OK, well, it would appear that life is infringing on my posting again. I am having a blast doing cabinets again, this time from a project manager/builder account manager angle instead of getting my hands covered in sawdust and filled with splinters.

I’ve been in the industry for about mumbletymumble years or so, and I’ve even worked for this company before – but there are things that you learn because you didn’t do them that way, or didn’t do them, or weren’t aware they were done even though you saw the end results. Paperwork is one of those things. Holy tree killers, Batman – I thought the cabinet industry went through a lot of wood. I think the planning and prepping for building the cabinets kills more trees than actually making the boxes.

OK, I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

I am diggin’ the open-ended schedule, though – except for the part were I spend most of Friday evening getting caught up with what I did all week. That should change once I get a solid handle on what I’m working on. I get to drop MEG off at school (did i mention that she’s in kindergarten already? she was born what, a couple months ago, right?) and head for my first appointments or the plant or the showroom depending on where I’m needed, and when I wrap up what I need to get done, I head on over to the sister-in-love’s house and pick MEG up and take her home. Unless TMBWitW beats me to it, in which case I just head for the house.

Today when I dropped MEG off at school, there was dad dropping off his kindergartner – or maybe first grader at the most – on his Harley. I admit, I was kinda jealous. I called TMBWitW and told her what I saw. She said it would be fine, if she hadn’t picked up her Daddy’s fearlessness – that kid will do anything. If she was scared, she would hang on tight, but Mommy is afraid that the little daredevil won’t have any fear and will end up falling off the bike.

So we made a deal – when it gets to the point that Mommy gets to retire, Daddy gets to do his work on a Harley and Mommy gets to take MEG to school.

I can hardly wait.

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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Can I prove it? Sadly, not thinking about the implications, I failed to order a documentary crew to follow me around.

Can I tell you about it?

Yesterday was Mom #2’s service. I was asked to be a pall bearer. As I walked into the chapel for the viewing, concentrating on what Mom’s daughter was telling me, I realized that I could make out her words as through a curtain of syrup.

Praise God!

I would like to think that Mom had something to do with that. She was a true prayer warrior and a woman of God.

Thank you, Mom.

Now, almost 24 hours later, I am starting to hear more clearly. I can catch details. I hear birds chirping out the back door. I can hear the dogs snoring in the next room.

Last night, it was to the point where I could hear as through a thick curtain, no syrup.

Last night I could hear my little girl’s voice again.

There is still a background of (BZ! DON’T READ THIS PART!) “white” noise, that “skshshshshs” that’s been going on since it started, but it’s not overwhelming everything else into submission.

I don’t care.

I can hear.

Chat ya later…

Yesterday was kinda busy for me – it was, after all, my day off, so all I managed to do was get to the chiropractor, give blood, take our “new” black lab to the vet, spend time with my daughter, and go to Fellowship where we played live again. The time spent with those we love …

I was thinking about something all day yesterday, but never got time to mention it. Yesterday would have been Dad’s 84th birthday. He passed away on their 42rd anniversary, in 1992. The morbid among us (me, mostly) constantly re-figure how long I have to enjoy my family. We’ll see.

Earl Scruggs passed away yesterday at the age of 88. Porter Wagoner once said that Earl Scruggs was to the five string banjo what Babe Ruth was to baseball. I have to disagree. Babe Ruth was just playing a game. Bluegrass is serious business.

What I didn’t get accomplished yesterday will have to wait until Sunday afternoon. Cleaning up the back yard, cleaning up the side yard, cleaning the garage … the garage keeps getting put at the bottom of the list. As long as TMBWitW can park on her side of my shop the garage, all is well.

