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Rants April 20, 2008

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1. You have heard me say that I can bring my wife home by simply thinking about stretching out on a bed or couch. Before my head has had time to sink into the cushion, she comes in the door. If you are a creative husband, you can probably think up dozens of ways to make your wife come in through the door, even though you have iron-clad proof that she is on safari in Africa or is reading seismological meters inside a volcano in Guatemala. Here’s my most recent example from the other night. My wife Marsha went off with her daughter and three grandchildren to take a walk down to Fort Point. At five o’clock, which is supper time, she was not home, so, because I’m not a helpless child, I cooked my own supper. But, the instant my fingers released a frozen hotdog over a pan of boiling water, the driveway bell rang. Yes. She was home before the hotdog had time to hit the water.

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2. How do you measure success? Do you measure success in material terms? When Mark Twain traveled in Europe he very astutely noticed that the wealth of a Bavarian farmer could be ascertained by the size of the manure pile in front of his house. Nowadays in Maine the manure pile is represented by snowmobiles and new pickup trucks. Inside the home success can sometimes be measured by the size of the flat screen television hanging on the wall. Charlie Sewall told me that a bumper hitch on the back of your car indicates boats or snowmobiles --- although my bumper hitch is for my wood splitter. I also use it to tow other disabled pieces of equipment from one part of the farm to another. Unfortunately for those of us who like to classify our friends, there is a group of people who do not have television sets. And unless you experience an epiphany, like I just did, you might suspect that these people have chosen to float out there in status limbo. This morning, however, when Marsha’s child refused to use the new shower I installed in the cellar, I discovered that is not true. Because --- for the first time I realized, that the shower stall in the kid’s house is bigger than her mother’s kitchen.

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3. From time to time some reporter from the Boston Globe will call me and ask, “What’s the difference between you people on the coast of Maine and the other folks who live 40 or 50 miles up country?” And I’ll tell him about the Boston man who retired and moved way up to Livermore Falls. He said that he liked it there because the mill had shut down and the only people in town were over 70. He chuckled and said that he didn’t have to worry about a 70 year old man messing with his wife. And that is the primary difference between Livermore Falls and Camden. June 3, 1999 (used on 941009)

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4. When some people fix something it falls apart again within a week. You might be married to one of these people and know exactly who I’m talking about. But there are other masters of the tool chest who are able to make minor adjustments that last forever in their homes. Their secret is called the temporary repair. When they put something up, they don’t intend for it to last. But, nothing lasts like a temporary repair. Hang a door with nails on one hinge --- just so it’ll hang there good enough until you can find some screws to do the job right, and it will be swinging contentedly there the day you die. If you’d put screws in the hinges --- if you’d done the job right, the door wouldn’t have fit, and the screws would have worked themselves out and you would have lived with a door that stuck for years until it fell off and dropped on the dog. Knock down a wall in your kitchen and put up some good solid sheetrock. Do a good job. The cat will claw it down before you ever get around to paint it. But, put a piece of plastic in your smashed out car window --- just to keep the wind out until you can get over to the junkyard to buy a window to fix it right, and that plastic will be there the day you park the old clunker out in the back yard and use the door as a target. If you really want something that will hang in there forever, the rule to remember in Maine is that nothing lasts like a temporary repair. (Used on 941005)

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5. The other day a friend sent me an email telling me to check out a great web site. Because I have a great amount of respect for that friend, I looked. It was a site to sell electronic equipment and there was no address on the bottom. You know that I got robbed a few years ago by buying from a website that advertised great prices but had no physical address on the page. Of course, they stuck me, like they stuck everybody else. I’m amazed that they are permitted to continue. Live and learn. But, back to this worthless website that my friend sent me. When I replied to her, she said that it was a virus that sent me that email. She said she didn’t send out things like that. So. My question to you is --- is a computer virus capable of sending out emails to everyone in your address book? I have a free antivirus program called AVG that was recommended by my guru friend Richard Bird so I haven’t had any problems for years. But now that I have mentioned it, you can be sure that I will.

