Category Archives: Home Life

Stuff going on in my personal life.

It’s the whole point

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There seems to be some surprise and indignation at the idea that the IRS would be used as a weapon against political opponents. I don’t understand.

First; what did you expect from a communist administration? Really. Can you say, “DUUUH!”? Second; the entire tax code is a weapon of political power. Always has been. It is designed to nudge you into behaviors you’d not be engaged in if you were left to your own devices, and to nudge you out of other behaviors. The very concept of a progressive tax is a political weapon, designed to substantially reduce wealth creation and accumulation. Raising revenue is far down the list, or it is only an ancillary function of the tax code and the IRS. I could on and on, but you should have gotten the point by the time you received your very first paycheck.

The specific targeting of individuals and groups is nothing new at all either. The Clintons were famous for it. Rush Limbaugh has been getting audited every year for many years. The list is longer than this whole blog since its beginning.

A “Gosh, we’re sorry” will change nothing. The only solution, assuming anyone wants one, is to abolish the tax code, abolish the IRS and go to a single digit flat tax. Otherwise quit your bitching– this is exactly what you’ve been asking for. Begging for, actually. Don’t bother pretending to be surprised– it makes you look even more stupid.

Boomerite packaging test

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On Saturday Barron and I did a simple test on the Boomerite packaging. It was hypothesized that the heat from heat shrinking the plastic wrap was causing evaporation of the ethylene glycol. We put a thermocouple temperature sensor just inside the cardboard box and applied the heat shrink plastic bag as normal. There was less than 1 degree F rise in temperature.

We applied heat until the plastic melted. The temperature just barely raised. That means it’s not the heat.

There are two remaining hypotheses:

  1. The additional thickness of the shrink wrap caused compression of the Boomerite when we squeezed the same number of boxes into the crates. I’ll have to order some more boxes and heat shrink bags to test this hypothesis.
  2. The slight change in mixing order changed things. Last year when we had exceptional good detonation rates someone, not me, had the bright idea of mixing the potassium chlorate with the secret ingredient before mixing in the ammonium nitrate and ethylene glycol. They told me they were doing it and I had sort of a nagging feeling about there being a reason not to do that but my brain wasn’t working well at the time* and I okayed it. A day or two after the event I figured it out. They were, in essence, making “flash powder”. The EG goes in first to eliminate the dust and static electricity during the mixing process.

It will probably be the middle of June when I go back to Idaho to do the tests.

*Just two weeks before I had served papers for legal separation on my wife of 35+ years. This year I was feeling much better and one guy told me that I looked terrible the year before and that this year I “looked ten years younger”. He also asked, “Is the new woman you are with (Barb L.) just as smart as you? I confirmed his suspicion that she is a smart cookie.

I can smell the hay

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Brother Doug was going through old photo albums and other stuff and came across this picture:

BlowingHay

He sent it to me and asked what tractor was used to power the hay blower and whether it was the ‘51 or the ‘53 truck in the picture above. The two people in the picture are our dad (in the truck) and me (on the ground).

I gave him my best answers. “I’m pretty sure that is the ‘51 truck” and “I think we might have borrowed a tractor to power the hay blower” (see the large, flat, belt leading off to the left of the picture?). Doug was able to confirm it was the ‘51 and found another picture of Uncle Alden’s tractor with a flat belt attached to it near the barn.

What is more interesting to me is that while I remembered putting up hay like this for several years the picture brought back surprisingly vivid memories. I can almost smell the hay, feel the rock salt in my hand from the rusty bucket at my feet (we added salt to dry out the hay and reduce the risk of spontaneous heating and fire), and hear the sounds the hay blower made as it pushed the hay up the pipe into the barn. It’s very, very vivid. It’s very close to real even though it was probably 45 years ago.

The next time I go back to Idaho with Barb L. I should take her on a tour of the barn in the picture. The hay blower is still inside.

Snoqualmie Falls

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Barb L. and I went for a short drive and a hike today. The main attraction was Snoqualmie Falls:

The weather was warm and with snow still in the mountains the water flow was on the high side of normal.

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And when we went on our hike I open carried. No one noticed or if they did they did not seem to care.

