What a lovely Summer we are having so far up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Here it is July 7th or 8th and it’s just pouring rain.
Next week it’s supposed to get up as far as 92.
Its been wet, chilly and windy with a few nice days here and there.
I just hope when it does finally decide to BE SUMMER that it stays that way until late October..
Right now it’s 8:45.
I need to get to bed and get some sleep, I’m still wore out and sore as hell from my little marathon garage rearranging yesterday.
The second day is always worse so I know I’m really going to be sore tomorrow.
It’s still light outside.
Some asshole neighbor is mowing his fucking lawn at almost 9 at night.
Then the Big Show is coming.
It’s already started, the 4th of July fireworks fest.
It will go until Midnight, it does every year.
I’m afraid to put in some earplugs, I just might sleep straight through both alarms.
That happened twice last week, twenty minutes both times.
It’s going to be a long night.
That would be Les Schwab tire centers, for quoting me $550 for two tires, mounted and balanced.
Remember?
I do.
Craigslist to the rescue again, I just went and picked up two more tires for $100.
That’s going to be all 4, mounted and balanced, for about $350.
They aren’t new but they are damn well good enough for my purposes.
As long as they hold air and stay round I’m golden.
I am just wiped out today.
I near kilt myself yesterday hauling and moving stuff in, out and around that garage.
I didn’t get everything put back until 11 o’clock last night when I finally shut the garage door.
No lunch, no dinner, just breaking my back.
My lower back is completely fried and my legs feel like I walked twenty miles.
First thing was taking the tarp off the Sprite and getting it started.
I put the trickle charger on it a couple of times last week just for fun.
It cranked over quite a bit, it’s been sitting since last Summer but eventually it fired up and ran again.
The throwout is squealing and the valves still need adjusting but it still runs and drives.
Then the real fun began.
I started hauling crap out of the garage into the driveway so I could get that massively heavy work bench out so I could get it mounted on a cart frame I got from work.
You can see that work bench there in the middle.
Sweet Jesus what a pain.
I didn’t take pictures of the process because I was too pissed off and just wanted to get it done but at one point it got away from me when I had one end picked up with the cherry picker and was trying to use a floor jack and a board to pick up the other end so I could take the huge crappy wheels off of it and roll the cart under it and the damn thing flipped over upside down into the driveway.
The driveway is sloped and the whole show kept rolling down hill.
It took me an hour to get the damn thing flipped back over by myself.
It’s gotta weigh 250 pounds easy.
It finally wound up with the cherry picker trapped sideways up against the tailgate of the truck and the end of the table jammed up against it too so it couldn’t roll away anymore.
Then I was able to lift the back and roll the cart under the back.
Then set it down on one end and let the other end down onto the tailgate so I could get the cherry picker out of the way, roll the cart under the legs, center it and then push the whole mess back uphill to get the end of the table off the tailgate and let it drop down onto the cart.
Then let it roll back against the tailgate so I could weld the feet onto the cart.
That table top is 1/2 inch steel plate.
Heavy?
Holy shit is it heavy.
That table is stout enough to sit that Sprite on though.
Then I had to rearrange the garage to make room for it.
Oof.
I forgot how heavy that Snap On Roll Away is.
Because at 10’Oclock at night when I was trying to get the crap out of the driveway and back into the garage, it’s still a mess.
But I will be going through and getting rid of a bunch of crap.
The back of the truck is already full.
It’s not exactly what I wanted but it’s a start.
I need more horsepower to get the rest of it moved around.
I want to get my tool boxes off the wall and out of the corner so I can get to them and move the cabinets back in there.
I am somewhat happier though.
As soon as I can move without yelping like an old arthritic dog, I’ll head back out there and start straightening things up and getting shit off the floor so I can get around better.
It’s a mess like I said but there is so much more potential and eventually it will be much easier to work in.
That table is going to be a game changer.
As long as it doesn’t turn into a Catch All.
Like that will never happen.
LMAO!
That just boggles my mind, sorry.
Even if I made enough money to be able to afford that, I wouldn’t.
