Peach trees going bezzerk.... how you spell that?

The are a gillion honey bees out there sucking nectar out of huge peach blossoms. The peach trees have been fooled. No fruit this year. They will get frost burned soon and die. Reminds me of life.

Interseting thing about Mexico

Mexico has a dozen well respected Med Schools! shock. Further, Mexican's go to the US for med school and many Americans go to the Mexican Med schools. That got me to thinking about the whole medical education system and why those Caribbean Med Schools exist (remember Grenada). Well there are hundreds of them spread around the world and many Americans that cannot get into, or cannot afford, American Med schools go to these offshore substitutes. Well, one may ask, "can they practice in the Untied States?"....they can and do and inhabit clinics and hospitals all over the nation.

I realize the strong headed ones insist that our horrendous cost of medicine is because we have the best medical care. We don't and haven't for decades. Also here is another one.

We have the most expensive but not the best. I only wonder if the hard liners will take the time to investigate it. My guess is probably not because if they would discover that Healthcare providers are raping us and they won't want to know that... too too modest, they.

long week.

Our dog Dudley passed. We have been expecting it. Hollow feeling when I look over at that place on the floor and see that it's just a place on the floor now. Having the cats helps a lot. Staggering pet ages is a good idea if you have more than one.

Liz had minor surgery last week in St George so that added to it too. She is doing fine.

Trying to work out a way to do some videos and animations for Western Gear's ISO9000 documentation.
If  you go to youtube you will find my pseudonym, "Allen Wrench" and a gillion of them I have uploaded

Wood Stove

We traded in our pellet stove for a little stick burner. Easy to clean and burns nice.  Wood is cheap around here and now I don't have to carry those 40 pound bags of pellets... or unload a pallet of them every year.

    

Born

The day I was born on 10/12/1942. On our planet sixty two thousand pair of human eyes saw light for the first time. Of them only 6% or 3800 were born in the USA. When I think about that I have to reflect on the  94% who WERE NOT born in the United States.

Have you had a good life? A bad life? Are you always bitching about your ugly lot in life? the things that got in the way? the sometimes impoverished other times politically murderous people who were luckier than you... or not as lucky as you?

I am so lucky to be born in the USA on that day. The life I have lived since does not compare to the others who have not had my good fortune. I have lived such a casual, informal, lucky life here. Yes, I've had my Janis Ian times. We all need to reflect on those things now ad then but perhaps we should be a little hesitant to paint it so grossly... in comparison. Should I want gross I would think about my 50% chance of being born in China on that day in that year.

Janis knows how lucky she was no matter the pain or the hate and remorse of her ugly duckling 17. She is appreciative of being born an American. She told me this in fact sometime after this now famous reflection.

 I learned the truth at seventeen that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles who married young and
then retired.
The valentines I never knew, the Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful. At seventeen I learned the truth.
And those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces,
Desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say, "Come dance with me," and murmured vague
obscenities.
It isn't all it seems at seventeen.
A brown-eyed girl in hand-me-downs whose name I never could
pronounce
Said, "Pity, please, the ones who serve; they only get what they deserve.
The rich relationed hometown queen marries into what she needs.
A guarantee of company and haven for the elderly."
Remember those who win the game lose the love they sought to gain.
In debentures of quality and dubious integrity.
Their small-town eyes will gape at you in dull surprise when payment
due
Exceeds accounts received at seventeen.
To those of us who know the pain of valentines that never came,
And those whose names were never called when choosing sides for
basketball.
It was long ago and far away; the world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free to ugly duckling girls like me.
We all play the game and when we dare to cheat ourselves at solitaire.
Inventing lovers on the phone, repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, "Come dance with me," and murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me at seventeen.

Janice knows that only here in the USA would her lyrics mean anything.

 

Janis know how lucky she was, at seventeen, compared to those many more her exact age who were being murdered by  Idi Amin Dada in Uganda. She really does and has said so to me in so many words...

Daylight Stupid Time

Which states have a brain? Arizona is one. There are some others who don't change time for gawd knows what reason. I think I post this every year but every year I want to bitch about it.

You want to knwo what lobbyist do? this from wiki:

 "Clorox (parent of Kingsford Charcoal) and 7-Eleven provided the primary funding for the Daylight Saving Time Coalition behind the 1987 extension to U.S. DST, and both Idaho senators voted for it based on the premise that during DST fast-food restaurants sell more French fries, which are made from Idaho potatoes"



To sell more fries or more charcoal.
We are a nation of robots subservient to lobbyist and Rush Limbaugh.
I don't love my country anymore.. I tolerate it.

Once between jobs

I forget when but to make some money (without the unemployment office knowing) I took a job signing up voters. We (two of us) sat at a table in front of the White Front store pestering people who entered, "are you registered to vote"? It was not a job paid for by any political party. It was some guy who paid me for registering voters demo or repub or indy. I got so much money for each. Never made much but I remember once in awhile taking my daily pay over to the burger joint and buying dinner for the family.

