Depressed

Yesterday, I was within four days of finishing our sunroom addition. All that was left was the second coat of primer, two coats of final color and varnishing the door at molding. Now, this project started in November of 2008 when, to my everlasting shame, we let a salesman pressure us into signing a contract. Since then, very little has gone right with this project.

The whole thing was subject to us refinancing our existing mortgage. Well, that took about five and one-half months. We finally got our check the first week of May, 2009, and we promptly sent Tri-state Building Specialties a big check. They didn’t wander back until late September. Between October and December, they got about 80% of the room built, and then they went away again for four months or so.

Over that winter, we discovered that we had a couple leaks. When they finally came back, we told them about the leaks and they supposedly fixed them. By June of last year, they had pretty much finished. And I had paid them about 98% of what was owed on the job. I told them that I would give them the final check after the first hard rain so I could be sure that the leaks were fixed. They took the power cord to the heat pump to hold as hostage.

Sure enough, the first hard rain came, and the leaks were still there. So, I went out and bought another power cord (screw them!), and hired another contractor to deal with the leaks. Well, after shelling out more money than I owed Tri-state to get the leaks fixed, we thought we were good. Of course, by this time it was late fall of 2010. We were now two years into the project.

Now, Tri-state only builds the shell. All finish work is up to the homeowner. It took a little time, but I got Judy to go on a couple of shopping trips to pick out things like the slate floor tiles and to begin the search for sconces.

This is all so depressing.

To cut to the chase, it took us all last winter to do things like decide on the final color we wanted for the back wall and what kind of door we were going to put in. (Originally, we weren’t going to have a door, but the rain on the plastic roof is so loud that doors are a necessity.). I had to mud in the rough work the electricians did in installing the receptacles for the lighting in the room which, I admit, took a long time. However, we also found that to use that room in the winter meant we had to run the heat pump almost 24/7 and that just is not economically feasible for us right now! So, it didn’t matter that we had plastic sheeting in the archway leading out to the room all last winter.

The good news was that it appeared that the leaks were dealt with. We got through all the storms of winter without any further signs of leakage. Finally, last week after, now, two and one-half years of this project, I put the first coat of primer on the wall. And that brought out all the little imperfections in the spackling. So, I think I got most of them done, and yesterday, while it was raining very hard outside, I started putting the second coat of primer on the wall. And that was when I saw the signs of the leak.

So, now, at the least, I have to wait a week (mol) for the drywall to dry out. Then we have to decide whether to go back up on the roof and put a bunch more roofing tar in that corner where the sunroom roof and the main roof meet, or to bite the bullet and have the whole house reroofed. I was hoping not to have to deal with that, but it is beginning to look like a probability.

(Fill in a whole bunch of 4-letter words right about here…)

Ah spring...

I love my house! Here I am, out by the barbie on a cool spring night cooking pork chops and blogging on the Internet in between ministering to the chops. We went out and spent over $400 on stuff for the house at the Toy Store (otherwise known as Home Depot). Got all the molding for the french doors and three sconces for the wall. We also got a new faucet for the kitchen, but I digress. I've got to call our landscaper (also know as the lawn mowers) to arrange a meeting before his guys show up to do the clean out and lay the sod in the backyard. Just want to be sure we are all on the same page.

In preparation for their arrival with the sod, I place the stones for the stone border along the north boundary garden. I will wait until the sod is in before I trench and place the stones in their permanent homes.

OK, that's all I had on my mind tonight. Tomorrow I'll post something nasty about the Republicans and how they obviously hate the founding ideals of this nation.

Shutting down the government

The Republicans are making a lot of noise about this, but the truth is that they have another agenda entirely. Their goal is to subvert the democracy we have in favor of a plutocracy. They want the rich and powerful to rule and for the rest of us to serve that ruling class. That is why there has been the intense war on the middle class these past thirty years or so.

The current budget crisis is a case in point. Shutting down the government primarily affects those of us on the middle and lower rungs of the economic ladder. If the Republicans really had our best interests at heart, then they would be insisting the taxes on the rich must increase at the same time spending is cut. That is the only way the budget is going to be balanced. And, by the way, it has conclusively been proven that “trickle down” just plain does not work. The rich use their money to garner more of the stuff which means there is less in the pot for the rest of us.

