I may move to North Dakota

I sold chicken feed to a fellow yesterday who has been working in North Dakota. He had a contracting business that failed when the economy stopped. The local economy has not and probably will not recover in the foreseeable future.
It is pretty unbelievable how government in this state gone out of its way to kill private business. Licensing fees have gone up some 300%. To license an over 26,0000 GVW truck it costs over $1,000 per year. Building fees, permits, fines, RV licenses, everything connected to government has increased in price. Of course when faced with a less than expected return on the draconian tax increases the clever folks in Salem decided that problem was not outrageous fees and taxes driving business away, no it was lack of funding for tax collection!
My chicken feed buyer opted not to pay licensing fees on his truck and his business, instead he decided do what few jobs he could get by licensing his truck at a much lower Gross Vehicle Weight and move his trackhoe when scales were closed.
Then he found a job driving water truck in North Dakota. His long term goal is to move his trackhoe and dump truck to ND where there are jobs and you can license afford to license a truck you only drive once a year.
He says he can help me get a job as well. I have to commit to three months. Housing is $100 per week. I would start at $20 an hour. He says you can work extra hours if you want. Since it is an under 150 mile haul you are not under the hours of service regulations. Here is a link. I'm not sure if it is the exact link. He is in Dennison, ND.
I need to get my CDL medical card anyway.
My wife says it is ok to go.
Should I be suspicious?

Things that make me laugh at 11:44 p.m.

Click on this link and then read the paragraph, "Grandma got ran over by a condescending novelty song."

Once again I prove how out of touch I am and that I am a bit of a prude

I admit to enjoying dirty jokes. I have glanced (perhaps twice) at the pictures girls send of their naked selves you my young helper's cellphone.
But on the other hand when forced to make moral judgments I set jokes aside and tend to err on the side of prudishness. I don't know if it is my separation of fantasy vs reality or some horrible moral dichotomy that will condemn me to perdition in the end.
In fact we were discussing this all at supper last night. What if you were being raptured and you got about 50 feet off the ground and you exclaimed "oh shit!" Would you fall back to earth? My daughter was of the opinion that God's grace would be sufficient but I am not so sure...
But I digress...
We now have television.
My wife bought one of those LCD TV's that have been on sale. It is smaller that the huge Plasma TV that we got as a hand-me-down from her Father, but it has a much better digital tuner.
We now get four channels of OPB, FOX, The Hispanic Channel, and a station from Eugene that fads in and out.
So it was with great excitement I sat down to watch "The Big Bang Theory." I had read a number of reviews on The Eye of Polyphemus and frequent updates on Kaley Cucuo and so I was thinking I had missed quit a lot in not being able to watch the show.
It was then I realized how completely out of touch I am.
The show seems to be a long compilation of not that funny sex jokes hung on a thin plot. Ok, are there any TV writers who were not beat up in high school? Or were not nerds, or were completely happy with their sexuality? (gay or not gay)
I have a theory about TV and movie writing. There is either a script writing program or there is a huge dart board. Script writers get drunk and tell sex jokes and then throw darts at the board. I imagine they are drinking Peppermint Schnapps with a snooty name, mixed with Red Bull and they are throwing darts.  On the board are various plot devices. Nerd, pretty girl, car chase, misunderstanding, roommate is a nerd, roommate is gay, roommate can't communicate, racial stereo type, gay stereotype disguised as enlightenment, and so on.
Every time they hit something on the board they tear off the tag and paste it into the storyboard. If they hit words like Gay, Singing, Lets Put on a Show, then it is a storyline for Glee, if it is Sex Joke, Nerd, difficult roommate, Hot Chick, then the storyline is for Big Bang Theory, and so on.
Anyway, I know all of you that watch TV on a regular basis don't mind all the sexual innuendo and it all may be funny.
My daughter walked in the room during the show and was shocked and turned around and left.
So I've been thinking about this for a week.
We have all heard the stories of teens having sex all the time and sending naked photos over the internet and we all know how accessible internet porn can be.
I wonder if the utter pervasiveness of rude TV has more affect than anything else?  The daughter is somewhat offened by the open sexuality on shows and I see her covering her eyes or leaving the room frequently. We have not been real hard line on that kind of thing. Somewhat rude jokes are made in our family. There have been real live examples of things that are joked about in TV shows and we have discussed them.
I suspect that our family and Amish people are perhaps the only people in the country who do not have TV and so have not noticed the general lack of morality shown over the airwaves. The television is actually worse than movies. I enjoyed "The Hangover" greatly but I did not show it to Lulu.  I was offended by "Grease," but it was also not one long sex joke.
The problem with TV is that it purports to depict everyday life. What is normal on TV may be normal in everyday life. I suspect anyway.
It seems that you make a decision to look at sex on the internet, but you are exposed to a pervasive attitude of sexuality when you watch evening TV shows.
I have no idea if I am right or wrong or if anyone cares about my little rant.
It is pouring down rain and the river is flooding.
I don't want to go out of the house.
I suppose the biggest joke of all is myself. We don't have network TV because I am too cheap to subscribe to something I think I should be able to get for free. Then when after a few hundred dollars wasted on various antenna amplifiers and antennas and the joke of having an aluminum extension ladder leaned up against the side of a trailer house manufactured home, I am shocked by what everyone else takes for granted.
Or perhaps the joke is that someone like myself who enjoys off color humor and pictures of girls who are no-better-than-they-ought-to-be has such a double standard in real life. It is like I told my 20 something sometimes a great helper, "I will make the jokes and rude commentary but I have no illusions of being some sort of "player," if she gets within two feet I will run... Laugh at me if you will-I don't care, I yam what I yam..."

