February 15th, 2008

although it's only mid-February, and we haven't had a "proper Winter", as yet, the nesting birds have begun to swarm some of the native, berry-bearing (fruit) trees and shrubs, well ahead of the migratory birds, who routinely do so in early-March. Usually, the ground is frozen (no worms or bugs) far ahead of this date, and that's the most readily-available food source. Each year, I feed the GC&N's hundreds of pairs of nesting birds, a good 20-40lbs of wild bird seed and ½ - ¾lbs of (not stale or moldy!) bread, each week. We also have hundreds of berried shrubs and trees on the 20ac Complex, and after numerous freezing-thawings, the berries become soft and edible for the native birds. Many plants — serviceberry, winterberry holly, black and red chokeberry, winter king hawthorn, skimmia, barberry, burning bush, evergreen holly, pyracantha and others — provide plenty of fruit for the birds to dine upon. It looks like La Niña's influence in the tropical Pacific is going to be felt for a while around this hemisphere, making faux-Winters more of a reality than I'd like, right now. In several past years, we've had such aberrant weather patterns and the migrating birds came back early, and were caught in late-Winter blizzards unprepared. (In the Blizzard of '96, I had 3 GHs with 30-50 trapped birds, which I fed daily with trays of worms (fishing bait tubs from a local convenience store), birdseed, bread and water, mixed into a "mush", until the 42" deep snow partially-melted and they were able to get out and get their own food. A lot of work, but I enjoyed being the "food giver" to all those birds, and we got to know each other as the days and weeks wore on. But I digress.) I'll know that Spring is "really almost here", when the migratory Robins finally appear from their Wintering-over deep in the regional southern forests, and begin to strip all remaining berries from the native plants. Meanwhile, the occasional 50-60-70°F days are just that: occasional and ephemeral. Okay, I'll admit it: it doesn't take much to entertain me. Like a small child playing with a shiny keyring or a kitten playing with a matchbook on a tile floor. I could feed and enjoy watching the birds all day long; ditto with kittens and puppies. I also believe that most animals have more personality, sincerity and life force in them, than many of the people I've met and worked with, over the years. That feeling, in and of itself, makes me smile and renews my Faith in "that which I cannot see and touch".

Around The Garden Center™

After my 2-yr old Asante Router crapped-out last Thursday, I unplugged the Cable Modem, installed the free version of ZoneAlarm Firewall, and turned-off the Windows Firewall option. I'm looking at LinkSys and Netgear routers as alternatives to that other unit. But for right now, ZA will do just fine.

I was up at 3:15am on Saturday morning, to water Murphy and decided to make some Cream of Wheat, while I logged-on to check the news and weather. As the stuff was being nuked, I read the box: except for "8 essential vitamins & minerals", there is no/zip/nada/zero health benefits to it, unlike the clearly-spelled-out health benefits of oatmeal. Cream of Wheat is "comfort food", if you grew-up in the 50s, as I did, you probably had it. I can also treat it as "grits-lite", with runny-yolk/sunny-side-up eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, toast etc, and hardly know the difference. Yes, I love grits. Well, it was a "change of pace", as they say. I'll go back to the oatmeal, on Sunday morning, thankyouverymuch. Mmmmmmm, now back to sleep until 7:00 or so.

WINTER WEATHER WARNING SATURDAY... BRIEF HEAVY SNOW TO AFFECT THE EARLY MORNING COMMUTE... Yikes! I encountered the heavy snow squalls when I hit Red Lion, about 5 miles south of my condo, and it continued right-up to my opening-up the GC&N Complex, at 9:15am. Although the temp was 34°F, it was sticking to everything except the road surfaces. Up north of Harrisburg, they were getting hammered with 3"+ of it. Our "mini blizzard" only lasted until around 10am, with no appreciable accumulation. I spent the day drinking green tea, eating pizza, working on new corporate website pages in HTML, and on my "Journal" in CSS-xHTML. By 4:30pm, my eyes were crossed, glazed-over and it was time to head home.

