Travels with Gunther and Kara

Well…just as I said last year at this time…another season in the books and we’re back at our usual winter site 101 at Seminole Campground, North Fort Myers FL.

Alabama’s football season ended last night just slightly short of the goal of another national championship. They fell 35-31 to Clemson on the last play of the game when the Clemson quarterback threw a short touchdown pass. It should have been called back for offensive pass interference…just like one of their previous scores should have been called back…but even though setting a pick play like they do in basketball is illegal it’s rarely called. The rules say that obvious attempts to impede the ability of a defensive back to cover his assigned receiver should be penalized. Teams that throw the ball a lot run what they call rub plays with 2 wide receivers on one side crossing…the outside one cuts inside and the inside one cuts behind him as he passes and goes outside. That’s fine…but in both of these cases the Clemson outside receiver blocked the outside defensive back into the other defensive back…preventing either from covering his assigned receiver. Clear case of offensive interference to me…but then I’m not a ref so that doesn’t really count. It’s not really sour grapes either…after we scored with about 2 minutes left to go ahead by 3 there were plenty of opportunities for the D to stop Clemson’s last drive. Unfortunately…the Clemson QB is really good and was feeling it by that point in the game and he was helped out by some outstanding grabs of passes on the final drive. They were also helped out by an injury to our power running back in the 3rd quarter which limited the offense.

Much was made of Alabama’s freshman starting QB last night and in the previous couple of weeks before the playoffs…but by this time of the season he’s not really a freshman anymore. Not as experienced as Clemson’s QB…and doesn’t have the touch he needs for long throws yet. His leading of the offense to score and take the lead with 2 minutes remaining was the way we should have called the whole game…but at this point in his career they were trying to get him to be a game manager and not game winner. Ah well…we’ll start up again in the fall.

The two teams have now played the last two championship games…with an overall point differential of 1 in Alabama’s favor…they really were the two best teams in college football this year and Coach Saban and the boys have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s only about 8-1/2 months until kickoff again…and Alabama once again has the highest rated recruiting class. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both of them back in the playoffs again next year.

Let’s recap the year…shall we.

We departed the day after Easter in the spring…our immediate goal was to arrive in Hanna IN on May 1 where we were going to swap BAT for Big Red. On the way we had stops in Valdosta GA, Knoxville TN and Charleston IN. We were originally supposed to be in Hanna for a week followed by heading back south to Chattanooga for the NHOG rally then northwards through PA and NY and up on into the Canadian Maritimes where we would spend the summer then head south to arrive back in Cedar Key FL for the last 10 days of October then on to Seminole on 1 Nov.

Connie’s eye…however…had other plans. As we drove into our scheduled stop at the Last Resort Campground in Hanna…the closest campground to Valparaiso where Big Red was being built…Connie noticed her eye issue…what she called a black rocket ship sticking into her vision from the side and loss of acuity. After parking we did a little internet research…figured it was probably a separated retina…and searched for a retina specialist who was in the Tricare Network. We found Retina Associates of Chicago…who have an office in Michigan City IN just north of Hanna. Called them and they said that since she wasn’t a patient to go to the ER. So we go there…they said to go to an opthalmologist the next morning for a consult. Did that…and he said “Yup, separated retina, go see a retina specialist.” His staff got her an appointment for that afternoon at…you guessed it…Retina Associates of Chicago office in Michigan City.

Long story short…she got a bubble injected into her eye to stick the retina back down, some laser surgery to weld it in place and a whole bunch of followup visits with the retina specialist up there. That…naturally…pretty much killed our Canadian Maritime plans as we spent May, June, and July in Hanna. We did get out of there for a couple of short trips in between follow up visits…the NHOG rally, over to DC and Midlothian to see Alex and various doctors and such, and spent the week of Independence Day up in the MI lower peninsula seeing where Neil’s ancestors were buried and the various sites up on the lake.

In late July…her doctor wondered why she wasn’t seeing any better as the retina healing looked great…so she ran a test and found that the center of her retina was bunched up. Turns out that a frequent complication of detached retina is that some cells get released into the goop inside you eye. Once the retina is flat again the cells attach to the front of the retina and sort of scrunch it up like a Kleenex…which means the vision doesn’t get better. Fortunately it’s an easy fix…basically you scrape the cells off and it gets better. Unfortunately that requires some more followup visits…and by this time it was almost the end ofd July. So we asked what happens if we wait 6 weeks until we get to FL…turns out that the answer is nothing, just longer before it gets fixed. So we packed up and left…did a quick run over to Kansas to visit Camp Horizons and get some warranty work on our fiberglass cracks…then skedaddled down to FL arriving on 1 Sep. She had an appointment with Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in mid September, had surgery the next day and we did all the followup visits down here…and her eye is pretty much back to normal. We originally planned on going up and doing our 10 days in Cedar Key the end of October…but then the hurricane went through there so we ended up just moving those reservations to same time next year.

OK, let’s have a few photos…just to help recap the year.

Paddlewheel steamer in Louisville.

Small waterfall in Louisville.

Hawk in KY or TN…can’t remember which.

Amazingly brilliant green bug.

Samplin’ a little bourbon in Louisville.

Connie and her best Vanna White imitation as we picked up Big Red in Valparaiso IN in May…you can’t tell it here but she’s pretty much blind at this point as her separated retina was healing with the gas bubble in her eye.

We didn’t get any closer to Chicago than this…she wasn’t comfortable going into the big city with limited visibility.

Another waterfall…

E8…the surviving eaglet from the spring 2016 nesting season by our local Fort Myers eagle Harriet and her mate M15. This was just a couple of days before he fledged (first flight) in March.

Connie at her alma mater for her graduate degree…Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant MI.

Lighthouse on the lake shore at Frankfort MI on the western side of the lower peninsula…we spent the Independence Day week here.

The dunes on the Lake Michigan shoreline at Indiana Dunes State Park and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Tombstone of Neil’s 5x great grandfather buried in Michigan…he was one of the members of the group that founded the settlement that eventually became Detroit. The Connor Greenway in downtown Detroit is named after him and we visited both his second homestead as well as the original area he settled in on Connor Creek off of the Detroit river…but the original homestead is now covered by the. airport.

The creek surrounding his second homestead…none of the structures are left but there’s a small peninsula in an oxbow bend on the creek where he lived.

Abraham Lincoln’s father’s house.

Back in Florida again…at Pelican Roost RV Park at Naval Station Jacksonville…by this point she was pretty limited visually…the retina had healed but the scar tissue on it hadn’t been surgically removed yet so we mostly just stayed around the rig pretty much from May to September when we got back south.

Grand baby Alex’s second birthday party…we drove up there in December for the festivities.

Ok…let’s check out the stats for the year…they’re not nearly as impressive as 2015 was but then we didn’t do much…out of our normal 7 month travel season we spent 3 in Hanna and got here to Seminole 2 months early so we really only had a 2 month travel season.

• States visited: 13
• BAT/Big Red Miles: BAT 1403 all towing, Big Red 6352 towing, 8329 solo, 14681 total. I expect this trend to continue with solo mileage on Big Red about the same as the towing mileage unless we end up buying another vehicle for our daily driver. Neil offered her a Harley trike…and she turned him down.
• RV Miles: 7,755 on 29 towing days
• Average towing miles: 267 (high of 445 and low of 78)
• Car Miles: 2,298 until we donated it in May 
• Campgrounds stayed in: 31
• Number of RV travel days: 29
• Northernmost and southernmost points reached: Lake Leelanau MI and North Fort Myers FL
• Easternmost and Westernmost points reached: Junction City KS and Fairfax, VA
• Number of contributions to the “Connie Meets the Town Drunk” page: just 1 but Mikey at Down the Street in Casey IL is one of the better contributions over the years…you can read about him as Town Drunk #6 on the Town Drunk page from the menu at the top of this page. We never did get our blueberry cobbler from him…dang it!
• Bicycling miles: 1026.5 miles on 71 rides, average speed 15.22 mph, fastest speed 32.82 mph (musta been downhill)
• Photographs taken: 663 frames for 20.24 GB…Connie’s eye limited our Fun Stuff© this season
• Photographs published: 156
• Blog posts published: 54
• Blog views: 4836, busiest month was May with 909 views…the rest of the blog stats like champion commenter and such got deleted this year as WordPress stopped sending you the end of year review apparently…and I’m too lazy to figure them out…usually you get the summary from them the last day of the year but apparently they’ve stopped sending them out. Poop. MJ is still far in the lead with 188 total comments though.

