Flooring, and other tidbits

 Okay, so we've made it to Sunday, the end of the week, the day of rest, except for me.  I always work on Sunday.  Today is supposed to be sunny, too.  Temps climbing into the middle 409s (F).  Short range temps are to continue climbing, reaching the low 60s (F) by Wednesday.  There is some rain thrown in there, but the we are nearly in spring, when spring showers drizzle.

I've finished more of my kitchen floor yesterday.  It's... approximately 3/4 complete, and most of that area by the chimney, and under the refrigerator.  I will need to have to do some serious cuts around the floor vent, but I don't see them as being so difficult as to cause much of a problem.  After the tiles are in, there's the quarter round needing to go in around the perimeter, and the almond color cove base under the cabinets before the construction is finished.  I will be glad.  While it's taken me longer than I though to do this myself, the alternative would have been expensive.   With the floor prep, the cost for someone else to do it would have been around $1000, and that's a conservative estimate.

Lily is back to being an upstairs / downstairs dog, and by that I mean she goes upstairs in the evening to go to bed, and then downstairs in the morning.  The rest of the day she spends on the sofa in the writing room, or chewing on one of her snacks.  She's eating fine.  Her stubby tail is wagging again.  What was her problem?  Well, she has a cyst on her wrist that shrank in size, meaning there was some internal leakage, and she had a swollen gland on her cheek that caused her nictitating membrane  to swell.  All is back to normal.  

SAG awards were last night.  I didn't watch.  But Oppenheimer continued to steamroll it's way through award season.

As expected, Trump won the Republican primary in South Carolina.  59.5% of Republicans in that state voted for him, however, his victory was not a slam dunk.  39.5% of the voters chose someone else, mostly Hailey.  He has lost the loyalty of these people.  That is something the Republican party simply doesn't understand.  They deeply believe the individuals who cast their ballots for someone else will automatically vote the the party's nominee.  Nope.  The only thing they can count on are the MAGA cultists.  Rather than having to chose between Biden and Trump, many old school Republicans will simply sit on their hands and not vote.  And, as several pundits have already noted, one guilty voted will send that number through the roof.

Trump's Swindle

 Everybody's working for a rainy weekend!  Well... that might not be quite right.  I'm sure there are certain areas of the country where it is sunny and dry, but not here on the eastern seaboard.  And the rain is going to continue.  

Lily went and did her morning business outside in steady rain and when I left her back in she ran straight to the chair with the towel.  She loves being dried off.  Truthfully, she doesn't care if she's wet or not, but being toweled is a lot of fun.  Biggie?  He's still being a slug-al-bed.  He lifted his head to look at me as I pulled open the curtains to let the dreary morning light creep into the bedroom, then gave me a snort, and laid his head back down.  

So, I was putting together the bar cart for my laundry room yesterday afternoon and there was a disaster, one of the pre-formed, fake wood cross pieces used to hold the drawer split as I was screwing it to the left leg piece.  My most favorite words just burbled up quite naturally.  "Son of a bitch."  So I shot off an email to the seller, and they responded this morning.  They will be sending me a new part.  They asked for a picture, so I'm sending them this one.

Yesterday was rather quiet politically speaking.  Though not really purely political, Alex Jones declared bankruptcy in an attempt to hold onto his millions.  Nobody thinks that's going to work, since his lies about the Sandy Hook shooting were intentional, used as a source of making money.  This scumbag can never pay enough for the evil he has wrought on suffering families just so he could make a buck.

South Carolina may become the first state that counts in the Democratic nomination process, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire.  Iowa Republicans are pissed.  Chaos, they shrieked, mostly because they have this desperate need to be first.  In their minds, that makes them special, and for them special is far more important than anything else.

And the closing arguments were held yesterday.  The prosecution was specifically detailed in mentioning that Donald J. Trump was not only aware of the tax fraud, but also sanctioned it. He is a greedy pig, you know.  Of course, the defense went completely bazonkers.  They fought long and hard to prove that he was not a greedy pig who had no problems breaking tax laws in order to appear wealthier than he really was.  This went on for fifteen years.  Sit back and think about that number. Then think about all of the money you have, as an individual, paid to the federal government in taxes.  All that time, Donnie was skipping around thinking his swindle was going to work, making him tax free.

The problem with Leaping

Well, it has finally arrived.  Today's our Leap Day, in our Leap Year, a rare occurrence and a bad day on which to be born.  I understand most babies being delivered today celebrate either the day before or the day after... but what do they with their driver's license?  If your birthday is the 29th of February, can you magically change it?  Otherwise you'd be learning to drive when you're only 4.5 years old.  How old will you be before you are actually legal to vote?
I saw this morning there's more evidence of the coronavirus heading into its Community Spread phase; new cases is Washington, Oregon, and California.  Of course, the Idiot Jerk has taken that leap off of stupidity's cliff.  Remember the Sharpie incident?  When he used his Sharpie to track a hurricane into Georgia?  He's using the same stupid, little gray cells now.  Yes-sir-rity.  He believes the virus is going to miraculously disappear in April...   I do not doubt that one of his henchies has told him this is going to be just like the Flu, because that's what he wants to believe.  And his base is following his lead in leaping off stupidity's cliff as well.
While most of us see Leap Year as being a bit of an oddity, the Idiot Jerk is so bouncy in his land of delusion he is leaping here, and there.  The truth is out there, though.  He's telling Republican voters in South Carolina to vote for Bernie.  This is because he's terrified of Biden, and believes he'll stand a much better chance of getting elected if Bernie gets the nomination.  Dumb shit.
I understand he's also leaping towards the idea of giving Americans another tax cut if the economy fails to recover.  He has no problem putting the country even deeper into debt, just so he can swing an election.  There is one thing you can count on, his base is going to loyally leap to his side.  Every time they hear refund their dirty little hearts sing 'ca-ching! ca-ching!'  Even if you told them there's not enough money in the bank to fight the coronavirus they wouldn't care.  His base is just like him.
Anyway, this is a great year to look forward to:

Oh, and don't forget, in November we get to fire the son of a bitch in the White House.