Quote of the ages

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“‘Love thy enemy’ does not mean kiss him and invite him into your country. It means stand up and fight, with grace.”
— Roy Masters, “Advice Line” April 29, 2013

He was speaking of what he refers to as the Dalai Lama’s cowardice in dealing with the Chinese, but the quote rang out to me as with regard to radical Islam. Years ago in Idaho, we had a Neo Nazi group calling themselves the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian Aryan Nations. They were racist socialist revolutionaries who managed to use a bomb or two, causing some property damage. They were rooted out of Idaho for the most part, and good riddance. I didn’t like some of the methods used, but good riddance. They weren’t from around here, and they figured that since most people in Idaho were white, their white power, anti-Semite nonsense would be tolerated. They figured wrong. I bring them up only as a comparison to the even more virulent and dangerous radical Islamists, who’ve been allowed into this country, often welcomed with open arms. If we had the same recognition of bigotry, promotion of violence and power-lust regarding the Islamists that we had with the Aryan Nations we’d be raiding certain Mosques and other organizations in the U.S., but violent bigotry that hides behind Christianity is a vastly more convenient target than the exact same violent bigotry that hides behind Islam. The difference is of course a result of political subterfuge and we can’t fight it because we’re short on grace.

It’s like our societal immune system is degraded, leaving us open to all forms of infection.

Politeness

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Apparently when I’m woken up in the middle of the night and asked to roll on my side because I snore when I sleep on my back I ask, “Which side?”

If you were to believe all the lies told by the anti-gun people about bumping into a shopping cart in the aisle at Safeway causing mass shootings you might expect a different outcome. The most plausible outcome in their world view would seem to be I would just shoot them with the gun next to the bed and continue sleeping on my back.

Perhaps Heinlein was right about being armed and politeness.

Quote of the day—Cook’s Helper

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Cook: [Pointing to a very well endowed woman’s breast area] You have some soup on your shirt there.

Cook’s Helper: Damn!

Cook’s Helper 2: Would like someone to lick it off for you?

Cook’s Helper: One of my three partners will get to it before you could.

Overheard April 13, 2013
[I have interesting friends.—Joe]

Beach trip

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Got back from the beach yesterday. Oregon coast sand, Pacific ocean, visit a relative. Flying kites, flying dogs, flying kids, a sand-storm in the rain. Lots of fun. It’s 45 and raining, so the kids have to go wading, running, and splashing in the ocean, of course. I only half-jokingly say we use a color-coding system – red is fine, blue means time to head home. The dog, which we think is a border collie – greyhound mix, is FAST, and she loves to chase waves coming in; I paced out her strides, and she’s covering something over 10 feet per stride, and she’s picking them up and putting them down at a rate of a bit more than four strides per second, or a bit more than 30 mph (camera doing 8 frames per second, slightly more than a full stride every two frames; at 5 fps is seems like almost a stride per frame). Found out that the Cold Steel “Special Forces Shovel” also makes a mighty fine kids sand-toy, MUCH better than the normal cheap plastic one, and sprout #2 can ALSO have fun chopping on drift-wood and kelp with it. Offspring #1 preferred the Gerber folding E-tool to build a fox-hole sand-castle. Got down to the Tillamook Air Museum, looked at old war-birds with sprout #2. Pics below the fold.

Oh, yes – The Stars Came Back will also pick back up tomorrow. Continue reading →

Slugging it out with a “cell of one”

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Last night I found myself in a town conspicuously like my home town – the place I spent the first 18 years of my childhood. I was up against a sniper. She was a Chinese woman; determined (“Hell-Bent”, even). She was wearing the classic Cultural Revolution style, plain O.D. jacket and plain O.D. hat, and she had a rifle. I think that’s her on the right, but she’s younger in this photo;
RevolutionWoman

It started out with her trying to snipe me from some distance (I hate it when that happens) but it ended up as a running, ducking, hiding, urban-style shootout from about 150 yards. I took a couple of rounds but were superficial hits. I thought I had nailed her good in the end. Through my low magnification, illuminated scope I saw her go down just as she was trying for cover.

