As a Catholic drop-out, I had to look up what they call the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. I was thinking “Super Saturday” but apparently that’s not it, and I was kind of disappointed to find out it was just “Holy” because that’s what I thought Thursday was (though I suppose that’s “Maundy Thursday” if you go old school). But of course when you go looking things up on the Internets, you find all kinds of shit, and it’s not different with this – Easter Even, Silent Saturday, Joyous Saturday – these people clearly have different definitions of “Good” and “Joyous” than I do – Great Sabbath, Black Saturday – combine those last two, and I think you’ve got a rock band – and a few dozen others. I even found this article at the Crappington Post from a few years back titled “What Did Jesus Do On Holy Saturday?” I didn’t read it, but I assume he binged-watched Breaking Bad. It’s hard to keep up on your shows when you’re running around proselytizing and asserting your 2nd Amendment rights and whatnot. So whatever you call it, I hope you’re having (or will have) a good one.

As for me, it’s a typical Saturday. I slept in until nearly 4:00, drank a pot of coffee while watching an episode of Taggart (it’s a show where everybody acts and sounds like Angus McFahrquar and Groundskeeper Willie – especially DCI Burke, who’s a miserable bastard that I get a kick out of – probably because we share a similar outlook on life), and then headed outside to see if I could get a look at the Chinese Space Station, which is on its farewell tour. So few artists bring their tours to my neck of the woods. Sadly, I was either too late or too early (and it was getting pretty f*cking cold so I didn’t hang out long) and I didn’t see it. I’m sure it’ll be on YouTube anyway. The moon was quite impressive, though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

The snow here is nearly gone (barely an inch or two on the pool deck), the sump pond is full (much to the dogs’ delight) and the lawn is nice and soft and, apparently, just perfect for digging in. Peggy likes to dig deep holes, but Frtizi enjoys digging trenches. And of course anytime you can scatter some stones from the leech field around, it’s an added bonus. Anyhow, all this springlike activity has me expecting another Nor’easter any time now. It’s basically a trick to try and get me to take the plow and chains off the tractor and put the mower on.

Hah! Nice try, Mother Nature. I’m on to you.

Instead, what I really need to do is get all the tools I dragged out to fix my garage door opener last weekend organized and put away. Or at least put away. There are several ways to accomplish that, but I think the best one is to throw money at it. I’ve been meaning to get a tool chest up there for quite a while now, and I think today is the day. I really hate to go to Home Depot, but they appear to have the best version of what I’m looking for (at least, for a price I can actually afford) so, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. And it at least comes (mostly) assembled – with the added bonus of it weighing close to 200 pounds, so by the time I wrestle into and out of the truck, I’ll be too crippled to screw around with the tools. Plus I’m sure it comes in a huge box, and what I really need is more cardboard in my life.

Oh well, I’d better go take a shower. Wouldn’t want the HD folks to think I’m a slob.

I saw that our brave hero President (who you may recall said he’d happily run, unarmed, into danger to save a bunch of strangers’ kids) has opted to run away from the kids who will be marching on Washington (among other places) today in what my all-too-cynical side predicts will be an honorable yet ultimately futile attempt to shame our government into at least trying to do something to prevent school shootings (and, you know, maybe mass shootings in general). In a surprising turn of events, Trump opted to head to Florida to play golf instead.

That’s why these things never really seem to have an effect – most of us regular people can only do this shit on weekends because we have to, you know, go to work (or in this case school) during the week. And the feds get the hell out of town on the weekends, so other than maybe accidentally seeing a few fake news reports, they can basically ignore it all. Though I suppose a little public pressure probably lets them jack up their rates for the NRA lobbyists. But, hey, what do I know? I’m just a miserable old bastard these days (probably because I saw the Hippies grow up to be Amway salesmen, the Yippies turn into, well, Jerry “I can do more for the movement by making a fortune on Wall Street” Rubin, and the United States of America not only treating an ignorant, megalomaniacal conman as a legitimate candidate for the highest office in the nation, but actually swearing the fucking idiot into office).

Besides, I have more mundane things to deal with. Like, where the hell is my mail actually going these days. Pretty sure it’s supposed to be going to a PO Box, but I don’t see a lot to indicate that. Not that I care, because my mail is boring, unless it’s a package.

