Nom de plume: Rivrdog

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...

Your fashion critic speaks...

Yeah, Rivrdog, fashion critic...

Have you stopped ROFLYAO yet?

Okay then.

Allow me to present my creds as a fashion critic:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, grandpappy was a tailor.

Notice that there's nothing current in the above line?

You're very observant.

Okay, a few years back, I watched a few episodes of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", not so much because I wanted to be better dressed, but because I really wanted to know exactly why being queer would make one automatically into a fashion guru. I failed to find out and gave up the effort. No gender-identity slur here, but I doubt if queer guys have mojo on this subject any more than straight guys. My go-to source for men's fashion has been GQ for years, although I'll admit that I don't buy the mag, only read it in doctors' or dentists' offices, and find that most professional athletes don't have any more smarts on fashion than anyone else, except that they DO go for quality and fit in men's clothing, which is over half the fight towards looking sharp. Grooming and body carriage is the rest of it.

Men's fashion is a no-brainer, because "good" is almost always measured in conservative style; suits, sport jackets, dress shirts and ties. Shiny leather shoes and a Pocket Square or correctly-folded handkerchief being the only accessories really required. If I REALLY wanted to put on the dog, I could change my usual Timex Camper wristwatch out for my Rolex Oyster Perpetual, (willed me by my Dad, I would never buy such an expensive watch), but I get nervous with that level of spendy jewelry on.

Now, look at women's fashion. Or don't look, unless you want a reason to visit the psychiatrist's couch, because it makes NO sense at all in most cases. Here's the perfect example of current fashion, in today's fishwrap, front page of the "Living" section:

Okay then. Heidi Klum, supposed fashion expert, is wearing a psychedelic-print jumpsuit layered over with an ill-fitting* blazer of double-breasted cut. Her protege, Michelle Lesniak Franklin, the winner of some sort of reality-show on fashion (I've never watched it), has clothed herself in an alternatively-designed (uneven-hemmed) sheath skirt topped by a see-through sleeveless blouse, nicely showing off all her tats but not her tatas, which are smothered in a Wagnerian metal-looking brassiere. The very latest in PDX millinery adorns her head, and it seems to be either the bottom cut out of a steel-mesh wastebasket or a BBQ grilling accessory designed to grill fish on. Her hose are nominally normal, but she appears to be wearing them over her shoes, which are kludge-modern and otherwise unremarkable.

If readers know about the modern Portland scene though, they will have to consider these ensembles rather conservative, and thereby, tasteful within their range, because the young-uns do, in fact, "keep Portland weird".

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* Dispite being tailored to her form, I consider this blazer to be "ill-fitting" because it is cut as double-breasted, which means it's supposed to have overlapping breast sections, but this one is cut away so that it has to be fastened with some sort of string arrangement to stay closed. That closure arrangement on a blazer is a strict fashion faux-pas for men, and since the blazer started out as a menswear concept, menswear rules for wearing it ought to apply.

Super Bowl AAR, the power dump

I may not be an electrical engineer, but...

The game was so-so, so I didn't stroke out in front of my new ghetto-screen teevee, but the most interesting part was the power dump, which some self-annointed engineer, hired for the purpose by Fox News, completely failed to explain this ayem, so here's my best:

Take the following facts in the following order:

1. It's New Orleans, which rebuilt the Super Dome after Hurricane Katrina, expecially the dome. One might reasonably expect that they refurbished or replaced the HVAC system at that point, so it's relatively new, and wired to the lates codes, or is it?
2. It's New Orleans, known for it's graft under previous Administrations.
3. The standard scam for building contracts (from the scammer point of view) is that I, the Administrator of the contract, award you, the subcontractor, a juicy sub-contract in return for paying me (kicking-back) 10% of the contracted amount for that subcontract. Because of that nearly-universal practice, the subcontracts are almost always shorted by the 10% as to their completion. In an HVAC contract, that shorting could easily be made up in the complexity and sufficiency of the wiring.
4. At half-time, there were a lot of pyrotechnics shot off, all generating a large amount of smoke, which had to be rapidly pushed out of the cavernous building in time to play the game within a few minutes. That takes huge ventilating capacity to accomplish.
5. The combination of bringing all the inside lighting back up to full-bright, and running the exhaust fans at full power to clear all the fireworks smoke, created a maximum load for the building's electrical system.
6. The cheapened wiring meant that there was a weak leg in the wiring system, and the emergency sensors detected a pending overload, and tripped the breakers, darkening half the stadium.

That's probably how it happened, folks. If it did happen this way, it will happen again. Maybe next time, it will be actually investigated.

Or, maybe you could just go to Ray Nagin and ask him what he did with the 10% of that sub-contract, get it back if he still has it, and fix the wiring of the SuperDome.

I might not be Martha Stewart

...but I do know my way around a cookbook, and this is a handy-dandy little cookbook, it has a big bennie attached: the recipe for "quick mix" which might just be highly similar to Bisquick.

Camp uses, SHTF uses, and I suppose you could use it like the authors intended, to help stretch your food budget if you are dependent on EBT.

