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Sunday night we had supper with Grannie Annie. The talk over desert was interesting. In her stories of her childhood, she has often mentioned that while her father was off in the wilds of Northern Alberta, trying to homestead, her mother rented half of their house to a Jewish family. It seems that no one else in town would take them in, and when the house was sold to raise the money to immigrate to Canada, the renters were distressed because they felt they had nowhere else to go.
The sequel came out Sunday night. Grannie spent several weeks this past year visiting her sisters; she and Aunt Sue had a number of slumber parties. (The idea of two 80+ year old "girls" having a slumber party somehow amuses me!). Like all girls at slumber parties, they talked the night away. Aunt Sue related a story that took place decades ago, when she and Uncle John went together on a trip to Israel.
As they waited for their bus one day, they decided to browse in a nearby shop. They conversed in Slovak, and the shopkeeper stopped them and asked where they were from. They told her they were from Canada, and continued to look around and chat. The shopkeeper asked again, where they were from before they were from Canada, and they told her that they were from Glozan, in Yugoslavia.
The shopkeeper knew two men who had also come to Israel from Glozan. Aunt Sue knew of only one Jewish family from that town, and told the story of how her mother had rented to the Berger family.
The shopkeeper became very excited at that. It seems that when the War started, the oldest son took his youngest brother and fled to Israel. The rest of the family stayed behind, and was murdered by the Nazis. The two Berger brothers lived in the town that Uncle John and Aunt Sue were passing through.
They did not stay to meet the men; their bus arrived and they had a schedule to keep. Still, another part of the story has appeared. In some ways, it is a family link to Israel.
I'm just now getting around to this. Old age makes me slow? Or am I just too busy with busy work?
Tuesday I spent the day -- 5:30 AM to 8:30 PM -- at Precinct 4-B in Barberton. I was one of the (R) precinct judges, and my specific job, as assigned after I arrived, was poll judge. I recorded the ballot stub numbers as the voters were given their ballots.
In all, our group functioned quite well. The lady who was presiding judge seemed to be a bit unhappy with me at times, probably because when people came to the table and had a question, they tended to ask me instead of her. She may have taken that as a slight due to her gender, I don't know. She was a bit testy at times, especially when I asked for clarification of some of the procedures that were followed.
ID was generally supplied very willingly by the voters. We did have some moments of uncertainty, though. Active duty military IDs were supposed to be accepted, even though they do not contain the bearer's address. Otherwise, government issued IDs needed to have both the bearer's name and home address. We ended up accepting some VA ID cards, which also lack the address, in lieu of a driver's license, as a substitute for an active duty military ID. I questioned this, because I thought the instructions from the Ohio Secretary of State were quite clear that any other form of government ID than a military ID must also have the current home address. The presiding judge felt that a VA ID was the same as a military ID.
Roughly 4% of the ballots cast in our precinct were provisional : they were a result of the voter not having acceptable ID. In such cases the voter has 10 days to contact the Board of Elections and provide the proper ID. If he doesn't do that, his vote is not counted. Our precinct had, I believe, a higher percentage of provisional ballots than the adjacent precinct table (6-C). To some extent I attribute that to the fact that as the presiding judge called out the voter's name, I would respond with reading the address from the poll book. Quite a few of the voters would quickly say something like, "I moved since the last election." At that point, the ID check would tighten.
Any voter who had moved out of the precinct but still insisted on voting a provisional ballot had to be informed that the Board would not count a provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct. We had voters who had moved out of the county trying to vote in Barberton 4-B because they said they had not registered in their new home precinct. They were informed that they could vote provisionally, but that their ballot would not be counted when the Board found out they had voted in the wrong place. Some wanted to know what difference it made, since they only wanted to vote for President. They had to be told that each precinct had different issues on the ballot; the ballots were specific for the precinct (and, in fact, there are some precincts that have different ballots depending on what the street address is!).
The ballot scanners did not jam (even though the AutoMark machine did have a paper jamb while our only disabled voter to use it was part-way through his first ballot page). We ended up with a different number of ballots in our scanner ballot can because we know of at least two voters who ran ballots from 6-C through the scanner for 4-B. The scanner is supposed to be programmed to reject ballots from the wrong precinct. That feature appears to have not been working that day. In fact, the scanner is supposed to reject a ballot unless the ballot stubs have been removed (would you want somebody to have a record of how you voted?). We had an odd number of ballots, which was a puzzle until I found a set (pages 1 and 2, clinging tightly together) that had gone through the scanner with the stubs still attached. Seems that another feature of the scanner also failed to work.
There were 951 voters registered in 4-B. 71 of them had been sent absentee ballots (which they may or may not have returned to the Board). We had 413 voters, counting the 18 provisional ballots cast. Bottom line : fewer than half the registered voters in Barberton 4-B actually voted.
I was very happy to head for home afterward.
I suppose that title is both shocking and irritating to some people. That was my intent. Yesterday's election was supposed to have ushered in an era of change. I doubt very much whether the change will be anything that will better the nation in any significant way.
