Scams Pt. 1

It is evening. The phone rings. I reach for it and answer it: "You're on speaker." A female voice (a recording) informs me that my Amazon account has been hacked and someone has made a fifteen hundred dollar purchase. In order to cancel this purchase, I must call their Help line at once, and she gives me a phone number to call.

I hang up. This is clearly a scam. For one thing, I don't have an Amazon account. I've never bought anything from Amazon. For another thing, I wouldn't trust an unknown voice on the phone that tells me to call a phone number. If I think I may have been scammed, I will go to the company's website and look for their help number. That way I can be assured that I am getting a real company number and not simply calling a scammer chat room.

It is unfortunately the season for being extra careful, not extra gullible. Watch out for online scammers. Think before you make a call. Ask, does this make sense? Is there a better way to handle this possible issue? You might want to check out some websites that teach you how to identify scammers. There are a number of such sites. Just google "how to spot online scammers."

If someone tells you that an unknown person has made a purchase in your name, go online and check your credit cards. Check your checking account. Has a purchase been made? Has a credit card been charged? Take care, people. And have a nice holiday.

Thanksgiving 2023

It's Thanksgiving Day in my part of the world. It's a beautiful fall day, too. Witness looking through my front window:

Nuria has cooked dinner for her and me and the two guests she invited over. There's going to be turkey and stuffing...
and green bean casserole...
and ham and pineapple with cloves and powdered sugar...
and apple salad with walnuts...
and deviled eggs...
and pumpkin pie and pecan pie.

I'm glad she invited guests because that's a lot of goodies for just her and me. Even with our two guests, we'll be eating leftovers for a week. I hope our guests will leave with some of the leftovers. We'll insist they do that.

In the olden days, when it was just me, I would make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I would stand in the kitchen while I ate it and ask, "What's all the fuss about?" 

Just kidding. Actually, I've blogged several times about Thanksgiving Day, and I was more likely to eat chili with onion, pepper, and tomato as the main course. Why does it have to be turkey?

But Nuria has gone a long way in domesticating me. I told an old friend about our Thanksgiving dinner plans and he replied, "Tell Nuria she has done the impossible in civilizing you!"

I'm surprised, too, but Nuria can be tenacious if she wants to be. 

A Life Lesson

Today I watched the movie Secondhand Lions for the second time. It's a good movie from 2003. It stars Michael Caine, Robert Duval, and a young Haley Joel Osment. The story was written by Tim McCanlies. During the movie, Robert Duval's character, Hub, was teaching a life lesson to Haley Osment's character, Walter. For young Walter, it was an important lesson. It was a lesson that most of us are usually not taught but, rather, come to realize at some point in our lifetime. True or not, it's an important lesson. Do you remember learning, or realizing, this lesson?

Walter: Those stories about Africa, about you ... they're true, aren't they?

Hub: Doesn't matter. If you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn't true, that's no reason you can't believe in it.

Sometimes, the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most:

That people are basically good.

That honor, courage, and virtue mean everything.

That power and money, money and power mean nothing.

That good always triumphs over evil.

And I want you to remember this: that true love ... true love never dies.

Remember that, boy. Remember that.

Doesn't matter if it's true or not. 

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

—Secondhand Lions

Interesting Times

How old are you? There's chronological age—your age by the calendar. There's biological age—your age at a cellular level, at a genetic level. There's mental age, there's emotional age. These ages often don't agree.

What have you achieved that will be of lasting importance? Some people want to make a lot of money. That is their life's goal. But what good is that goal? What does it accomplish? For a while, money allows you to buy more expensive toys than the average person, but you often cannot buy the things that are most important. You can't buy happiness. You can't buy love. You can't buy knowledge. You can't buy maturity. You can't buy good health—the certainty of freedom from illness. All the really important things are beyond buying.

What have you accomplished? You've spent your life getting to where you are now. What can you show the world for your decades of existence? Do you have plans to make yourself better tomorrow than you are today, better next year than you are this year? How will you do that?

Jonas Salk invented a vaccine to prevent people from getting polio. He helped millions of people, but he didn't invent that vaccine by thinking "what's in it for me?" He invented it and he declined to patent it, because he wanted the vaccine to be inexpensive and available to everyone. By virtually giving away his invention, he lost, by some estimates, seven billion dollars. He did that because of altruism: a concern for the well-being of others. That is a human quality that is becoming increasingly rare in today's society.

In many ways, we are going in the wrong direction today. What happens when people go in the wrong direction for a prolonged time? They get lost. What happens when a society becomes lost? The result is societal collapse: the loss of cultural identity and social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. 