So…what are our plans this year. Good question…we haven’t really made detailed ones yet but here’s a general idea of what we’re doing before Neil does all of the detailed planning.

We’ll again depart Seminole the day after Easter on April 17. Our first real stop will be Midlothian to see Alex and the kids. Don’t know exactly how we’re going to route ourselves yet but not through Orlando…we’re planning on spending the first night at the Elks Lodge just north of Tampa then overnight in Brunswick GA and Florence SC. Then we’ll head on up to Northern VA for financial/dentist appointments…and to do the portion of our Fun Stuff© from Ocean City MD to Fairfax VA via an overnight trip over to the coast without the rig.

After that’s done we’ll start the Fun Stuff© portion of the summer. We’ll transit the length of US Route 50 from Ocean City MD to San Francisco…all 3,008 miles of it although the signs at each end claim 3,073 miles…but it’s been rerouted slightly since those signs were put up. We used to live right off of US-50 at our sticks and bricks in Fairfax VA and always wanted to see the whole length. A lot of it is 4 lane at grade crossing highway, some is dual numbered with interstate highways, and some of it is just a 2 lane road. Nonetheless…we’re doing it…in fact the portion of it in Nevada is known as “The Loneliest Highway in America” and there’s a certificate you get for completing that portion of it. We won’t do our usual detailed planning of every stop along the way except for figuring out where to spend holiday weekends as reservations for those can be hard to come by. Instead we’ll meander as seems necessary as long as we get to holiday campgrounds on time and meet the rest of our schedule. We figure on spending May through July getting to the west coast…with particular time spent in Utah and Colorado as we haven’t seen the southern portions of those states…Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, Antelope Canyon, Zion National Park all beckon us along with the portion of the road in Nevada and several earlier portions in Ohio and IL.

Once we get to the west coast…we’ll head generally northwards and catch northern CA and southern OR that we missed in 2013 when Neil broke his foot…our next real commitment is the NHOG Rally in mid September in Spearfish SD in the northwestern corner of the state. Our friend Joe Claxton and his bride live up near Coeur d’Alene Idaho and we hope to get by and see them…but it all depends on when we get to the west coast and how quickly we want to get to Spearfish.

Once the rally is over on 20 September…our next firmly scheduled stop is Cedar Key FL on 20 October. We were originally going to just meander south and east to get there…at least until our friends Bill Napier and Roy Brody got involved. They’ve got this itch to go see the polar bears in Churchill Manitoba…which means you leave the rigs in Winnipeg about 100 miles north of the border of Canada with ND and MN…and fly about 700 miles to Churchill to see the bears…then return to Winnipeg and head south. The bears are there in September and October…and the cold weather arrives by late or maybe mid October. Anyways…Roy is doing some information gathering and the plan is for at least the 3 of us…plus whoever else wants to come along…to sort of loosely caravan from the rally in Spearfish to Winnipeg. We’ll all make our own reservations and travel together or separately as we desire…more of a friends traveling more or less together than a formal caravan.

It’s about 3 days travel from Spearfish to Winnipeg…then figure a week to go up and back and see the bears. That would put us back in Winnipeg ready to head south by about the 3rd or so of October. That’s about 1950 miles from our reservation in Cedar Key on October 20…which means we would have 17 days to get there and it’s 6 or 7 travel days. If we go…we won’t be doing a whole bunch of Fun Stuff© on the way south…mostly just getting south. It’s 3 days to get to Cedar Rapids IA including the delay for getting back across the border…and by that far south we’ll be out of any real possibility of bad weather. We’ll probably…assuming the plans come to fruition…go ahead and plan to go via Winnipeg as we can always cancel it if looks like winter isn’t going to cooperate with us. The overall trip would give us about 9,000 miles before getting back here to Seminole…and maybe 1500 less if we skipped Winnipeg because of winter and headed home via Nebraska and Missouri instead.

Our guess is that although there will be some cold weather in Winnipeg by early October the likelihood of heavy snow conditions that last and essentially winter us in is relatively low. Even if it snows…the roads should be plowed in a couple of days and we should be able to head south…once back into the US we’re continuing to get toward less wintery climate. Neil’s wanted to see more polar bears and Winnipeg isn’t that far out of the way.

If Winnipeg and the polar bears doesn’t work out we’ll either head south to Albuquerque NM for a few days at the balloon festival there before heading eastward across the southern states…or we’ll just head south and east gradually from SD towards our eventual reservations at Cedar Key FL on 20 Oct and back in North Fort Myers on 1 Nov.

Ok…gotta have a couple of interesting things ya know.

Who wore it better?

You know what this is…doncha?

Why…it’s Fred Flint Stone of course. Wiiiiilma!!

This is an example of queuing level (lining up) Thai.

And finally…and no, this isn’t a political statement other than that a Republican president will be less likely to take any crap than a Democratic one.

Cyas.

Nothing’s really going on…but I ran across a couple of interesting things about New Years and 2017 I thought I would post.

First up is the German New Year’s tradition…that you’ve never heard of.

It’s called The 90th Birthday…or Der 90 Geburtstag in German…which you can read about here if you want alllll of the gory details…but here’s the short version.

Back in the ‘60s there was this British comedy duo named May Warden and Freddie Frinton who had this vaudeville skit about an elderly lady named Miss Sophie. She’s invited her friends Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommerov and Mr. Winterbottom for her 90th birthday dinner which will be served by her butler James. Unfortunately…all of these friends are dead…but fortunately Miss Sophie is senile and has failing eyesight…so James decides to pretend to serve dinner …with him playing the parts of the dearly departed. He serves 4 courses at dinner…each of which involves drinks…and he naturally drinks their portions as Miss Sophie keeps proposing toasts. Naturally James gets sort of drunk and has difficulty carrying out his routine.

This skit was seen by a German entertainer Peter Frankenweld…who thought it so hilarious that he convinced May and Freddie to film it for German television…and titled Dinner for One. So they did…and it was filmed in English with no German subtitles. The sketch appeared on German TV in 1963…but in 1972 began to assume a life of it’s own when it was broadcast on New Year’s Eve. Since then it’s earned quite a name for itself…by 1988 it earned a place in the Guinness World Record Book as the most repeated program in history. By 1997 more people were watching it (11.93 million) than watching the German chancellor’s New Year’s speech (9.28 million). It’s been broadcast over 230 times in Germany.

Here’s a shot of James tripping over the tiger rug as he gets increasingly drunk.

I saw on another of my blogs the following tidbits about the new year 2017. It will be a good year.

• We all know that 2017 is a prime number, but it is more than just another prime number.
• 2017π (rounds to nearest integer) is a prime
• 2017e (rounds to nearest integer ) is a prime.
• The sum of all odd primes up to 2017 is a prime number, i.e. 3+5+7+11+…+2017 is a prime number. 
• The sum of the cube of gap of primes up to 2017 is a prime number. That is (3-2)^3 + (5-3)^3 + (7-5)^3 + (11-7)^3 + … + (2017-2011)^3 is a prime number.
• The prime number before 2017 is 2017+(2-0-1-7), which makes it a sexy prime, and the prime after 2017 is 2017+(2+0+1+7). 2017 itself is of course equal to 2017+(2*0*1*7) 
• Insert 7 into any two digits of 2017, it is still a prime number, i.e. 27017, 20717, 20177 are all primes. Plus, 20177 is also a prime number
• Since all digits of 2017 is less than 8, it can be viewed as an octal. 2017 is still a prime number as an octal.
• 2017 can be written as a sum of three cubes of primes, i,e, p^3 +q^3 +r^3 for some primes p, q, r.
• 2017 can be written as a sum of cubes of five distinct integers.
• 2017 can be written as x^2+y^2, x^2+2y^2, x^2+3y^2, x^2+4y^2 x^2+6y^2, x^2+7y^2, x^2+8y^2, x^2+9y^2 (for positive integers x, y)
• 20170123456789 is also a prime
• the 2017th prime number is 17539 and 201717539 is also a prime.
• Let p=2017, then both (p+1)/2 and (p+2)/3 are prime numbers.
• The first ten digits of the decimal expansion of the cubic root of 2017 contains all different digits 0~9. 2017 is the least integer has this property. 
• 2017 = 2^11 – 11th prime

Yeah…I know…way more than you wanted to know.

