Day: July 15, 2025

Getting up early with the Teat Strippers once again around 5 AM not that I should be up so early but I set my alarm early last Friday for the LASIK evaluation and I like the moments of cool and clarity in the early hours of the day as I navigate between the roadside garbage heaps and McDonald’s in the traffic.

Driving out Washington Avenue Extension last night after escaping the hellish traffic of the Interstate 90, 🏪 I was reminded I’m not wrong about those signs that blink at you along the highway saying, Buy! Buy! Buy! As that soon closed to new garbage heap on Rapp Road looms larger over the highway. 🗑️ It’s not like anybody recycles any more, not that such things weren’t mostly a scam to get people to believe in buying more shit. 🛒 Somehow it’s better on my mind, that plastic milk jug will get burnt into carbon dioxide with the rest of burnables the next time I have a fire then pretending to recycle and buying more woke shit. 🔥 They scream about dioxin and climate change, as I sit bumper to bumper in traffic as people haul their plastic crap in carts out to their cars. 🧸

I keep playing that Grateful Dead record with Uncle Johns Band on it over and over again, 🏖️ with visions of summer vacation. I know a week from Friday I’ll be leaving for the Finger Lakes and it will be good regardless of my anxious mind. Memories of that black truck tube floating on Seneca Lake and listening to the cows chew their cud 🐮 up in the National Forest. The truck is fine but every time I slam the door more rust falls off and I find one noise or another to fixate on though none are new, most have done it for half a decade or even a decade at this point. 🛻 I totally know wanting a new truck for next year is the ultimate in consumerism but I also don’t want to have so many worries when I drive out to Michigan and Wisconsin come a year form now. I just don’t know if I can do make Wisconsin at 75 or 80 mph driving for hours in Red without a visit to a repair shop on the way, assuming it’s even fixable at this point. Nothing is wrong now but I see the future. Just like the inevitable growth of garbage heaps along all the roads it seems as people fill their carts at Walmart and Woke-mart alike. Landfill operators don’t care if it’s a paper or plastic bag, it goes the same place. Wokeness is such a scam, but it seems easier then actually making real change.

Today I’m busing it in so I can meet Lynne and go back to the Guilderland Town Hall 🏞️ regarding the Comphrensive Plan. We need to preserve more of the Albany Pine Bush. It’s great what there is but if nobody speaks up the remaining area will not be saved. 🦋 I was working on analysis for Save the Pine Bush’s comments but I was having trouble as I upgraded my computer to Fedora 42 and that bumped up the R language to 4.5 which meant I had to reinstall all the packages I previously had installed. That happened and then was work projects and calls to take 📞 and it just kind of got put aside. Hopefully I’ll have something together for tonight, I just need to pull together a few things. It doesn’t help that MLRC keeps changing the paths where they store the TIFFs containing the land cover dataset. 🗺️

72 days more of wearing contacts. 👀 Do I want summer to be over so quickly, the nights long and dark? Do I want the pain of welders blindness for a couple of days when they cut open my cornea in hope of permanently fixing my horrible vision without glasses. Labor Day is super early this year, and once summer vacation is done, 🌇 the sun will be setting earlier and earlier, and it will disappear quickly and cold will set back in. Last night was certainly refreshing for sleeping, 🛏️ but I’m not looking forward to the ice and salt of winter, or the cold and paying for heat in my draft old apartment. True it’s probably cheaper then heating a big house unless of course you know I have a wood stove or outdoor wood furnace,  but still. 🪓 I’m just ready for summer vacation and listening to cows chew their cud.

I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World 🌍 driving home from the Pine Bush after dark last night. I just find these days to be so confusing, 🧠 a note that the advertisers have now discovered as I see ads for brain boosting pills and old-timers disease. And of course, Better Help! It’s the kind of confusion that I think set in many Americans minds during the 1970s, it’s really a haze of plastic and endless junk that is supposed to make life better. Some of things like building materials, tractors, solar equipment and portable sawmills are quite interesting though usually it’s the unknown labels brings that are advertising. Not the businesses that have an established reputation. 🚜 I can’t complain that much about advertisers, they have brought in $70 so far this month for the blog, so there might be an August blog check after all. But soon enough – September 2026 – the blog hosting company will want another $500 or probably more these days with inflation. That said, I just can’t believe the direction the Trump administration is taking our country, it’s so confusing. It’s a haze of plastic smoke and cow shit. After all, all my heros burn their trash and smell a little like cow shit. 🐄 🛢️