I’d kind of wondered about the whole package thing, now that Amazon ships so many things via USPS. As I mentioned in my previous whining, we got a PO Box to make life easier and not have to go looking through the ditch for our mail. So I thought, well, maybe First Class mail would get forwarded to the PO Box and the parcels would still come to the house. ‘Cuz, like, I have no idea ahead of time how Amazon is gonna ship something, and if it’s UPS or FedEx, I’d just as soon not have to go pick it up at the Post Office, so I don’t really want to change my shipping address.

Turns out, not only will the PO forward your mail, but also your packages. So far, so good. Except they seem to expect you to pay postage due on said packages, for the privilege of having them forwarded. And they want you to pay from the point of origin. Even if said forwarding literally amounts to the package going to the same PO it was going to anyway, but instead of loading it on a truck to be delivered to your house, they toss it in a bin for you to pick up yourself.

For instance, let’s say, hypothetically, you – as an Amazon Prime member – order a new gear set to rebuild your garage door opener, and it ships from Indiana. For “free.” Or actually for about $10 more than you’d have gotten it from somewhere else w/o free shipping. So far so good. Then you get a slip in your PO Box that says you have a package. Still good. And then you go to get it and they say, “postage due: $10.12!”

Not so good.

Well, if you’re like me, the first thing you do is cancel all your subscribe and save orders – I don’t mind getting some stuff sent to the PO, but if I have to go pick up cases of toilet paper and paper towels and whatnot, I’ll just go to Costco. I mean, the whole point was to make my life easier, not more difficult.

The next thing I did was have an online chat with Amazon, asking if I can find out how they plan on shipping an order before it ships so I can use the appropriate shipping address. UPS? To my street address. USPS, to the PO Box. Seems simple enough. Right?

Wrong.

The good news – according to customer service rep Rohan – is that a choice of carrier is something they’re “working on.” The bad news is they don’t have that feature yet. However, they do have a workaround, which is to wait until it ships, see how it’s coming, call or online chat with Amazon and change the shipping address while it’s en route. And since Rohan realized that’s not ideal, he offered me the choice of either an extra month of Prime or $10. Whether that’s because he saw I’d just cancelled a rather sizable amount of orders or not, I dunno. But I went with the ten bucks, and I’ll just make sure I don’t order anything bulky until I get this shit all figured out.

Speaking of garage door openers, that’s another one of my mundane worries for the weekend (as I wait for the snow to melt and the ground to thaw out enough to reconfigure my street mailbox situation – or at least find the existing mailbox door that’s still hopefully buried in the snow near the box and not halfway down the street somewhere).

I did manage to replace the gears and everything works swimmingly, as long as you don’t mind the door going down about 18″ before going back up again. I anticipated having to readjust the up and down travel and up and down force and all that, but no amount of adjustment seems to get the job done. So I consulted the trusty Internet, and it appears I either have something interfering with the “interrupter cup” or I’ve got it in the wrong position (which seems unlikely, give that it just kinda goes onto the end of the motor shaft), or, more likely, I’ve got too much play in the shaft (usually have the opposite problem these days) due to not getting the collar that holds it in place on tight enough.

So, it’s back at it. I can’t quite recall if this is something I can mess with w/o dropping it all back down again or not. That’s a hassle, but working above my head isn’t really something my shoulders do well these days. Or my neck. Or my back. And working up on a ladder alone is a real pain in the ass if you don’t happen to have at least three hands (and a net to catch all shit you drop).

Also, it’s still pretty goddamn cold around here (28° at the moment, and it’s not gonna get a helluva lot warmer), and now that I’m one of these old-timers that can never seem to get warm (until I start bitching about the heat), the thought of spending more time in my cold, dark, damp garage is pretty unappealing.

So maybe I’ll just Netflix and chill instead.

And, sadly, that’s not a euphemism.

