Nom de plume: Rivrdog

First word on a badnasty

Here in this Instagram post. Will have to authenticate it, but since this government is SOOO good at accepting badnasties, I'll put it in the file. If true, it's aimed right between the eyes of the fishing industry AND recrecreational boaters. Fit's right into the Gates-plan for depopulation.

BTW, this will self-authenticate if it turns out that this compound has been granted exempt status from lawsuits like the mNRA jabs were...

The photo for this blog shows my boat, M/V Lofoten Girl, recently out of Scappoose and now berthed in Umatilla. A fine crew and myself brought her up the Columbia back in June. I will write a long post to cover that Grand Voyage. Hint, there was a lot of DAM action...

The long good-byes

I wouldn't wish my situation on my worst enemy.

In the past two weeks, the medical wallahs have decided that after she heals and rehabs from her bad ulcer, my wife is in too bad a shape to come home. Ever. She has to finish out her days in a nursing facility.

I have another family member almost into end-stage cancer.

Two "long good-byes" running at the same time. We warriors understand death. Deaths happen, it's part of life and war. This, to have the two in my family I've loved the most,  taking months more to die from incurable disease is VERY hard to take.

Today, I have family and and friends coming over to this big lonely house to begin the process of emptying it out so it can be sold. Seems straightforward enough, it's just logistics, right?

Everything that must be discarded or sold has some history, some significance to me and the almost-departed ones. It's like ripping out a small piece of me with every kitchen gew-gaw I toss out. I can remember when my dear wife WORE these clothes I'm putting aside to donate, and she WAS a clothes-horse, so there is a lot of clothing. Shoes, I can't imagine having that many shoes.

A man might get by with five or six pairs, a dozen, tops, but a woman feels under-dressed if she can't select from fifty or sixty pair.

To make matters worse, my wife has a wasting disease, has had it for 25 years. She has slowly shrunken from a Size 12 down to now a Size TWO! I guess this disease led her to some anguish, because she never threw out many of the oversize clothes, and there are three walk-in closets full of them. Formal dresses for evening. We used to do a lot of that. She was a big wheel in the Officers' Wives Club at my last permanent station, KI Sawyer AFB, MI. The base closed out 25 years ago, and now she is closing out her life.

This wouldn't be so bad if I could just call some service to do it all for me, but I can't afford that, since I will probably have to pay for her nursing home life, and around here, that will be north of $6K/month.

Selling the house and spending down the proceeds will get me by for about 40 months.

I guess my dreams of moving somewhere warm and living in a villa with servants will have to wait for MY next life, but in the meanwhile, I have to take time to say another good-bye to one of my children who isn't going to out-live me now.

WTH, if Life was (a) fair, some barker would be selling tickets to see it, but it isn't fair, and now I have to see this through by myself.

I'll manage. Facebook helps with that, except they just put me in "Jail" because I used a common Spanish slang expression to describe two ugly male cross-dressers...

UPDATE: 041420 2334 PDT:

 My wife of 43 years, Blanche, passed across the Rainbow Bridge on March 30th.

Pharisees of our time - House flippers

House flipping, and why we need to ban it. (Cross-posted on my Facebook page)

 

The whole process of  "flipping" is a tit on a boar. Useless. The idea starts with the usual scammer's dream: buy a house on the cheap because it's in terrible shape, then do cosmetic fix-up, resulting in the proverbial silk purse made from a sow's ear, sell it, get obscene profit. Do it enough times, and you get a TV program on the HGTV channel, THEN you can fly into a City, rent their basketball arena, conduct a half-day seminar on How To Flip for $500 each person, make even MORE obscene profit and fly back out of town...

 

Okay, take an attrractive city, put an army of house-flippers to work in it. What's the result? Housing which isn't technically improved all that much, and the improvements which ARE made are cosmetic, so in ten years, the house will be a crap-hole all over again (and it's usually in a crappy neighborhood anyway). But Wait! There's More! The flipper is going to SELL this house immediately, and make maybe 20% to 50% on their "investment dollar" doing so, then THEY leave, take that money with them, so your CITY makes almost nothing from the deal and life DOES NOT IMPROVE FOR YOU.

