Leave a Number...

If someone found your phone or laptop or wallet and wanted to return it to you, how could they?

I had a dream this morning after falling back asleep.  I found this woman's large purse which had a laptop in it, a wallet, and a cellphone, along with other things such as notebooks.  I wanted to call the lady and tell her I found it, but there was no way to contact her.  I could not turn on the laptop without the login code, and the cell phone similarly required a PIN or fingerprint.  I looked through the notebook but there wasn't even a phone number for a friend (those were all listed in her contacts, no doubt, on the phone).  The only phone number I could find was for a credit card company and I doubt they would have given me the time of day...

....then the phone rang.  My phone.  And I woke up.  It was that annoying, "Hello...Hello" recording and if I responded, people from "elder care medicine" or some such nonsense, who would switch me to an Indian call center where a guy with a punchboard (that plays recorded snippets of an American's voice) would ask me whether I was on Medicare or not.   Scam!  Hang up!

But this dream got me to thinking.  I've lost stuff in the past and honest people have returned my things.  I have found other people's lost items in the past and tried to return their things.  Honest people exist, and they want to treat others as they are treated.  A vanishing breed, I know.

I lost a pair of sunglasses once, and after several months, someone suggested I try the lost and found at the Visitor's Center.  Sure enough, when I went in, they quickly found my glasses, which some other honest person had turned in.  Thank you, anonymous honest person!

Another time, I found a wallet in the middle of the road.  A guy had stopped at our gas station on the island, took out his wallet to pay, and set it on top of the car.  He drove off and it fell on the ground.  I was able to find his business card in the wallet and call his office, who in turn, called his cell phone.  We met, and I gave him back his wallet.  I knew the business card was his, as the name was the same as on the driver's license.

By the way, resist the urge to put things on the roof of your car.  Yea, your hands are full, so you set your Starbucks on the roof while you fumble for the keys.  You drive off with hot "coffee drink" drizzling down the back of your car.  Five bucks down the drain!  People regularly lose clothing, groceries, and other items this way.  Some folks have been as absent-minded as to place their baby, strapped into the car seat, on top of the car, as in the movie Raising Arizona.  Unlike the movie, however, there was no comedic payoff.  Just don't put things on the roof!

Another time, we found a cell phone at the beach.  We picked it up, but as in my dream, there was no way to contact anyone about it.  Shortly thereafter, a guy was walking up the beach, looking worried and scanning the sand.  "Looking for something?" I said.  He replied, "Yea, I lost my..." 

"Cell phone?" I finished, holding it up.  That brings up a conundrum with lost items.  Do you leave them where they lay and hope the person retraces their steps and finds the item?  Or do you take it to the "lost and found" and hope they know to look there?  Moving a lost item may do more harm than good!

I got out my label maker after that and printed out Mr. See's phone number and name and stuck it to the back of my phone, and printed my name and number and put it on the back of his.  The idea is, if someone found the phone, and they were honest, they would call the number and we might get the phone back.  Putting your spouse's number - not your own - makes sense.  Your own number doesn't do much good in locating you, since they are holding the phone in their hand.

Our phones are so old and cheap (I think I paid $99 for one and $199 for the other, used) that they aren't going to be worth much to thieves.  It is the hassle of losing the phone and having to get a new SIM card (or virtual SIM or whatever) and reloading all your apps and being "out of the loop" for several days that is the real hassle.  It is like losing your wallet.  You cancel the credit cards, you get in line at the DMV for a new license and you are back in business.  Maybe you lose a few bucks, but that's it.  It is the hassle that is the hassle, not "identity theft" or anything like that.

More modern phones have a "find your phone" feature, but this requires you have a second phone or device to find it.  Moreover, if the phone is off or the battery goes dead, you aren't likely to find it.  Mostly it seems, the "find your phone" feature is handy for figuring out which third-world country your phone was shipped to, after you were pick pocketed in Milan.

It was a weird dream, and I would not have remembered it if those scammers hadn't called me and woken me up.  But I thought, as I crawled out of bed, "Good blog meat!"