Campaign promises are slanted toward self-interest. While the Obama campaign attacked the "selfishness" of those who did not want to pay more taxes, it played to the selfishness of those who deem it just to plunder and pillage anyone who has more than the average share of goodies. It will be interesting indeed to see how much satisfaction will be obtained by those who expect bigger handouts from the Federal pigtrough.
Welfare recipients (including all those who look forward to refunds of taxes they did not pay) aside, players such as the National Association of Homebuilders and the National Association of Realtors, both of which have substantial influence due to the amount of lobby money they can throw at Washington, are looking for a housing bail-out. They will probably get it. It matters not that the current economic crisis is founded in an oversupply of housing. Economics is a subject that no politician wants to master, because it does not supply soothing answers to thorny questions.
Housing has always been a part of American manufacturing. When offshore production of most other goods became more cost effective due to the levying of production taxes on American products, the percentage of manufacturing made up by housing increased because it is not practical to build houses overseas and ship them here. (The transportation problem is really the only thing that stands in the way of outsourcing housing to China. Once some enterprising American figures out how to build a Star Trek type matter transporter, and some Democrat President allows the advanced technology to be sold to the Chinese, you can kiss the US housing industry good-bye, too. Buy a house on-line, have it delivered to your lot, anywhere in the world. Think what that technology would do to pizza delivery. "No cold pizzas; we deliver fresh to your dining room table.")
It was a standing (and union-irritating) joke that anyone who could buy a hammer could be a carpenter. Out of work? Start your own construction business. Farm shut down for the winter? Get a construction job until spring. America built more houses than it had households, and the greedy foreign bankers loaned money at teaser rates with adjustable terms, fully expecting that they would recoup their initial low interest when the rates reset.
The foreign bankers gambled and lost. Congress and the Federal Reserve sold the American people into slavery to bail the foreign bankers out. It was not a problem of New Math. It was a problem of No Math. I doubt that many of the culpable ones ever sat down to figure out how 100,000,000 taxpayers would pay for a $700,000,000,000 bailout. (I once had an argument with a Jr. High math teacher who insisted that a zero was a nothing. Makes me wonder if he was a Congressional math tutor.) Now the Home Builders are asking for a $268,000,000,000 bailout, plus interest rate subsidies (paid by who?), to the tune of another $143,000,000,000. I am betting that they will get what they ask for. Here is a hot investment tip -- buy Milton Bradley money, because it will soon be worth more than Federal Reserve notes.
So here is the joke. To solve the economic crisis, we should build more houses.
Barry will only be able to blame GW Bush for a limited time. Then he will have to produce results. He will find that it is easier to promise change based on fairy tales, than to actually make coaches from pumpkins or waken sleeping princesses by kissing them (Bill found that out, too, but the people of Serbia stood for the tab). Reality is much harder to deal with. When piggies start to squeal over their disappointment, the ruckus can drive a pigherd to desperate measures. One solution is to chase the piggies from the trough and make bacon. Ask yourself, "What Would Obama Do?" Piggies of America, you have been warned.
This is just a catch-up filler, for those who are blog junkies.
We had our first snow on Thursday, October 30th. It stuck a little, but there was no accumulation. Mike called from the road and said the snow was about 2 inches deep from Richfield and north into the snow belt. Of course, upstate NY had to get about a foot of fluffy to plow that day.
The deck rail is coming slowly. One 6 foot section is complete. There are still five post sleeves on back order from Carter Lumber. The rail color is "White Sand", and it is a sort of "dirty" white that doesn't quite match the white of the trim on the house. Mutterings have been heard about the possibility of painting it to match. I want none of that.
Moved the gas line from its original position (sticking out of the face of the deck fascia) to a new spot on the rail post of the lower deck. I had just enough scrap 1/2" gas pipe to do the job, and only had to buy a pair of close nipples for the project. Mike and I had determined earlier that the pipe threader would allow production of nipples down to about 6 inches, but I figured out a way to get that down to about 4 inches. Also figured out an alternative to a pipe vise, requiring a stand that would hold the pipe threader in a vertical position.
The MAD is going to need far more traps to do the job properly. I suggested that perhaps school projects could be encouraged where students would build the traps in shop class or as science projects. Registered at freepatentsonline.com and downloaded the files for the CDC Light Trap and the CDC Gravid Trap. Since the gummint was assigned the patents, I assume that all we have to do is put some working drawings together and see if we can get volunteers to build them.
Registered with the unemployment people. Found out that they cannot yet make a determination of my eligibility for benefits since my previous employer has only reported my employment through the end of June.
Sent out another resume this morning.
Met the parents of Dennis Datich at Family Night at church last night (see January 25th post). Found out that Dennis died two years ago. I'm starting to understand what old geezers feel when all their contemporaries have become extinct. Can you imagine being the last living dinosaur?
Tomorrow is V-Day. I will be a precinct judge at Barberton 4-B. 5:30 AM until 7 PM. Long day tomorrow, methinks.
Ready to set up a joint account on ComputerShare (can't change the individual account to joint), one at Dominion, and one at Mellon Bank for direct stock purchases. The mutual fund business may be an easy way to go -- let somebody else handle the management and charge you for it -- but direct control of what is purchased and held has some appeal. Too many mutual funds were heavily invested in financial stocks. I should have known better than to leave stuff exposed that way.
Se ya narrow.
