Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

Now That’s Showmanship

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Ah, Groundhog Day.  When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up.  After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate.  The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit.  This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement.  Almost any depth of snow can be removed.  0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel.  2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow.  After that it get trickier, but it can still be done.  And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.

A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster.  If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it.  Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway.  That’s very unfortunate.  Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface.  This works but it is extremely labor intensive.  So, I hate rain in the winter.  And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.

Alright, enough whining.

So, what’s new?  Well, tariffs.  Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places.  And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed.  Wow.  Trump is going full steam ahead.  Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do?  Nothing.”  But then he does three more things.  One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s.  These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country.  Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens.  Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem.  I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better.  Sort of an anti-Obama.

Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week.  If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote.  And that’s actually me being optimistic.  There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate.  McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train.  I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI.  Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby.  This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.

Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data

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top-medical-indust-receip

 

 

As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie.  So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic.  Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.

We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say).  I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow.  This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end.  But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth).  I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens.  Now that’s showmanship.

It’s Not Pretty

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The family gathering at the recent funeral down in New York City spawned another reunion up in New England.  A gaggle of my siblings gathered and we broke bread at a local diner that had a sign that touted their fried clams and ice cream.  Quite a combination.  But we had neither of these.  I had a Reuben and a cup of coffee and the rest of the crew went up and down the menu.  Somebody even got the pot roast and mashed potatoes.  And as we sat there and enjoyed our fare several of us remarked on the virtues of a good local diner and the fact that they seem to have disappeared from some locales where they were formerly ubiquitous.  Brooklyn used to have a ton of Greek diners and you could always get baklava at midnight after a movie or some other outing.  Now they’re all gone, or so it seems.

This being New England, baklava was not on the menu.  But this diner was one of a very few locations within a twenty mile radius that would be open much after 1 am.  And they had very courteous service which is also quite rare nowadays.  One very strange business practice, they’re a cash only establishment.

That’s another reason to hate the Biden administration and the Democrats.  The COVID lockdowns bankrupted so many small businesses including restaurants.  Sure, you can always go to Mickey D’s when you’re coming off a late shift or a date but the local diner was so much more welcoming a sight.  A place where you could order an actual burger and finish with some pie and ice cream.  That’s how I remembered the world back in the day before mega-corporations finished off all the mom-and-pop shops in America.  And sure, there are plenty of good chain restaurants that serve good food and do employ the local kids as wait staff.  But history has some bearing on it.  The place we went to eat has been around for seventy years.  The grandchildren of the original owner run the place.  We’ve been going to it for over thirty years.  Is the food four star?  No.  Is it good.  Plenty good.  Are the prices fair?  All things considered, yes.  The food is fresh.  The silverware is clean and the waitresses are good humored.  What else could you want?

I know that Donald Trump has an enormous to-do list on his plate.  He’s got a raft of executive orders a mile long and he’s battling everyone from the presidents of Denmark and Panama, to the deep state, to that dopey lesbian bishop in Washington.  But if he needs another item to add to his list, I’d say he should figure out a way to boost small businesses.  The billionaire class has beaten the snot out of small and even not so small businesses over the course of the last thirty years.  Amazon alone has killed off the downtown retail district of every city and town in the country.  And with it has gone any hope of ever meeting up with your neighbors.  Probably grocery shopping is the last gasp of that.  And even there Amazon is doing its darndest to conquer all.  I know I must sound like a Luddite but I think anti-monopoly laws are there for a reason.

And if there’s no way back then something fundamental has to be done to force people in the same locale; town or neighborhood, to spend some time together talking to each other about the details of their community; their kids’ schools, the trials and tribulations of their police force and their fire dept. and all the pot holes that the road department hasn’t fixed and all the other things that need attention.  The problem is we’re all too busy or too lazy or too anti-social.  But people are going to have to start solving these problems.  If we leave all of this to the “experts” they are going to tell us how to live and we really won’t like the rules they come up with.  In fact, we’re already there.  It’s time people woke up and looked around at the default setting of the New America.  It’s not pretty.

