Wow, this is creepy. Last night Trump tweeted that he and the first lady tested positive for Coronavirus, and today I’m finishing up the book “Rage” and Bob Woodward asks Trump in the book if he’s worried about contracting the virus and he said “No, I’m not concerned about getting it. It doesn’t bother me.” He explained how they had a meeting with a room full of people at the White House recently and someone sneezed. Everyone immediately fled from the room, including Trump.

The last three hours of the book focuses on the outbreak from the very beginning up until recently, before the book was published. Trump kept referring to it (and still does) as “The China Virus.” He should change that now, to “The Trump Virus.” He likes to have his name on everything, why not?

Some more takeaways from “RAGE”, the book about Trump by Bob Woodward:  

I need to read “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a world where facts don’t matter” by Scott Adams. This will help understand the Trump administration.  Yes, it’s by THAT Scott Adams – the one who wrote or writes the Dilbert comic strip!  This book was recommended by Jared Kushner, Trump’s Senior Advisor.  Trump is also his father-in-law.  Go figure.  He had several sources of information for anyone who wants to better understand the Trump Administration, and this book was one of them.  I listened to the excerpt on Audible and the book is read by Scott Adams, the author himself, and it sounded really interesting, so I bought it and added it to my reading/listening list.

Kushner also said Alice in Wonderland is a guiding text for the Trump Administration! The Cheshire cat said “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” His strategy is one of endurance and persistence, not direction.  That’s pretty wild.  But now I want to watch Alice in Wonderland again. LOL.

Based on all of Kushner’s recommendations, Bob Woodward said Trump is: Crazy, Aimless, Stubborn, and Manipulative.  That pretty much sums it up.

One thing that worries me is the fact that no other POTUS in history has gotten me as interested in how our government works (or doesn’t work) than Trump has.  I never bought political books before.  Of course you could actually put these books in the categories of comedy, dark humor, and tragedy too, I suppose.  They are probably a lot more entertaining than any straight-up political book would be to me though.  They’re definitely keeping me plenty busy as I try to get through all of them before November.

I was in the drive-thru lane at a very popular fast-food restaurant for lunch yesterday. I know, tsk tsk Jim, I erased a few recent walks. Anyway, I’m in a nice short line for a change–usually the line is all the way around the building at the time I go to lunch–so this was nice to see. There were two cars ahead of me. I get one car away from ordering and the guy in front of me turns off his car and opens his door and starts trying to order:

” A sausage muffin with egg…” he begins…

The employee says “I’m sorry sir, we’re on the lunch menu now.”

“OK, Two hashbrowns…”

She repeats the same thing she said before.

“Dang! Y’all ain’t got nothin’ I want then! How about…” He looks over the menu and asks something else I couldn’t quite hear, and she responds to him again, giving him another response he didn’t like. And again, and again, back and forth.

She apologizes, he stammers a bit more, then finally angrily says “Alright then!” , slams his door, and drives out of the drive-thru.

This all seemed to take longer than when there’s usually a line of customers around the building waiting to order. Very frustrating, and it ate up half of my lunch hour.

PS: The fake Trump-Biden debate on The Howard Stern Show that I listened to during my lunch break yesterday was much more entertaining than the real debate last night, which was a real Fustercluck.

Wow. You spell that kind of debate “DEBACLE”. What a mess.

And this one I posted on Facebook the other day: https://photos.app.goo.gl/m6YER49tK1mJAoXb6 – Our yard, after Matt pruned the backyard tree and Sandy and I cleaned up all of the branches and leaves.

Those are hosted on Google Photos in their original size – 9000 x 12000, or 108 megapixels. I love the detail when you zoom in, I just wish my website could handle this image size. I was able to modify my php.ini file to accept up to 120 meg file sizes, which I assumed would be fine, since the Halloween photo above was the largest of the two photos, at 47mb. It uploaded to WordPress just fine, but then failed the “Post-processing,” whatever that is. A script or something ran out of memory. It’s probably the script that generates smaller versions of the same image for WordPress to use as thumbnails or for mobile viewing.