Think about putting a contact number on your "stuff" in case it gets lost.  If the police find your stolen bicycle, how can they contact you?  How can you prove it is yours?  Do you know the serial number?  Of course not.  But a sticker under the top tube with your name and phone number can solve a lot of problems, and the thief likely won't know it is there.

Car keys?  Maybe put a sticker on the key fob or something.  You never know!

Zenni - the online glasses place - offers as a "bonus" to etch your phone number on the temple of your glasses.  Might get a pair back, that way!  You never know!

Again, it is the hassle, more than anything, of losing something.  And it is a real hassle when you are traveling.  Think about things that are important to you or are difficult to replace and then think, if they were lost, how would a Good Samaritan find you to give that item back?  Chances are, they'd have no way to do so.

The "Lost and Found" used to be a big deal everywhere you went - at school, the department store, the beach pavilion, whatever. These days, it seems far less prevalent.  I was even sort of shocked to find out we had one at the Visitor's Center!   Nevertheless, if you do lose something, ask if there is a lost and found, and sometimes if you leave a description of the item, they may call you if it is turned in.

Anyway, a weird dream, but maybe an instructive one!

Life Span and Social Class and Intelligence

If you are dumber, you won't live as long.

A reader sends me an article about life span in the United States.  They had previously posited that college graduates live longer than non-college graduates.  But in a new analysis of the data, it appears that high school dropouts skew the statistics for "non-college graduates" as the drop-outs have a significantly lower life expectancy.

Why is this?  Well, the article gets all weepy-liberal (the wrong kind of liberalism, in my mind) about how we should be reaching out to the lower classes, perhaps by lowering the power window on our limousine and handing them a twenty.  There, problem solved!

Having rubbed elbows with the poor and working class (Yes, I lived in Chittenango once - as well as Flint, Michigan) I have a different perspective.  Yes, the poor get a raw deal and don't live as long, but it isn't just a matter of them getting depressed and killing themselves - at least not in the traditional way.

Lower class people end up being forced to take jobs that essentially kill them over time - jobs that are dangerous or expose them to toxic materials.  Much ado was made by Republicans about how they were going to "save jobs" in the coal mines of West Virginia.  But who the hell wants to work in a coal mine - if there are other alternatives?  I spend some time in the Mountain State, and there are billboards galore for law firms willing to represent you for black lung cases.  Yea, we all thought that problem was "solved" back in 1968.  It wasn't.  It still happens.

People take jobs like that not because they love being a mile underground in an environment that might explode, cave-in, or suffocate them to death at any moment -  and if they survive that, will slowly kill them after 30 years of inhaling coal dust.  No, people take those jobs because that's all there is in impoverished areas like West Virginia, and coal mine owners know this.

Kind of weird, when you think about it, that one guy gets to own this huge mine and make tons of money from it while hundreds or thousands labor underground for a relative pittance.  Why does one guy get to own a natural resource that arguably should belong to all of us?   But that's commie thinking and dangerous.

And no, I don't feel sorry for that "one guy" when demand for coal dries up due to the low cost of natural gas.  Free market, baby!  You live and die by it.  So of course, the coal mine owners throw money at political candidates who promise them to save the coal industry by passing laws restricting fracking, solar, and wind.  That's Capitalism, right?

But I digress.

When I worked at GM and Carrier, I was exposed to a lot of hazardous materials - and I was a salaried employee!  But those were just places I was passing through - three years at GM, five at Carrier.  The career employees saw much more in the way of toxic exposure than I did.  And most salary employees were ensconced in clean, well-lit offices, that had little in the way of exposure to toxic chemicals, other than perhaps a whiff of photocopier toner.

I recall a guy at Carrier, "Herman the Crazy German" who ran the trichloroethelyene bath in TR-1. "Tri-chlor" as we called it (and we washed our hands with it) is nasty stuff.  They used to use it for dry cleaning, but it can kill you if you are drunk and inhale the fumes, apparently.  We had a "tank" of the stuff, set 30 feet into the ground, about the size of a small swimming pool - maybe 30 by 20 feet, rectangle.  Herman manned the tank and he was crazy as a loon. The other workers told me his brain was full of holes from inhaling the tri-chlor.  I don't know.

