Not going to be a good day to ride in today, necessarily so I will bus it in. Yesterday I did the drive my big jacked up truck to work thing, then inched it in and out of the tiny parking lot at the shit Glenmont Laundromat as people lined up for their slop bucket at whatever the woke restruant is next to that dump of a laundromat as I spent nearly $120 on groceries and supplies at Wally World.
I think I got some good eats out of it, 🍏 and more plastic crap ultimately to send up in smoke. But it will be good and produce much warmth with all that wet wood. Milk, eggs, flour, beans, fruit and vegetables. The usual stuff. Deodorant and toothpaste. Nothing fancy but necessary to ensure my pantry stays full. 😋 I don’t buy things I don’t plan to eat right away, though I probably didn’t need another 5 lb of carrots 🥕 this week but I didn’t want to run out as I’m using them in most meals I cook up. Had more of the green pea soup last night, probably going to put the rest of it in containers and freeze until later in the week or weekend for a change. It was such a bitch getting in and out of the laundromat parking lot, 🛻 but between shopping at Walmart and doing my clothes, 👚 I still was home by around 6:40 PM and was done with dinner by around 7 PM. I guess I read after that, maybe looked at some stupid TikTok or a YouTube, honestly I forgot and fell asleep fairly early on.
Past few nights I’ve been sleeping like shit, 🛏️ not totally sure why except it’s that time of year with the windows closed. It’s not like the electric blanket isn’t nice and warm, though I just toss and turn and find myself waking up during the night. I thought the solution was getting to sleep real early, you know bedding down at 7 or 8 PM and getting up at 4 or 5 AM but I find myself waking up during the night. Maybe it’s dreams 💭 of a better tomorrow, as I watch the minutes fall of the clock ⏰ madly and another year draws to a close. I really hope to get out to Madison County after Christma or at least before the year is done for a few nights in wilderness.
I got busy yesterday, 🔎 and never made the appointment for the inspection and tire rotation for Big Red but I’ll do that today. I also need to do my time sheets at work, 📄 and a half dozen other things that got put off as the line of people and problems piled up at my office, and I furiously wrote out little scripts and fixes to fix random things. Driving in and out was fine, 🚗 but I made the mistake and took Southern Boulevard in on morning, and while it was probably faster then South Pearl, it mean sitting in traffic which I despise. 🚨 There were so many cops on the road last night, I think I passed three of them driving home and running errands. I wasn’t doing anything illegal but come on, give me a break. Why do we have so many jack-booted thugs working for the government? Aren’t their jobs in the private sector, you know like selling roof-top solar panels and Woke-branded organic vacuum cleaners? 🚍 With the snow coming, busing it in today. I’ll bike 🚲 in tomorrow.
Continuing to push my way through Stewart Stronger’s Doable Off-Grid Homestead, 📚 which I need to finish up today before it’s due back at the library and almost done listening to Edward Abbey’s the Fool’s Progress 🃏 which I know is going to end in such a sad and ironic fashion as all of his books do. Honestly, I think I am running out of Edward Abbey books to read. But then again, I still have more Hunter S. Thompson books to explore. I’ll read the Doable Off-Grid Homestead on the bus this morning, and listen to the remainder of Edward Abbey walking the Plaza in the evening. Then I still have a bunch of books to read this weekend. It would be good to go out camping, so I can have a fire 🔥 and listen to audio books late into the night, though this weekend looks cold. I think my Hoopla borrows are all due back a week from Thursday,
I've been playing with different ways to use K-Means classification to find related classes of states when it comes to income distribution. I tried dividing up the states into four groups, which came up some interesting income distributions, as shown below.
I guess, go out, buy a paper and support your local journalists if that is your thing. I’m skeptical though, as most local papers grow thinner and thinner, with most of their staffs being college interns and a handful of old timers who hope their company will stay around long enough for them to retire.
Truth is local journalism is a lot like local restaurants in the era of McDonald’s and the interstate highway system. It serves less and less of a purpose, when local and even state government is mostly about implementing the policies set out by science and the federal government. In a complicated, engineered world, where people float freely from community to community, there isn’t a lot of need for the local anymore. Regional, state, and national planning make a lot more sense, whatever is local is quaint and a throwback like that stubborn café that pokes along on the back road, as most people fill up their Joe at Dunkins and Starbucks.
Not only are local papers thin and often just repetitive of national narrative of today, for the most part local news is news like the articles in Playboy make it a series publication. Newspapers are mostly about salecious stories about the latest violent crime and gory traffic crashes, rarely do they provide much of substantive valley. Often they are little more then propaganda for their publisher, giving comfort to ideology of those who read them regularly. News is good, but I’d rather dig into the data myself. Draw my own conclusions. Or read the positions and reports put out by activist groups themselves, reflecting the views put forward by those money interests, rather then hear it second hand in newspaper.
Maybe it’s better people are getting more of their information directly from the government and interest groups. Why read a newspaper article, when you get the original press release or report? Does the news media do that much of a service over what you can find put from the source? Investigative journalism sounds good, but how does it compare to the opposition digging up dirt on questionable institutions? Maybe I’m just skeptical of the lofty position that journalists often write themselves to be in.