Either way, it still isn’t able to complete the upload process, so I can’t get photos this large to display on my website. It’s also pretty inconvenient to display them in their full size. Every app and browser I have viewed them in so far always wants to display it much smaller (and clearer) that its real size, but I want to be able to easily view them at 100% to see the detail. FastStone image viewer does a pretty decent job, but you have to first download the photo to your computer, then open it to view it in an app.

I was hoping to be able to have a user just click on a photo on my website and view it in whatever size they want to. Apparently that’s not so easy to do. Or it’s not very practical. I guess that makes sense. I sure like looking at the detail of these at 100% though. I can see just how much detail is (and isn’t) actually there. And I can see just how fuzzy and shaky my photography skills really are too. I need to try these with a tripod. Wow, I can imagine how much better they’d be that way. Probably no difference you could tell really, until you zoomed in to 100% like I mentioned.

Waiting for kickoff for the Packers game in about 40 minutes… Just got back from walking the dogs another mile and it starting pouring out during our home stretch for the last block! The dogs came in pretty energetic and are tearing through the house chasing each other right now… I think they’re trying to air dry! They hate the rain, but I guess their walks out-rank the rain, so they still seemed to enjoy the entire walk.

Been playing with my phone’s 108 megapixel photos lately. Just took a photo of someone’s nice front yard decorations, but my website won’t allow the upload of a 47mb photo! I can compress and resize it, sure, but when you’re trying to show off the niceness of a 108 megapixel camera, the detail is kinda the point. It’ll be here soon, don’t you worry. I’ll figure out how to increase the file size limit on my site, or I’ll cheat and upload it to my site another way. Somehow I’m going to get it here, dammit!

During Kenosha’s riots the streaming scanner app I had used and relied on for years let me down when the person who was hosting the scanner stream for Kenosha Police & Fire apparently got banned for streaming Kenosha’s tactical police channels. Apparently this is a bannable offense, so the stream was permanently removed. I have no doubt the criminal element in Kenosha were using the same scanner stream (maybe even with a different scanner app–many scanner apps use the same streams from one very popular stream host.

So right in the middle of everything I was cut off, no longer able to listen the the local police and fire radio traffic. I grew up with scanners all my life. My dad got me into them when I was a kid. He bought many police scanners over the years and we listened to them constantly, learning the ’10’ codes and all the jargon, just as we did with CB Radios. Anyway, Kenosha Police went digital a while back and it was (and still is) very expensive to purchase a digital scanner, but awhile after they went digital, smart phones started to come out with “apps”, and that’s when I found a decent “scanner” app that streamed thousands of different scanner radios all around the world. It was an amazing option too, because even if you weren’t in a particular listening area you could still stream that scanner radio, since it streamed over the Internet. There just had to still be one person who could afford to own and stream their scanner to the scanner streaming service, then the various scanner apps would include it in their listings.

So this was great, and it actually lasted for years until they finally cracked down on the Kenosha scanner stream and had it removed and banned. I’m sure the authorities–maybe even the government, once they became involved with bringing in the National Guard–had a lot to do with the crack-down and getting it quickly removed.

I brooded for a few days, then decided I had to solve the problem once and for all and get a scanner again. A real scanner, not another streaming app. I knew only a real scanner would provide true scanning functionality that I had remembered, but I didn’t know much about the technology of it these days. I only knew that you still had to be within a short distance to be able to pick up radio signals from transmissions in your particular area.

I found out quickly that the technology had evolved far beyond what I had experienced as a kid. “Crystals” were a thing of the ancient past. These plug-in (solder-in if you’re really old-school) crystals were tuned in to one specific frequency–for example “Kenosha Police Channel 1”, so plugging that into a 16-channel scanner gave you access to listen to that channel whenever your scanner checked whatever crystal slot you had that crystal plugged into. Your 16-channel scanner could scan 16 different channels quickly, and stop when someone was talking on one of those channels. You’d have to purchase a crystal for each frequency you wanted to listed to.