The bottom of the tank was filled with tri-chlor maybe ten feet deep - hundreds of gallons of the stuff.  Halfway up the tank was a set of cooling coils that caused most of the tri-chlor fumes to condensate into a nasty ominous-looking cloud about ten feet from the top.  Herman would lower machinery into the tank to "degrease" it.  If you lowered something into the cloud, you could see the grease just melt off it - and the paint, too!  Down into the liquid, well, when you pulled whatever it is up, it would be clean and shiny metal!  Great stuff!  Too bad it is deadly and a carcinogen.

They bulldozed TR-1 and planted grass there.  I am beginning to understand why.

Guys like Herman worked at jobs like that and yea, as a union job it paid well.  But every day he went into work, it took a toll on his body, a little bit at a time.

At GM, I worked in a ball bearing factory.  We had a "grind shop" where inner and outer rings were ground to precise tolerances.  The grinding machines used a "grinding fluid" which was an emulsion of water and oil and filled the bay with a fine mist to the point where you could not see the far wall during the day.  You spend a few hours in the grind and you end up blowing oil-snot out of your nose.  And the noise was deafening.  Some wore hearing protection, others were basically stone deaf.

Of course, when you grind metal, you produce a lot of metal powder and for high-chrome alloy steel, this includes some heavy metals.  The stuff is flammable - like magnesium!  Half the plant burned to the ground only a year after it opened.  Putting out a metal fire is hard to do - pouring water on it makes it burn even hotter.  Imagine inhaling all those metal particulates.

Those were, of course, union jobs.  Other jobs pay less and are more hazardous.  A friend of mine took a job with a temp agency doing "Hazmat cleanups" on the Interstate whenever a truck turned over.  Mostly, it was just mopping up spilled diesel fuel, but other times, it was far worse.  The truck they used to service these incidents was a hazmat site of its own - having had every sort of chemical known to mankind tracked into it.

Most of the other employees were desperate people - ex-convicts, drug addicts, and illiterates who could not get any other work. Their employer viewed them as an expendable commodity.  Most didn't work there for more than a few months, but one or two made a career out of it.  I think my friend lasted a week.  He was kind of appalled by the whole thing.  If you think experts in space suits mop up all that crap and carefully dispose of it, you've got another think coming.  At least back them, it was a lot of kitty-litter and hosing things into the storm drain.  Can't keep the Interstate shut down for days while you clean things up with a Q-tip!

The point is, people with lower education levels tend to end up in more dangerous jobs that expose them to imminent physical danger as well as exposure to toxins.  One of the most dangerous jobs out there - more dangerous than Policeman - is garbage collector.  Riding on the back of a truck, with one foot on a tiny, greasy step and one hand on a slimy bent handle is just one mis-step from falling off and being run over by the asshole tailgater who is in a hurry to get nowhere.  The guy climbing the tower at the radio station risks his life every climb.  The executive in the corner office risks getting a paper cut.  That's one reason why lower education means lower lifespan.

But there are other reasons as well.  Less-educated people engage in more risky personal behaviors.  Smoking is prevalent among the lower classes, and today is seen as "trashy" by more educated people.  Heavy drinking and drug use are also more prevalent among the poor and less educated, even as some celebrities and rich folks fall into that trap.

The poor are less likely to get top-level medical care. Even in countries with socialized medicine, the very rich can afford private doctors and get moved to the head of the line for transplants and special surgeries.  It is unfair, granted, but that is part and parcel of the problem.

Even something as simple as dentistry is to blame.  Many doctors are now realizing that heart problems may be linked to mouth bacteria which in turn may be linked to poor dental hygiene.

Then there is diet.  The poor are more likely to be obese (oddly enough - the trope of the "starving poor" has no traction in the USA, where we have the fattest poor people on the planet).  The rich are not the ones sitting in line at the drive-through, waiting for their diabetes meal.  It is the poor who eat the worst sort of trash.