I may have given everyone the impression that I’m not fond of our Governor her in NY State. That’s mostly because I rather despise him. Not that he doesn’t have his good points. I guess. He was right out there in front of the whole legalizing same-sex marriage here in NY, for instance. I don’t know what his motivations were. Perhaps he truly felt it was the right thing to do. Or maybe he was just politically savvy enough to see which way the political winds were blowing and figured he’d get out there in front of the issue. Wasn’t really a tough sell in most of NY, to be honest. And he kinda sorta was out there on the whole medical marijuana thing, except the law here in NY has some pretty ridiculous hoops to jump through, they aren’t allowed to sell anything smokable or editable, and from what I understand it’s about ten times more expensive to get with a prescription that it is get it the old fashioned way (you know, from your kid’s friend Larry). But NY politicians are a weaselly bunch, going back to abstaining on the vote for independence from England and, hey, it’s a start, right?

Mostly, though, our Governor is an arrogant, corrupt (in the political tradition of the Great State of New York that isn’t exactly unusual) snotball that puts the Cuomo name to shame. I don’t have the strength to delve into everything going on in NYS government (it’s not all that easy to understand) but, among other things, Cuomo seems to have emboldened a bunch of NYS Senate DINOs in forming a coalition with Republicans to keep the Senate in Republican control. Why, I don’t know.

I do know that he feuded with our recently term-limited Democratic mayor (silly woman seemed to think the state ought to help us out with our crumbling infrastructure, whereas Governor Andy seemed to think an amphitheater for an area that gets about six weeks of summer a year, a new downtown taxpayer-funded football stadium – whose failure he blamed on her – and a gondola (of all things) for the NYS Fair – which lasts for about two weeks in the fall, were more important. So he shut her out and cozied up with our Republican County Executive (who, to be fair, is also a woman, so I guess we can’t toss out the “misogynist” label – at least as far as this goes).

But, anyway, let’s just say it wouldn’t break my heart to see Governor Snotball gone.

Enter Cynthia Nixon. Now, I don’t know much about her and I’m not gonna just write her off as a “celebrity activist” or anything. She seems like a nice person, appears to pretty much have her mind right (by which I mean I agree with all of her stated positions – that I know of, anyway), and I know it would make certain heads spin (then pop off and explode) to not only have a woman Governor, but a bisexual woman married to a woman.

I will say that my knee-jerk reaction is that going from zero-to-Governor (in terms of political public service) is not necessarily a good thing. I mean, maybe run for school board or common council or something, first. And Governor of NY isn’t exactly like being Governor of, say, Alaska (all due respect to Sarah Palin). Good intentions aside, it seems like you kind sorta oughta be pretty sure you know how things work and how to run an office like that in order to have a prayer of actually getting things accomplished.

I mean that’s why, politics aside, Hillary Clinton would have been good at the whole presidentin’ thing. Being a very respected (at least in private – can’t let the wingnuts see you giving her any credit publicly) two-term Senator and Secretary of State are a couple of pretty good items on the old CV. And Bernie Sanders knows how the sausage is made, too, and by all accounts had a lot of success (that he didn’t get credit for) at working with scumbags Republicans to get things passed.

That’s why – even setting aside the whole narcissistic sociopathic moron stuff – Hillary or Bernie (or my dog) would have been a much better alternative as POTUS right now.

Now, I did hear somebody the other day say “well what about Arnold as Governor of California?” Which kinda proves my point, but, you know, I’ll let our Californians explain that one.

The other issue with Nixon as a candidate (not so much with me, personally) is that I think she may be seen as very New York City-centric. I’ve heard a lot about her wanting to, say, fix the subways (which I don’t disagree with), but up here in god’s country, the infrastructure is falling apart and we’ve got rather appalling poverty and unemployment. Plus there’s long been a sense (fair or not) that downstate gets all the money and at best doesn’t give a shit and at worst has complete contempt for the hicks upstate. Or, as Ed Koch once said,

“… out in the country, wasting time in a pickup truck when you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit? This rural America thing — I’m telling you, it’s a joke.”

The real joke there is that all the Sears are closed.

Anyhow, the gubernatorial candidate that I supported a few years back – Zephyr Teachout (who, full disclosure, has also never held elected office that I know of, but is a law professor and clerked for a judge in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, so she’s at least got some experience in the Judicial Branch) – signed up for the Nixon campaign (god, that sounds weird), as her Treasurer and seems to be a staunch supporter, so I’ll certainly keep an open mind.

