Check out our B&B web page.

+

This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 27, 2014

+

1. Do you have a lot of smart friends? I do. I have one friend named Pegg who is always right --- except when she disagrees with me.

+

2. What is this silly ad for Casino Slots that turns up on my Facebook page from time to time? Does the person sending it out get a commission for luring in candidates? Does it cost anything to play or is Casino Slots simply a diversion for people who can't read? You tell me.

+

3. Marsha brought some Sevin home from the store so I could spray the bugs on the beans. You know that you can buy most any kind of bad poison to kill weeds, so I asked my Facebook friends if I should use Sevin and one word came back to me, “Bad.” On the web site that accompanied the word “Bad,” I read that "Symptoms of acute carbaryl exposure in humans are malaise, muscle weakness" I know someone who uses Sevin on the job who has muscle weakness, so I'm mentioning it to you now and I’m posting this as a warning notice on Facebook. It is probably as difficult to get a person who has sprayed with RoundUp or Sevin for years to stop using it, as it would be to get a smoker to stop smoking. When a good friend asked me to help him spray with RoundUp, I refused. I said I didn't want to be anywhere near it, as I already have enough of a problem with my coughing. I remember that around 60 years ago one of my college friends lived at our house while he was working for some company that was spraying the bushes along the road. He was told that the spray wasn’t harmful to humans. We buried him 15 or 20 years ago. It might take a while, but that stuff finally gets you. Wouldn't I be foolish to give up eating ginger snaps and ice cream for the 8 years that I have suffered without them to give me a year or two of extra life and then throw that extra year or two away by working with poison? The companies that are permitted to sell these products must spend a wicked amount of their profits on ensuring that they are not legislated out of business. As about 51% of the people in this country know, if you have enough money you can buy most any kind of legislation you want. Bottom line. When Pegg said, "Bad" I told Marsha that Pegg said "bad" and, with a smile, Marsha agreed to return it to the store. It is nice to have friends like you who know.

+

4. As I sit like a vegetable at my computer screen, from time to time I'm distracted by a motion and I look up at the mirror over my desk to see if someone is on the back granite steps. But it is only cars zipping by. As you know, I have two mirrors aligned so that just by rolling my eyes up and to the right I can see my rhubarb stand and The humble Farmer Bed and Breakfast sign out by the road. And every time a car goes by something flashes and is picked up by my peripheral vision. The mirrors work like a video camera on my front lawn and, because I got the mirrors down at our wonderful dump, my home-made system is a lot cheaper. Now that I look up at the mirror and see my front yard, I realize that if I set up another mirror on the garage at a slightly different angle it will give me an even wider vista. The cows out back are happy just to have enough green grass to eat, but if you’re a human being like me do you think you are ever satisfied with what you already have?

+

5. What do you do? What do you have your doctorate in? These might be the first questions you hear when I’m introduced to you. The other day a woman confessed to having a couple of degrees in psychology, so I asked her about the Rorschach Test. The way she explained the Rorschach Test, it is a quick way of getting to know a stranger. She said she wouldn’t need to use it on her daughter because she already knows all about her. What a surprise it would be if daughter confessed that in the ink she saw her boyfriend smoking some of that synthetic marijuana that kills you. I asked her about perception and reality. Isn’t it your understanding that our minds are pre-programmed to make order out of chaos? I asked her if she could see faces in most any rug or in the clouds, and then I looked at the swirls in the concrete floor beneath our feet until I saw and pointed out the face of a dog. There were other questions in my mind, but when the dog snapped at my finger, the psychologist got up suddenly and left.

+

6. It is my understanding that Midcoast Internet Solutions has been sold. They have been handling my web pages pretty much since I started doing web pages 15 or so years ago. All good and well. Jason who started Midcoast Interntet Solutions is a smart boy, he put together a great company, and even if he can't retire on the proceeds he is so smart he can start some other business and do very well with that. But for weeks after the sale I couldn't find out how to access my web page so I could update it. I had no idea of what was going on. I got bills from both GWI and Maine Hosting Solutions, both bills for the same service. How is an old Maine man supposed to figure out what is going on? Luckily, Facebook friend Zack saved me. Zack told me what to do. And, after many phone calls and an understandable misreading of a small l (ell) for a capital I (eye) by the person on the other end of the line who was "helping" me work things out, I am finally able to update my web pages. Now I get a survey from Maine Hosting Solutions. Choosing to ignore the Satisfied or Unsatisfied blanks, I simply wrote them a letter. But I was unable to send the letter until I went back and filled in the blanks. One does not want to offend a person licensed to inject foreign substances into one's body. And one does not want to offend a person with the power to screw up one's web page. Doing either of these things will get you shut down quicker than a liberal commentator on a radio station in the United States. So I filled in all the blanks, just so they could get my letter. Anyone who knows anything at all has moved deep into the forest with no TV, phone or radio, content to eventually die, coughing from the tiny bit of smoke generated by their wonderful wood stoves. Perhaps we should envy them.

+

7. My money managing program, Quicken, messed up. It wouldn’t do what it is supposed to do. I Googled to find out how to restore Quicken from my external drive. Because of a recent computer shuffle my external hard drive had not been plugged in properly. I was surprised to see that there was an entire Quicken on the external drive. It opened just like the one on C drive when I clicked on it. I'd never done that before in 7 years. It had not been updated for two weeks. And when I opened the Quicken on my C drive, C drive had copied what I had opened before on my F drive. The bright side is that the adjust button works in Quicken again. So all I have to do is reenter two weeks of things from my bank statement and I'm back in business again. Also I see I have Windows Media Player on my old computer and used it this morning to burn this CD. Somehow a new version of Windows Media Player got installed on my computer and I couldn’t figure out how to use it. So I'm in petty good shape today. Any day your computers have not been updated to a new improved program is a good day. How are you doing?

+

8. It was wicked windy the other night and the mirror on my garage (that enables me to see cars going by out front) shifted. I went out and adjusted it. And now, for the first time, I have it perfectly aligned on the rhubarb and tin coffee can on my rusty chrome plated newly-renovated farmstand. I didn't have the mirror perfectly aligned before. The next obvious step is to put a speaker under the stand so when I look up and see someone out there with their hands on the rhubarb or the can, I can say into a mike, "Thank you for stopping today.”

+

9. While making my pan of rolled oats one morning a song called Peg O My Heart came to mind as I thought of a friend who is always right as long as she agrees with me. In listening to the lyrics of Peg O' My Heart that morning I recalled the words I used to sing to it. There are so many words that end in -art --- you know, that rhyme with heart. And it was somewhat startling to realize that at the age of 11 I was already a very creative, if somewhat vulgar, little boy.

+