The musings of a madman...

  "If you got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. If you got hard eyes - you staring at the same tree missing the forest." ~ Bunk Moreland “Soft eyes” is most simply defined as “attentive to detail.” Over my little hiatus I fell into the world of Podcasts, with my favorite genre being “historical humans behaving badly.”  I have some suggestions if you ask me, but we aren’t here for that kind of an aside today. A commonality of the above-mentioned “historical humans behaving badly” is how far the grift would NOT have gone if the scammER wasn’t banking on the scamEE not catching on to the fact that they were indeed being scammed with a simple question or two. “Well shiiiiit, this could WORK!” That’s right…  If you’ve learned nothing from the last several years of my writing, one could consider me a bit of a grifter myself. Lest you thought I bought a new (to us) house and just sat around working from home and paying bills and shit, you’re assuredly mistaken. ...

     So we moved into this house 361 days ago…  Among things I planned to do were to fix the yard (completed in May & maintained ever since) , mancave the garage ( that has been an ongoing project that will never be “done,” but it contains all my fun stuff) , and build a fire pit in the back yard. Wife insisted we add a patio under the deck in the meantime.  Not to bore anyone with tales of an ongoing garage/mancave/home gym – if you were on IG then you saw it – we’re here to talk about that last one.      I put this project off for the longest time, only to find myself upset at how damned easy it wound up being…      We’ll start off by cutting the back yard as we do every Wednesday:   (note: that tree there on the right WAS dying so I cut it down to a stump and now it is growing again, SMFH) Start with twelve cinder blocks arranged into a square.  Standard blocks will give you a 56” outside diameter using sta...

       I have been with my current employer since December of 2006… Almost 16 years of productive employment and the merit increases and simple seniority at a well-known-but-ne’er-to-be-named-here company has afforded me a comfort I’d never felt at a prior job.   The seniority thing lends itself to a goodly amount of paid time off as well, which is a fact that makes me as an employee kind of hard to recruit/snipe by other companies.   They can match my money, but they can’t match the amount of time off I receive.      One thing about the above-mentioned time off is that I must use it or lose it, so I frequently find myself forced by my wife at gunpoint to take time off for no fucking reason taking time off for nothing more than my own entertainment. If it feels like I have talked about something like this before, it is because I have . -BUT- This is not that…      Now that you’re back from the sideques...

       If I could use these powers for good, I am not all the way sure I ever actually would… Wait, put a pin in that.   It will come back up on the final exam.        My city has spent the last few years basically criminalizing homelessness.   The able cannot feed them of their own free will unless they have an organization or church allowed to do so.   They themselves cannot have signs specifically requesting money when standing on the corners and the most insidious is that they have to go downtown and get a PERMIT to stand on the corners with the signs! More recently, there have been signs going up on signs in medians that there is to be no standing there.   This was presented as a necessity to keep traffic safely and unobstructedly moving.      In that last point, I saw an opportunity… The “opportunity,” as it were, involved a newly minted lack of competition for eyeball equity on the ...