Home Improvement, the series...

 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..?

Just like we've been for the past half-dozen years, We the non-insane People sit here, mesmerized like a mouse before a cobra, watching the Worst People in the Nation Fuck Around, desperately hoping that our "fellow citizens" don't make us Find Out whilst knowing full well that most of those gomers are clueless, credulous nitwits who eat up the public press' Both Sides Bullshit. 

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?

Dunnage

 

So.

Turns out that the "silence" of the night, the cease-fireworks I mentioned yesterday?

Had nothing to do either with the City rules or the fire-safety inclinations of the good people of Portland, but, just like in the movies, the "it's quiet...too quiet" silence before the French and Indians attack.

Last night the first ranging shots were fired before sundown, and by full dark the streets were exploding with all the illegal-goodness I thought the City had shut down. 

Mortars, Roman candles, fire fountains...all the bounty of mainland China was bursting in air to celebrate the 247th birthday of the Land of the Free.

Which, by the way, I remarked only through the front windows. It was a hot sultry night, and I wasn't arsed enough to go sit out in the heat and mosquitoes to watch the fire-for-effect. It was pretty ferocious, though, as the traditional scattering of dunnage at the intersection of North McKenna and Amherst Streets testifies.

Which kind of got me thinking about the whole "why-do-I-hesitate-to-wave-the-flag" thing I also wrote yesterday.

Because I opened up the phone today to read something about how some Republican nitwit had lead off his Fourth paean to Ammurica with a made-up Patrick Henry quote about how we owe our independence to Christians.

"America is a Christian nation".

How many times have you read some "conservative" saying or writing that?

By which they mean that if you're NOT "Christian" (or something their idea of "Christian" hates, like queer or poor or Samaritan or liberal or something...) you're not really "American".

Which is, well, just shitty.

The entire promise of this country is based on an idea, not a religion or a language or a kind of food or clothing. The idea of "equal justice under law"; that if you believe in and defend the rights of all your fellow citizens who are equally committed to the ideals of the nation as expressed in the founding documents then you ARE an American.

So you can be an atheist-American, or an otaku-American, or a gay-, lesbian-, liberal-, conservative-, Rule34-American. If you buy the ideals expressed in things like the Declaration and the Constitution, you're an American.

Period.

That's something pretty awesome, when you stop to think about it.

There are people who have lived in Japan for generations and still aren't considered "Japanese" by the majority of Japanese.

There are people who have lived in Great Britain, or Poland, or Argentina who aren't considered, or treated, as true citizens of those nations, because they look or speak or act "differently" from the Platonic Ideal of a Briton or a Pole or an Argentine that's fixed in the public mind.

But the promise of the United States - and I say "promise", mind, not "reality" - is that if you believe in the promise you can be American.

The Founders made sure of that by making sure they didn't write religion in to those promises.

Too many of their ancestors had beat cheeks out of Britain because of the ugly remnants of the 16th and 17th Century Wars of Religion had made their kinds of "Christianity" (or lack of Christianity) something between rebellion and treason.

And they'd seen what the unholy marriage of political power and religious sectarianism had done to both politics and religion.

It was bad. 

For both.

So yes; a hell of a lot of the people who were responsible for the design of this country were Christians.

But no; they explicitly designed the country to include all blends and shades of belief - including no belief at all - by making religion a personal, not a political, choice.

Which leads me back to yesterday.

It seems to me that we are on the cusp of having to make a hard choice, a choice foisted upon us by people like the Republican nitwit cited above (Josh Hawley? Sound like the sort of Christopathic fathead who would say something like that).

We the People can choose to become the nation our Constitution promises us we can be; a nation open to all who believe in those promises.

Or we can become the nation people like Josh Hawley promise us; a nation open only to those who believe and act like they do.

I know which nation would make me proud.

Do We the People?

Of that, I am honestly unsure.

When you're unsure that your own country truly believes, and wants to make true, the promises that you love about that country?

It's hard to be vigorous about waving its flag.

All you can do is police up the dunnage.

And hope.

Independence Day 2023

 I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.

For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.

I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".

I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).

But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today. 

And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.

And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.

I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.

It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.

Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.

So. Happy Birthday, US. 

May you always be right. 

And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.

(And Charlie Pierce says all the same things, and better, than I just did. Worth a read.)

As for me?

Well. Couple of things.

Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.

I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing. 

Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.

Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...

So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.

We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.

I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.

Well.

Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.

We filed.

Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.

Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.

Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.

So. Good.

Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.

Oh! Almost forgot this.

So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.

But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.

Last night?

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.

So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?

Given my general opinion of We the People?

My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?

So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.