 

The result of this flip, multiplied by hundreds to thousands of them in your City, means a huge jump in the value of YOUR home, much higher taxes, and the loss of "affordability" in your housing market, which means YOU are now stuck with the crowds of yuppies who buy the flips. They come in to town, earn obscenely high salaries for doing something with bits and bytes, stay a couple of years, invariably vote Democratic, then leave.

 

I have a solution to all this malaise. We use the power of taxation to keep the flippers away. Here's how we do it: First, define property owners by how long they have LIVED IN their homes: over 30 years, they are "Pioneers". Over 10 years up to 30, they are "Sustainers". 5 to 10 years, they are "Locals" and under 5 years, they are "Transients". Real estate taxes are assessed on a sliding scale by these categories. Pioneers pay the smallest RATE, Transients the highest. Any tax rate higher than Local, the difference is used to LOWER the rate for Pioneers. Now for the flippers: their obscene profit is taxed at 50%, and that money is used SPECIFICALLY to lower the homeowner taxes, across the board, except for the Transient level. Secondary idea: use this tax money to fund a grant system for those who actually want to build NEW housing, because new houses are built with new materials to new codes, are more efficient, by far, than cosmetically-changed 40-70 year-old housing stock.

 

Make these changes, and the flipper-scammers will put your City in the rear-view mirror, and within 10 years, real estate values will start to return more towards normal, more towards what they were before the flipping-craze hit town.

 

Oh, by the way, those Pioneer home owners? They are amost invariably more fiscally responsible, are better neighbors than the yuppie hordes anyway.

 

My third career...

...after the first two, 22 years in the military and 25 fighting crime on the mean streets. Excuse the typesetting, I know it sucks (the new O/S).

I just figured out my third career: I will be Second Banana (straight-man) to various feline jokers. First, my cat never ties of trying to cadge me out of an extra meal after the gudwife feeds him and he has gobbled it down in the best Large Orange Cat tradition. He begs by his empty dish and I am tempted just to scoop up some kibble, but I usually ask the missus, whose usual reply is "Fed him two hours ago".

 

Second, my sweet old neighbor lady's cat, an indoor & outdoor cat. I have my parka on in the rain, doing the weekly garbage cart fill and positioning at the end of my driveway. This poor beast comes up to me, all wet, and begs me to let him in MY house to find some dry and warmth. I finish with the carts and trudge over to the neighbor's and ring her doorbell. On the way over there, the cat races ahead of me and hops up on the park bench on her well-sheltered stoop (we both have these benches for stoop-sitting). I observe numerous paw prints on the faded pain of the bench. When neighbor opens up, she says that she just let the cat out! She tries to get the cat into the house, but it moves a few feet away and snubs both of our offers for it's dry and warm shelter.

 

On my way next to the mailbox, it hits me: both of these cats know that I can be played for a chump. I think I will try to find an agent to rep me to the greater cat-world...

 

Red Hatter

Might be a Mad Hatter as well, some days. Ubuntu destroyed itself with a routine upgrade, so I went for Fedora on the advice of my SysEng S.I.L. It loaded up like a dream. Seems slower than Ubuntu in some regards, such as loading apps and software. Cripes! It took 23 minutes to load Firefox V. 57! Thunderbird loaded right up, though.

Never say never, buuuuut, this is probably the most hack-proof O/S commonly available. DOD uses it for encrypted shit up thru Level Two, which, IIRC is Secret, NoForn. I have two layers of shell on it, and each one requires login. I could have had a third, the KDE Desktop, which has yet another layer. I have all that in an older Fedora distro on a little Gateway Netbook that is my BugOut Puter. Ready to go, with two high-endurance batteries charged, I could stay on it for 16 hours if I had to.

This puter had a fall-back second boot of Win7Pro on it. As I looked through the files to see if I needed to save anything, I noted that I hadn't booted Windows in over two months. No loss there. I don't own a windows machine now. Wife still has one, runs Win 10.3, she doesn't use a fiftieth of the capacity of that O/S.

