Father's Day or 23andOMG

(Happy Father's Day Annual Post) 

I sat there looking at my phone in disbelief.

No way. Wow... No way.....

This cannot be happening.......

I guess I should start with a little background. I have had three fathers in my life.

That's two more than the standard, so let me start with the one with whom I share a name; Walter Joseph Lucas.

My father was 50 when I was born, so you could say he was late to the game when it came to having children. My sister Lisa is two years older that I am. I knew my father had been married twice before, but the few times he did talk about it were very brief. He would just say his previous wife did not want to have children and he did. It seemed reasonable enough.

Even into adulthood, I never pushed him to tell me more. He had a very complicated relationship with his own family. He was born in 1915 on a ranch near Lockeford Ca. His father died when he was 18 or 19 and he had to take over the responsibilities of running the family ranch. I'm sure he did all he could for his mom, but there was definitely some bad blood between he and his siblings. I only know the little he told me about his family, and I don't know their side of the story, so I cannot judge what really happened.

My father was two generations older than me. He rode a horse to school, and milked thirty cows by hand before and after school. His life was work, money and family, but mostly work. He could not get into the Army during WWII because he was deaf in one ear. He worked in the shipyards at Mare Island, building PT boats during the war years.

By the time I came into the world my father was a successful rancher, real estate broker and owned a land leveling business. He had an extraordinary work ethic and drive. I can best describe him as a combination between John Wayne and Donald Trump. Just imagine that for a moment.

Starting off on our ranch in Clements, our family seemed to be on the move most of my early years. We moved to a ranch on the John Day River near Mitchell Oregon when I was a toddler.

He tied me onto my first horse when I was two years old, and sent me plodding off down the dirt road to the bunkhouse where the cowboys lived. My mom said the snowfall that winter was the biggest in decades. You could ride a snowmobile over the corrals without touching a post. That was enough for her. Somehow, we ended up back in California, in Orland. That's the first house I can remember, but we were soon on the move again to the tiny town of Oak Run, north east of Redding.

I loved Oak Run. My father had wheeled and dealed his way into a big ranch there. It was several thousand acres of red dirt, lava rock and oak trees, but it also had a hundred acres of good bottomland where we could raise hay.

The ranch at Oak Run was a giant playground for me. There was a lot of work, but my father never seemed to drive me the way I'm sure his father drove him in his youth. Those were different times. That drive came out of sheer necessity.

I learned to operate the ranch trucks and tractors when I was old enough to reach the pedals. I fed cows, cut hay, and helped irrigate the fields. But only when I was asked or I wanted to. It was not forced labor to be sure, but there wasn't a lot of laying around the house either.

I was turned loose much of the time. In the summers, I would leave the house after breakfast and sometimes not come back until evening. We always had dogs on the ranch, lots of them. They were my constant companions since I didn't have any bothers. Lisa didn't see the enjoyment in damming up streams, throwing rocks, or chasing frogs down at the creek all day.

As I grew older, I was given more responsibility, and expected to do more. By twelve I was gathering cattle in the summer heat, driving Caterpillars, clearing brush or skidding logs. Most of these things were semi-dangerous for a twelve-year-old kid, but I survived.

My father had a way of teaching that could be summed up by the old Nike slogan: Just do it. He never took the time to patiently teach me how to do anything; he just put me in the seat and told me to do it. Drive this D-8 Caterpillar, clear this brush off these hills, I'll be back when you're finished. For a kid, it was equal parts excitement and terror, but that's just the way he was.

He would also let me skip school to go to the Shasta Livestock Auction in Cottonwood on Fridays. I would spend the day running around the sorting pens, while he was in Ellington Peek's office doing business. He would also let me go on business trips with him. I would sit quietly at a table full of businessmen and listen to million dollar deals be made. It was a unique experience for a young man. However, some of favorite times were in his old blue Jeep Cherokee where he and I would go 'check the cows'.

I loved my father, as most sons do. I loved him despite the fact that mine was very flawed, like all fathers are.

My father was an alcoholic. Ever since I can remember, my father drank, a lot. He was a maintenance drinker. He was never falling-down drunk, and he was never hung-over. He would always get up at 6:00 the next day ready to work. Back before computers and cell phones, business was done by telephone. After dinner, my father would start making his business calls. Every night, he sat at the kitchen table, talking on the phone and having several large 'hi-balls'.

We went through stretches where things would be fine for a time. Then, if the cattle prices or real estate market would go down, the stresses and pressures he put on himself would start to boil over. It was very volatile around our house, but then again, my father seemed to live in a constant state of chaos.

In the late 70's my father's ranching business started to take off. I remember the bankers from Bank of California sitting at our dinner table asking my father how large of a credit line he wanted. They were just giving money away, and they were taking my father's word he had the cattle to cover that amount of credit. All with a wink and nod. (Think of the housing bubble in 2008)

He bought a new ranch in Lakeview Oregon. He bought new pickups, horse trailers, semi-trucks, hired more cowboys and a mechanic. We even built a pool and a new addition to the house. It was a good time for our family. Well, until it all came crashing down a few years later.

He was always in conflict with the neighboring ranches, including one actual range war complete with sheriff's deputies, a helicopter and me standing in front of a gate with a lever action rifle to make sure the neighbors didn't push their cattle out of that gate onto the road.

My father made and lost several fortunes in his life. He never seemed to find a balance he could reach. He always wanted more; he always wanted to move forward, never content with where he was. My father was a complicated man.

He loved us kids, but he couldn't stop drinking. He had my life planned out and expected me to take over his 'empire' when the time came. But he spent almost no time teaching me how to do it. He was hard working, but had a soft heart. He could also bend a rule, or outright break it if stood between him and his business success. He never talked about his own feelings, and rarely how he felt about you, unless he has been drinking. Even then it was 50-50 propositions. You were either the best kid in world, or a huge disappointment.

