Month: February 2022

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We’re coming up on Spring

Technically the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere is March 20.

That’s the official calendar and Equinox date.

My dog, the trees in the yard, and the flower beds, have a slightly different perspective.

The dog is shedding… A LOT! In the past 2 weeks he’s dropped most of his undercoat.

He’s a husky mix and as near as I can tell he’s got three different layers of fur. The outer coat is longish and seems built to shed snow, water, and ice. The mid coat is pretty dense and looks like it’s built as a wind breaking layer. The under coat is fluffy and reminds me of my down jacket.

That last coat is also prone to static attraction, and flies around the house when I’m running the vacuum. I caught myself chasing little bits of fluff with the vacuum the other day and suddenly understood why the vacuuming chore was taking twice as long as usual.

When he starts shedding the undercoat, he’s also more prone to matting so I’ve been brushing him every other day.

You’d think, “Oh, that’s nice…” You’d be wrong. The dog thinks that brushing is a game. So he plays and spins and tries to keep the brush away.

Admittedly, it’s funny.

What’s not funny is that after the brushing is done. I’m covered head to toe in static charged downey fur and I look a lot like a Yeti. (Brushing is best done outside, prior to a shower, or putting on clean clothes.)

I also try to brush him when there are no breezes. The neighbors probably don’t like clumps of fur the size of small rabbits blowing across their lawns.

Brushing him outside made me notice the large pine trees are greening. There are buds on some of the ground cover plants. As the snow recedes, I’m seeing the work that I’ll have to do in the yard.

I’m seeing greening of the maple in the front yard and sprouts in the flower beds.

If the temps remain warm, I’ve got a plan to fire up the chainsaw and vigorously prune the Apache Plume which has become a little too wild for my tastes. It’s a neat plant but this one has become rather large and threatens to take over the planet.

I need to fence off the vegetable beds. The dog loves digging in the soft soil. That’s great for him, (ahem,) but I want to grow vegetables this year. I don’t want to plant a bunch of vegetables only to have to battle the dog and rabbits. The rabbits are enough of a challenge!

Last year, the vegetable garden wasn’t remotely possible because the dog was new to the household and had no sense of boundaries. I’ve concluded that he still has no sense of boundaries and that a fence will be necessary.

While I’m fencing off the vegetable beds, I’m thinking I’ll fence off the area under the main deck. (Again to keep the dog out of that area. He likes to dig for buried treasure and an unknown number of toys have disappeared into the abyss under that deck.)

The overall plan is to get the spring gardening out of the way, which will make room for my trim and house painting projects.

It’s at these times that I wish I had a pick up truck. I’d like to be able to take cuttings and other stuff to the dump on my schedule instead of stacking it, then borrowing or renting a truck.

There are also a lot of little building projects that I’m thinking about doing.

I’d enjoy doing the projects, but I’m light on tools to accomplish the tasks. I could see myself spending $800 bucks in tools to assemble $150 in projects.

I suppose it really comes down to would I get $800 worth of pleasure and satisfaction out of the work.

Forget the lumber costs! Even decent sawhorses are obscenely expensive these days. Then there’s the issue of being able to store the tools when not in use. The other half also doesn’t much in the way of boundaries in the garage. It’s a royal pain in the butt to climb over all kinds of junk to get to my tools.

I suppose, I can start by cleaning and reorganizing the garage while it’s still too cool to work in the yard. Then I can do the yard work, rent a truck and take all of the crap to the dump. Once that’s done, I can begin the building projects.

It’s a bit like pulling a loose thread on a sweater, one thing leads to another, and another, then before you know it, your sweater is just a pile of yarn.

I’m tired just thinking about it! Oh well, I’ve got a few weeks to think on it.

That compound miter saw looks awfully nice though…

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I Had the perfect post

It was all there in my head. A perfect gossamer soap bubble, it completely encapsulated what I wanted to convey. It was exciting and I’d just started to type it.

Then interruption upon interruption. Dog howling, Washer buzzer going, Extraneous conversation directed at me.

I usually filter out about 75% of the words I hear, to boil the conversation down to the actual facts. The process excludes attempts at humor, a myriad of detail that is not necessary to support the ideas and generally over complex sentence construction.

What I’m often left with is, “Do you want lunch?”

The problem is, all of this requires a ton of extra mental processing. In this case the additional processing load caused the beautiful soap bubble of thought, to go pop!

I tried to recover it, but while I was trying to recover it, store the words in my memory, more and more mental processing was being directed away just to determine if the conversation was anything that required immediate attention.

You know, something akin to, “Hey you’re on fire!”

Although the person doing the talking would probably have phrased that condition something like this;

“You appear to be hot, not in the sexual way, but there seems to be smoke rising from your general vicinity. Oh look, I can see now that you are actually combusting, or is that just your clothing? Well if it is just your clothing I’d suggest that you remove the combusting clothing and seek the resources of the nearest water access point. Unless the combustion is electrical in nature, then perhaps you’d like to have the fire extinguisher that is designed for that purpose. Do you think you’re likely to want the fire extinguisher and would you like me to retrieve it from the closet for you?”

This, I think is why, the person in question is virtually useless in an emergency. All the chatter in their brain limits their ability to actually take action.

Really, it’s interesting to watch. They just stop and stare glassy eyed at a situation. It’s like watching a computer trying to compute Pi to the last digit.

It’s also why I actively don’t hear what they say 75% of the time. Mostly, I scan the sonic stream for key words that may be actionable.