No, if the Republicans were truly working for the good of the country, they would be addressing the disparity between the Haves and the Have-Nots. Another case in point: look at the move by ATT to acquire T-Mobile. Rather than use the billions of dollars that they (ATT) has in their coffers (in other words, the huge profits they have made on the iPhone) to increase pay to the their non-executive employees, they are trying to buy T-Mobile to make themselves even bigger. This is just wrong, but the Republicans don’t see it.

Some interesting bits from the media

I was browsing through National Geographic Magazine today, and, while there were some fascinating articles, on the whole it was a depressing experience. What NGM is telling us is that we are using up this planet's resources at a prodigious rate. I think or my well loved granddaughter and I worry for her future. What all of this is telling me is that, as a species, we have to get off this planet in big (and I mean in the billions) way within the next one hundred years, or we are going doom both ourselves and our planet.

Then I was skimming through Newsweek, and found this on page 4, "...from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They're sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been." We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no real reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency, we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche. 

Slow morning at the bookstore

Yeah, it’s raining out, and, besides, Sunday morning is usually slow for the first two hours or so. Knowing that it was most likely going to be not busy, I snuck a couple magazines behind the counter to fill in the empty minutes. The first one I opened was March's copy of National Geographic Magazine.

Now, I love National Geographic. It has been a staple in my life since I first learned how to read. But, this issue depressed me. One of the center-piece articles as about the “Age of Man”, and how we are shaping the planet in ways similar to major geologic events such as asteroid strikes. The gist of the story is that we are burning through the planet’s resources at a prodigious rate. There is a three page foldout picture of one of the California oil fields which produces about 32 million barrels of oil per year. The story notes that this is about 9 hours of the world’s consumption of oil.

I think of my well-loved granddaughter, and I seriously worry for her future. I’ll be dead and gone when the oil wells dry up in fifty years (mol), but she, and her children, will have to deal with this reality. So, what all this is telling me is that we, as a species, have to get off this planet in the near future (next 25-30 years) and in a very big way (in the tens…hundreds of millions.) We have to bring the population of the planet back down to a sustainable level and we have only a little time to do ourselves. Otherwise, dear old Mother Nature will do the culling, and, dear and sweet as she is, Mother Nature’s methods tend to be very…painful for both those culled and  those left standing. If we don’t get off this planet, we are dooming both our species and our planet to a very dark future.

Leaving National Geographic, I picked up the current copy of Newsweek and began to read. I Didn’t have to get very far into it before I came across the following, “…from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been.” We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no good reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche.

Re: Aaack…(aka. computer problems)

Well, that post was about 3 months ago. Let me relate how things progressed. First, it seems that Roger didn’t know what he was talking about. The problem was not the drives, the problem was the SATA controller on the motherboard. Now, seeing as how the SATA controller is integral to the motherboard, the way to fix it is simply to buy a new MB. Which I did. However, it was not the exact same model as the one originally in the ASUS case.
While I was waiting for that to arrive, I started poking around with the Dell to see what it's problem was. Turns out, it wasn’t the Dell at all. I have a Belkin port sharing switch which allows me to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between up to four computers. Well, I have a real old computer (still running Win98) and the Dell hooked up to that. I had some idea once about converting the really old Quantex into a Linux box, but that never quite happened. Anyhow, when the power went out, the Belkin box reset to default configuration. The really old Quantex is on port 1, the Dell is on port 2. When I switched ports on the switch from one to two, voila!, the Dell was right there. Oops, operator error.
So, back to the ASUS. I finally got the new MB in towards the end of January. Had it installed and ready to go the first week of February. I got the board pretty much naked. I cannibalized the CPU, memory, fan, video card, original hard drive and the new 500gb drive I had purchased to replace the supposedly bad 2TB drive I had originally got to fix my problem from the old setup. Once I had everything in place, I powered it up and (again) Voila! the ASUS was back. OK, it was not the same computer: it was a new computer in the old box. Still, I now had/have a working computer again.
Except that it glitches a little bit. Sometimes things are very slow and sometimes it freezes up entirely. Now, the slowdown could be because I have installed the full ZoneAlarm package, and  it, in its unswerving pursuit of perfect safety, sometimes does slow things down. The good news is that I am back to having everything working. And it only has taken me three months to reach this point.
Now that I think of it, I’m not sure this is all good. I’ll get back with a conclusion about that after I have had time to think about it.