As scanners evolved when I was young, they would release scanners with more and more channel slots and crystals evolved to be easier and cheaper to purchase, and eventually crystals became a thing of the past, and you could but scanners with 500 or even 1,000 channels in large groups or “banks” of channels in which you could simply enter a frequency you knew and save it in one of the channel slots that the scanner had. You could also “search” a frequency range to find a particular channel, then lock that into a channel slot, which made things a little easier than manually entering each channel frequency. You can imagine the kind of patience it took to program several hundred local channels into a scanner to be able to use it effectively. But that was the technology, so we did that. Or I should say “I” did that. For my dad, many times, on various scanners throughout the years. I found it fun, and fascinating.

That was probably roughly 30-35 years ago, so you can imagine how far things have evolved up to this point. So here we go. I knew I needed a digital scanner, but that’s about it. What type of digital scanner, I had no idea. So I researched it. The Internet provided everything I was looking for at a head-spinning pace, as usual. I narrowed my search down to a few scanners that most knowledgeable enthusiasts highly recommended, so I read the reviews and watched the videos on each of them. I then narrowed it down to one scanner that looked just amazing, but Amazon was sold out of them, so I tried Google to see if it was available elsewhere. I found a Ham Radio store with outlets nationwide that had plenty of them, and their Milwaukee store had them in stock, so I took a trip up there and grabbed one. The storefront wasn’t actually open, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they offered customers the option to order products on their website or over the phone, then you could pick it your order at their warehouse entrance by driving up and calling them when you’re at the door. They bring your order right to your car (as long as you wear a mask), so you don’t even have to get out. I was there picking up my scanner about 90 minutes after I placed my order.

Right from the start I was floored. I purchased a hand-held scanner so I can listen to it anywhere. I always did love the handheld models when I was younger. Having watched the videos and read the reviews, I knew what I wanted to try instantly too, before even leaving the store’s parking lot–Location-Based Scanning. I installed the battery, attached the antenna and power it on. I went directly to “ZIP Services” and entered my zip code. It instantly started scanning every channel within my zip code that it had in its database–and it’s a huge database, updated online weekly with millions of frequencies for every state in the US and every area of Canada. (I also found out recently that you need an actual license/permit to own and use a scanner in Canada). After entering my ZIP code it immediately started scanning all Kenosha-area frequencies and picking up very clear broadcasts–from the Kenosha area–while I was still at the store in Milwaukee. I was amazed and drove home happy.

I quickly found a “Record” feature I didn’t realize it had, turned it on, and decided I’d just leave it on all the time. Why not record everything, so even if something happens and I miss it, I can go back and experience it again, from the recordings! It came with a 8GB microSD card, but can support up to a 32GB card, so I bought one of those and upgraded it within a couple days of purchasing it.

So that was just over a month ago, in the midst of all of Kenosha’s riots, looting and destruction. The other day I just learned that it has a limit of holding 1,000 “conversations” when I hit that limit and it displayed a message on its display telling me it is unable to record anything more, so recording has been disabled. I’m still trying to determine exactly what a “conversation” consists of.  It has exactly 1,000 folders, all with slightly different names, containing what seems to be a short period of time when the scanner was active, recording transmissions.  This includes multiple channels.  I guess it’s just whatever the scanner captured during that period of time.  So in those 1,000 folders there are a total of 97,892 recordings.  Some folders only have a few files while others have many files.  It varies quite a bit.  The total of all of those files in 5.04GB, so I guess 8GB of storage (the amount it comes with) probably would be plenty.  I guess this means I probably don’t really need the 32GB card I upgraded it to, unless it will allow me to store more database information in addition to the recordings, or maybe it will allow more recordings in the future with an update…?  There must be a reason they allow you to upgrade it to 32GB.

Those 97,892 recordings cover all of Kenosha’s channels that are in the scanner database, recorded 24/7, from 08/29/2020 to 09/23/2020 – Pretty close to a whole month.  I think that’s pretty good. I’ve been playing several of the recordings and groups of recordings in some of the folders. I’ll have to post some here when I find some really interesting ones.

One thing that impressed me was the use to Exif data in the scanner recording file details. Standard file detail fields such as “Title”, “Contributing Artists” and “Album” are filled to details like “Police Dispatch”, “Kenosha”, and “BCDx36HP” respectively. These are specific to the channel it recorded in that file, which can make it very each to locate a specific recording by its details, or it it can be very handy when playing back a list of files if you can display those details in whatever audio player you’re using.