Maybe you shop at the high-falutin' grocery mart and never see this.  I shop at Walmart.  And it is heartbreaking to see a 300-lb (or higher) person in an electric scooter, loading their cart with orange soda and chips - after having already lost one leg to diabetes.  You want to reach out and shake them. You want to shout, "Stop killing yourself with shitty food!"  But them you realize you'd probably be thrown out and the "helpless" person would pull out a gun and shoot you.  You can't fix stupid.  You can't save people from themselves.

The poor and less educated tend to engage in more risky recreational behaviors as well. The poor drive fast everywhere - and drive a LOT, as I noted before.  Car accidents can happen to anyone, but they seem to happen more often to the poor.  Throw in drug and alcohol abuse - combine that with reckless driving - and you've got a perfect storm.

When I was living in Chittenango, I had a neighbor, Gwen Swatski.  She was a sweet lady and worked at Syracuse China (now defunct).  One day, I came home from Carrier, and she opened her window and introduced herself and asked if I wanted a beer.  I said "sure" and we sat in her kitchen and had Genesse beers.  She used these to wash down handfuls of aspirin, which she said helped with her various pains.

She had a sump pump in the basement and her ex-husband "Stan" had rigged up a string to the sump pump, and ran it into the kitchen next to her chair, so she could tug on it, occasionally, and get that last bit of water out of the sump.  She lived on a corner lot and from her chair, she could see everyone coming and going through the Venetian blinds.  Whenever one of us peeks through a Venetian blind today, we call it "doing a Gwen Swatski."  Her memory lives on.

She was a nice lady and took me to the Syracuse China company Christmas party, making all the other office ladies jealous that she had such a "handsome young man" on her arm.  It was fun.

But over time, her diet of beer and aspirin - and did I mention cigarettes? - took its toll and she developed stomach cancer and she died not too long after retiring from Syracuse China.  A sad story, but illustrative of how the working class often ends up living shorter lives.  No doubt the level of medical care she got was not the same as, say, Dick Cheney.  It is sort of like how my Sister was treated for breast cancer - with her rural doctor denying for two years that the odd lumps in her breasts could be cancerous - until she finally demanded a biopsy.  "Well, if you're going to get hysterical about it!" the doctor said.  And later on, he said, "Whaddya know!  Cancer!"

You don't get that kind of treatment at Mayo.

And then there are firearms.  Not the root cause of the discrepancy, but yet another factor.  The poor are more likely to squander what little money they have on guns.  And gun owners are 22 times more likely to kill themselves or a family member with their gun, than an intruder or criminal.  You do read the papers, right?  Every day is a story about some man (and it is usually a man) who murders his whole family before turning the gun on himself.  Those who merely kill themselves are not reported on much, other than to be listed in their obituary as "dying suddenly" in their home.

Eschewing masks and vaccines took a toll mostly on the less-educated.

Today, the pattern continues.  The poor and lesser-educated are more likely to believe that vaccines are bad for you - and they died in droves during the pandemic.  As the above-chart illustrates, life expectancy among the less-educated was already several years less than those with a college degree.  But it really took a nose-dive during the pandemic, as the less-educated were more willing to believe in conspiracy theories and deny basic science.  Far more of the poor earned their "Herman Cain Award" than the rich and better-educated.

UPDATE:  Note how this graph is made to look more dramatic by starting the Y-axis at 50 and using the metric of "life expectancy at age 25" instead of overall life expectancy.  A zero-axis chart with overall life expectancy would not show such a dramatic difference or such a dramatic drop-off, either.

So what is to be done about it? To some extent, nothing.  As I noted before, you can try to educate people but they will shout you down as "telling 'em what to do!"  You can't fix stupid, you can't save people from themselves.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.  We've known this for millenia.