2 am and I can’t sleep….

So, here I am at 2am with eyes wide open. I have to get up in about 5 hours, and the harder I try to fall asleep, the more it eludes me. Last night was inventory at the store, so I didn’t get to bed until 4am-ish yesterday morning. my circadian rhythms are all screwed up. I have jet lag without having gone anywhere. That and the fact that my granddaughter’s weird mother (they’re divorced so all she is to me now is my granddaughter’s mother) wants to take her out of the Montessori school she is currently going to, courtesy of my wife who is a teacher there, and put her into public school. This is not a good thing. The woman is certifiable. If I were even moderately rich, I would spend huge sums of money on lawyers to bury her in the system. By the time she got her head above water again, the granddaughter would be in college and living her own life.

Alright, maybe the 3 ibuprofen tabs I just took will kick in and I can get a couple hours sleep before facing another day in retail. Some aspects of my life really do suck…

Aaack...

I know...I know...I started something and it stands out there unfinished. But I have a good excuse: the dog ate my homework. No, actually I do have a good excuse: computer problems. First, my 6 month old ASUS stopped recognizing its hard drive. I ordered a new one (a great big 2TB Samsung SATA), but, when it arrived, there was no joy. The ASUS still wouldn't recognize this one either. So, I took drives and computer to Roger at PC Warehouse (Roger has helped me in the past with computer repairs beyond my ability) and he confirmed that the computer was, in fact, OK, and that it was the drives that were not working correctly. Fine.

I sent the Samsung back to the vendor with a request to replace. The replacement arrived and it too would not work. The ASUS BIOS kept giving me varying information about the capacity of the drive. It got it right about 3/4 of the time. But, when I tried to load Windows from the DVD, the setup program steadfastly refused to recognize the drive. So, with tears in my eyes, I sent this one back to Samsung with a request for a drive that actually has been tested and is known to work. When that one comes, I'll put it in the ASUS and determine once and for all whether it is the drive or the computer that is failing on me.

Howver, this is not the end of my problems. While the ASUS is doing a strong imitation of a doorstop, I have fallen back to using my 8 year old (MOL) Dell as my primary computer. Until yesterday. Yesterday, we had a power outage that, for the computer at least, lasted about 5 hours. (I unplugged it when the power failed, then spiked on and failed again. I didn't want surges to damage anything...) So, when I got home from work for dinner and plugged it in...nada! My guess is that the battery backup for the BIOS failed. (I am guessing that because I did get a warning about low battery the last time I turned the machine completely off.)

So, I am now down to my Linux laptop. All my stuff that I had on my Windows machines is locked up on HD's that I cannot get to. This is what I get for ignoring battery warnings and for not having this machine connected to my Windows network.

I'm going to give Roger a call to see if there is anyway he can get the old Dell back up and running. If that is a "yes", maybe by the end of the week, I'll be back in business. Also, the suspect HD reached Samsung yesterday, so, maybe, I'll have my replacement back by the end of the week as well.

Oh yeah, and my desk chair also died. I am not having a good month so far...I will get back to discussing the failings of the Tea Party as soon as I get past all of this...damn.

Tea Party agenda

Thomas Jefferson said, “"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” As proven by the rise of the Tea Party, which gains virtually all of its real economic strength from corporate sources, we haven’t yet succeeded in this goal.

