While there was nothing wrong with The Snowblower, the acquisition of the spare shear pins was preventative, meaning that if I didn't have any I would surely need them, but if I had them then I wouldn't need them.
The new snowshovel was needed because one of our older ones “folded like a cheap suitcase in the rain.” The shaft kinked and bent mid-span, turning the shovel into nothing but an ornament. Due to its construction it wasn't possible to replace the shaft and handle easily, and there would have been no guarantee the repair would have lasted beyond the first few shovelfuls of snow. Hence, the new shovel.
I also made a run to our town's highway department to fill some buckets with sand, something that will be needed on The Manse's driveway once the last of the snow has been removed. With an almost 23% grade on the driveway the use of sand becomes mandatory unless we want to 'chain up' just to go less than 100 feet.
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Here's a list of the 100 Best SciFi Movies Of All Time.I've seen all but three of them.
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The damage being caused by ObamaCare has been spreading, and now it's hitting the very people who were most supportive of it: New York's cultural and professional elite.To yet again quote one of my favorite action movies, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
It's interesting to watch those who gave no thought to what it was they were supporting see it come back to hit them where it hurts the most. Call it yet another unintended consequence of being low-information voters.
These folks should have been much better informed than the captive Democrat constituencies. It just goes to show you that a true flim-flam man can pull one over even on the nation's “best and brightest.”
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If we need more evidence of global warming, all we need to do is look at the 2000 new cold and snow records set in the USA this past week as well as the first snowfall in Cairo, Egypt in 100 years.It must be George W. Bush's fault!
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I have to admit being amused while watching the local TV news reports as the snow storm wound down this morning. Many of the reporters seemed at a loss for words as they tried to “make a mountain out of a molehill”, trying to make the aftermath of this storm seem far worse than it really was. Maybe they felt the need to use their ominous “Storm Center” theme music and the only way they could justify it was to oversell the snowfall.Were there power outages? Yup. Happens almost every time there's some kind of storm. But they tried to make the few hundred people without power seem like it was unexpected and widespread.
One of the lamest comments made by one of the reporters standing in eight inches of snow dealt with Christmas trees and how those trees might not be able to be sold because they are snow covered. Say what? All that's needed to make those trees 'sellable' is to bang the stump against the ground and most of the snow will fall off.
You know they're grasping at straws when the worst thing they can come up with is a “snow on Christmas trees” meme. This whole thing was a typical non-Nor'easter snow storm of the type we get in winter, not a snow-storm-of-doom or a gee-we-haven't-had-snow-here-in-100-years storm. It's winter. In New England. It snows during winter in New England.
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Powerline shows us a list of the organizations and corporations funding one of the more vile leftist websites – Think Progress – by way of the Center for American Progress.I doubt that there is any conservative organization that can boast a remotely comparable list of corporate supporters. CAP’s disclosure is a timely reminder that large corporations are not, in general, supporters of free enterprise. Many of them love to partner with government to suppress innovation and competition.To me this illustrates that the Left is a firm believer in cronyism, the bane of free market capitalism. What's worse is that such cronyism is often portrayed as capitalism when in fact it is not, further pushing forward the greed and envy-driven agenda of the Progressives. That's their modus operandi, accuse their opponents of the very thing they themselves are doing.
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The local TV news program, the same one that tried to make the snowfall we had overnight into a major media event, aired a segment that dealt with ObamaCare and its effects on New Hampshire. I found it interesting to see that 17,234 residents have selected a plan through ObamaCare. Notice the term “selected”. At no time during the segment did they use the word “enrolled”. Not once. It seems they're trying to imply that selecting a plan means the same thing as being enrolled in a plan. It does not.By that same criteria Amazon could say a customer purchased an item merely because it was in their shopping cart even if the customer hadn't yet paid for that merchandise. “Selecting” and “paying for” are two entirely different things. It is no different with “selecting” and “enrolling”.
It never ceases to amaze me how far the ObamaBots will go to sell the unwilling American public on the idea that all is well with the steaming pile of manure that is ObamaCare.
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I've always liked Mike Rowe, both on his show Dirty Jobs and the narration he does for a number of other shows, including one of my favorites, Deadliest Catch. I've heard him speak, seen his TED lecture, and read or listened to a number of his opinions about every day subjects. He's basically a down to earth guy with a wide range of experience.Recently he spoke on Reason TV, talking about the high cost of college and the insanity of mortgaging a student's future “in order to train them for jobs that clearly don't exist.”
"There is a real disconnect in the way that we educate vis-a-vis the opportunities that are available. You have - right now - about 3 million jobs that can't be filled," he says, talking about openings in traditional trades ranging from construction to welding to plumbing. "Jobs that typically parents' don't sit down with their kids and say, 'Look, if all goes well, this is what you are going to do.'"Let's face it, there are far more job openings for welders than there are for someone with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Urban Graffiti or a BA in Gender Studies. (That's true of any degree program that ends in the word “Studies”.) To ignore where the jobs are and go into a course of study that won't qualify a student for anything other than working in the fast food industry or retail while racking up a debt that rivals that of most family's mortgages is indeed insane.
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I spent a little over two hours removing the 12 inches of “not a snow-storm-of-doom” snowfall. It was a bit tougher to move this light and fluffy snow than it is to move regular snow as the light stuff tends to fly all over the place and will not necessarily go where one is pointing the discharge chute of their snowblower. This is usually a 1-hour job, including shoveling out the doorways and stairs, cleaning snow off of The Boat's winter storage cover, and cutting a path to both the wood ash pile and the propane tank filler cover. But with the foot of light fluffy snow I had to go over some of the same ground more than once to remove snow that drifted back onto areas I'd already cleared.At least I finished well before the New England Patriots game!
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Uh-oh, this doesn't bode well for ObamaCare.In a WSJ/NBC poll that asked uninsured people whether they thought ObamaCare was a good idea, only 24 percent though it was while around 50 percent thought it was a bad idea.
If you've lost a solid majority of the people that ObamaCare was supposed to 'help', you know it's really in trouble.
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If the Obama Administration can't get ObamaCare right, what does it say about them if they can't even get appeasement to the Iranian mullahs right?So much for Smart DiplomacyTM.
One has to wonder how many more such blunders will occur before Obama leaves office in January 2017? (That's assuming he actually leaves office, if you know what I mean.)
(H/T Pirate's Cove)
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While we're piling abuse on the Obama Administration, we must add this from Sister Toldjah.As she writes:
No, Mitt Romney wasn’t the rock-ribbed conservative we wanted in 2012 but on key issues, especially the disastrous impact he predicted Obamacare would have on the American people, and his emphasis on how Russia and Syria were NOT our friends, he was absolutely right.Mitt was right about a whole bunch of things during the 2012 campaign, however his message was drowned out by the MSM and the wide ranging ObamaBots.