Not that anybody cares, of course, but Phase II of the fencing project is finally complete, and the dogs’ world has been vastly expanded. Their new environment features two ponds for swimming (assuming they don’t dry up – which doesn’t seem likely for the foreseeable future, assuming you’re fairly short-sighted), lots of new trees to sniff and pee on, and all new vistas to survey. It’s also nice for us humans, as we can let the dogs be with us in the front as well as the back. And the front has an excellent view – especially at sunset. Phase III – fencing in the three and a half or so acres of woods – will take a while, and will probably have to happen in bits and pieces. It’s just a shame that four-letter word that starts with a ‘w’ has to keep getting in the way.

But, for today, let’s turn that dubya upside down, and wish those of you who are mothers a happy Mother’s Day. I hope those ungrateful brats of yours do something nice for you. I mean, would it kill them to remember mom one day out of the year?

Those of you ungrateful brats who have mothers should go and do something nice for them today. At least call, and can you try and suffer through without too much eye rolling and sighing, and acting like talking to your mother is killing you, ferchrissakes.

If you’re so lucky as to be able to go and visit in person, try not to be so damn snotty and quit looking at your watch every two minutes. What, it’s gonna kill you to spend a couple hours with the woman who spent eighteen months in labor and had to walk to the hospital uphill both ways (in winter, or at least during a freak blizzard) just so she could give you life and her undying, unconditional love? And for what? You don’t write, you don’t call….

And if the mother of your children is around, do something nice for her, too.

Those of us who have neither mothers nor spawn are off the hook (go do something nice for yourself while the rest of the world does its best to remind you that you’re a barren, motherless loser).

I also want to point out to you that Amazon is still eager to sell you “last minute” Mother’s Day gifts (not sure how that works – maybe you just print out a picture and hand it to them or something). Speaking of which, I was looking for Adirondack furniture (not the real stuff, which around here I’d go find some Amish or Mennonites to whomp up for me, but the fake plastic stuff), and came across this Adirondack chair squirrel feeder. Is it just me, or does this thing look kinda perverted?

It doesn’t say what kind of batteries it takes.

I have a wife, of course, but she’s neither my mother nor the mother of my children (which, if I have any, have failed to step forward and admit it) and there’s no “Wife’s Day,” because that would be redundant – let’s face it, every day is Wife’s Day.

Now, let’s hear all your best natural methods of repelling black flies (and mosquitoes, too). With everything so wet, the little bastards are out in force. Talk about useless mothers.

Did you hear the “disturbing” revelations from Osama-porn yesterday? Namely that he was still interested in doing bad things to the US. Not that there was any imminent plot ready to be unleashed or anything. I mean, what? Did they think he was over all that now? Just cashing in his 401K and ready to retire, baking bread and taking his kids to the park? The “news” people really ought to get a clue. We should just all be grateful that Dubya personally led the SEAL team that went in and got the bastid, over the objections of our commie mooslam President, who really had nothing to do with any of it. Why do you think dubya couldn’t be at Ground Zero? HE was still being debriefed.

Not that Osama is actually dead, of course. Just the fact the al Qaeda announced on its forums that Osama is kaput (I wonder if there’s a Terrorist Twitter, too? Or a Fatwa Facebook? I’d do a search, but would just as soon not have the NSA showing up at my front door) and that the Taliban has now confirmed it, leads me to believe that they’re all in cahoots with their terrorist brother Obama.

Thanks to SJ, we know that Alex Jones, of course, has broken the real story. Again. How that guy stays alive is beyond me, what with him constantly foiling the plots of the one-world government, the Bilderberg Group, and the Illuminati. Somebody ought to award him the Jerome Corsi medal of honor. I mean, they finally managed to silence Glenn Beck (not to mention Jeff Farias), yet Alex Jones lives on to continue the struggle.

Speaking of struggles, I have a lot to do today, so I guess I should do it. Or at least drink more coffee while I wait for Tractor Supply to open.