This photo is undeniable proof that font selection is…very, very important.

That’s all I got for today.

Oh yeah…our local eagle pair…follow along here if you want…Harriet and M15…had one of their two eggs hatch on xx and it appears to be a healthy eaglet. Unfortunately…the second egg which was laid about 30 hours after the first hasn’t hatched yet…and given that it’s now 4+ days after it’s expected hatching time it’s most likely a non viable egg. So I guess Harriet and M15 will be only raising one eaglet this year. We’ll keep track of them and keep ya apprised of the young’n’s progress.

One last request…if any of our readers ever get to Catalan…that’s over in Spain on the Atlantic coast…you gotta get me one of these pooping figurines. Apparently no Catalan Nativity scene is complete without one. You can read all about the tradition here. It’s got something to do with Catalan not really being a willing part of Spain and rejecting the Spanish influence/takeover of the area.

Cyas.

And I must say it’s gotta be better than 2016 was…at least according to Connie…who declared that 2016 was the worst year evah. What with her eye and all…I can see how she might think it was not so good…but worst evah…I dunno.

Anyway…the new year started off really great for us. We headed down to the Elks Lodge at 1400 for the New Years Party but could only stay an hour. We hadda couple of brews, some eggnog which Neil spiked with some bourbon and found it was a already spiked so I guess it was double spiked…didn’t eat much as it was pot luck and we didn’t take anything as we weren’t staying long but did try the Jalapeño pepper stuffed with cream cheese and cheddar cheese then wrapped in bacon and baked that our friend Art made…they were pretty outstanding. Just a little heat as all the seeds and membranes were removed and they contain most of the capsaicin in any pepper but quite tasty nonetheless.

Afterwards we headed home for the College Football Playoff semi final between Alabama and Washington. Neil wasn’t concerned much after the first quarter as we could run the ball, they couldn’t, and although they got some passing yards early our D had figgered it out by the end of the quarter. We ended up with 2 TD runs by Bo Scarborough…the first was what the guy on TV called a “real man run” as he ran through and over 5 attempted tacklers on the way to the end zone. The second one came in early in the 4th after Washington finally got the Tide in some bad field position via a quick kick punt by the quarter back that rolled out of bounds at our 2 yard line. A couple of quick Bo runs and a pass got us just out past the 30…then it was time for another Bo run…he broke one tackle in the backfield and another right at the line of scrimmage then was off to the races. About 30 yards down the field there were a couple of secondary guys that might have tackled him but a great cut to his right put our wideouts between him and the defenders and they got in the way enough for the 68 yard scoring run. Bo is a lot like Derek Henry who won the Heisman Trophy last year for the Tide…big strong buy who mostly runs over people but once he’s in the open he’s a lot faster than he looks and just runs away from defenders.

We added in another defensive score…22 yard return of an interception…in the second for the final score of 24-7 in a game that really wasn’t as close as the score. In the late game…Clemson blew out Ohio State 31 zip so they’re scheduled for a rematch in the championship game next week. Really looking forward to it.

After the game was over we headed down to the party at the campground…got there right about 2000 and stayed a couple of hours drinking wine, snacking and shooting the breeze around the campfire. Came home and went to sleep in the recliners until 0130 before getting up and drifting into bed.

Today our friend Jeff is bringing down the traditional Tennessee New Years dinner…hog jowls, taters, and black eyed peas. Neil’s passing on the peas of course and baking some sweet taters to go along with the feast…and we’ve got just enough caramel pie left for 3 small servings…which is all you want anyway as it’s really, really rich. Nobody at our house has ever had a hog jowl…he tweeted a pic of him cooking it and it looks like bacon to me except it’s the pig’s face. Hey…it’s pork fat so it’s gotta be good…right?

Ok…what’s interesting on the net this week.

I found this…it’s a picture of a little island named Vulcan Point

The water surrounding it is named Crater Lake. Crater Lake is contained within another body of water named Lake Taal…which is then contained by the island of Luzon (the large island in the Philippine chain. So this makes Vulcan Point…an island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island…or what the geologists would call a third order island.

Here’s a larger shot of the whole shebang…the water at the bottom is the Philippine Sea which is part of the Pacific.

Turns out this is one of only two known instances of this happening in the whole world. Up in Canuckistan there’s an unnamed island on an unnamed lake on an unnamed island in a finger lake in the island of Victoria Island. This second instance was discovered after hours of searching google images by a guy you might have heard of…Ken Jennings of 74 game winning streak on Jeopardy fame. I was gonna put in a picture…but the only one I could find was on Google Maps…and it’s pretty lousy…Google didn’t bother paying for decent resolution satellite photos up there since there’s absolutely nothing up there.

Ken admits there might be more of them…after all Canuckistan has over 3 million lakes…many of which have islands in them…so if you’re interested in becoming internet famous…go ahead and start searching.

Canuckistan…it turns out…has many other examples of lakeology present within it’s borders.

• It has the largest lake on island…Nettilling Lake on Baffin Island
• It has the largest island in a lake…Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron
• It has the largest lake on an island in a lake…Lake Manitou on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron
• It has the largest island on a lake on an island on a lake…Treasure Island in Mindemoya Lake on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron

Lessee…what else I got.

Baby Jesus is getting an early start on his New Year’s resolutions I guess.

I never thought of the Second Coming like this…

What could go wrong?

I’m confused.

If the light stays on more than 4 hours…call an electrician I guess.

And that’s all I got for today. Ya’ll stay safe and productive in the New Year…Ima still working on the end of the year post…well, it’s all done except for the blog stats and such but WordPress hasn’t sent those out yet.

Cyas.

Yeah…I know…I shoulda posted this yesterday…but I was too busy eating and being lazy. Tough on ya’s.

Oh well…Merry Christmas to all of you…but you need to choose one and only one of the following to provide you our wishes.

For our progressive friends…yeah, we actually have some of those misguided folks in our circle…

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011 but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes.

To our conservative friends…Merry Christmas.

‘Round these parts…we started the merriment with Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve…but in the interests of the old folks down here who (a) don’t stay up late and (b) can’t drive at night (well, they actually can’t drive anytime…leastways not correctly dammit…but at least during the daytime they have a prayer of seeing anything…after dark it’s a lost cause for them.)…anyways it was a 1600 in the afternoon. Father Tom gave a relatively short sermon…he said it was because he was told shortly before Mass started by a parishioner that they had a 1730 dinner reservation. There was a very nice concert by the choir to start…well except for the last piece which depended on the men in the choir…and they pretty much suck (but they try and it’s choir so that’s not too bad)…anyways they got off and the whole last song was a train wreck. For those of you who’ve heard the old Harry Chapin song about the 30,000 pounds of the bananas…”The reaction of the band was best summed by my brother John who said…(music stops and very deep baritone voice here)…Harry, it sucks.”

After Mass we stopped by the local sushi/chinese restaurant and had sushi and Kirin Ichiban brews for dinner then it was back home. Earlier in the day Neil had done most of the cooking for Christmas…made the caramel pies; made the sweet potato polenta and put it in the fridge to be sliced, fried in budda’, and topped with maple syrup on the ‘morrow; and marinated our venison tenderloin (Thanks to Tom…Jenny’s dad…for the meat!!)

Sunday Connie headed back over to St Therese for the 0900 Mass…Neil stayed home so that she could call when she left and he could put the sorta home made cinnamon buns into the oven…the buns part came from a package of Flaky Southern Style Grands biscuits and he made a pecan, brown sugar, butter, and leftover caramel pie stuff mixture. He stretched the buns out into ovals about 6 inches long, schmeared (that’s an Emeril Lagasse term) the mixture on the middle and rolled ‘em up. Tossed into an oven after schmearing a little more butter and left over caramel on the top for 13 minutes at 350…et voila…hot home made cinnamon buns. He added a rum and OJ cocktail once she got home…we had finished coffee earlier before she left…and that was brunch.

