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2 days ago
Tuna is supposed to go extinct by 2012 due to overfishing. A year ago I bought 6 ounce cans of tuna for 39 cents a can. Today that same can of tuna is $1.49. Did you notice that the stock market is up? Did you ask yourself why it is up? Corporate earnings are up because they are cutting their expenses. The biggest expense is employees. It looks good on paper but no economy can survive without consumers. Consumers represent 70% of the US economy and they are not spending. They face mounting job losses and pay cuts. Wall Street is spending millions on lobbyists to kill financial regulation reform and at the same time gambling on the 670 trillion global derivatives market. They are raking in billions of dollars annually from their weapons of mass destruction as Warren Buffet puts it. It is just new ways to fleece customers and hide risks. Nothing new here. I don’t think our future looks good and I don’t want to be thrown back into the stone ages. I am saving ...
3 days ago
It has been raining here and turned cold. Well by cold I mean it is 55 degrees outside. I am such a wimp that the heat is on. I have been lazy all day and the only thing I accomplished was to get a new battery for the car and put it in my car. My Honda just turned over 201,000 miles so I don’t know how many more years it will keep truckin. Every other car I have owned was lucky to get 100,000. At that time they always started their death walk. Not the Honda. Something unusual happened on Friday. I got a note in the mail from my old boss Mary Jane. I worked for Mary Jane for about 4 years off and on. At one point I left Ashland and moved back to Superior but after the demise of my marriage I went right back to Ashland. She and I left that treatment center at about the same time. She went to Hazelden Hanley in Florida and I went to the corporate offices of Lifemark which in the early 80’s was a huge healthcare conglomerate and later merged with AMI or American Medical ...
7 days ago
This reel is now 35 years old and in good shape. I took a couple pics of it. It was made in Sweden and I or my husband must have bought it after our second child was born in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. It was made before we started putting plastic parts on fishing reels. The only thing not made of aluminum and steel is the handle grips that are black and wooden. The line on it feels like maybe 17 pound test line. It is stiff line and I don’t like fishing with stiff line so maybe my husband used it. Each reel has an ideal weight of line and I will have to research what the ideal weight line is for this vintage reel. I checked it on Ebay and the price right now is $200 for one in such good shape. That one was missing the seal that mine has. It looks like a crown and it must be glued on somehow. Maybe it is welded. Most likely welded. It is a reel for big fish like muskie. I don’t remember using this reel so it may have been my ex-husbands reel. I did not do that much muskie ...
8 days ago
Does anyone remember the Ugly Stick fishing pole that came out in the early 70’s. Graphite's came out in the 60’s and they were the rod to own. I still have a vintage graphite rod. Union Carbide subsidized the development of the graphite rods and graphite golf clubs. Then came the Ugly Sticks that outperformed anything ever created. The graphite's were wood, fiberglass and graphite. Graphite was at the time the most expensive rod ever developed. I think Shakespeare put them out and then there were some patent battles as I recall. The Ugly Stick was created by mistake. The engineers were testing strength with the graphite rods. They blended fiberglass and graphite together and went home for the night. The next day they tested what they had and it was far stronger than what had been selling as a graphite rod. The brought the rod to a company meeting that afternoon and were laughe d out of the meeting because what they created was ugly. It was a white stick and the ...
10 days ago
Friday and Saturday nights are the worst. Last night my daughters house had 9 teenagers in it overnight. My daughter was out on a date and I ended up supervising all those kids. There were 3 extra cars in the driveway and one had a flat tire. Luckily they were all girls. At 11:30 a man showed up with his foreign exchange student who apparently had been invited. He wanted to make sure there were no boys, drugs, alcohol, and nobody was piercing or cutting themselves. I told him he had pretty much covered the field and nobody was doing that. He took a look at the house and the kids and then asked if I was going to be there the entire time so they were not left unattended. I reassured him that I would and after he drove out of the driveway I handed over $40 for pizza and went to my house where I went to sleep. When I woke this morning I found that 12 had hid her purse in my house. All these kids were part of the drama club at the high school and had just finished a ...