Plus, did I mention I despise Cuomo?

But, man, it would sure feel weird to pull the lever for Nixon. OK, so, we don’t have levers anymore – but “fill in the bubble for Nixon” sounds pretty weird, too.

Times were simpler when I was a kid. We had four, maybe five – occasionally six, if WUTR from Utica was coming in – teevee channels to look at. Back then “remote control” was just another name for the youngest kid (which of course was me), and we ate good wholesome meals presented on tin foil plate type things, served in front of the television while watching Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin on plastic teevee trays that had two legs with plastic wheels on them, and which folded for easy storage (we kept ours in what would otherwise have been wasted space between the stove and the base cabinet where you stored things you never wanted to see again, along with the extra oven racks and the cutting board).

You peeled back the aluminum foil cover on your Swanson TV Dinner to reveal the delicious Salisbury Steak or Turkey or what I’ll refer to as Roast “Beef” entrees slathered in a gravy-like liquid. There was a separate section that contained meticulously whipped potatoes (sometimes if you were lucky there were steak fries instead), and another with a serving of some sort of veggies (typically an unnaturally green shade of peas, or said peas mixed with extraordinarily orange carrot cubes, and sometimes a brilliant yellow variety of corn) and a third “dessert” section that often contained what I believe was referred to as an “apple cake cobbler.” This cobbler was typically 300-500 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun, and more than capable of searing your lips together or cauterizing your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

Ah, those were the days.

Also, growing up in the ‘burbs as I did, we had a mailbox attached to the house – right there next to the front door – and the mailman (who was, indeed, a man – “Joe the Mailman,” in fact – and we had two of them. The second Joe came after the first Joe retired, but the first Joe stayed busy in retirement by writing crackpot letters to the editor, back when it took a little bit of effort to be a crackpot. I mean, you had to write something down – on paper – find an envelope, address it, put a stamp on it, and then mail it. Say what you want about crackpots in the olden days, at least they had commitment) would walk – yes, walk – house to house delivering the mail. No jeeps or little trucks back then. As I recall, Joe used to drive his own car and park it somewhere in the neighborhood and walk around with a huge leather purse, dispensing mail from one pocket while picking it up and putting it into another.

And although “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” was never the official USPS motto, they were nevertheless words by which these dedicated civil servants lived by.

Times, of course, have changed. “Where have you gone, Joe the Mailman?” Joe got a truck and he doesn’t walk through the snow anymore. At least, not where I live. Like most of rural ‘Merica, I have a mailbox (approved by the Postmaster General) mounted on a post at the end of my driveway that apparently has an invisible (except to snowplow drivers) “hit me” sign attached to it.

My first serious run-in with the plow came, oh, I dunno, maybe four or five years ago. Now, it’s not unusual to have your once proudly erect mailbox post listing a bit during the winter. There’s a “snow wave” that gets generated by the plow that slams into the sucker and heaves it this way and that. There isn’t much you can do, other than straighten out as best you can and wait for spring.

Every once in a while, though…. Well, that wing scores a direct hit, and WHAM!

What happened in this case was the post split down the middle. About halfway down. So, as a quick fix, I went out and drove a shitload of 3″ deck screws into in an effort to make it to spring. It suffered a few more hits, took a few more screws (and I added a metal plate here and there), and by summer that poor post was in pretty tough shape. And the box was pretty beat to hell, too.

So, figuring there wasn’t much point in sending any more money than I needed to (hell, the box is a good 400 feet from my house, and I only have to look at it in passing, so who cares, right?), I got a new box, cut the post down to where it was still intact, and cut a hunk off the “For Sale” sign post they never came and got, and I spliced the two together with a conglomeration of strong-ties, joist hangers and L-Angles that I had kicking around.

Pretty? Hell, no. Two-tone (white and really, really old pressure-treated), not exactly square, but definitely functional. But I figured sooner or later the damn plow would just take it out anyway, so what the heck?

Well, a year or two of that was all my wife could stand looking at, so she declared that she wanted a new one. So, out she went with instructions to get a new, pre-made cross post type of thing. Easy enough for me to shove in the ground and mount the box to.

