Crazy Numbers, Priorities, the Silent Treatment

It was 6:21am when I began opening up this blog to begin this post. It will be a simple post but I want to impress upon my readers just how long a simple post can take to write. I can work for hours on particularly long ones especially when I embed links to other stories and webpages within the post. I’ll report the time at the point I upload or “publish” it.

CRAZY NUMBERS:

I have a head for numbers. That is not to say I have an easy time with math especially accounting to the penny. I was always very undependable back forty years ago trying to balance a check book. But I have never had any trouble with forests of numbers. If I have roughly ten grand in the bank I can go for a year rounding off numbers of deposits and withdrawals and keep a good approximation of the balance in my head, usually withing ten or twenty percent. I have always avoided credit like the plague. Its the hemophilia of bookkeeping. Its a slow leak of money that over time will dry a bank account to the bone.

So, I’ve added a couple new statistics to my thinking. The first is not terribly different than the one that has been in my head for years. It probably came from and NPR story so I have little doubt about its general accuracy. It is this: Roughly 1 in 3 “black” kids will spend time in jail. For Latino kids its 1 in 6. For whites its 1 in 17. I could and no doubt will, and probably already have, written about this in this blog. After worrying about the question of human potential among the various collections of humans artificially divided into a anti-scientific myth called “race,” I’m severely annoyed that something as benign as melanin should be the determining factor in assigning people to costly, damaging and degrading atrocities like prison. It tests my faith in apple pie, motherhood, the statute of liberty, the constitution and the stars and stripes. Not nearly “nuff said,” but I’m in a hurry.

The next number is one I heard today on another NPR story I half listened to about, I’m not sure, Daycare I guess. I was only half listening. It is this. The average daycare providers in the US earn $22,000 a year (a pittance). The requirements for providing daycare are roughly equal to the qualifications demanded of prison guards. Prison Guards in the US earn an average of $72,000 a year. I could pontificate about this at length and as noted in the previous paragraph probably already have or will at some point in the future. Again, not nearly “nuff said.” If the juxtaposition of these two figures doesn’t set your mind into the spin mode what the Hell are you reading my blog for anyway?

PRIORITIES:

I’ve posted about this often in the last year. For me right now its Family first, Saving the Duluth Schools second, Getting a writing career started, or something like that……It will probably change the next time I write about it.

As this construction season has bled away from me I find myself with one putzy project left I paid someone else to do the last time it was attended to – painting the woodwork on my brick house. It needs to be scraped, spot primed, and painted. I don’t have enough time to do it now. I started but I’ll end up finishing up the little I started and then resume the majority of the work next spring. I may do that grudgingly or hire someone to finish it because next spring I hope to attend to two other non family tasks. 1st Electing a sensible new school board in November of 2015 and fixing up my attic into a place where I can commence my writing career with all the documents I’ve collected over forty years and the couple thousand books I’ve put together to make sense of the world. I’d hoped to do that this year but first I sacrificed a 40th year anniversary river cruise through Europe and then the building project itself when we were hit with a huge tax as we altered our retirement financing.

Life……its so two steps forward, one step back.

Meanwhile I’m still attending to the first priority. I had the grandkids over last night as per Wednesday’s usual and I got myself signed up to be a chaperon for half a day on a field trip with the little dickens who crawled into bed with me at 3am this morning to steal my heat. Last weekend we took both of them to Iowa for a family reunion with Claudia’s farming relatives. The boys got to drive a tractor twice as big as anything I ever saw in a farm field when I was little and roll around in several tons of corn. When they got back home their mother dislodged a corn kernel from the old boys hair at bath time. I facebooked the pictures but I won’t be putting them here because of my priorities. It will take too much time to do it with all the other things I’d like to blog about whenever I find the time to get to them.

THE SILENT TREATMENT:

This, of course, refers to the last post. My buddy sent me this nudge yesterday:

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:06 PM, [Harry’s Buddy] wrote:

From https://lincolndemocrat.com/?p=11636: (Sometimes when I go silent…)
I have the most to say.

Oh, come on, Harry. Jump in. The water is deep.

[Your Buddy]

To which I replied:

It sure is. Oh my roof’s got a hole in it but I might drown…..

[Buddy],

Some of these entries are little literary tricks meant to keep people looking. But it is true I’ve got a lot of distractions. I don’t want to metamorepose badly too often or readers will get the idea I’m trying to miseducate their children. Besides, you always beat me up when I get sloppy.

Harry

This started out as a post to let me mention a couple stray statistics before they evaporated from my head. Its now 7:06am. 45 minutes. Sheesh!

Gotta go make breakfast for the grandkids and see if there is any useful news in the Tribune which may be waiting me on my front porch.

PS. I haven’t proof read this post but I did decide to add that I added a colon (:) after PRIORITIES. That and this addendum added another five minutes to the posting.

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