The next day however, she was back to her usual self, dressed like a perfectly ordinary American woman in the small, eclectic community of immigrants in which I grew up, tending to her ordinary American life with her perfectly ordinary, American-born children, interacting in her perfectly normal, friendly manner with friends and neighbors.

I spoke about the encounter with some of my friends, showing them my bullet wounds, which had healed to the point of being mere scars, and explaining what had happened, pointing out to them my now perfectly innocent-looking enemy. Funny what the light of day can do to a person that was trying to kill you just a few hours ago in the cover of darkness. I saw the woman a few times that day, and both she and I were pretending nothing had happened the night before. Neither of us wanted entanglements with law enforcement or other authorities, knowing that such would be the undoing of us both. This had become a chess game. We were going to have to settle our differences later…

I don’t remember many of my dreams lately, and would certainly not have remembered this one except for something my daughter said to me this morning at around 06:00 that triggered the memory.

More on communication

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When I was a boy, out working the fields alone on my grandparents’ farm, I heard voices wafting in from the distance. Two men were standing next to a tractor, its engine running, and so they were shouting at each other to be heard over the engine noise. Two to three hundred yards away, I could hear nearly every word they were saying.

“Ah Hah! Unlike addition and multiplication, communication over a noise source can be asymetrical, or one way.” YOU may be able to hear ME just fine, but it may be utterly impossible for me you hear you, or vice versa. I knew that there was no possible way I could ever shout loud enough for those two men near the tractor to hear me, though I could hear them pretty well.

I’ve used this as an example on several occasions, trying to explain this as the reason why the frustrated fool on the other end of the conversation cannot get through to me. My wife, for example, has never understood this, and she will get angry when I tell her I can’t understand her as I’m washing my hands at the sink. SHE thinks I’M the dumb one, see.

Same goes for radio communication, when someone hears you booming in on a 100 watt repeater, but can’t understand why he isn’t being heard from his 3 watt handy-talkie (then he shouts into the microphone, which makes it worse, because his over modulation [FM} spreads out his three watts over more bandwidth, out toward the edges of the receive passband).

Then there are those who, when wearing ear muffs or headphones and you’re not, and you’re standing right next to them, will shout at you.

And we won’t even get in to the subject of those “low talkers” – those who will talk under their breath apparently as a means of irritating you or for some bizzare reason they want to use it as a means of feeling superior to you, because you’re struggling to hear them while they can hear you perfectly well, and so what’s wrong with you, Chump?

The vortex of coincidence

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March 16th is the six month anniversary of the first date between Barb L. and I. It is also the birthday of my soon to be ex-wife. Our first date was on September 16th. This is the birthdate of Barb L’s soon to be ex-husband.

This is but a small part of what Barb L. calls, “The vortex of Joe Huffman coincidence”. That should be “JoeH/BarbL” instead of “Joe Huffman” but she named it months ago and we are kind of stuck with the name at this point.

As RobertaX and many others have pointed out our brains are pattern matching engines and find “interesting things” where there really isn’t anything of particular significance. But still it’s fun to look at the patterns sometimes.

Within a minute or two of our first date Barb L. and I started noticing a plethora of coincidences between us:

  • Her first and middle names are identical to that of my (soon to be ex-)wife.
  • Her (I can’t wait until he is my ex-)husband is not named “Joseph”. That is the name of his identical twin.
  • Her mother’s name was Josephine.
  • Her son’s middle name is Joseph.
  • She has a hand gesture that is identical to one used by daughter Xenia for the same circumstances.
  • She spent time on a farm when growing up and even milked cows by hand like I did.
  • She lives on the eastside of Lake Washington, as do I, and works in downtown Seattle about six blocks from where I work.
  • Her mother’s birthday is the same as my wife.
  • Her son’s birthday is the same as my wife’s sister.
  • Her birthday is one day after my brother’s birthday.
  • Her birthday is one day before my wife’s sister’s birthday.
  • Both her mother and my wife’s mother were teachers.
  • We both went to the University of Washington at the same time (but to be best of our knowledge we never saw each other).

Yes. I’m aware of the birthday paradox.

