Thoughts On A Sunday

One of the ‘rituals’ of spring in our town is what are called ‘Free Dump Days’ which allows residents to haul all kinds of junk and detritus to our dump...err...Solid Waste Center and dispose of it for free. Things like construction demo, old furniture, mattresses and box springs, old lawn mowers and snowblowers, appliances, and so on can be disposed of for free. Some of those items usually require those dumping them to pay a fee to dispose of them. But for two days in the spring, people all throughout town can get rid of all that junk. A lot of folks make use of those days to clean up around their homes or lake cottages, signifying the approach of another summer.

From reports I’ve seen, Saturday’s FDD was a big success, with a line of cars and trucks almost a half-mile long waiting to get in. Some of that might have been due to last year’s Free Dump Days having been canceled due to Covid-19, so there were two year’s worth of junk to dispose of.

Free Dump Days moves us one step closer to summer.

==+==

I have to admit to being dismayed seeing a lengthy real estate article in our local paper touting the joys and advantages of moving to our town. It sang its praises, with a list of all the great things that make it a great place to live.

Just what we needed. [/sarc]

I was tempted to write a rebuttal article, informing people why they should stay as far away from our town as they can...except for a week or two in the summer.

I want to tell them about the all the potholed roads, heavy traffic, bible-thumping/gun-toting bitter clingers who don’t cotton to “flatlanders” taking over our town, informing them how the sidewalks are rolled up after 8:30PM, the streetlamps (what there are of them) are turned off at 9PM, and how they have to keep an eye and ear open for for packs of coyotes just waiting to pounce on them in the dark. Oh, and did I mention the mountain lions and fisher cats waiting to do likewise while they’re out walking their dog?

And then there’s the housing market, with dilapidated houses/cottages and single-wide mobile homes asking prices being eight times the market value, places you’ll still have to sink a lot of money into to return them to livable condition.

So don’t move here. Stay away. You don’t want to live here.

You’ve been warned.

==+==

Just when I thought they can’t get any stupider (or crazier), they prove me wrong.

It seems SUNY’s Geneseo campus has announced they will be expanding their segregated housing and support programs.

The State University at New York Geneseo has announced their newest addition to the school’s Umoja House, a dorm "for students of color."

--snip--

SUNY Geneseo Associate Director of Residence Life for Educational Initiatives Meg Reitz reasoned that “Part of the goal in supporting BIPOC students is giving them a place where they don’t feel like they have to put on a different face."

I have to wonder if the next step will be a wholly segregated campus? I would like to think it won’t go that far, that some form of sanity will return. However, seeing how woke insanity has spread through academia like the Black Plague (no pun intended) did through Europe during the mid-14th century, it may be just a matter of time before some administrator proposes just such an idea, totally unaware (or uncaring) of the outcome of that kind of segregation in the past.

Welcome back, Jim Crow….

==+==

In light of ever expanding defunding of police departments, willful destruction of morale in police departments, increasing demonization of police officers by city government and ‘gripe’ groups, and round the clock scrutiny by the Lame Stream Media/DNC, is it any wonder more police officers are deciding to leave their departments, retiring, moving to new departments away from the big cities, or giving up their careers entirely.

The NYPD lost over 15% of their force in 2020, with a little over 5300 officers departing. That’s a 75% increase over 2019. It will be no surprise if that number increases this year, particularly “as corrupt De Blasio and Cuomo allow the continued attack on cops...”

The NYPD isn’t the only city seeing this happen, with Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities in the same situation. It will only get worse unless the Progressives running these blue cities are cured of their cranial-rectal inversions.

==+==

And then there’s this, something I feel more of us should be demanding, particularly in those cities where continual acts of “mostly peaceful” protests have been taking place and the damages have been mounting.

(H/T The Feral Irishman)

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re hoping for some more rain, warmer temps, and shorter Mondays.

The Bedlam Of A Nation Without Cops

I have to admit I am becoming a fan of Daisy Cousens. She certainly makes some interesting videos that makes one go “Hmm, I wonder if she’s correct on this one?”

Her latest certainly struck a chord with me, making wonder if the endgame of defunding the police is merely another step in bringing about anarchy which in turn will allow a police state to come into being as a means of restoring order? (This is not her conclusion, but she did get me thinking.)

Am I being paranoid? Of course I am, but you are asking the wrong question. The correct question is “Am I being paranoid enough?”

