10/30/2026
10/25/2026
Thoughts On A Sunday
The trusty RAM 1500 will be having a little more bodywork taken care of and then to one of the local mechanics garages to have the heating looked at and repaired. And then it will have its annual undercoating performed to protect it from winter road conditions (meaning the salt used to keep the roads from freezing up).
There will be some curtains that will need to be swapped out here at The Gulch, replacing sheers with thermals in order to help keep fall and winter chills in abeyance. There are also things that need to be moved in the garage to make it easier to deal with the winter weather once it arrives.
And we haven’t even reached Election Day yet!
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I found this on Instapundit earlier and found it intriguing for two reasons as it involves Elon Musk, one pro and one con.
The first paints Musk as a savior as ‘X’ seems to be the only thing keeping democracy alive in France.
The second refers to an “Elon Musk hit piece movie” that flopped bigly in movie theaters and has already been pulled.
It seems that some people only see him as an evil trillionaire who is enslaving the planet and others see him as a self-made trillionaire who is doing things people have only dreamed about doing, has made millionaires of many of his employees (even some of the janitors), and has even more ambitious ideas to expand humanity’s reach outside Earth’s atmosphere.
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Yeah, this sounds right on the money.
I get tired of Democrats claiming to be on the “right side of history” when both their past and their present are so utterly sordid and destructive. So, if you are a Democrat, let me tell you about MY side of history and YOUR side of history. My side of history is Cato the Elder, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Irving Babbitt and William F. Buckley. Your side of history is Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, Mao’s Little Red Book and Noam Chomsky. My side of history is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Your side of history is Tories who fled to Canada, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, George Wallace and Nancy Pelosi. My side of history is freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and spirited debate. Your side of history is ThoughtCrime, Speech Codes, religious persecution and Cancel Culture. My side of history is Brown v. Board of Ed., Loving v. VA, Gitlow v. NY, and Heller v. DC. Your side of history is Dred Scott, Korematsu and Roe v. Wade. My side of history is Jackie Robinson. Your side of history is Colin Kaepernick. My side of history is head held high, standing straight, hand over heart. Your side of history is sullen glances at the ground, kneeling. My side of history is the family as the foundation of society. Your side of history is mutilating confused children. My side of history is the rockets’ red glare. Your side of history is imagine no religion. My side of history is firefighters going up the stairs into the Twin Towers. Your side of history is 28-year-old men playing Call of Duty in their mothers’ basements. My side of history is smoked brisket. Your side of history is a no-foam, no-sugar, soy latte. My side of history is Lincoln freeing the slaves and General Patton liberating Buchenwald. Your side of history is Fort Sumter, the Gulag and Pol Pot’s killing fields. My side of history is Mel Brooks. Your side of history is Amy Schumer. My side of history is all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Your side of history is critical theory and only some lives matter. My side of history is 20-year-olds storming Omaha Beach. Your side of history is 20-year-olds in their safe spaces with adult coloring books. My side of history is American men and women disabled by an IED. Your side of history is American men and women disabled by anxiety. My side of history is the Kentucky Rifle, the Springfield 1861, the M1911, the M1 Garand, the M14 and the AR15. Your side of history is whimpering submission. My side of history is Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Apollo 11 and Jonas Salk. Your side of history is “global warming,” 100+ genders and porous cloth masks stopping viruses. My side is of history is laughing babies. Your side of history is selling aborted baby parts on the open market. My side of history is the Sistine Chapel and Monet’s water lilies. Your side of history is an inverted crucifix in a bottle of urine. My side of history is construction. Your side of history is deconstruction. My side of history is civilization. Your side of history is nihilism. And, MOST OF ALL: My side of history is liberty. Your side of history is tyranny. *finis*
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) May 12, 2023
Nothing more need be said.
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Yeah, this is going to work out well. NOT.
Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By “Renewables”
That sounds more like fever dream by folks who are seriously ill.