OK, My bad…I didn’t pay as much attention to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin over the past few months as I should have. I especially didn’t pay attention to their so called Contract with America, and I should have. I should have because it is one of the most seditious documents ever foisted upon the American public. Of course, the only reason most Americans did not reject it outright is because these are the same people who have been dumbing down our public education system over the past generation or so. When I went to school in the middle of the 20th Century, we were taught more than just facts. We were taught how to solve problems and how to judge the written word. However, these same folks who now control the strings of the Tea Party are the same folks who have been leading the attack on our public education system over the past generation or so. And now we are seeing the fruits of this dumbing down process: the American public can’t recognize when it is being raped and sold down the river into perpetual servitude.

So, since it appears that there is a significant portion of our electorate which cannot engage in critical thinking when it comes to…politics, I will try to do it for them, and I’ll do it in order. (All of the following is quoted from The Wikipedia article on the Tea Party.)

Number 1: Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does. (82.03%)

Well, this is just plain stupid. First of all, if a law is questioned about its Constitutionality, the correct course of action is to take it to the courts. That is what the Federal Court system is for. Second, if you take a minute (because that is about all the time it takes) to read Section 8 (Powers of Congress) you’ll see that it is broad and vague enough to cover a great deal. For example, take this: “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;” Basically, this gives Congress the right to enact laws that govern any economic activity whose effects cross state borders. That, my Conservative friends, includes activities which pollute the air and any lakes and/or rivers which touch two or more states. More to the point, every prospective law introduced to Congress goes through a vetting process which included a check of its constitutionality. Again, sometimes laws are passed which do not meet the criteria of constitutionality as set forth by the Supreme Court. Which is why we have such a court and which is why laws that don’t pass that Court are quashed. If you have a problem with constitutionality, take it to the court.

Number 2: Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control carbon dioxide emissions by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide. (72.20%)

This has nothing to do with constitutionality, this has to do with the cost of not polluting our environment. The Tea Party is simply fronting from their masters here. Besides, this is a market based method for controlling pollution that does not require government funding. What the Tea Party is proposing is simply another government program designed to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of all the rest of us. Check the link to “cap and trade” above if you need more information on the subject.

Numbers 3 & 4: Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)

Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the Internal Revenue Code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words – the length of the original Constitution. (64.9%)

These two are actually part and parcel of each other. Of course, the agenda here is the eventual repeal of any taxes that impinge upon the wealthy, which would leave the government without the means it needs to govern effectively. That would mean that the rich could begin to carve up this country into their own personal fiefdoms. In which case, just guess who would end up down at the bottom of the socio-economic-political ladder? That’s right, the other 95% of the population, and that, I would guess, pretty much means you, gentle reader. One of the things our Founding Fathers were united in their rejection of was the creation of an aristocratic class. Dump progressive income tax and estate taxes on the great fortunes, and it would take only a generation to create such an aristocracy. Think about it.

OK, we’ll continue this in my next post. In my next post I will look at items 5 through 7.

Amazing stuff

If we are smart, there is a way out of the environmental mess we have gotten ourselves into. I was watching one of the handyman networks...DIY I think, where they were talking about some emerging technologies that (IMHO) hold a great deal of promise. The first thing they showed me was solar panels made pretty much out of the same stuff they make car bumpers out of. Basically, the photo-voltaic cells are embedded in plastic which is then molded into whatever shape is needed. The sheets on the show were made to follow the profile of barrel tiles, but, if you can do that, then you can make 'em fit any roof profile. These things are weatherproof and have and estimated life of at least 35 years. That means the homeowner gets about 25 years of straight profit from his roof.

The other product highlighted was a heat pump designed to remove heat from the fridgid air of our northern latitudes in winter. They showed a unit that could heat/cool and 1800 ft^2 home for about $1000 per year. In other words, this heat pump is a hugely more efficient use of energy. Instead of using fossil fuels to heat one's home, use electricity, preferably created by those solar panels on one's roof, to run this heat pump. Even if you are using electricity produced by burning fossil fuels, it is still more efficient than using that fuel in individual home furnaces.

Now all we have to do is get the Tea Party to see the light.

We're doomed...unless we can keep them the hell out of Washington, D.C.. Come November, do your part by voting AGAINST all Tea Party candidates. I don't care who you vote for as long as you don't vote for anybody endorsed by the Tea Party and/or Sarah Palin.