Much like I described him as a combination of John Wayne and Donald Trump, many people loved my father and thought he was a great guy. Others thought he was a son of bitch. I think, in the end, they were both right.

After another lost fortune, our family ended up here in Yolo County. He bought a house with 20 acres after the bank took back the ranch in Oak Run, and he went to work leasing ranches and running steers and heifers for other ranchers.

He stayed in the real estate business, and never letting well enough alone, he took my mom and my sister's interest in cutting hair and turned that into a business. He opened a beauty salon in Vacaville for my mom and sister to run while he had his real estate office next door.

I was in college and discovering the world outside of ranching, hay bales, and cattle. In other words, I was have a great time.

It wasn't until I met my future wife that my interest turned back to the ranch. She loved it out there. Being a city girl, she couldn't understand why I didn't want to ride horses if I had the opportunity. To me horses meant work, and 14-hour days gathering cattle in the brush from sunup till sundown. Why would you want to ride them for fun?

We both were going to school at American River College, but I was still a year from getting my associates degree, so when my wife transferred to UC Davis, I went to work for my father running cattle. We lived on a ranch my father leased in Dunningan. I think I made $600 a month plus the nine hundred square foot house we lived in. Those were good times.

However, like all things cyclical, the good times are always followed by tough times, and that came in 1991. My father was again overextending, and planning as if the good times would always be good. He hated paying taxes, so for every dollar he made in the cattle business or real estate business, he leased a new ranch, or built new corrals or helped my wife and I buy a place of our own. Our house was just about complete, and with my father's help, we had just made our first annual balloon payment on the new place.

One day he was in Sacramento at a deposition, not surprisingly, he was being sued by one of our neighbors for some semi-shady way he sold their ranch, when he felt sick. He came home and stayed there for a while before my mother convinced him he had to go to the hospital.

I was irrigating the alfalfa at my place when I got the word he was headed to the hospital. He sat in the ER at Woodland Hospital for three or four hours while the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with him. By the time a new doctor came on and decided he was bleeding internally, it was too late. He had an aneurysm of his aorta. They air lifted him to UC Davis Med Center. They performed surgery to repair the tear in the aorta, but he had lost too much blood and died the next day.

Not that there is ever a good time to lose a parent, but it could not have come at a worse time for our family. The cattle market was heading into a decline along with the real estate market. Loosing not only my father, but also my employer and the person who had engineered my life, was a huge hit. Even though I had my real estate salesman's license and was working on my father's ranch, I had let him make almost all my decisions for me. He was running the show, and now he was gone.

I was very immature for someone in my position. At twenty-five, I should have been ready for this day, but I wasn't. Not by a long shot. I went through the motions of gathering the cattle, and trying to help my mom figure out if we should keep the leases on the ranches. In the end, with all my father's bills and past due taxes, we had to sell everything, my house included, and start over.

At the time, all you see are the problems, all you feel is the pain, all you want is to have things put back the way they were. That isn't going to happen. You have to move, you have to go forward, you have to grow.

15 years later, I was working in the technology field, something I really liked, we had two children, and I was making a good living. My mom and sister were living in North Idaho and my mom had a met a man.

This is where I met my second father, Paul.

Paul is a so much different from Walt Sr.

He is soft spoken and kind. He's a patient, caring man, and he is very happy with the life he has. He is content, or at least at peace with his place in the world. Paul is a contractor, although he's retired now. He's a hard worker, but doesn't chase the almighty dollar at all costs. He likes to read, and loves working on his classic cars. He is interested in the world around him. He is self-aware in a way my father never was.

I could not have picked a better person for my mother to marry. He loves her dearly, and she has found someone to love without having to deal with the whirlwind of chaos and volatility.

Living sixteen hours away, I don't get to see them as often as I would like, but I have never worried a moment about my mother since Paul entered her life. He is wonderful, and I owe him more than I can say. He is the perfect second father.

So wait, I thought you said this was a story about three fathers? Yes, I'm getting to that.

Shortly after my father passed away, my mother told Lisa and I that dad had two sons with his first wife, long ago. He had told her not to tell us kids, but now that he was gone, she thought the time was right. She didn't have any names, just the little my father had told her.

This was fascinating to me and it started me on a long journey to find my lost relatives. Ancestry was a new service, and I signed up looking to see if I could find my lost half brothers. I had no luck. I tried to find his first wife, but without her maiden name, you cannot find birth records and such with the counties involved.

I think I solved the mystery a few years back when I found a census record of my father living in Stockton with his first wife Zelda, her mother, and two small children with different last names. So, I think those kids were my father's stepsons, and would be no relation to me. A bit anticlimactic, but the mystery was solved.

Enter the new DNA registry 23andMe.

I had always heard from my father that he was mostly Irish with some French from my grandmother. My mom is full Portuguese, half from the Azores and the other half from Portugal by way of Brazil.

I wanted to see how true that was and signed up. A week or so later a package arrived. I followed the instructions and spit into the little tube, sealed it up and mailed it back. They said it would take about 6 weeks to get the results.

I didn't think I would find too many surprises, but being a huge history buff, I thought it would be cool to be able trace my heritage. I received an email saying my results were in and I logged on and looked at my DNA make up. Nothing too startling. I was 28% British/Irish, 25% Broadly Northwest European, and 35% Iberian, (Spain/Portugal) with the rest a mash up of mostly European make up.

This tracked almost exactly the way I thought it would. Oh well.

I had traced my father's family back to Prince Charles County Maryland in 1731 through Ancestry, and I thought there may have been an American melting pot, genetic wildcard thrown in there somewhere. But it turned out I'm just a plain old American white guy.

I had told my mom about the 23andMe findings and she wanted to know why I was so interested in it? I said I found it fascinating to know for sure where you come from. Knowing what part of the world you came from, tracing your history and such.

I thought that was the end of the story.

A few days later I received an email from 23andMe asking if I wanted to search for my DNA relatives. Sure, why not. I clicked the link.....Oh boy....

I looked at the page for a minute and reread it a few times just to make sure.

