Secretary of Overcompensation Hegseth took a bunch of people to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for a photo op yesterday, and on their way out, somebody made a joke, prompting the group to laugh. The sentinel on duty immediately reprimanded the group in front of the media. The Old Guard does not fuck around. I fully expect some form of petty retribution against this soldier from Secretary Douchebag, under the excuse of ‘failure to respect rank’ or ‘unsatisfactory levels of testosterone’ or ‘woke on duty’, and I hope to God the Joint Chiefs stand up to him.
So, good news; Mississippi elected its first black state senator since the 1800’s, and its first Democrat in 44 years. Better news: a 27-year-old unknown filmmaker produced a commercial for him which went viral and is hailed as one of the keys to his campaign victory. Politico has an interview with the Senator-elect and Ryan Sales, the spot’s creator.
The ad is perfection: it’s a modern, young, irreverent and truthful skewering of the Republican incumbent’s condescending, elitist attitude. It’s exactly what the Democrats need to wake up and start doing every damn day.
Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer is making a bid to be the Senate majority leader again. Sit the fuck down, Chuck. We don’t need old-time Democratic politics anymore. We need young, angry, motivated, and energetic leaders to start ramming good legislation through both houses and get shit done.
As the remaining days in November count themselves down, I’m trying to keep busy and explore all options to find a salaried job. As social media is trumpeting everywhere, now that the algorithms know I’m looking, it’s a brutal market. Talking with my brother-in-law, a recruiter based in Kansas City, I asked what I might be doing wrong, and he told me I wasn’t making any mistakes—it’s just that the bots are the gatekeepers and it takes an Act Of God to get through to a human, in a time when recruiters are getting flooded by hundreds of applicants in a single day.
So I decided to put the bots to work for me and set up a trial plan with ChatGPT so that I could create an agent. The idea is to have it look at a list of job aggregators, other NGO’s careers pages, and industry websites every morning to find new listings, compare them to the skills and experience on my resume, rank them, and set up a draft cover letter I can then rewrite as a human being. From what I’m being told, being among the first to respond is key, so every morning at 6AM it’ll run a check and hopefully good things will appear. Meanwhile, I’ve had several folks from work reach out and offer to put me in touch with their friends, which I’ve graciously accepted.
Yesterday I filed the official paperwork for Dugan Heavy Industries, LLC and got an EIN number from the government. The next big step will be to study for and take the MHIC license test to be a real live contractor, and secure some form of insurance so that I can hit the bricks and start generating cash with my hands. In the early 90’s, when I was flying by the seat of my pants, I had no license, liability or health insurance, and was paid in cash. I did it that way for three years—and in that time I learned how to do basic electrical, gutted and refinished a bathroom, stripped asbestos shingle off a house (I did wear a respirator for this), insulated several houses, roofed a house, and painted a dozen more. By some miracle, the IRS never came after me. I should have operated my consulting practice as an LLC but never did, and by some miracle that worked out too. I’m not going to tempt the universe again.
In the meantime, I’m unwinding thirteen years of files, passwords, accounts, and equipment down at work. It seems like every time I think I’ve got a handle on stuff I find other things I need to archive or shift ownership of; Dropbox was a big blind spot until yesterday when I remembered I had a whole directory of stuff online that I’d forgotten about.
At home, I’m making myself handy as the universe has been quietly deciding now is the time for that thing to break. Jen baked some delicious ginger/lemon/cinnamon bread last night, but it took longer to bake than it should have, because the oven wasn’t holding a constant temperature. Today I pulled it out from the wall and removed the back panel to test the temperature sensor with a multimeter. Turns out the sensor was completely fried, so the oven had just been guessing the whole time. The Jungle Site will have a $14 replacement on our front step by tomorrow at 8AM, and it should be a simple task to install and button everything back up. (I also took the opportunity to clean the floor under the stove, which was gross).
In the afternoon, they’re going to drop off a thermostat housing and lower radiator hose for the OG-V, which has been slowly piddling blue coolant onto the driveway for a week or so. Yesterday I drove it up on Dad’s old ramps, removed the front air dam and peeked up into the crowded engine bay to identify the source. After wiping the thermostat dry, I let it sit overnight and looked it over this morning. From what I can tell there’s no liquid leaking anywhere above the housing, so I took a gamble and spent $35 on the two parts. I think it should be pretty simple to swap in, and then we’ll see if she keeps peeing the bed.
Probably the hardest part of this new normal so far is simply telling myself, don’t buy that. I look around and see things that need to be fixed, which usually requires a purchase of some kind, but I’m trying to be as frugal as possible until we get some sense of how things are going to shake out. I’ve spent the last five years or so not worrying about money as much as I did for the first 50 years of my life, and now I’m back in that post-college mindset of keeping an eye on every penny. I’ve always been fiscally conservative (e.g., cheap), but it’s the stability I’m going to miss the most, I think.
