One thing I did complete today was dropping off the trusty RAM 1500 at the body shop this afternoon. It will be waiting for them first thing in the morning.
And one more thing I finished – cleaning out the front gutters on The Gulch…again. I took care of it early yesterday and with all the wind and rain overnight they had collected a lot more leaves. I will also be doing likewise for a neighbor.
It seems the remaining leaves decided to come off the trees all at the same time which has made it an ongoing chore to keep the gutters open over the past couple of days. With the rain we have coming overnight and on Tuesday, I must keep the gutters clean. Thank goodness it is only one set of gutters on the front of The Gulch and the neighbor’s house I must attend to, so it only takes about 10 minutes or so to take care of each of them.
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This doesn’t exactly surprise me. My only question about the move is why did Ford what so long to do so?
Report: Ford Might Kill the F-150 Lightning Electric Pickup Truck.
Seeing as the F-150 Lightning did so poorly in towing comparisons I can see why Ford might be willing to kill the Lightning. My old 2004 F-150 with the V6 and four-speed automatic outperformed the Lightning when towing, and cost a small fraction of the cost of a Lightning, even taking into account inflation. Some folks may have bought it for the same reason folks who bought the Tesla Cyber Truck and the Rivian, and it had nothing to do with their suitability for use as an actual work truck. It’s been virtue signaling across the board.
With that in mind, I will not lament its passing should Ford kill off the Lightning.
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I don’t know about you, but I am finding it more difficult to shift back to Standard Time than I have in the past. Being that I live on the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone might have something to do with it, so that sunset is around 4pm now and will be closer to 3:30pm by the winter solstice. (Actually, the sun will dip down behind the surrounding hills by 2:30pm.)
I am still waking up at 4:30am EST, a good hour earlier than necessary. It’s taking me a lot longer to adjust to the time change. Frankly, we here in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts would be better served if we stayed on Daylight Savings Time year-round, or alternately, moved from the Eastern Time Zone to the Atlantic Time Zone and stayed on Standard Time. Being at the extreme eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone makes the shift back and forth a real pain. I know it’s likely the folks on the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone would rather stay on Standard Time year-round. I think that is true of the four time zones in the Continental US, but probably more so in the Eastern Time Zone since it seems to me it is wider than the Central, Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones.
I know most folks would prefer to have more daylight later in the day despite it being darker for longer in the morning. Some make the argument that dark mornings will put school children at risk, but the same argument could be made for them being at risk at the end of the afternoon as well.
I think the twice-yearly switch between Standard and Daylight Savings Time has outlived its usefulness, at least on the eastern and western edges of the time zones. It also makes no sense that Standard Time is in effect for four months and Daylight Savings Time for eight months.
Let’s save time and annoyance by staying on one time or other.
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This is something I’ve known for a long time, “this” being that socialism/communism doesn’t work. It never has and never will, particularly if it’s human beings trying it. We have hundreds of years of history showing again and again that it doesn’t work. One of the first trials here in the US was the Mayflower Compact of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts back in the 1620’s. The colony almost died out because the “From each according to their ability. To each according to their needs” didn’t work because everyone wanted to draw from the common larder but no one wanted to work to fill it. Once the Plymouth colony abandoned their experiment in socialism it started to thrive. But it seems we can’t learn the lessons from the endless failures and now it looks like New York City is going to learn that lesson the hard way.
In January 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared during his State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” And following America’s decisive victory in the Cold War, it seemed it might be so. Socialism began as a hypothesis – that central planning would improve the human condition. The ensuing decades-long experiment, stretching across all corners of the world, resulted in the opposite: Where communism spread, liberty’s flame was extinguished, ushering in unprecedented human suffering for billions.While the linked article posits that socialism and its even more malignant cousin, communism, was more of a modern phenomenon, but as I mentioned above. It’s been tried again and again under different names in many places and it never worked.
By every empirical measure, the socialist hypothesis has been falsified. And yet, socialism is catching fresh wind in its sails – not in Moscow, Havana, or Hanoi, but in New York City, capitalism’s capital.
This week, New York voters elected self-declared and unapologetic socialist Zohran Mamdani, a man endorsing proposals like widespread rent control, fare-free public transit, and government-run grocery stores. In November 2025, the Democratic mayor-elect declared during his victory speech, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”
The incoming mayor’s policies have been tried and tested many times, and robust evidence shows they don’t work, putting their continued advance in the same category as flat Earth theory, Moon-landing denial, and chemtrail conspiracies.
If Mamdani gets his way I think we’ll see New York City starting to resemble the Moscow of the Bad Old Days of the Soviet Union and not a Socialist Utopia.
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I think we can place the following under the “Well, That’s Obvious You Moron” heading.
The More Violence You Find Acceptable the More Violence You Will Get
I think we can safely replace the word “violence” in the above with “crime” and it will be equally valid. We’ve seen that amply demonstrated in US cities that have been ignoring crimes and taking on bail reform of the kind that means little or no bail for criminal miscreants who then go out and commit more crimes. Then they wonder why crime is skyrocketing, not making the connection between their actions and the dramatic rise in crime. This in turn leads to businesses and citizens deciding it is no longer viable to remain in the crime-ridden areas and leave.
In the case of the article linked above, they are looking at violence as being politically motivated and the worries that people have about the increasing violence, particularly politically motivated violence. Their concerns are no less valid.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the winds and rain have done a good job of stripping many of the remaining leaves from the trees, those same leaves are clogging gutters and causing some roads to be as slippery as if they were covered in ice and snow.