You will note that the recipes are very basic, and easy to follow and most are one-stage recipes, i.e. you mix up the ingredients and cook it, and if you don't burn it, you can eat it quickly.

Here's the cookbook:

Download Utah Quick Mix Cookbook

Note the strange page set-up. This is so you can just hit "print" on Adobe Acrobat Reader, and the thing will print right up into a proper page-ordered booklet. Supposedly. I'm not going to do the paper booklet. Someone else let me know how it comes out.

Over the next few days I might just have to try out that oatmeal raisin recipe, although I have no clue how raisins get into anyone's EBT budget, with a small package costing upwards of $5.

H/T to the Country Gal

I may not be a fashion designer, but...

Yoga pants: for 90% of wearers, they are male contraceptives. Discuss

Fiscal Cliff: the solution

There's been nothing less than a cubic buttload of crap flung about on the "Fiscal Cliff negotiations". I might not be a degreed economist, but I know a solution to a problem when I see one. Here's the end of the crap-slinging.

I propose a true compromise:

• Set the definition of "Rich" at $400,000 Adjusted Gross Income (for a couple, single would be $225,000). Everyone below that level keeps their present tax rates.
• Raise the personal income taxes on everyone making over that amount to the pre-Bush level.
• Adopt a new personal income tax deduction: Any new hire of any employee in the "Rich" taxpayer's business, in a position previously closed for three years, or never before existing, is a tax credit ("consultants" won't count, it has to be a permanent employee, with filed W-4). Negotiate the tax credits for new hires on a sliding scale, so that the money put into those new hires can't create a tax credit exceeding the total tax liability of today's tax rates.
• Generate a new personal income tax deduction for salaried taxpayers who are NOT business owners. This deduction would allow an investment tax credit for investing in a business (not including buying their stock or bonds) for the specific purpose of allowing that business to expand it's work force. This would require a new item of accountantcy, but it's worth it for the results it generates.

With this system, some "Rich" will pay more, but none will have to, and if they don't, it will be because PRIVATE SECTOR jobs have been created.

Isn't it supposed to be all about job creation?

This idea is a "win-win". It lets the (D)onks crow that they've taxed the "Rich", something that, if not accomplished by 010113 at 0001 EST, will cause them all to keel over dead (or so they have inferred). It lets the GOPes claim that they've protected the Private Sector, and facilitated Private Sector job creation.

Let's git 'er Done!

I might not be...

...a real TeeVee critic, but I know a pig-in-a-poke when I see one.

Does anyone else feel that all the spendy, splashy "talent" shows are merely vehicles for washed-up entertainers (the judges) to have another fifteen minutes?

It's all about the judges now. Few of the promos ever show even past talent which did okay, all they push is the judges and the fancy sets with their swivel seats, etc.

Wotta waste of time!

I may not be...

.the most important man in the world, but I bet I can name him.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Okay, you say, he's got a few nukes, a well-trained military, but he also has as enemies every single Islamic Republic in the world. He's got a helluva box built around him right now, you say, and you are correct.

Netanyahu holds the wild cards in the biggest poker game of all: the US presidential election.

Think about it.

I have yet another report of the IDF's movement in Israel, and this report says that Israeli armor is moving towards the Sinai, my guess would be to stalemate the Egyptian military, which, under the Islamist President Borsi, can be counted to try to take the Sinai as a side-door into Israel in the coming conflict.

So, Netanyahu is about to force the hand of the most anti-semitic President since FDR. When Israel goes to war, Obama will resist helping him. That will cost Obama the election, period. Full Stop.

Oh, it might also cost the Democrats control of the Senate, because never again will a single Jew vote Democratic, the party of the betrayal of their home.

I might not be a fashion designer, but...

I've been to Anchorage AK, and I'm here to tell you that Alaskans are much more interested in what caliber to carry for bear defense in the environs than in what they might wear to go hiking.

I recall one nasty night in mid-winter, flying into Elmendorf AFB on a USAF C-141B I was navigating to that city and beyond, and first having to "go around" (abort landing) because of a moose on the runway, then having to go around a second time because the combination of the horrible Matanuska crosswinds and a low RCR reading from packed snow on the runway made landing too risky, then after the third approach was a charm and we got down, getting blown off my feet crossing an icy street near the BOQ (fortunately, my wearing of full Arctic Gear padded the fall). The temp at the time was -20 and the wind 40+ and gusty. Later that night, our large transport aircraft blew off of it's parking pad and onto the taxiway, stopped only in it's unmanned cross-country ground journey by a snowplow-windrow at the far side of the taxiway (Use Ice Chocks next time, Ground Crew!)

Nope, in AK, fashion in clothing is something you watch on the satellite TeeVee Style Channel. In AK, you dress for the weather, for the bugs, and for your comfort, in that order. Fashion is not on that list.

I might not be...

...a PhD sociologist*, but I know a societal trend when I see one.

Going on my socio-police training Maxim Number One, which says "there are no coincidences, only un-researched connections", and going on what seems obvious to me as an adult who has lived through the entire period of our history in question (1970s-present), it seems to me that the issue of Gen-X obesity and forward through the generations to the present is directly related to...

...wait for it....

....no, click the next page for it...