All the lakes, rivers, and canals around here are closed. Why? Too much water. Yes, the waterways have too much water in them, which is odd because I thought all the water was coming up in my basement and being pumped out to my sump pond (and from there over to the cornfield, which is more like a corn swamp at the moment; if things don’t dry out soon, the poor cows down the street are gonna go hungry this year). Yesterday was, I believe, the 19th day in a row with at least a trace of rain (and it was sunny yesterday). We’re hoping that streak will end today (“only” a 20% chance of some sort of rain), because we all (“we” being me and the sump pumps) need a break. Not that things are anywhere near as bad here as they are in the South or the Midwest or Texas or whatever, but we’re not really used to all this shitty weather, because God doesn’t hate us. It’s just unfortunate that we’re getting caught in the crossfire of His desire to punish these other places. I guess the veil of protection is more like a leaky shower curtain.

Whatever the weather, at least today is Friday. There are a lot of things on the list for the weekend, none of which involve Mother’s Day. There may not be a lot of advantages to being an orphan, but at least I’m off the hook for the Hallmark® holidays. My #1 priority will be to finish my fencing, which will double the running around area for the dogs. And as anybody who’s still here after all these years knows, at my house, it’s all about the dogs. In fact, they’re the whole reason I moved out here in the first place.

I don’t have much fence left to go, but I do need to get one more 8 foot gate (and, as luck would have it, gates are among the items on sale at Tractor Supply this week). I should go get that after work tonight, but it’s pretty tough to get me back out once I’m home from work, so I may just have to wait ’til tomorrow. I need some diesel (there’s another fifty bucks; maybe I should hold out, as I hear that prices are gonna drop 🙄 ), too, and I should probably paint a ’44’ on the Kubota in honor of Floyd Little’s return to Syracuse.

Oh, there’s a mighty long list of shit to do this weekend. But first, I’ve gotta get Friday over with.

So, back a couple of months ago, the utility company came and read my meters. You probably think this is something that would happen monthly, but out here in God’s Country, they only dispatch a meter reader every other month. Now, the electric meter is digital, so any idiot can read that (though you have to figure out which is the off-peak meter, and which is on-peak; I make an effort to use as much as possible off-peak, which saves me a whopping nine-tenths of one cent per kWh), but the gas meter is one of the old-school dially meters so, well, pretty much any idiot should be able to read that, too, to be honest. Especially a “professional” meter reader.

So, anyhow, I get the bill and the gas usage is like triple what it ought to be. It followed an “estimated” reading, but, still, I was pretty stunned (as I believe I may have mentioned at the time). The only think I have here that uses gas is the hot water generator (commonly called a boiler, though technically it isn’t a boiler, since it doesn’t make steam). Well, there’s a pool heater, too, but you’ve got a better chance of seeing God than ever seeing that sucker run.

The boiler makes hot water for heat, and they also had it running to a heat exchanger in the water storage tank to make domestic hot water (I’ll be making use of this for my solar water heating project – assuming I ever get around to it). Using the heating system to make domestic hot water seemed kind of stupid to me (not quite so bad if you’re running the boiler constantly, but having the heat on in the summer – assuming we ever get summer around here; kinda disappointed I had to revert to the heavy jacket yesterday morning, with temps down in the 30s – seemed like a bad idea; I mean, how much 180° water do you have to run through a few hundred feet of 1″ supply and return line to heat 50 gallons of water to 110° or so?). Plus, for the three heating zones, I have programmable t-stats that were more or less set to “off” for about 20 hours a day, give or take. Mostly, we relied on the pellet stove (and blankets, sweaters, and hoodies – as my dad used to tell my mom, “put some clothes on if you’re cold”) for heat, and it was a mighty cold winter.

Once I got that bill, the t-stats went to 55 degrees max, 24/7, and I bought and installed a 40 gallon electric water heater hooked to a timer. It heats the water in the tank in the morning (off-peak) and again at night – a total of about 3 hours a day – and in between the water stays plenty hot enough for anything you might want to do. Or anything I might want to do. I would love to have installed a tankless heater but, sadly, the cost was just too much and they require some major electric service which I just didn’t have room in the panel to install, or I could have gone with gas, but the layout of the house and the gas supply would have meant running a lot of gas pipe and no real good way to get it there, plus a vent, and there just isn’t enough money to be saved to justify the expense.