In one breath they talk about farmer's living on government welfare

( Read this article...)
What does it mean when farmland is worth more than what you can grow on it?
What does it mean when the Portland Pravda finally figures out what I have had the bitter experience of knowing for the past decade?
Why do I do it and why do I desperately want some ground of my very own?
So the usual topic is how farmers live off of government assistance and subsidies and now their ground is worth more than the crops they raise.... Just where is this train of thought going?
And why do I feel a continual sense of unease?
(aside from that ever present threat of aliens abducting farmers)

In case you were wondering

I really have nothing to say...
The wind is blowing and it is raining. I checked the river levels online to see if my truck would go under water. Then i realized it was pointing the wrong was and I would have to tow it backwards up the hill. Then I thought about the chances of me actually rebuilding the engine and I decided not to worry about it.
Muddy Valley bought me lunch at Ashes Cafe Monday. It was a good hamburger. He also brought some Wasabe stuff which Lulu loves and an old Rek-o-Kut turntable. I have been obsessively looking at online instructions on building plinths since then. Apparently the most common scheme is to stack layers of Birch Plywood and glue them together with hide glue. It HAS to be hide glue and you don't cover up the edges of the plywood as if you do it will reflect the sound waves back into the plinth and increase rumble. Unless you leave a 1 mm gap between the plywood edge and the cover. I don't know what 1 mm is because I'm not a communist.
This is what I want it to look like...
Have not figured out how to reattach the tonearm yet.
Got a book of mystery stories for Christmas. Read a couple stories.
Went to bed early.
I do not want to go to work this morning. Rain, mud, piles of junk farm equipment, obsessive old folks, more junk, rain, cold, I think I may do some electrical wiring for my wife. If I am lucky I will get a jolt of 220 which I have read gives one super powers.  I had a nice talk with the PGE inspector last year and made it a point to ask him if he knew of any instances of people gaining super powers after being shocked, perhaps in conjunction with a bite from a radioactive spider and he said "NO." I'm sure it is always covered up as they don't want people running around sticking to buildings and throwing lightning bolts with their fingers.
Have a nice day...