In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.From some of the examples I have seen, I can say that it hasn’t been working out all the well. If you keep reading the linked post above it delves into one such experiment that hasn’t been working all that well because proponents didn’t do their arithmetic. What sounds good doesn’t always meet what the real world dishes out. They still depend on diesel fueled generators to meet their needs because the renewable system provides under a half of the power required. And so it has been in other places that have tried switching a large portion of their electrical generation over to renewables. But that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying...and failing again and again.
At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?
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Something I have been seeing over the past year has becoming more prevalent, that ‘something’ being more people deciding that they no longer want to be held in thrall to Microsoft, and more specifically, Windows 11. While I never really cared for much for Windows, I didn’t particularity dislike it. In fact, I didn’t really have any real problems with it until Windows 11 showed up.
At work Windows has been the “go to” OS for most of our operations. Yes, we did use a version of Linux on some of our higher end instruments as the employed single board computers rather than just a micro-controller and we didn’t have to pay use Linux. But then Windows 11 came out and we found that a lot of our desktops and laptops couldn’t support it as it required more memory, a TPM ‘security’ co-processor, and a few other hardware upgrades. A lot of our computers that were only a few years old couldn’t handle Windows 11. What happened to those computers?
Most were returned to corporate IT for disposal, most likely meaning sold to third parties for resale on the used market. I expect most of those ended up having Linux installed by either the resellers or the new owners. Some of the computers were retained and had Linux loaded for use in the Engineering department for services and programs that didn’t require Windows to operate properly.
Out in the real world we have seen governments of entire countries decide they weren’t going to use Windows any more and have switched or are switching over to Linux. (France is one of those countries.)
One problem a friend has run across with Windows 11 is having to reverify their computer with their online banking and other apps after almost every Windows 11 update. That’s not a good thing.
Am I prejudiced in favor of Linux? Without a doubt. I have seen few downsides to Linux, at least for what I use it for. That there are Linux distributions out there that look and feel like Windows and can run Windows programs is a plus.
If Microsoft keeps angering the customers who depend upon Windows with their ‘changes’ that have made Windows 11 less than friendly, I expect to see even more people and businesses abandoning Microsoft for Linux.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been very nice, the foliage is till quite colorful, and where we don’t care if Monday is coming around again...at least this week.
10/24/2026
New Nukes?
While a lot of people have been pushing the use of ‘renewable’ energy sources, they have major drawbacks with some of them being that they are a lot more expensive than proponents claim, take up a considerable amount of land area for the amount of power they generate, are not readily dispatchable because of their intermittent and weather dependent operation, do not have the promised service life and require a lot more maintenance than promised.
The beauty of nuclear is that it is generally available 24/7/365 regardless of the weather, time of day, or time of the year. The one downside, at least to the old style Generation II reactors, was that they took a long time to build, cost a lot of money to build, particularly when “do overs’ are ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which requires changes to portions of the plants that have already been completed, and such changes could also mean that two reactors built side-by-side using the same design would not be identical because the NRC mandated changes. However the new nuclear power plant designs, specifically the reactor designs, are easier, faster, and much less expansive to build, with most of them being built in factories and trucked to the construction site for final assembly. These are the so-called Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, that are the future of nuclear power. Another plus to these new designs is that many of the are what are called “Walk Away Safe” since those designs do not used a high pressure cooling loop and cannot melt down. Instead, they use a system that operates at atmospheric pressure and in a number of cases, uses convection to circulate the coolant rather than pumps. If there are no pumps, there are no worries about pump failures. (Yes, this is an overly simplified picture of the more modern reactor designs, but I didn’t want to get too deep into this during this post. It is something I will delve into in a follow-on post next week.)
The nice thing about these SMRs is that they can be built to provide a specific amount of generation capacity up to about 300MW. The smallest SMR design I’ve read about generates about 15MW of electrical power. The beauty of the wide range of capacity designs means they can be installed almost anywhere depending upon the need and surrounding infrastructure. The can be clustered together to provide a total output equivalent of the older Generation II plants, meaning 800MW to 1500MW. Or they can be dispersed across a wide area in various locations which would not require a lengthy and expensive construction timetable. It could be one reason some companies planning on building hyperscale data centers are investing billions to develop and build SMRs to power their data centers. Both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have done so, with Gates investing in TerraPower and Bezos in X-energy. Excess electricity capacity can be sold to the utilities, assuming utilities don’t buy some of those same SMRs to add to their overall generation capacity.