I’m Still Working Out the Details

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So, which is it?  Rage against the dying of the light or serenity in the face of the inevitable and natural cycle of life and death?  I was at a funeral and I looked at my cousins and saw what time was doing to them.  All of us were proof of the inevitability of aging and death.  Each one was a slightly different take on mortality.  Some seemed to be aging gently and they exuded humor and calm.  Others looked very tired and deeply saddened by how hard the way is.  Well, that difference comes of a combination of internal and external factors.  Luck plays a part and also wisdom and also temperament.  If I’m going to guess I’d say luck and temperament play the largest parts.  I mean I guess someone like Gautama could remain tranquil in the face of fate’s onslaught against our loved ones and our selves but most people are not so stoic.  We need some luck to keep us going.  Even Job finally had enough and wanted a word with the Big Guy Upstairs about all those boils.

So, is there a correct attitude toward the Big Sleep?  I’ve always taken a somewhat legalistic attitude about what kind of deal we get from fate.  When I was a bit younger, I used to say that fifty years was somewhat the break even point.  What I meant by that was if fate gave you fifty good years you should think that you got a decent deal.  Not great but decent.  The first fifty years are the best part of a life and with any reasonable amount of effort you can get quite a bit done in a half century.  You can raise a family.  You can become an expert in your profession.  You could even have served as President of the United States by then.

It’s not really a full lifetime but if you don’t lollygag around until forty you can cram a lot of living into fifty years.  So, if you live comfortably to seventy, I think you can feel like you got a pretty sweet deal.  I’m approaching the biblical “three score and ten” mark myself.  And even though I’m not anxious to throw in the towel quite yet I can’t see myself going through the whole wailing, gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at heaven act.  I feel it would reflect a certain amount of ingratitude.  After all, think of kids who die of cancer or some other terrible disease before they ever get their permanent teeth.  That’s where I see someone lodging a legitimate grievance against the way the universe is run.  I’ve always been repelled by the suffering of the innocents; “the problem of pain.”

So that’s my somewhat simplistic but easily explainable philosophy of life and death.  God owes us fifty good years.  And we owe it to ourselves (and Him) to use the time wisely and diligently.  And this is coming from a profoundly lazy man.  No male in my family has ever truly grown up before thirty.  We have a talent for floating above the ground for an inordinate amount of time before being forced to finally settle down and get to work.  For this reason, I feel like I have been blessed in having reached my age with all of the milestones accomplished.  Of course, all of the credit for this goes to Camera Girl.  She refused to let me stall her plans and so she had her kids while we were very young.  Which means we were desperately poor for the first ten plus years of our married lives.  Which means I was that much luckier to get the whole thing to work out.

So, seeing death and dying is a humbling experience.  But it also makes me grateful for what I’ve already been allotted.  And honestly, I’m not very excited about ending up a nonagenarian or even an octogenarian.  I’m hoping for some very lazy death.  I’ve toyed with the idea of starving myself.  But I’m afraid I might keep putting it off every time I smell something good on the stove.  I’m still working out the details.

The Human Element

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Einstein is said to have made the imaginative leap when he based his Theory of General Relativity on the notion that time (t) is just another dimension to go along with the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z).  Space-time.  When we talk about the where of a particle (or a person) we must also specify the when.

So yesterday when I travelled back to the place where I was born, I would have to travel back in time to reach my place of origin (x, y, z, t = 0, 0, 0, 0).  But Einstein also said that for matter time can only travel forward.  But maybe the mind (or the soul) isn’t composed of protons and electrons; leptons and hadrons.  Because I had an uncanny feeling I had stepped back into an earlier era.