With our low flow shower heads, faucets, toilets (I really need to install that dual-flush adapter), and front-loading washer that had damn well better only be used with cold water (note to self, shut the hot water supply off to the washer), we average about 60 gallons per day total water usage between the two of us, so the hot water usage should be a lot less. With the timer, I think we’re doing OK, and the difference in cost between this and a tankless solution will give me a good jump on the solar (which, if it works out OK for the domestic water, I’ll expand to supplement the heat).

Now, what was it I was gonna say?

Oh, yeah, the gas meter. To shorten a long story, after putting in the water heater, I went to have a look at the meter after a couple of weeks, to see how I’d been doing. The “actual” meter reading on 3/23 had been 3223. When I read the meter well after that, it was 2944. In other words, they fucked me. Looking a past usage, it should have been more like 2850 or something. There’s really no way to read 28xx as 32xx, so I have no idea what happened (except that 3223 is pretty darn similar to the date of 3/23, so maybe he wrote the date in the wrong place or something). I don’t know. All I know is that what should have been about 100 therms turned into about 400 therms.

So I did a customer reading this time around (as it was an off month) – still 2944, as we are using no gas at this point – and sent it in. Their system apparently figured I’m an idiot who can’t read a meter (should have offered me a job), so they estimated it again.

Well, screw that. I took a picture of the meter and sent it in to prove I’m not a moron. I mean, not only did I not use the previous 300 therms, I sure as hell didn’t use another 100.

So, anyhow, instead of bills totaling $700 for two months, it was more like $300, so not only do I not have a bill this month, I still have a credit balance of $186, which should cover next month and at least some of the next. And I’ll be reading the meters myself every month, too. Gotta keep an eye on these bastids.

All of which is just a long way of saying I really don’t have much to say this morning. Except if anybody has about a 5,000 gallon tank I can use to capture some of the 4,000 or so gallons a day of ground water I’m pumping out of basement, let me know. Not sure what the hell to do with it (I can only flush the toilets so many times), but it sure seems a shame to waste it (even my new sump pond is overflowing at this point).

Oh, and Happy Fifth of May.

As I’ve mentioned before, many things remain a mystery to me, even at my rapidly advancing age. For instance, I don’t quite get the whole “foaming hand soap” thing. Never mind that I’ve never quite understood the need for liquid soap in the first place (I mean, bar soap was goddamn good enough for me, and for my father, and no doubt for my father’s father – get much before that, and I’m not sure what they used. Probably some sort pf paste made from sand and lye, or maybe they just took the kids down to the river and beat them clean on the rocks back then – I’ll have to look that up). I suppose the justification might be that soap is “dirty” because people rub it on themselves. But, please, GMAFB. If you’re that frickin’ delicate, then just use two fingers to pick the shit up and rinse it off or something. And do what we’ve done for decades – just don’t think about where that bar of soap was before you started rubbing it all over your face (could be good, could be bad – best to just not think about it).

That’s why people are so goddamn sick these days. Teevee has tried to sell us a line of bullshit that says you’ve gotta live in a freakin’ sterile operating room environment (and worry about our toilet paper leaving lint on our asses, ferchrissakes), so any little germ that happens to hop up your nose damn near kills you. In my day, we rolled around in the mud and ate dirt and didn’t go crying to mommy to clean things out every time we got a cut (for one thing, if we did, we got iodine shoved in it, and that shit hurt). If a cut turned red we didn’t whine about “infection” – we just kept picking the scabs off ’til they went away. And we were better off for it, damnit. If we lived, we built up an immunity to pretty much anything. If we didn’t, well, that’s just natural selection at work, baby.

Anyhow, those little plastic soap bottles just seem terribly un-green to me. I mean, with a bar of soap, you just have a little piece of wax-coated or whatever it is paper to make and then recycle (when it bar gets small enough, you just magically stick it to a new one, and you’re good to go – no waste), whereas with the liquid stuff, you have the plastic bottle and the little plastic pump gizmo, plus that spring thingie, and then you still might have a little paper or plastic label thing to put on it, and then that crappy plastic “tamper resistant” cover thing that has to be on everything nowadays thanks to that Tylenol tamperer asshole back in ’82, and then that tinfoil coated Styrofoam disk seal thing that you have to pull off and throw away. Lots of moving parts and extra packaging just to solve a problem that didn’t exist. Oh, sure, you can buy the big gallon jug refill thing, but that’s still extra plastic and packaging and sooner or later you still need to replace the little dispenser bottle, ‘cuz it breaks.

