Arnold declares a drought emergency in California

Can't get the link to this but California is in a drought emergency. You might be thinking who cares I don't live there. Well this is going to affect the rest of the nation because California produces one quarter of the nations food supply. Some 750,000 acres of farm land in that state will be affected with federal water managment saying they will release no water.

It's time to get out there and plant a victory garden. You may be glad to have even a small container garden when you see the prices of produce at the local markets in the coming months. We're still experiencing freezes here but you can do starter plants indoors until things get warmer. You also might want to do a rain barrel because we don't know how our rain situation will be this year.

Update: Looks like Texas is in the same boat as California and unless the weather pattern in the Pacific changes that boat will be sailing on dust. I'm just wondering what to plant this year. Will it be cold and wet or hot and dry? If the weather pattern changes like it did in the 1930s then were all screwed because here's what's happening right now. Farmers aren't even bothering to plant some crops because they know the won't have enought water. Ranchers are getting rid of a lot of their cattle because they can't grow the feed crops and don't have the water. And you know chickens take a good bit of water. So I guess you'll just have to go and eat dirt.

The fickle finger of fate

As I mentioned the other day there are some days that nothing goes right and you're better off just packing it in and going home. Well today was the other side of the coin. Went to the clinic for lab work and to straighten out a bill. They had sent me a bill that went back over a year. And here in lies a lesson. If you get a bill that you know you don't owe get off your butt and see a person face to face with the evidence in hand. As it turned out the computer was set to credit my account everytime I paid which I do everytime I go so there's no balance. The computer didn't do that and spit out a bill for $250. Now some people would have just paid it without thinking. I won't do that since I have no balance and get a nice discount for the pay as you go method.
In my shopping trip I found a few other things I had looked for the last time out as well as something for $20 that I had seen for $50. Things went so well I should have bought a lottery ticket.

In other news it appears Obama is continuing to undo the mess that Bush has given us.
If you haven't bothered to read the Recovery Act I'll give just a glimpse of some of the things in there.
No more no bid contracts for Iraq
Funding for EPA and Superfund (Thanks Barrack that's up my alley)
Money for Veteran health care
Funding for National Sciences (hey somebody figured global warming is real)
Funding for Cops (remember Clinton wanting to put 100,000 more cops on the street)
Funding for the military (this is for rebuilding run down barricks and other buildings)
That's just a part of it. It's 407 pages and I can't really say I fully understand all of the aspects of the bill but it is pretty clear where Obama wants to take the country. If we can get even a part of the way there in the next year we'll be doing well. Will there be more spending? I'd say so. But as we saw trickle down economics does not work so the help must come from the bottom up not the top down.

Happy Birthday Steve

I remember the first Apple Macintosh I bought back in (I think it was) 95. Back then I knew almost nothing about computers. Some years before that I had the fortune to own a timex sinclair. It did very little and took hours to program to do the simplest things. When I was looking for a computer in 95 still not knowing much because computers had advanced so much in 10 years I went around to several stores and started to see what they were all about. One salesman seeing that I was playing around with a Mac said stop I can show you a machine for much less that will get the job done. He showed me a windows machine. I'm a pretty cheap (make that frugal) person. But I had heard horror stories about frustrated windoze users. It may have looked like a great machine but then I stopped to consider that it came with nothing. Machine and operating system was all you got. Much like buying a pizza with only cheeze. That might have been alright had I been in grade school. I used to love plain cheeze pizza in the third grade but I wanted a bit more.
I found a computer store stand alone that had a bunch of Macs. This was way before Mac Stores. In playing around I found in the top right corner the word tutorial. I clicked on it and the rest was history. It was unique. It guided this computer illiterate soul through the ins and out of the machine. If I did something wrong it would guide me through with a gentle Oops and a red circle around my mistake. It would then show me what I should have done. So in about 15 minutes this old dog had learned some very new tricks. And the bonus. Unlike the windoze machine this beauty came with a printer, modem, 15 programs, a year of internet, and subscription to McAddict magazine.
Since that first machine I've owned two more as the technology advanced from floppy disks to CDs and then to DVDs. I recently bought an ipod touch and I must say that is the future of computing. This thing with the right programs is like a swiss army knife of the tech world. You can surf the web, email, word processing, listen to music, watch videos, watch TV, listen to radio, record music or voice, play games, one program lets you use it as a level while another you can turn it into a flashlight.

To Steve Jobs who's years ahead of Microsoft I wish you a very Happy Birthday and may you have many many more.