After battling New York City traffic that defied belief, to attend a family funeral, I walked into the little Roman Catholic Church that I attended as a child and was transported into my past.  Sure, a few little things had changed.  They had freshened up the paint on the ceiling over the altar and on the bas relief stations of the cross but the stained-glass windows, the icons around the altar and the pews we sat in triggered memories that perfectly mirrored my surroundings.  And then there were my cousins and their children and their children’s children surrounding me with proof that the world I left behind decades ago still existed in a very human, very tenacious way.  God said be fruitful and multiply.  And we have.  From a tiny family that set foot on this continent less than 150 years ago there are now a whole town’s worth of descendants.

And some of the latest additions were unknown to me by name.  But just looking at their faces I could see the kinship.  And in the middle of the Mass one of the youngest made such a noisy nuisance of himself that he forced his mother to retreat to the annex to return the ceremony to dignified order.  But this outburst was of the very nature of the family.  We are noisy, somewhat spoiled, sometimes rude but genuinely good natured and extremely funny people.  And we do enjoy each other’s company.  Being surrounded by this small army of family felt so right.

One of my cousins remarked that it was a pity that only such occasions rounded us all up together again.  He spoke nostalgically about when we were all living within blocks of each other within the Italian ghetto that we all were now flocking to for this solemn occasion.  He reminisced about the parties and get togethers we used to have on a regular basis; holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, births.  But I reminded him that no one’s grandchildren could hope to afford the multi-million-dollar price tags that now attached to the buildings in this once humble neighborhood.  What young people could afford to buy houses here now?   I kidded that we would have to buy a whole town somewhere in the middle of nowhere if we wanted to live together in this modern and expensive age.  He ruefully nodded his head in agreement.

Quickly the ceremony ended and we said our goodbyes.  I wasn’t headed out east to the Long Island cemetery.  I was headed north toward New England through the grid-lock of the outer boroughs and onto the highways beyond.  But we made one stop before we headed home.  There was an old time Italian Bakery that specialized in Italian pastries.  They had sfogliatella riccia (seashell), coda d’aragosta (lobster tail) and various other pastries stuffed with cream that we would eat on Sunday nights when we were kids.  The only problem with this wonderful store was the old woman who had run the counter.  She was a sharp-tongued shrew who carped at everyone who entered the store.

I entered the store today and found the shelves still lined with all those Italian delicacies.  But now the store was run by a Chinese family that had bought the recipes for the pastries when they purchased the business.  And thankfully the pastries were just the same!  And even better, the young lady running the counter was entirely friendly and polite.  A miracle!

After too many hours I returned home with my small cache of desserts and told Camera Girl of my epic journey.  We’ll eat the cakes with our coffee this week.  And that will remind me of what I learned.  Einstein was wrong about not being able to go back in time.  You can.  What you can’t do is go back to the same place.  It’s always different.  But it can be worth the trip.

Circling Back

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The next couple of days will be different.  I have to attend a funeral for a close relative.  She was ninety-seven and so I’m travelling both closer to my geographical origin and back in time to my childhood.  I’ll be going back to the Catholic church I attended as a child and seeing the neighborhood I lived in.  And a lot of my cousins will be there and my siblings.  I probably will also see some old acquaintances for the last time on this Earth.  And that is a thought that gives me pause.  This is the second death of that generation in the last few weeks.  Those folks had a lot of vitality.  All of them on that side of the family have reached their nineties.  I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that legacy.  It’s not an unmixed “blessing.”

I’ll look over the old neighborhood.  Last time I was there it had become a Southeast Asian enclave of one sort or another.  I’ll be interested to see if the homeless and the illegal aliens have shown up to any degree.  I suspect things will look worse than even it looked a decade ago when I passed through.  The only thing that seems to have endured since my childhood is an old-fashioned Italian bakery that somehow has endured.  The family still runs it and from what I’ve been told they still make crumb cake and crème doughnuts that are worth buying.  So, after the wake and the mass I intend to stop by that store and buy some pastries to bring home to Camera Girl.  She’s partial to good crumb cake and I like it too.

