Mindless Brain Dump

I had decided prior to retirement that the first task I'd undertake would be removing a large amount of clutter from my home. Four weeks later it's closer to the door. Is that success? I doubt it.

Everything from the kitchen and living room now resides in the dining room. Two large totes of it have been stacked in a corner to be placed in storage. The resident furball producer has determined it's a fine sleeping place. How does one take the favorite sleeping place away from one's beloved pet? I haven't the heart yet.

One of my numerous excuses for not having all that much accomplished in 4 weeks is that there's so much snow it's not safe for me to carry anything out to the storage shed. I may run out of that excuse soon. I'm hoping. Even have my fingers crossed. I won't mind losing this excuse since it means the snow will go away and warmer weather will arrive. I do still have a few excuses I can replace that one with.

There's always the *my daughter-in-law decluttered her deceased father's apartment by sending me some clutter* excuse. I wouldn't be lying either. Well, not too much, anyway. Her father was a person who believed in stocking up for the winter or something. He had two replacement coffee pots for his maker and close to 400 coffee filters left. Neither of the pots come close to fitting my machine. They're glass, mine is a thermos style pot. The filters work so those I'm keeping but have no idea what to do with the pots. Apparently neither did she which is why I now possess them. Hey! Maybe I can find some poor schnook to gift them to? It's a thought.

It's been warm enough these past couple of days that running the woodstove makes it too warm in here. I'm just using the propane right now. I decided to take the opportunity to clean the darn thing up so it isn't such an eyesore. When it's not hot you see stuff you don't care to see. Like soot all over the glass and something that looks like ashes all over it. So, I blackened my hands washing it. Tonight's fire, because it's going to get colder again, will occur in a sparkling clean stove. All that effort just to get it dirty again. I think I'll go take a nap.

Then I'll go see how much more clutter I can move into the dining room. Maybe I'll do that after lunch, and then I'll take a nap. I don't even need an excuse for that. All this thinking about decluttering is making me sleepy.

The Internet Isn't A Lifestyle

Over the weekend I ran afoul of a Libertarian over my post on the Google ranking change. He appears to be someone who feels that he knows everything and if we don't agree we're drinking the koolaid. He also seems to feel the need to insult when he calls out a person rather than provide facts. Somehow or other we've lost sight of the idea that opinions aren't always facts.

I felt I was holding my own during the exchange and being ever watchful for the dogpiling that usually happens, I was totally flabbergasted when one person chose to defend me. I do hope you're sitting down. The person who stepped up to my defense is the Commander of the Right Wing Hit Squad that has it's stranglehold on that site. I honestly was so shocked I stopped speaking to the Libertarian and let him continue his vituperative attack upon my person.

OMG the Libertarian called me a  "Liberal" like that's a bad thing. He also called me a liar, scum, miserable old hag, etc. Somehow in the minds of the under 40 year old internet residents this is winning an argument. This is calling you out and proving you wrong? How?

I will admit that the Commander wasn't giving a balls to the wall defense of me. After all I am a socialist or maybe that's a communist? I have a hard time keeping up with my labels, so you'll have to excuse me. He did point out that the Libertarian's behavior was uncalled for. Even said that we don't agree on anything but at least we do it nice.

I don't make it my business to school anybody. If I know the facts of a matter I may step up and provide them. I've found that for some people facts bounce off their opinions the same way water runs off a duck's back. No amount of my frustrating myself to try and change their minds is going to work. If someone has chosen ignorance, who am I to bother them?

These days my life revolves around me and what I want to do. We have a warming trend going on this week here in CNY. Snow is beginning to melt. It isn't dark at 5 PM anymore and I can look forward to the sunny days ahead when the robins return and my morning coffee will be accompanied by the songs they and all the other birds will sing.

I'm spending less time on the internet now and that may drop further as Spring advances. The internet can be a good thing when used right. And a not so good thing when used the way I'm seeing it used these day.

I'm Officially Retarded! Errrr, I Mean Retired.

I wasn't supposed to retire until the end of this month or the beginning of March. Unfortunately I overheated my SUV and blew the head gasket. Without transportation to work, and no idea when I will have said transportation, my employer decided to find new people for my cases.

