I don't really have a topic today.
Retirement is interesting in a sort of not-very-interesting way. You tend to find yourself puttering about doing lots of little things that you put off in your previous life that, while often useful and entertaining (ir irking), aren't such of a muchness in terms of "hey, wow, how about this cool thing I did!"
Case in point: downspouts.
This is the south - back - side of the Little House.
FWIW, it's a sort of real oddity.
Back in 1922 when this crib was tossed together I think it was an open porch. There's signs that the back stairs to the then-half-basement were a sort of "storm cellar" kind of hatchway, and my guess is that the area next to that was not enclosed.
Some time in the next hundred years the owners enclosed it...in a very weird way. We think that it was as the same time that the goofy bastards ripped out all the interior closets and built what was a "room of closets" which is the most useless thing I (but, obviously, not they) could imagine.
We ripped open the thing to make the Girl's room, the account of which is at the link above, and very strange we found it.
Anyway...
Years ago we bought a couple of rain barrels at the Portland Nursery down on SE Glisan and installed them at the front and back east corners.
The front barrel still works just fine.
The back one? Not so much. It overflows, and the stormwater has an annoying habit of washing out the soil near the back corner of the house. So after a couple of bad winters it was time to replace the barrel with a downspout.
Off to the local hardware store I went to pick up the various bits needed for the upgrade...only to find that the local store had nothing like what I needed. C'mon, local hardware store! You want me to Shop Local, you gotta make it so I can Get What I Need Local!
Off to the not-local Home Depot, then, to feed the corporate beast and pick up all the pieces so I could slap the sucker up in fifteen minutes like any half-ass decent roofing crew.
And hour later, in the midst of my third full-on profane rant, it occurred to me that the reason that the roofers could slap these suckers up in fifteen minutes is because they're a crew, and have one guy who can hold the pieces in place while another guy nails the straps in.
Well...it's up now; not a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but it should work to keep the dirt around the foundation, which is the point. Yay, retired me.
I then took advantage of the cool morning and did some serious landscaping, largely whacking away at the annoying gardening efforts of our birds and squirrels whose passion it is to scurry across the street with nuts off the big black walnut tree and bury the fuckers over here. They're everywhere, and that reminds me someone buried a nut behind the air conditioning unit that I need to clamber over and dig out.
Bastards.
Oh. This is the other "home improvement project" thing from this past week. Fencepost along the east side, between us and the nice gal who moved in this past year.
The original fence builder didn't bring the concrete footings high enough to protect the posts from damp rot, so after twenty or thirty years or so they're falling over. We really need to replace the whole thing but, barring that, have to swap out the ones that are actually rotted through and here you are.
As for the Rest of The World..?
Half of them believe that the GQP's culture war nonsense has some validity, or, at least, doesn't reveal them as the shrieking lunatics they are.
And what more can I say about that?
Other than is anyone surprised by any of this GQP fucktardry?
The “conservative” ideal has always been dictatorship. Whether it’s the dictatorship of a king, or of a mullah or pope or some other heirophant, or of a party as it was in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or as in our current problem, the only way you’re going to get We the People to go along is with one hand on the whip. Propaganda only gets you so far.
And the only way you can get these sorts of people off your neck is…well, do the math. If they’re willing to rule you with force, how willing will they be to respect your miserable little “vote”?
I know I keep banging this drum. But all these Tales of Trump Terror have a moral, and it’s not “let’s debate whether gay people should exist”.
It’s the same one that ended in a pillar of fire over Dresden.
I don’t like that. I don’t want that. But if it has to be that or a New Gilded Age?
Then fiat justitia ruat caelum.
But that's enough of that.
I've got to go off and find something to finish off the downspout. So let's just hope that Empty G doesn't manage to seize the Department of the Interior in the meantime, right?
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