In this video she paints a picture of a nation none of us want, even the woke (thought they don’t realize it...yet). Parts of what she envisions has already been described in Kurt Schlicter’s People’s Republic series. I know I certainly have no desire to see any of that happen, at least not in my lifetime or that of my son or my nephews or nieces. But if something doesn’t change soon, that’s where we might be headed.

Making The Same Mistakes As The Jacobins?

This comment was posted in response to this piece by Victor Davis Hanson which delves into the deliberate ruination of the American nation from within.
Writes Hanson:

As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation’s well-being hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability. A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.

Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders.

The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy.

Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt.

The challenge is not just enemies abroad such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The greater problem lies within us, as we erode the inherited and acquired strengths that made us singular, both materially and spiritually.

--snip-->

Modern Jacobins seek to erase our founding in 1776. Mobs tear down statues and deface monuments with impunity. There is no consistent rhyme or reason to why the names of schools, institutions and streets are erased overnight — except the relative dangers of a nihilistic electronic mob.

Anyone who paid attention in History class knows what happened to the Jacobins and the damage they did to their native France.

The comment made to VDH’s piece addresses another issue those tearing the nation apart are ignoring.

What gets me is that the folks supporting this downfall, particularly the 'useful idiots', think that somehow things will be better once everything has been turned to rubble. However, when the reality of what they have wrought hits them they will wonder how it all happened.

And then we, who remember the times before they came upon us like the Four Horsemen, will point to them and say "You brought this upon yourselves and now you will pay the price for your willful ignorance, and the mayhem and destruction you have wrought in that ignorance. Enjoy this hell you have created. Enjoy the chains you have willingly placed upon yourselves. Revel in the pain you have caused and the pain you have inflicted upon yourselves. Suffer in the knowledge that this is what you worked so hard to create."

The nation will become like Detroit, a wasteland of closed factories, dilapidated public buildings, and homes that are Soviet Concrete Block chic, lines for food, lines for clothing, lines for basic necessities, full prisons, full gulags, schools to teach dogma, to indoctrinate, but not to educate. It is this they have worked so hard to create. But we also know they will say "But this wasn't our intention. We had the best of intentions!"

We know where that road leads, don't we?

Indeed.

Always Ask Them These Questions. Always!

Seen in the comments to this post at Instapundit:

To any claim you need to ask The Three Questions: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. Where has this worked before? (Link added – ed.)

Political claims especially fail when attempting to answer these.

Those are questions the Left rarely bothers to answer…because they can’t.

SloJo Needs To Go Back To School

So the Constitution is more of a suggestion rather than the Law of the Land? It can be 'reinterpreted' to fit the needs of those in power? Yeah, that's going to work out just fine. Uh-huh.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Old Man Winter reminded us that he’s still hanging around with a Nor’easter dropping as much as 12 inches of snow in the western/southwestern parts of New Hampshire on Friday. Not that it will be around for very long as temps will be back in the 60’s starting Monday.

We were fortunate here at The Gulch, seeing far more rain than snow, and what snow we did see – about a half inch – disappearing by late Friday afternoon. There was still plenty of snow on the higher elevations in our town yesterday, including the location of The New Manse once it is built. (That still looks to be a couple or three years off at this point.)

It was mostly on again/off again rain during Saturday, something we have needed. The weather didn’t stop some folks from taking their pleasure boats out for a spin on the Big Lake. (I saw a couple of boats out on Paugus Bay while taking one of the feline contingent of The Gulch to the vet for a check up. I envied them.)

Some of the work on The Gulch mentioned in yesterday’s post has started. In this case I am making changes in the Official Weekend Pundit Office, removing some furniture, moving wall-mounted shelves, putting in a new computer desk to hold my work computer and dual monitors. (Using just the laptop screen hasn’t been cutting it for some work, hence the change.) These additions don’t replace the Official Weekend Pundit Computer and monitor as I keep work and ‘play’ equipment separate. (For me ‘play’ is sometimes indistinguishable from work as it usually means I’m writing, but for myself or this blog.)

==+==

It appears the shooter at the FedEx facility in Indianapolis was ‘known to authorities’.

Brandon Scott Hole was a nutcase known to both local and federal law enforcement officials, had been reported to be dangerous and violent by family members, and nothing was done until after the fact.