I have two half-sisters.

No way. No. Way.

I clicked on their names and looked at their profiles.

No way.

How could this be? They must belong to dad, but when were they born? I found a link to send them a message. What do you say? Hi, I'm your long lost half brother, where did you come from?

I sent each one a message. I had so many questions. I asked if they knew my father, and did they know about my sister and I?

Pam was the first to respond:

 ”.... Tracy and I now know how we are half sisters through information told to us by our mothers when we were young adults. I'd be happy to connect if you want to solve this mystery for yourself. It is just because our parents really wanted us to be born, and all they did to arrange for our arrivals. I was born in 1961. Tracy in 1967. It will benefit us all to know the health and genetic data. So glad to find you. :)"

Wait? What?

I was a little slow on the uptake here just because it seemed so strange. With Pam being born in 61, that was before my mom and dad were married, so no foul there, but Tracy was born in 67, two years after me. Why would our all our parents really want us to be born? I could see my dad having a bit of fun, but I'm pretty sure my mom would not have been okay with my father out populating the planet.

Like I said, it was staring me in the face, but I hadn't put it all together.

I sent both a message saying it looked like my father was a bit of a scoundrel. I think Pam and Tracy had a correspondence between each other and decided to have Pam spill the beans:

"Well, not a scoundrel actually. I don't want to shock you, but since you are over 50, I think you can handle it. When I was 14, I found out that my father (my legal father) was not my biological father. Before my parents married, he had a vasectomy. It couldn't be reversed. My parents really wanted me, so they went to a specialist in San Francisco who arranged for a sperm donor. All they knew was he was a medical student who was healthy and had a great health history and already had a family and children. I was never to have known. Back then, the secrecy was thought best for the child being conceived. At 14 when I chose to sever my ties to my father, my mother told me the truth of my paternal creation. I didn't know about any of you, but always thought that this medical student may have made several donations. Lol. I met Tracy last year through her daughter making a connection to me. We were both stunned. Tracy found out from her mom about the medical student on her 22nd birthday. She is still very close to her legal father, so she is cautious about making it known because she doesn't want him to feel bad. So was your legal father a medical student? Tracy and I don't know if you were from donation like us or if our parent’s donor was both your legal and genetic dad. Sorry for the shock if you didn't know." 

Wow..... No way.

I was shocked.

So the only man I ever knew as my father was not my biological father.

No flippin' way.

As I sat there staring at my phone, I felt a rush of different feelings.

This changes everything.

Then again, it changes nothing.

My father will always be my father. He raised me, for better or worse. It was surreal to me that a man from my father's generation would use a donor to have children. He was nothing if not a man's man. With all his success, all that money, there must have been something missing. There must have been a huge hole in his life he needed to fill with children. It made me wonder about those two stepsons he had with his first wife, and how it must have hurt to lose them when they were divorced.

My head was swimming, but it was late and I went to bed with lots of different thoughts rattling around. What was I going to say to my mom? Should I even bring this up? I had to. It was just too much to let go. Besides, my mom did nothing wrong. She did something extraordinary to bring me into this world. The doctors had instructed her not to tell me about my biological father. She kept the secret for over 50 years. She did it out of love, and that is a great reason.

The next day I called my mom in the morning. We spoke for a while and then I told her the story that Pam told me. The story of Children's Hospital in San Francisco, and the donor, and the instruction not to tell us kids. When I finished, I asked, "So, do you have anything you want to tell me?" There was a bit of a pause, "Well, I would say that my story is the same story you just told me."

We talked about dad and her not being able to have children, and the special clinic at Children's hospital was the cutting edge for the 1960s. It was very expensive, but it was their only hope of having children. My sister was conceived the same way. Mom said she never really thought about it about it after a few years, and didn’t think it was important to tell us after dad died. We were going through enough turmoil at the time.

The fact that I signed up for the DNA tests out of pure curiosity was something they couldn't have even imagined back in the 1960s. If I had not spit in that little tube, I would have never known about my biological father.

So, the real question is: Now what?

What does it change? Like I said before; it changes everything and it changes nothing.

Walt Sr. will always be my father. He raised me, he showed what it was to be a man, to work hard, and he showed me you can do more than you think is possible. I will always love that man.

So what about my biological father? Do I want to know more about him? Yeah, I guess so. I would like to see a picture of him, and see if I look anything like him. I would like to know something about his personality, his temperament. Those kinds of things.

I'm sure he never imagined DNA testing, and that three strangers would someday find each other through an ounce of saliva. I wonder if he would want to know how we turned out?

So many questions.

In the end, I am glad I know. I am also glad my mother and father went to that specialist in San Francisco. I am here.

I have a wonderful family, a wonderful life, and memories to last me a few lifetimes. I am hoping to get together one day with my half sisters; that would be cool. Hey, 23andMe is a new company, not many people have signed up, there may be more of us half siblings out there. I always wanted a brother. (Sorry Lisa, love ya)

Saving the right, (from what happened to the left)

One of the things that first stood out to me when I discovered Dr. Jordan Peterson about ten years ago was the question he asked his democrat friends. "How do you know when the left has gone too far?"

He said they would never answer the question. Never.

When he asked his friends on the republican side, how do you know when the right has gone too far? They would answer quickly, and confidently; when they turn to racial superiority, victimhood, and outrage mobs. That's when the right needs to be smacked back into reality. 

The left maybe an election cycle too late in finding the answer to the 'too far' question. The DNC are just now coming up with the courage to start asking that small, but insanely loud insider group of the intersectionality wing, to be quiet. In the back rooms they asking themselves, are we sure we should be fighting to sterilize children, and to force young girls to have naked young men in their dressing rooms and sports teams? 

It may take a few more election cycles for them to either shut these people up, or separate themselves from this insanity. It looks like the big-money people paying for these billion dollar election losses are starting to say no to the pro-Trans crowd. Money and multi-media culture are the coin of the realm in politics, so it may take some serious work to move the democratic party back towards the middle. We will see. 