We opened presents…Connie got this cool granny mug from grand baby Alex.

Other than that we got some hair things, a beard trimmer, and a few other odds and ends but nothing really spectacular…but then we mostly just get what we need when we need it anyway.

About 1030 he put the venison into the pot with our sous vide machine. Sous vide is a French cooking style technically meaning “under vacuum” but essentially you put your food into a bag…and either vacuum seal it if you have one of those to just seal into a freezer bag and squeeze the air out if you don’t have the vacuum machine. He had put some rosemary, thyme, and marjoram into the bag Saturday along with a little sherry vinegar and some olive oil to marinate over nite.

Anyways…sous vide cooking actually means cooking your food in warm to very warm water for a long time. Take venison for instance…our tenderloin was about 10 ounces and say 5 inches long and 2 inches in diameter…and we wanted it medium rare…which for venison (as for most other red meats) is about 130 degrees internal temperature. Now if you cook meat in the oven or on the grill you cook it to a center temperature of 125 and then take it off and let it rest for 20 minutes. Since the outer portions are hotter the heat equalizes and the whole thing is now at your desired 130…but unfortunately it’s only pink in the middle. Towards the outside it’s more done as the outside portions of the meat got hotter. To counteract this problem…because medium rare should be medium rare all the way through…sous vide was invented. You put the sealed bag containing your meat into a pot of water which is maintained at 130 degrees for a long time…this venison would have been done in about 2 hours but we actually had it in there for about 5. The good thing is that it cannot overcook because it can never get hotter than the 130 degree water in the cooking container…and the longer you leave it in the more tender it gets. Neil uses his large pasta pot about 12 inches deep and has a portable sous vice machine that clamps to the side of the pot. The machine has an 800 watt heater inside it and a propeller arrangement that sucks water in from the pot, heats it up and shoots it back out. It has a temperature sensor at the intake and a dial where you set the desired temperature (129 in our case since it would warm up a little bit when seared…which I’ll talk about in jus’ a minute if’n ya give me a chance. The controller cycles the heater on and off so the incoming water to the sensor remains at 129 and the propeller ensures that all the water is evenly mixed.

The result is that the meat is the same temperature the whole way through…a very nice 129 which is almost medium rare. Take a look at the cross section of the venison in the photo below and you’ll see what Ima talking ‘bout. See how the meat is nice and pink almost all the way to the outside…that’s the benefit of sous vide.

The only drawback is that the outside surface of the meat only gets to 130 as well…and it does not get that nice seared crispy brown outside. That’s technically known as a Maillard reaction and it’s a product of the amino acids and sugars in the meat in the presence of high heat  and it’s what gives browned food that nice browned crunchy bits taste. Anyways…sous vide means no Maillard reaction…and hence no browning so the meat just looks gray when you take it out of the bag. No worries though…you just toss the meat into a very, very hot skillet…or onto the grill…for a couple minutes to sear the outside into that nice browned meat color and taste.

The other stuff on the plate above is savory herb stuffing with mushroom gravy on it and the venison…and the sweet potato polenta. Polenta is sort of like the Italian version of grits except it’s made from yellow stone ground cornmeal ground finer than what’s normally used for grits…you can use grits in a pinch and the flavor is pretty close but (a) corn meal is the original stuff and gives it a creamer texture and (b) we have corn meal anyway for stuff like frying oysters and fish. Cook the corn meal with water and cream for a half hour or so, add in a smashed and baked sweet ‘tater and a little cinnamon, brown sugar, salt, and ground smoked chipotle pepper for a bit of a kick. Next put the mixture into a loaf pan and into the fridge over night where it sets into a congealed mass. Slice, fry in butter, and top with maple syrup and it’s mighty tasty.

We had dinner about 1700 and much later had the salted caramel pie Neil made for dessert.

For this…you take Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk and put it into a flat baking dish which you then sit in a water bath in the oven for 90 minutes or so…this causes the milk solids in the Eagle Brand to caramelize into that nice gooey stuff you see in the photo and make it so it will set into a custard consistency when put into the fridge. Scrape the mixture into serving dishes that have a graham cracker crust, top with a little fleur de sel…that’s a 10 dollar word for sea salt…which is chemically the same as regular table or kosher salt except it’s made from evaporating sea water and has very nice crystal crumbly texture…sometimes called finishing salt but it’s what we…and fancy chefs…use as salt at the table when a bit more is necessary. Put the dishes into the fridge overnight, top with whipped cream and you’re done. It’s not as salty as either table or kosher salt is…the large crystals are flat like snowflakes and have a lot of air in them so each crystal contains less salt than it looks like it does.

We had a nice bottle of Pinot Noir red with dinner…and a couple of Green Spot Irish Whisky cocktails while he was cooking. Crammed all the dishes into the dishwasher and watched TV until bedtime…and that was our Most Excellent Christmas Day.

One other election related note…as you’re no doubt aware the media, Clinton campaign, and the various liberal talking heads/social media gadfly/et. al. are still complaining about how HRC won the popular vote…and are still making noises about abandoning the Electoral College.

There’s even a thing going on called the 270 Coalition which is trying to get states that represent 270 electoral votes to agree to cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner. Now that just seems wrong to me…after all we are the United States of America and not just plain old America…the founding fathers deliberately wanted the states to retain the upper hand…hence that sentence in the constitution about all other powers being retained by the states. Anyways…this seems like an end run around having to have a constitutional amendment to get rid of the EC…just like liberals trying to give the District of Columbia voting rights in Congress and the Senate despite the clear wording in the constitution that States get congressmen and senators, not districts or possessions…funny how those wanting to give DC congressional representation don’t seem to want to give any to Guam, Puerto Rico, or American Samoa…probably because they wouldn’t be reliable Democratic votes but that’s just me.

Anyways…back to the continued harping on the popular vote. Turns out that the fabled recounts of hacked elections in PA, WI, and MI actually increased Mr. Trump’s winning margin in those three states…and that while it is true that she won the overall irrelevant popular vote by 2.8 million or so…it also turns out that her popular vote victory was due…solely…to vote in NYC and LA County. This means…at least to me…that it’s even more important for the EC to be retained to ensure that the President is elected by all the people…do we really want LA and NYC to control the out come of a national election? Not me.

Neil keeps having the same discussion over and over with his liberal friends on social media…they all claim she won the popular vote and should be declared the winner. He keeps telling them that she was a lousy candidate that nobody trusted based on her record for the past 30 years; that Comey didn’t cost her the election…he actually decided not to prosecute her…twice; that she ran a terrible campaign which assumed traditional Democratic states were in the bag and completely ignored the flyover states while concentrating her energy only on the coasts; and failed to listen to the smartest politician we’ve had in the USA since Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton…despite his moral deficiencies…was a pretty darned good president…and more importantly is a brilliant political mind. He begged her not to ignore the largely white middle class voters in the center 35 states but she saw fit to ignore that advice and campaigned only where people liked her already or where she thought she could flip a state. Ya gotta take care of your base first and foremost.

Ok, need a couple of interesting things to post…lessee.

You think wimmin are the weaker sex?

Those sneaky Chinese.

This should be posted on everything.

Life imitating art.

Definitely not…Good Eats.

We’ll finish out the holidays this week with New Years and the College Football Playoff games on Saturday…then it will be time to get down to work. In the next couple of weeks Neil’s got a bunch of work items to handle on the trailer…flush and sanitize our water system as it’s been almost 5 years, swap out the resin in our water softener, change the water heater anode element, order more water filters and install a couple of them as part of the whole water system flush/change thing, and get his bike fixed (he broke the front derailleur trying to adjust it…which isn’t surprising as he’s not a bike mechanic and doesn’t know what he’s doing. Hopefully the LBS…er, local bike shop…can quickly fix his errant adjustments.) After all that’s done he’s gotta plan out our next spring/summer/fall travels. I’ll give ya a preview of those next time in my end of the year summary…but it involves a Charles Kuralt like journey across America as well as (hopefully and tentatively) polar bears.

Cyas.