I wrote about my older MacBook Air having a close encounter with a bottle of water a few months ago, and set it aside while I took care of a bunch of other, more pressing life issues.Now that I’ve got some more free time, I sat down with it yesterday and took the bottom of the case off to chase down a possible solution: the Lid Angle Sensor, a tiny little board in the back corner of the case which, apparently, is a common failure point when water enters the case. From what I was reading online, failure of this part often kills connectivity to the keyboard and trackpad. I got out my tiny Torx screwdriver kit, squinted my middle-aged eyes, and got to work. Removing the board really wasn’t too hard other than trying to keeping tiny, fiddly little screws from launching themselves across the room, and within a few minutes I had it out and on the bench. Putting the case back together, I booted the machine up and was thrilled to find the keyboard was working again.
Apart from needing to remember that I have to manually put the machine to sleep until I get a new sensor, the machine is up and running as it did before. This means I can leave the newer, faster Air on my desk and use the older machine as a walk around, which is a huge relief.
When you have nothing but a glorified shack to use as your workshop, you have to learn how to organize the space carefully. My garage is, at best, minutes away from being condemned, but somehow remains upright and keeps the rain off my junk. But it’s small, and any hope of increasing its footprint is a distant pipe dream these days. I’ve had to learn how to be frugal with space, utilizing every inch of horizontal and vertical area for storage or working surfaces. Whenever I’m out there, I typically spend a half an hour cleaning up after myself, putting things in their right place, and trying to plan out my next project before actually doing work.
So when Brian warned me, on my way across the bridge to his shop, that it was a disaster, I chuckled to myself and sent a reply: Don’t worry about it. When I got there, his mess did not disappoint: he’d emptied out a storage locker and dumped its contents in the empty bay of the garage, so there was a pile of random contractor’s tools, building materials, and other stuff covering all of the free space. I’d driven over to make a plan for resuming work on the EV project, but quickly realized what he really needed was help cleaning things up and organizing the space (and our collective headspace). So we dove in: He started sorting the big pile in the center bay and I tackled the area around the EV, organizing the shelves, separating old ICE parts from new EV parts, collecting scrap metal, and opening up a space around the truck. Then I did a rough pass across the workbench, collecting hardware, putting tools away, and making more free space there. We then spent about an hour talking over where the truck is and what we need to be doing, and I left for home with a checklist. We’ll see how well we do there.
On Sunday, I answered the call from Bennett, who was looking for help moving Phantom, his ’53 pickup, out of his garage and onto a trailer for eventual transport to Brian H’s shop. Eight years ago, we’d dragged the pickup out of the shop at his Mom’s house and stuffed it into his garage, so I knew what we were up against before I got there. He’s been working on several cars out of that space (the Hudson, his Crossfire, a ’67 Mustang, and a Speedster replica), so it was completely packed with tools, parts, and other stuff. He’d cleaned the area out around Phantom before I got there, and after we staged the trailer in the street, we used the Travelall to pull Phantom out of the garage. After two tugs we realized we didn’t need the truck—the slope of the driveway was enough to keep it moving, so he got behind the wheel. I kicked the chock away, and he steered it down the driveway, out into the street, and it stopped right behind the trailer. Hooking the winch up to the front axle, we pulled it up and strapped it down, and then secured all of the parts in the bed. With that done, we brought it to his storage lot and hid it under tarps and a car cover.
After driving out for some pizza in the Hudson, we got back to the garage and started organizing boxes, moving them to the back of the garage and organizing by type—old pickup parts on the left, Scout stuff on the right, and ‘other’ in between. He’s having a new set of garage doors installed so the main goal was to make room for the installers first, and then prep the space for the new Scout. Hopefully that situation will work itself out soon, as I’m hoping I can piggyback on that effort to get the title for the DanScout—making it easier to sell down the line. But for now, I feel pretty good to be able to help my friends declutter and organize.
Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. In a strange bit of synchronicity with my last post, this weekend they covered Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are all equal to any of Steely Dan’s best output, while some others are a fraction of that quality. The Nightfly was one of the first ten CDs I bought in the late 80’s—I already had several Steely Dan albums on cassette and I decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff I already owned. Right after this, both Fagen and Becker went dark for a couple of decades, and I didn’t reconnect with their later output.
I’m sitting in front of our living room hi-fi system, listening to a used vinyl copy of Aja by Steely Dan on the turntable I brought back from the dead. The turntable itself is a Technics SL-0033, a really nice midrange deck with automatic start and stop. It’s playing through a Denon head unit I saved from the side of the road (really, no kidding), a pair of Mission bookshelf speakers—also saved from the side of a different road, on a different day—and a KLH subwoofer saved from my parents’ basement. I’d like a little more treble response out of the high-end; Aja is an excellent reference record to test out sound, and the high frequencies are too muddy for my taste. I can’t adjust the subwoofer frequency cutoff like I can with the Polk unit in the den, this being a lower-end brand. I turned the Loudness feature on and jacked the treble up, and that made a little bit of a difference, but still not quite where I want it. There is another subwoofer gathering dust in Mom’s basement; I’ll check to see if the circuitry is adjustable, and maybe that one will find its way back to Maryland.