In the end I must admit I’m impressed with how far scanner tech has come and I’m very happy I got back into it. I probably wouldn’t have taken the plunge if I hadn’t been pushed into it by the current state of affairs in Kenosha though.

I started walking again last night.  I don’t know what it is that makes me stop, but I just totally lose my motivation to walk for periods of time, then my health slowly gets worse.  I feel a little better already.  And the dogs, well I think they are elated.  They enjoy their walks immensely and just go crazy when I ask them be either saying one of the keyboards (walk, leash, or the pacman sound ‘wokawokawoka’) or by showing them their harnesses.  This, alone, should give me the motivation I need to take a walk daily, but I still just make excuses to myself with other things I need to get done, or “I did this today, so that should add enough exercise for the day”, or one of a hundred other things come up to give me a reason not to walk.  I even have a “desk treadmill” complete with a PC so I can watch whatever I want while I’m walking when there’s bad weather.  No excuses.  I just have to make it a priority, that’s all.  Going a month or two without a single walk is no longer acceptable and will kill me.  I need to keep telling myself that.  I have gained back the weight I worked a long time to lose, so now I start all over again.  Hopefully, telling myself this in a web post, to the world, will somehow help and encourage me to be consistent and walk every day from now on.

Yesterday’s walk was on 0.7 miles, but it felt like miles to me.  I’m clearly out of shape.  Or at least out of what I consider to be my normal.  I used to be able to walk 2 to 3 miles without issue, completely wearing out the dogs, and I felt really good afterward.  Last night I chose a circle of a few blocks and figured I would extend the walk depending on how I felt along the way.  I was always trying to strategically end the walk by coming back so we walked past this one house on an opposte corner of our block who always had a large basket in their front yard with a sign that said “Drop your bagged poop here”, and so I would.  I don’t know what they did with it, or why they were so nice to offer such an option, but I liked it and supported it with daily bags of Shadow and Tiger’s “donations.”  Last night that basket was gone completely, so I had to carry my bags the rest of the way home.  So I guess, from now on, I’m free to walk in any direction I want, they’re all pretty much the same–except for one side of our block with a very large and protective German Shepherd behind a 4-foot chain link fence he can easily jump over, which I avoid completely.  Not because of the dog though–because of the lady who lives there.  She, just like her dog, is very aggressive, and actually scolded me for letting my dogs walk on her grass.  They were leashed of course, but like to check everything out, and her German Shepherd, barking and jumping like crazy at my chihuahuas, got my dogs going, so they wanted to get closer and argue with him.   She said “Do you see the sign?  Do you mind getting your dogs off my lawn?”  The sign said “BEWARE OF DOG”.  Ok, I see the dog.  And I reeled in my leash to its shortest length so my dogs game back to the sidewalk.  But if she’s really that concerned about walkers’ dogs stepping on her grass, why not put up a fence in your front yard and not just your backyard?  Sheesh.  I just really didn’t see any harm in them stepping a few feet onto her lawn, but it is her lawn, so I pulled them off.  I just didn’t see why she had to be so mean about it though, I was just walking by.  We would have been gone and out of her dog’s sight in less than a minute.  So that’s why I try to avoid that side of our block.  It’s just sad that some people have to be so mean toward their neighbors while others leave something special out (the bagged-poop basket) to encourage dog-walking neighbors to walk by.

I started watching the new series “Away” recently. It looks like a great series, I’m hooked already after only watching the first episode.

Epic is on a roll lately. They’ve been giving away free PC games like crazy these days–several per week. It’s all connected, somehow, to the controversy and publicity surrounding the Apple and Fortnite issue. I’ve been taking advantage of it and snatching up every “free for a limited time” game they offer, and have amassed a decent collection at this point.

