Best laid plans of mice and men...

...often go awry.  Crew-x was canceled, again.  Sure glad I am not the one onboard.  Looks like another half to a full week on dry land.  Yo, ho, ho!

In other news, we bought a new wood stove.  This winter we struggled with a small, Morso parlor stove called The Squirrel.  Mr Budd lent it to us so the price was right, but I had to re-split all of my wood and it ate wood like you would not believe.  Fed that thing at least every hour, had to constantly play with the draft and while it did heat most of the house, it was just too much work and now we're out of wood. 

The new stove, a Lopi Endeavor, is a treat.  At 500 pounds, it was a bit tough to get into place, but it rocks.  Lights easy, burns very well and constant.  It employes re-burner tubes in the top of the firebox and is rated at just over 70% efficient.  The re-burner isn't catalytic, so not worries about replacing ceramic inserts and all that jazz.  Best thing is the glass front door.  LP and the dog love to watch the fire and after watching a very hot fire damped down, I find watching the gasses re-burning looks like a cross between some of my better physcadelic nights as a teen-ager and the burning plasma of an Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectroscope I once built and fooled around as a side job while in college.  Definitely the thing to watch with an altered mind...
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I've been watching a lot of CNN lately.  Bernie Maddoff?  Kill him.  People greedy enough to invest in something too good to be true?  Fuck them.  Any politician that says the crap in Mexico is our fault and we should apologize?  Kill them, or send them to the border, the Mexican side.  Our side?  Line it with troops given orders to shoot anything that moves.  Obama?  Me thinks that the halo has finally slipped off and even his devoted followers will see he is, after all, just another lying, spineless politician.  AIG, et al?  Let them fail.  People will suffer, but we are all going to suffer greatly as the eventual impacts of this unbelievably huge and foolish bailout.  Auto industry?  Fuck them.  As with the financial institutions, giving billions to folks that continuously and knowingly fucked up will only make it possible for them to do it again. AIG bonuses make that point better than I ever could.  Everyone on both sides knew it would happen and it did.  The only reason it blew up was that the media decided to tell the public that the public was outraged over them.  I'm glad the media tells us what we are feeling, but I still dislike them for some reason.  The uneployment numbers are ignoring the number of people graduating from college, or high school, trying, but unable to enter the workforce and will not show up in the unemployment benefits statistic because they are ineligible.  People that work for my and any other, multi-national corporation are also ineligible, as those corporations never pay state unemployment tax.  The snowstorm last night felt like a kick in the balls, this morning.  As I get older, more and more things piss me off.  Why?  The previous fact pisses me off...
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Anyhoo, I have to make some plans for an unexpected, extra weekend at home.  Ya'll be cool.