Category: OCF

Hello folks.

Here we are in only the last week of January and already Dementia Joe is:

• Preparing to start World War III with Putin and Xi
• Planning to impose price controls on the US economy
• Struggling to find even stupider things to do about COVID
• Repackaging his Build Back Better disaster into newer and even less appealing “chunks”
• Calling people racists if they don’t acquiesce to permanent voting fraud
• Dropping his vocabulary from three hundred words to one hundred seventy five
• Swearing at the White House Pool reporters

But we have more important concerns here at the Compound.  Camera Girl has heard there is a big snow storm coming on Saturday and she’s concerned.  Reports vary from twelve inches to twenty and she wants me to swear in blood that I’ll have it cleared for Sunday when Princess Sack of Potatoes is arriving for a sleep over event.  I have vowed to use all my snow clearing skills to handle this “blizzard.”

Now all this is hyperbole on her part.  Even twenty inches of snow is hardly a catastrophe.  In the good old days we’ve had thirty inch snow falls and they are nothing more than a day’s worth of work.  Not fun but not disastrous.  In fact thirty inches of dry snow is much easier and safer to deal with than a half inch of freezing rain turning to ice.  But I talked up my heroism in the face of climate catastrophe and vowed to clear that road!

I’ve discovered that my Capture One photo post processing software will not read the raw files from my new Sony A7 IV camera.  So I must buy the upgrade for the software.  And that’s not a problem except that means I’ll have to link that computer to the internet to download the upgrade.  And that means Microsoft will start messing with my Windows program to force a bunch of patches on it.  I’ll see if I can shut down those Windows programs.  I hate that stuff rattling around my desktop so I have that computer isolated from the internet for years at a time but then when I do have to connect it causes massive attacks by Microsoft and a few other software companies.  Ah, such is life.

I heard about the size of that Canadian trucker protest from Neil.  I’m curious to see if the Canadian feds buckle under the pressure.  I wonder if the truckers intend to call a strike.  Now that would get the attention of the population pretty quickly.

This seems to be another indicator that the world is fed up with COVID, vaccines, masks, mandates and petty dictators.  The Brits and the Irish have already thrown in the towel.  Individual states and the Supreme Court have chipped away at pieces of the insanity but Brandon is still hanging onto that albatross that is rotting around his neck.  I’m guessing he will “pivot” in about a month and declare victory.  Well, good luck with that.  My guess is he’s already pissed off so many of even his own voters that November is going to be a butt kicking to remember for the Evil Party.

And it’s time to start thinking about doing taxes again.  The IRS has gotten hyperactive of late so I use a professional advice.  I wonder what nasty surprises await me this year.

I found a cache of museum pictures I took about eight years ago of armor and other ancient war equipment.  I’ll sprinkle them in the daily photos as a change of pace.  I must get out and see some new stuff but the weather has been unhelpful of late.  Apparently that global warming is extremely unreliable around here.

I read about Trump’s new social media project coming on line in April or so.  I wonder if it will be all that much.  I did see that Bongino and Rumble has some sort of payment processing company that he claims is cancel proof.  Now that’s something I’m interested in.  I’ll have to check it out to see if it would be useful to me.

Well stay tuned and I should have something interesting today.

Today I intend to mail off my old camera for sale.  I feel a little disloyal for casting it away but I have had it for over four years and the trade up in capability is well justified.  But it’s funny how mechanical devices can become like old friends.  I’ve gotten e-mails from people who, after seeing the classic car photos of the day, wrote about some memories of their favorite old car.  It’s almost like there’s a symbiosis between our machines and us.

But it’s got to go and so that’s that.  The main problem is that it’s snowing again so I’ll first have to clear a path so I can drive to the post office.  This snowing every other day is a royal pain but at least a familiar one.  It gives me an additional reason for hating New England.

Last night I headed out to attend the monthly Dunwich Republican Committee meeting and when I got to the town hall I found out the meeting had been cancelled.  No announcement, no nothing.  And the building custodian shows up at the door wearing a face mask and so now they’ve brought those stupid things back.  When he sees I’m not wearing a mask he hands me a stack of R-95 masks and tells me how great they are.  I thought of saying something sarcastic and then thought, “The poor guy is only doing his job.  It’s not his fault he lives in a mental asylum.”

The battle to repair the heating system is (seemingly) headed for the final chapter.  After the last burst of activity the system worked without failure for a full week.  Then it developed a new failure mode.  This time the system would fail to restart after it cycled off on high loop temperature.  Because no failure code and hard lockout occurred this apparently proved that the problem is indeed in the power venter.  Now a crack team of technicians will descend on the compound in the next day or two and replace the power venter and order will be restored to my heating system.  But somehow it reminds me of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL 9000 declares that a component on the external surface of the spaceship will fail and must be replaced.  I feel like I’m being lured into some horrible conspiracy where I’ll discover that a maniacal mechanical device is attempting to finish me off to further a bureaucratic initiative that is “for my own good.”

After snow removal and mailing off the camera I really have to do some photo work.  I’m out of photos again and must put in the time for the post-processing.

I watched some of Dementia Joe’s press conference yesterday.  After a very few minutes I had to turn it off.  His endless lies and play acting are really hard to stomach.  I read an article that discussed the unlikelihood that after the current Supreme Court session the Dems will try again to get Justice Breyer to retire so they can nominate Kamala Harris to the Court.  Amusingly it would require Harris to vote for herself to get it passed.  Also it would leave the Senate deadlocked until a new Vice President was installed and that might prevent one from being installed at all.  So theoretically, if Dementia Joe dropped dead, the future Republican Speaker of the House would then succeed to the presidency.  So if Harris leaves the VP spot this year maybe Trump will run for congress just to be able to become Republican Speaker of the House just in case Biden drops dead.  How’s that for 4D chess nonsense?  The article was especially amusing because of how openly it disparaged the intelligence of both Harris and Justice Sotomayor.

Well, gotta go make the donuts.  I’ll be back later with more interesting things.

So we hit the jackpot today.  Four inches of snow followed by a half inch of rain overnight.  That makes the slop as heavy as possible and plus you’re standing in freezing water.  But I meant every bad thing I said about Gaia and don’t take anything back.  I’ll clean up this slop and be back with my shoulder to the wheel of OCF as soon a possible.

As an aside, I watched Dementia Joe’s speech down in Atlanta.  He really is a lying moron.  But his voters are right there at his level of dishonesty and stupidity.  So his strategy is probably sound such as it is.  Problem for him is the polls show the number of voters on his side has shrunk quite a bit.  Sucks being him.

So the guy showed up yesterday and after several hours of fiddling around he got the heater going again.  It still sounded terrible but it slowly heated the house up so that when it failed again today at 11 am my teeth weren’t chattering.  I pushed the reset button then calmly called up the “Company.”  And, wonder of wonders, they finally agree with me.  The fan they installed a month ago needs to be replaced.

So we’ve gathered our wits and gotten an electric space heater to keep us alive while they replace the fan this afternoon and life has resumed!

Although it’s pretty cold today, the sun is out and I hope to get Camera Girl to unleash the hounds and allow me to try and get tracking autofocus shots of them running with the A7 IV.

And I intend to continue to press on to the end of Star Trek Season 3 no matter the damage to my body, mind and soul.

Fiction writing will have to wait until I can get a block of time that isn’t submerged in contractor management grief.

The news is sort of slow.  I read that the Senate is putting aside work on BBB and will attempt to enshrine voter fraud into law.  If they fail they intend to try and eliminate the filibuster.  We’ll see if Manchin and Sistema are still holding them off.

So things are getting back to normal and I hope to have something a little less nonsensical to read soon.