Lazy Scammers

You know, I don’t mind the occasional scammer. They are fun to mess with. In fact, there are several web sites dedicated to seeing how much time you can waste for these people. Some of them are pretty funny as they get the scammers to take humiliating photos of themselves in an attempt to prove their sincerity and that they are legitimate.

However, the other scammers you don’t see much of are the ones that pretend to be some hot chick from another country looking for the love of their life. Normally, I think this is pretty funny as they don’t speak English very well and have a very hard time communicating. This morning I was toying with one that found me (who knows how) and finally got “her” to send me some pics. How lazy can you be? The least you could do is REMOVE the portion of the pic that advertises the web site you stole it from.

At least they didn’t try to tell me that was really them and that they were the model and those photos just happened to be on the web site. Of course, that would have required some thought and creativity to try to pull off a lie like that one.

What is the Balance?

Is it that we are here for an undefined moment of time, and in time? That we should "make the best of it" while we are here? That we should, perhaps, try to better the things around us? Or simply live in the moment and enjoy what we have before us?

I suppose these are questions that have been asked for thousands of years. And I am no different, other than I am not an ancient Roman philosopher.

Quite simply, I look at the moon with my neighbor and discuss the way we think things should be. That's not to say that we even believe everyone should live the way we do. But the simple thing to say, or ask, is "couldn't the world be a better place?"

Sweet Factory!

In this case literally! I was just on a job doing a wireless site survey for a company that I cannot acknowledge here. They wouldn’t let us take any pics out that even showed any equipment or the facilities. Let’s just say that they make ice cream and other cold treats in mass quantity!

I am not much of an ice-cream fan (I don’t like cold things on my teeth, and I don’t have a big sweet tooth), but this place was really neat. They produce about five or six major items or “lines” in the factory. I really enjoyed watching how all this stuff is made up close and personal. We were on the factory floor, hence the garb I am wearing such as the booties, smock, beard net, hair net, safety glasses and hard-hat. I think it would be pretty neat to be in engineering and design systems like they use there.

Most of the areas we worked in were at about 30 ~ 40 degrees. We only had to work in two areas that were kept at roughly 0-degrees. Let me tell you, when you are on a lift approximately 30 feet up in the air and the chillers are blowing directly on you that is some cold ass air!!! My co-worker was taking readings and I was just thinking “hurry up…hurry up….” As my beard net froze to my face and clothes because of the water vapor in my breath,

This was one of the neatest places I have seen in a long time and they kept things very clean! I was impressed with the whole process and how big the facilities were. A few quick observations:

Pallets (and I mean pallets) of 50-lb bags of sugar

A whole room called “the chocolate room”

50-gallon drums of peanuts on pallets.

Corn syrup stored in vats that were about 10 feet in diameter and went up two stories!

If you walked four times around the plant it was the equivalent of doing a 10k!!

They take delivery of milk each day by NINE semi’s trailers!!! That’s approximately 47,551 gallons of milk each day and it takes approximately 9,510 cows to produce that much milk!

And one of their production lines could produce up to 500 “items” per-hour!

You people eat way too much sweet treats! No wonder we are all a bunch of fat bastards!

Illegal Aren’t Stealing Jobs!!

Ok, maybe they aren’t stealing jobs but it’s made it a lot harder for anyone except an illegal alien to get a job here in Texas if you work in any type of manual labor trade.

If you just break it down to raw numbers it’s no wonder that non-illegal aliens can’t hardly get a job here. A few years ago Texas became a minority state. Somebody too scared to print factual information concluded that the minorities are now the majority in Texas. The Department of Homeland security estimates that there are 1.64 million illegal aliens in Texas. That doesn’t include the legal aliens or other resident and non-resident Hispanics.

Break it down even further and you will find that a lot of blacks don’t want the jobs that the Mexicans are doing. I don’t blame them! It’s hard work, and if you can make cash under the table it’s a lot better than busting your ass only to have the government take a huge chunk out of it at the end of the day.

One of my good friends moved back here from Alabama. He’s got about 10 years experience doing trim work (he helped me with my floors!) and he can’t find a job here. He’s been looking in the paper and going to construction sites. The Mexicans have made it very difficult for non-Mexicans to find employment. All the contractors and workers that we’ve talked to while out and about all say the same thing – “you can’t get a job here because of all the Mexicans.” Usually there are a few colorful expletives thrown in as well. Folks are not happy.

In Forbes I am reading about how everyone is whining and complaining about the new crack-downs on illegal aliens. “Oh….booohoooo! We are going to lose our workers and go broke.”

