Let brotherly love continue.
Do not neglect hospitality,
for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.
Be mindful of prisoners as if sharing their imprisonment,
and of the ill-treated as of yourselves,
for you also are in the body.
Let marriage be honored among all
and the marriage bed be kept undefiled,
for God will judge the immoral and adulterers.
Let your life be free from love of money
but be content with what you have,
for he has said, I will never forsake you or abandon you.
Thus we may say with confidence:
The Lord is my helper,
and I will not be afraid.
What can anyone do to me?
Heller started lining up resources for the root-cellar project. The Bockbecks had agreed to pay on a time-and-materials basis. Heller was to keep a running tab and they had the option of pulling the plug if they thought he was being extravagant.
Heller knew that he was going to have to figure out how to build the root-cellar in small bites given his work schedule. That required a bit more flexibility than some folks were willing to provide.
So, the first step was to tap family and see how much help they were able, and willing to provide. He started with excavating because that was the first task that needed to happen.
He looked through his contacts and found the number for his cousin Clayton.
“Hey Clayton, Heller here. How ya doin’?” he asked.
“Not bad, not bad!” Clayton responded.
“You and Uncle Ed getting along OK?” Heller wanted to know.
“Yeah, we butted heads a little bit at the beginning but we worked it out. It helped when Krystal reminded me that we were guests in their house” Clayton admitted.
“How’s the baby?” Heller asked. Digging around in his memory he added “Madison”
“Growing like a weed” Clayton said.
“So what’s up?” Clayton asked.
Both men were at times in their lives where it was passing by at a million miles an hour. Outside of opening day of deer season, the family reunion and a couple of bonfires in the summer, they only bumped into each other by accident. The prolonged introduction and catching up was Heller’s way of tipping off Clayton that he was going to be asking for a favor.
“Do you still have that skid-steer?” Heller asked. “I gotta side project where I gotta move some dirt.”
“Hmmm” Clayton temporized. “I kinda have it out on loan right now. Uncle Ed and the neighbors are using it to snake logs outa swamps to put up firewood.”
“When would you need it?” Clayton asked.
“Soon” Heller admitted.
“How big of a job?” Clayton asked. “Maybe we can work it in.”
The two men thrashed out the details. Based on Heller’s long work hours and commute, Clayton agreed that it would work best if he did the grading. Heller could pull the trailer with his truck and provide the diesel for the skid-steer.
Clayton agreed as long as he and Krystal got to meet Shannon. Apparently, Heller’s sister, Suzanna was quite taken with her. Suzanna and Shannon’s friend who worked in IT, Garth, had gone dancing and she was smitten. Shannon and Heller were not posting to Spacebook but Suzanna was blowing it up. Everybody had heard about the relationship, and Shannon’s part in it, but hardly anybody had met Shannon.
That was agreeable to Heller. Clayton was a first-rate hand with the skid-steer, and while it might not have been the tool-of-choice for the kind of excavation Heller needed done, it would work. It would just take a little bit longer.
***
“Anita” had four connection requests when Shannon popped open the account at the library the next day.
Shannon double-checked to make sure they were somehow linked to previous connections, and they were. She approved all four connections.
The account pinged within five minutes. One of the new connections had a question. “Why did you pick Michigan instead of California, New York or Illinois for your internship?”
“Anita” replied
The short answer is that my father will not pay for an internship in a big city.
My father is very protective and he has contacts that inform him that there are far more attacks on Asian women in big cities than the media reports.
My father is a devout Muslim and he is concerned that I will be exposed to too many corrupting influences in the big cities. While he has two cousins in Chicago, he does not want ME to be in Chicago.
The compromise he worked out is that Michigan is close enough to Chicago that I can report to my father’s cousins and they can keep track of my activities. I also agreed to stay away from Detroit but I can go to Canada.
He doesn’t need to know that a creative girl can find fun anywhere. Right? 8-)
The three-year-old microwave went Tango-Uniform yesterday. Fortunately we had a spare in the basement. I woke in the middle of the night to the sweet potpourri of fresh, buttered popcorn. Mrs ERJ had gotten up back up to finish a novel she is reading.
***
In line with recent posts about fishing rods, I decided to make some artificial lures. I opted to make some 3/8ths ounce, brass spoons with a .308 diameter. Looking at the internet, it appears that with the right kind of rod and line, an experienced caster can fling them at 2750 fps although many seem to think it is easier to cast more accurately at 2650 fps.
I was very happy with the unfinished, brass spoons that I purchased from this supplier in New Jersey. I purchased the F-C brass blanks because I believe it casts a little bit more uniformly although it is prudent to max out at 2.0 grains less line than listed for the Win brass referenced in many handbooks.