The E Ticket

Oh, my, I get to go back to work today.. for 2 days, and then I have another solitary day off.  Can we talk about things that suck?
My first reader as a copy of The Body in the Well.  Her first comment:  "It's big."  She then asked if there were a lot of 'twists and turns.'  To be honest, I never thought of it that way.  A number of characters could be guilty of murder.  I guess I'll have to wait and see if she thinks that 's the case.  Another reader gets a copy today.  The final reader will be getting his copy tomorrow.  I'm not sitting on pins and needles.  My readers will either like it or not.  One asked if it was riveting.  My response:  It's an 'E' ticket ride at Disneyland.

So, how many of you really want to go on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride?

I guess there's another debate tonight in South Carolina.  Of course, I'm not going to watch.  Tomorrow morning all of the pundits will be clamoring about what they liked and what they didn't, who came in strong and who looked week.  At the last debate they all jumped on Bloomberg, tonight they'll go after Sanders.  Speaking of Sanders, he spit out a couple of turds on how Fidel Castro, a Communist Dictator, got some of it right...  ....  I'll bet that squishes when he sits down.

On my cycling.  I've cancelled my Rouvy subscription.  It will expire is 6 months.  I'm enjoying the Tacx software.  Yesterday I went for a 9 mile ride in Catalonia.  I rode across cobblestones... and I could feel them.  The road was not always smooth, and I could feel the rough patches.  The videos seem much clearer on my big TV.

I also got a big laugh yesterday when I saw some Bobo Brain from Fox Business News said the Stock Market dropped because of Bernie Sanders win in Nevada.  His was the only voice not mentioning the Coronavirus, or Pandemic.  His head is so far up the Idiot Jerk's ass, this 'analyst' will never see daylight again.  He's the kind of fool who will sit out in the parking lot looking in at Disneyland.  He will never experience the joy of an E Ticket ride.

  

This if flipping ridiculous

Well, today's Saturday - Flo is wrecking havoc in the Carolinas.  Worry about those people, for them this is cataclysmic..
Normally, today would be my hump day, however I'm scheduled to work 6 days in a row this week.  That might not happen.  Flo is supposed to passing a bit north of here on Monday.  The forecast is for tropical rains...  I get water in my basement when we have torrential rains.  I have a pump, but I need to be here to turn the damn thing on.  Rather than come home and find a foot of water swirling around the foot of the staircase, I will most likely take the day off.  Having an expensive water heater repair is not what I want to deal with right now.
Oh, and in case you haven't seen.... Paul Manafort flipped.  This is what happens when you purchase loyalty rather than earn it.  Prepare for the Idiot Jerk to start Tweeting "he's lying!"  Interesting how everybody around the Idiot Jerk seems to be lie.  I'll bet his whole family is throwing shrieking shit storms.  This close to the mid-terms?  You see, they've been lying shit birds for years, and years.  They've never really been put under a microscope - until now.  Holy Shit Bangs!  Look what we found:  behavior so reprehensible it boggles the mind.  And since that rock has been flipped over, there's no stopping it the flow of shit.
On a lighter note, last evening my store began our Success Sharing celebration - we will be fed well for the next 3 days.  My bonus will deposited into my account on Tuesday.  It's already spent.  Well, not really, not yet.  Those $$$ will be used in my next vehicular acquisition.
And there's this Evangelical blowhard I work with, he has constant diarrhea mouth, not so much about politics, though.  He's one of those who needs to be an authority on everything.  Yesterday he was starting to run at the mouth while I was having lunch.  They were naming hurricanes and he, of course, became the authority.  Someone brought up Hurricane Agnes, which was devastating to Central Pennsylvania.  Just as he was beginning to show us his expertise on that storm, I said "no, I don't.  I was in Vietnam."  Those few words shut him up. He sat there silent, and I finished my lunch in peace.
Anyway, someone evidently wrote a book about Vietnam as experienced by those on air craft carriers.  No, it wasn't me.   Here's the cover picture.

I spent a lot of hours on the bridge of the USS Constellation CVA 64.  Can't you see me waving from the window?

Confederate Atrocity

With the shit that went down in South Carolina I did have to note how the GOP 'wanna be' are reacting to it because I don't think many of the understand this is where they get to act "presidential."  So far Jeb Bush is the only one to have said that damn  confederate flag needs to come down.  The rest of them are being pretty namby pamby   about the whole thing.  Except for Rand Paul, that twit issued a "no comment" statement.  Oops, I don't see him in the White House.  The rest of the bunch are terrified of offending the "southern, white voters."  Speaking of those "southern, white voters," you hear a lot of them defending the confederate flag, claiming it's part of their heritage.  They claim they want to be proud of their ancestors who fought in the Civil War.  They're proud of the fact that their ancestors were pro-slavery and anti-black?

I started searching Southern Heritage and was surprised that in general most websites, except for one, had serious racist overtones.  The one that didn't pretty much smacked down the confederate flag.  Even more interesting are the comments, and there are quite a few.  Most find the flag to be an atrocity.  Those defending the flag?  Well, they're very good at rationalizing their racism.