The AVERAGE price tag on a new car is now $47,000
Twenty years ago when I was repairing Lincoln / Mercury vehicles for a living,
forty grand bought you a top of the line, all the bells and whistles, prestigious
automobile that most people couldn’t afford.
Now they want forty grand for this,
Now add insurance and $5 a gallon gas.
According to the article linked above, because of the electronic chip shortage, automobile builders decided to build bigger, more expensive models to get the most bang for their buck because they couldn’t crank out as many as they wanted to.
Now as I recall, back in the day, mid 70’s and a couple of times since, when the price of gas got higher than peoples comfort level, the automobile industry still had enough sense to respond to demand by cranking out little Econoboxes by the millions.
Such as,
Now of course these newer cars have way more amenities and still get pretty decent mileage but give me a break, Thirty Five Grand for a Grocery Getter?
Are you fucking serious?
And who are these people who can just plunk down that kind of dough, especially when EVERYTHING ELSE has gone through the roof except wages?
$2000 a month for rent, $600 to $800 a month for groceries, etc. etc. etc..
As it is, credit card use has skyrocketed in the past year as people foolishly try to maintain a standard of living that they are purposely being squeezed out of.
Then we have the ones I really love seeing.
Sweet Jesus, I wouldn’t even be able to afford NEW TIRES on that shit!
I mean, I make decent money but are you kidding me?
It’s not just new cars either, the price of used vehicles has shot way up too.
Now me being a mechanic, I might be able to afford a much older rig, spend the money here and there and REFURBISH something but I sure as HELL ain’t paying what they are asking for what I consider to be a vehicle that isn’t rebuildable BY DESIGN in the first place, let alone some Front Wheel Drive piece of crap with enough useless electronic crap in it to run a small country.
Damned if I know, most folks gotta do what they gotta do to get around but the way I see it, unless you are pulling down just about twice as much as I make in a year, there is no way you can afford to buy a new car.
It just isn’t possible.
Eventually the car manufacturers are going to see their sales fall off a cliff and be forced to rethink their strategy.
I guess they never heard of this before,
Some or most of look to be having three days available to us to do something besides being a Wage Slave.
We can expect the usual OOH RAH, ‘Merican, 4th of July 24/7 for the next three days at least.
I have some sad news for you, the America we were born and raised in is deader than a door nail and there is no miraculous resurrection in the cards.
I have documented the death of America slowly but surely for many years now and I can pretty much call a Time of Death at this point.
That certainly doesn’t mean that we can just throw up our hands and walk away.
On the contrary, the need to fight has never been greater.
It’s just that what we need to fight for now is a New and Improved version of what got perverted and corrupted.
The very first thing that needs to happen is that a few million people need to pull their heads out of their asses and come to the realization that our government wants us dead.
Not just beat down, really dead.
They have been doing their damndest to kill off as many of us as they could, openly, for the past two years.
Since the first plan didn’t work out as well as they had hoped, they are now doubling down with a variety of other methods.
Those of us they can’t kill outright are to be hammered into dog shit economically for starters.
So I plan on doing some thinking, some scheming and some planning over these next 3 days.
Since the Communist supporting local Government outlawed fireworks here in the city limits finally a couple of years ago anyway, they have saved me a bunch of money and aggravation for their trouble, both of which I can now use to my advantage.
I know I have had to come to the conclusion that about all I can do at this point is to try and survive as best I can without any immediate support from anyone here on the home front.
It is what it is and I have been surviving shit for a very long time.
I can be quite innovative and very efficient when I have a certain goal I want to accomplish right in front of me.
I’m also not the least bit afraid to let it all hang out if necessary.
This is an open thread, you can spout off on anything that suits your fancy but I am really interested in your thoughts about long term plans, if you have any.
His approval rating went below Trumps at the same point in office.
39.0 % of your fellow citizens still think he is doing a Bang Up job.
That’s a lot of Brain Dead Motherfuckers.
But hey, no more mean tweets, right?
Meanwhile,
The MSM, FBI, DOJ and several Police Departments continue to pretend it’s not.
Fuck You, Asshole.
And that goes double for your little Commie Butt Buddy, Attorney General Bob Ferguson.