Wow…a month since my last post and while I wish I had something interesting to blather about the truth of the matter is that I don’t. We’re just living life down here…enjoying mostly warm weather even though it’s winter and making do.

Connie’s had a busy time of it…she had a Fort Myers Mastersingers concert and between two performances, extra rehearsals, and all that pretty much took up an entire week. We went down to the Valentines Party at the Cape Coral Elks Lodge since ours is still closed…and there’s no real progress towards getting the plans approved for the place they’re trying to lease so management is holding some more discussions with other lodges in similar straits to see if something can get worked out. 

We got our dryer vent cleaned on a neighborhood special price, got one of our windows that had a busted spring mechanism fixed…and Neil had to replace one of his hard drives. He’s got an array that one of the 4 drives in went belly up, and it was getting short on space anyway so he bought a larger one that has more capacity. Getting data backed up, the new drive configured, and all the data restored to the new one then fixing all of the related backup tasks pretty much killed another week. 

We got the oil changed in both cars and a new set of tires for Connie’s Mazda CX-5.

Add in a Sarasota Symphony concert and a coupe of periods when one or the other of us wasn’t feeling well and…you end up being a month out from the last post.

Neil worked on our income taxes today…and we’ll be filing our last Alabama state return for 2024. The family timber company land was sold after a great deal of infighting starting in about June of last year. The two folks that manage the company are both older than we are and wanted to retire so they investigated a potential sale of the land and dissolution of the company. Naturally the few shareholders who hunt on the land (it was mostly used for harvesting timber and partly leased out to another hunting club) insisted that they were being “deprived of their birthright to hunt on the land” and figured the rest of us should subsidize their search for Bambi. We like venison as much as the next person does…but penalizing 100 odd shareholders for the benefit of a half dozen doesn’t make much sense…and despite saying they were ready to step up and manage the company none of the naysayers either have the experience to do so or actually stepped up to do anything. The sale finally closed late in the year and we got a nice distribution from the proceeds since we owned something close to 2 percent of the shares. That adds to the 2024 income tax bill of course but it is what it is.

We’ve been watching and scratching our heads at all the cost cutting and job elimination going on up in DC and have to admit that there is some validity in at least the basic idea of what they’re trying to do. Anyone with a functioning brain knows that every government department and agency has some fraud, waste, and abuse going on…but both sides pick and choose the most inflammatory things they can find to demonize both the departments and the other side. We agree that the country has a debt problem and an annual deficit problem…but the only ways that can be fixed are some combination of increased revenue and lowered spending…again, anyone who’s ever worked on a family budget and spending can see that.

However…randomly firing employees and shutting the doors at agencies one doesn’t like isn’t the way to go about it…and neither is issuing crazy executive orders to not spend money that the Congress has provided under their constitutional power of the purse. What should happen is that Teslaman and his organization should come up with ideas to increase revenue and cut spending…and then send that to Congress to actually turn into laws. Congress isn’t blameless here though…for decades they have passed laws that left the actual rules up to agencies and then those agencies change the rules randomly depending on who is in the White House. Congress needs to pass better, more detailed laws…and they need to learn to compromise and to realize that the reason there’re in DC is to get the country’s business done. They’re not there to demonize the other side and eat their own young…which both sides have been doing repeatedly since Jan 20.

Unfortunately though…I don’t see it changing anytime soon,

That’s about all I got for today…sorry it isn’t any more interesting than it is.

I did find a couple interesting things on the net though.

This one tells you how to identify whether a snake is venomous or not…but I have to agree with Pubity’s comment on Corrine’s post.

And finally…

Cyas.