Following up on the thinking I was doing about my old iPhone the other day, I used the email address assigned to the basement server to create a new Apple account, and used that to sign into the phone. This way the two machines were happy to talk with each other, and it didn’t fuck anything up on my current iPhone (using the same email address tells Apple you want to mirror the two devices, so you wind up with apps on the old phone that don’t work and no room left to add music). Once I got it connected and loading music, one of the other things I wanted to do was see if I could add it to the list of devices shared in my iCloud account, so that I could see it with Location Services. Because the iPhone is only on OS 12.5.8, it took a bit of finessing, but I was able to get it in the list and visible on my newer phone. With 64GB of storage, it’s a very fancy iPod, but it’s free and it works, so I’ll keep filling it with tunes.
Credit: The New York Times
Alright, there’s the good news. Now, to the Democratic leadership: GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND FIX THINGS. Do not slow down, do not pause to debate, do not wander down useless pet project side roads; we don’t need to squabble over trivial points. There are huge problems that need to be solved immediately, and the clock is ticking.
In no particular order (Jen and I talked about this over coffee for an hour this morning):
- Healthcare—rebuild ACA immediately
- Campaign finance reform
- Close down ICE, the camps, and fix immigration
- Equal rights for everybody, and reinstate Affirmative Action
- Nuke the Electoral College
I know I’m forgetting, well, everything, but those are top of mind for me.
I’m entering the second month of work wind-down, and so far, it’s been very busy. I feel like I’m putting more of myself into a lot of different projects than I was before, and staying busy right now is a good thing.
People at work seem surprised that I haven’t completely checked out, including the COO, who I talked with briefly on Friday. I laughed and told him that as long as they’re still paying me, I’m working for them. It’s a measure of how strongly I feel about the mission and the organization; I have no beef with them, other than the fact that they didn’t plan well enough, but I want to see WRI succeed. I like to think I’ve also finally learned something from leaving some of my previous jobs, where I did a terrible job of staying in touch with people—some who I really liked, and some who I didn’t. I have a lot of regrets about that, actually. I was never able to maintain long-term friendships going back to the days when my family moved around a lot, and with a few exceptions, I don’t talk much to my friend group from high school. I’ve never been good at maintaining these kind of things, because I’m afraid those people won’t want to talk to me, but I’ve been working to get over myself and put myself out there some more.
In the meantime, I’m trying to average sending 1-2 resumes out per day, depending on what’s posted, but I’ve only heard one thanks-but-no-thanks reply. There are a number of job websites out there with pretty decent listings, but a lot of the social media stuff that’s suddenly entered my algorithm is about how people haven’t been able to get past the AI bots to have their cover letter seen by a human being. Having been on the other side of this, I know how hard it is to weed the wheat from the chaff, especially when you’re getting 200 applications each day, but I always did try to take the time to look at every submission myself. This new way of doing things seems capricious and arbitrary. I’m doing that thing I hate doing the most [see paragraph above] where I reach out to my network and kindly ask if anyone might know of anything. I’ve actually gotten a couple of good leads from friends, and I’m hopeful that the network will do what the bots will not. The LinkedIn post I put up about ‘moving on from WRI’ got a HUGE response from people, and I made sure to reply back to everyone that posted to boost it further. Here’s to hoping the right people see it.
I’m also looking at other ways to start generating income. There’s money to be made doing housepainting and light carpentry, which I have plenty of experience with, and our old friend Jen, a realtor, can funnel me work. I can load the OG-V with carpentry and painting gear and work for hire without a contractor’s license for what I’m told is pretty decent money, and she could share my name around with her peers. It got me through college, and it can work in the short term now.
I’m headed over to Brian’s this weekend to take stock of the EV project. Making a go of this would be the best possible option, although it would take me away from home for long periods of time. He’s been busy with personal stuff, but I’m hoping we can make a serious go of it in December.
At the house, I’m finishing up the Travelall floor and also looking at inexpensive ways to insulate for winter. I got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about the underside of the front porch floor, which had originally been sealed up with some sheets of plywood over the joists, which were filled with insulation. When Brian and I shot foam against the sill plate shared with the ice room, we never covered that area back up, and there’s a section of the office floor that hangs out over that open space. I got under there and covered it back up a few weeks ago, but I then thought about how our kitchen floor is always cold. In the basement we have insulation up against the underside of the floor but it’s not sealed with anything, which I’ve learned is basically useless. I did some research and found that some simple sheets of 2″ semi-permeable foam sealing the cavity between the joists would keep heat from soaking downwards into the unheated basement. So I’m going to do some experiments in the next week with that to see how well it works.
Meanwhile, my left wrist has been bothering me for the last couple of days—right after I had my checkup with my GP. I’m going to make another appointment to go back in and have him look it over, but what I fear is that this is the beginning of arthritis. About 30 years ago, I was mountain biking with Rob, and we were riding downhill toward our car at dusk on a dim single track. I cartwheeled over a chain spread across the trail, invisible in the fading light, and did a half-decent tuck and roll, avoiding a cracked skull—but I planted both wrists on the pavement as I tumbled. They hurt pretty bad for a week or so after that, but as a newly minted graduate with no health insurance, I couldn’t have them looked at. I’m pretty sure I fractured or tore some cartilage that day, and I’d bet it’s coming home to roost now that I’m older and the weather is colder.