In the example above, the actionable words would be, “smoke,” and “combustion”.

With my stepfather the filtration rate is 95%. President Biden has a filtration rate of 99.8% Biden is harder because he usually manages to spawn at least 4 other conversations or stories and tries to tell them all at once.

Biden’s “word salads” are epic and wholly unsatisfying. The few times I’ve expended the energy to understand what he said, have led to my brain having to restart from first principals.

Autonomic functions – reloaded – normal.
Optical input – normal
Higher cognitive functions – Reloading
“I think, therefore I am…”
and so on until I’m operational again. This can take some time, and is not completely painless. On the bright side, It does clean out a ton of “hung threads” in my thinking processes.

Biden’s speeches are wonderful at rebooting my brain.

There are other things that can reboot my brain, for example 75% filtration of incoming conversation, a bunch of random input and having a really wonderful blog post, or chapter of a book spring fully formed into my head.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat ADD.

At any given moment there’s a lot of other stuff going on in my head. Some of it useful, and some of it not. This makes focus hard for me to achieve and maintain. Once I achieve focus, I tend to go to extreme measures to hold onto it. Including biting someone’s head off if they’re blathering on about something that is inconsequential.

More fairly, something I think is inconsequential.

The fragments of my soap bubble of thought, are lying in a heap in my brain. It will require a substantial effort to reconstruct, and I’m ambivalent about the ROI.

Even reconstructed, that particular train of thought will not be as perfect as it was.

That dear reader, is why you’ve gotten this goofy post, instead of something more enlightening or thought provoking.

Apologies!

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Where do we go from here?

The headlines are screaming, “Putin invades Ukraine.”

“Putin intends to decapitate the Ukrainian government”

To the second headline… My response was simply, “Duh,” That’s straightforward tactics. Destroy the command and control and the rest is simple.

I’m personally sad about the invasion , I have several friends from Ukraine and I’m sure they’re worried out of their minds. I hate seeing them upset and in limbo regarding their families still in Ukraine.

My question is; What’s Putin’s endgame?

Unlike our President, I think Putin is no fool. There has to be a political or economic reason for his actions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning the action. I just don’t think Putin is a moron. As such, I can’t see Putin invading another country unless he has a clear goal in mind.

That goal could be land, oil, or making sure that he has unimpeded access to the warm water ports along the Black Sea. After all, wasn’t that what the old USSR did?

I said previously in this blog that after Biden’s demonstration of his weakness and mental incapacity, other world leaders would recognize it and take advantage.

Putin’s actions are no surprise, except to the idiots in the Biden administration. Biden handed Putin a gift when his Administration said Russia would invade Ukraine on a specific day.

I pictured Putin laughing his ass off in the Kremlin and telling his Generals, “Oh, let’s wait a little while. We can use this as an opportunity to embarrass the Americans on the world stage. By waiting, we humiliate Biden, and undermine faith in the intelligence communities of the west. This too serves our purpose, and can be used in the future.“

It’s pretty obvious Putin has less respect for Biden than he did for Obama. Anyone remember how quickly Putin stepped over Obama’s, “Line in the sand”? Putin did that for no other reason than to piss on Obama’s parade.

I honestly don’t know what to make of Putin. I know he’s technically a dictator. I know he was part of the old USSR. I know he’s wealthy and that wealth has in part been made in questionable ways. (Funny that we say that as a bad thing about Putin, but look the other way in doddering Joe’s case,)

I know Putin was KGB and that he spent a lot of time in Germany in that role.

That’s about it. Nothing more than you could get from a Google search. Observing Putin over the years, I’ve come to respect him as one respects a strong adversary. Putin is a leopard that doesn’t change his spots when the wind blows. I respect that as well. At least you always know you’re dealing with a leopard.

What drives Putin is a bit harder to follow. He’s not insane like Hitler, he seems to have plans and goals. I’d never play poker or chess with him. Unless, I wanted to get my ass handed to me.

This brings me back to what are Putin’s intentions?

Were I in Putin’s place, I’d be looking to increase my arable land. I’d be working towards complete energy independence. I’d be trying to secure the ability to manufacture a wide variety of technology within my own borders.

If a country has these things in place and the ability to ship goods year round, then they become a world economic player. They also wouldn’t need to bend a knee to any other government or economic consortium.

You know, kind of like China has done.

Who knows, in the next 10 years maybe we’ll be seeing Национальный бренд  on all of our products, instead of Made in China.

Given the chaos the world has descended into. It could simply be that Putin has decided to adopt a “Russia First” agenda.

He may have concluded that financially it makes more sense for Russia to have the ability to isolate from the insanity. That would serve Putin, and the people of Russia.

If a country is dependent on no-one, then it is in the catbird seat when the shit hits the fan. There’d be a considerable bit of Schadenfreude for Russia to have America, Germany, France, England, and other NATO members, with their hats in hand asking for food, and manufactured goods.

The Schadenfreude would be even sweeter if the reason they were asking, was due to shitty economic, energy, immigration, and manufacturing, policies that drove their own countries into the poor house.

Putin is 69, he might even live to see that day.

We can only hope that the moronic Biden Administration takes Putin at his word about interference. Putin effectively castrated Biden, the only thing Putin hasn’t done, is bent Biden over a desk and metaphorically fucked him.

That’s probably on the agenda for next month.

If the timing works out right, maybe Putin could do that, the same day Biden is delivering the State of the Union address.