This is the total number of membership associations in a county divided by the population of the county. The associations include membership organizations such as civic organizations, bowling centers, golf clubs, fitness centers, sports organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, labor organizations, business organizations, and professional organizations. These associations are identified by NAICS codes 813410, 713950, 713910, 713940, 711211, 813110, 813940, 813930, 813910, and 813920.
I totally plan on driving Big Red in this morning, assuming I can get him fired up as he has run since last Monday when I got back from camp. Yesterday was sunny for the balance of the day and I cleared off the solar panel, so I think things will be reasonably well charged to get the engine spinning but it’s only about 5 degrees this morning.
I think it’s a good day to drive in 🛻 as I want to get to the Walmart and the laundromat on the way home, as tomorrow looks like snow and ice, and I think I’d rather be busing it on that day. 🚍 That said, despite the cold, I honestly enjoyed the bike ride both in and back down to the local bus home. No stepping over homeless people as I got my steps in at Concourse, 👣 though there was some black dude smoking mildly shitty weed and drinking a Natty Light at bus shelter by SUNY World Headquarters last night. 🌎 Honestly, I’ve smelled worse weed been smoked by colored and poor in the ghetto before. I know, it’s my high brow liberal urbane tastes when I smoke up in wilderness with my Budwiser and PBR. 🍺 They made a big deal a few years back about adding heaters to the bus shelters, but all year they’ve been off, probably because the Bus Authorities blame the winos and homeless people for hanging under them, but I am sure it’s to save money on electricity at the bus service is completely broke these days. 💵 See when Trump came in he cut funding to bus authorities in many different little ways.
Well I do hope Red starts up, 🔋 as otherwise it will be a pretty cold bike ride in. But maybe it’s an excuse to finish up Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress, as the woke commuters in their warm Honda WOKE-branded SUVs see a Doc Sarvis want-a-bee riding his bike in single temperature down Corning’s Hill. 🚲 I’ll leave early so I have some extra time to head in plus I want to give the engine a good chance to warm up before I head out, being that it’s been eight days since I last ran it. I’m sure at first it will sound like engine is lacking lubrication for a second or two until it gets up to oil pressure. I’ll be yelling at truck, OIL PRESSURE, PLEASE!!! 😱 But even then when it’s so cold, it won’t have much power until it warms up. Got most of the snow and ice off the truck last weekend, including making the sure the solar panel was well cleared off. Sunny ☀️ yesterday, so that should help. But Saturday I didn’t get the panel cleaned off until mid-day, and it wasn’t really completely free of ice and snow until Sunday, but that way was cloudy.
Pea soup last night was good, 🥣 pretty much congealed by the time I got home, and I should have added some water but I enjoyed it in moderation, dipping my homemade bread in it. 🍞 Eggs this morning with onions and spinach. 🍳 Didn’t sleep well last night, not sure why, it was plenty warm under my heated blanket, and honestly on the cold nights my apartment tends to stay warmer, as it’s so dang drafty, that the heat runs far more, plus I tend to push it up to 53 or 54 degrees from 48 or 49 degrees, to make sure pipes don’t freeze. That and leave the cabinets open which brings in even more drafts. But for the wasted energy, it is far less then what I would pay in rent or mortage/taxes if I owned a big house that would take more energy to heat, ♨️ to say nothing of all the gas burned in the commute, even if I didn’t drive a big jacked up truck. ⛽ .
I can’t complain too much, I have this elderly neighbor 👴🏻 the one who drove into the old masonry fireplace next door, who has such a poorly insulated building that their house is always the first on the street with the roof free of snow. I few years back they replaced their old gas or maybe oil boiler with an zero-chimney high efficiency boiler but you can see the condensation coming out the exhaust pipe nearly non-stop on most mornings, they must have real high gas bills. I’m not saying though that the gas heat didn’t run a fair bit in my apartment last night, but it’s off now because I stopped it back a bit now that sun and mercury is rising and I’m up and going. ❄️ I just like the cold, and the heated blanket helps a lot.
I didn’t sleep well last night, 🚜 and ended up pushing my way through about half of the E-book, Shannon Stronger’s The Doable Off-Grid Homestead. Only about 370 pages on E-book version, it actually is a fairly quick read about one family’s vision of how to turn a few acres of raw land in Texas into a sustainable homestead with livestock, gardens composting, out houses, and solar. 🍅 Nothing super out of the ordinary from many other permaculture books I’ve read but still interested. I renewed the Backyard Guide to Farm Animals but this other book got greater priority 🐐 as somebody else has that under reserve, so I need to finish it up before it automatically returns on Thursday. I saw this book before I went up to camp two weekends ago, and got it out but I got reading other things while I was up at camp. 📚 Past few nights I’ve not slept well, a lot of broken sleep, maybe it’s too much caffeine but at least I’ve been in bed by 7 PM and usually asleep before 8 PM most nights, so I’m not that sleep deprived. 🛏️ I want to get raw chocolate when I go to store tonight, ☕