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6. For a year or more I took my old hp ink cartridges back to Staples where they gave me --- I think it was $3 apiece for them. And, as I recall, I was able to trade in three at a time. So I would buy some ten dollar item that I needed and pay for it with three old cartridges and a dollar bill. If you were doing it, too, you might have found Staples to be a very pleasant place to shop for ten dollar items, even if you could buy the same items for six dollars somewhere else. It was really too good to be true. This week I went in and asked my friend behind the counter if he would give me $9 in trade for my 3 hp ink cartridges. Yes, no problem. But --- then I was handed a paper to fill out. And the way I understood it at the time, I would get a credit for my returned cartridges on my account every three months or so. You can see where somebody in management was trying to figure out a way to get rid of, or at least modify the damage too many people who think like you and I do were doing to their bottom line. There were a few customers in line behind me or I would have hung in there until I fully understood the new system. But because I didn’t want to hold up the people in the line I snatched up my 3 empty hp ink cartridges and told my friend I’d changed my mind about buying those blank DVDs. But I’m going in there to talk with the manager there the next time I’m in town. Years ago I juggled a $35,000 debt back and forth between two MBNA credit cards at 1.99 percent plus costs which beat the stuffing out of the banks. I wouldn’t be surprised if Staples could still be a viable alternative to anyone willing to wait. When I get the full story, you’ll be hearing from me.

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7. A friend of mine has been getting electricity for her light bulbs and heat for her home from the sun for over 20 years. But it wasn’t until a few months ago that you heard me say that I had decided to put in whatever solar and wind technology was available. And that was before I paid $877.13 for a tank of oil in April. Nearly nine hundred dollars for a tank of oil will go a long way towards reinforcing your good intentions about solar energy. I know nothing about solar energy except that the water heats up in a garden hose if you leave it in the sun. You might not know anything about solar and wind energy, either, but we’re going to be talking about it for the next month or two as it gets installed at my house. In a very short while, you and I are going to know a lot more than we did about escaping our dependency on oil.

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8. All I know about solar energy is that is works. Unfortunately, it took me 20 years to get around to it. And what did it take? I could see that when nobody complained when the robber barons weasled the price of oil up from two to four dollars a gallon, it would take even less time to drive it up to eight dollars a gallon. As you know, the ideal way to dupe the public with any product is to raise the prices so slowly that the customer really doesn’t pay any attention. But greed is a powerful motivator, as you’ve seen by your gas prices over the past couple of years, and the 40 billion profit Mobil posted last year obviously wasn’t enough. Let’s look at the bright side. If they’d been satisfied to raise the price 3 or so cents a year like the post office does, I wouldn’t have felt the sudden pain and I’d still be heating my hot water with oil. (oil went up 16 cents the past two weeks according to Channel 6 this morning)

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9. How high would the price of gas have to be before you’d stop driving your car? I don’t know. But I do know that you and I are hooked. We have the automobile habit. Someday we will all have an electric cars that run on batteries that are charged by solar energy. When that day comes it will be even more painful than the transition from the horse and buggy to the automobile because all of the people who produce and maintain oil fueled engines will be in the same position as the folks who once made buggy whips.

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10. You know people who will not eat meat. You also know people who do not take showers as often as you might wish. You know people who think that people should be free to determine what they do with their lives and you know others who, in their ignorance, vote to give away all of their freedom and do it with a smile on their faces. You saw those families on television who were broken up because they were violating the law as well as their children. It is not illegal to belong to a cult in this country. But aren’t cults a good thing? Don’t you and I know one or two people who need to be told what to think?

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11. I’m sure you can find many books and articles on how to save energy in your home by simply changing your habits. We have a nice electric stove with a smooth flat top. It is one of the few rich-kid items we have in our home and we have it because the flat top is easier for Marsha to clean. As I dropped a hotdog into the water that was being boiled on that electric stove the other day, I wondered if it would be cheaper to cook the hotdog in the micro. And then --- I asked myself why I was cooking only one hotdog when it would probably take just as much electricity to cook two hotdogs in the same water. It would be more energy efficient to eat two hotdogs. And if you think about it, wouldn’t a person who is really serious about conserving energy probably cook and eat four or six hotdogs? I don’t think I should say any more because what I’m saying seems to make sense and I don’t like it.

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12. This morning my wife’s youngest grandchild walked through the room while chewing on the handle of a fly swatter. My brother, who witnessed her walking through and knows more about these things than I do, said that that was the way children immunized themselves against disease. And when you hear this example of what happens to kids who don’t chew on fly swatters, you’ll agree that he is right. He mentioned mother’s cousin Will Williamson, who lived up near the corner of Gleason Street in Thomaston. Cousin Will perished with some childhood disease, probably in the 1920s. I can remember going into Uncle Dell’s house 20 years later and seeing a cardboard doll of Charlie McCarthy on the wall and I remember being aware that Cousin Will had died before his time. But it wasn’t until this morning that my brother told me what had killed him. His parents, Uncle Dell and Aunt Eva, were protective. They kept him from ever catching anything from other children or anyone else. When the day finally came when he did catch

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