Before I get into my dark thoughts tonight, I wanted to let everyone know that I've spruced up this website again this weekend. I reworked the book store page, and deleted the other online-store page, to make things easier to browse the book store. I also improved the page lineup, and tightened things up on the Entry Page. Let me know what you think of it. If you have any suggestions to make it look better, let me know, and I'll see what I can do. Just so you know, for not being a web site coder, I learned how to code that page from scratch by going to online coding schools. Not too bad for a PC mechanic, huh?

To which this repair turned out to be more than I bargained for. What started out, to me at least, as something I thought I could take care of in a couple of hours tops, turned into a twelve hour marathon, that I didn't finish until about 9 o'clock Saturday morning. Another server repair session that had me greeting the sun through my office window as I toiled away early Saturday morning.

I'm realising that I'm getting too old to be doing these all night repairs on critical machines and their network configurations anymore. I've had my fair share this summer, and it's starting to show in physical ways I never would have paid attention to when I was younger.

I took a half hour power nap Saturday on the sofa, which really didn't help much, but I did manage to get through the day. But, I was really starting to feel it by bedtime. My normal bedtime that is.

I woke up Sunday morning with a terrible deep seated pain in the back of my neck, and the realisation of my seventy years of life on planet earth.

I started thinking about this as I sat on the back patio enjoying the quiet sounds of the early Saturday evening (my effort to relax and spend some quality time with my family). The moon was showing at half face above the treeline, and the insects and birds were doing what they do every day. The difference for me, was the sense of peace and tranquillity I felt sitting there in the chair, enjoying the relative quiet. As quite as it can be living in a suburban neighbourhood anyway.

The good part about that, was the ability to mentally tune out the traffic noise from the main street a block away, and the relative quite of living in a seniors neighbourhood. There are only a couple of children living nearby. A young family of middle eastern culture, who have three(?) young children. They're renting the house behind mine from the senior owners. They have to be, as no one is allowed to "own" a home here unless you're at least 55 years young.

Saturday night, after dark, I watched a couple of lame episodes of Star trek on Paramount, much to the consternation of my wife, who hates Star Trek. I will say this, I have been a Star Trek fan for 60 years. I started watching Star Trek as a kid, when William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy were very young, and I've tried to keep up with all of it's iterations through the years. Imagine, William Shatner is in his 90's, and Leonard Nimoy, and several of the other original co-stars have died by now. Yet, the story continues long after many others have faded away into media history.

I will add, that up until this season, I have always enjoyed the good story writers. But this summer season, it's like the good writers took a vacation, and the lame ones came in and can't figure out any good story plots anymore. I'm disappointed, to say the least. I would hate to finally see that franchise be squandered away after all of these years, because of bad writers.

But that brings me back to what I'm thinking about this weekend. After all I've been through this summer repairing corporate level IT networking equipment, I'm really thinking about the near future now.

It's good that I'm keeping my IT skills up by using them over and over, but I'm getting tired. I want to keep them up, because I'm more and more aware this year, that I might be forced to go back to work someday in the very near future. Trump is destroying the United States as rapidly as he can, to continually enrich himself, his family, and any "special" friends he may have on any given day. As we've seen, those seem to come and go on the daily whims of that demented uncle syndrome I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

I don't think the democrats are going to be able to stem the tide of the failing American empire anymore. There's no doubt in my mind, that the U.S. electorate will vote in a blue wave of new congressmen and women this fall.. That's nothing new or novel, as this happens fairly frequently whenever the people have voters regret over a president. Even more so in the last fifty five years, since the Nixon days. I'm sure there will be more in the future, as long as the U.S. continues to have free and fair elections still. Which is in some jeopardy right now, if Trump gets his way.

I started voting by mail in the last couple of years, but this fall, I'm thinking seriously of taking my mail in ballot over to my polling station on election day, and dropping it into the blue box, because I no longer trust the U.S. Post Office after what Trump just did this summer. That's how bad things have become across the country. There are a lot of us who no longer trust that the states will be able to manage free and fair elections this fall.

If Trump gets away with manipulating this years congressional elections, imagine what he'll do for the 2028 presidential election? Once a mafia bully, always a mafia bully.

All of that, plus the continual wars over oil and empire around the world, are starting to wear me down quite a bit. I've stopped engorging myself on news feeds anymore, mostly because they're all talking about the same thing over and over again, every day.