With the elections in November, we did see people like Democratic Socialist candidate Mamdani win, and that is disturbing, but not really surprising. Electing a young charismatic socialist can happen in deep blue city like New York, but that won’t work across all of America.

The left had their fun on election night in their blue state vistories, but I'm sure the frustration is boiling over inside the democrat party. This socialist stuff is not going to work in purple states, can it? 

Watching the left embrace the extremes on the outside of their party is frightening enough as someone in the middle. However, I am now starting to see this same thing starting to happen on the right, and it scares the hell out of me. 

The latest item I would point to is the recent podcast by Tucker Carlson. He brought on 27 year old Nick Fuentes. If you don't know who that is, good for you. He's an incredibly talented, yet extremely disturbed young man. He is becoming the ever increasingly popular face of what is called the Groypers. This is a dangerous ideology that is gaining traction on the far right, or the 'Woke Right' as they are now being described. 

Now with everyone calling everyone Nazis, and anti-semites, I want to make sure we are describing what is true when it come to Fuentes. There's a never ending list of evidence for his fondness, and support, for both Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. That seems very odd to someone who has read as much history as I have. One would think it's hard to be a supporter of both fascism and communism at the same time, since they were murdering each other by the millions less than a 100 years ago. But, the woke right doesn't have to make sense, they just need clicks and popularity, and that will bring in revenue and relevance. 

Tucker Carlson's interview was not problematic because he did the interview with Fuentes, it was the very friendly nature of the interview. He offered almost no pushback or questions digging into Fuentes' outrageous claims. 

I used to like Tucker Carlson, even if he's had a some strange takes, and said some bizzare things from time to time, but he's gone off the rails of the conservative movement in a few short months.  

Why is someone on the conservative side of things not stomping down a young pro-nazi, anti woman, anti semitic personality like Fuentes? This movement is really growing among those young disaffected men on the right. Like I said, the numbers of views and clicks make money in this new media world, and for a person like Fuentes, what else does he have?

Another person who I follow online is Bret Weinstein. He’s an evolutionary biologist who was one of the first people to be ‘cancelled’ at the University of Portland back in 2015. A bit later in 2019 he gave everyone a stern warning. He said this intersectional identity politics movement on the left was going to create an identity political movement on the far right. He was correct. This is a recent piece about why you should be able to criticize Israel, without being called names.  

"What a terrible error it is to go after anybody who has legitimate questions about the interaction between the United States and not only a foreign state but a particular administration that has a very hard line bent within that foreign state.

You're allowed to have questions. You're an American. That's one of the great things about it. You're allowed to have questions. You're allowed to ask any question you want. And anybody who wants to say that the reason you can't ask that question is because you're revealing a horrible defect in character, or defect of character, is running exactly the risk of creating the enemy, effectively calling it forth."

So over the past twenty years or so, we as a society, and culture led by the left, called forth an entity called the Groypers. 

So who are these Groypers? I didn't really know exactly until a few months ago. They are the outlet for young, mostly white, men and teens who are not playing inside the lines that modern culture allows.

They have lost meaningful connection with healthy masculinity, and are not engaging with each other in face to face friendship, and have almost ruled out interacting face to face with women. This fear and frustration of trying to engage with young women, who have been told that they don't need men, and men are useless, has been a force driving them to stop trying, and to turn to porn. Porn is their outlet for their sexual frustration with women and dating, and that is not good. They also have resorted to the online gaming world for social contact, and friendship. They have dozens of online gaming friends, and a few close ones, where they can spend hours shit-talking about how bad the real world is.  

So, as someone who just turned 60 years old, and retired after a life of working blue collar and then white collar jobs, I do not see what they see. I can't, the world that I grew up in long gone. I need to ask myself, what does the real world look like to me, vs what it looks like to them?

In my next two posts, I will delve into what I see (from the outside) are the two main problems driving young people, but especially men, to drop out of the real face-to face work, and burrow down into artificial worlds of social networks, porn, and gaming. 

Affordability: - Why is everything so damned expensive, especially homes?

Getting your shit together: - Communication, dating, socialization, working.

 

Basic Economics and what drives Affordability?

If you want to know what is driving many Americans to embrace socialism, one of the major factors is the American education system. At your local district level, schools have not taught the basics of economics to the past few generations of children . The astonishing ignorance of today's public in basic economics is remarkable. 

It is said that, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." What follows must be, if you do know history, you are destined to watch others repeat it. 

Speaking of history, I remember back in 2024, when republicans were complaining (understandably) about the Biden administration flooding the market with trillions in borrowed cash to keep the economic GDP numbers up. The democrats were also buying votes with government checks. High inflation and crumbling affordability were key factors in Trump's victory in 24. 

As soon as republicans were in charge, they gave up on that messaging. Why? Well, because making prices go down is hard to do through federal government policy. The one thing Trump has done well is open the energy markets up, and the price of fuel has dropped dramatically. That helps lower prices across the board, as everything that goes to market needs to use energy to get to your store, or your front door. 

Inflation has been stuck around 3%, which is about a point higher than optimal. Remember at one point in the Biden administration, it rose to 9%. You can't get those price hikes back, you can only slow that rise down to a manageable level. Even at that magic 2% inflation rate, prices go higher each year. However, if the economy is growing at 2.5 - 3.5%, your purchasing power goes up. You don't feel those small price hikes with more money in your paycheck. 

When people look at housing, it becomes a bit more complex, but also pretty simple; It's Supply and Demand. Do you see subdivisions being built all over your town? No, new housing subdivisions are a increasingly rare. This leads to a lack of supply in the housing market. 

The persistent lack of sufficient new housing supply has been a major driver of rising home prices in the US. The country faces a shortage of around 4 million homes right now. That shortage has led to increased competition among buyers. This has pushed prices up by 60% nationwide since 2019.