Bang! Another SEVERE WEATHER WARNING!, for Sunday morning into Monday morning: "After a major arctic front blasts through this area with heavy snow squalls and high winds, temps will rapidly drop into the -5°F to -10°F (windchill) range, with expected 45-50mph winds." I got up at 5am on Sunday, had breakfast and coffee, and went back down to the GC&N Complex to turn-on the 2 auxiliary heaters in the Pump House, so that the water pipes wouldn't freeze, from the coming bitter cold weather. So much for "sleeping-in" on Sunday morning. It snowed, sleeted and rained on the 29mile round-trip, and it reminded me of a Winter day, which we haven't had, as yet. Traffic was very light, as I like it, and I quickly did what was needed to be done. I took my shopping list along and got that errand done, as well.

As the bitter arctic air came through the region, Sunday afternoon and evening, so did some heavy snow squalls and violent 50-60mph winds. It got downright ugly just northeast of us. I had 3 short-lived power outages, but the APC Back-Up did its job. I had the gas fireplace stoked-up all day, and Mama Kitty spent the day lounging in front of it, while Murphy was content to drink from the kitchen faucet. Temps outside went from 39°F to 10°F in under 4 hrs. Windchill temp was -3°F, last I checked at 9:45pm. I was up at 3:30am to water/feed the cats, turn-up the condo's heat and have a cup of green tea, check the weather and news, and the temp was just 8°F with a windchill of -12°F. Damn. Coldest day/night of 2008, yet. Boom! A WINTER STORM WARNING! for Tuesday, just came in on my Weather Channel Alert, in the computer's tray. Looks nasty. Oh well; back to sleep for a couple of hours.

Monday was for trying to get my arms around all the numerous projects on my desk; trying to finsh some, while starting many others. No, I don't have a secretary or assistant; it's just "Me, Myself & I" doing it. All projects have deadlines and all want my undivided attention. Since there are only so many hours in a day/week/month, priorities kick-in and I sort the projects out, according to urgency. I deal with those, first. The rest fall into place, and seek their own level of attention. Yawn. Ka-ching! A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY! from The Weather Channel, hit my desktop around 9pm, replacing the W-S WARNING. It's going to get ugly on Tuesday. Knowing I need to get up real early and get into the office to get a load of work done, and get out of there and back home, before the snow/ice/sleet hits in early/mid-afternoon, I turned-in at 10:30pm.

For the past few weeks, I've detailed the temporarily-dropping gas prices, in the York(PA) area, but I've also said that "it won't last long". On the way into work on Monday morning, I saw that Unleaded Regular is now down 12¢, to $2.83/gal, Unleaded Premium is now at $2.93/gal, and Unleaded Super Premium is down to $3.13/gal. I also noticed Diesel at $3.29/gal at two of the local stations on the way home, Monday.

I was up at 3:30am, Tuesday, to water/feed the cats, and it was already snowing lightly, with 17°F and a "balmy" windchill of 7°F, as compared to last night/yesterday morning's bone-crunching temps of 8°F, with a windchill of -12°F. Back to sleep for a few more hours, and up again at 6am, aka "0-Dark-Thirty". On my way into work, I was amazed at all the school and business closings, on the local news radio station, in anticipation of the coming snow/ice storm. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon working on revising 12 different retail handout sheets, detailing landscape installation, plant material (tree) installation, hardscape installation, landscape design costs, drip irrigation systems, delivery costs etc. And working on several (of 10) website pages, which needed complete rebuilding and re-writing. As well as designing/writing the 6" x 9", 18th Open House (Sat, April 12th) notification postcard. I faxed the weekly CATV "Weather Channel" ad copy into ComCast, for airing next week. There were also Employee Weekly Timesheets, LSCP T&M Jobsheets, T&E Forms, LSCP Drip Irrigation Spec Sheets, and a few others I can't remember. It all becomes a blur, after awhile. All of those and more need revisions and updating, every year.

