PLANT PORN!

 

PLANT PORN!!!

Napoleon once said…’Rest is Rust.’ He never shut it down until they put him on the island of St. Helena. Well, neither have I. Since I retired a couple of years ago, I find I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to find things to keep myself occupied. I cannot sit in a chair all day and stay glued to the television. I read 3 to 4 books at a time but even that gets old after a while.

I have made cheese, pickles, jam, and bread. Lots of bread. It has taken me about 15 recipes to finally find a bread recipe that I like and that turns out worth the effort. The bad thing about cooking, baking etc. is that you tend to eat stuff which you do not need.

When I was a kid I made model ships, airplanes of all sorts and sizes. I love glue. We had no place to keep them in our house, and my grandmother let me use a big glass cabinet of hers to display them. That was about my only hobby as I recall.

I don’t want to do those again, so I embarked upon an entirely new adventure.

I bought a greenhouse.

This venture has taken me into a completely new world. First off, I know nothing about growing anything, but I am fairly certain my success will be better than it was with an old jeep. What could go wrong?

I can’t make up my mind to grow flowers or vegetables. We buy lots of flowers and they are expensive, but carrots and celery are cheap. I have gotten comments about the fact that any vegetables I grow will be free of chemicals and pesticides. I suppose that’s true, but I am at a loss to think about how you grow only a small amount of peppers or squash? So, I am mulling these things over in my mind as I peruse various seed and gardening catalogs. So much to see and so little time.

Greenhouse gardening has many points to be considered that I had never thought of before. For example, I find that I am notoriously guilty of over-seeding! I never gave it a thought until now. If I must take an aspirin, I take two to make sure they work. Same with seed planting. The more the better. But now I find that is over-seeding and can lead to unnecessary plant bunching. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?

I find myself sitting in my chair at night drooling over new seed and tool products in very expensive catalogs. A month ago, I had no idea you needed different sized seed bottles to be accurate with your planting. What exactly is a seed bottle anyway? The internet picks up on what you are searching for and now I am besieged with web sites wanting to sell me something that has to do with things growing in the ground.

You’d be amazed at all the stuff they have for sale to plant. Who knew there were ten pages of tomato seeds or fifty kinds of chili peppers?

Well, at least it keeps me out of the bars and keeps me busy doing something useful.

And I don’t gain weight growing flowers…

See you next week….Peary Perry

 

SEND IN THE CLOWNS....

SEND IN THE CLOWNS….

I don’t consider myself to be a Republican or a Democrat, I am an Independent.

So, today’s rant is not directed to any particular political party but to the institution of politics and government in general.  When I see or read about various politicians of both parties getting indicted for various criminal acts but there isn’t any closure to the issue and it just seems to fall though the cracks, it hacks me off.

Those of you reading this would all be tried, convicted and put in prison if we committed these sorts of crimes. No questions asked, just do not pass go, just go to jail.

How many of us have received calls from folks pretending to be IRS agents or some law enforcement officer who has a warrant for our arrest unless we send them money or gift cards? Most of us, I would assume. How many elderly people lose their savings and endure grief over these frauds with very few of the total being arrested for their acts?

In 2024 there were over 850,000 reports of imposter fraud and scams reported to the government. There were 24 arrests made as a result. They could have gotten that many from just the calls made to my cell phone. Those ‘piracy’ notices you see in from of movies you watch at home? All those fake Gucci bags you see at the flea market? Resulted in 80 total arrests nationwide. 80?

In 2020 there were 1,571 arrests for IRS tax fraud in the whole country. They could have gotten more than that from our congress and government members.

Everyone knows it’s a federal crime to impersonate an FBI agent, but there isn’t any record of anybody getting convicted of doing this. They don’t post anything with their numbers.

Last year I was almost scammed by a guy in Chicago trying to buy a jeep I had for sale. He sent me a cashier’s check for the money but the whole deal looked and smelled suspicious. By the time I got through with it I found the check was a forgery and I would have lost the jeep. I took all of the information to the FBI in Fort Worth. Needless to say, I was not well received and did not feel as if they had time for an interstate auto scam. The FBI agent took all of my evidence (about 25 pages) supposedly to make a copy. I had paper-clipped all of these together and they were returned to me with the paper clip  in exactly the same position, obviously they had not been copied. I asked him for his name so I could send him any later evidence. He said he was forbidden to give it out. I never heard from them again.

On several of these issues I have taken the time to write to my congressional representatives. Their letters in return are totally useless and say nothing. I assume some clerk mails these out daily with the content being so bland and vague as to cover every possibility you can name. I doubt any of you have ever received a letter from anyone in the government with any real answers to your inquiry.

My point is this, we elected them and we must deal with the results. These are our clowns, we did it to ourselves.

See you next week…Peary Perry

 

Ai SUCKS!!!

 

Ai SUCKS!!!!

As you may know I am an octogenarian (someone over the age of 80) and proud of it. I asked Google what you would be called if you were in your 90’s and they replied ‘dead’.

Not the answer I was looking for, actually you can be called a nonagenarian’. I object to the first 3 letters of this word being the pronoun ‘non’. As in, not here or doesn’t exist.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste and unfortunately once you pass 50 years of age, you start the downward slide into the black hole of life. Your brain starts to shrink as you get older. This means you have less volume to store stuff into. So for me, it’s like I had a huge warehouse for all of my stuff and now I’m in an efficiency apartment.

You have stuff in there you may never need again, but we all realize that if you throw any of it away or try to forget it, you will certainly need it next week. Like that old tube of caulk that you had around for several years and threw it away last week and now you need a dab of it to fix a hole where a nail for a picture used to be.

With my brain shrinking, I’m afraid to put much more into it for fear I might push something out that was really important. Like that guy that kept the number for his 200 million bitcoin account on his computer and then forgot his password. If I had an account with 200 million in it I’d have that sucker written down in several places. On a rafter in my attic or in my sock drawer. Maybe write it on a bunch of pages in my bible. Note to readers who are part time or full robbers…I don’t have anything like this, so don’t come to my house.

To give you an example of how easy it is to lose your information, I bet most of you cannot remember all of the phone numbers you had to memorize before cell phones. Now we just know them as a voice prompt like ‘call office’ or you hit #4. My grandmother’s number was JA-22675, but I’m telling you I can’t for the life of me remember my kids cell numbers. Gone, just gone.

There is no way for me to know how old any of you are that read what I write each week. Obviously, I don’t do this for a living but just a hobby and to keep the old brain working on something all the time. A lot of my weekly rants are to fill you in on what is happening in the life and lives of us that are now old. I hope you don’t mind if I share these things I am experiencing with you. You won’t find any info here about hip-hop or the latest songs. You will only hear from me about this process I am going through.

One I hope you get an opportunity to enjoy yourself as well.

I just have to remember not to put too much information into my shrinking brain which might cause me to forget where I live.

See you next week….Peary Perry

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