10/31/2021

Thoughts On A Sunday

The first half of the weekend up here at the lake has been quite wet, with rain all day and heavy rain overnight. I did have to go down to check out the condition of the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, pumping out the bilge and checking its general condition. Between the Nor’easter that hit this area earlier last week (which damaged some boats here in our town) and the heavy rains yesterday, checking the boat seemed prudent.

The boat will be coming out of the water this week, not quite the latest I’ve pulled it out, but not the earliest by any means. It will be the official end of my boating season, something that is always a little sad. But all good things come to an end and preparations for the upcoming winter must made, so the boat comes out of the water, gets winterized, shrink wrapped, and put in storage until next spring.

Surprisingly, I will be pulling out the ex’s snow tires from my storage unit when I put the boating equipment away for the winter. She’ll be having them mounted before she heads out of state for a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. I have also made an appointment to have the trusty RAM 1500 undercoated during the week of Thanksgiving, getting it ready for winter as well.

So much time and effort will be expended over this coming month getting ready for a winter a number of forecasters have said will be colder and snowier than average.

==+==


One thing I also managed to do this past weekend is attend a housewarming party held by friends I have mentioned before, they having escaped from San Francisco and relocating to New Hampshire last year. They lived in Portsmouth for a year and finally found a house they liked outside of Portsmouth this summer.

The finally moved in a few weeks ago and invited me and my ex to their housewarming. They found a great place, a Victorian farmhouse with a barn. The house needs a little work, mostly paint and varnish, but it is otherwise in great shape.

The barn needs a coat of paint so I figure there will be a painting party come next spring.

I can hardly wait!

==+==


For those of you using Disqus for commenting, you may have noticed that the filtering algorithm keeps getting tighter, removing comments that it deems has used bad language. I know I’ve seen some of my comments removed for reasons I couldn’t always fathom, and others because of a word that could be offensive in some contexts (but none that I used). One example: I had a comment removed because of the word ‘Coon’. In this case I had posted a comment about Maine Coon Cats, a recognized and popular cat breed. In fact we used to have two Maine Coon Cats in our feline contingent. Yet Disqus found the word offensive and removed my comment(s).

Disqus has also been deplatforming websites on a Hate Group list provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a list that is known to be inaccurate, partisan , and widely discredited.

It is cancel culture taken to another level, used to silence speech they disagree with, and Freedom of Speech be damned.

==+==


Here’s yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play against vaccine mandates, this time in New York City.

It seems Hizzoner’s vaccine mandate for city employees is having the unintended effect of forcing firehouses to close because firefighters are refusing to be vaccinated.

The FDNY shuttered 26 fire companies citywide on Saturday due to staff shortages caused by the COVID-19 vaccination mandate, according to furious elected officials, who ripped the move as “unconscionable” — and warned it could have catastrophic consequences.

The shutdown came amid a pitched battle between City Hall, which on Monday will start enforcing a mandate that all city workers have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and jab-resisting firefighters, many reportedly saying they were already sick with the coronavirus and therefore have “natural immunity.”

Nicole Malliotakis (R-SI, Brooklyn) said 26 companies shuttered — five in her district — and laid the blame on Mayor de Blasio.

“If someone dies due to a slower emergency response, it’s on Bill de Blasio and his overreaching mandates. I hope this fool fixes it ASAP!” she tweeted. Some residents rallied outside of the Ladder Company 149 in Dyker Heights to support the firefighters.

‘They’ just don’t want to understand that people have had enough of the Covid fauxdemic. The Powers That Be are using it to justify all kinds of actions that under usual circumstances would be illegal, unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, and fattening.

==+==


From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this:

PETA wants Major League Baseball to change the name of the “bullpen” because they don’t like the fact that it once referred to a holding pen in slaughterhouses. I don’t know about you, but that is the last thing I think about when I hear that term, and I’m a farm kid. PETA are the only ones thinking of that because they are nuts. Considering their over the top campaigns, I learned to ignore and pity them, but never give them any credence. Never accede to their demands. Don’t feed their delusions.

==+==


I had to include this, verbatim:

THE HORROR…THE HORROR: Trump Does ‘Tomahawk Chop’ At World Series and The Left Flips Out.

Good. I hope they got good and ‘flipped out’. The list of stuff that ‘offends’ them keeps growing longer by the day. Maybe we should keep them offended so that’s all they have time for and they won’t have the time to turn this country into a totalitarian Progressive hell.

==+==


And that’s the abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rains finally stopped and the sun has come out, the air is warm, and the leaves have been falling in increasing numbers.