My first Social Security check will arrive in April I think. The letter isn't quite clear on that. It might be March, but I'm pretty sure it will be April since they pay for the month in the month after the month.

Now, since I haven't seen much to impress me online, I think I'll go do some impressive house work since that's about all I have to do at the moment. I'd rather someone find something to impress me, but I suppose into each life some rain must fall. Or, in this case, I should say snow.

It's falling, and piling up and I don't have to drive anywhere in it. I could get real used to this retarded, I mean retired thing.

My Boring Life

I'm going to retire at the end of February at the ripe not so old age of 65 and a half. I was going to wait until full retirement age but discovered I'll only get $41 more than I will if I retire now. The problems I'm having with my soon to be ex-employers make me yearn for this month to pass as quickly as it can.

We've lost 19 employees in the past 7 months. Another agency went out of business and the owner offered her cases and the aides that wanted to go with them to the agency I work for. They were quite happy to be employed even if they did have to take a cut in pay to do so. Then they found out they would also lose their health insurance because our agency decided to limit the hours we work so they don't have to provide insurance.

I wonder how the idiot in the front office decided that 19 people given less money, fewer hours and no health insurance was going to be loyal? They gave me back my $10 per hour. However, instead of the 28 to 30 hours I used to work, I am only being given 18. According to my Social Security Estimate, I can make more money staying home.

My doctor says my job is too physically stressful for the condition of my joints. I'm suffering from frequent repetitive motion injuries because of the difficulty. I actually sprained my wrist just turning a door knob and we will not talk about my aching back.

With all the joint deterioration I'm experiencing, I may not be able to hang onto a client should they slip in the tub or some other place. I can't do transfers without hurting myself. It's time to face the music and do the things I am capable of doing and quit doing too much.

It's like she said, clean my own house, take a walk, maybe join the Y and go swimming or take the pool exercise program. Do Tai Chi at the senior center, maybe some gardening weather permitting. It's not that I can't do anything I want to do, it's that I can't keep doing the heavier things more than once a day. My joints require that I learn to pace myself to minimize the stress and there just isn't any way to do that and work the job I do unless I just don't do the job I'm paid to do. My clients would complain if I tried to do that. No sense of humor there at all.

Winning And Losing

It appears my experiment with Blogster may have ground to an abrupt halt. Like Blogstream before it, the site owner isn't making enough money to satisfy himself and is reluctant to spend on upgrades. Sometime overnight, there was a hardware failure which has taken the site offline I guess. All the volunteer "Blogster Team" can say is that there is a hardware failure and that "Tony" has been notified. Something temporary is being used with limited functionality, except the server still doesn't answer queries so functionality is more like 0 than limited.

I'm not really sure this is a bad thing. There are people there who seem to want to fight all the time. I guess that's the downside of "social media". It's not a bad blogsite, it does focus on social blogging as opposed to educational/opinion blogging. There is a very vocal, nasty bunch of Conservative nut jobs there that tend to want to rule the roost. If one wants to put forth an opinion that is more liberal, one will find oneself in a rather messy situation.

It became so bad that 18 or so fellow bloggers moved to a forum cum blogsite as a way to get away from the vitriol. I looked at the site and wasn't interested and that means I will lose contact with some of the bloggers I've met there. Possibly not a bad thing. A couple of them are over here in Blogger. I have found one of them, but the other is still lost in the Blogger vacuum.

I've never defined my style of blogging since it isn't for me always about my opinion of something. Sometimes it's a diary that I don't choose to keep private. While I can find those willing to interact on my political posts, I've not been lucky here finding the social bloggers. Maybe my fault, I don't know. This place isn't friendly the way both Blogstream and Blogster were/are but at the same time it also isn't full of drama mamas.

I can't say I'm back because I don't know that I am, and besides, who but the spammers ever leave comments here? You all do realize that thanks to the spammers my page views grew by leaps and bounds? When I left in march I think I had somewhere around 50,000 page views after 3 years as an actual in use blog. Without posting a single thing, I managed, in a few short months to triple that number and OMG, you should see the number of spam comments I need to go delete.