Well…not really much of anything to report but we did make a trip to to Midlothian to see the human kids…and most importantly to be at grand baby Alex’s 2nd birthday party…although I gotta tell ya going up to Virginia in December is really way too cold for us.

We had dental appointments on Dec 8…and planned on leaving afterwards for Virginia bit the cleanings at the dentist delayed our departure until about 1030 instead of our normal 0700 or so…which meant we had to stop partway up. After completing our cleanings we headed up I-75 and then I-4 through Orlando…and made the decision never to go through Orlando again…the traffic basically sucks and the roads are terrible with construction everywhere. Turns out that taking 75 north to 10 and then west only adds a out 40 miles to the distance from Seminole to Jacksonville…so we’ll plan on going that way in the future…especially with the rig as the construction delays just make Orlando unbearable.

We stopped for the evening in Hardeeville GA just north of the border about 20 miles or so…had a decent hotel and a pretty decent dinner then got up early the next morning…dressed in jeans and hoodies instead of our normal shorts and flip flops and continued north. We got to the hotel right near the human kids house about 1500…had a nap and then headed over to see Alex for a bit before he went to bed on Friday evening.

We spent most of the daytime Saturday at Bryan and Jenny’s house seeing the kid and doing some preliminary party on Sunday stuff…then had dinner and headed back to the hotel.

Sunday was Mass at the local church in Midlothian we usually go to and then we headed over to Alex’s house…spent a couple of hours getting ready for the party and then it was pretty much madness for the next 2 hours…about 20 people in the house with 4 kinds under 5 and a bunch of adults…sliders and cupcakes and opening presents were the order of the day. By the time the party broke up we were beat and ready to head back to dinner and the hotel for the evening…with an early departure scheduled for Monday morning.

We did get some photos at the party…have to have those ya know.

Alex wandering around before the party.

Having a cupcake after the sliders were gone.

Getting his height marked on the chart on the wall…he should be just about 5’10” to 6’…based on the two times your height at age 2 metric…when he’s an adult. Don’t know if that will work or not but Bryan is within an inch or two of the metric so maybe it will hold true.

Serving granddad some tea from his kitchen set before we left.

We were so tired after the party…just headed out to a local Bonefish for dinner then home for bed. Got up early Monday morning…temp was in the 20s and that’s way too cold for us…and headed south. Our destination for the day was just north of the GA/FL border on 95…we wanted to stop by Green Cove Springs the next morning and see our new mailing service in person and they don’t open until 0900.

After a gradually warming day we had dinner and bed and headed off again early Tuesday…had to get there for choir practice ya know and we had some Xmas deliveries to take care of for Bryan and Jenny at her grandmother’s house in Bradenton FL just south of Tampa. We made a quick stop at the mailing service…which isn’t actually located at the specified street address because when they outgrew their facilities and moved either the city let them keep the street address of 10,000+ clients had to do that whole address thing…anyway we followed the GPS and failed and then the directions on the website and got there. A quick stop, picked up our mail and introduced ourselves, and we were back on the road. Stopped by Bradenton and met Grandma Ruth at the Waffle House to drop off presents then continued on south to Fort Myers arriving just after 1420.

Connie quickly headed out for choir and Neil took all our stuff back inside.

Other than seeing the kids and Alex…the highlight of the weekend was getting some venison backstrap tenderloins from Tom, Jenny’s dad. We had taken him some homemade eggnog and he surprised us with the venison…it’s on the menu for Christmas dinner.

That’s about it for now…gotta run to get to Bingo as Connie’s almost home from choir. Just a couple of quick interesting thing this week.

Too hot on the landing I guess.

Keep your head down.

How to confuse a vegan.

Cyas.

Yea! We’re really official Floridians now. The title for Big Red came in last week and got forwarded over to our local DMV office and we went by there this morning and finished up the titling and registration for him in FL…got tags and the title application copy in hand and the real title will go back to USAA until we finish paying the loan off.

Connie has choir practice today then it’s Bingo at the Elks. Hopefully her luck from last Thursday night at the Bingo here at Seminole will carry over…she won 3 times for a total of $90 then and brought home a Maple Donut for Neil.

Tomorrow it’s packing day then we’ll be off to the dentist early Thursday morning followed by heading out for Midlothian to see the human kids and grand baby Alex for his birthday…really looking forward to seeing everybody although we’re definitely not looking forward to the weather which will have temperatures in the 30s the whole time we’re there…brrrr. If I was a polar bear it would be one thing…but I ain’t so I’m definitely not going into the woods.

Neil has a new idea…he’s going to start getting a lot more kale in his diet…only he’s going with kale that has the silent k at the beginning…I dunno who thought that up but he’s a freaking genius I tell ya.

Not really anything else to report although we did find a few interesting things on the net this week.

After the SEC Championship Game last Saturday which was won by the Alabama Crimson Tide…they destroyed Florida 54-16…at one point in the third quarter Florida had 60 yards or so of total offense compared to -7 for the Tide who had a penalty and a punt on their only possession of the game so far…anyway at that point the score was Alabama 16 Florida 9. The Florida coach probably had a really hard time understanding that. Florida ended the game with a total of zero yards rushing after you took off the QB sack lost yardage but had 32 yards for the game on actual rushing plays. Alabama helped their cause with 2 more non offensive touchdowns for an NCAA leading 14 for the season and 3 long drives with touchdown runs in the second half. They did surrender their first touchdown since October and the first opening drive touchdown since early in the 2015 season. Anyway…saw this one about the game.

I see they’ve started the election recount in Wisconsin.

Fixed it. Nailed.

Meanwhile…in Colorado I guess there’s a road with this name.

You had one job label maker.

Remember…watch out for the bad one.

Cyas.

Clearly…it’s a sign that 19 year old teenagers should not be allowed to be Presidential electors…members of the Electoral College.

This isn’t really political…I’m just trying to understand this.

Secretary Clinton carried the state of Oregon by 53% to 37%…and hence the Democratic Party chosen electors will be voting next month when the Electoral College. That’s fine.

However…I saw an article today on Yahoo News…about this 19 year announcing that he’s going to be the 7th faithless elector in this election…or at least the 7th who’s publicly announced he will do so.

Now Oregon electors are legally bound to vote for who they’re supposed to vote for…but this moron has decided to ignore that and pay whatever fine is associated with being a faithless elector.

It would be perfectly understandable…I would do it but I could understand the logic at least…if he was a Republican elector who refused to vote for his party’s nominee.

That isn’t the case though. He’s announced that…instead of voting for Secretary Clinton as he’s legally bound to do…he’s going to vote for a different Republican for President as a protest vote against Mr. Trump.

Now I’m only a bear of course…and obviously not very smart, that’s Kara’s domain…but I can’t figure out how not voting for Secretary Clinton and voting for a different Republican as a protest vote against Mr. Trump…well that doesn’t make a lick o’ sense at all. Nope…not a lick.

We’re continuing our approach to just doing nothing this winter…Elks a couple nights a week for Bingo, chicken or fish, or Fun Night…but that’s about it. Tomorrow we’re headed out for lunch for Connie’s birthday…she’s gonna be the big Social Security eligible number…but we’re not doing much else. Seeing our friend Jeff, visited with other friends Dennis and Janet who arrived from Indianapolis today and just mostly moseying along.

On to interesting stuff.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this one before…it’s a bow on comparison of the RMS Titanic…the largest passenger liner launched at the time…with the Princess of the Sea of today’s liner fleet…and it’s not the largest cruise liner currently in use. Simply mind boggling.

Seems the movie Wizard of Oz was being broadcast on some channel recently…this is the synopsis of the film as listed in the TV listings in the paper.

In Minnesota…the two photos below were taken…two, count ‘em two…days apart last week (late November).

Some guy wandering through the woods found…or maybe staged…this one…but it looks really cool like the tree base is glowing.

Meanwhile…I guess it’s really dry in Tennessee…where the was the wildfire in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge this week.

And the best one of the week…no, I haven’t seen the cat, why?

Cyas.