This seems to be a recurring theme lately – a dangerous person known to authorities murders a number of people in a mass shooting, and those same authorities are surprised when that known dangerous person kills. In many cases that person ‘known to authorities’ shouldn’t have had any weapons to begin with because they are convicted felons or under protective orders from a court. If an earlier report that Hole was using a machine gun is correct, meaning a fully automatic weapon, then it was one he obtained illegally.

I have to wonder how many other ‘known to authorities’ mass shooters we’ll be seeing over the next few years? If I were paranoid, I would say just enough to give SloJo, WRBA, and the totalitarian Progressives to strip law abiding citizens of yet another Constitutional right? (The Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion are teetering on the brink of extinction, courtesy of MSM and social media corporations, Covid nannies, and woke ignoramuses.)

==+==

With so many schools, public and private, having gone ‘woke’, parents are withdrawing their children from those schools. Some are enrolling them in other schools and others have decided to homeschool. This trend has been accelerating since Covid.

When schools reopened in our town, a full 11% of parents decided their children would not be returning. Many decided to homeschool because they saw their children were actually learning and not being indoctrinated. (I have known many homeschooled kids since moving into town almost 20 years ago and without exception they were better educated with a broader and better understanding of the subjects they studied. They also tended to be more mature than their peers in public school.)

This isn’t a phenomenon seen just here in rural ‘flyover’ country. It has also appeared in Manhattan, and has done so in spectacular fashion. In this case, a father withdrew his daughter from the prestigious Brearley School and sent a letter to the 600+ families of the school, explaining why he was doing so.

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child's education is irreparable.

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

==+==

Germany has invested heavily in renewable energy, specifically wind, and phased out nuclear power. It also been using coal plants as backups to wind, but have been working to reduce their dependence on them. Right after the first of this year Germany shut down and disconnected 11 coal-fired plants from the electrical grid as a means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Then the winds stopped blowing.

Eight days after the phase out began, a number of the disconnected coal plants had to be reconnected and restarted to meet demand due to that lack of wind.

My question is this: Why didn’t they foresee this event? It wasn’t like it wasn’t predictable.

Germany went from having the most reliable and resilient electrical grid in Europe to the worst, and all of it done on purpose in pursuit of a goal based upon an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Germany would he been better served by keeping their nuclear plants and building more. Nuclear is also a means of reducing carbon dioxide but is not vulnerable to weather. The newer Generation III and IV plants are safer, more efficient, and if modular design is used can be built quickly.

Ask what the German public thinks about wind turbines and you’ll find that while they were enthusiastic about them at first, the reality of their downsides has shifted opinion away from them. Between increasingly poor grid reliability, the sound, the light flicker, and particularly the health effects of infrasound, many Germans wish they would go away.

Has Germany become an object lesson about how not to deal with reducing carbon emissions?

Yes.

==+==

This is an interesting look at people’s perceptions versus reality. Even with hard facts and evidence, some people are unwilling to change their minds or perception of what’s true. This is true across socio-economic, political, and religious lines.

Let’s take a look at a few of them from the point of view of voters:

During the late 1800s when the renowned scientist Louis Pasteur was trying to overturn the medical community’s deadly belief that germs are not communicable, he wrote: “The greatest aberration of the mind is to believe a thing to be, because we desire it.” The results of a scientific survey conducted just after the 2020 presidential election show that voters from across the political spectrum have failed to heed that warning.

--snip--

76% of Trump voters think that the average income of middle-income households fell during the Obama administration. In reality, their inflation-adjusted average income rose by $5,300 during this period.

88% of Biden voters think that police are more likely to use lethal force when arresting black people than white people. In reality, police are 42% less likely to use lethal force when arresting blacks than whites.

The survey also found that a considerable portion of Trump voters have adopted some progressive fallacies spread by the media. For instance, 38% of Trump voters (and 86% of Biden voters) think that the number of strong-to-violent tornadoes in the U.S. has generally increased since the 1950s. In reality, they have slightly decreased.

The study linked the article do some further breakdowns of misconceptions and show us this problem does indeed exist across political lines, something everyone needs to aware of. They also need to question what they believe to be true. As John Maynard Keynes once said, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

Indeed. I find myself constantly challenged and always have to question what I think I know. I have found from time to time that what I and “everyone else” knows just ain’t so.

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where winter tried to make a return even if only for a day, warmer weather is returning, and where preparations for summer are becoming increasingly apparent.