One thing that helps as that we are seeing some states deciding their future is nuclear. New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, has been pushing for a nuclear renaissance here and sees SMRs as the way to go. Goodness knows we could use a less expensive means of generating electricity here.
10/23/2026
10/18/2026
Thoughts On A Sunday
However, this morning did bring a nice sunrise with a cloudless blue sky and the fall foliage at peak with the full range of reds, oranges, and yellows among the greens of the pines and some of the ‘slow’ deciduous trees. I have been sending pictures of the fall foliage colors around New Hampshire to friends and colleagues in the UK and South Carolina. More than a couple thought they had been edited for more color saturation, but they weren’t.
Unfortunately, from here on the colors will start to dull and the leaves will start falling in greater numbers going forward. It also means cleaning out the gutters along the front of The Gulch in order to make sure they don’t get clogged with leaves. The gutters at the rear of The Gulch all have leaf guards installed since they are unreachable by any of the ladders I own. At least the gutters on the front only require a step ladder to reach them.
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Sorry, but I believe that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, to borrow an old phrase. To what am I referring?
Obama, Whose Own IRS Targeted the Right, Clutches Pearls Over Ilhan Omar Raid and Wow, That Was DUMB
Barack Obama just posted a lengthy defense of Ilhan Omar, solemnly lecturing the country about how the government must never selectively target people for their political beliefs.So it’s only the Democrats that can do what Obama did to Republicans but when one of their own is investigated it’s somehow wrong? Really?
--snip--
Can't help but notice he omitted the part where his own administration used the full weight of the intelligence agencies and Justice Department to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and push a fabricated Russia collusion narrative that consumed years of American politics. The same man who green-lit the Crossfire Hurricane operation and watched the FBI cook the Steele dossier into something resembling an investigation now wants everyone to clutch their pearls over questions about whether Omar was actually 18 when her father naturalized.
Yeah. Right.
FLASHBACK: Obama’s IRS singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for heightened scrutiny based on their names and political positions, delayed tax-exempt applications for years and demanded unnecessary donor information. The IRS ultimately admitted wrongdoing and apologized. Obama insisted there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.”
— Will Ricciardella (@WillRicci) October 18, 2026
‘Nuff said.
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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this winner:
Rutgers Scholar Opposes Integrated Churches Because Black People May Vote Republican
Oh my Goodness! Black people voting Republican?! This just can’t be!!!
Black people should mainly attend churches with just other black people so that they keep voting Democrat, according to a Rutgers University professor.It’s obvious to me that Professor Cobb hasn’t bothered looking at history to see how the Democrat party no longer represents the working man and is still the party of racism, more specifically the party of the “soft racism” of lowered expectations and the belief that Blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups can’t possibly advance without their guiding hand. Far too often that “guiding hand” is used more to hold them back rather than help them advance. After all, if they do advance they may find that they don’t need the Democrat Party or its demeaning and totalitarian viewpoints and policies. Heaven forbid that Blacks ‘leave the plantation’ without their political leaders’ permission.
Professor Ryon Cobb argues “while 84% of Black adults identify as Democrat or lean Democratic, that number hides what congregational diversity costs Black politics.”
“Among Black nondenominational Protestants, that figure drops to nearly 60%, with one in three calling themselves independents,” Cobb wrote in an essay for the Brookings Institution.
Cobb, an “inclusive excellence in research” scholar considers it a “loss” when black people vote Republican.
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Tell us something we don’t already know.
Blue States Have Highest Electricity, Gas, And Taxes Across The Board
We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”My home state is what some people consider a ‘purple’ state despite having a Republican governor, a Republican majority state House, a Republican super-majority in the state Senate and Executive council. Our Congressional slate is made up of Democrats, two in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. (It is one of the ‘weird’ things about New Hampshire.)