Of course, some folks seem hell-bent on stripping our educational system down to nothing and letting it fail - replacing it with religious education.  That has worked out so well in the Middle-East, hasn't it?  An army of uneducated people who will die young and die for your cause or your industry.  And they won't do pesky things like use Medicare or Social Security, either!   Hell, if you play the game right, they won't even live long enough to qualify for either!

Intervening in people's lives isn't the answer.  Throwing money at them isn't the answer, either.  You can try to educate people, and hope they make better life choices.  But if they insist on self-destructive behavior, there isn't much you can do about that.

And as for Herman-the-German, we can pass laws to make workplaces more safe and less toxic. What that has done, in effect, is offshore dangerous industries to third world countries, where people are deemed expendable and the ruling classes see no problem with this.  Or, it means that third-world people who sneak into America become the new exploited class - forced to work at dangerous or toxic jobs, and threatened with deportation if they complain.

Sadly, that is how the world works.

The wealthy and the better-educated will always get a bigger slice of the pie - a better standard of living and a longer life.  The poor and less-educated will, by definition, get the short end of the stick.  What is odd to me - or perhaps not so odd - is that many of the poor and less educated will defend, literally to their death, their lifestyle and employment.  The coal miner pines for his job back, while puffing on a Camel cigarette.  Working in the coal mine - those were the good old days!

It is like my stinking hippie commie brother who talks at great lengths about "the workers" which are creatures he only knows about in theory.  Having worked in factories and having been a Teamster, I can tell you the "workers" would kick his commie hippie ass if he came around the plant passing out leaflets.

The poor working class - that's who voted for Trump.  You really can't fix stupid.  So why bother trying?

UPDATE:  In re-reading and editing this entry, I realize that some may think it comes across as elitist.  I beg to differ.  The authors of this ivory tower study are the elitists, I think, wondering what theoretical poor people they've never met, worked with, or been, behave.  Having been poor and working class at one time (and engaged in all the stupid self-destructive behaviors) I think I have some insight into the problem.

Freedom means freedom to make bad choices, and the people making bad choices are the first to tell you to fuck off when you try to "educate" them otherwise.  To the guy with the big-dually crew-cab jacked Ram pickup, the problem isn't that he is commuting to work in a 10 MPG vehicle, but that gas prices are too high because..... Democrats!

Fortunately, it is always possible to change your mind and make better choices in life - although the longer you wait, the harder it is to do and the smaller the benefits.

I guess that is where I digress from far-left liberalism in this country.  I realize from experience that the reason why I was "poor" had more to do with my own life choices than luck - although luck should not be discounted. I made better choices and my life improved.  I see no need to give "guaranteed annual income" to someone with a $1000-a-month drug habit or someone with $10,000 of tattoos on their body.  Poor choices should not be subsidized.  But they often are!

Why Should I Have To Pay Taxes? - Conversation With A Millionaire.

No one ever wants to pay taxes, or if they do, they'd rather pay less.

I guess it was nearly 25 years ago, I was riding in a car with a friend of mine who had inherited many millions of dollars as part of a "Trust Fund" - enough money never to have to work again a day in their life, while still living quite well.  Quite well.  Oddly enough, she still worked, which says a lot about her character.  Also, as she put it, she didn't have to tap that trust fund as much.  Smart lady!

Anyway, she pulled out onto the Mt. Vernon Parkway and immediately got in the left lane.  It is a four-land road with no divider for much of its length and the left lane is the "suicide" lane as if an oncoming car crosses the center line, even by a few inches, a 100MPH impact is all but assured.  And it did happen with regularity on that road while we lived there.

"Why are you in the left lane?" I asked.  "Well, I want to go fast!" she replied.  "Yea, but there is no one in the right lane, so there is no need to ride the left!" I shot back.  I explained to her the danger of riding in the left lane on this particular road, and also that in general, it is disrespectful to "park" in the left lane, which is generally considered the passing lane and if you aren't passing, why ride in it?

She put on her turn signal and pulled into the right lane.  Smart Lady.

Somehow the discussion changed to taxes.  She was parroting her father's ruminations here, arguing that she saw no reason to pay any taxes, as all that money went to "foreign aid" and "people on welfare" the latter being a code-word for you-know-what.