The White Woke Racists Among Us

A recent post highlighted the problem with woke liberal racism, specifically the soft racism of low expectations. The cartoon in that post overstated the issue (but sometimes that’s the only way to get their attention), but I have to say I have actually interacted with people I know who act exactly that way. While the blatant woke racists are a minority, it is the subtle and unaware ones that are the big problem.

While I could expound in depth about this problem (and it is a big problem), I figured I’d let someone else do the heavy lifting this time. (I have been very busy at work and getting ready to start some renovations here at The Gulch.)

Without further ado, I present to you Daisy Cousens and her take on Georgia’s new Voter ID laws, and how White Woke Racists are trying so hard to prove non-white voters are incapable of dealing with them which, as any halfway intelligent human being could tell you, just ain’t so.



Ayuh.

Promoted From "Promoted From The Comments"

To borrow a subject line from Skip at Granite Grok, the following was promoted from the comments at GG about a subject near and dear to yours truly, that being the problem when folks “from away” relocate here to New Hampshire. We aren’t the only ‘locals’ that worry about such problems as we see the same concerns in places like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming worried about folks relocating from California trying to turn their states into the very place the fled from. In our case it’s folks from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York coming here and trying to recreate the very places they came here to get away from.

Over the years, I have seen many folks from away move into our town and they can be categorized into three different and distinct groups.

The first group are those who move here, do their best to fit in and enjoy their new home town, and after a few years you’d swear they’ve always lived here. That’s a good portion of the folks coming here from away.

The second group are those I call “drawbridge” folks.

They move into town and then want to freeze everything, allow no changes of any kind. In effect, they want to ‘raise the drawbridge’ to prevent change from entering the town. While I can understand this mentality, it isn’t realistic. Change is inevitable. Some changes will happen quickly, usually forced by circumstances. Other changes will take place slowly, a little at a time and barely noticeable, but it will happen.

Most “drawbridge” come to realize their expectations are unrealistic and eventually come around. Those who can’t come around fight against every change, large or small, and tend to be unhappy about the changes they see. There is no mollifying them. Fortunately they tend to be a very small minority of those moving here from away, but they can be the most problematic.

The third group tends to be the loudest, most disruptive, and least likely to listen to reason. It is this group that Skip and commenter NHNative address (hence the “Promoted from the Comments” tag) .

They are the folks that move here to get away from wherever they came from, and the first thing they do I try to recreate the very place they fled, recreating the very conditions that caused them to flee “back where they came from” to begin with. They want all of the amenities of their old home towns and expect the rest of us to pay to provide them, amenities the rest of us couldn’t possibly care any less about than we already do. They make a big stink if we bumpkins don’t automatically bow to their ‘superior’ wisdom, not understanding that their wisdom isn’t all that wise and rarely applicable to their new situation. Those with lots of money tend to be the most obnoxious, not understanding that some of the bumpkins have even more money than they do or, lacking that level of cash, have far more influence in the town/county/state than the newcomers could ever hope to have.

It is to this group the following message is addressed:

They should take the message to heart.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’ve seen a preview of summer with nice sunny weather with temps in the 70’s, light winds, and the wide open lake. Very few boats have been venturing out on the lakes, and those that have have been mostly fishing boats, trailered in and launched by their owners for the day. I have seen only a handful of boats at their slips in the marinas and coves here in my town, but that will be changing with every day as the boatyards, marinas, and residents launch their boats and get them to their summer berths.

About the only dark cloud making itself known is the cost of gasoline, up about $1/gallon from a year ago. (Gee, I wonder why that might be?)

Despite the higher gas prices, the enthusiasm for the upcoming boating season here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire is quite high, with the demand for new boats outstripping supply.

Despite the age of the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout (28 years), it is still quite serviceable and I expect to get quite a few more years out of it. (I would like to get a new boat at some point, but I have other priorities for my money for the time being.) With regular maintenance I should be able to keep it in running shape for as long as necessary, something that, for the time being, is a lot cheaper than buying a new boat. But some day...

==+==

Are we seeing yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming to bite President *’s administration in the butt? Of course. This isn’t the first such instance nor will it be the last. This latest iteration?

His threat to order the banning of a whole host of ‘scary’ guns has driven the sales of AR’s, ammunition, and “ghost” guns to unbelievable levels.