The weather the first day was way better…

I keep telling myself to just let it go…but then I see idiots saying stupid things…and I just canna help m’self as Scottie used to say. I was soooo hopin’ that after the election was over we could go back to seeing tweets about computers, eagles, or anything else but politics. Seems to be a forlorn hope though…

Before I get into all of that…good news on the Eagle front down here. Harriet and her new beau M15 returned to the nesting site in September and have been doing nesting things for the last couple of months. Along with that…there was the requisite amount of wild eagle sex…which is mostly pretty boring to watch as he just sits on top of her for 15 seconds and it’s over…but apparently according to the blog this happened multitudinous times. Anyways…Harriet laid her first egg of the season on 11/22 at 1703 and is currently incubating it. If history holds there should be another egg by Friday or Saturday of this week. I’ll keep ya posted.

First up…I keep seeing articles on various news sites talking about the popular vote…and how Secretary Clinton’s popular vote is 600,000, then 1.1 Million, now 2 Million, and who knows what it will get up to next.

I keep asking myself…what do these morons not understand about how the Constitution and Presidential elections work…it’s right there in black and white (well, black and yellowed parchment actually but I digress) that THE POPULAR VOTE DOES NOT MATTER in Presidential elections. Simple…we’ve got the Electoral College and there is zero possibility that anything even remotely related to the popular vote will change this other than amending the Constitution. 

I don’t recall protests in the streets when President Obama was elected and reelected…and I don’t recall too many Republicans carrying signs saying “Not My President” after those elections either. Sure…there was a little grousing and even some cross the line comments from morons…but the majority of Republicans accepted the result and moved on. Sure…Congress didn’t pass many of his policies and wants…but then it was a Republican controlled body for the most part of his 2 terms…and the simple fact is that Republicans and Democrats have different wants and policies and each body (legislative and executive) pushed for the polices they wanted. Now I personally would think that they should compromise and each get some of what they want…you know, like they used to do back in the days when politicians tried to be statesmen and lead instead of bicker…but control of both of our parties have been seized by the far left and far right respectively…and for them it’s my way or the highway. (I really wish we could go back to the days when the White House and the Majority and Minority Leaders of both houses sat down and figured out a way to move the country forward with nobody getting everything they wanted and each side accepting some things they were against…that’s called negotiation and compromise…but again I digress.)

Now I’ll admit…it’s not all Democrats…and not even all liberals…that are saying this. There are a goodly number of progressive political people, commentators, talking heads, party strategists and the like that keep saying “Move on…we lost.” They’re trying to analyze why she lost and there again a goodly number of those aforementioned people who are saying “it’s not Comey, the election wasn’t rigged, the campaigns would have been completely different on both sides if it was a popular vote election…but it’s not so just move on, analyze what went wrong, and try again in four years.

Secondly…there’s all this hue and cry from the liberals who are NOT in the aforementioned groups with common sense…about alt-right, Nazi salutes and the like. Saw one yesterday about some white supremacist guy who gave the Nazi salute at a convention of like mentioned far right wing wackos. That was a valid headline…but then the angry liberals piled on and I saw numerous posts about how if you didn’t recognize how wrong this was you were either with them or in denial about a “grave crisis”. Then it turned out that there were 275…that’s, right…less than 300 people…at this convention and it’s just a fringe group. Didn’t see any of the angry liberals spouting that little fact…just calling all Trump supporters white racists…or -obic-ists as Neil says for being whatever -obic and -ists as the liberals claim. They simply cannot comprehend why those ignorant deplorables clinging to their religion and guns (to borrow words from some recent Democrats) are such -obic and -ists that they didn’t vote for her. They’re obviously racists…every darned one of them…even though most of his supporters were likely voting against her and her sleazy behavior over the years rather than for him.

Thirdly…I now see that Jill Stein is asking for a recount in WI and PA which both went for Mr. Trump and in MI which hasn’t been called yet but he’s leading there. The reason for this recount is that a statistician found “serious discrepancies in her vote totals” in WI…but not in the other two states.

Now this statistician investigated the vote totals in counties in WI that used paper scanned ballots and those that used electronic voting machines. She got 7% fewer votes in counties with electronic machines. The Democratic machine immediately concluded that the sole and only reason for these discrepancies was that the machines were “hacked”. The statistician came out later and disagreed with their conclusion…he said that merely there was a difference and it may possibly have been due to hacking or any of a dozen other reasons.

The guys from fivethirtyeight.com…which is a non-partisan site…well they say that it’s actually demographic differences that are more likely for those vote differences based on their analysis. Now there’s been no evidence of hacking uncovered…but the Democrats who want the recount in WI have concluded that the most definitely hacked electronic voting machines would have given her 30,000 more votes if they had been paper ballots…and since she lost by 27,000 votes she clearly would have carried WI except for the voting fraud engineered by the Russians, Republicans, alt-right people, or the vast right wing conspiracy. No idea how many votes they’ll claim to have been not counted in PA or MI…but surely it will be enough for her to have carried all 3 of those states and hence the EC.

So I’m asking myself…just what do these people expect to happen. A recount…which is what Jill Stein has asked for…will just count the existing votes again in WI…and this very rarely changes an outcome. So Mr. Trump still carries WI in that case. Now there’s this “audit” of the electronic voting machines that the Democratic machine wants…I’m not sure exactly how you audit an electronic voting machine…and I’m not sure why you wouldn’t also audit the paper ballots except that Mr. Trump won by larger margins in those counties…but suppose they find some ironclad evidence that 100% of those electronic voting machines were “hacked” by…well let’s just call them The Bogeyman. I’m pretty sure that this evidence wont’ be forthcoming…there will be no real evidence of fraud but there won’t be any evidence of non-fraud either as you simply can’t prove a negative…it ain’t happenin’.

So anyway…assuming they find this proof…how does she get any more votes? They’re claiming 30,000…but based on what…just voting differences from different counties with different demographics. That would be like the Republicans claiming that because Mr. Trump won by 25 percentage points or whatever the number was in SD that clearly any results that favored Secretary Clinton were the result of more of this alleged “hacking”. Obviously…as any moron should be able to understand…different states, counties, urban vs suburban vs rural, racial or ethnic makeup of the local population, economic status of the local population…well those account for differences in the outcome of things like elections since each of those demographic differences just might have the slightest possibility of influencing how that particular social/economic/racial/whatever person might vote.

Sheesh. To quote our current POTUS…elections have consequences. Get over it. 

Ok, on to more interesting stuff.

Our friend Ray sent us this little test yesterday…it’s a simple, fool-proof method of determining whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or Southerner.

OK, here’s the question for you.

You’re walking down a deserted street with your wife
and two small children.
Suddenly, a Terrorist with a huge knife
comes around the corner,
locks eyes with you,
screams obscenities,
raises the knife, and charges at you…
You are carrying a
Kimber 1911 cal. 45 ACP, and you are an expert shot.
You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family.
What do you do?
THINK CAREFULLY AND
THEN SCROLL DOWN:

Here’s an image to look at while you’re considering your answer.

Bit specific there, eh?

OK, here are the answers that let you determine what you are.

Democrat’s Answer:
·Well, that’s not enough information to answer the question!
·What is a Kimber 1911 cal. 45 ACP?
·Does the man look poor or oppressed?
·Is he really a terrorist? Am I guilty of profiling?
·Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?
·Could we run away?
·What does my wife think?
·What about the kids?
·Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand?
·What does the law say about this situation?
·Does the pistol have an appropriate safety built into it?
·Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message does this send to society and to my children?
·Is it possible he’d be happy with just killing me?
·Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?
·If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he was stabbing me?
·Should I call 9-1-1?
·Why is this street so deserted?
·We need to raise taxes, have paint & weed day.
·Can we make this a happier, healthier street that would discourage such behavior.
·I need to debate this with some friends for a few days and try to come to a consensus.
·This is all so confusing!

………… ……… ……… ……… ……… …….. ……… ……… …
Republican’s Answer:
BANG!

………… ……… ……… …….. ……… ……… ……… ……

Southerner’s Answer:
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
BANG ! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Click….. (Sounds of reloading)
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Click
Daughter: ‘Nice grouping, Daddy!’
‘Were those the WinchesterSilver Tips or Hollow Points?!
Son: ‘Can I shoot the next one?!’
Wife: ‘You are NOT taking that to a Taxidermist!

Here’s a shot of our new microwave in the rig…we burned up the old one. Many thanks to our friend Jeff for providing more arms to lift it into place.