Tommy learned the the world's greatest pickup line at the age of six (cute)
And that line is "Do you want to dance?"
Varnishing doors
The doors in our house were stained but not varnished when we bought it. I assume they had not been stained when the house was built in the mid '70s.
So, after forty-five years and our raising 4 kids and uncounted pets...it is time to varnish them.
I apologized in advance to Mrs ERJ. "I don't think I can do a great job on these". I have friends with boats and I was treated to much exposition about dust-free rooms and leveling the varnish with solvents and not re-brushing and sanding...much sanding, and wiping with tac-cloths and so on.
She brushed off my apologies. "We will just call it "rustic".
One of our local families went to Chicago to tour the Wriggle's Gum Factory.
One of the kids was an exceptionally active six-year-old. The precocious child separated from the group and fell into a large mixing vat of product.
Never fear. It turned out OK. His father chewed his ass out. That is what dads do.
***
Conversation at tonight's dinner table centered around precious children who dodge growing up.
"Mother (or Uncle or Cousin or older sibling...), I am falling behind. I need to have you loan me some money" says the erstwhile child.
"No" says the parent.
"But I am so sensitive. I feel pain much more intensely than anybody else!!! Maybe YOU can sleep on 600 thread-count sheets and eat prepackaged, cold cereal, but I simply cannot FUNCTION under that kind of deprivation."
"Never-the-less, I cannot loan you money unless you put up collateral. Are you willing to sign your vehicle's title over to me?" the parent asks.
"But, but, but...I will lose my car. I need that car to drive to the dispensary to buy my medicinal weed!" the child wails.
"Which tells me that you have no intention of paying back the 'loan'. They only way you lose your collateral is if you default" says the parent.
"Grow up, Billie. You are forty-three. Don't you think it is time to start acting like an adult?"
"The thing about things that hurt...stop doing them. Stop spending more money than you have."
Sadly, a cooling economy and the ending of "Covid relief" programs will make these kinds of conversations more frequent.
***
Blues. Nominated by Lucas Machias. Dig this guy's guitar. It ain't pretty. It is a tool.
Illinois recently passed a law that restricted firearms rights. The majority of the sheriffs in the state announced that they will not devote any resources to enforcing that law.
Illinois Controlled Substances Act, 720 ILCS 570 contains over 45,000 words and 313,000 characters (including huge numbers of punctuation marks, a single one of which can vastly change the meaning of the text).
So picture yourself standing in your County Sheriff's boots, looking over his motley assortment of deputies who stand as the thin-blue line between chaos and order in your county.
Do you tell Deputies to enforce every law on the Illinois books? If you do, you just gave them permission to be totally arbitrary in their enforcement because you gave them an impossible task. It is IMPOSSIBLE to KNOW all of the details of every law in the State of Illinois much less enforce them.
Or do you give them specific areas-of-focus based on the current threat profile to YOUR county. For example, do you have your Briefing Sergeant tell them "The surrounding counties are seeing an uptick in various types of uppers coming from the southern part of the state. Pay particular attention to drivers whose plates have these first three letters (gives list) because those were issued by the Cairo Secretary-of-State office. If you get any kind of bad vibe, call for back-up and let the driver soak until back-up shows up."
Population density
Population density of Illinois
Homicide rates in Illinois, 2016-2020 that involved the use of a firearm. Data pulled from CDC Wonder system
Looking at the table shown above, is it fair to state that the priorities in Effingham County, Illinois are different than those in the City of Chicago?
"Anita" had an email waiting for her on Pluggedin when Shannon got to the library.
One of the connections that Paul Andrews had supplied had responded. "What are your goals for your post-Graduation internship? What do you hope to take-home?"
Shannon had anticipated that she would get a question like this and she had given it some thought but did not want her response to seem too polished.
Indonesia is a growing county and I am very proud to be Indonesian. But in many ways we are catching up with the rest of the world.
While we are very rich in oil and agriculture and manufacturing, we do not have the social freedoms that the United States enjoys. That is especially true for women.
While I am in the United States, I want to make connections with as many people with as many different outlooks on life that I could never meet in Indonesia.
While I am in the United States, I want to experience all of the freedoms that progressive women in the United States enjoy so I can take those experiences back to Indonesia so I can report on them and help guide our future.
Yours very truly-Anita Santosa
PS: I enclosed a more recent picture than I the one I used in my Pluggedin profile. I cannot go out in public like this, but this picture was taken in the courtyard of one of my father's villas.
Then Shannon's phone pinged. She had a message from Kim, Miss Dig had sprayed and flagged the build site and the closest line was 200 feet away from the proposed site of the root-cellar.
Shannon left a voice-mail on Mandy's office telephone and would follow up with a phone call in the morning.
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