Meh

Today is actually my Friday, I'm off tomorrow, of course I'm back to work on Sunday... but just for one day.  Then I'm going to have five days off in a row.  Now... just what will I do?  Maybe paint.  Three things that are scheduled are my annual physical, my car gets serviced (oil change), and Seig goes to the Vet.
And, of course, repercussions and accusations are still flying into the walls of American morals after the Idiot Jerk's rally in North Carolina.  While his base sings and dances to his racist song, far more Americans saw him step into a deep pile of shit.  Does he, and the rest of these dung dancers, really care?  Absolutely not.  He has an adoring base and as long as they give him what he wants, praise and veneration, he will spew hatred.  For him, the only true American is one who bows before him.  His problem, and it's a serious one, is that large swaths of voters took a step back and said "what the fuck?"  The crowd at his rally was not all local.  Some drove from as far as Florida to spin and whirl in his hatred.  The response by a majority of Americans was to scratch their heads in disbelief and say "shut up!"  Prepare yourselves, he and his white party will continue to shit in their pants.  It's the only thing he really knows how to do.
On the bright side, Rep. Omar went home to praise from constituents.  The Idiot Jerk has no clue as to how much he helped with her re-election campaign.
And on the 'meh' side of life.  The trailer is out for "Cats."  Deep, deep groan.  I saw "Cats" on Broadway.  Many words have been written, not about how great this show is, but rather how it's a one song musical.  "Memory."  There, I've said it.  The rest of the music is... meh.  How meh?  The London cast version had different songs to sing than the New York version.  Meh.  I like shows that use dialogue to move the story forward.  "Cats" is a dance musical...  No dialogue.  In fact, this is a concept show, meaning there is no real story per se.  They do sing "Memory" though, a couple bars here, a couple bars there, and then the full song at the end.  Now, I don't mind watching people dance on the stage for short periods of time... though not for 2 + hours.  Meh.  I watched the trailer and I think the actors look less like cats and more like aliens with kitty-cat ears and tails.   Meh.  Don't believe?  Watch?

There's almost as much dancing here as at one of the Idiot Jerk's rallies... well, maybe not that much.

Time to Unify

It's Thursday... I know this because I checked my calendar.  For some reason I thought it was Friday... wrong.  Believe me, I would really like it to be Friday.  It's my approaching vacation... and the fact that it's slow at work.  This is not flooring season.
I went riding in Utah last night, not my normal 10 or 11 miles, I was on a new route... with hills, strep hills - 10% grade.  I took a snap.  My position is marked by the little blue helmet.

My legs are a little sore this morning, so I'll take the day off. I like this ride, though, so I'm going to focus more on it and build up some strength in my legs.
The Idiot Jerk held a White Republican Rally in Greenville, North Carolina.  It was racist as all get out, with the very white crowd chanting "send her back."  The ugly man is fueling hatred towards minorities because he wants to, because it gives him joy.  He so desperately wants to wear the mantle of American Dictator.  His approval rating has gone up a few percentage points... among white Republicans.  The rest of America is inching backwards in horror as the party of the Idiot Jerk creeps deeper into fascism.  Believe me, the Idiot Jerk would love to run a fascist country and so would the Republicans.  They hate the constitution because it restricts them, binding them with rules which deny them the control they so desperately want.  One good thing is that they are a minority group, themselves.  Vast majorities do not stand behind the Idiot Jerk.  His approval rating has been sitting, for the most part, in the low 40's since his election.
Democrats need to come together.  The infighting between the middle and the far left needs to stop until after the 2020 election.  If this means AOC needs to bite her tongue... well, then she needs to bite her tongue.  Centrists and Independents are the key.  Do not piss them off.  The Idiot Jerk does not know how to deal with a wall of unity.  He and his sycophants will chip away at every crack they can discover.  Unification is the only way to beat this Evil.  I like The Squad, but they need to become for Centrist in their message if we hope to defeat the Idiot Jerk.  The Squad needs to become a name he hates.  They need to represent truth, justice, and equality for all Americans.
And, now that Al Green (D - Texas) has failed at his little impeachment stung, he needs to put on his Big Boy Pants and join the team.  His priority must be to help win the White House back from the Idiot Jerk.  He needs to pocket his hatred until we Americans can begin to prosecute the Idiot Jerk and his henchies.

How to Treat an Inept Politician

Holy Crap!  It's Wednesday... and I go back to work for 3 days.  Trois jour ou les temperatrues seront tres chaudes...   The humidity is already here.  Yikes!
I had an eye exam yesterday.  It's been 6 months since I stopped using the eye drops.  And the good news is?  I don't have Glaucoma, as diagnosed by my first specialist.  That's nice.  The pressure in my left eye actually dropped... now ain't that nice.
I have 79.5 miles completed on my challenge.  That will be easy peasy.  For those who are curious, here's a snap of my riding set-up.