There is no real way for the federal government to increase home building. Getting the interest rates down will help people afford more home, but it doesn't drive home prices down. Supply does that. 

Have you heard anything from your State, County, or City politicians talking about how they will lower home prices? Have they talked about their plans to start reducing regulations, lowering permit fees, lowering new home taxes, lowering developer fees, cutting permitting times, or making rezoning happen? Nope. Not at all. 

The people who own high priced homes, ones they've owned for decades, want to keep their neighborhoods exactly the way are. They vote politicians into County Supervisor seats, and City Council seats who will pass rules and regulations to keep any new houses from being built in their cities or counties. The ones they will approve will come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in building permits, fees, inspections, environmental research, testing, mitigation costs, open space taxes, green energy nonsense, and layer upon layer of red tape made to do two things; Make money for the local government budgets, and slowing new home building.

I'm not sure what can be done with this. I guess that's why we are seeing the huge migration from Blue States to Red States. These Red States, for the most part, are much friendlier to building homes. 

The other side of this is the Demand side of the equation. Say what you will of President Trump's immigration policies, 1.5 million illegal citizens self-deporting, and another half million who have been deported, is driving the demand side down a bit. It's just not quite enough to drive rental housing prices down much, and it doesn't really effect the middle class housing demand side. 

So, what can done to address these frustrated Gen Z and Millennials who would love to afford a home? It's a little late to sign them up for YouTube classes on how basic economics work, but we can be honest with them. The people you vote for at the local levels matter. 

Encourage these new home buyers show up at their Board of Supervisors meetings, or City Council meetings and ask those politicians questions. Ask if the policies they are approving to make 'smarter cities' or 'greener cities' or 'more sustainable cities', will these policies make new homes cheaper or more expensive? You will be ignored, or given a word salad of slogans and buzzwords to shut you up. 

That is what's going on with the affordability crisis. Local and State policies drive up regulation, and costs, while they drive down new home building.... 

It's not a bug, it's a feature of the class of people who are running your local governments.

Voting them out. That is really the only answer. 

Hitler for Dummies

So, let me just play along with this idea for a minute. I've heard this from the left, democrat leaders and the media for almost ten years now; Trump is just like Hitler, and republicans are just like Nazis. 

Do I have that right? I'm pretty sure that's what I have heard from protesters, and seen on their signs since 2015 when Donald Trump rode the golden elevator down at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President. The real question is, do they actually believe this? I think they do. 

Here's the problem, when asked, they can't give you any actual examples of Trump doing anything resembling the acts taken by one of the top three murderous dictators of the 20th century. Basically inside their minds, it comes down to 'I think Trump is a terrible person, and you know who else was a terrible person? Adolf Hitler." It's just that simple. 

Here's the problem with that statement; If you think Trump is just like Hitler, you may be confused about who Trump is, but you definitely don't know who Hitler was. 

Here's some quick facts from my Hitler for Dummies course. 

Hitler was never successful at anything in his younger years. He was an average German soldier who was wounded in the thigh during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, then spent the last month of the war in hospital after suffering a temporary blindness from a British mustard-gas attack in the trenches. When he got out, the war was over. He was convinced the German upper class politicians, and the Jews, sold out the soldiers and capitulated to the Allies to save whatever power and wealth they had before the war. 

That was 1918. Hitler doesn't rise to leader of Germany until 1933. That's a short time to go from a failed painter, to soldier, to Chancellor of Germany. 

(I grabbed some of this from Grok, since I don't have time to go through Winston Churchill's 'The gathering storm' here.)

After the war, Hitler was busy. With his charisma, oratory skills, and organizational skills, he became the DAP (German Workers Party) chief propagandist, delivering fiery speeches that attracted crowds and new members amid Germany's economic turmoil. 

In February 1920, he helped draft the party's 25-point program, which included revoking the Treaty of Versailles, excluding Jews from citizenship, and promoting Aryan supremacy. The party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) to broaden its appeal.

With full control of the Nazi Party, Hitler focused on expansion, using his oratory to rally supporters in beer halls and public rallies. Membership grew from a few hundred to over 50,000 by 1923, fueled by hyperinflation and resentment toward the Weimar government. 

He strengthened the SA as a private army for street violence against communists and Jews, while propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels (who joined later) amplified antisemitic messages. 

Inspired by Mussolini's March on Rome, Hitler attempted a coup on November 8–9, 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. With allies like Erich Ludendorff, he marched on Munich's government buildings but was met with police gunfire; 16 Nazis were killed, and Hitler fled before being arrested for high treason.

Hitler's 1924 trial in Munich turned into a propaganda platform; he delivered defiant speeches blaming "November criminals" for Germany's woes, earning sympathy from nationalist judges. Sentenced to five years but serving only nine months in Landsberg Prison, he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), outlining his ideology of racial purity, Lebensraum (living space), and hatred of Jews and Bolshevism. 

 Released in December 1924, Hitler rebuilt the banned Nazi Party upon its legalization in February 1925, shifting toward legal electoral strategies while maintaining paramilitary elements. He created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as an elite bodyguard unit under Heinrich Himmler, which would later eclipse the SA. 

The mid-1920s saw limited success, with Nazis winning only 12 seats in the 1928 Reichstag elections. However, the 1929 Wall Street Crash and Great Depression devastated Germany, causing mass unemployment (over 6 million by 1932) and eroding faith in the Weimar Republic. 

Hitler capitalized on this, promising jobs, national revival, and scapegoating Jews and communists. In the September 1930 elections, Nazis surged to 107 seats, becoming the second-largest party. 

In the 1932 presidential race, Hitler garnered 37% of the vote against incumbent Paul von Hindenburg but lost; undeterred, the Nazis won 230 seats in July 1932 elections, making them the largest party, though a November rerun saw slight losses to 196 seats. 

Backroom deals with conservatives, who underestimated him, positioned Hitler for power.

On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in a coalition government, hoping to control him.