As I look at Windows, all I see is worry about hacks. Computing shouldn't bring worry.

Upon the Occasion of my 74th Birthday

...I will write a short blog: All of this grand life I've lived these past 74 years and 268 days since 22 January, 1943 (my Dad's 37th birthday, and apparently also the day I was conceived!) has led me to ONE conclusion, which engenders ONE piece of advice for my few faithful readers: Write Something! Be it a blog like mine, a Diary, A novel, a serious work of research in the Sciences, ANYTHING. Write SOMETHING!

The world thanks you in advance!

In two days...

It's my birthday. 74 years. I'm officially a Mid-Seventies Geezer. I get my Life-Membership in the Curmudgeon Club. I can snort and sniffle at all the X,Y, Z generations and their "trending" apple-crapple (especially their Apple crap, not a fan). I'm just a bit too old to be a "Boomer", although I could probably fudge my way into that group, except I diss on THEM also. That generation was responsible for bringing us metal-thrash music. Aside from a few GREAT base players in that genre, you can put metal-thrash music where the sun don't shine. The Doors lit my fire. Aretha Franklin made musical love to me. Steely Dan lit my fire. All music since has been a Royal Scam.

I put up with a lot of different politicians in these 74 years. The first President I read of regularly in the paper was Ike, who had just WON a War for the USA. We don't even try to WIN wars nowadays, we just fight them to some point of supposed advantage, then we quit without vanquishing anyone. The next President I really RESPECTED after Ike was Ronnie Reagan. I was an ace B52 nuclear bombardier during his Admin. Stationed at March AFB for the first three years of Ronnie, his E-4 Airborne Command Post aircraft would fly in and take up so much space, and his Staff used up so many Alert Vehicles that we had to be restricted to the Molehole while he was at his rancho down on the coast, but I didn't mind that, he was a great Commander In Chief to work for. I got a tour on the big bird once. It was VERY secret then.

I had two full careers in these 74 years. My Sociable Seguridad statement from 2003, the year I last worked for a paycheck, said that I had 47 years of full-time SSA credits. I served in the USAF for 22, half on Active Duty and half in the Reserves. I had 25 years as a beat cop on the mean streets, but in the days I worked those streets, the police commanders were interested in RESULTS, not PeeCee attitude. I couldn't do that job today. Crooks are still crooks, and you don't keep your community safe from them by mollycoddling them and "understanding" them, you find Probable Cause that they committed crimes and you take them to JAIL. The police game isn't played that way anymore, and you won't last as a cop nowadays without subscribing to the Chief's (or Sheriff's) political correctness dogma. Summing these two up, the new Chief is a BLM supporter who removed 25+ years of a database which tracked the street thugs as her first policy in her new office. Sheriff Reese is a major gun-banner who has sucked up Bloomberg's bucks. End of discussion on THOSE two. Good effing luck, Portland!

I have a new full-time job now. I am the full-time caregiver for my sweet wife of forty years, who will meet her Jesus in the not-distant future. We have a big house, so trying to keep it clean and her in a civilized condition is a full-time job with overtime every day for me. It's my duty, my God gave me this Duty when I made my Marriage Vows on February 7, 1977.

I have always done my duty as given to me. I see no reason to change that habit now, Praise God.

Labor Day 2017 Report

Report: Your blogger labored mightily for 47 years, is retired now with 3 Pensions. End of Report

Enjoy your Union Picnic. Any time you can get Free Food, eat it. The Speeches will be bulltwaddle, but the food is worth going for.

Bloody Hell

...coming to the PacNorWest. Forecaster says all-time high-temp record of 108 on Thursday, maybe 4 or 5 days of hi temps over 100 in THIS heat wave, and August usually has several of them here. 107 is the old record, and in 1964, I was working out of doors putting a roof on an ag products processing line for Neusihin Pickle Co when we equaled that.

My central air has 25% overcapacity built in: this house pencils in to need a 3-ton and I have 4 tons, but I will probably have to sleep on the ground floor. At 108, with the late afternoon sun in the west, the second story will get to 85 or warmer.

We will see, but it will be a heller of a week.