When I get back, we’ll have some good coffee and enjoy some pastries while I tell her what the old neighborhood looks like.  And I’ll tell her who showed up for the funeral and who didn’t.  What everybody looked like and any family news for good or bad.  And hopefully, there won’t be any new feuds breaking out to report.  At this point in the cycle, I’m hoping everybody is looking to let bygones be bygones and go quietly into that good night.  But you never know.  I come from some pretty ornery stock.  There are old feuds that go back well over a hundred years that I’ve heard about and as far as I know are still being honored.  But hopefully those folks won’t be showing up for this family gathering.

And in fact, I know of at least one party who will attempt to spark a gathering of the clan for a summer party sometime in the summer.  I used to have one every summer about a decade ago at the Compound but people got older and travelling became more difficult so it subsided.  Maybe this will revive the custom.

So, I’ll see what I can do to keep this site active while I’m on the road.  At the very least there will be pictures and quotes.  I’ll see if I can get one more post scheduled after this one to fill in the gap.  But we’ll see.

Well, back I go.

Times that Try Men’s Souls

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One step forward two steps back.  Ah, the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.  Last week the mainframe that I keep my photos and editing software on died a terrible death.  I had hoped at first that maybe the power supply had given out.  I sent it off to the local computer geeks with this dream of a call back the next day about how a wire had come loose or a fuse had blown and all was well.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I received the dreaded news that, “The motherboard is fried and all you can reuse is the case, drives and the fans.”

The horror.

Well, at least my photos didn’t go up the chimney so that’s good.  But this has put a kink in my photo-editing schedule.  For the last week I’ve been scouring my camera memory card for stuff to post and I’m reaching the bottom of the barrel.  I’ll need some more stuff really soon.  Plus, I can’t use my favorite editing software or the big monitors I usually use.  Well maybe I can, but I’d have to fiddle around with the wires and I’m too lazy to do it as a one-off.  But I must be stoic.  As the bard reminds us, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;  They kill us for their sport.”

Or something like that.

But not everything was bad this week.  I decided on a path forward for my story.  If you remember in the last installment, I had my good guys strike back at the vicious President of the United States who had hurled a 10-megaton nuke into their underground retreat.  As a counter attack they undermined the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon and a few other key federal buildings and sent them hurtling hundreds of feet into the underground abyss.  This effectively decapitated the United States federal government.  Specifically, the president, vice president, the congress and the cabinet secretaries are all dead.

What I’ve decided to do is arrange for the only honest man in the FBI to be selected to succeed the president.  And this is the guy who I’ve been using to track down my protagonist and his sponsors.

So, the antagonist I have who has been hunting for the sniper is selected for succession to the presidency.  In part he is selected for the knowledge he’s gained hunting the sniper and the organization supporting him.  But because the head of the FBI had been assassinated earlier, he was also the acting head of the bureau.  Of course, that isn’t technically in the line of succession for the presidency but with all the legitimate successors dead, the military and the supreme court put their heads together and after doing an inventory of who was left and who was willing, they chose my guy.

Now this is an outrageous scenario.  And so, it’s really a lot of fun to poke around with.  And because it’s so outlandish I can do more or less whatever seems like fun with it.  I have the poor schnook summoned to a military base and he’s thinking that he’s about to be blamed for the catastrophic failure of the manhunt for the sniper and instead he’s being asked if he will accept the presidency.  That’s a pretty great scene.  I think I’m going to have him ask if he can work remote from home.  That would be a nice touch.  I think that’s what I would ask for.

So anyway, the story is moving forward.  So that’s good.

Camera Girl laid down the law today and had me put the weatherstripping around the basement door.  She found where I had hidden the supplies and brought them out to me.  So, I grumbled and dragged myself over to the door and did it.  And you know, it really made a big difference.  But I really did a lousy job installing it and I’m planning to redo it and add a sweep to the bottom of the door.  Funny how these home improvement projects can grow on you.