The February 27 Reichstag Fire, blamed on communists (likely arson by Nazis), allowed Hitler to suspend civil liberties via the Reichstag Fire Decree. 

In March 1933 elections, Nazis secured 44% of votes, and with allies, passed the Enabling Act on March 23, granting Hitler dictatorial powers to rule by decree. 

He banned other parties, unions, and opposition press, establishing a one-party state. On June 30–July 2, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives purged SA leader Ernst Röhm and rivals, killing over 85, to appease the army and consolidate SS dominance. 

Hindenburg's death on August 2, 1934, let Hitler merge chancellor and president roles into Führer, with the army swearing loyalty to him personally.

In 1935, Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles by reintroducing conscription and revealing the Luftwaffe. The September Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and banned intermarriages, institutionalizing antisemitism. 

In March 1936, he remilitarized the Rhineland without Allied resistance, boosting his prestige. The 1936 Berlin Olympics showcased Nazi propaganda, while economic recovery via public works and rearmament reduced unemployment. 

By 1937, Hitler had allied with Mussolini (Rome-Berlin Axis) and, in the secret Hossbach Memorandum of November 5, outlined plans for territorial expansion through war, signaling aggressive intentions toward Austria and Czechoslovakia. 

Hitler's ascent relied on exploiting crises, masterful propaganda, violence, and alliances with elites who saw him as a tool against communism. By 1937, Germany was a totalitarian state poised for expansion, setting the stage for World War II.

A few bullet points: If you have not read up on Hitler's rise to power, maybe you think he was just voted into power like Trump was, so they must be the same, right? Um, no. Not by a long shot. 

If you back and look at that Night of the Long Knives section, Hitler and his boys went around to all the leaders of the Nazi party who weren't absolutely loyal to him personally, and murdered them. 

Let's look back at our top three murderous dictators in the 20th century...... 

Communist leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, killed around 40-60 million human beings through the purges of USSR's military, its citizens, through planned starvations, and his brutal work camps in Siberia. 

Germany's National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, killed somewhere between 14-20 million human beings, not including those in war fighting. Jews, Gypsies, Soviets prisoners, pretty much anyone he didn't like, and he didn't like anyone but the Aryans.

Communist China's Mao Zedong is our winner of the murderer of the century. He killed his own citizens by the tens of millions. Through political executions, but mainly through famine and farm collectivization. His estimate is well over 100 million human beings who were killed. 

By the way, Pol Pot and the Communist Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia, get an honorable mention in the murderous dictator category. He murdered about 3 million of his citizens in the Killing Fields in the 1970s. He may have been the worst one, he just didn't have access to enough people to murder. 

Each one of these murdering maniacs we not elected into power through a free and fair election. Even in the German elections, there was active street violence everywhere, and political assassinations. Remember that Hitler failed in a Coup d'eTat that wound up with him in prison. He became Chancellor through backroom deals, then he went on to murder dozens of people inside the Nazi Party who opposed him.

Stalin murdered any political opponent he thought may be threat to him, even in the future. He murdered bright, young army staff officers because people 'liked them' too much. 

Mao had millions of young students who led the revolution, turning in anyone who had beliefs that were not in line with whatever came down from Mao. Young students sending their own parents off to be murdered for the revolution. These same students had a rude awakening after Mao was firmly in power. He didn't have much use for a bunch of young idealist, with a taste for blood and power, so he murdered them as well.  

See the commonality in all these authoritarian dictators? They do not want any opposition. None. Zero.

Now let's look at President Trump for a bit. You might hate his orange hair, his orange spray tan (although thankfully he's backed off both of those things recently) his mean Tweets, his crude talk, and generally, just his personality. You can hate all those things. It's perfectly fine to do so. 

You can be mad that he is enforcing the laws on the books when it comes to illegal immigration. You can me mad that he is sending National Guard troops downtowns in big cities because the local police chiefs and mayors of those cities will not keep violent protestors from blocking and hindering federal ICE facilities and ICE officers. You can hate all that, but here's the real question, do any of those things make President Trump a Nazi? 

When a judge issues an order to stop doing this, or says you can't do that, Trump says, okay fine, and follows the court rulings. He may appeal the ruling, but once there is a final say, he lives with the outcome. That seems to be the opposite of an authoritarian dictator? 

I just don't get it. Hate all you want, but calling someone, who doesn't believe in what your political side believes in, the same as someone who murdered 20 million people seems more like a mental illness and less than someone who failed their history class. 

70's movies that changed America: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Being old has some benefits. Not many, but some. Having old stuff you bought 40 years ago become collector's items is one. Living long enough to compare what people, politicians, and the media promised, to what they actually delivered is another. 

I grew up as a kid in the 70s, and I loved movies. We lived on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere northern California, so going to town for a movie was a special treat. Maybe one or two times a year, mom would make time in her shopping trip to town to take us to the movies. 

When the Mt. Shasta Mall was built in 1975, it had a movie theater inside the mall! You have no idea how big of a deal this was for a town the size of Redding. We were now able to go to a movie while mom shopped. Still, movies in a theater were not a regular thing, maybe a few big movies a year. 

However, sometime around 1980 a Satellite TV salesman drove into the ranch and sold my father on buying one of those gigantic 9' satellite dishes. It was heaven for a kid going into high school. HBO had just come out, and it was subscription free on the big dish. I could watch what would become 'Cable TV' out in the hinterlands, for free. It was pretty cool. 

All these new movies, and there was no internet or Rotten Tomatoes, so you just watched whatever was on and hoped it was good. Many of the 1970s movies were the strange 'new Hollywood' type films. They were almost incompressible for a kid who grew up going to a three-room elementary school, and chased cows most of my childhood. 

The gritty New York scenes of Taxi Driver, or the Manhattan world of Annie Hall, were a world away from me. I still watched them, but I could not identify with the world they were living in, it may have been a different planet. I could barely make heads or tails of the characters as well. I would just watch them and think, well, I guess that's how things work in New York. I imagine it would be the same for someone living in the city watching a western and thinking that's how I lived.