We voted – all three of us – Kevin, Sandy and I. Felt good to get that out of the way. If only completing that would cause the constant e-mails, texts and TV ads to stop…

I still gotta finish “Rage” and “9/12. So much to do, so many distractions…

Now that e-mail is working correctly for my website, I have a much better idea of just how often it’s under attack. It’s daily, and it bugs me. Someone’s always trying to login as administrator, others (or maybe the same person) keeps creating new accounts but not authenticating the account by verifying the e-mail address. Others DO verify the wackiest e-mail addresses and then the account just sits there. My user list just keeps growing. After I cleaned it up I had less than 10 registered users (including me). Now I’m up to 40 again, 18 of which are unverified, which I’ll delete again. I guess that’s actually not too bad compared to the thousands of bogus accounts my site had before I installed some protection on it.

My scanner’s full. Apparently it has a limit of 1000 recordings, and I filled it up. No one mentioned that there is a limit and I haven’t found anything noting this in the manual at all. Kind of disappointing, especially since I upgraded the included 8GB microSD card to 32GB so I’d have plenty of space. To be honest, I’ve had the scanner set to record everything, 24/7, non-stop, since I got it, just to test it out and also to make sure I didn’t miss anything, so if something big happened I could find the date and time and play back that event. So I’ll have to move the 1000 recordings to a PC, then delete them and start over. I’ll be sure to note how much space it used and exactly how the recordings are organized–all the geeky stuff I’ll want to know in the future, and maybe post here later on.

Ok, now we get deep for a moment… Is this the End, Beginning, or Somewhere in-between? What’s after this? I try to keep an open mind. I wouldn’t want to eliminate any options I might otherwise have had, if at some point something is actually proven as being valid. But then again there are plenty of people who do claim to have proof, or those who have claimed to have experienced what comes after personally and claim to know, for a fact, that it’s the real deal. Is it just our minds telling us it’s the truth when it really isn’t? We can’t know. The mind can play tricks on us in a myriad of ways. Some people can tap normally unused portions of their brain that most others can’t. Are they “gifted”? “Evolved?” “Enlightened?” Or just plain “crazy?” If they aren’t in the collective majority we call “normal”, are they “abnormal?”

I don’t want to be labeled an “atheist”, but I also don’t consider myself a member of any specific religion. There’s a general “Christian” label that people use for many, and think that generally means a good, god-fearing person with proper morals, etc., etc. I guess I wouldn’t be in that group either, as I’m not sure whether I believe in one or more all-powerful beings who control or create the universe, or not. There are just too many different religions and too many different views on everything to be certain any of them holds any merit. I go to church, yes, on occasion, in an effort to try to gain more knowledge about the Lutheran faith in particular. My wife has been Lutheran all of her life, so I accepted it and attend church with her when I can. Before that I was Methodist along with my parents and siblings when I was younger.

Most religions seem to have evolved over time to be a way of coping with the reality of death and the myriad of other problems revolving around life in general. Most people would rather have a definitive answer to the question “What happens to me when I die?” besides “Nothing. When you die you cease to exist any more. Biology continues to move on as usual, things decompose and break down, and you’re returned to nature, so-to-speak. But people seem to have a hard time dealing with the possibility that maybe there’s nothing after life, maybe this is all there is. We are miraculously created through biology, given the incredible gift of self-awareness, and then told we have a limited amount of time to exist. What do we do? So groups of us develop a whole backstory of history, some of it based on real events, some of it dramatized for effect, and we make it “official” and “real” by creating an ancient “document” said to be sacred and true, and label it “The Bible” or “The Koran”, or whatever you like, but it has to be something that enough of us will accept as the absolute truth.

It’s as old and convoluted as politics is today. And just as messed up. Today we get mass terrorism claiming to be in honor of Allah. Suicide bombers sacrificing themselves for their God, thinking it’s what they’re supposed to do–what they have to do. Most of us are taught “God is Good”. Where’s the good in taking the lives of other innocent people? People with different beliefs that yours. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who decides who is right and who is wrong? What are the beliefs of the one (or more) who decide who’s right and who’s wrong?

Who sets the ground rules for any of this? Wherever you are born, you’re restricted to the laws of that land – exposed to the religions and beliefs of your family and your environment, everyone on their own path, whether intended to better themselves, better mankind, or to destroy it and return it to ash. Most can only hope that the majority intends to make things better, bringing more and more people into the world and handing down their beliefs to them, giving them the gift of life with the hope that we can evolve, advance our collective knowledge, and use that to keep our species alive and thriving. Life is ultimately just a classic good-versus-evil scenario. Either way, our time here is limited. It’s a gift. And a short one at that. What we choose to do with it is our choice.

