Is this year never gonna end??

 First I'd like to say sorry. Sorry for not being here for almost 2 months.

This year started out great for me: Business has been booming and we were pretty happy. Then around the end of September I started feeling a little sick....not too much, but this constant nagging pain in my stomach.

Went to a doctor and was told I had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), witch is not so great because my wife has Crohn's, so we fought for the toilet a little lol.

Then my house basement was flooded by black water (yes, poopy water) and it caused about 20gs in damage, that I mostly repaired myself at night, while working during the day. Then I get this contract for a big demolition at night, so I switched schedules.

After a month of working 19 hour days, I finally finished my demolition. The engineer was pleased with our work and promised a lot more contracts. All in all it was great.

Then the stomach trouble came back with a vengeance. I could barely make it to the throne in the morning. Hurt so bad I went back to the hospital. Now they are saying I have as many as 20 ulcers in my stomach and intestines. I changed my diet DRASTICALLY over the last 2 weeks and it seems to help. May I remind you that as a machinery operator, I tend to eat a lot of junk on the go. Lots as in morning noon and sometimes evenings. Those drive-thru joints are a man's best friend when he is on the go. I been eating like that pretty much all my life, with the occasional fancy supper doused with wine and beer.

Like I keep saying, this getting old thing ain't working out so good for me.


Now I gotta eat salads minus the dressing, veggies and cut down on Coke and Coffee. Man I miss my coffee!!

I feel like one of those morbidly obese persons ordering 2 combos at McDonald's but with a diet coke.....

I'm a hefty guy, 6'0'' and 325pds, but I was never really ''fat''. Of course I got the love handles and all but considering I work sitting down all day I guess I thought I was all right. EEEEE   Big mistake.

Of course the doc gave me a complete check up and well well, what have we got here? Lungs so dark they look like an 80 year old's. Guess those 50 cigarettes a day didn't really help. Guess inhaling diesel exhaust for the most part of the last 25 years didn't help either. So now I got an inhaler, just like when I was a kid. Great, just what I needed.

I bought a brand new truck on the 1st of November. I was overdue, and my older Dodge was starting to cause me grief after 18 years of loyal services. So I went all out and bought this 2012 Dodge 2500 Cummins and got her all equipped with a brand new plow, a brand new spreader and all the bells and whistles I always wanted.

In the showroom the day I bought it

Guess what?  I got to drive it 300 miles before it started to smoke like crazy and died on the road. That was 1 week ago, and it's still at the Cummins shop getting fixed. Engine blown, turbo blown, off cooler blown. They never saw that. That was November 7th, and I just turned the radio on to hear that Obummer was re-elected....Guess who I blame for my truck trouble???

So 70 000$ later including the flood in my home, I'm still driving my 1994. Of course I have a few 2000 in the yard, but the 1994 is MY truck. I am the only one who ever drove it. And I love it.


But I really enjoyed my new ride...

Please let 2013 roll in and be a better year!!!



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Under the Fedora: The Wisdom of Walter

For the last several months as I confidently predicted a Mitt Romney victory there were two people who consistently told me I was dead wrong, both are local business owners who deal with people every single day. Their daily interactions with people told them that the country was too far gone and Obama was going to win this election. I politely listened and disagreed, I looked at the numbers and the trends, I saw where the electorate had seemingly gone and looked at the state of the economy thinking that while here in Massachusetts it was certainly possible people in Massachusetts where so many of our producers had simply left for greener pastures the rest of the country had not reached that point. I was wrong. Walter in particular was adamant, he said he hoped I was right but didn’t buy it. He was right. America did re-elect Barack Obama but there were some interesting oddities such as this from Election Projection:

Four years ago, Democrats made up 39% of the electorate and held a seven-point advantage over Republicans who numbered 32%. Last Tuesday, the Democrats' share of the vote accounted for just one point less than in 2008 and Republicans failed to improve at all on their 2008 number. Frankly, those results shock me. Republicans who couldn't bear to vote for Mitt Romney the Moderate or Mitt Romney the Mormon are now faced with having to bear four more years of Barack Obama, the Uber-liberal.

