Outdoor Light Fixtures . . .

The front of our house has a series of lights that point/face upward, so called accent lights.  They were nice fixtures but not designed to be used as they are.  They are all point upward and they capture water from rains and sprinklers.  They have corroded, paint peeled off and for the most part are located behind foliage.

Our neighbors have simple ones that the flood light screws into, the bulb is exposed so it does not have lens, covers, etc.  They are just basic and work quite well.  They are not finished in bronze, black or silver, they are what they were when they were made, metallic in color, could be painted if one wished to do that.

I thought I could get some on line.  I found literally hundreds of so called accent fixtures and basically all have the same faults as the present ones.  And they all cost about $70 each.  I am looking for the basic $10 special.  I do not care what color they come in.  I can get a $3 can of spray paint and paint them myself.  I see these things all over the place.  But I can not find one in Home Depot or Lowes, they all have the super duper $70 specials.  I do not need the elaborate fixture, just a basic one.

There is a light fixture place around the corner from us and I will pay them a visit.  I am sure the kind of fixture I am looking for is readily available but not pushed as it is basic in color and price.

I find them, just got to keep looking.  I know there are at least five or six supply houses in Fort Worth that supply that kind of stuff.  I will just have to keep looking for it.

Windows 10

I have concluded Windows 10 is a piece of crap.  First I noted that they deleted solitaire and the entire games suit.  That I suppose is now on X box or some other place where one has to pay for it.

So I finally decide to pay for the solitaire and it is another hurtle to get through.  No help.  No instructions, no nothing, Nada!

When I do get some to show up, if flashes on the screen,  the flash takes about five or six times to figure out what it says.  That leads you to another piece of crap, a Windows Password.  What password?

Finally figure that out.  Got a password and it does not work.  With that I gave up.  Just a piece of crap, no help unless you pay a fee.  All it is is a system to collect more money.  It down loads free and one must do it because old Windows 7 is no longer supported.  Windows 8/8.1 probably is in the trash can too.  So one must down load the allegedly "free" Windows 10.  Well nothing is free, got to pay either a monthly fee or an annual fee for solitaire.  No idea how that works because I can not get there because of a lack of function understandable instructions.

I guess I have to just give up on solitaire.  I am stuck with Windows 10.

Not a happy camper, like I said it is a piece of crap.

Thanksgiving . . .

What do we have to be thankful for, much.  A bride and her husband (Amanda Louise and Mike), healthy grandchildren and great grandchildren, three sons alive and well.   So far it has been a good year, Judie has survived a heart attack, seems like ages ago but not really that long back in time.  So we have much to be thankful about.  Yes, we have had little set backs, material things, some health issues but nothing compared to what others are suffering.

I just learned our former neighbor, Carl, who has been suffering from Alzheimer's is now in hospice care and is not expected to live more than a week.  His Kidneys are shutting down, his brain is turning off his body.  Perhaps that is a blessing in disguise but not to his family, his children and perhaps his yet unborn grand children.  A real tragedy.  We shall miss him.

We have seen some massive hate filled crimes in the world (Paris, Syria and Iraq) and our President in his misguided beliefs wants to unabashedly release the same on our citizens.  He apparently personally accepts the risk as being overly stated, and he presses madly on into his arrogant way.  Even those of his own party counsel a slow down and he ignores them.  He is not a President of the people, he is not a visionary, he is too short sighted.  We have an expression from the USAF days, "Heads up and locked."  It means literally damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.  It means we are ignoring the risk in making  our judgements, we are not looking, checking, or assessing the danger.  I pray we shall not suffer some great miscarriage of justice due to his ego.

Yet Thanksgiving is upon us and we should thank the Good Lord for our gifts, our beneficiaries, our good luck for our Nation as well as our family.  Maybe it is just good Karma, or maybe disaster is just around the corner.  We must be positive and look ahead, and hope and pray for the best yet to come.

Amen!

I Was Right . . .

I was right, the French moved swiftly and thoroughly to track down and rid themselves of a major terrorist.  The news papers and TV news shows are full of it. 

And where was Obama, crying in his milk?  What an embarrassment.  The world is looking down their noses at us.  What a wimp.  What incompetence.  What lack of leadership.  He will go down in history as a worse President than Jimmie Carter.  Hard to believe the Democrats can do it twice within a lifetime.

What a Dabacle . . .

I am ashamed of our President.  We knew he was a wimp but we did not know big of a wimp he is.  And what is worse our Democratic contenders are all following suit one way of the other.  Bernie blames it on climate change and Hillary is just like Obama, in fact she help create this debacle.

We need strong but stable leadership.  We must again take the lead.  Yet one party is being truly out in left field.  Are we returning to a land of disregard for the rest of the world?  Or we becoming isolationists, that is certainly what it sounds like.  A real head in the sand philosophy.