Personally, I am what they call morbidly obese (over 100 lbs above what is considered my normal body weight). This will significantly lower my life expectancy. Along with this comes the extra wear and tear on my body and organs, my knees are breaking down causing me a lot of pain. I’ve had a total knee replacement and a partial meniscectomy done on my other knee so far, and I have Type 2 Diabetes, though I am taking insulin injections daily, almost as a Type 1 Diabetic would. I have a goal of losing weight and getting in much better shape, but with also having a job, a family, an addiction to food and a love for all things movies and video games, it is very slow going. My love of food is slowly killing me, but I’m happy. This is my choice. I am still very in love with my wife, enjoying every day as much as possible doing the things I like to do, and even enjoying my work. I try to do my part to help in my work. I help many others on a daily basis in a hospital environment. Though it isn’t the patients of the hospital, I help the staff, who, in turn, help the patients. Keep a staff member happy and hopefully that kindness is paid forward to the patient.

I may not live to the ripe old age of 90, being in the shape I’m in right now, but I’ve had, and am having, a great time getting this far and I can’t complain one bit. This gift of life I’ve been given has taught me a great deal and allowed me to experience many many things I will cherish until the time comes that I cease to exist. I only hope I am around long enough to be able to share as much of what I’ve learned and experienced in some way or ways. Writing and photography seem to be the simplest method for this, so I write here, and in a personal journal I keep to myself. I take photographs regularly, which automatically get stored in “the cloud”. Storage space for all of this information is unlimited these days (as long as someone keeps making the payments) so I will take advantage of that as much as I can and continue to write and snap as much as I can.

So in response to my initial question I say “I have no idea, so why dwell on it longer than the time it takes to read this article? Go live it. Be happy. Enjoy. It may be all you get.”

It wasn’t easy, but I managed to avoid every political ad today. I didn’t watch any live TV. We watched this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country and “Robin’s Wish”, the documentary about Robin Williams. It was a very nice evening. Lots of bizarre blood and gore in Lovecraft Country, then a ton of depression and a horrible disease we hadn’t even heard of before called “Lewy Body Dementia” that Robin Williams was suffering from and never even knew it.

But no political ads. At all. That is a very big accomplishment this close to a presidential election. The only thing that would have made it better would be if I hadn’t mentioned it in my post. Ah shit.

I added a “Subscription” option to the right sidebar on this site. No, it’s not a “pay” option. All it does is add you to our mailing list. Once you subscribe (and confirm your e-mail address by clicking an activation link in your e-mail) you will receive an e-mailed copy of each post I make on this site. I’ve been using this option for a few other blogs for years. I can’t believe it took me this long to realize I didn’t have the option on my site. I’m a little sketchy on the “when” details at the moment (my cron doesn’t seem to show the proper server time), but you’ll receive just one e-mail at some point each day containing all posts I made that day.

Today we have a contractor coming to fix our garage. This will result in all mouse & squirrel entrances to be permanently closed for business…as long as they don’t start using the actual doors to get in and out. We’ll also be finishing the last of the cleanup from the tree removal. Lots of fresh air. We’re really enjoying the awesome cool weather!

We’re watching the Packer game today and it’s half-time, so I’ll make this quick. After the game we’re heading back outside to try to finish cleaning up from yesterday’s work. Yesterday I cut down a tree in our backyard. It used to be a corner bush, but it kept growing out of control for years, and became a small tree, too close to the fence, so we decided to remove it before it started damaging the fence. It was also making it much harder to cut the grass around that corner of the fence on both sides.

So we took the tree down yesterday, leaving just about six inches of stump. We actually wanted to cut it as close to the ground as possible and put our bird feeder over it, but while we were taking it down we realized there was a round wire bush guide on it that the tree had grown right through. I actually hit the metal rod inside the tree while cutting it down. This pretty much trashed the chain on the chainsaw, and it wouldn’t cut hardly at all after that, so I had to stop at Menard’s this morning and get a couple more chains.