"Well, what about this road?" I asked, "You drive on it, it costs a lot of money to build and maintain, shouldn't you pay for your fair share of it?"   

"Well, OK," she said, "I'd pay for the roads, but not those people who refuse to work!"  Again, code words.

A lot of this, she later revealed was from her father, who she revered and also feared a little, I think.  Her Dad was a "self-made man" in that he made the wise choice to marry an heiress and thus instantly become a multi-millionaire himself.  Smart man, but I am not sure marrying a rich girl is really a sign of sound business acumen so much as it is a sign of cleverness.

But of course, once he married money, he was horrified to find out that they had to pay taxes on it, and what's more, the inheritance tax on tens of millions of dollars, back in the day, was quite steep - although paid by the estate, not him.  As a result, much of the money was in a "generation-skipping trust" designed to cheat the tax-man and transfer wealth between the generations.  Hence my friend had a trust, set up by her Grandma, or at least her lawyers.  Yes, the money came from the matriarchal side of the family, for several generations.

Smart women!

Anyway, getting back to our discussion, I went down the list of government services she utilized and she agreed, that yes, she should pay for her share of defense spending (at least 1/3 of our budget!) and for schools and roads and maybe the library and a few other things.  She was still uncertain about Social Security and Medicare, until I pointed out that these things are self-funded by a separate payroll tax (or would be self-funded if a certain political party stopped defunding the program by cutting the payroll tax in a cheap stunt to buy votes!).  It was the "people on welfare" that stuck in her craw and again, this was agitprop from her Dad.

Of course, since the Clinton administration, there is a lifetime cap on the number of years you can collect "welfare" (four in Georgia) - so the myth of the multi-generational "welfare queens" is just that - a myth.  Similarly, she was convinced that "Foreign Aid" made up a huge chunk of our budget, when in reality, it makes up less than one percent of Federal spending.

Maybe I gave her something to think about. Maybe not.  Once she went back to the echo-chamber of the country club and the upscale parties in exclusive neighborhoods and of course, Fox News, she might disregard our conversation entirely.

But it illustrates how people think - how we all think.  Her Dad, who married into money, considers himself a "self-made man" and a "businessman and investor" when in fact, he fell ass-backward into a swimming pool of money.  No one ever wants to examine hard truths, particularly about themselves.  It is hard to do.

And I am not attacking her - she is a nice person.  And if you knew her and were in trouble, she would give you the shirt off her back.  Up to a point, of course.  Politically, we are not aligned and over the years, we have drifted apart.  She moved to a deep blue State and told me, "I hope you don't mind, but we're voting for Trump!"  I told her I didn't mind, but I didn't have the heart to tell her that her vote was largely meaningless - her State went overwhelmingly for Hillary (and later, Biden) and due to the electoral college, her vote meant nothing.

Does she pay a lot of taxes?  Well, you bet.  But in terms of tax rates, she is paying less as a percentage, as most of her income is in capital gains.  Once that inheritance tax (gifts and estates tax, we call it) was paid by the estate, the remainder went to her, tax-free.  She only owes taxes on capital gains and dividends and interest from the inherited money she invested.  She could really screw the tax man by putting it all in a zero-interest account and just living off the principal.  But that would be silly.  When you stand to make money, it doesn't really matter that you have to pay a small portion of it in taxes - despite what the GOP tries to tell us.

(I digress, but it is an old trope that if you cut a businessman's personal income tax, he will then hire more employees.  It makes no sense mathematically or financially.  If I run a law firm and can hire a young associate for $100K a year and he bills $300K (which is typical) and after overhead, I pocket $100K in profits, I am incentivized to hire him, regardless of whether my take-home pay is taxed at 25% or 35%.  But try explaining that to some Joe Paycheck who has never run a business!  He thinks the boss hires people as a favor to them using his "leftover money."  You hire people to make money, period.  What your tax bill is, or your cable bill, or any other personal expense is irrelevant).

