Full Moon and Empty Arms

Posted on 31/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe

Usually every time there is a full moon visible in the night sky I send a text to several friends saying, “full moon and empty arms.” Of course it is because it is true. I see the moon as an opportunity for some romance, but it seems I never have anyone to romance. Last evening while walking home from a jaunt into town I spotted the moon coming up over the tree line. It was amazing. I never took my eyes off of it until I entered the house.

This afternoon and evening, my neighbors were camped out on their driveway waiting for trick or treaters to come by; the volume of tricksters is near nil. I handed out but a dozen pieces of candy since two this afternoon. On most halloweens I have to play Scrooge and ration the candy. Today, I was generous and I’ll still be sampling the left over wares six months down the road. On the way home from my afternoon walk I stopped by the neighbors and told them to watch for the moon tonight. Later, after supper dishes were done I put on my jacket and strolled over to point them at the moon. It looked like it was six feet high above the horizon and huge. They were amazed and appropriately so. One of them whipped out his phone and found his app that identifies planets, and stars in the night sky, all by holding the camera up at the object. He identified three planets, Mars, Venus, and Saturn all visible along with the most gorgeous moon ever. Of course the moon was like looking at a beach ball and the planets were like looking at a grain of sand. I have to get that app on my phone.

Sky Safari

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I Will Not Eat My Greens

Posted on 30/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe

In many movies and comedy sketches I have often heard the line “eat your greens.” I had to look up what greens were. My source labeled greens as collard greens. They are in the same source of greens as kale and broccoli. I found them disgusting. I suspect the vegans in the world think they are delicious, not me. A week ago I wrote about my virgin experience with kale. I love kale, especially when it is drizzled with salad dressing. The collard greens supplied in my Green Chef dinner package turned me off. Maybe they will grow on me if I eat enough of them, fat chance of that happening.

Collard
Kale
Close up of a bowl of Italian boiled spinach

Each time I cruise through the vegetable aisle at my local grocery store I am amazed at the quantity of green leafy lettuces and other strange looking eatables from around the world. On a good day I will pick something I have never tried before just for the sake of experimentation. I can tolerate the lettuces, but when it comes to the heavier leaved darker green things like collard I pass by. As a kid I hated spinach. That is because my mother had only one way to prepare it, by boiling. Boiled spinach leaves are the world’s worst resembling some very old and wet sea weed. On the other hand fresh spinach leaves are excellent in a salad. The best is baby spinach drizzled with poppyseed dressing and with sliced strawberries on top. The chef who invented that combination should be in the Chef Hall of Fame.

Baby spinach with strawberries and poppy seed dressing

I find that the Green Chef meal plan is making me a better cook, and making me develop a more refined pallete. I hate waste and will never throw anything away, I’d much rather make it the way they instruct me to and try it. So far I am batting 5/6, only the collard greens have been a loser. In major league baseball a batting average of 5/6, (0.8333) would command a hundred million dollar contract. I’ll stick to keeping score with my selections from Green Chef.

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COVID Will Make Me Fly

Posted on 30/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe

This morning on my way into Home Depot to pick up some huge trash bags to stuff used winter coats in an idea popped into my head. I struggled while installing my face mask, and it occurred to me that my ears are out of capacity. My hearing aids hang off my ears, my glasses find a home there too, now when I hang on the elastic face mask keepers my ears begin to flap out. The vision of Walt Disney’s flying elephant Dumbo flashes through my mind. When will I be able to fly? My prediction is that if COVID-19 lasts much longer that I’ll fly pretty soon.

Alfred E. Neumann the cover boy of MAD Magazine has ears that project from his head like mine do with all the shit hanging off them. The prospect of flying by flapping my Alfred E. Neuman ears seems very possible.

What I fear more than anything is another shut down of business and a decreed lock down of citizens. The health effect on me has been noticeable. Mostly in my positive mindset. I seem to have taken huge steps backward into negativism. At an earlier age I realized that positivism beats negativism by a huge margin. BUT, in this environment the dark force of negativity seems to control. I see and hear Darth Vader speaking to Luke Sky Walker, and predicting his demise. Poor Luke had to fight off the evil empire all by himself, a task which seemed impossible, but Luke overcame the negative force and prevailed.

We too will prevail, but we need to remain positive to beat the evil curse of COVID. Once we take control we must then regain our drive to punish the real evil empire China for releasing this curse on the world. One tiny step I am taking to beat them is to avoid buying products originating in China. That is a chore, but it is possible.

As I write this the governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker has decreed a shut down of indoor seating at restaurants. What that does is cripple the restaurant businesses. I don’t know about you, but the prospect of eating outside in thirty degree weather is not appealing. Even in a tent with three sides and portable heaters blasting away I can’t see myself enjoying a meal in that environment.

I finally hung a mask on my face when I confronted a huge sign on the door of Home Depot. “All customers must wear face mask covering their mouth and nose.” How simple a way to control the virus, I thought. A company makes a simple request and their customers comply. So why is the Democrat candidate for president making a huge deal about passing a law to make us wear masks? He truly believes this action will kill the virus. I’m afraid that the only thing to kill this virus is to flood the world with sanitizer, and even then the sanitizer kill ratio is 99.9% with leaves 0.1% to keep on coming at us.

What is scarier than a new shutdown is the prospect of Joe Biden winning this election and then retiring from the presidency. His successor will be Kamala Harris, and that is more scary than a witch flying across the sky on a broomstick. Even more scarier is if Kamala dies in office and Nancy Pelosi becomes the next leader of America.