ZAP! A SEVERE WEATHER ALERT! flashed across my desktop, from The Weather Channel, updating the snowfall amounts from 1-3" to 4-8", so I decided to pack it up and leave, for the day. I secured and armed the buildings, chained the front gate, and noticed that snow was now accumulating on the frozen road surfaces. At 20°F, even the NaCl-treated roads were icing-up. By 6pm, we had 2-3" on the ground and side roads. By 7pm, temps had risen to 24°F and it was just freezing rain coming down, but quickly-icing all the sub-freezing surfaces. ZOT! An ICE STORM WARNING! just landed on my desktop, from "You Know Who", at 10:15pm. We're going to get hammered overnight. Time to sleep and not worry about it.

Comparatively speaking, I "slept-in" on Wednesday morning: 6:15am. I could hear the rain/ice/sleet on the skylights before coming down to water/feed the two cats. At 29°F, it was still freezing fast and pulling more tree limbs and power lines further down, so I expected a power outage, at anytime. I still had my cable modem connection, so I logged-on while making coffee and breakfast, and checked the local weather. Grim and getting worse until after 9-10am, was their forecast. Okay, to "Plan B". Oh well, I had brought plenty of work home on the flashdrive — the 10 website pages, hundreds of pics and 2 Word docs needing revisions — so there was plenty to do today, as long as I had an InterNet connection and power/heat. If those failed, then I'd go to "Plan C". (Don't ask; I don't know what that is.) After the "Three Ss", I put in a load of laundry and came back downstairs to make some green tea and 9-grain toast, and noticed that temps had risen to 33°F, and that the rain was quickly melting the ice. Okay, I went outside to test the driveway's and street's ice. Good to go! And out I went into a Winter Wonderland.

The 14.5 mile ride south to the GC&N was uneventful; I got behind a PennDOT plow truck and he removed the 3-4" of icy slush on SR Rt#24, from Red Lion (PA) on down to my driveway. But my drive had 2-3" of ice/slush/water on it, and I couldn't get out of the Jeep to open the front gate's chain. I went into the Complex through the back fields, opened-up, dealt with major ice back-ups on the poly-roof and leaks in the Main Retail GH by opening the floor drain caps, noticed that I had no Net connection as my wireless broadband towers were encased in 1"+ of ice. Swell. Bob and Arthur stopped by to feed the "stray dog" and do some shovelling and plowing for me. After they left around 12:30pm, I called Lee and we drove south to Hunt Valley (MD) to Wegman's Markets, since I had a $150 Gift Card burning a hole in my wallet, from Christmas. We had a nice lunch of Maryland crabcakes, crusty bread sandwiches and soft drinks, did some shopping and left Hunt Valley around 3pm. It was freezing rain all the way back, so I closed-up and went home. Still no Net connection. I'll deal with all the phone messages, tomorrow.

I was in early on Thursday, to get caught-up on messages, the Open House postcard mailer, numerous corporate webpage rebuilds, paying bills, writing out Gift Certificates for walk-in customers, inviting people into the GC&N Complex for simple tree installation quotes, and fielding calls from others who have various landscaping/water garden-related problems. Arthur was in to feed the dog. 21°F with a 12°F windchill, and it felt colder than yesterday, even though the sun was out. Still no Net connection. Damn; I'm gonna have 500+ emails to deal with when it resumes. I hate that. I got a little bit of everything done; nothing specific completed, though. I closed-up around 4:15pm and made a few errand stops on the way home. Well, there's the weekend to work on all that stuff, and I will go in on Sunday if I need to do so. Such is life with a small business: you do what you have to do.

Things Which Make Your Head Explode™.

Sooooo, the FBI is arresting and prosecuting elderly mafioso from the 70s, when they should be going after subhuman, murderous muslim-islamic-arab filth, who have vowed to kill all of us Infidels, take over the USA, and make it part of the worldwide islamic umma/caliphate turdworld shithole? Where are the FBI's ***priorities***, these days? In the toilet, if you ask me. Dumbasses.

