WiR 20241111 – Nothing is ever easy or true, except the leaves. They all fall. Dependable as a season
Week 45 has concluded and curiously, President 45 got re-elected, so Grover Cleveland no longer sits alone in the Non-Consecutive Club. It’s fitting, since Cleveland himself presided over an era of rampant graft, corruption, and a disgustingly wealthy elite who rapidly consolidated their power while exploiting everyone else as if they were disposable cogs in their machines. But they put their names on a couple of libraries, so it all balanced out. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, where we will spend the rest of our lives. Excelsior!
With that out of the way, winds and fires were the big news here this week. This is the time of year when the winds kick up something fierce, and combined with the dry vegetation, fires almost always follow. This time, the fickle finger of fate chose Ventura county to ignite massive wildfires, specifically around the Camarillo/Santa Paula area which I’m well familiar with. I’m going to be out there in a couple of weeks, but I’ve already made some calls and no one I know was impacted. As with a lot of these fires in Southern California, they begin in the hills. The hills are where the wealthy live. I don’t know too many wealthy people, so most folks I know mostly have to deal with air quality issues from the smoke and ash falling like snow over everything.
I had to deal with the winds out in Norco, home of the horse lords in the fabled land of Riverside; though unlike Rohan, the land and its people are bereft of any notion of quiet beauty and nobility. I was getting blasted by at least 50 mph gusts over there, which was a nice reminder of home when tropical storms and hurricanes came through. Unlike those events, I wasn’t pelted by rain but rather by sand and grit. I was still cleaning sand out of my nose a couple of days later and it took a few hours for the grit in my teeth to go away.
The rest of the week was spend zipping about the Southland and enjoying the milder weather. In between all that, I made a brief video inspired by recent events and the Rings of Power series. I got a kick out of the idea of the elves in the besieged city of Eregion looking up and seeing this dude enjoying his cup of tea while orcs assault their walls and fires burned down their fair home. Celebrimbor is obviously under the spell of Sauron, so he’s unaware of the situation as he only sees a Matrix of Sauron’s making, but it was a great juxtaposition of someone enjoying the peace of tea as chaos erupts around them.
I spent the remainder of my week working on my gundam model and decorating my little hobby area. I’ve added some flags to festoon the bare wall and began test printing some small storage bins for parts. The one thing I really need to do is organize and store the myriad cords that I’ve hoarded over the years. I’ve got HDMI, mini HDMI to USB, mini USB, USB C, and so on and so forth that I need to bring some order to and put them in labeled bins that I can easily access if needed.
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♻️ 9r00vy