This seems about right…

That’s it for today…ya’ll all have a happy turkey day with your families, friends, significant others, wives (and may the latter two never meet). We’ll be not having turkey ‘round these parts…steaks and grilled ‘shrooms on the barbie for us along with some French bread with roasted garlic and roasted carrots and rosemary taters. Jeff’s in charge of dessert…some sort of cake he’s baking we think but we changed our minds on dinner twice already so who knows what he’ll actually show up with. We got a bottle of Pinot Noir to go along with dinner and a bottle of this excellent Port Wine made in Alaska that we picked up summer before last to go along with what the Brits would call “afters”.

We’re starting to get revved up to go and visit grand baby Alex early next month for his 2nd birthday…well Connie is anyway…Neil will get revved up when we’re on the road there. 

Before I get to that…let me tell ya about yesterday. Nov 20 is Neil and Connie’s anniversary and yesterday was their 40th. We saw something on the internet early yesterday morning that said that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were married on Nov 20 back in 1947. When Connie told Neil that…he told her that the Queen had chosen a most appropriate wedding day. So…Connie tweeted about it and…at least according to Neil…she went viral. She’s got 239 Likes so far and 16 retweets…imagine “Sooo many likes” if you’ve seen the recent Geico commercial on TV with the Amelia Earhart character.

One of them was this soap opera star from a show that Connie used to watch back in college…she and the actress had 3 or 4 tweets back and forth about our anniversary and how cute the Alex munchkin in her avatar is.

So…enough of that. Today we headed down to get Connie’s FL drivers license…finally got the form last week and she was successful and is now a fully licensed and insured FL driver and voter. Tried to do Big Red as well…still waiting on the title to get here from SD so we’ve still got SD tags on him at this point. Insurance company is fine with that but we’re going out of FL on Dec 8 so hopefully it comes in before then or else we’ll have to get a temporary FL tag just in case. We did resolve an issue they had with our insurance coverage and whether we needed this extra form based on weight…they aren’t interested in the total trailer weight but just the weight of the truck and the portion of the trailer that sits on the truck hitch…this is only 17,000 pounds or so and we’re well within the limit of 26,000 where the extra paperwork is needed.

We also picked up our new microwave/exhaust hood to replace the one that burned up a couple of weeks ago…Neil put the bracket up this afternoon and our friend Jeff is coming down in the morning to help them live it up and put the final couple of screws in to get it mounted.

We’re continuing to march forward on getting our address changed at all the places it needs to be changed…our FL address is in effect and most everybody has been notified.

Nothing much else going on…we’re having Jeff down for Turkey day dinner…but we’re eating steaks and not turkey.

On to interesting stuff.

I don’t know who this dog belongs to or why he’s banned from the park…but he looks like a lot of fun to me.

To steal/paraphrase a line from the movie Jaws…he’s gonna need a bigger pump.

Simply fabulous…if he could speak he would be saying “My humans are assholes.”

It’s not just any biscuit now…

One of the few election related supposedly funny things we’ve seen that’s actually humorous.

Gotta wonder what’s going on at Dillard’s here.

The least missing cat…ever.

And finally…we thought that damn boat would never sink in the movie.

Cyas.

Warning…this post concerns civics…not politics.

Or is it just a matter of a lot of people failing high school civics lessons?

Or is it a matter of millennial who’ve been brought up that everybody gets a trophy whining?

Or something else entirely…I just can’t figure out what the heck is wrong with people.

Let me say this this is not a political post. I could give a rat’s ass who you voted for in the election last week. This country is a constitutional federal republic…not a democracy as many may think…and it’s your right to vote for the candidate of your choice on Election Day. What isn’t your right is to attempt to change the outcome because you don’t like it. What isn’t your right is to demand that the Constitution be changed illegally just because you don’t like what it says…there’s a way to amend the Constitution…see below…but any fool should know that rioting in the streets ain’t it.

Around these parts…we were a house divided. I ain’t telling ya who voted for who since it’s a secret…let’s just leave it at “it weren’t unanimous”.

Now before you get going and say that Bush vs Gore was an attempt to change the outcome of an election…it wasn’t. It was using the state mandated procedures for close elections to conduct a recount and the rules for deciding whether a recount was required/optional and when/how said recount starts, stops or ends and how it’s conducted.

So…this democracy thing. A democracy is where the population gets together town meeting hall style and votes. Back in ancient times…Athens had one. Rome didn’t for much the same reasons the US doesn’t. In more modern times…a pure democracy is just no longer feasible as nations became too large and the population too spread out with slow/limited communications for that to work. Yeah…we’ve got the internet today but communications was not the primary reason for abandoning a pure democracy. The founding fathers were also a bit worried about using a popular vote because (a) it was pretty uncommon for large countries back when the US Constitution was adopted and (b) they were concerned that landowners…basically the aristocracy…might get their interests outvoted by the uneducated masses numerical advantage.

So…the founding fathers established the Electoral College instead…with proportional representation based on each state’s population and left the selection of the electors up to the states. Back in the day…they were appointed by the state but in more recent times the electors are elected by voting for candidate A or candidate B (or C) for President. Granted the Electoral College concept might have some disadvantages…but it was a compromise at the time and the founding fathers thought it was the best way forward.

Anyways…we had the election the other day and according to the tally Mr. Trump has an Electoral College majority over Secretary Clinton…and hence he and not she is the President Elect. Our current President and Secretary Clinton have accepted this fact. In fact…76% of her supporters according to a Gallup poll released yesterday have accepted the outcome as legitimate.

Given all that…what’s with these morons.

As I write this…over 3 million votes have been placed on a petition at change.org calling on the Electoral College to disregard the outcome of the election and elect Secretary Clinton as President instead of Mr. Trump.

There are numerous problems with this…first off it’s completely unknown how many of those votes come from US citizens and how many come from foreigners who have none/zero/zilch say in elections in the US of A. Second…it’s not gonna happen anyway…members of the Electoral College are almost exclusively chosen by their respective political parties and the likelihood of say Democratic electors in states that the Secretary carried voting for Mr. Trump is about as vanishingly small as the opposite. Second…the results of the Electoral College vote have to be accepted by the Congress…and with Mr. Trump’s party holding majorities in both houses both before and after the election…well, this ain’t happening either.

Then there are those 10s or 100s of thousands depending on who’s doing the counting…and it might be claimed to be millions by this afternoon…who are demonstrating in then streets calling for a change in the outcome and carrying signs that say “Not My President”.

Well…again…there are numerous problems with this.

First and foremost…it’s not right. We had an election…he won…and it’s time to move on. Believe it or not…after Bush/Gore and after Obama/McCain and Obama/Romney…the sun still came up the next day for those on the losing side…and Western Civilization as we know it didn’t come to an end. Sure…there were a minority of citizens who carried on about silly stuff…but for the majority of our citizens the winner became our President even though we may or may not have agreed with his policies. There weren’t demonstrations in the streets by tree huggers after Gore lost…and there weren’t demonstrations in the streets by caucasian folks after McCain and Romney lost. Even around our house…and we most definitely didn’t vote for our current President…still recognized President Obama as the leader of our great nation. We lost and we moved on.

I’ve been seeing the protestors in the streets on the news…and the vast majority of them appear to be what would be called Millennials…a generation brought up by helicopter parents who insisted in no winners and no losers…and everybody got a trophy even if it’s for best T-shirt. Heck…even Connie and Neil’s human kid got them for various and assorted things while he was growing up…but he was taught at home that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose…and that you get over it and try harder next time. I wonder how many of those protesting morons actually voted last week…or did they just stay home until their candidate lost…too interested in their cell phones to get off their lazy asses and go to the voting station.

Do they not understand how elections work? Do they not understand how the Constitution works? Do they think they should get their way just because they say so? The Electoral College and the Presidential election process are the law of the land as specified by the Constitution ratified in 1788…and there is no, repeat no, repeat ZERO possibility that demanding that Congress pass a law overturning the Electoral College can change the Constitution…or that the results will change simply because you want them to. It ain’t like college campuses where at the presence of a few signs the administration will buckle and institute safe places or trigger words that can’t be uttered on campus.