Look at America's history and then look at American society today. We're not the same country. People believe things today that would have been laughed at fifty years ago, sixty years ago, seventy years ago. National elections can be stolen. We never went to the Moon. The earth is not round, it's flat. Vaccines don't work.

In addition to false beliefs, there are other signs. Political systems become dysfunctional. Systems put in place to prevent loss of life collapse when needed.

I read an abstract of a paper written by Parker Crutchfield at Western Michigan University that began, "The collapse of society is inevitable, even if it is in the distant future. When it collapses, it is likely to do so within the lifetimes of some people. These people will have matured in pre-collapse society, experience collapse, and then live the remainder of their lives in the post-collapse world."

I agree with Mr. Crutchfield's assessment. I think we are seeing it in present-day America.

There is a Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times."

I think we are there.

Speed Kills

I was browsing the Internet and I found an advertisement for a Ford Raptor truck for sale by a local dealership. The ad featured this image of the truck:

The dealership was asking $147,085 for the truck. I blinked, too. Witness the below portion of the ad:

I read a few specs on the truck. It has the same size engine as my old Jeep and about the same mpg. It has 4WD, my Jeep has 4WD. The Raptor wins easily in the horsepower department. But then, it's supercharged and my old Jeep breathes regular air, so no contest.

I continued browsing and right away I stumbled upon this video, below. The same kind of truck hit the side of a tanker truck.

Careless driver? Love speed? Pay $150g AND YOUR LIFE! 

Don't let that driver die for nothing. Learn from his mistake.

Windows Finale

In my previous two posts I discussed getting new windows for my home. In Window Whirl I wrote these words:

"The installers also took down my front awnings and disposed of them. I'm left with some paint around the perimeter of where the awings used to be located, thanks to a fast and sloppy paint job a number of years ago."

With the awnings gone, I decided I would try to remove the paint, so Nuria and I went to Home Depot. I bought a gallon of Citristrip paint stripper, an acid scrub brush, latex gloves (should've been nylon because paint stripper can dissolve latex), a pack of three 9 inch paint rollers, a roller stick, and an 11 inch paint roller pan. 

The next day, while Nuria worked, I rolled paint stripper onto the long-dried paint on the bricks. When Nuria came home, I scrubbed it and she handled the garden hose, rinsing off any dissolved paint that came off the bricks. After it dried, it looked a little better, but not a lot better.

The next day around noon, I went outside and took another go at the task. I applied a generous coating of paint stripper all around the front windows. I let it work for a few hours. By now, Nuria was home, so we went out and began trying to remove more paint. Nuria used the hose and I used the scrubber pole. I was close to the house and looking upward, when something happened. I lost my balance and began tilting to my right. I brought my gaze down and twisted my body in the direction I was falling. I managed to take a few steps instead of falling, but I was running toward a brick wall. I put out my right hand to stop myself from hitting the wall, and instead of hitting the wall I bounced off, thanks to my extended right arm, and fell into a bush.

A broken limb in the bush gouged my back in several places. I also sustained a laceration to my right arm. When I stood up, Nuria pulled up the back of my shirt and said, "You have to get into the house." I thought it was no big deal, but Nuria insisted. 

"I'm okay."

"No, you're not. You're bleeding. You have to go inside now." 

Nuria was quite firm, so I knew I had done some damage to myself. I went inside the house and pulled off my shirt. I walked to the bathroom. In the mirror I could see streaks of blood running down my back. I also had an abrasion on my arm that was already swollen.

Nuria patched me up with various bandages and gauze pads. At least, I could put my shirt on without getting blood on it. That was my main concern. It was a shirt Nuria had given me and I didn't want it to get ruined. Somehow, there was not a drop of blood on the shirt, despite streaks of blood on my back. My right arm had an abrasion with streaks of skin missing but it wasn't bleeding. It was scraped and puffy, as if there were a lump under my skin. 

After Nuria patched me up, we went outside to finish the job. Just as we finished, a man driving a pickup truck with a large freezer in the truck bed stopped in front of our house. He shouted at us, so we walked to his truck.

He was making deliveries of meat (like Omaha steaks, but maybe a different brand). He had a customer who didn't take the order, so he wanted to get rid of it rather than drive thirty miles to get the frozen meat back to the company's freezer. He showed us his wares. Various cuts of steak, burgers, chicken, etc. He said it was a $400 package and he would sell it for $178. Nuria buys Omaha steaks, and she inspected everything and said the price was good, so we loaded our freezer with meat. We had to remove all the cuts of meat from the boxes they came in, in order to make all the meat fit into our refrigerator's freezer compartment. 