One of those days

Made a nice little to do list yesterday and then proceeded to have one of those nothing goes right days. Went to the clinic to have some regular lab work and straighten out a bill. Sometimes I feel like a lab rat. Once per year they do a physical. I feel like that's only to make sure I'm still breathing. Hey he's still warm he's good to go. Then of course there's the blood draws for heavy metals when we work on those types of jobs.
So I get to the clinic only to find out that they're out sick. Call before you come next time I'm told. They're getting to be as bad as dentists. Most dentists around here only work three or four days a week.
Went to the next item on the list. Pick up a phone calling card for a relative. He's a bit disabled and only has limited local service on a cheap cell phone. Went to one store and find that they stopped selling those about three weeks ago. Strike one. Go to another store. They had some off brand service at a rediculous price. Strike two. Go to one last store and find they only have one card that they wanted $80 for and they wouldn't take a check as payment. Strike three. I said the heck with it and went home. I guess some days you just can not win so it's time to give up and call it quits because that spirit or karma or whatever you want to call it is just working against you. You ever notice that? There are times that no matter what you do things turn out wrong. Then there are those rare occasions when everything goes right no matter what you do. Unfortunately the wrongs always seem to outnumber rights.

Happy Blogiversary to Me (belated)

Almost slipped my mind that two years ago yesterday I started this blog. Why? I don't know. I had been posting comments on a couple of blogs and the guys there (Blah3 in particular) encouraged me to start my own. But I must say I much prefer to comb other blogs and leave a little snark here or there like a hit and run driver. I also like to research current topics to find those overlooked tidbits that MSM never seems to bring out in the open. So sorry if you missed the party. It wasn't much but the cat had fun.

Depression era cooking

I remember surviving the recession of the early eighties and was just thinking how we made it through. About all we had at that time was a large bag of flour and those big blocks of government cheese. So what do you make that's balanced. Pizza of course! With a large jar of tomato sauce and whatever left over veggies or meat it makes a very balanced diet and by making it yourself it has less in the way of fat (except the cheese) and salt. So that's one of the things we live off of for several months. Needless to say I couldn't eat pizza for a long time after that. But that got me to thinking about other meals for surviving the depression. Any favorite poor boy receipes you'd care to add just leave them in the comments. Remember we're all in this together.

What do you bet the Bush crime family has their money hidden here?

Or at least some of it. Either here or in some offshore account under a phoney corporation name.

I'm guessing in an attempt to find out where Bernie Madoff has hidden a good chunk of the $50 billion the US government was able to get the names of eight Swiss bank accounts. There are according to this article some 52,000 accounts that our government wanted a peek at for tax evasion purposes. And you know Madoff had help. No way in hell could he have come up with all those monthly statements to his clients by himself.

$$


Sorry for the lack of posts but you get to a point of burn out. There just isn't much to snark about that hasn't already been covered. Hopefully as spring approaches the beavers will be out in their usual Friday glory. Now since today was forcast to be nice weatherwise I've got a bunch of stuff to do. Or as they say up near the great lakes "make hay while the sun shines". We take that expression literally around here.

Hey where's my bailout? And I don't want any chump change either.

History repeats itself

Looking through a drawer the other day I came upon a coppertype (an old photo printed on copper) that gramdma gave me many years ago. It's a photo of Warren G. Harding our 21st president. That's one part of history I really haven't studied so I thought I look up old Warren. Didn't know if he was a republican or democrat. The more I dug into this history the more I found him to be a typical rethuglican. He lowered taxes on most peoples' income by a whopping 1% while totally eliminating all the taxes on those making 300K or more. Oh but it gets better. Like the typical den of thieves his minions were doing some shady deals out in Wyoming and California. One of his cabnet members gave a no bid contract for oil drilling rights in those states. One hundred thousand dollars changed hands and bribery charges were brought. Sound familiar (Haliburton)? This little episode was called Tea Pot Dome after the area in Wyoming. Ron Blogoevich might have been proud of them but they got caught as well. Hey Ron this was when they didn't have tape recorders too.

But back to my antique photo of Warren G. Once I found out the history I decided to see if I could find out if the photo was worth anything. Don't want to have anything around here that reminds me of what that party has done to this country. It would be like having a portrait of Hoover, Nixon, or worse Bush Jr. The portrait seems to be the official white house issued but unlike any of it's day it's done on copper. I'm wondering if this wasn't some gift to Grandpa for a campaign donation. Grandpa was pretty high up in a corporation so I'm sure he was a Republican. I've looked all over the web for anything like it and find nothing.
Grandma did leave me with a bunch of old tintypes but they are fairly easy to value and I don't think I'll part with them.