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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The following words are keyed to attract the attention of the DHS and the NSA – including the new “Spy Center” in Bluffdale, UT: Terrorism Al Qaeda (all spellings) Terror Attack Iraq Afghanistan Iran Pakistan Agro Environmental terrorist Eco terrorism Conventional weapon Target Weapons grade Dirty bomb Enriched Nuclear Chemical weapon Biological weapon Ammonium nitrate Improvised explosive device IED (Improvised Explosive Device) Abu Sayyaf Hamas FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces Colombia) IRA (Irish Republican Army) ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) Basque Separatists Hezbollah Tamil Tigers PLF (Palestine Liberation Front) PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) Car bomb Jihad Taliban Weapons cache Suicide bomber Suicide attack Suspicious substance AQAP (AL Qaeda Arabian Peninsula) AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) Yemen Pirates Extremism Somalia Nigeria Radicals Al-Shabaab Home grown Plot Nationalist Recruitment Fundamentalism Islamist Emergency Hurricane Tornado Twister Tsunami Earthquake Tremor Flood Storm Crest Temblor Extreme weather Forest fire Brush fire Ice Stranded/Stuck Help Hail Wildfire Tsunami Warning Center Magnitude Avalanche Typhoon Shelter-in-place Disaster Snow Blizzard Sleet Mud slide or Mudslide Erosion Power outage Brown out Warning Watch Lightening Aid Relief Closure Interstate Burst Emergency Broadcast System Cyber security Botnet DDOS (dedicated denial of service) Denial of service Malware Virus Trojan Keylogger Cyber Command 2600 Spammer Phishing Rootkit Phreaking Cain and abel Brute forcing Mysql injection Cyber attack Cyber terror Hacker China Conficker Worm Scammers Social media

Very interesting day.

Headed out to work this morning (“Hey, I cleaned up cat piddle, nothing worse can happen to me today!” heh.) and as I was crossing Grand, heard a little grinding/growling noise from under the right front side of the QX4. Traffic slowed, I tapped my brakes, and the noise grew to a full on metal-on-metal squeal. I got the car over to the right and turned off the main road, and parked with a lurch – felt like something seized.

Preliminary inspection showed the brake caliper assembly wasn’t in the right place – looking closer, the bottom of the caliper had dug a groove into the magnesium rim. If that had happened at highway speeds …

Called the boss, called the wife, and then started looking even closer. The bottom bolt on the caliper was missing. Plain not there. The top bolt was loose. Hmmm – maybe back where I heard the noise? I walked back the way I came for a bit, but didn’t find anything. TMBWitW pulled up, and we headed for the house. (sat at the railroad crossing for about 30 minutes as a train was switching back and forth, and I think they were building the train for departure).

Got home, changed clothes, headed up to the dealer (‘cuz I knew, in my heart, that the bolt was a dealer-only item. I was right), found out that the bolt only cost $4.74. I could pick it up on Monday.

Monday? Yup – the nearest copy of the bolt I needed was sitting in a warehouse in Tennessee and they would Fed-Ex it to the dealer and I could pick it up Monday afternoon. My mind was already racing, worried about transportation with only one vehicle and long commutes to work.

I couldn’t leave the QX4 where it sat – I needed to get it home. I called a member of boss’s networking group to have it towed, and they told me it would be about an hour to an hour and a half. I headed out after an hour, so I wouldn’t be rushed getting there when they called. As I drove along, thinking about how to get the transportation stuff done, something in the road caught my eye.

I though to myself “No way.” This was several blocks before the noise had started, so I didn’t think it was possible. I turned around, parked, waited for traffic to clear, and walked out to pick up the object – because it looked a lot like the bolt off my caliper.

When I got to the QX4, I checked it against the other caliper bolts – and it sure looked right. It fit in the hole, and threaded into the exposed rotor mounting point. I called and canceled the tow truck, drove home, grabbed the tools I would need, (cancelled the part order from Tennessee) and drove back. A little bit of mechanical work later, and the assembly was back in running order. I drove home, got TMBWitW and MEG (and Cinnamon, because she had an appointment today and TMBWitW was going to be taking her) and headed back to the QX4. Once I got the car home, I headed for the hardware store to get a new washer – hey, I found the bolt, I was more than happy to spend 30 cents on a split ring washer – and then tore the assembly apart again so I could put it back together.

30 cents instead of $4.74 and a tow bill? No problem!

Anytime something like this happens, that prevents me from going somewhere or doing something I had planned, I always wonder what God was keeping me from. I had extra toys in the car that were headed for the warehouse; that prevented me from switching cars with TMBWitW – and prevented her from being the one stranded with the broken down SUV. The caliper came apart on a fairly calm stretch of road, instead of on the stretch of highway in my commute, keeping me from having a more catastrophic event. If the caliper assembly had dug into the magnesium rim at highway speed, I wouldn’t have been able to stop before it sliced all the way through, possibly causing a loss of control and the resulting incident afterwards. Not to mention how much more expensive a rim is compared to a 30 cent washer …

All through this, TMBWitW and MEG are recovering from or headed into a stomach bug – MEG was throwing up last night, TMBWitW is feeling nauseous tonight – and the rest of the crew at the store stepped up and picked up my sudden absence.