Anyway… we aren’t superstitious but every once in a while, we look around to see if there is someone filming us because it sure seems as if there is a script writer in the background someplace. And that guy that walked by as we were kissing around the corner at REI at one day at lunch time and said, “Don’t worry, no pictures were taken!” didn’t exactly reassure us that we aren’t acting out someone else’s script and we are being recorded on video for a reality show on Lifetime or something.

Quote of the day—Robert Slaughter

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Robert Slaughter (@bobslaughter)
Tweeted on March 12, 2013 in response to More stalker activity.
[If he only knew the total sum of crazy people in my life he would think I have a herd of recruiters out looking for crazy people and sending them my way.

I actually asked my counselor why there were so many crazy people attracted to me and why I was, in many cases, attracted to crazy women. With her help I think I have solved the later problem. I suspect there is no practical, moral, and legal solution to the first problem.—Joe]

More on phonetics

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As often happens, I was talking to a customer over a poor cellular connection today. We have to exchange a lot of data to complete an order. He’s spelling the name of his street.

“Wait; that’s A, T, T as in alpha tango tango?” I say to confirm.
“No, it’s hotel echo papa”
“Wow!” I said “I really got that wrong” and I’m thinking to myself, “Bam! We’re home free– this guy knows standard phonetics.” Without it, we’d have had a hell of a frustrating time.

So, Young Grasshopper; learn your Standard Phonetics.

I’m still amazed and disgusted that most cop shops have their own systems, which makes it more difficult because for one, they don’t always use words that all sound completely different from one another, and too, if you know Standard Phonetics, their retarded cop phonetics don’t sound familiar and it therefore takes longer to comunicate. Moron phonetics.

Learning the standard system is easy. There are only twenty six of them, and as it happens, each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet (fancy that) so it’s really easy. It’s an international system, and most pilots, military and ham operators already know it hands down. Whaterya waitin’ for?

Practice. For example, if I look to my left on my desk, I can read off in my mind, “Hotel Papa…Delta echo sierra kilo julliette echo tango.” Stuff like that. Road signs, what have you. This should be taught in school, except for the fact that kids should know it before they get to school.

On a similar note; use text on your phone when the signal is too poor to use the more bandwidth-hogging voice communication. If you have only one bar on the s-meter it still works like a charm whereas vioce communication is two steps below impossible. I explained that to my daughter a while back, and was surprized that she hadn’t thought of it. I’d though it would have been obvious even to a teen-aged school girl– a few dew drops of bits verses a tsunami/torrent of bits, you know.

PETA buys my hamburgers

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The ad you see in the right column under “BLOG ADS” which says, “SHOCKING: Meat Industries CAUGHT” is a PETA ad. They paid for a month which is enough for Barb L. and I to each have a really nice hamburger for lunch next week.

Quote of the day—David W.

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Wait so, he requires you to have the guns, so he can shove them up YOUR ass?

He’s not going to bring his own guns or else he would say “I’ll shove my gun up your ass”.

So basically he is threatening someone, with guns, and the threat is to shove said guns up the gun owners ass…

Me thinks he is infinity fries short of a happy meal…

David W.
February 26, 2013
Comment to Another threat
[Barb L. and I were discussing, laughing, and shaking our heads at this very thing at the same time David W. was leaving his comment.

I was talking to AlphaMike about this nutcase as well. He said, “Obviously he has never met you or he would not have made any threats.”—Joe]

Another threat

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Today at 1408 I received another threating phone call. It sounded like the same guy as last time but it was from a different phone number.

The first time the phone number was 619-646-7526, this time it was 630-489-9064.

The call went very close to this:

Joe: Hello?
Caller: Is this Joe Huffman?
Joe: Yes.
Caller: Do you have any guns?
Joe: Who is this?
Caller: Do you have any guns?
Joe: Who is this?
Caller: I said, “Do you have any guns?”
Joe: And I’m asking who am I talking to.
Caller: You better own some guns because if you mess with me I’m going to f*&^king shove them up your ass.
Joe: <hangs up>

As Ry has said before, “Ah, the voice of reason.”

Or as Officer Dill said, “He is clearly irrational.”

This is the same number that was a “no answer” from an Illinois exchange at 8:26 AM the day after the threatening text messages.

I’ve received several “no answer” calls in the last few days but until now I wasn’t certain they were connected. Now I know that at least some of them are.