So anyway at the end of the day this guy came by and counted the registrants and paid us per piece. I found out later that he took those to the local registrar but before he did, he copied them and put them into Demo, Pub, and Indy piles and "sold" them to the local politicos. He made money from the county and the Republican Party and the Democratic party. Cute bux, eh?

So this got me to thinking about what some people are calling voter fraud. I mean I could have made up names and addresses and filled the forms out myself. I didn't but I could have. Would that have been voter/election fraud? No that would have been registration fraud. Voter/election fraud is a Federal offense. Making up names and address for registration is not a Federal offense unless somebody named "Micky Mouse" turns up to vote on election day. You can turn in all the fake registrations you want and you have committed no federal crime and have given no one an advantage or disadvantage in an election.

Lots of wailing and gnashing of the teeth by many of the ignorant but absolutely zero cases of election fraud  via the registration process anywhere. Ask the FBI.. just ask them. No election fraud comes by way of registration fraud. NONE!

Am I to make a point about this? no.. I could and you know why I could but this isn't the place for it...  it is just a damned cold hard fact that your news channel wont tell you.

sun snow and sun and snow

We have had days sunny and in the 60s followed by snow followed by sun and 60s followed by...

What a crazy pattern out here this year.

Thank god that USA has had a mild winter. Winter went to Europe this year.

We don't need no stinking Europe

Fuel prices rise worldwide

Not just here. We are not the center of world like some believe. Prices are up in Europe, South America, Australia... every where. It is a world market not just a US market. But adding to this is that fuel consumption in the US has been steadily falling for seven years.
Two reasons for this: people are justnot driving as much and new cars are getting 25% better millage than your old 20th century carriage. The result is that weekly gasoline bill has stayed about the same with the high prices.

But the real interesting news is that oil companies in North America are producing gasoline like we were still driving lots of miles in a gas guzzler. This has led to a surplus of Gasoline, Jet fuel, and especially diesel fuel which is being "exported" from North America as I type. In other words we have a surplus of oil right now.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mkjexus2&f=m

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/02/us-exported-more-gasoline-than-imported-last-year/1#.T1ETdIHLKAg

Ok and one more thing. Oil companies in North America keep pumping at a rate that keep the stock holders happy. They don't slow down pumping when the USA has all it needs. No, they send it too Japan or China or wherever but they never ever stop pumping.

A piece of trivia: the Alaskan pipe-line is encumbered with a law that all of the north slope oil must go directly to US refineries. That would be Seattle, Oakland, and LA/Long Beach. So we are not exporting crude now, we are instead refining it and "then" exporting it. No one wrote a rule about what happened to it after the refinery.

And the drill-baby-drill crowd is simply ignorant. The more we drill the more we will export. Yes, we could say flood the market (not really) and make prices drop "worldwide" but what good will come of that? We will be making oil cheaper for China. The world-people will decide how much petroleum they need and in the process set the world price.

The US and Canada are siting on Saudi Arabia size petroleum reserves and will ultimately be the last to drill and distribute it... along with Russia. That will make us even more powerful. Don't drill now. Drill much much later.

One more thing on Cars. Have you read Car and Driver for the last decade? If not you would be surprised to see how the economics play out with electric vs gasoline cars. You can spend $15k on a new Ford Fiesta that gets 41mpg or you can spend $33k for a Prius hybrid that gets 49mpg. These used to be subsidized by the USA for around $4k tax credit (meaning you will pay $33k for it and get $4k back from Uncle). But not anymore. You simply cant beat a little gas engine at less than half the price of a so called "green" car. You would never find a place where the cost line and return line would meet in a graph.

Rat's nest is best!

I think I have the computers where I want them now. Table level, off the ground, and with "all" of the cables connecting in the FRONT of the computer and nothing in the back. I used every kind of short extension cable imaginable. Monitor, USBs, SATA disks, all! It makes a rat's nest but at least its a nest I can sort out without bending over or pulling computers out just to get to the back.
Here is a pano of the office with some numbers.

1- laser printer Brother $99 free shipping at Amazon

2- standby el cheapo color HP inkjet on sale at Amazon for $29 free shipping. Its not even hooked up. It may sit there forever un-used.

3- eight port hub...have Liz and Laptop and shop computers networked here.

4- el cheapo Canon scanner $50 uses no power. fully USB driven.

5- new dell Vostro Windows 7 w/XP virtual emulator.

6- one terabyte USB backup disk

7- uninterrupted power supply will easily keep everything running for 60 seconds before outside generator kicks in.

8-Home built running Linux

9- Old dell with two 2-terabyte internal hard disks. C: ghosts to D: every midnight

10 - KVM switch four port using three.Allows to switch instantly between computers with only one monitor, one mouse, and one keyboard (all wireless of course). Don't throw your old computers away... keep them and run them parallel with a KVM