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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Obama(THHO) has decreed that we, the sheeple, should all drive the General Motors Volt. After all, it is electric (with a gasoline backup engine) and we all should know that electric cars are the future of transportation. So energy efficient! So inexpensive to drive! Cheap to fuel!

Let’s do some math, shall we? I know, Obama(THHO) doesn’t want us doing math and other stuff like thinking for ourselves, so let’s not tell him, OK? (that goes for you dhs bots, too, ok?)

Let’s start with my own vehicle for a starting point, ‘kay? We purchased a 1998 QX4 used in 2004 for about $18,000.

Yeah, it was a little high, but it was in pristine condition and Blue Booked for about 21k at the time. it had a tick over 50k miles on it. It is free and clear with no payment. It averages about 17 1/2 – 18 miles per gallon down hill with a tail wind. It has a 19 gallon tank. Let’s use an average of $4.00 per gallon (ok, fine – $3.999) for the sake of argument. At 17 gallons per week, operating costs (no insurance, repairs or maintenance costs are factored in here) are about $68.00. I have a 20 mile one way commute (24 if I need to swing by the warehouse on the way to work). This works out to about $.2285 per mile ($3.999/17.5), which means a daily cost of a warehouse run on the way and straight home after work would be $10.054.

The Chevy Volt must be incredibly cheap to drive, then, if it can be operated for less than that! Let me go out and plunk down $46,000 for a new Volt.

And a little more for a charging station. And even more for the storage fees needed to store the stuff on my side of the garage since TMBWitW sure isn’t giving up her side and park her Camry out in the elements.

OK, that was a little snarky. I’m sure I could find a cheap, HOA approved shed (less than six feet tall so it doesn’t extend above the fence) where I can store my table saw and other woodworking equipment.

Now – the commute. The QX4 has a cargo area with the seats down of 85 cubic feet. The Volt has a cargo area rated at 10.6 cubic feet. Hmm. That means my commute just went from 24 miles with a warehouse run to over 50, since I would have to make multiple trips to the warehouse. Eight, to be exact. 24 miles warehouse commute, two miles from warehouse to store means 24 miles plus (7×4) 28 miles for the extra runs equals 52 miles one way. OK, so I have to leave a lot earlier too, to drop MEG off at the babysitter and then get to the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store warehouse and the store and the warehouse and the store.

I received an email from my friend Dave T.:

Eric Bolling (Fox Business Channel’s Follow the Money) test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.

For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.

Let’s see … after 25 miles, the Volt is running on a gasoline engine. It takes ten hours to charge the 16kwh battery. That would put a big dent in the day’s schedule, so the gas engine it is. Hopefully, I’ll have enough time after getting home before having to leave earlier the next day to get a full ten hours of charging done.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah – so, if you can’t count on the electric motor for more than 25 miles, then the vaunted Volt no longer gets the 95 miles per gallon on the electric motor alone. Once you figure in the 9 gallons of gas, the average drops to around 30 mpg. $3.999/30 = $.133 per mile. But wait! I forgot the electricity. 16kwh x 1.19 per kwh (the average cost of electricity) = $19.04 for a 25 mile charge per day. $19.04/25=.761 – $.761 per mile for twenty five miles, then $.133 for the remaining 47 miles works out to $19.04+($.133×47)=$25.291 per day.

So I need to sell my QX4 for about $2500, finance another $43,500 and lose an hour and a half of morning time to reduce my carbon footprint and drive the Volt, which costs more than two and a half times more to operate than my QX4.

If I was a liberal, left leaning DemocRat with Obama stars in my eyes, I might believe that this is actually a good idea.

I would like to take this moment to do two things: mourn the death of common sense, and thank Dave T. for the email that started this line of thought.

(just so you know, i am not selling the QX4 anytime soon, and i am certainly NOT buying a chevy volt. ever.)

Chat ya later…

Thanks for stopping by, In GOD We Trust, and Wear Red on Fridays!

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