When I'm riding a route, the TV in front of the bike show a video of the route.  The only thing bad is going around curves because I'm on a stable bike and the camera leans into the turn, the way I would if I were riding the actual road.  I can live with that.
The House passed a bill censuring the Idiot Jerk for his inflammatory rhetoric yesterday.  Oh, and some dingle-brained Democrat from Texas introduced a bill of impeachment.  Don't try and impeach!  The last time a political party impeached a president, Clinton, he went on to win a second term.  We need to legally vote that Moral Degenerate out of office, and then prosecute... prosecute... prosecute. We need to get the AG Billy Barr disbarred.  The rest of the Idiot Jerks terror team will be jailed for committing crimes against humanity.
And the Idiot Jerk's rhetoric?  It will not only continue, it will get worse.  Instead of throwing temper tantrums, our representatives need to begin to throw it back at him in a very... nonchalant way.   Don't take his bait.  They need to start using phrases like "These are the things you expect an inept politician to say," and "These are the words of a failed political hack."  When people call him things like this he flips out and makes himself look even worse.  Don't try and impeach the sucker, just piss him off.  Let him do the dirty work himself.
And now, for some pretty snaps... of my purple dahlias.  Yes, they are blooming.

Now, ain't that just beautiful?

Rest Day

Today is Tuesday.  This is the first of 2 rest days in the Tour de France.  Those cyclists deserve it, they've ridden over 1300 miles in 10 days (give or take a mile).  They will relax and eat pasta and build up their strength for the stages in the Pyrenees which come next.  Eli and Max spent the first rest day up in Montmartre.

That evening found us having dinner with Walker Beresford and her fiancé Henri d’Eauville at Le Poisson Blanc, a basement café in Montmartre.  The long dead souls of Beat poets filled the air around us while people wearing berets smoked cigarettes in long, eloquent holders.  This was a shadowland of past and present, where shiny cell phones lay on tables next to wine glasses and ashtrays filled with unfiltered cigarette butts, where some conversed and others listened to the pale, smoothly flowing sounds of a jazz flautist.  A transfixed moment from a Romantic age now only chronicled in books and on film.

Here in the United States we have a Moral Degenerate, and Idiot Jerk in the White House who is proving he will stoop to any level in order to get himself re-elected.  He is justifying his racism by call those voices unifying against him as unpatriotic... un-American..  Four of those voices are women of color.  He is trying to rip a page from McCarthy's playbook.  For those who don't know, McCarthy was a Republican politician who saw Commie, Pinko Sympathizers every where.  He got Congress to hold hearings on Un-American behavior.  The Idiot Jerk wants to do the same thing, except his targets are minorities.  It's the 'old, white thing' you know?
One of the opinions I saw this morning on NBC News claimed he'd flipped the race card on Pelosi, tying the entire Democratic Party to the far Left.  That might be true if we already hadn't seen 2 years of the Idiot Jerk.  He is inept.  He has henchies like Stevie Miller telling him what he needs to do to hold on to his base.  This is what he is desperately trying to do, make sure they go to the polls in 2020 and cast their votes for racism.  If you weren't prepared for this, you should have been; he will pull every dirty trick in the book.  He is a desperate, angry man who represents an aging white America that steadfastly refuses to even try to understand evolution.  We are changing... and it's worldwide.  The dominant gene is brown, not white.
There will be no rest day in politics until the Idiot Jerk and his minions are voted out of office.  Vote Blue. 

Grade This

My weekend begins today!  What's in store?  Yard work, of course.  And most likely a ride on the bike.
I hit the 60 mile marker yesterday on my 100 mile challenge.  I rode and completed the CBTT (Charlie Baker Time Trial) in Concord, Mass.  I was pleased because this ride has some hills.  Hills are good, they build strength and grow muscle in your legs.  The higher the grade of the hill the more power you expend.  What is grade, you ask... well, if you have 1000 feet of road and the end point is 90 feet higher than start point, you have 9% grade.  In "The Body on the Lawn," Eli remarks how the grade up to Margaret Stanley's estate is a 9% grade.  When the Tour de France goes through the Alps or the Pyrenees the grades are as high as 24%... that's almost like riding up a ladder.  The steepest hill I had yesterday riding the CBTT was 6.5%.  I took a snap of that ride when I was finished so I could show you what those hills look like.

The hills are the green bit

And, of course, the Idiot Jerk in the White House Tweeted out his ugly racism yesterday.  Approximately 89% of the Republican Party agree with his handling of the immigration crisis.  They are a slowly shrinking minority group, a fact to which they completely oblivious.  They are white, aging men and white rural communities with a small minority presence.  They are the white class of Americans who feel entitled:  they want to buy as much shit as they possibly can with low payment, interest free loans.

