about. But then it occured to me: maybe they just stay inside all the time. You can get everything you need delivered, you've got all the entertainment you could want coming to you over a wire, and if you get bored with that you have a great view out your window. Maybe they are there, inside, perfectly content.

So there you have two plausible, innocent explanations, but it doesn't take much to imagine more sinister solutions. Maybe the buildings are friggin' empty. All of the condos were sold to people, but they don't live there, they live somewhere else, or maybe they don't live anywhere, they just travel constantly and just drop in to visit occasionally. Or maybe there are people in those apartments, but the door is locked and they can't leave. I mean all these high rises could be prisons and who would ever know? Pretty sure you can't get in without permission from a resident, and inmates can't give permission.

Life in a high rise has no appeal for me. Long waits for the elevator. Just going outside is an expedition. There is the view and that can be entertaining for a while. We bought a house up in the West Hills with the intention of moving there. Didn't pan out. Anyway, it had a great view, but after I had seen it a dozen times it kind of lost its attraction. I like my backyard more better.

Close Call

Driving north on Jackson School Road this morning, I see a man jogging on the sidewalk. He is also heading north and he is on the portion of the sidewalk closest to the road. You might think he is going the wrong way if the normal rule of 'keep right' applies, but this sidewalk is special. The left lane, if you can consider that sidewalks have lanes, is for bicycles and the other one or two lanes are for people walking.  Jogging is not walking, so you might consider jogging in the bike lane the correct choice.

As I catch up to the jogger, he encounters a woman walking a couple of dogs and one of the dogs takes exception to the jogger and makes a lunge toward him. Was the dog just trying to say hello, or was he trying to take a bite out of him? I couldn't say. I only saw this for a split second, long enough to see the startled jogger take a step toward the road. If he had taken two steps we would have collided.

I did not even think about braking until I was past them and there was no bang or bump, so I just drove on. Disturbing to say the least.

Happy Birthday to Me

Faucet Aerator Thread Gauge

Wednesday July 3 went to Cafe Nell for lunch. Had an order of huevos rancheros, my favorite dish there. It's kind of a foo-foo place, but I've gotten old and slow so I enjoy it. Stopped at older son's compartment and his kitchen faucet had gotten kind of wonky, so we walked half a mile over to Ace Hardware where they had a rack of about hundred different aerators. They also had a thread sizing gauge very similar to the one shown above. I swear every one of those threads was something demented. One was like 55/64" by 27 threads per inch. The Amazon blurb reads: "Identify thread pitch & diameter for 20 of the most common aerator sizes from 1/4-18 to 15/16-27". I think ours ended up being something like 15/16" by 23. It took a while to sort through the selection but we eventually found one. $10. I cracked wise that back in the day they probably cost 15 cents, and it turns out I was about right:

Curent Price of Gold	$2,300.00
Price in 1970	$35.00
Ratio	65.71
Price of Aerator	$10.00
Equivalent 1970 price	$0.15

So I had a nice meal, went for a walk, explored the arcane world of kitchen faucet threads, fixed something and got to complain about the gummint. All in all a pretty nice day.