Some folks see movies as a powerful force driving the cultural changes of the times. I think that rarely happens, but it certainly can.  Some of these 70's films changed culture in ways that very few people, if any, saw coming. 

So here are the three films I picked. Movies that have made real, measurable, and lifelong changes to the America I grew up in.

One flew over the Cuckoo's nest - 1975 

All the President's men - 1976

The China Syndrome - 1979

Why these three? Well, I've just had so many people my age whose only understanding of a topic has come from watching one of these movies.

Today, I will talk about the first: One flew over the Cuckoo's nest.

The film is based around a character named Mac, played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson. Mac is a petty convict who plays the criminal justice system by pretending to be insane to get out of long prison sentence. He is sent to mental institution instead of prison. There, he runs up against the hard and fast rules of the institution, and his nemesis, Nurse Rached. The movie shows the mental institution as a dark, oppressive place, where the patients are kept under strict rules, and receive harsh treatment if they disobey. 

If you haven't seen it, you should, so I won't give away any spoilers. My critique of the movie isn't that it showed what could be a very oppressive place for the patients, not at all. I believe that those judicially ruled insane should be given the opportunity to live as much of a well-adjusted life as they are capable of doing. My problem is what the counterculture liberal folks turned this movie into: An open door 'freedom' movement for the insane. 

There was already a lot of movement towards deinstitutionalization back then, but the movie made  regular people think they now understood the issue. They did not. Public policy shifted as the culture shifted. Normal citizens started putting pressure on policy makers to shut down mental institutions for everyone except the Charles Mansion type of inmates. 

There was also a 1975  Supreme Court case that ruled that you couldn't hold a non-dangerous person in a mental institution if they were capable of surviving independently. The problem is, and we still deal with today is, who defines non-dangerous, and what defines independently?

In the late 1970's and 80's, no one wanted to be thought of as Nurse Rached. No one wanted to say, "Yes these patients have good days, and can be quite normal, but then, they will have an episode, and become extremely violent. I think they should be kept institutionalized."

I'm sure there were people in these facilities saying this is a huge mistake we are making, but those voices were drown out by people who had seen a movie. 

So we turned hundreds of thousands, (now in the millions) of mentally challenged people into halfway houses, or just turned them out on the street. We have not been institutionalizing dangerous, mentally ill criminals for decades now. We can lock them up when they break the law, but we don't do even do that in most big-cities. 

Go ask a police officer, who are the people you have to deal with every single day? Who are the people they will get a call about today for assaulting a business owner, or a customer at a store, or screaming at people trying to walk down the city sidewalks? They will tell you it's almost always one of the mentally ill people in their town. They know them very well, and they know the nonprofits and NGOs who will go after the police officers if they do anything that could be considered excessive, or against procedures. Many of the 'people experiencing homelessness' fall into this group as well. Addiction and mental illness go hand-in-hand much of the time. Mentally ill people self medicating their way in overdose is so common now, people just ignore it. 

We need to fix this, and fast. We as a society, thought we were doing the right thing by turning the mentally ill out on the streets and giving them their 'freedom'. We are now seeing the results of those changes, everyday on our streets today. 

We need to have another conversation about this topic right now, because deinstitutionalization has obviously been a complete failure. We can't make our towns and streets safe when there is no place to put mentally ill people.  

There are only so many spots in a county jail, or a state prison, and local law enforcement and district attorneys are faced with making a terrible choice every day. Let's say there are only 100 spots available for criminals in their system. They have 200 people that should be locked up to protect the people of their city, so they have to decide who are most dangerous 100, lock them up, and release the other 100 back onto the street. They have to make the best terrible choice they can. Sometimes they get it wrong.

What can we do about this? 

I don't know, I'm not a politician, or a billionaire, so what I think should happen doesn't really matter. However, if someone gave me a magic wand, and I could be the Governor of California for a day, and the democrat supermajority would go along with it, I might try this.... 

I would take the 20 billion dollars Gavin Newsom just committed to keep the fraudulent high-speed rail project on life-support for another decade or so, and start building. Building what? Building mental facilities, treatment centers, group homes, and start moving people off the streets. 

Start moving them into a system that can evaluate them, treat them, and give them an opportunity to work their way back into society. If they are able, with treatment and medication, to move to a group home, or to move in with a relative, great. They will be supervised, and given care. If they cannot, if they are too prone to violence, or self harm, we need to move them into a humane mental facility that will keep them, and us, safe. 

I don't think it's that hard, but what do I know? 

I'm sure there are thousands of people with humanities degrees that will be yelling at me saying I'm wrong. That might be true, but I know that the current system of flooding the city, counties, and state with tax money going to nonprofits and NGOs that are supposed to helping the mentally ill isn't working. We need beds and facilities to treat these people, and for some reason, we don't want to build them. We don't want to help people in ways that might make us cringe, even a tiny bit. 

Instead, we'll go back to the 'throw more money at the problem' model, when we have more than enough evidence that model isn't working, and cannot work. 

Could you handle 'success'?

Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power."

I've always found that quote interesting, and true. You could almost replace power with 'Lots of money' and that test will be very similar. If you use 'Fame' that test would seem to get much harder.

Many people can handle adversity, most people in fact. We face adversity and some sort of failure in our lives quite often. We struggle, we learn, we overcome. Sometime those steps can get strung out over time, but most people will get through adversity. What about success? What about unexpected, significant success? 

If you have ever read stories about the people who win the lottery, you can see this test play out in real time. Sure, the people who play the lottery maybe a subset of people who might not be the most stable or  reasonable people, but most are regular folks. How do they do when they win an extraordinary amount of money?

The data is a bit sketchy, but it seems that those who win a few hundred thousand will file bankruptcy at twice the rate of normal people. If you win millions, it seems to get a little better as you hopefully will have a financial advisor help you with that new found wealth. 

I would never want to be famous. That seems incredibly challenging. Wealth I can handle, or at least I think I can, but fame? No thank you. 