It was an interesting conversation, but it made me realize that all of us self-justify our stations in life. Luck, we think, had nothing to do with it, unless of course, we had "bad luck."  It was all hard work on our part and "if only" we didn't have to pay those onerous taxes, the world would be a Shangri-La.

But of course, the tax code is slanted to favor the rich.  I found out, once I started making good money, that I could avoid a lot of taxes by purchasing investment properties and renting them out and taking the depreciation deduction - which would defer the taxes owed for many years or even forever, if I kept rolling over my "equity" in a Starker-type deferred exchange.  The rich get richer, the working class pays taxes.  Then again, the biggest chunk of taxes they pay is the payroll tax, which funds their retirement and medical care.

Hard work?  Yea, sure.  I also was lucky to have several opportunities thrown into my lap and was smart enough to take advantage of them.  Many other opportunities, I squandered.  But lady luck plays a big part in who gets ahead and who falls behind.

And inheriting millions of dollars is all 100% luck, period, despite what we may want to think.

If You Wait Long Enough, Everything is Free (Or At Least Cheap!)

Someone was throwing away a pressure washer. like this one.

I noted before that if you wait long enough, everything you want in life is free, or at least very cheap.  Of course, this means three things.  First, you have to be patient.  Second, you have to keep your eyes open for bargains.  Third, you have to let go of the "I gotta have it, right now, brand new, so I can impress our neighbors!"

I wrote before about our microwave.  We looked at replacements at the local lumberteria, and they were about $250.  But they were all in stainless steel.  If we are going that route, maybe we should replace all the appliances with stainless!  $250 is now $4000 or more.  And it makes sense to paint the cabinets white, if you are going that route.  Might was well paint the walls and replace the countertops. Oh, and that Engineered hardwood floor in the kitchen (bad idea!) should be replaced with tile.  Now our $250 microwave is over $30,000 and that would be a cheap kitchen makeover these days - with us doing most of the labor (other than the floor, I think).

I looked on Craigslist locally and there were two microwaves for sale, hours away, and the local bubbas wanted $200 for them - only seven years old!  You can buy new for not a lot more.  Meanwhile, in Jacksonville or Orlando, there are several listings in the $50 range, for used microwaves (built-in type, with mounting plates, thank you very much) that are only a year or two old - the owners switched to stainless and wanted to get ride of the white model.

We are travelling there in a couple of weeks, so I told Mr. See that maybe we can snag a microwave while we're down there.  We'll see.  We did this at our old house in Virginia - finding a dishwasher for $75 that a lady had just bought before converting her whole kitchen to stainless.  Good thing, too, as two years later, we sold the house and it was bulldozed.  Glad I didn't spend $250 on a new one, back then.

So, if you are willing to wait and look, bargains can be found.  And maybe this will keep our kitchen going for another few years - delaying the cost of an eventual renovation, or shifting the cost to the next owners - and there are always next owners.  We've seen, time and time again, people pour money into houses to "fix them up to sell them!" and the new owners tear out all the renovations and start over again.  A neighbor put in granite countertops and all new cabinets and appliances to sell her house.  The new owners tore it all out - smashing the brand-new granite and throwing it in a dumpster.

Only in America!

Another neighbor gave me a Honda mulching lawnmower.  It used to be self-propelled, but that part broke.  But the rest worked fine.  I put new mulching blades on it (there are two) and a new spark plug and air filter and changed the oil.  It works great for what it is.   I use it on a large pine-straw mulch bed in our back yard to grind up all the pine straw (that falls like rain from the trees here - can you believe some people pay for pine needles?  They can have mine!).  It also does a good job of grinding up all the weeds, too, leaving behind a fine mulch of shredded pine needles.  It is hard on the mower, sure, but it was free and I've been mulching with it for three years now.  I used the regular mower for the lawn, but I am doing that less and less lately and letting the "lawn guy" deal with that.