When I read that GM had lost $39 BILLION in 2007, I couldn't quite grasp what that truly meant. $39 BN? "Whoops! Lost another 39 billion to Ditech!" $39BN loss? Well, what did they gross? No mention of those numbers, either. If it wasn't for their international business profits, GM'd be long gone.

This is rich: bigot, racist, scum, pig-fucking bitch filth, National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia, who heads-up the hate group, is accusing Americans who want the criminal, illegal alien filth out of this country, of v.

Election 2008™.

I said two weeks ago, that I was thinking about staying home and not voting in November's General Election. After re-thinking it over the weekend, there's no way I could do that. After 25+ years of voting (once!) in every damned local, state and national election in which I was eligible to vote (once!), I thought better of "sitting on my hands" that day, and will vote for everyone except POTUS. Afterall, if I don't vote, I'd have no right to criticize or complain about what's happening in my country.

We are living in a "benevolent/benign oligarchy" — government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich — and our "Constitutional Republic" or "participatory democracy", has been over with since the 1940s. Most Americans just don't know it, yet. As long as the government continues and increases the "nanny state" of "cradle-to-grave" and "womb-to-tomb" healthcare, government-guarranteed jobs, activist courts, tobacco and other legal product bans, right not to be offended or criticized, homo-sodomite "marriage", out-of-control taxes, shrinking paychecks, Boy Scouts under constant attack, redistribution of income, fetal stem cell research and cloning, special rights for all fringe groups, etc etc etc, the American Public will voluntarily stay dumb, docile and overly-compliant. The "Prozac® Nation" is blindly plodding along, doing the government's will. Only those who recognize this will be a danger to the government's power-agenda of one-world government (UN), the Trans-Texas Corridor invasion of America, total dissolution of all national borders (NAFTA), and US Constitutional Sovereignty (SPP), banning of Christianity, increased persecution of the White Man, elevation of murderous islam and sharia filth, creeping socialism, etc.

To date, 14.6mm liberal-demokkkRATs voted, while only 8.4mm GOPer-RINOs voted. What's the "discrepancy"? Simple: the Conservative base stayed home, and there was only the ***liberal-moderate dogshit*** to vote, IMO. Independents, demokkkRATs and liberal scum voted for McCain. We, the Conservative Base, didn't vote. The GOP candidate has already been selected for us! Pennsylvania's so-called primary is in April, but it doesn't mean shit, anymore! demokkkRATs, liberals, libertarians, RINOs, moderates and other assorted scumbags and assholes have selected the GOP's Candidate: John McCain, a total and complete loser.

The Little Yellow Bus™.

Talk about gutless, bend over and grab your ankles, worthless lowlife liberal filth: NBC caved to the Hitlery Rotten Klintoon Bitch's demand that one of its on-air, leftist-liberal correspondents, David Schuster, be suspended and made to apologize, for a comment about the Klintoon's butt-ugly, skank-bitch daughter, "pimped out Chelsea". Hey Hitlery: your "turkey baster" daughter is a filthy, ugly, smelly skank bitch! Now, the Klintoon Bitch wants Schuster fired. NBC gets s front row seat on The Little Yellow Bus.

This AP-Ipsos bullshit poll proves that 1,006 adult Americans are assholes, idiots, morons, cretins, scumbags, lowlifes and should be summarily tried and shot, IMO. None of them should have sharp objects in their hovels or shacks, and should be supervised by muslim-islamics when wiping their asses, after a shit. Oh, did I use muslim-islamics and shit in the same sentence? Sorry for being redundant. Another front row rider on The Little Yellow Bus.