The question is why. Clearly millions of people decided Barack Obama wasn’t for them, so why didn’t the public embrace Mitt Romney? The answer is really in two parts. The first is this. While a nice guy personally and an able administrator Mitt Romney was the weakest and least conservative of the GOP choices that ran in 2012 and republicans who turned out for John McCain and Sarah Palin apparently were not willing to show for Mitt Romney. Second, we didn’t sell, we DUCKED. No matter how much some people in the professional punditry would like to pretend otherwise, the GOP the party they are a part of is a CONSERVATIVE party. Its electorate is conservative, the folks who do the heavy lifting are conservative and their activists are conservative. Conservatism is a philosophy. It is a way of life. It is an idea that if you are frugal if you work hard you will get ahead and your success will bring success to many others with you. Social conservatism is the same, Reality is it better to discourage your daughter from sleeping around then to put her on the pill leave condoms for her boyfriend and hope your insurance pays for an abortion. (even if it wasn’t murder). And as for equality, It is better to treat everyone the same regardless of race than to decide to grade behavior on a curve based on skin color and ethnicity. Mitt Romney and the GOP decided it was acceptable to not push these themes, it was enough to say : The economy sucks and Obama is in charge. Didn’t work did it? Ann at Legal Insurrection quotes an open letter to the GOP establishment:

The grassroots will fix this for you. Please stay out of our way. And don’t do anything stupid like granting citizenship to 15m illegals. We have to persuade Hispanics they are conservatives who belong in the GOP, just like that County GOP Chairman in New Mexico did with Susanna Martinez. We win Hispanics by persuading them that conservatism, that free enterprise rather than entitlement, is the path to the American Dream of individual liberty and prosperity.

Their message is you can’t win without your base, they’re right.

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There is an old story about St. John the Apostle during his last days, that he would on the Island of Patmos once a week gather all the believers to teach them. They would sit down and wait for her to talk and then tell them “Love one another” and that was it. One week one of his followers approached him and saying: “Master every week we come here to learn and every week you tell us the same thing.” John smiled and replied: “When you have learned that first lesson then we will move onto the next one.” The moral of the story is conservatism needs to be taught. It needs to be professed and evangelized in the same religious like way that liberalism is. It’s not enough to say the truth one and count on people believing it, you have to constantly reinforce it. There is a reason why companies spend millions of dollars to constantly push their product, once the advertising stops, the people forget and easily switch to the next product and the new ad. Conservatism is the same, it won’t matter how good our product or ideas are, if we don’t’ sell them, if we don’t sell it every single day folks will fall prey to liberal propaganda that promises them everything for nothing.

That’s our job and will be mine for the next four years or at least until I can’t afford to do it anymore.

In Massachusetts the 2^nd biggest shock was not so much the defeat of Scott Brown, after all the polling showed it was anyone’s race, but the sheer margin of it, 8 points. That’s a swing of 13 points toward democrats since the last election. Brown is a decent fellow but the local dems who had no skin in the game in Jan 2010 went all in. And spending months running away from the party didn’t help. If you are ashamed of saying you are a republican then you tell people that being a republican is something to be ashamed of. That’s not a great selling point, if you don’t believe me ask well running away from the GOP worked for Congressman Richard Tisei. And I’m sorry if you can’t elect an openly gay republican when you are running against an actual crook then Massachusetts is in real trouble. -------------------------------------------------------------------

The real shock was Question #2 I had little faith that Question #2 would be defeated. When I covered the forum in Hudson weeks ago I was the only media there and it was not picked up widely. Last week I covered another event that got absolutely no press, a 24 hour Eucharistic Adoration was held in at St. Joseph Church in Medford Ma. I spoke to a woman named Geraldine there and through her got an interview for a show before the election. There was no thing I was more worried about than question 2, because the idea of making it culturally acceptable to dispose of people in such a way in the name of “compassion” will over time corrupt a society in ways that are abominable, particularly when our future looks so bleak in terms of healthcare costs. While I was sure of Mitt Romney and cautiously optimistic on Scott Brown I was absolutely convinced that question #2 would pass in a state as liberal as Massachusetts. Reason told me that all of these things were the case and no matter how much I wanted question 2 to be defeated, it was not going to happen When I looked online just after I got to the Romney victory party it was leading and projected to win. By the time it was all over the question which was leading in the polls 68-19% just a few weeks ago had lost 51-49. It was a cause of great joy for me but I was ashamed of my own lack of faith. -------------------------------------

So now comes the job of teaching, but if another four years of Barack Obama doesn’t teach the public not sure what will.

Maybe I should ask Walter.

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