Canadians now pay more in taxes than on food, clothing, and shelter combined.
Such a deal!
August 25th, 2016Have they checked with Sandy Berger?
August 25th, 2016I’d certainly have been disturbed
August 11th, 2016Giles Hembrough just received a disturbing tax notice. He was told that he might be in arrears of a £14,301,369,864,489.03 amount.
I think we can all be relieved that his heart was able to withstand the shock.
Not unexpected
July 12th, 2016
Back to normal
July 11th, 2016… or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Marion had family visiting all last week, and I was tapped to help out with driving and hosting duties. We covered a lot of ground, visiting various places from Nederland to Cripple Creek. Good food, but we were on the go from (usually) 8 in the morning until 8 or 9 pm each day. We got them back to the airport Saturday afternoon, and then more-or-less collapsed.
Sunday was Marion’s birthday. We didn’t go anywhere, but I cooked dinner for her. I fixed tagliata, and made a chocolate orange torte for dessert. We had the leftovers for dinner tonight. Good food, if not as good as a few of the meals we had during the past week.
This morning I went back to work, and had a couple of packages on my desk that had arrived last week. One contained some LCD displays I’m planning to play with, and the other contained a Raspberry Pi 3 that I won in a drawing. Fun stuff.
RIP Ralph Stanley
June 24th, 2016Dr. Ralph Stanley, one of the bluegrass pioneers and a hell of a banjo player, died yesterday at the age of 89. I had a few LPs of his music, but I don’t have them anymore, and the only music of his I have on CD is the song everyone is mentioning today: Oh, Death, from the Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.
For comparison, the first performance of that song that I heard was performed by Doc Boggs.
Well, that was fun (not)
June 22nd, 2016Today has not been the best day. It started when I got up – my normal practice is to weight myself and take my pulse and blood pressure right after waking. Today, my sphygmomanometer died. I pumped it up several times, and it displayed the falling pressure and the pulse indication, but it gave me an error each time, instead of the final results.
Driving to work, there’s a major intersection about 1/2 mile from the office, and the cross street is the major one, so I always have to wait for the light. This morning, just as I was braking to join the line of cars at the light, some idiot (I’m using an innocuous description to avoid the profanity that I used when this happened) zoomed past me and jinked into my lane to avoid having to wait behind a gravel truck. I had to brake so hard to avoid hitting him that everything loose in the car went flying. I’m just relieved that I hadn’t stopped to pick up coffee and burritos for the office this morning. When the light turned green, the idiot kept pace with the gravel truck, so that the light turned red before I was through the intersection. He remained ten miles per hour below the speed limit to the next light, calmly sailing through just after it had turned red, thus forcing me to wait for the next cycle.
Nothing much happened at work, apart from a BSOD at the end of the day, just as I was about to save a file I’d been working on.
Driving home, I noticed a heavy brake smell just after I got onto the highway. I didn’t think it was my car, because my on-ramp going home is just after the highway finishes a 7% downgrade that is several miles in length, but I have had some brake trouble recently, so I wasn’t certain. I got off at the next exit, and saw that a semi trailer several vehicles ahead of me had a smoking wheel, so that relieved me. However, just past the next intersection, the pickup in front of me got into the “right turn only” lane to go into the shopping center there. Then, he decided not to, but I had drawn almost even with him. Another flying interior braking event, and I’d avoided him. He got back into the traffic lane, then turned into the second entrance to the shopping center.
Later, and closer to home, I managed to avoid (without any trouble) driving behind a van with precariously-packed back section, and which also had back doors that were open and swinging. I did have a little trouble with a vehicle that decided to cut abruptly from behind it to in front of me, though.
No problems with dinner, but my bad knee has been acting up since then. Blargh.
Happy Father’s Day
June 19th, 2016I celebrated with my daughter yesterday – she took me out to dinner and then to watch roller derby. It was a good time – I hadn’t seen roller derby in person before, and hadn’t seen it at all since it was on late-night television back in the 1970s. The program is here, but I don’t know how long it’s going to be available – it looks like the sort of link that gets reused.
The original plan had been for us to spend a day at the Denver Comic-Con, but we decided that wasn’t going to work for us, thus the replacement plans. There was a lot going on in Denver and reasonably nearby areas this weekend – Denver PrideFest, the Winter Park Chocolate Festival, and a lot more. I heard a radio interview related to PrideFest that disturbed me a few days ago; I hope I misheard what they were saying. What I think I heard was a comment that they had increased the security so that all 350,000 attendees would be safe. I hope I misheard, because that’s equivalent to half the total population of Denver, and Comic-Con had credible estimates of over 100,000 attendees for this weekend.
Today, Marion and I went up into the mountains to visit some friends of hers who have a vacation cabin off the Peak-to-Peak highway. It was a good day – we had a nice walk in the forest, watched hummingbirds and other avian wildlife, and saw a few flowers (columbines weren’t blooming yet except in a couple of sheltered locations).
Memorial Day
May 30th, 2016As I have done before, I’m posting two things for Memorial Day. The first is a poem that Robert Service wrote after World War I:
PILGRIMS
For oh, when the war will be over
We’ll go and we’ll look for our dead;
We’ll go when the bee’s on the clover,
And the plume of the poppy is red:
We’ll go when the year’s at its gayest,
When meadows are laughing with flow’rs;
And there where the crosses are greyest,
We’ll seek for the cross that is ours.For they cry to us: Friends, we are lonely,
A-weary the night and the day;
But come in the blossom-time only,
Come when our graves will be gay:
When daffodils all are a-blowing,
And larks are a-thrilling the skies,
Oh, come with the hearts of you glowing,
And the joy of the Spring in your eyes.But never, oh, never come sighing,
For ours was the Splendid Release;
And oh, but ’twas joy in the dying
To know we were winning you Peace!
So come when the valleys are sheening,
And fledged with the promise of grain;
And here where our graves will be greening,
Just smile and be happy again.And so, when the war will be over,
We’ll seek for the Wonderful One;
And maiden will look for her lover,
And mother will look for her son;
And there will be end to our grieving,
And gladness will gleam over loss,
As – glory beyond all believing!
We point … to a name on a cross.
The second is a link to remind you of those who gave their all for their country, and some of the others that it affects:
Ok, I get the idea. No garden this year.
May 24th, 2016My garden area is small, and too shady to really grow good vegetables, anyway. I do try, because I like having a garden. Mostly, what I can grow successfully are herbs, and that’s ok by me. I made a fair amount of a nice oregano pesto with last year’s crop.
This year, however, the weather has been against it. I’ve got a hops plant that I planted last year, which got about 6′ tall by the end of the season. This year, it was about 9″ tall when a late snow hit it in March, breaking the tallest bine. Then, most of the leaves were stripped from it on May 9th, when a hailstorm came through. Small hail, but lots of it. My oregano and sage made it through without trouble, and the strawberries were damaged, but not badly.
Today, we had another hailstorm. One of my neighbors told me that there was 2″ of hail on the ground in places. It was almost all gone by the time I got home from work. The weather report said it was quarter-sized hail, although what was left on the ground when I got home was much smaller. There are no leaves left on the hops plant. At all. My oregano is about half the height it used to be. The sage (with its woody stems) is the same height, but with fewer leaves. The strawberries are no longer visible.
I think I may write off the garden. I’m not sure how far I’d need to go to find a nursery that didn’t have all their outdoor plants blasted by the hail.