Instead, she comes back with one of these plastic things. If you’re not familiar, this is a plastic sleeve that fits over a post with a plastic mailbox that attaches to it. So I STILL had to get a new post, which is really the only thing I needed to replace anyway.

Oy.

Anyhow, fast forward a couple of years to this year. The box has taken a few whacks, and the sleeve part is cracked and the box part has gotten kinda wobbly. I come home one day and, hmmm, Something seems to be missing, but what is it? Oh, it’s the mailbox – which is in the ditch, along with some very soggy mail. The top part kind of snaps into the base and the plow has apparently blasted it clean off. Also, I had to scrounge around to find the doors, because they’ve been blasted off, too.

Well, I pound everything back together and hope for the best but a few weeks later we come home and the wife says “do we need to check the mail today?” And I say, “well, first we need to find the mailbox,” ‘cuz once again, it’s gone. In the snow in the ditch – sans doors.

I get it all back together, but it’s become apparent to me now that all those plastic tabs are now stretched out and deformed and this thing’s gonna have to be replaced. I just want it last until the ground thaws out so I can get a new post in there (and I begin drawing up plans in my head for a plow-roof mailbox with springs and hinges and whatnot).

So if course every day it snows, I come home hoping the mailbox is still there and things are looking good even after I got home last night. It had snowed about a foot during the day, but the mailbox is still still there, so I’m feeling pretty good. Until this morning.

We got another eight inches or so overnight, so I’m out there at 5:30 on the tractor and, sure enough, no mailbox. This time, though there’s no sign of the goddamn thing, and I’m wondering what the hell I’m gonna do when I spy a tiny bit of the house number poking up out of the snow. So I wade into the ditch – up to my waist in snow – and pull it out. The doors are gone. I guess I’ll find them sometime in April, if I’m lucky.

So I pound the damn box back on but it’s become clear to me that I’ve lost. Fuck it, snow plow – I surrender. You win.

My wife went and got us a PO Box this morning.

I never get any good mail anyway.

As you have already heard a million times by now, today is Pi Day. Also Albert Einstein’s birthday, and the day we lost Stephen Hawking who said, among many other things, “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.” And also “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

It saddens me to think of how much farther along in that goal he, personally and we, as a species might be today if his body had been able to keep up with his mind. And also why a person like Hawking was dealt the hand he was, while Donald Trump is allowed to exist – let alone be in the position he’s in today.

If there’s a stronger argument against the “theory” of “Intelligent Design,” I don’t know what it would be.

On a happier note, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a brand new version – Raspberry Pi 3 B+, which features, among other things, Dual Band WiFi. And it’s still only $35.

Stephen Hawking and Raspberry Pi – two stellar (so to speak) examples of American Ingenuity. Oh, wait, they both come from the UK. Well, we still have that Trump guy. Nobody’s gonna gonna take that away from us. Pretty sure we don’t have enough cash to pay anybody to come and collect him, either. But I’m willing to chip in my next couple of mortgage payments if anybody wants to take up a collection and try.

The worst part about Trumpism (if there can possibly be a “worst” – maybe a “wurst”? Trumpwurst – stinkier than liverwurst and even the spiciest mustard won’t make it palatable) is the true believers. Those fake religious hypocrites who were so ashamed of, say, Bill Clinton with their faux moral outrage and “what about the childrenisms” (if those goddamn whiny children think they’re gonna take my AR-47 away from me, they better just shut the fuck up) who couldn’t care less about this bloated, pussygrabbing, porn star fucking (no offense to porn stars, mind you – I don’t judge) piece of crap that stops by the White House once in a while in order to sit on the toilet and tweet about the “Marine Core” before changing into his white knit golf costume en route to Florida.

To paraphrase the late Nicholas von Hoffman on Nixon, Trump is the dead bloated whale carcass that’s washed up on the beach of America, and the only question now is who’s going to get a bulldozer out there to shove him back into the ocean or bury the rotting putrid thing in the sand. Before, you know…

I will say one thing for our President, though. He’s the only person imaginable that could (almost) make me feel sorry for Rex “tea for the” Tillerson.

Ah, almost time for lunch.