First off – if you hadn’t been hiring illegal aliens you wouldn’t be in this position.

Secondly – let’s take all the illegal aliens and remove them from this country. That’s 30-some-odd million illegal aliens. Do I think there is going to be some far-reaching economic impact? Of course. But it won’t last forever. Think of how many jobs would be available to good ‘ol US Citizens or at least people that are here legally!! Economics would eventually reset and equalizes wages. People, like my friend, could go back to regular and steady work. And you, Mr. employer, wouldn’t have to worry about the IRS, INS, or any one else coming down on your ass because you have a bunch of illegal aliens working for you.

But it can’t be one or two companies that are nailed and held responsible. That just won’t cut the mustard. We have to hold all companies accountable. And, we have to prevent them from starting up their own companies and seeking refuge by proliferating the underground economy. We have to get them out and we have to keep them out.

And what is up with the new proposals in congress to give in-state tuitions to illegal aliens? Out-of-state US Citizens have to pay a premium to go to school out of state and yet we are going to give illegal aliens the same relief on tuitions??? At what point do we finally put OUR country first?

New Floors!

Over the last week I was juggling putting in new floors and getting work done all at the same time, but finally it’s all about to come together.
My friend, Droid, is up from Alabama and looking for work. He does carpentry and trim work and so it was an excellent opportunity for me to have some help putting the floors in and giving him a place to stay and putting a few bucks in his pocket.

Needless to say, he did an excellent job on all the detailed work with measurements and trim. I couldn’t have done a job like that, and it’s looking great!

Trimming things throughout the hallways took a long time, but the main body of the floor went pretty quick.
The floor is a true tongue-and-groove hardwood maple. It’s glued down to the slab with some pretty heavy-duty polyurethane glue that pretty much makes you high just looking at the bucket.

Stripping the carpet and padding out took a few hours. But we took about a week getting the flooring in with the majority of the time spent on those tedious trim pieces.

The transitions from the hardwood to the carpet is in, but I’m waiting on a piece of wood to go from the hardwood to the tile due to the height difference. I could have gotten a 6-foot piece of transition, but I needed 10 ½ for my front entry way. Not only that, but all the shops had the cheap laminate crap. The ones I have in, now, and the stuff on order, is a solid piece of maple. It just has to be cut and lacquered before installation.

So that’s about it….but like many projects, it escalated. Because the floor has a gap we had to get some shoe-molding and install it. Bling let me borrow is air nailer and that made quick work of that particular part of the project (Thanks Bling!). That also meant caulking and painting the baseboards. That was OK, because the ones in the kitchen needed it from the tile job.

This little guy ended up getting stuck to the wet paint. I could just imagine him thinking “what the fuck do I do now?” I thought he was dead and would come apart when I peeled him off the paint but he started twitching so I took him outside and let him go. I never saw him again, so I don’t know if he made it but there is a nice gecko imprint on my closet baseboards, now. No point in re-painting it. It just adds charm.

Done!

Now the problem is that I had to get rid of my old Oak stereo cabinet and replace it. So I have new one of those on order….and as long as I was doing that, how about a new CD rack to hold all of my CD’s and the DVD’s that used to be in the old cabinet? Maybe I’ll have it all wrapped up next week. I hope so!

I’ll post one or two more pics once I get everything put back together. For now, though, I am just really excited that the house is coming together this year. I have some new furniture, new tile floor in the kitchen, new hardwoods in the common areas, and my brother in law was installing sun-screens as I left to get on my flight.

Drama and Stripper Chicks

I had to fly out to Maryland today. No big deal, but I was woken up at 4:00am. Hopper was calling me and needed help. No, he wasn’t in jail….and I knew better than to think he would call me needing a ride because he was too drunk.

Somehow, he had ended up at the gas station a few miles away from my house with two chicks and one motorcycle. Unless you get really creative, you can’t get three people on a bike, and certainly not in a way that wouldn’t get you pulled over by the local po-po’s.

I end up getting out of bed and driving over there and sure enough, two chicks…one bike. One of the chicks was pretty upset. Apparently, the guy she was riding with took her to a park and tried to force himself on her. When she wouldn’t give it up he took her to the gas station and dumped her off. She got some bad pipe-burns on her leg from the bike.

There is always two sides to every story, though, and it certainly sounds like she was all over this guy prior to the incident. Does that justify forcing yourself on someone? Not at all, but there is obviously more to the story than meets the eye.

We all came back to my house and woke up ‘Droid. Or rather, he was already awake. So we stayed up until they could get another ride back to N. Dallas. Typical stripper chicks. Drama, drama, drama….. the one was pretty upset, but had no problems showing us various parts of her body while explaining the whole ordeal.