That might be a full time job right there. As near as I can tell the comments are almost all on just one post. I'm thinking that if I delete that post the spamming might stop? I hate to do that but if I'm going to post here, I need to do something about the spammers. I can't shoot them, so I'll try deleting the post and see if that stops the onslaught. I'm getting around 4000 spam comments a month on that post. I'm just a popular blogger I am, I am.

Moving Day

I have moved myself to Blogster. This place has acquired too many spammers and hackers for my comfort. I was upset when Wayfarer's blog was hacked and taken over by a pornographer, but now Mr. Ornery's closed blog has been hacked and taken over. I can't deal with that on any kind of sane level. These were e-friends of mine and I'm seriously upset.

I'm getting far too many spam visitors, and am accumulating close to 40 spam comments a day. It's no longer fun here.

Since I'm aware now that closing the blog wont stop the hackers, I'm just going to leave everything exactly the way it is and I won't be back. If this blog acquires another post, it won't be me. I don't know how to protect myself from that happening. So I took this opportunity to warn you all.

It's been fun, enjoy yourselves and stay away from the spam if you can.

I Told You So

I've always wanted to say that. I told you so is such a satisfying use of 4 words in the English language, isn't it? Admit it, more than once any of my readers have found themselves with the sudden lift in spirits that the ability to use those 4 words brings. It's a rush, almost as good as winning the lottery because you aren't any richer, but you have the proof that you were right! Yay! I was right! Then reality sets in. And being right becomes less important in the over all scheme of things.

I have a really hard time dealing with people who spout the GOP theory of trickle down economics. I'm not seeing evidence that it works, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from saying that trickle down is evidence of a free market. Where? Even more important, where do people get that idea? Exactly what part of people are unemployed because there are no jobs that they have the skills to fill escapes them?  Furthermore, since they are unemployed, where is the money to acquire the skills supposed to come from?

The reality of the situation should have indicated that something is wrong with this theory, but it doesn't. I'm not surprised since we've become the type of Christian society that doesn't seem to understand the meaning of Jesus and the covenant God created with his people by allowing Jesus to die on the cross. To some degree, that becomes understandable when you realize that a large segment of Christians actually believe Jesus, born in the Middle East was blond and blue eyed. Spoke English too. After all, the Bible is English, right?

Jesus appears absent from most Christian churches these days. He's been replaced with Politics and Money. How else do you account for the hatred of the poverty stricken? If one were to follow the example of Jesus as it says to in that Bible, people would have to give up something to assist in caring for those less fortunate. Pointing fingers and ordering the "lazy" to get a job isn't quite it. But that's only my opinion. Oh! Wait! The holder of the very highest religious position within Christiandom, Pope Francis also says so. Ahem!

Another opinion I've held, is that corporations are not job creators. WE, the consumers are the creators of jobs. WE buy the products in sufficient numbers to create a demand and people must be hired to meet that demand. THAT'S the "free market" that I hear so much of these days, only that's not what we have. We have a market that bears a marked resemblance to that market created by monopoly. We've been there during the Gilded Age, we did that and it didn't work then. So, why are we trying it now?

If you need proof that our economy runs on how we shop, what we buy and how much of it, I suggest you look at Staples as an example. They're closing 225 North American stores. They are doing this in order to better serve their customers, according to them. And where are they intending on serving these customers? Why, online of course.

Instead of keeping stores open for the convenience of shoppers, they're enlarging their website to handle the increased traffic that online shoppers have brought them. Online shoppers are the drivers of this particular bus. That's really a negative since if the same volume of shoppers had gone out to the stores to buy their products, the stores would be left open and the people there would have jobs. While it is a negative, it is also proof that our economy doesn't run on the corporations as job creators, it proves that the CONSUMER is the job creator. Only, in this case the consumer is the job destroyer.

So, now I want to hear from all you believers in the poor corporations that don't create jobs because of unions and taxes. You tell me where, since its entirely driven by the increased use of the internet as a shopping tool, Staples is creating unemployment for the workers in 225 stores because of unions and taxes. And when this situation becomes widespread enough to affect  your own ability to support yourself and your family, you can take pride in the fact that you built this. Oh yeah, don't look to the government to help you out because you fought to destroy the programs you will need. For your sake, I hope you won't be successful in that but if I'm wrong, well, I told you so.