I also have to wonder if the brute force attack attempting to log into this blog this morning was related. I may have a way of answering this question.

Update: Apparently he followed up with a bogus ad on Craig’s List.
Update 2: I got the ad taken down.

Night walk in the snow

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This past weekend Barb L. and I attended a community dinner for the area where I grew up. It has been over 35 years since I lived there so I didn’t know a lot of the people. But it was nice to see the ones I did know and catch up a little with them.

After leaving we stopped by the Boomershoot site to shoot a few tracers. It was way past dark but with a nearly full moon and the ground was covered with snow. Both the scenery and the tracers were really pretty.

After shooting the tracers we went for a walk on top of the hill where the 700 yard targets are placed. There is a great view from there. I took a bunch of pictures but they just didn’t capture what we experienced. “It’s magical!”, is how Barb described it. I’m not sure magical is quite right. Perhaps surreal.

Here are a few of the better, but still poor, pictures.

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What’s wrong with this picture…

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…is what’s wrong with society. You all have gotten some version this spam e-mail, usually from a .ru domain;

“You know, they are so many people in the world, but some of them are alone, because they didn’t find their halfs yet, as it is so hard.
If you are alone and want to find your love, you can write me and we’ll start communicating. I’m alone and looking for a good man, who will give me his love and care. Who knows, maybe we can fill up our lonely hearts with love.”

If you’re looking for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking in the wrong place. If you want to be wanted, if you desire to be desired, if you need to be needed, you are part of the problem.

I cringed when one my many nephews said, right after he’d been divorced within a year or two of being married, that he’d found this other woman, and how great she was, and how they were meant for each other and he knew it because of some mundane coincidence or other. The ink on the divorce papers was still drying. I didn’t know what to say at the time, but he was running from one hell-of-his-own-devising and straight into another.

No, Young Grasshopper; if you’re not whole, or complete already, no one else can make you whole. If you’re searching for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking for love in all the wrong places. You’ll be let down, because getting what you want, the way you want it, is impossible. You’ll feel betrayed, because what you thought you had was something you can never have. This is the stuff of murder, of self destruction and suicide. It’s what’s wrong with our whole society.

Those in government (and gangs) know just enough about this to take advantage of it. We look to them for “salvation” of one kind or another when all they have to offer is entrapment. They want to own you in the same way you want to own someone else, or be owned by someone else. They want you dependent on them in the same way you want to depend on someone else, or you want someone dependent on you. They want you to need them in the same way you need other people, or you want other people to need you. This is the stuff of mass destruction, war and mass death.

That word we throw around so much in America, Independence, I am only just realizing, has a far deeper meaning than I’d previously suspected, and I think it is extremely important.

None of this stuff is new, and so these words aren’t mine. It’s as old as the hills, and yet we fall for this trap over and over.

Alcohol is a carcinogen?

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I did not know this:

…when it comes to cancer, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

There are other sources that appear to agree with this conclusion.

There have been times in the past when I would have a few ounces of red wine before going to bed on a regular basis. Recently I only occasionally have a sip of wine from the glass of Barb L. Hence my lifetime alcohol consumption is very low and now I can be even more self-righteous about it.

My morning adrenaline rush

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As I was riding the bus into downtown Seattle to go to work this morning we stopped at Yale and Stewart for a traffic light. Initially I thought there were gunshots close by. Then as I did a “playback” in my mind and observed the subsequent sights and sounds more carefully I realized the flashes were white. Muzzle flashes are red/orange. Multiple explosions? But the flashes from explosives I am familiar with are reddish too. I was on the far side of the bus from the source but I ultimately located the origin.

A NW bound truck on Yale had tangled with a power line, and broken a power pole holding three transformers. The sounds were the breaking power pole, arcing of the power lines, and the exploding transformers. The truck stopped for a bit then left. Our bus remained stopped at the intersection and most of the passengers exited out the rear door and walked around the intersection. Some stupid and/or ignorant people walked OVER the downed power lines. At least one person turned around and took a different route after I yelled not to walk over the wires.

WP_000002

The bus in the picture above is the one I was on.

I was late for a meeting at work.

Update: Ry sent me an email with this link to the news story.