Then again, SloJo has already stated he believes the Constitutional restrictions on government can be ignored because none of them are absolute. It seems he (or WRBA) thinks the Second Amendment can be ignored despite the phrase “Shall not be infringed” being part and parcel of the Amendment. In effect, Biden’s proposed gun policies will treat everyone as a criminal, except for the real criminals, of course.

Once he disposes of the Second Amendment the focus will shift to the First.

They are about to find out the hard way that a majority of the American people won’t stand still for that.

==+==

At least our governor has gotten one thing right: He says New Hampshire will not have so-called “vaccine passports”.

Requiring citizens to have a government-issued vaccine passport to travel and to attend public events would needlessly stir more controversy over the risk of contracting COVID-19, Gov. Chris Sununu said Tuesday.

“Washington is so removed from what is happening on the ground. We shouldn’t be mandating anything. These vaccine passports, creating the haves and the have-nots, you are just going to create a lot of problems and anxiety,” Sununu said.

Sununu said the passport runs counter to New Hampshire’s tradition of treating vaccines as voluntary.

“I am very hesitant about any of that. At the end of the day, it is an individual choice,” Sununu said.

Of course the Left will need to silence the Governor because he is refusing to follow the narrative, refusing to create or follow a system that will ask “Papiere, bitte!”

==+==

A quote from Pete Buttigieg: “Freeways were built on a “racist” system, and built at the expense of communities of color.”

So now even highways are racist? What’s next? Water mains and sewers? Electricity?

If everything is racist, then nothing is racist.

==+==

One of my friends was up visiting today and on his way back home he called me on the phone to share a sign he saw outside a business:

We warned you about Joe Biden, but did you listen?

No. No they did not.

==+==

One thing that has become a concern, at least here in New Hampshire (but also seen in other places), is the spreading phenomenon of short-term rentals, particularly those booked by way of services like AirBnB, VRBO, and other similar operations. There has been a growing problem with such short-term rentals, both here and in other towns, one of them being poor behavior by those renting the short-term rentals. None of those problems are the fault of the rental servcies. Some of the problems are resolved by the owners of the short-term rental properties, particularly those who also reside in or nearby them. (Some owners only offer to rent their properties during certain time periods such as for a couple of weeks when they are away on their own vacations.)

A more recent phenomenon has been properties bought for the sole purpose of using them as short-term rentals. That has been seen here on an increasing basis. What’s even more disturbing is corporations – LLCs – buying up such properties, sometimes paying well above the market value for ‘vacation’ homes, then listing them via the aforementioned services. This has certainly skewed the housing market, making homes that would have been occupied by owners, i.e. families, unavailable, particularly since some corporations have been paying well above market value to acquire them.

The problem we’re seeing with this? If there are issues regarding the property, who do the parties concerned contact? Some anonymous LLC in Boston or New York whose only concern is that they keep making money back from their investment and not quality of life issues caused by those renting their properties? Will it be a property management company who will handle it? One of the members of the LLC? A law firm representing the owners? Who does a municipality contact of there are immediate problems...or chronic problems that constantly plague neighbors, and by extension, the town?

We haven’t figured out the answer to that question...yet.

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer has been been giving us sneak previews, summerfolk have been showing up to get their vacation homes ready, and where everyone is anticipating the summer restaurants reopening in a few weeks.

Yes. Yes It Does.

Umm, yeah. I think this explains real racism pretty well.

(H/T Powerline)

Thoughts On A Sunday

It is Easter and we are celebrating the Resurrection, something that has brought Joy to many throughout the centuries. He is Risen!

==+==

This will be a short TOAS as we are on the road, visiting family to share Easter Dinner. Since most of those participating have been immunized, we believe the risk is small. Those who aren’t yet immunized have been working from home for months.

==+==

One of the side effects of last week’s visit to Southwestern New Hampshire was a couple of tires in the trusty RAM 1500 being out of balance. I thought I had managed to get all of the mud and gravel out of the wheels after our trip down there (the last mile or so of our trip to our family’s home was on muddy dirt road), but I was wrong. I didn’t manage to get the last of it removed until Saturday afternoon, being aware of our trip to the older WP Sister’s place for Easter dinner would be much less comfortable if I didn’t restore the wheel balance.

==+==

Is it just me or have our adversaries realized that no one really appears to be in charge at our highest level of power? Certainly China and Russia understand this.

