Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Thursday 4/7/2011

Thursday

Has an odd ring to it - it's Thursday already. Okay. It sprinkled yesterday, a bit, it wan't supposed to rain at all. Not that I mind, I just wish the forecasters in this area would do a bit better job of determining what, exactly the weather is going to be. Saturday there are supposed to be thunderstorms, I'll welcome that.

Next door neighbor - the one to the east of me that calls the police for parking on the street and for them flipping me off......lol.......- I'm out there fiddling around on the east side of my house - I spend a lot of time over there since that's where 2 of my ponds are.

There is a portion of chain link fence that between our properties that juts out beyond the front of his house so that his driveway and front yard are exposed. Not by design, mind you, trust me, if I had the money to build a block fence all the way down that property on that side, I would build it 10 feet tall if the city would let me and 3/4's of the issues with those people would be done and over with.

Well, he comes walking up the driveway. I look up to see him looking at me - the feeling-eyes-staring-at-you feeling. So I looked at him in the eyes, right back. He throws up his hands, I mean, all the way up, like if the cops were pointing guns at you and you are surrendering.

If that's what he meant, I sincerely hope it is true and that it sticks. In other wars, stop the BS, stop calling the police because the police aren't going to DO anything. Not only that, but if they stop, I won't respond in kind. The only issue that would remain are the completely untrained dogs that bark and bark.....and bark..........

After that encounter was done, their dogs got beyond their make shift fencing and yes, started barking at me through the fence. "You need to deal with your dogs", I always say now very loudly towards their house. It works, too. Amazing, in about 30 seconds time, those dogs disappear and I don't usually hear anything again from them either the rest of the day or until the next day - when it starts all over again.

The old saying that money doesn't buy happiness isn't completely true. It has elements of truth to it, don't get me wrong, but there are situations where money can do wonders to restore peace. In this case, yes: a block fence would deal with much of this situation. About $500 worth of block, plus cement and of course the skilled labor to put it up.

Yeah, not exactly in the cards any time soon. It's a nice pipe dream, though. In fact, there are so many things I would love to do with that property........no use lamenting forever about it, I guess, I'm stuck there, though, for now anyway.

Now then, is the government going to "partially" shut down? If that's what it takes to even begin to start to get this debt and deficit under control, then so beit. In other words, get both sides to talk some REAL numbers, not just a few billion dollars. I mean, in terms of the federal government and the staggering debt we are loaded under right now, 61 billion dollars is like finding a penny on the street. Do you even pick it up? It's chump change - now the 4 trillion they are talking about attempting to get passed for 2012 is something entirely different.

Anyway, it is nice, at least from my view of it, to see that one party isn't able to just ram whatever they want through whenever they want to. I continue to ask the question, though: why didn't the Dems pass a budget when they had a Triangle control? They could have done whatever they wanted, the GOP wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, the only constraints would be voter approval or disapproval of whatever they might have done.

I take that back, there is a proposal that slashed SIX trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Now THAT is significant.

Whatever. Plenty to do today in the truck routing system, which is always a good thing - for me anyway as I hate not having something to do and having to "invent" things to do to pass the time.

G'day.

ben

Wednesday 4/6/2011

Wednesday

I'm sorta hoping the police events yesterday will be it for, sayyyyy, at least another year? But if that neighbor threatens me again, I'm calling the police again. That neighbor STILL has his blinds drawn and doors shut. He was talking smack yesterday: "The police won't do anything", apparently that didn't translate into him acting quite so cocky when they actually showed up and started knocking on his door and windows.

As for the neighbors on the OTHER side, nothing is new there, either. I mean, I still don't quite get what they thought the police would be able to do to me for responding back to THEM flipping ME off. I didn't call the police on them for making rude gestures, lol. I waited out there last night for quite a while to see if they had anything further to say to me after their discussion with that guy and his wife - they did not.

Whatever. I received a very nice and interesting reply from the general manager yesterday concerning a quesstion I had posed to him: Do you have any idea when, possibly, corporate might decide to go ahead and restore our hours? It was a several day gap from the time I sent that email to the time I received a reply, but I was glad to get one.

I will not go into specific details of what a GM is saying in an email to an employee - just cause' this is the internet and I don't want to go there publicly, but it was a good reply and though I may not be getting my hours back now, eventually - if/when the economy comes back - I will. I can also get more hours if the situation warrants it, ie: we're having a strong month at our branch and the allotted hours simply aren't enough to get everything done. Last month certainly did not qualify for that, the month before did and I did end up getting a few extra hours on a couple of paychecks.

Sooo, I never did find the paperwork I was looking for for my taxes. I am going to request the paperwork from the company that had processed my payments but - I am sure it won't be found and given to me in time. So, next paycheck being days away, I am going to go ahead and have the tax preparing company go ahead and process it and send it in hopefully early next week. Just want it in before the 15th.

I've read in several places/different authors that later on this year? Good possibility stocks are going to tank again. I've received some pretty decent returns on the various groups I dumped my 401k money into, but I think by July, if I keep hearing this stuff, I am pulling it all out of high risk junk and putting it into the "safest" risk group available. I don't want to go through what a lot of us did the last time: watch the gains disappear. I'd rather take a loan out on it and at least get the money rather than lose it to market volatility. But I don't think I'm going that far with it: just need to get it into a safer house and see what happens this summer or later this year.

That's it. I wrote enough in this blog yesterday, not getting carried away with it today. I mean, there IS the budget and the fact that the 2 sides are butting heads. My question remains, though, since the Dems are pushing the issue: Why didn't they create a budget BEFORE they lost all of their power to, basically, do whatever they want? They can blame GOP all they way, but in reality, they HAD their chance to do whatever they wanted with it and they did NOTHING.

Okay, enough of that. OH, well, it's regarding a cousin, nothing bad, just never had any real conversation with her until last week when she messaged me on Facebook and we started talking.

Have to go into that some other blog entry.

G'day.

ben

 Monday - afternoon The oldest was in a very bad mood this morning.  Out of character and amazingly, the roles were reversed. The youngest w...