That night I slept okay, except for my usual insomnia. After a couple hours in bed, I got up and took a melatonin tablet and drank two glasses of wine and went back to bed. I was able to sleep. I wasn't in pain, even when I lay on my injured back, though I don't spend much time in bed on my back. I'm a side-sleeper these days.

Today, I went outside and looked at the result of our work removing paint. White paint was still visible on the bricks, though there was some improvement. I've decided that I've removed as much paint as I'm going to remove. The rest will have to be removed by God when the next big tornado comes through town.

It's a beautiful, sunny fall day. I'm going to open the front windows and the back patio door and allow fresh air inside. An ancient oak tree across the street is shedding its yellowed leaves, and with every breeze they come tumbling down in the sunlight like a resplendent torrent of gold. This is the most beautiful season of the year for those humans who live in this part of the country. I have family in the Tampa—St. Pete area of Florida, and Florida has a nice climate year-round. But I would get tired of it always being sunny and warm, or sunny and hot, except when hurricanes are passing through. I enjoy having four distinct seasons. New windows that can open (unlike my old painted-shut windows) will allow me to enjoy autumn's nice temperatures.

Maybe I'll drive to the river later and take some photos. I'll wait for Nuria to get home from work, of course. She loves getting into the Jeep and going somewhere, anywhere. And today is a good day to go somewhere, anywhere.

Window Whirl

It's Friday, 6PM. This post is a follow-up to yesterday's post titled Windows Prep. Today is Friday. The window installers arrived at 9AM. The outside temperature was about 30°F. Soon, the inside temperature was the same as the outside temperature, because all my windows had been removed from the first floor. The installers went about their business and by about 3PM I had ten new windows. I like them, but I'm not going to use the old Venetian blinds with them, so Nuria and I will have to pick out some suitable curtains. 

I think there were six installers but I could never count more than five at a time. There was one woman and five men. Three were from Peru, two (including the woman) were from Honduras, and one was from Mexico. None of the men spoke English, but the woman was fairly fluent in English. They wasted no time cutting out the old casement windows and installing the double hung windows. 

Both sashes on the new windows slide up and down and can tilt inward toward the room. There is a screen that can slide from the bottom window to the top window. The installation looks nice. The installers also took down my front awnings and disposed of them. I'm left with some paint around the perimeter of where the awings used to be located, thanks to a fast and sloppy paint job a number of years ago. Not by me, in case that is what you were thinking.

The installers told us that they (the installers, not the windows) work all year unless it is snowing. Nuria spoke with them and told me that one of the installers has been in the US for fourteen years and still cannot speak English. He probably doesn't want to take the time to learn it, or he really doesn't have the time. Or perhaps he tried and found it too difficult and gave up on learning it. Some people seem to learn a foreign language easily and quickly, while others just never get it. I tried to learn Spanish in high school. I spent two years studying and learned how to pronounce the Spanish word for "no." It's pronounced "¡no!" in case you were wondering.

I hope you have a nice weekend. It's going to be 70°F here in central Virginia. 

Windows Prep

It's 9:35PM Thursday night. The temperature is 31°F according to the National Weather Service, and 40°F according to Accuweather. I'll do an average and say it's 35°F.

I am getting new windows for the downstairs tomorrow. I've prepared as best as I can. I've moved furniture around, taken down Venetian blinds, and taken down curtains. I don't think I will replace the blinds. They're a real b*tch to install into my window openings. I'd rather have curtains. I already have curtain rods installed. So, I'll install curtains and see how that goes. If it's necessary, I can install blinds later.

The window installers said they would be here between 8AM and 11AM. They're going to remove all of my downstairs windows. The temperature at 8AM is forecast to be 27°F. Hello! And with no windows, I won't be running the heat.

As of now, the only room that still has Venetian blinds is my bedroom. Nuria and I will get up around 5:30AM to finish getting the rooms ready. There's not much left to do. I'll take down the blinds from my two bedroom windows and take down curtains from one window. We'll do a walkaround to make sure there is no furniture in the way of the window installers. With the forecast morning temperature, I have to believe the installers will hold off coming here for a couple of hours, at least.

If the installation goes well, the house should be more comfortable and cheaper to heat and cool. The current windows are single-glazed, meaning one thin pane of glass in each of eight steel frames in each of the ten windows. Single-glazed and a steel casement window frame: you couldn't make heat conduction through a window any easier. Of course, when this house was built, fuel oil was 25 cents a gallon.

The new windows are vinyl with double panes. The glass panes are low-e (low-emissivity) which is produced by a microscopic coating on the glass. Between the panes there is argon gas which helps to block infrared (heat) energy from entering or escaping the house through the windows. 

Naturally, I'll post a followup letting you know why this blog post was wildly optimistic.