The new administration started off using virtue signaling as an important component of foreign and domestic policy. But now even the “only adults in the room” suddenly suspect that Woke garlic doesn’t repel vampires. Russia and China continue to defy the rules of the Biden-Harris administration despite their expectation that the world would return to its pre-2016 order.

--snip--

Russia and China — not to mention North Korea and Iran — are all on the move and don’t seem deterred by Washington. If disaster overtakes the Biden Harris restoration future historians will conclude that organized self delusion played a leading part. The cultural and political establishment belief in the Great Reset after Trump sputtered and instead of the predicted return to normal the global world has continued its descent into crisis.

--snip--

While Biden-Harris sees itself as “back” in charge, recent Great Power challenges treat them as a fading, decadent relic. At a top-level diplomatic meeting in Alaska, the Chinese envoy said: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength” according to the New York Times.

They realize the US is no longer cohesive, that those in power are nothing like the previous administration, the one they disliked but respected since it spoke from a position of power and strength. Now we have SloJo “in control” and Whoever is Running the Biden Administration believes they can make nice with China, Russia, and even scarier, Iran and, that because they’ve done so, they will fall in line. But not so ancient history (just 5 years ago) shows they won’t. They will exploit the Biden Administration’s focus on making sure no Democrat will ever lose an election again and fomenting a for-the-moment cold civil war.

One thing we can count on: If the feces hits the rotary oscillator and adversaries like China and Russia make moves against Taiwan and Ukraine respectively, SloJo and WRBA will find some way of blaming Trump...and will do absolutely nothing about it.

==+==

And that’s the abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where there’s still snow on the ground here and there, Ice Out is close, and where boats are already being unwrapped and prepped for the upcoming boating season.

Irony...Writ Large

How does one define irony? Let’s give it a try, shall we?

(H/T Powerline)

Prepping For Summer

Normally I would be writing about this subject on Sunday, but with it being Good Friday today and Easter on Sunday, I figured I’d delve into this subject today, that being preparations for the upcoming summer. There was another motivation for this subject, that being a discussion with an old friend, talking about Covid-19 and the differences between the mandates here in New Hampshire and her home state of Connecticut.

One big difference – restaurants and bars are fully open here, but still locked down in Connecticut.

That got us talking about summer in general and what I’ve got planned.

The first thing: Ensuring the slip for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – will be ready. The rent for the upcoming boating season has already been paid and the owner has already made arrangements for any repairs that might be needed to ensure the docks are serviceable.

The second thing: Calling the boatyard where The Boat is stored and asking that it be taken out of storage and serviced by the second weekend in May. (It needs to be unwrapped, the hull acid-washed to remove the algae buildup that collected during last boating season, and the oil changed in the engine and stern drive.)

The first and second things are probably the biggest things that need to be taken care of before summer since boating is one thing we do a lot from May to October.

The third thing: Since it looks like summer will again be summer around here, that means we’ll see cookouts again. One thing we lack here at The Gulch is a grill, a lack I plan to correct sometime in the next week or two. (When we left The Manse a little over two years ago, we left our gas grill behind at the request of the new owners. We have been grill-less since then and last year it didn’t seem like we really needed one since cookouts were strongly discouraged...and we didn’t have too many family or friends visiting.) I have seen some nice ones over at Lowes and Tractor Supply Company, so time permitting, I will swing by sometime this weekend to see what’s available and how much they want.

The fourth thing: Spring cleaning. There are a number of items in the attic and the storage area above the garage that we neither need or want, so would be better off going to the dump, Goodwill, or St. Vincent de Paul. A few more will go to rental storage. There are some items elsewhere in The Gulch the WP Mom would like to see go away as she has no use for them and they are doing little more than taking up space. Some will go to family members as they are family heirlooms. Some will go to the Goody Shack at the local dump, some will go to Goodwill, and others will be sold. We hope to have more friends and family visiting, but we need to make room and make sure we have the amenities available for guests. As part of this effort I will be bringing a few items from storage to The Gulch to help with those needed amenities.

The fifth thing (sort of): It looks like I will be residing here longer than originally planned. With the housing market being what it is and the high demand (and costs) for building materials, starting construction on The New Manse makes absolutely no financial sense. Finding a general contractor has been a problem as well as many of them are booked out until next year. Better to maintain the status quo for the time being and wait until the housing bubble deflates. I don’t want to spend a penny more than necessary so I am willing to wait this out.

And so it goes for the upcoming Summer of 2021.