And looking around at the Trump juggernaut I see he’s making headway in all directions.  He’s travelling to North Carolina and Los Angeles to get involved with the hurricane and fire victims.  And tonight, JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  Collins, Murkowski and good old Mitch McConnell were the holdouts that made Vance’s vote necessary.  Well, that’s why we needed the other Senate pickups last November.  But things are looking up everywhere in Trump world.

So that’s my post, a little this and little that.

Where’s My Slide Rule?

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Thank you, Donald Trump.  Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.  I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.  Hallelujah and amen.

Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do.  Have at it, boys.  Give ‘em hell.

So, what’s for me to talk about tonight?  Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight.  First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.  The heating system at the Compound is undersized.  Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.  When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy.  And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.  Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.  I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.  I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.  The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.  The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.  The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.  The quantum meaning of absolute zero.  And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.  All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).  None of this registered with her at all.  She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail.  Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.  I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons.  But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.  Maybe.

I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.  The question of the curvature of space came up.  I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.  I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected?  How would we know the difference?  After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there?  It’s empty space.  Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.  But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter.  So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend?  Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.  But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.  Oh, my aching head.  I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved.  I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.  Yikes!

So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.  And I think I’ve made a big mistake.  I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved.  I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.  The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction.  I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.  It just keeps going.  It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.  Well, what about five seconds before that?

So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!).  Well, why not?  Trump’s fixing the country.  The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.  Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?

Phoning it In on Friday Morning

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Thursday was just such a busy day that I didn’t get anything done on the site until late at night.  I had to process some photos and set them up.  And so late at night how can I think of a topic no less speak intelligently on it?  My mind is a spent force.  So, I’ve just watched Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight.”  This was Welles’ cut and paste job from the two Henry IV plays to showcase Falstaff and his time with Prince Hal.

And it’s a brilliant idea that should be remade again.  But who could be Falstaff now?  Who’s funny enough?  Who’s fat enough.  Who can act Shakespeare?  No one.

But no reason to be gloomy.  These things will turn around.  All the nonsense that has been pushed on the kids for the last thirty years will not last.  All of it is rot that won’t last.  All those who truly believe it are self-selecting themselves for extinction and they will leave room for those who don’t.  There are plenty who make believe that they believe for self-preservation.  But when the winds change, as they already are changing, they’ll move on to where their advantage lies.

I was watching the movie “Fury” today with one of my friends.  I had never seen it.  Brad Pitt is an American tanker in WWII.  He and his men including a raw recruit are deep into German territory in 1945 and everywhere they turn they’re hip-deep in death.  The action and personal actions of the soldiers are as gritty as can be.  I won’t give away the plot but suffice it to say that the tank crew was beyond hardened.  They were approaching psychotic.  But they had a camaraderie that was stirring.  My friend told me that the movie’s ending was based on a true story although instead of an American tank in WWII it was based on a British tank in WWI.  Well, it is a rousing battle scene.

You know, YouTube is an interesting concept.  They must know I’m writing a novel because I keep finding videos on fiction-writing in my feed.  And one of them was by Vonnegut.  And I watched it and it reminded of when I met the guy by accident at the carousel in Central Park.  And it’s funny, I wasn’t a fan of his writing but he came across very friendly and normal.  And it got me thinking which other celebrities are regular people when you meet them off the cuff.  I once spoke to a car service driver who brought people in and out of the Northeast casinos.  He said Jerry Seinfeld was an arrogant jerk.  Well, I won’t say that shocked me.  The one guy I’d really like to meet completely candidly is Donald Trump.  He’s a complete enigma.  How much of the Trump we see is real and how much is make believe?  And is he crazy?  Well, I’ll never find out so I’ll just have to keep making stuff up.

I hope to catch up on the website chores tomorrow so I’m not working from behind.  I guess Dunwich is a busy mythical place where even humans find themselves trapped in warped space-time.  But this will have to do for tonight.  Good night and good morning.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.