We go to the City

My lovely wife does her best to keep drag me out of my odd little shell.
The latest endeavor was to get me to go to Seattle to see Brian Setzer and His Rockabilly Riot at the Showbox in Seattle.
Now I admit to not being real enthused about the whole plan. It was decided on evening when I was tired and frustrated and for some reason I did not give my automatic, "no..."
At the time I was thinking we would take Lulu and see the Space Needle and the mechanical windup toy shop in Pike's Place Market, and eat at the Mecca Cafe, and perhaps buy some "longhair" music at the used record store up the block.
But then we heard that the Show Box was not an all ages show. Not to mention the questionable ethics of taking a ten-year-old to what could be a pretty wild show. Of course, thinking of the median age of the average Stray Cats fan, what would there be- a walker fight?
Anyway, I did not want to go but I was committed as the tickets were purchased and a groupon for the hotel and dinner was non-refundable and I hate controversy at Christmas time.
So we drove up, meaning my wife drove...
My extreme tension grew with the traffic. When you come over that little hill heading into downtown Seattle and suddenly there are buildings, and cars zipping everywhere, it is suddenly sound and movement and stress. Kind of like the cow going down the chute to to get a big old worm pill down its' throat and a rubber glove up it's rear...
But my wife drove...
First we stopped a the huge Seattle GoodWill. There I passed up a pair of $400 speakers because I couldn't remember the same. I bought a 45 of the "Hovercrafts," because there bass player has the same name as my daughter, (Lulu). There was a wealth of funky album covers but the vinyl was scratched on all of them.
We had a pretty cool hotel.
I wanted to go see the oldest elevator on the west coast but...
The old Rainier Brewery is now artist space and condos.
We had an excellent steak dinner on the Groupon voucher for our hotel. We tipped really well. We saw kids waiting around the block in freezing weather for those stupid shoes.
Then we got a call from my wife's sister. We were to meet her and her husband at the Showbox for the concert. It was something like three hours before the show. She was worried about getting good seats. We looked at each other and out at the folks shivering outside and said we were "waiting on our food."
We played that game until her sister went down and started waiting in line herself. She was first in line.
Finally the guilt got to us and we walked down to the Theater which is new Pike Place Market. It was cold. There were ten people in line. I was dressed warm. We waited a coupe hours. My wife and her sister had a good chat.
Later we discovered that we could go into the bar and wait where it was warm. We found that out 45 minutes before the show. Fifteen minutes after they quit letting people in the bar.
However, the show was absolutely incredible. Brian Setzer absolutely played his heart out. The opening band was good. Setzer played a good two hours straight. The guy is not as young as he once was. The guitar playing was fantastic. Later in the show it appeared that Phantom and Slim came out and played as well. At one point there were dueling Stand-up basses on stage. Setzer even came out and played bass.
We were a little far from the stage. After standing four hours in order to sit for two hours a compromise was made on the seating. We had a table back where the sound was terrible. My wife found a spot close to the stage and her and I saw some of the show up close.
I was pretty amazed at the guitar playing and the energy level. Those guys are old and they were working hard.
I had to think back to 1982 and how bad the local radio music was. The local stations never have been real innovative. I swear KGON was playing the same heavy rotations of Aqualung and Stairway to Heaven with the occasional "Walk this Way," thrown in as variety.
We used to listen to new bands like The Stray Cats on college radio from Eugene, when we could get it. They were high energy and played old songs and were a breath of fresh air when music was dense and over produced and boring.
So anyway... I guess we were just trying to be different and hip. Who knows.
Here is a view of the show.  I got to go to work. Christmas is past...

Oh, I did get the Lego Alien Spaceship and several Lego figures have been abducted. If only we had a lego cow...

Merry Christmas Post

My lovely wife and I traveled to Seattle. It was nice. We saw a Christmas display where pigs were pulling a sled.

And we saw a banjo player.
And we found out we would probably die a horrible death from lung failure due to the lack of filters on the incinerator at Pike Place Market. I know this because I saw several people fall over dead in front of the communist book store. They explained in depth how and why as they died and also seemed to talk a lot while they were dead. I wanted to take a photo but there were a lot of cops around and I know they don't like to have their photos taken, so you will all have to imagine it all.
Then we looked at cheese. There was a lot of cheese...

And then we came home.

Anyway... here is a nice Christmas card for you all...

and a little puzzle and I hope you all have a nice Christmas!

And a nice Christmas song for you all...