there are days when I feel like shooting the alarm clock. It'd be much simpler to just sleep through all of it. Rainy days and every single Monday are two of those instances. Another is when the work's piled up to staggering heights, though it's much better to get it done and off my mind for the time being. And because it's the season, work does pile up quickly around here.
Waterlogged.
I don't ever remember it being quite this rainy and wet. We had severe floods right after The Blizzard of '96, but nothing quite like this: 15 days straight of nonstop, 1-2" rainfall per day, sometimes heavier. The multi-billion gallon water retention ponds on the 20acre garden center complex were full and overflowing; streams and rivers were crested and flooding throughout the region. Not since the Blizzard and Flood of '96 have I seen this much excess water in southern York County.
Not only did the rains play havoc with the local water tables, it screwed up my schedule of landscape and landscape maintenance work for the Spring. Over the past eight years, I've developed and refined estimating and scheduling techniques in both MS-Works for Win95, MS-Excel97 and MS-Word97, but they were useless after the rains. For every day of rain, we lost 3 days on the job site.
Other landscape contractors tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to work in the rains. The damage they caused with heavy equipment, machinery and people has yet to be measured. We concentrated on light, landscape maintenance jobs. So we're only 3-4 weeks behind as I write this. Dry, warm weather has descended and we're slowly drying out. Back to the real work soon, I hope.
The mornings are my favorite time around here. I sit of the front porch at 6am, sip some freshly brewed French Roast gourmet coffee, play with Pickles and watch the sun rise. Or, keep 100x scoped .22 longrifle nearby for when the malicious groundhogs cross the field by the dozens. The local maggots appreciate my offerings of dead, intact critter to them over the years. The rest of the day is too damned hot and humid. The crews and office staff are in by 7am, so it's time to go to work. I like the quiet moments of peace and solitude and take them when I can. Smell the roses, before the cacophony starts in earnest.
In Memoriam.
My good friend, corporate and personal attorney, died suddenly at 50, Friday night, of complications from chemotherapy during a (curable) cancer treatment at The York Hospital, according to one of his secretaries and close friend. The cancer wasn't life threatening; the chemo and radiation whacked him. Gary L. Snyder, ESQ was a good friend of eight years and a noble, ethical attorney. He's now in a far, far better place than we are. Rest In Peace, old friend.
Liberal Democrat Criminals.
It appears that the liberal scumbags stepped into it again with this one. If what is said is true, and national security was compromised, someone or several people will be going to prison. The lowlife and still dead, Ron Brown, should be the first. He was a f*cking crook and should be prosecuted, posthumously.
Soon, when the China-DNC scandal breaks loose, Clinton will wish everyone was back on Monica Lewinsky's great blowjobs instead of something this serious. Everything this filthy administration did borders on criminality for monetary gain. They are so dirty, I can't see how the American public can be so blase toward their crimes.
The New York Times William Safire poses it this way: "A President hungry for money to finance his re-election overruled the Pentagon; he sold to a Chinese Military Intelligence front the technology that defense experts argued would give Beijing the capacity to blind our spy satellites and launch a sneak attack. How soon we have forgotten Pearl Harbor. October 1996 must have been some tense month for Democratic fund-raisers. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times had begun to expose "the Asian connection" of John Huang and Indonesia's Riady family to the Clinton campaign. The fix was already in to sell the satellite technology to China. Clinton had switched the licensing over to Ron Brown's anything-goes Commerce Department. Johnny Chung had paid up. Commerce's Huang had delivered money big time (though one of his illegal foreign sources had already been spotted). The boss of the satellite's builder had come through as Clinton's largest contributor. But public outrage was absent. The F.B.I. didn't read the papers and Reno Justice did not want to embarrass the President. And television news found no pictorial values in the Asian connection. Stealthily, the Clinton Administration held back the implementation of the corrupt policy until Nov. 5 -- the day the campaign ended. Now the reporting of Jeff Gerth and The Times's investigative team is putting the spotlight of pitiless publicity on the sellout of American security. We begin to see how the daughter of China's top military commander steered at least $300,000 through the Chung channel to the D.N.C. (Apparently Mr. Chung skimmed off a chunk and may be spilling his guts lest he have to face his Beijing friends.) We begin to learn more of the Feb. 8, 1996, visit of the arms dealer Wang Jun to the Commerce office of Ron Brown, and Wang's "coffee" meeting that day with the President, the very day that Clinton approved four Chinese launches -- even as China was terrorizing Taiwan with missile tests. Clinton's explanation, which used to slyly suggest that China policy was not changed "solely" by contributors, has now switched to total ignorance: shucks, we didn't know the source of the money. But this President's D.N.C. did not know because it wanted not to know; procedures long in place to prevent the unlawful inflow of foreign funds were uprooted by the money-hungry Clintonites. Today, two years after this sale of our security, comes the unforeseen chain reaction: as China strengthens its satellite and missile technology, a new Indian Government reacts to the growing threat from its longtime Asian rival and joins the nuclear club. In turn, China feels pressed to supply its threatened ally, Pakistan, with weaponry Beijing promised us not to transfer. This makes Clinton the Proliferation President. Who has helped keep this sellout of security under wraps? In the Senate, John Glenn was rewarded with a space flight by Clinton for derogating the leads to China of the Thompson committee. Fred Thompson's warnings about China's plan to penetrate this White House were then scorned by Democratic partisans; his Government Operations Committee should now swarm all over this. The House's aggressive agent of the Clinton cover-up, Henry Waxman of California, is finally "troubled" by the prospect of damning evidence he prevented the Burton committee from finding. At least three Democratic partisans who foolishly followed Waxman in blocking the testimony of Asian witnesses may have difficulty explaining their cover-up vote to even more troubled voters in their districts. The Gerth revelations lead to more questions: Where were the chiefs of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, their intelligence so dependent on satellites, on the satellite technology sale to China? Is anybody at Reno Justice re-examining testimony taken by independent counsel investigating corruption at Commerce before Ron Brown's death? Does Brown's former lawyer claim "dead man's privilege" on notes? Did N.S.A. tape overseas calls of suspect Commerce officials? Who induced Commerce to lobby Clinton for control of satellite technology? And the most immediate: Will homesick prosecutor Charles LaBella, beholden to Janet Reno for his political appointment in San Diego, dare to offend his patron by calling for independent counsel?"
The Justice Department is investigating whether sensitive technological information was passed to
the Chinese during American industry reviews of an accidental explosion of a Chinese rocket moments after it was launched in February 1996. The criminal inquiry is focused on whether officials from Loral and other companies who joined in the review violated American export control laws. Loral said this week that no secret or sensitive information was conveyed to the Chinese. But a Pentagon study concluded that American security was jeopardized.
This is clearly more serious and less fun than getting blowjobs in the Oral Orifice and trying to cover it up, though that should still be pursued and prosecuted. This blatant criminal act offends my sense of national security and espionage.
Looks like there'll be some more hearings this Summer. Should be interesting. Haven't used either the Sony Super Beta 600 or the Sony Super VHS 1200 units for several years. I need to re-learn those evil machines and tape the hearings.
The most corrupt and investigated administration in US history may finally get hung on this one.
The Weather.
My business is certainly weather-driven, so I'm always checking weather.com for news of what's coming up. Here's one better: NASAs satellite view of what's happening on our little blue orb. It's a real time image that changes and updates by the minute. A fast connection (a 500 kbps cable modem) really helps. But the 43.5bps Office connect on a 56k server is painfully s l o w.