We got everything chopped down to manageable size yesterday, then started stripping off and bagging all the leaves, to leave just kindling sticks and logs, which we should be able to finish up today, or tomorrow at the latest. We’ll keep the wood and sticks for our firepit, which we use often.

Our grandkids spent the night last night. This morning I asked Connor to help me with the new Mario pack that came out for Nintendo Switch the other day. I had started playing Super Mario 64 and was already stuck, at the beginning of the game, not knowing what to do, even though they give you a straight, simple clue telling you exactly what to do: “There are 4 rooms on the first floor. Start in the room with the Bomb picture on the wall first, which is already unlocked.” I searched and searched, but I’ll be damned if I could find it. So Connor (6 years old) showed me and I felt so stupid when he showed me… The door was right next to where the person is who gives you the clue! You can’t miss it. The problem for me was that it had a star on the door, which I thought meant you needed a magic star to get in that room, so I never tried it.

Connor said “You’re not very good at Mario games, are you?” I said “Well, you know, grandpa grew up with a lot of video games, but they were all more simple and straight-forward than this–games like Pong, Zork and Space Invaders… These newfangled 3D games stump me sometimes.” He just looked at me blankly and repeated “You’re not very good at Mario games are you, grandpa?” I dropped my head and just said “No.”

Now back to the Packer game.

I have a lot to do today – yard work mostly, but also a doctor appointment, errands to run, etc., etc., so I’ll keep it short. I noted something funny from “Rage”, the Donald Trump book I’m currently reading:

Regarding the accusation that Trump was in collusion with Russia,  Trump said “I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t do this.”

“I agree with you on both counts” said senator Lindsey Graham.

Trump went on to say “I did not work with the Russians.  I did not make those phone calls.”

And Graham said “I believe you.  I really believe you, because you can’t work with your own government, so how could you possibly have been working with the Russian government?”

I have been getting constant text messages, supposedly from Joe Biden, asking me to donate, make sure I vote, and even some that ask for a few bucks for a chance to possibly receive a personal call from him after the debate.  I’m not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican.  I would expect constant texts from someone like Donald Trump, based on his tweeting history, but not Biden.  I know most, if not all, of these messages are scams and include links, so I have them muted so they don’t actually interrupt my day (and night), but I do glance at them occasionally when catching up on my texts, just to get a laugh.

I don’t get ANY Trump texts, they’re all from Biden.  Now THERE’S some texts I’d be willing to read!  That sounds like a blast, based on some of that guy’s tweets!  I could learn more new words, like Covfefe, and learn how to really rant like a leader!  That Wikipedia page is hilarious, by the way.

With all those texts and the constant TV ads we’re forced to endure, we’ve been moving more and more to just letting YouTube TV record all of our shows and we watch them a day or more later, just so we can skip through the commercial breaks.  Now it seems like both campaigns make sure if one has an ad at any point in a program, the other ALSO places an ad in an adjacent timeslot, so they’re always both in the same commercial break, most of the time back-to-back.  It really drives us nuts trying to tolerate the lies and slanting of truths on both sides.  They can’t just say what they’ll do and be honest about it, they have to attack the other side.  And if they DON’T do that to defend themselves, they’ll be perceived as weak.  There’s no winner.  The only winning move is not to play.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave and close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

If you didn’t recognize it, that’s a famous poem by Dylan Thomas and you might have heard it in one of my favorite movies: “Interstellar”. That poem is what I always thought of when the word “Rage” came up, at least ever since I first watched Interstellar. But I think that’s going to change now that I’m reading Bob Woodward’s new book. I’m learning a lot of things about Donald Trump and his administration that are pretty disturbing, especially when Trump gets angry. I’ve never heard anything like what’s in this book, especially from someone who is the leader of our country. I’ve always respected the President, whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. Some would do some random odd thing occasionally, it would make the news and possibly get them in trouble, but then things returned to their normal state. But not with Trump. It’s just a constant, never-ending “what will he say next” bizarre, unpredictable and goofy state that we will probably/hopefully never experience again in the history of our country.