The same neighbor asked me if I wanted a pressure washer.  It is an old Craftsman model 580.752070 with an 8HP Briggs and Stratton Engine.  He said it stopped pumping as the shaft key connecting the engine to the pump broke.  I figured I'd give it a try.  I am not a big fan of IC-powered pressure washers, as the electric kind are usually all a homeowner needs and they last forever, provided you treat them like they are made of plastic (which they are) and don't let them freeze in the winter (which busts the internals).

I typed the model number into Google and found the owner's manual and parts diagram which I downloaded and printed out (60 pages) and put in a binder.  I found the part number for the shaft key and found several sources for it, for $10 including shipping.  The previous owner said he couldn't find the shaft key at any "store" but I suspect he was looking at brick-and-mortar, not online.

I started the engine and it runs great.  If it is just the shaft key, I've got a nice pressure washer for doing the driveway (where you need higher pressure than the Karcher can provide) or maybe even to sell at a garage sale later on.  If the pump is shot, there are rebuild kits for that, or a new pump can be found for $150 or so. I'll have to think about that, though.  Suddenly the free pressure washer is no longer free.

But a few hours of my time and ten bucks, what's not to like? Granted, appliances have a service life and I am realistic enough to know that this unit, even if I can repair it, will not last as long as a brand-new one.

But it's worth a shot!

Waddle Walking - Trendelenburg Gait

What makes people walk this way?

Living on Old People Island, you see a lot of decrepitude.  But then again, when we leave the island to go to Walmart, well, you see a lot of young decrepitude.  One thing I have learned over 60 years is, well, two things.  First, you never get back all the time you wasted watching re-runs of sitcoms (or today, reality shows).  Second, every soda-pop you ever consumed never really leaves your body.  Over time, you will get heavier, unless you are proactive.  Look at the photos of older celebrities - unless they get really skinny like old cats, they puff up and get fat.

And that is tragic, but it happens by age 40 or so - the middle-aged middle-bulge.  But what is really tragic is when you see young people who are morbidly obese in their 20's - or even teens!  Or even in the single digits.  I mean, where are you going from here, if you are 300lbs by age 18?  Life will be a world of woe, loneliness and pain, particularly in the back and knees.

We see people doing this "Wobble Walk" or "Waddle Walk" these days, and it is painful to watch.  Rather than lift their legs and move them forward one after the other, these folks walk like infants just learning to walk.  Their legs are immobile pylons which they lift, one at a time, with their back.  This creates a slow, painful gait where they "Wobble" from side to side, as they use their upper body to lift each leg in sequence.

Turns out, there is a name for this - Trendelenburg gait.  Apparently it can be caused by a number of factors, including nerve issues and muscle deterioration.  Some argue it may be also caused by hip and knee joint degradation - and the waddle-walk is a way of avoiding pain.  All I know is, it seems to be getting more and more popular these days - legions of people walking like zombies.

In some instances, the person favors only one side, but in many cases I've seen, people seem to do this with both legs.  The legs stay straight, and the upper body tilts to one side, to raise the leg on the other side.  The person then swings the leg, like so much dead meat, forward, and then lets it down by tilting back.  The process is repeated for the other side.  It is sort of like how zombies are depicted walking on television and in the movies.

And this can happen to anyone.  My massage therapist noticed that I tended to "lean" to one side while standing, and when he pointed this out, I was sort of floored by it.  I try to do exercises and make a conscious effort when walking to not "wobble walk" but instead lift my legs and use my leg muscles to move the legs forward - not side-to-side.

Many folks, I think, don't realize they are doing this and once you go down the road of wobble-walking, well, it ain't gonna get better without some sort of intervention.

And of course, for some folks, it isn't possible to get better - if you have an injury for example, or some sort of muscle disease or deterioration.  Waddle-walking, for such folks, is better than no walking at all.

But I think for others, it results from lack of exercise and lack of walking - too much riding around in cars and such.  Most truckers seem to do this waddle-walk when you see them after climbing down from their cabs after a long drive.  The legs fall asleep, sort of, and it takes a while for the muscles to remember how to work again.

All I know is, I want to avoid the waddle-walk, for as long as I can!