US Rep Tommie "The Commie" Lantos (SCUMBAG-CA), a lowlife, hate-America dirtbag, abortion-loving, baby-murdering, Jew-hating, gun-grabbing, arrogant scum-sucking, piece-of-liberal-filth, is finally dead and gone from the corrupt, criminal US Congress. Good riddance and rot in hell, asshole! Kiss your idol, Molech (the devil), before you go into the eternal fiery hell, Lantos garbage! You go to the back of the bus, corpse!

The stupid-ass shithead losers at the USPS (US Postal Service) are again raising the cost of a first-class stamp another 1¢, to 42¢ this May 1st, from 41¢, raised 1¢, last April. Un-fucking-believeable! This is precisely what's wrong and corrupted in the US Gov't: idiots, morons and scumbags, who've never run a private sector business, can't balance a budget, do a business plan or turn a profit, are given charge of a billion-dollar gov't agency, with hundreds-of-thousands of employees, and they fuck it up like clockwork! Where's the duct tape; my head's ready to explode!

Global Warming BS™.

Have you seen this video: "BBC: The Great Global Warming Swindle"? It was outright-banned from leftist, hate-filled, dirtbag lowlife scumbags, Google.com's and YouTube.com's websites, by the mentally-ill, left-wing, global warming idiot wackos, but I've preserved it, for posterity, aka you, me and *ours*. Watch, be informed and download it for others to see. It's on my corporate server, and will stay there, BTW.

Ready for the coming cold spell? Screw the global warming crap.

Read some of the left-wing wacko "Global Warming" crowd's screeds: no more "Global Warming"; it's now all about "Climate Change", to accommodate what's coming, very soon: very cold temps from the sun's inactivity in an 11-yr cycle. That way, they're never wrong, whatever happens. Get it?

Some People Just Need Killing™.

It's probably about time that I cleared-up any confusion about this section, so aptly named as it is. I do not imply that "we" are the final judge of an evil person's black soul, but rather that God is, and all we're here to do is "hasten the meeting" between them. Plus, getting such subhuman filth out of society, where they can do no more damage to innocents, is also paramount in my mind. With that in mind, let's proceed to the 'candidates for summary trial and execution", shall we?

Subhuman piece-of-shit spic-filth, Santos Wenceslao Guzman, 42, of El Salvador, needs immediate killing for aggravated sexual battery against two 8-year old girls, and not the 3½ years he was given by a liberal activist court. Kill him!

Pig-fucking, camel-molesting, subhuman piece-of-lowlife-dogshit, Salman Hossain, a homo-sodomite muslim-islamic punk in Cana-duh, needs summary trial and killing, for advocating the death of American and Canadian Soldiers. I'd volunteer to headshoot the muslim-islamic garbage/shit/trash/scum/filth, and zero cost to any taxpayer. Take out the muslim trash!

Good riddance and rot in hell, William Robinson, 49!

Both subhuman, drunken lesbo, sweathog filth, Zahira Matos and Carmen Molina, of NYC, need summary trial and headshooting, IMO, for the murder of 23-month old Yovany Tellez. Read the article; it'll break your heart. Kill the lesbo garbage/shit/trash/scum/crap!

Treasonous chink, seditious gook, saboteur slope, Dongfan "Greg" Chung, of Orange, Calif, needs summary trial and killing, IMO. Shoot the yellow-dog scumbag filth!

The Times They Aren't-A-Changing™.

Ever since The New York Times opened its archives to one and all, journalist Jeremy Olshan has jubilantly mined its riches "to prove that everything news is old", especially on this site. Derek Jeter strays into a tax mess? Big whoop! The ball players and umps from 1919 found themselves in a just such a brouhaha. Alarmed over reports of a tsunami smacking the East Coast? Readers were similarly rattled, back in 1878. School officials and teachers tussle over tenure? Yeah, we've all heard it before — the year we entered World War I. And, just to prove the steadiness of the New York character, a recent post covering "umbrella umbrage" on Manhattan's sidewalks reminds us that "New Yorkers have been whining in the rain for more than 75 years." Thank heavens for a little consistency.