“Did you get a look at her pussy?”

“umm….yeah, who didn’t?”

And for her, it was all about her….. she was fishing for a ton of affirmation that she was good looking, etc. etc. I couldn’t deal with a chick like that for too long. Maybe a few hours.

Give me a beer, I’m going back to bed because I have a flight to catch…..

INS Crawls up Guys Ass!

A friend of mine does fairly consistent contract work with a guy that we’ll call “Festus” for lack of a better name. Well Festus has been hiring illegal aliens for years as crews for the jobs he does. Sure, he gets paperwork on them so he can feign innocents, but he knew they were illegal aliens.

Festus also supports allowing more open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens. It’s all an effort to keep his costs low so that he can put more money in his pockets. He’s the same kind of person that complains about rising costs, taxes, etc.

Not too long ago, Festus had his crew working at a government in the Metroplex. Well, one day the feds came and hauled off Festus’s van, with his tools and Mexicans in it. All but one of the Mexicans didn’t come back as they were illegal.

Needless to say the IRS and Feds were all over him demanding records, tax records, etc. He wasn’t very happy about it, but it looked like it was finally over.

Just recently, the INS has started crawling up his ass and investigating him, too! Well, I say screw him!!! I hope they give him such a hard time that he never thinks about hiring another illegal alien again!

It’s amazing to me that the same people who favor this complain when their world is negatively impacted by having so many people flood into the country.

Remember 9/11!!!

Yesterday I intentionally didn’t post about 9/11, but I have not forgotten. I haven’t forgotten sitting in front of my TV with my jaw on the floor. I haven’t forgotten visiting NYC when the airports opened back up. I haven’t forgotten the people that I talked to there that had lost a piece of themselves. I haven’t forgotten the little kids that I met that would never see their mom’s or dad’s again. I haven’t forgotten conversations I had with people that were in or near the towers when it happened. I haven’t forgotten the people that did this or what their objectives were, and still are. And most importantly, I haven’t forgotten the thousands of people that lost their lives and that for a brief moment in time, America came together to mourn and heal.

More Global Warming Dumbasses!

http://politicalangstinamerica.blogspot.com/2007/09/global-warming-is-fickle.html

Ever Have One of Those Weekends?

Where things just seem to go right for a change? We always talk about them going obscenely wrong, and I’d say that if you make plans then most of the times things are going to happen that don’t fit in with your plans.

Last weekend was one of those rare times where things not only went as planned, but they turned out better than planned!

I had to be up in Montana to do some work, and while the work-week was hectic my friend Hopper was flying in to come party with me over the holiday weekend. He’d never been to a place like Montana before so I wanted to show him how beautiful it was and to give him an idea of “my world” for the 2 years that I lived there.

I started getting sick on Friday morning at about 4:00am. At 6:15am Hopper called me to let me know he had his first beer and was getting ready to catch the flight.
“What’s up?”
“mhrem…sleeping…”
“I got my first beer and getting ready to get on the plane!!! IT’s ON!!!!”
“great. See you later.”
*CLICK*

Then he gets in and we proceed to start off with Elk burgers and Blue Moons. From there, it’s pretty much a blur. Suffice it to say that we had very little in the way of a plan. The loose plan was this:

• Shut the bars down at night
• Hike up to Palisades Falls
• Hike the M
• Play horse shoes with my friend’s Fuego and Bentley.
• Go to Big Sky

Whatever else would happen would happen. Other than that, we put no constraints on doing other things or even sticking to a schedule. The closest we got to that was playing shoes up at Fuego’s just because of trying to get everyone together up there.

• The fires had been burning up in MT for quite some time, but when Hopper flew in the winds shifted and cleared out the skies for the weekend.
• We got to enjoy Palisades Falls almost all by ourselves.
• Our friends came out to see us and party with us almost every night.
• Fuego’s place was awesome and we had a great time throwing shoes and checking out the amazing stars that came out. We even saw multiple satellites with the naked eye.
• We got to check out a 700+ lb black bear that was someone’s pet.
• We saw milfs and young college chickie-babes on the M
• We shut the bars down just about every night.
• Our friends let us borrow motorcycles and ride with them up to Big Sky as opposed to doing it in a car.
• We had a lot of laughs, and nobody got arrested!

It was a bummer getting up and catching the flight out on Tuesday and both Hopper and I were done by then anyway. It was a long, but very good weekend. I really enjoyed sharing what I think is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen with a close friend, and having them appreciate it as much as I do! Cheers, Hopper!