All of these thoughts are causing me to have insomnia which is not healthy for a senior citizen.

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An Interesting Perspective

Posted on 30/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe

I received this post from a friend who got it from a friend. Just who wrote it is unknown. I do know that I have seen these figures before and believe them to be accurate. I have also heard this argument before, and it is plausible.

NUMBERS TELL TRUTH   These numbers help explain why these last eight years prior to DJ Trump were disastrous for the USA. I read the last item and then looked at Trump’s Cabinet. No wonder Washington, DC is in turmoil. Trump’s picks are bosses who expect their employees to work. These are Eye Opening Numbers. This is what bothers a lot of people about Trump. He won’t accept a can’t do attitude, or inexperienced, incompetent performance. He will get results; it just might not be smooth or pretty.    Here are some amazing stats: Make sure you read to the bottom. An eye-opener!

 1 . These 10 States now have more people on welfare than they employ!

 California, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, New York, Maine, and South Carolina 2 . Last month, the Senate Budget Committee reports that in fiscal year 2012, between food stamps, housing support, childcare, Medicaid and other benefits, the average U.S. Household below the poverty line received $168.00 a day in government support. What’s the problem with that much support? Well, the average household income in America is just over $50,000, which averages out to $137.13 a day. To put it another way, being on welfare now pays the equivalent of $30.00 an hour for 40 hour week, while the average job pays $24.00 an hour.

 3 . Check the last set of statistics!!   The percentage of each past president’s cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet. You know what the private business sector is: A real-life business not a government job.

 Here are the percentages:

38% T. Roosevelt 
40% Taft 
52% Wilson 
49% Harding 
48% Coolidge 
42% Hoover 
50% F. D. Roosevelt 
50% Truman 
57% Eisenhower 
30% Kennedy 
47% Johnson 
53% Nixon 
42% Ford 
32% Carter 
56% Reagan 
51% GH Bush 
39% Clinton 
55% GW Bush 
8% Obama       
90% Trump     

   This helps explain the bias, if not the incompetence, of the last administration: ONLY 8% of them had ever worked in private business! That’s right! Only eight percent – the least, by far of the last 19 presidents! And these people tried to tell our corporations how to run their businesses? How could Obama, president of a major nation and society, the one with the most successful economic system in world history, stand and talk about business when he’s never worked for one?? Or about jobs when he has never really had one? And, when it’s the same for 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers? They spent most of their time in academia, government, and/or non-profit jobs or as “community organizers.”    

I hope you are including DJT in your daily prayers, because if he fails to be President for the next five years, we may never be the same again at any time in the future save an armed revolution, and today, even that would be an iffy proposition..

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Shift the Paradigm

Posted on 24/10/2020 by Grumpa Joe
Quit Looking At the World Through Your Ass

During the last debate I heard some pretty wild claims that President Trump is responsible for 240,000 deaths from COVID-19. I also heard his rival Joe Biden promise that he had a plan that follows the science and that will protect us from COVID-19 deaths. The problem is that he didn’t really explain what his plan is. I think we are looking at the problem totally wrong. We shouldn’t be looking at how many deaths there were, but rather how many lives were saved.

All of the claims are based on following the science. The only science anyone has are the predictive models. All of the scientific models used back in March, 2020 predicted over that over 1.7 million deaths will occur if no action whatsoever is taken. Without any knowledge of how the virus spread, or why it spreads so quick, or why it affects some people and not others was totally unknown. All the science knew was based on experience gained from previous viruses like H1N1, SARS, and MERS.

Biden very boldly claimed the President is responsible for all the 224,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. I rather like the fact that the President saved 1.5 million lives with the action he took as early as he did.

Biden’s logic that his new COVID-19 plan will save lives. Joe’s plan, as far as I know it, is exactly the same as Trump’s which began in March, 2020, and will save the same number of lives that Trump’s plan is doing. Testing is another complaint that Biden has. Testing does not kill the virus, it merely lets us know who does or doesn’t have the virus at the time of the test. One could go home from the test and get it. But Biden believes that everyone in the country should be tested and the responsibility of testing should be given to the Federal government (another Bureaucracy in the making). If we choose to do that we will be looking for adequate testing capacity two years from now. Another part of his plan is to involve the federal government in how you will protect your people in the workplace. Again, a noble idea but scary as hell. I, for one, would not want the Feds to come into my place of business and dictate how I should run my process. I will protect my workers by the best means I have, but one of the means is not the Federal government. Biden’s plan is expensive, time consuming, and redundant. Trump put together a viable plan in less than two months bringing ventilator production on line, developing and implementing testing, and manufacturing PPE for the country. What new things Biden brings to the table with his plan is negligible.

No doubt, what is not shown in Biden’s plan are new laws that will make not wearing a mask, and not social distancing at all times, a federal offense punishable by huge fines and jail time.

What we need is a presidential candidate who does not ride on the success of his rival but rather depends on the common sense of we of the people to control the virus. All of Biden’s actions do not erase the virus they merely delay one from getting it, and we can do that ourselves. As long as there is COVID-19 there will be deaths attributed to it, even when we have drugs that will keep us alive.

Just as Obama Care has a death panel whose job it is to decide who will be treated and who will not, I’m sure Biden-Care will treat COVID-19 patients with the same compassionate care and allow nature take it’s course when dealing with difficult to treat souls.

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