How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second. The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”
The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.
We do have problems with high energy prices, much of which of the blame can be laid at the feet of the governor of the state directly south of New Hampshire, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who made sure we would suffer a deficit of natural gas by blocking not one, but two different natural gas pipelines that would have brought abundant (and cheap) natural gas into New England from Pennsylvania. (By cheap, I mean US natural gas rather than the natural gas New England has to import from foreign countries at world market prices rather than domestic prices. The problem is that even with these foreign imports demand is outstripping the supply.) That certainly drives up both heating and electricity prices.
One thing we do not have that is a good thing are lots of taxes. We have no income tax. We have no sales tax. We have lowered business which actually resulted in an increase of revenues. Yes, we have high property taxes, but when one looks at the overall burden from state and local taxes are some of the lowest in the country ranking either 48th or 49th as it seems to vary a little from year to year. We have more people (and businesses) moving here.
Is it perfect here? Oh, heck no. It’s not even close. But as compared to the other states here in New England, all Blue states, we’ve got it good. As compared to Blue states elsewhere line New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois, and others, we’re golden.
Now if we could just solve the housing prices problem around here…
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This next item is near and dear to my heart, that being LED headlights and just how awful they are. I certainly have a great dislike for them because they are just too damn bright and blinding. I do have so-called ‘night driving’ glasses which have yellow lenses which help cut down the glare, but they aren’t perfect.
The reason they are so awful? The inaction by U.S. Government to fix the problem. But it looks like the Feds are finally catching up with the rest of the world when it comes to making the use of LED headlights far less problematic.
While this change won’t fix the problem of those vehicles already on the road with ‘awful’ LED headlights, it will help solve the problem going forward...but only if they allow the needed changes.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the foliage colors are brilliant, the weather has been a bit cooler, and where Monday is coming around all to soon.
10/17/2026
It Isn't Working As Intended, Ten Years On
Governor Margaret Wood Hassan signed New Hampshire’s hands-free device law in 2015. We told them it wouldn’t do what they claimed and might just make matters worse. After all, the research showed that people who got distracted still would, and people less inclined would be more often, as they tried to avoid detection.Goodness knows I’ve seen numerous blatant violations of this law over the years with the worst being a fellow traveling south on I-93 with a tablet on his steering wheel he was using to watch video. I let him get far ahead of me because I didn’t want to be a statistic if he ended up causing an accident because of his inattention. Another blatant example I’ve seen again and again is people at stoplights texting and being so focused on their texting that they never saw when the light turned green and would sit there, oblivious to the fact that they were blocking the traffic behind them...or they didn’t care because their texts were far more important.
The law prohibits drivers from using hand-held electronic devices while driving. This does not include styling wands, razors, or anything else you can hold. It also does not include interacting with embedded in-vehicle devices the size of iPads or anything else distracting, including passengers.
--snip--
Ten years later, there is no evidence it did anything but inconvenience safe drivers and jack up car prices, as every model had to have hands-free tech, even the sort that was more distracting than talking with a cell phone held to your ear.
As I have written here and in comment threads, the auto industry’s move to touchscreens to control vehicle functions may have seemed logical from a cost point as the touchscreen eliminates most of the buttons, knobs, and switches which is convenient since just about everything in a vehicle is controlled by computers these days. But when those cost-saving moves add to the distractions experienced by drivers, then it can end up being more costly than any of the supposed savings, particularly in damage to vehicles and injuries or fatalities to drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. This has prompted some auto manufacturers to take a step back and return to those archaic buttons, knobs and switches because the touchscreens require a driver to take their eyes off the road in order perform a simple task on the touchscreen.
Yes, I did get a little off topic as the original reference was made to Hands-Free Laws, but those off-topic items did show that even if a driver wasn’t using their phone or tablet or whatever in contradiction to the law, there are plenty of other things inside a vehicle that multiplied the distraction problem.
