The Traveller: Personal Update: Home Project & Work

Quotes

George Orwell
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Stephen Biko
"The oppressors' most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."

Kevin A. Carson
"Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters."

C. Spurgeon
“While I regarded God as a tyrant I thought my sin a trifle; But when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him. When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast."

Madeleine L'Engle
"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

Troy Wisdom
"The truth needs no defense; it only needs witnesses."

Mark Horne
"There is no pleasure as exquisite as being told by someone with more income than you have ever had in your life that your politics are wrong because you don't have solidarity with the poor."

JRR Tolkien
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Augustine of Hippo
"What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits."

Mark Horne
"The Bush-Obama killing continuum shows that there are no reformers; each successor builds on the power grab of the predecessor."

Robert A. Heinlein
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH THE TRIVIAL LIKE THE ABOVE, BUT LEADS TO THE FOLLOWING:

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

Neal Stephenson
"The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things....From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. "

Friday, September 05, 2008

Personal Update: Home Project & Work

So, I used up the last of my PTO (paid time off) to take the 28th, 29th, & 30th of August off (these were the last three work days before Labor Day weekend). I'll post pictures later, and I will explain why I am going to be sparse in the number of entries over the next few weeks. We wanted to repair the siding on our house on the Southwest & South side of the house (the side that gets all the weather--sun, wind, rain, etc.), so we removed the siding (T1-11) and replaced it with 'oriented-strand' board siding ($20 per sheet vs. $35 per sheet for T1-11). Everything went well until we got to the last 3/4ths of the South side where we discovered that the contractor that built the house had not put on any backing or vapor barrier on the outside wall. We opened the wall and saw just 2x4 studs and insulation, so we had to buy twelve sheets of treated 1/4 inch plywood and then install the vapor barrier before we could side. So we finally finished siding the house and got everything ready to paint by Saturday evening just before the sunlight ran out. I had to break the sabbath and spray-paint the house after morning church service. But after all the hard work, we got to relax at our Labor Day church picnic. Tuesday (Sept. 2nd), I took down the masking, and finally laid down for a nap to get ready to go to work that night and just as I laid down I got a call from work to come in early so I got a 2.5 hour nap and went in to work early. I've been working twelve hour shifts from that night through tonight and through the weekend and into next week. The blessing is that the extra money will make all my creditors happy (& the gov't.--a la taxes).
I have more to post on Brothers Karamazov and other subjects once all the work slows down to a mere eight hour day. At least Sea-Tac Airport will have all the runway lights on new regulators in the new lighting vault.

So another time it will be...
Novo Visum
Neue Ansicht

Gute nacht everyone.

PS Sam just celebrated his 16th birthday!