As I mentioned last time, I gutted the eCommerce store and massively expanded the photo albums. It is in those photo albums, with over a hundred or more photos, that I need to add the titles and accessibility description to each and every photo to meet EU requirements. I plan to do a little at a time, as I have free time, in order to call this project complete in a couple of weeks.

In other news from the home front, my wife, whom I love dearly, is upset that our five year old expensive, Taiwanese oven range hood, isn't moving air as efficiently as it once did and I need to fix it or replace it before she'll cook on it again. Or at least only use the gas range when she can open the windows. As a retired appliance technician, I tried to prove to her that it is still working fine but she's having none of it. So, later today, I am planning to disassemble it near completely so she can clean it even more to see if we can restore it to its former self to her satisfaction. I hope so as I have no desire to replace it anytime soon. I paid a thousand dollars for it, plus all of the work I put in trying to install it and I don't want to go through that again right now.

Then she asks me this morning over a cuppa coffee, when are we going to put mulch down around her flower gardens? We had talked about it but that was before I shelled out over $30,000 for a new roof last week, which I just paid for yesterday. I'm a little short on cash right now to be spending a couple hundred quid on mulch for her gardens. Maybe next month.

She's also upset over this business of trying to make her a doctors appointment. She asked at the beginning of the week, so I got on the company web site and requested an appointment date and time with a doctor at her family clinic. It took them two days to come back with a day and time and she is upset that it took so long. She thought I should have been able to pick up the phone and get her an appointment the day I called, had I called.

I tried to explain to her that these big corporations are doing away with in person call centres where people can just call and get things done, such as make appointments. They're all moving over to AI run auto call in systems that direct you to other places, and can possibly make an appointment for you, if you have the patience to go through all of the robot back and forth, which only works half the time. My wife is going to her appointment later this week and give them an earful about this automated appointment making system that takes two days to make appointments and how much she doesn't like it. I thought to myself, "Good luck with that". I don't think any of those people will give a fig about what she does or doesn't like. That's just the world we live in nowadays.

I have a son, with a daughter who is getting ready to graduate from primary school this coming June and we were invited to attend the graduation. I was a little hesitant but he is family, so I said I would think about it, depending on the venue it was being held at. As it turns out, the graduation ceremony is being held at a crowded high school gymnasium, and it will be hot in central Florida in June, which my wife hates. There are no RV campgrounds anywhere near their subdivision where they live, and I absolutely cannot manage public, crowded events due to my own PTSD issues, which my son knows all about. After our last visit back in 2023, my wife refuses to have anything to do with my daughter in-law (A long story), so there is all of that. So, I politely declined the invitation citing a lack of vacation money and the price of gas right now.

A few days ago, I sent my son an email from my private email server and he has yet to reply. I got to thinking yesterday, is he snubbing me because I can't attend the graduation for my oldest granddaughter? Is he ignoring me because I made his wife miffed at me a couple of weeks ago over a Facebook post they didn't like? She is easily miffed so I have to wonder. She's known for that, which is why my other grown children won't have anything to do with her, unless they have to. My other son refuses to do even that. He's just refuses to talk to his brother, period. Family drama, don't you just love it?

Now, if my son or daughter in-law should ever read this, I'm sure I'll be dissed even more. But if I can't air my thoughts here, then what's the purpose of me writing in this blog in the first place? I'm done trying to please people at my expense. They either take me as I am or not at all, to quote an old Irish proverb. That applies to everyone, including family.

It's almost time to celebrate Bealtaine once again. May first is only a day away. This is one of my most important holidays of the year for me. One that I celebrate with a small bonfire in a brazier on my back patio every year at this time. It celebrates the transition of the earth maiden to the earth mother and our entry into the growing season. I have a special pagan ceremony I follow, which my loving wife watches from a distance quietly. As she is a somewhat recent convert to Christianity, she is more tolerant of my spiritual practices than most other people would be. I was also fortunate to have a group of pagan friends in Northern Maine back in the day to celebrate with but in Texas, not so much. I was lucky that I had a high privacy fence around my backyard back then or someone probably would have called the local constables on me.

Here in Virginia, I don't have a fence at all, but I do have elderly neighbours who keep to themselves more. As long as I don't do anything grandiose, they don't pay me much mind.

After the turn of the season this weekend, I will be concentrating more on selling my book, and maybe try to make a little extra money doing something from home. A friend suggested that I advertise that I can create web sites. I don't know about that as there are a lot of young people already doing that. With the available software out there these days, most anyone with a little bit of computer skills and artistic license, can create a website and export it on a thumb drive. I will have to think about that some more before I actually reach out to see if there would be a market for a senior citizen created web site project that would have to be exported to a hosting and domain service, which doesn't come free.

I have a dear friend who lives on the other side of the world these days, who reached out to me last year about helping her with the creation of a new web site for her tourism company. She had contracted with some guy where she lives to make a business web site for her company for a sum of around $600. Now, she would have paid with her local currency but still, that's a tidy sum for that web site. I never checked with her to see if that project was ever finished but it was shaping up to be quite a web site project. I told myself at the time, I could do that, if I wanted. But now I'm asking myself, do I want to get into something like that? Maybe.

In the rest of the world, as I noted in my podcast this week, the chaos is getting worse. I'm getting a little worried. More than my usual worry as I'm seeing more and more online articles in my inbox about the coming apocalypse. I don't know about the end of the world but I do see the end of all we held dear fading away into political chaos in the U.S. and Europe. The middle east is another story but because most of the other countries of the world were so heavily dependent on the finite resources being exported out of the Gulf state region around the Persian Gulf, the choking off of all of those exports is bringing the global trade system to a grinding halt. And now, all of these countries are trying hard to reconcile that and failing.

I'm watching as economies around the world are starting to crash. Especially here in the U.S. Our current government is trying hard to gas light everyone into believing that everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Ohh, let's start a war with Iran to take people's minds off the economy that Trump broke with his tariffs last year. We see how that's working out for us.

The opposition party wants us to think they have a magic solution to all of our problems if we would only elect them next November. I have news for everyone, as I said in this week's podcast, they are also gas lighting us. They just want to get into power so they can continue the grift of taxpayer money into their pockets, instead of the very unpopular party in charge right now. Some things will change but the funneling of money into politicians pockets will never change unless we change the way government officials are allowed to operate. And I don't see that major change happening in my lifetime.

Which means that the once mighty U.S. economy is going to become a stagnate, smelly body of water within the next few years and everyone around the world will feel the effects of the loss of the American consumer market. Our manufactured exports are already down to historic levels, and it's only going to get worse over the next few years, no matter who is running the government.

I'll be talking more about this in future podcasts. In the meantime, I'm trying to keep a extra stock of basics in the garage and freezers to stay ahead of what are sure to be food shortages by next fall after a lean harvest season this year. Food imports are going to be less by the end of the summer. Then there is the prediction of a super El Nino weather pattern from the Pacific for late fall and next winter. Which will bring on severe drought conditions beyond what we're already experiencing this year. There are already wildfires taking out a large swath of territory in north west Florida and south Georgia right now. There was so much dead fall left on the ground after hurricane Helene came through that area a couple of years ago, and now it's all burning. We can expect more of that starting next year.

I could go on but you get the picture. Life for everyone except the morbidly rich, is just beginning to get rough. It's going to get so much worse over the next few years. I'm planning ahead now, are you?