And now an amusing customer story.  He had bought three vinyl mini-blinds and was attempting to adjust the length.  We will cut the width down, but length?  That the customer's responsibility.  It's a timely process.  Well this customer was having problems.  He didn't understand you need to take the extra string and thread it through the holes in the bottom rail, tie them together, cut off the excess, and replace the plastic plug.  "I have all this extra string," he kept saying.  So, I repeated the process.  His response?  "If I can't figure this out, do you have a support team you can send out?"...   ...   ...  He must have thought we had a blind Geek Squad... or, well, a Geek Squad for blinds.  We don't.  I apologized and told we don't provide that kind of service and recommended he call the 800 number on the instruction sheet.

Mike and Barbara?

Something is eating my nectarines!  I have no idea what... some sort of buggy things.  It's actually not that upsetting.  I hadn't planned on being able to harvest any this year.  I'm off tomorrow and that's one of my yard work chores.
In my Trek Riding Challenge I am 98,983 in the rankings.  That sounds bad, right?  Well, there are actually 41, 208 cyclists who are doing worse than I am.  Oh, and I hit 50 miles yesterday.  Also, I can tell you that some of the few ahead of me have over 1000 miles in so far this month.  Think of that, the month is not even half over and they've already traveled more than 1000 miles on their bikes.
One of the things I did to aid myself in learning Greek was to print off a copy of the alphabet.  For me, learning a language has always depended upon specific sounds with specific letters.  Showing me a word with letters I've completely unfamiliar with is not the way to teach me, especially when at some point I'm going to have to write Greek... and that depends on spelling.  I also write down the new words I'm given.  You need to be familiar with the Eta, Beta, Theta... if you know what I mean.
On Jeff Epstein: there are a lot of words being written about how he, as a sex offender, a jailbird, managed to get so many of the rich and powerful to turn their heads.  He lent his jet to the rich and famous.  Here is a very small list of those many who flew Little Lolita down to Florida:

The names include well-known performers, including Ralph Fiennes, Alec Baldwin, David Blaine, Jimmy Buffett and Courtney Love; media figures including Charlie Rose, Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters; former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, former British prime minister Tony Blair, industrialist David Koch and the late Salomon Brothers Chief Executive Officer John Gutfreund and his wife, Susan.

Holy Shit!  Barbara Walters!  Mike Wallace!  It wasn't just Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, there were a whole slew of people.  So, were all these people being flown down to one of his parties?  No. Before we blindly brand everybody with Epstien's evil we need to get to the truth.  He is not some dolt, like the Idiot Jerk in the White House, rather he is exceptional when it comes to muddying up the waters.  The truth he doesn't want you to see is there, all you need to do is filter the water first.  His purpose has always been to do what he wants by covering his ass.  Tell me, do you really thing Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters got massages from 14 year old girls?

Of course, you never can tell.  Maybe they made a sandwich with Tony Blair...

Oh, my, did I really write that?

ηλιοτρόπιο

I guess today should be called my mini-hump day since I'm in a 3 day work week.
Yesterday, work was slow and boring to begin with but then, about 20 minutes before I was supposed to leave things... got hectic.  One of my customers with an expensive carpet install showed up... and did some minor changes... and signed up for a credit card.  The other 2 specialists were busy with customers of their own, and then another customer showed up, and another, and then a customer wanted blinds cut
 Oh, and we have a customer with a flooring issue:  three of the transition strips they need for her doorways have yet to be delivered.  For fifteen minutes I listened to her non-stop complaints about how her daughter had warned her we were going to be slow, how she can't have guests over because they've moved the island out of her kitchen, how she's a clean person and can't deal with the mess, how she's spending all of this money and wants the job done now.  There's only so much we can do.  We don't manufacture this product... somebody else does, there's nothing we can do if they're waiting for materials.  So, I patiently listened, and apologized... and didn't that whiny woman call back 6 hours later and go through the same song and dance with one of our Assistant Managers.  She is one of the Entitled Ones who is only patient as long as things are going her way.  Her demands are always framed in whines.  In the end they will probably knock a couple of hundred dollars off of her charge, not because it's the right thing to do, rather they'll do it to shut her up.  She is a lot like the Idiot Jerk in the White House, who feels she's owed.
Anyway, because I didn't get home till late, I didn't add any mileage to my challenge.  I did, however, print off  Greek alphabet so I know what their letters look like.  Now when I look at a word, I know what the symbols stand for, like the English 'p' is actually the Greek 'r.'  Interesting.
Oh, and I planted ηλιοτρόπιο  (sunflowers) this year... and they're black.

I will save seeds and plant them again next year.