You’ve probably already seen the stream-of-consciousness tweeting rants he can go off on, with absolutely no filter. This alone drives several members of his staff to lose a lot of sleep and spring into action instantly, at all hours of the day or night, depending on the time of the tweets, trying to determine how best to handle the press and everyone else they are bombarded with every time it happens. I’m only about two hours into the book though, there is much more ahead.

Bob Woodward goes into great detail about our country’s Defense Secretary Mattis, who was working for Trump when Trump was trying to negotiate with North Korea and Kim Jong-Un regarding their nuclear missile program. Mattis had tons of staff, electronic equipment and devices installed in his home and everywhere he went just so that he would be notified within a few seconds any time a missile was launched from North Korea. Even in the shower – he could even been instantly alerted when he was in the shower, and within seconds he’d be deep within the updates and connected to the “conference” that would instantly begin each time this happened. Then, starting almost instantly, he would be constantly updated on trajectory, location, and possible impact areas near or in the US or on its coasts as it progressed, and our own military would be at the ready to fire our own missiles in an instant if necessary. He worried a great deal about being in charge of possibly killing millions of people if he had to launch missiles. All this is explained in great detail and was completely top secret. I’m enjoying it so far.

Today’s episode is brought to you by the color Yellow.

I have been called both “Big Bird” and “School Bus” when I wear this shirt. I’m not quite sure how to take that. Both seem to mean I’m huge and yellow. I am both, don’t get me wrong, but hmm. I don’t think they’re trying to be insulting, but who knows. I know it’s a bright shirt, I thought it would be nice for a change. I needed some new work shirts, so when ordering time came this year, I ordered five new shirts, each a different color, just to change things up. Some departments here have a specific color requirement, but not ours, so I like to mix it up. Let’s see… what else is bright yellow? Ah, there we go… I should paint a smiley face on my shirt!

Today I start reading this book on Audible. I still have about 2 hours of “9/12” to finish, but I think it’s more important to make this one a priority. I’ll get back to that one soon enough. Right now, this one is all the… well, you know.

Last night we watched “This is Where I Leave You”, a movie from 2014 that I somehow missed. It stars Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Dax Shepard and several other good actors. It’s about a large dysfunctional family who’s father dies and they’re all forced to come back to their childhood home and live together again for a week.

It’s a comedy/drama and I thought it was really good. The entire family is pretty screwed up and the chemistry between all of the different family members is very funny and sometimes awkward and emotional.

Kevin was actually key to me finding this movie. He showed me a clip from the Internet of a key fight scene in the movie and it looked pretty funny. I recognized Jason Bateman right away, and I assumed it was a scene from Arrested Development. I later realized that Adam Driver (Kylo Ren from Star Wars) was also in it, but I don’t recall Adam Driver being in Arrested Development, so I looked into it further on the web. I quickly found the one movie that both of these actors were in and I knew this was it. I watched a few more clips and the trailer, then decided we needed to watch this one. It didn’t disappoint.

I also found another Jason Bateman movie in the process that sounds pretty good that I want to watch too: “Bad Words”. I’ll be watching that one in the near future. These should give me a good JB fix until Ozark returns with Season 4.

We’ve been cleaning more this weekend. This time in the house. A “few” boxes of things were brought in from the garage when we clean that, so now we have to find room for everthing in our house. And since a few areas of the house have gone neglected, we’re addressing those areas now to further improve our situation.

I am cleaning out a closet and Sandy is working on an area of the basement. Both areas are coming along nicely and we’re making good progress, we both just need regular, frequent breaks. The scanner’s been nice and quiet except for the usual stuff, which is a good thing for Kenosha, and very relieving for us. But little time to post much, so that’s about it. Just needed to get my 59th day in the bank.

One other thing: I found out Wil Wheaton was in The Secret of NIMH, a favorite animated movie from my past that Linda and Melissa loved to watch when I babysat for them way back then. Holy crap! I had to go back and watch it just to see how I missed that, and it turns out it was easy to miss. Even after watching it again I would never have known that was him without someone telling me. He was a little kid and his voice was totally different so I didn’t even recognize it. He played Martin and it was his first movie. Shannen Doherty was also in the movie and played his sister. Again, never knew.