In any case, I have to wonder about how other states have been handling their versions of Hands-Free Laws and if they’ve seen the same thing seen here in New Hampshire or are their laws working as they were supposed to work?
10/16/2026
10/11/2026
Thoughts On A Sunday
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, plans for pulling the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water are being made. I expect it will be safely ensconced at The Farm (the official name of BeezleBub’s new home) long enough to be cleaned up and all of the boating gear pulled out and stored away. Then it will make its way to the boatyard for winterization and shrink-wrapping before returning to The Farm for the winter.
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You would think that after all these years we would know how to bathe, and more specifically, how to take a shower. Apparently that is not always the case.
Turns Out There Really Is a Right Way to Shower
I am one of those adults who much prefers showers to taking a bath. Mostly, it has to do with the fact that it takes a lot less time to take a shower than to take a bath. I can generally perform all of the showering “tasks” in less than 10 minutes including turning it on, stepping into the shower, cleaning myself, shutting off the shower, and drying myself.
I am not going to delve into all of the recommended steps and how they should be performed, but I will say that I have been doing them for most of my life. But I am going to mention one that I didn’t expect:
Showering thrice a week is optimal, but seven times is the limit to avoid stripping skin of essential oils.I will admit that I do not shower every day. I do skip a day now and then, so I’ll shower four, five or six times a week. Most of that depends upon the time of year as I may shower less often over the winter. However, when I was doing heavy physical labor back in my youth I showered every day, usually after work.
Every time I think there’s nothing new to learn, I find I’m wrong.
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The Winter Is Coming! The Winter Is Coming!
Yes, I know we’ve not even made it through the first month of autumn, but we do need to start thinking about the coming winter. Winter up here in New England can be harsh with lots of snow, sleet, freezing rain along with sub-zero temperatures and high winds that can cause problems with power outages and wind chill factors that are well below zero.
However, it seems that 19 states may be seeing heavy “snow blasts” this coming winter.
A recent long-range forecast model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed a massive shift in the bands of heavy precipitation between December 2026 and February 2027.I remember more than a few winters with heavy snows. One of them was when I still resided at The Manse where one winter we saw 150 inches of snowfall. We usually see an average of 60 inches. In any case I think we’ll be okay as we’re used to severe winters around here. The only concessions I will make will be ensuring I have enough propane on hand for the Official Weekend Pundit Portable Generator to operate for 5 days straight, dig out my tire chains in case I need them for the trusty RAM 1500 pickup, and make sure the winter emergency kit is checked and stored in the pickup as well.
That map shows a growing chance that the entire US East Coast will see above-average precipitation this winter, from southern Maine to the tip of Florida and stretching across the country into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as well.
On the West Coast, California is also expected to see above-average precipitation this winter, which likely means feet of snow in the Sierra-Nevada mountains and other high-altitude areas out west.
Other than that I doubt I will need to make any additional changes to the usual winter preparations.
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When I first heard about this, I wondered if they had the age of the schoolchild involved wrong. But it turns out it was correct and it is disturbing to no end.
The Six-Year Old Psychopath
You may have come across this video of a 6-year-old who shot and almost killed his teacher:Listening to how this child acted and how he spoke he sounded more like a hardened street thug rather than a six-year old. It begs the question whether or not this is something he hears and sees at home. If so, it seems he’s been learning the wrong things. If not, then it has to be determined if the child is a murderous psychopath. Either way, this is scary.
🚨 A 6-year-old shot his teacher. Richneck Elementary, Jan 6, 2023. Court unsealed Officer Brian Torrez's bodycam Oct 6, 2026. 🎥 The Virginian-Pilot / Daily Press https://t.co/TPphaycltx
— Patriot (@_Patriot1776Q_) October 7, 2026
--snip--
It seems this child was already lost at the age of 6. Can a child who clearly has been exposed to terrible parenting be saved if rescued at that age? I would say it depends. It depends on whether he’s a psychopath. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want him mainstreamed. But what to do with a child who’s already shown such a propensity for evil?
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This is another thing I had to read more than once to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood what it said. What is “this”?
