Mrs ERJ does the heavy-lifting

The seven deadly sins are sometimes listed as

• Pride
• Greed
• Wrath
• Envy
• Lust
• Gluttony
• Sloth 

Mrs ERJ, out of the goodness of her beautiful heart, took it upon herself to help a young person sort out some financial issues. In retrospect, it was nothing that they could not have sorted out on their own if pride had not blocked them from asking a few, simple questions.

The crux of their problem is that through a cascading series of unfortunate occurrences the lender was not added to the title as holding a lien on the vehicle they had purchased.

The little duckling may have felt a bit smug at one point, thinking that the lender could not repossess the vehicle if they fell behind on the payments.

Imagine their surprise when the lender converted the loan to "unsecured" and jacked up the interest rates to match. They went from approximately 6% to almost 20% interest rates.

Mrs ERJ caught wind of the little duckling's conundrum and took the little duckling firmly in-hand and walked them through what they had to do. Between the document chase to collect all of the supporting documentation and the need to have "appointments", a legacy of the Covid policy implemented by the Democrat Secretary of State, it took the better part of six hours.

It was undoubtedly worth it. The little duckling's interest rates will not drop to the original 6% but it will likely drop to half of what he/she is currently paying and that will go a long way to helping the young one flip right-side-up.

Planting pecans

I was watching Quicksilver for most of the day while Mrs ERJ did the heavy lifting.

After I was popped free, I grabbed a shovel and some pecan seed-nuts and ran out back to put some in the ground. By a fluke of nature, the ground is not frozen.

Nut fill August 22 in Kansas. Photo credit Bill Reid. Notice that the shell has deep, narrow fins that protrude into the nut-meat of Goosepond. That results in the nut-meat not dropping freely from the shell.

The pecans are an obscure variety called Goosepond and it should be quite cold hardy, even if it needs a longer growing season than Michigan usually gives us to ripen the nuts. The most likely pollen parent is Kanza based on the other varieties sold by the pecan orchard.

My plan is to graft over any seedlings that survive the squirrels, mice, rabbits and deer.

I planted the seed-nuts between 6" and 8" deep to frustrate the squirrels.

Time will tell if I was successful. It is possible that the nuts are too deep to push their shoot to the surface and into the light.

The clock is ticking

Southern Belle and Quicksilver are flying back to Miami this weekend. They have been with us since November 16. I will miss them both.

I installed a TV antenna so we could turn on the TV if we ran out of other options to entertain QS.

Today is the first day we turned on the TV programming although I must confess we used it to channel Spotify  kid music like "The Pirates who don't do Anything" and "We don't talk about Bruno".

577/450 Martini-Henry ammo

 

$13 a cartridge.

Ouch!