Secretary Clinton is…as of this writing…in the lead in the national popular vote by about 600,000 votes…thus the strident claims by demonstrators that she “won” the popular vote and deserves to be elected by the electoral college. Turns out though…that she may or may not have actually won the popular vote. She does currently lead in the counted popular vote but not necessarily in the cast popular vote. There are about 7 million absentee ballots which have not been counted at all…this is because states don’t bother counting absentee ballots unless there are more absentee ballots than the difference in the election day vote totals. If there aren’t enough absentee ballots to change the results…they don’t get counted. Now historically…most absentee ballots are cast by members of the military and their families…and historically absentee ballots tend to break about 2/3 Republican and 1/3 Democrat. If all of these ballots were counted and the historical averages were attained…Mr. Trump would pick up about 4.7 million votes and Secretary Clinton about 2.3 million votes…an he would be leading in the popular vote. Since the federal government has no power to require states to count all votes cast absentee or otherwise…election procedures are left to the states by the constitution…it’s clear that we really don’t know who won the popular vote.

None of this popular vote nonsense matters though…the electoral college system comes straight out of the constitution and isn’t easily changed. The founding fathers deliberately set it up so that it’s hard to change the constitution…to prevent the whims of a few or a temporarily popular idea to become part of the constitution.

Their human kid…and many others…characterize the constitution as a moldy, outdated 250 year old piece of paper that shouldn’t be paid attention to…it should mean what we want it to mean instead of what it says. Those of earlier generations…particularly those with military service who swore an oath to it…have different ideas about the validity of the constitution.

For those of you who might have failed (or slept through) high school Civics class…there is one and only one process for amending the US Constitution. Again…this was a compromise back in 1787…but it’s served us pretty well through the years and it’s frankly amazing that the concepts in a 200+ year old document are still relevant today and haven’t been overcome by technical and technology innovations.

First…an amendment must be proposed by either a 2/3 vote in both houses of congress…thats’s 67 Senators and 290 Representatives…or they can be proposed by a Constitutional Convention which must be called for by 2/3 of all state legislatures…that’s 34 states since the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other territories ain’t states. 

Second…the proposed amendment must be approved by either the legislature or a state ratifying convention in at least 3/4 of the states…that’s 38 states.

Third…well, there is no step 3 and there is no other process by which the electoral college can be abolished…although I suppose there could be a constitutional amendment to change the rules for constitutional amendments…but that amendment would have to be ratified by the old process before it took effect. Or there’s that whole let’s have another Constitutional Convention, toss the old one out and write a new one idea…but yeah, that probably ain’t gonna happen either.

Now what about this whole “popular vote—will of the people—majority rules” thing. While I can agree that at least theoretically this has might be a better idea and it does have some valid points…the Electoral College is still the best way to proceed in my view. It’s for different reasons than envisioned by the founding fathers…but at least in my thoughts the reasons are valid and should overrule the single popular vote concept.

The biggest reason that it should remain is that elimination of the Electoral College would basically eliminate and disenfranchise the voters in small states and concentrate the electing power of the people in the hands of large cities. For example…let’s consider New York City. Like most large cities…NYC over the years has become a Democratic stronghold because the policies of that political party tend to favor large cities and their inhabitants. Places like Idaho tend to be Republican for the same reason. Let’s consider population…NYC has 9 million people and while not all of them are voters the numbers are easier to figure out than eligible voters. Idaho has 1.6 million people and is the 39th largest state by population. In fact…you have to add up the 10 smallest states by population to be approximately equal to NYC. Now add in LA, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Washington DC, Houston, etc and you can what going with a strict popular vote would do.

No national candidate would…ever again…bother to campaign in New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, either Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, or Wyoming (those are the 10 smallest population states) because it simply wouldn’t matter…campaigning in NYC and Philadelphia would get more votes. As a practical matter…they would campaign in NH, ME, RI, DE and VT since they’re in the northeast and are relatively small so it’s not hard to go there while you’re in the NYC or Philadelphia area.

Now personally…I think that it would be fairer for states to allocate electoral votes based on the same method that Nebraska and Maine do…the state popular winner gets the 2 electoral votes based on Senate seats and the others based on House districts are awarded based on the popular winner in that district. That seems fairer to me…and close in concept to a popular vote election. I’ve got no idea how this would have changed last week’s election…haven’t seen anything on it on the web and I don’t have enough interest to figure it out myself…but go ahead and do it if you want as the numbers are all out there in the internet and let me know in the comments. Me…that would cut into my beer drinking time:-)

I ain’t gonna say that there aren’t conflicting opinions that support going to a popular vote for the Presidential election…but see above if you want to change it. Again…follow the process.

In summary…I’m appalled not by the outcome of the election…after all it’s an election and by definition there’s a winner and a loser…but I am appalled by the outrage being expressed and by the demands to overturn it because “my candidate didn’t win”. I wouldn’t be appalled if Secretary Clinton was the winner either.

Bunch of whining assholes if ya ask me…they need to sit down and shut up…and maybe vote next time in the hope that their candidate will win. Seems like we’ve reared and educated an entire generation of me first whiners who don’t know the first damn thing about how government works, think they should be handed 100K+ salaries just because and have to go to their safe place whenever anything mildly controversial is said. What happened to going to college to be challenged intellectually, having reasoned but polite discourse/debate, and learning that something other than your particular viewpoint not only exists but is a good thing. 

Speaking of “the process”…how about the Alabama Crimson Tide yesterday. Both the offense and defense did their jobs and they came out with a run away win and clinched the SEC Western division when Auburn lost to Georgia later in the evening. We’re in the SEC Championship in Atlanta regardless of the outcome of the Iron Bowl two weeks hence…but the Tide will rightly be favored in that game. They might lose…after all it’s the biggest game of the year in the state and the clearly “superior” team has lost many times through the years. That’s why they play the game of course…any given team on any given Saturday and all that. Georgia is now coached by Kirby Smart who was the defensive coordinator under Nick Saban for many years at Alabama…he’s been completely Saban-ized over the years and his defense is starting to look remarkably similar to Alabama’s and the offense is trusted to not make mistakes and score enough points to win.

***Added this below later on**

Found out some more stuff that I thought was applicable to my discussion above later on…decided to just add on rather than edit what I originally said.

The following states contain more than 50% of the US population in total…NY, CA, FL, and TX. Do we really want those 4 states to control elections?

Concerning the possibility of an amendment to change the Electoral College to popular vote…even if Congress approved the amendment for submission to the states…if 13 states vote against it then it’s not going to be ratified. There are 15 states with 5 or less electoral votes…it’s hard to see any of those states voting to dilute their national election significance.

Another illustration of the 50% of population and concentration idea. The blue areas on this map contain in total >50% of the US population. Should those small areas be allowed to overrule the remaining 95% of the country’s landmass?

Here’s the Trump/Clinton voting map broken down by congressional district. Note how it almost duplicates the above population map.

What these two images really show is that large city populations as shown in the one above tend to vote Democratic. Rural and non urban areas tend to vote Republican. This isn’t because the rural/non-urban people are deplorable…and it’s not because the inner city residents are minority or poor. It’s because different segments of the population want different things. Poorer people in the cities want more social safety nets and what Republicans would call social giveaway programs. Rural/non-urban want the government to mostly stay out of their business and not do what Democrats would call social responsibility and Republicans call redistribution of wealth. Redistribution of wealth is what normally happens under socialism or communism…and we’ve seen how well that works out. The USSR failed miserably…and while socialist states like Denmark/Norway/Sweden are doing reasonably well…their tax burdens are large and driven by Robin Hood-ism…take from the rich and give to the poor. Not so sure how well that’s working either.

OK…on to interesting stuff.

Most apropos for a post election week post.

Second most appropriate…I’m going with the Founding Fathers and the 99.8 million who didn’t bother to exercise their voting rights…you don’t get to complain about the rules if you’re not playing the game.

Please join Millennial International and sponsor a millennial today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGvrmltfMrA&sns=em

Where baby airplanes come from.

This totally needs to happen.

Anybody ever had Amazon do this to their purchases…we have. Bubble wrapped bubble wrap.

I can get behind this sign.

Poor Fido.

Cyas.