I've now become convinced that the United States is going to have a breakdown similar to what happened to the old Soviet Union soon. The U.S. can't maintain their current economic policies, and Trump is going to push them over the fiscal cliff, before the democrats can get it together and stop him. The democratic party is also having it's own ideological split-ups, and by the time they finally get around to fixing the corruption damage Trump has done, it'll be too late.

As I write this, I'm also starting to work on a series of podcasts for the next couple of weeks, about what that might look like. What if the United States finally defaulted on it's massive debts because other countries have decided that the United States is no longer the shining investment beacon shining on the hill anymore? It's already starting to happen, and only a few are paying attention.

This is not something that will happen overnight, like someone throwing a switch one day. More like a slow erosion, like a heavy, prolonged rain on a mountainside. The trickle of mud starts small, but over time, the water erodes more and more, until one day, the whole side of the mountain falls down into the ravine at the bottom, bringing all of that dirt and rock down with it.

Then the cleanup begins. Which is what the new Russian Federation has become. Putin took charge of the cleanup, after the Soviet Union broke apart under its massive fiscal weight back in the early 1990's, and it emerged into the oligarch run, semi-republic we see today. Trump would love to sit on a pile of dirt like that until he dies. Which, given what we're seeing now, probably won't be for much longer. His obvious health issues will bring him down soon, one way or another. But, I digress.

As I watch Rome burn, I have been asking myself this summer, what do I want for myself in my last years above ground? I know I want to get out and take more pictures from around the country at some point. The price of gas kind of stalled that this year, although we're thinking seriously about taking the RV to the Virginia coast this fall over a long weekend, just to get out of the house and wear the flat spots off the RV tires before putting it up for the winter.

If the democrats can bring things back to some sense of normal next year, we may plan more trips out. But, that all depends on the price of gas next year. We'll see how that works out.

What I'm also anticipating some, are coming food shortages. I received an email from Amazon last week, regarding a scheduled shipment of some special Spelt whole wheat bread flour I had been buying to make bread with. Their 5 lb. bag vendor can no longer supply them anymore. Or at least for a while anyway.

Months ago, I had discovered a local small grocer that sold this flour in bulk. I had bought some from them before, but, like most people these days, I got lazy, and just ordered it from Amazon. It cost a tad bit more, but I kind of liked the delivery to my door aspect, rather than having to drive a few miles to buy from this local store.

When I got that email, I remembered this store, and since I was almost out of this special flour, we paid a visit to this local grocer. Sure enough, they had just enough for my needs. They had six lbs. left in stock in their bin, so I bought five pounds to get me by.

If you're wondering why I am going to so much trouble for this special flour, it's because, due to my trip to Afghanistan twenty five years ago, I developed some severe food allergies since, and one of them is a mild allergy to wheat glutton. I found, after experimenting with some bread recipes off the internet, that I can tolerate bread made from this low glutton bread flour. The catch, is that if you want to try and keep the costs down, you almost need to make your own bread. Which is what I do about every two to three days now.

I make a three pound loaf in a bread maker, that we both like a lot better than any store bought bread. It doesn't have all of the additives and preservatives in it, so therefore, is a lot healthier for us in the long run. As long as I can keep purchasing Spelt flour.

And that is the conundrum I find myself in. While I was at this small grocer that specialises in bulk food purchasing, I had a conversation about acquiring this flour in the near future. The young man, and his manager, assured me that they would be able to handle my future needs. Being the detail orientated guy that I am, I asked him to check to see when they were expecting their next shipment. That's when things started to unravel.

The manager discovered that their normal wholesale vendor was also struggling to supply them with their normal twenty-five pound bags to fill their small bin with. Which coincided with my Amazon vendor struggling to supply me with a five pound bag every few days. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

The young store manager assured me that they had a backup vendor, but they only shipped in fifty pound bags. The manager then asked me if I would be interested in buying in bulk at twenty-five pounds a go? They'd offer me a discount if I would. I told them I would think about it as I paid for my five pounds of flour.

After thinking about it for a couple of days, and receiving another email from Amazon telling me that they still couldn't ship me any five pound bags for any where near the price point I had been getting, last Friday, I called the local store to tell them I would like to take them up on their offer of the twenty-five pound bulk order. I will figure out some place to keep it in my kitchen. I already have some five pound flour bins on my kitchen counter next to the bread maker, so it won't be that big of a deal.