And the current administration is ignoring the majority of the state Governors on resettlement of Syrian refugees.  Vetting they say will go on, but we now know there is little to vet on.  Yes, the CIA and FBI have some but not all of a data base regarding potential saboteurs.  All we have to do is look at what is going on in France today. My God, where is our intelligence, where is our smarts, why are we allowing potential threats into the United States?

The Horror of Paris . . .

I am reeling from the horror of what happened in Paris, France.  We visited the City of Lights and while I was not impressed with the Parisians in general, no city, town or country should suffer what they have had happen to them.

The problem is liberalism and Muslims.  The Muslims have taken over whole sections of Paris.  Non-Islamic people are not welcomed in those areas.  The Muslims have even imposed Shari Law on the locals in those areas and the Parisians, the French have liberally let them do it.  The Muslims are not assimilating into the French society, they remain separate.

All of that spells trouble and boy do they have trouble now.  It is not going to be peaceful in Paris anymore.  I predict the French government will crack down.  But those same troubles are on the horizon for both Great Britain and Germany that both have large unassimilated populations of Muslims.  Remember "Jihadi John" is a Brit (or perhaps was a Brit).  Already, the Dutch have begun to reverse their liberal polices dealing with the Muslims.

And for all the anti gun folks let me remind you that there are severe laws in France, indeed in all of Western Europe, regarding possession of fire arms.  You can not own a gun like you can in the US of A.  Yet, these fanatics pop up with automatic weapons and randomly slaughter people.  The real experts will tell you that the reason we do not see this kind of thing in the US is because they know the general populace here is armed and will react.  The Japanese knew it in WW II and that inhibited their ideas of invading the US.

So remember just because you disarm the populace, you still have these unbridled onslaughts.  Some use knives and knife like weapons too.  So it is not the gun that causes it, it is the nut cases that have guns that cause it.  And in this case, extremist Islamic people are doing it.

Automatic weapons have been banned in the US for years.  No more "Tommy Guns."  Do not confuse semi automatic weapons with automatic ones.  Automatic weapons, machine guns, are rare and are heavily regulated and licensed in the US.

You have to ask yourself how, in a country that has severe penalties for fire arm possession, do these extremisst get submachine guns like AK-47s?  They are smuggled in you say, well of course they are.  So why doesn't the authorities find these weapons.  I guess Charlie Hebdo was not sufficient warning for the Parisians and the French in general.

Time to start profiling the radicals.  Time to prevent resettlement of additional Muslims from Syria or anywhere in the Mideast into the US.  Time to observe and learn from the Israelis.  Time to change from Liberal to Conservative immigration policies.  Time to go into the survivable mode.  Time to change!

We do not want such horror in our borders.

Watching The Squirrels . . .

We have two Red Oak trees in front of our house.  They were planted by the house builder in his efforts to landscape the house.  These trees are maturing now and are producing acorns.  I am told they start at 12 years of age to produce acorns.  Well they have been planted now for a little over 13 years.

The produce rather big acorns.  They are not as big as a Burr Oak but much larger than the locally common Post Oaks.  Thus they are desirable by the squirrels.

We have two young squirrels beginning to feast on the acorns.  Both of our trees are quite healthy and have both been treated for Oak Wilt.  Oak Wilt is a common disease and much worse, is common for our locality.  So we paid a handsome sum for their treatment.  I can say that after the treatment they looked very healthy.  I am not so sure what the treatment is, but it appears to be a solution and the trees readily suck it up.

I have over the years also fertilized the trees.  At first I just used a balance fertilizer, poking holes in the ground at the drip line and pouring a handful of the fertilizer.  Later I used tree spikes, more solid, and probably take longer to dissolve, thus provide for a longer period of time that the trees are fed.  And of course, the lawn people also fertilize two or three times a year.  All of that makes for two pretty healthy and now quite large trees.

By large I mean they are probably about 14 or so inches in diameter.  And they stand well above our roof line providing a great deal of shade to the west facing front of the house.  They are big enough so that the grass will not grow under them, too much shade for the grass.

Any way I watched this little squirrel dash about looking for a place to bury his acorn.  It perturbed him and he chased about looking for just the right spot.  As he was doing that his competitor, another small squirrel scamper up the tree to get his acorn.  That seemed to bother him too.  His turf was being invaded by an enemy, or at least a competitor.

Of course, there are dozens of acorns on the ground as the tree is dropping them all over the place.  He does not really have to climb to get any acorns but he does.  Last year there was a first and a bumper crop of acorns.  So much so that we have a bunch of little trees sprouting all over the place.  That is not a bad thing, just a fact.

Soon the trees will drop their leaves.  The one on the left front does it first and then the second one on the right does it.  It is just genetics.  While they are the same species, they have different parents so to speak and one tree is always ahead of the other tree.  Their cycles are just a tiny bit different.

No matter the squirrels love them.