Ah, but then they came out with “foaming” soap. WTF? Talk about solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Oh, I just don’t have the time to waste working up a lather with my liquid soap. Can’t we have soap that comes out pre-lathered? How stupid is that?

Plus – and here’s the part that’s really mysterious to me – my wife continues to try and put the non-foaming liquid soap refill from the gallon jug into the goddamn foaming soap dispenser.

It doesn’t fucking work.

To get it to work, you have to add water to thin it out and then shake it for like an hour and it’s a pain in the ass and you still have the regular un-thinned out soap in the little straw thing so it’s damn near impossible to push the plunger down, and then the pump breaks prematurely and, well, goddamn it, it just doesn’t fucking work, and AFAIK they don’t make bulk “foaming” soap gallon jugs (because I think the shit turns to foam as soon as it’s exposed to the air – not unlike that batch of homebrew I made a while back).

So just stop buying the shit, OK?

The I can get back to worrying about whether or not I’m going through life with pieces of toilet paper stuck to my ass.

I don’t know about you all, but I’m quite tired of the Osama porn (though I may go ahead and buy a pair of ‘Obama Got Osama’ thongs to wear to my next soirée; doesn’t take long to roll out the merch these days). Actually, I was tired of it yesterday morning by about 4:30 AM, but it’s proven harder to avoid than Royal Wedding porn or even American Idol porn.

The president can be confident, however, as he appears to have the support of such mental giants as Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Guidi Ruliani. For about two days, I’d expect, when they’ll all go back to calling him a lily-livered commie pinko uncover Manchurian Mooslam. Or something. Hard to believe one can be both an ineffectual coward and a secret spy bent on the destruction of truth, justice and the American Way, but there you have it. I think the big question on all our minds is “will gas prices go down now or what?”

Fortunately, ABC – network of the celebrity bad boys – is going back to reporting on the important stuff, and will have an “exclusive” with Jesse James on both GMA and Nightline. Goodness knows I’ll be tuning in to that. I hope they ask him how he felt when he heard about Osama. And why haven’t we heard what Lindsey Lohan thinks (assuming that’s not a contradiction in terms)? Is there some kind of cover-up going on, or what?

If only the Weekly World News hadn’t been silenced by the Illuminati.

Is it really only Tuesday? Yesterday seemed to last a whole week.

Well gosh. You go to bed one night with the world pretty much as it has been for quite a while, and you wake up the next morning and the boogie man is dead. Or supposedly dead. I’m sure many people will remain unconvinced. Well good, I guess. I don’t seem to feel the need to go outside and whoop it up chanting “USA, USA” while waving the flag. But then, I was never much of a flag waver. Most of the people I’ve seen on the teevee who were out there partying as if their team just won the Super Bowl look like they’re under 20 years old, so you have to kind of wonder what the motivation for their exuberant jubilation is all about. But it just goes to show that Obama has fucked things up once again. First, he really shoulda kept the fucker on ice until the election. Second, he failed to inflame the mooslam world by parading Osama’s body around like a trophy, which will lead to mass speculation that it wasn’t really him (as if a photo of the dead body is better proof than all that godless “sciencey” stuff). Of course, I’m pretty sure we’ll come to find that Obama was the one that set bin Laden up in that fancy crib in the first place, and only took him out because Osama had a copy of Obama’s Nigerian birth certificate. Obama, Osama…. It’s all too confusing for me. I need more coffee.

I did a fair amount of manual labor yesterday, and as a result, I slept in late – ’til 5:00. Well, I wasn’t actually sleeping. I just didn’t get out of bed. But then I finally got up and decided to try and make up for all the coffee I didn’t drink yesterday. So now I’m just waiting for it to get late enough to make noise on a Sunday morning, and I accidentally saw a few seconds of some stupid infomercial. Even on that, the banter between the two “hosts” was nowhere near as inane as that of the “royal wedding” morons. No more moronic than anything else we see on American morning teevee, I guess. Oh well, still too early to fire up the tractor, I think, so I guess I need more coffee.