The City by the bay admitting it f**ked up?
You see what I mean?
Did you know the Mayor of San Fransisco is a jewish son of a Rabbi Democrat Capitalist? Yeah try and string that sentence together in another context. Anyway, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie blamed the city’s progressive politics for fueling its homelessness, drug overdose and business exodus crises, admitting in a new interview that the city had “lost its way.”If Lurie is serious it may be possible that San Francisco can be saved from itself. If he can change the focus of San Francisco government and political policies in favor of “things that work” rather than those Progressive things that sound good but don’t work, there may be hope for the City By The Bay.
Lurie, who has made restoring San Francisco’s battered public image a priority since taking office, told CNN’s Dana Bash that his administration is taking a more hard-nosed approach to crime while working to make the city friendlier to businesses. But Bash pressed the mayor on why San Francisco needed a turnaround in the first place - prompting a blunt admission about the city’s far-left reputation.
“We lost our way as a city. We were focused on the wrong things and today we’re focused on common sense,” he said. “I mean, we got so, entrapped in our progressive values and talking about progressivism that, we weren’t taking stock of what was happening on our streets,” he added.
It’s been years since I was in San Francisco, the last time I was there being 1996. Back then things weren’t all that crazy and SF was one of the places to be. However, over the past 30 years it has deteriorated to a place most folks don’t want to visit, businesses and residents have been leaving, and nothing seems to work anymore. (Two friends of mine who escaped from San Francisco years ago for the freedom of New Hampshire stopped going back there to visit friends and family because it was too depressing to see the city where they were born and raised turned into a Third World s**thole. They took to the New Hampshire way of doing things not too long after they arrived here.)
Of course, the mayor will have to fight the Leftist establishment and the Progressive lock on California’s state government to make progress, but who knows what will happen at the November elections. Maybe California could end up with a Republican governor.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the foliage colors are approaching peak, the weather is cooperating, and where I won’t have to deal with Monday this week...
10/10/2026
Random Thoughts While Out And About
While it is fall the fall foliage colors are still developing here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire and probably won’t be at peak for another week. However, that didn’t diminish what foliage we did see with a lot of reds and yellows mixed among the leaves that are still green. Traffic wasn’t all that bad, particularly once we got off the main roads and onto the back roads that still got us where we were headed even though they were a more roundabout way of getting where we were going.
Like the main roads, the back roads were festooned with campaign posters for state offices in the legislature – the House, Senate, Executive Council, and Governor – and federal offices – two House seats and one Senate seat, all of which will be voted on this coming November 3rd. (I have to admit that the TV ads have reached the point where I no longer hear or see them as it’s the same campaign rhetoric over and over and over again, ad nauseum.)
There were plenty of leaf peepers out and about. (Leaf peepers are what we call foliage tourists up this way.) Unlike the summer tourist, most of these folks are well behaved and cordial. They want to drive around and look at the landscapes bright with reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves. Certainly the local restaurants and hotels are loving the influx of tourists. Though not quite to the level we see in the summer, there are more than few up here in the Lakes Region and large quantities of them up the White Mountains and North Country where the foliage is at peak.
I have been considering pulling the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water sometime over this coming week. The weather is expected to be rather nice and will give me time to remove all of the boat gear and give the boat a good cleaning before I have it winterized and shrink-wrapped for the winter. There are still a lot of boats in the water from what I’ve seen at the local marinas, but not for much longer.
One thing I did notice during our trip around the area – gas prices have fallen a bit more. Towards the end of our trip today I stopped by my go-to gas station and filled up the gas tank of the WP Mom’s car and paid $4.06 per gallon. That’s down 5 cents from last Wednesday.
I did have to put on the heat here at The Gulch the other morning to take the chill off the inside. Not that I needed to leave it on for very long, but it had reached the low 40’s outside overnight and the heat was on just long enough to get the temp inside up to 69ºF. It took less than 15 minutes and then I shut the heat off. I will have to do that every now and then until we get into the consistently colder weather.
And so it goes.