A great mental exercise would be to image two scenarios, One where you lose everything, and have to start over with nothing, at whatever age you're at, and one where you somehow are given 50 million dollars. In each of those instances, the whole world knows what happened. What would do in each one of those instances?

I'm old, and recently retired, so losing everything and having to start over would be one hell of challenge. I think I would get through it, at least I hope I would. I know how to work, even if my body isn't quite so sure these days, and I don't really need fancy things or a lot of money. I've been pretty damn poor, and it wasn't fun, but it wasn't something I couldn't get through. I'll bet I would have a bunch of help from a lot of people. I have some great friends, and I have always tried to do the right thing with everyone I meet, so I don't think I would have many people rooting against me. 

What about getting a 50 million dollar check? Even with the taxes taken out, 25 million is a lot of money. Remember, everyone knows you have this money. Your friends, your family, people you know from high school, people you used to work with a few decades ago, everyone.

How would handle that? 

Ugh.... 

I'm sure my good friends would be fine with me having that kind of cash. They might hope I would pick up the check for drinks and dinner, and I would so that wouldn't be a big thing. It's those you kind-of know you that you would have to watch out for.  Once you paid for a new car for someone who needed one, you might be inundated by requests for loans, houses, vacations, hell, all kinds of things. How would respond to those? You have 25 million, they're just asking for $30,000 to pay off their credit cards, why shouldn't you help?

Again, ugh....

It's not surprising that most big lottery winners move to a new town/state once they've won. Get out of town, change your number, stop answering any correspondence. It's just too much.

How would you handle each situation? 

I'm curious. 

The rising value of People Skills

Having had almost 60 trips around the sun, I've seen some things. I'm not a world traveler, or someone who's had a great deal of formal education, but I've been paying attention most my life. Paying attention to the world around you is like taking a class on how the world works. 

Some people go through their life without even noticing what happens around them. Their only concerned with what happens to them. The rest of the world is much like outer space. They know it exists, but it's just 'out there' and they can't be bothered with it. 

They're focused on themselves. What just happened to me? What did that person do to me? How did this or that affect me? 

I get it, we can only see the world from inside ourselves. What we think of the world, both the true and false, are seen through our own lens, through our own set of experiences. You and another person can see the same exact set of events and come away with two completely different explanation of what happened, and why it happened. One maybe true, one maybe false, but it's more than likely they are both right in certain aspects, and both wrong in other ways. 

Not paying attention to the world around you can make you fail the small pop-quizzes that come up in the "How the world works" class you are taking. 

Wait, you may say, I didn't sign up to take a "How the world works" class! When did I do that? Well, let's just say, the minute you drew your first breath, you were automatically enrolled, and baby, the test are coming fast. 

Failing a pop quiz is one thing, failing the midterm, or the final, is a bitch. 

I was watching a YouTube video the other day, where a lady was explaining why some people, especially these days, don't get the job they applied for. These were qualified people, who made it to the job interview, but did not get the job. They were told the company found a better qualified candidate, or they simply didn't hear back at all. Her main point in the video was that many of these people drew a false conclusion from this process. 

They though the reason they didn't get the job was basically what they had been told; they didn't have enough qualifications. The conclusion they reached was they needed to go back to school to get their Masters, or their MBA, or some other certificate, trailing qualification, or some other document to show they were the most qualified.  They missed the point....

She explained the real reason many of them weren't hired; They didn't have the people skills, or the social skills, they needed. 

That hiring manager was trying to imagine them working with their team, or imagining if their people would want to work with them. That Masters, or MBA, or whatever shiny certificate you had, may have gotten you into the interview, but you still must get past that manager, or owner of that company. No manner of education, or training, will make that person look past their conclusion of, 'Yeah they look fine on paper, but they have zero people skills."

This was a great study guide for your "How the world works" class: Your resume gets you into the interview. Your people skills, and communication skills at that interview, will make or break you. 

There are exceptions to this rule. 

Sometime they just need a person with a pulse to do the same simple task, hour after hour, day after day. Sometimes they need a person to lift heavy things, or break big things into smaller things. If you're fan of the movie Caddyshack, you will remember the line from the judge when the caddy was telling him, he wants go to college, he just didn't have the money. The judge said in a matter of fact manner, "Well, the world needs ditch diggers too." 

True enough. I have done that kind of work. Growing up on a ranch. I bucked barn-loads of hay, built miles of barbed-wire fences, and many other kinds a hard work. I also worked at a concrete cutting & breaking company. Nothing like loading 80 pound chucks of broken concrete by hand into a excavator bucket in the 100 degree heat all day to make you think, maybe there's a different way to make a living......

Over those 40 years, I've done a lot different jobs, and had many different titles. Some I liked, some I didn't, and some that I flat out hated. I started as a junior technician, pulling communication wire, then worked up to a lead position in that same field, running crews. I was moved up to the project estimating side, then inside sales rep, and finally worked as a project manager/product specialist. I've worked in the private sector for most of time, but spent the last 20 years in the public sector at UC Davis. 

I recently retired as a technology construction project manager at UCD. It sounds a lot cooler than it is. 

I worked in the field about half my time, walking jobs, inspecting jobs, dealing with other project managers, contractors, and sub-contractors. The other half of my time was spent in the office reviewing upcoming projects, filling out the dozens of forms, requests, and submittals for our projects. 

Project management is quite challenging. Your knowledge of your trade, construction division requirements, specifications and materials, along with understanding the way your organization operates, all play into how well you manage your projects. 

The other thing that can lead you into a successful career, or set you up for failure, is your people skills. I have always been told I have good set of people skills. I have seen other people in my field struggle with this. Many who have had much more experience, and knowledge that I possess, did not, or could not, play well with others. Sometimes it was simply their personality traits, and sometimes it was their communication skills, but working with all the different entities in a large, complex project, you need both to succeed.

So, here is my free advice to all who are applying for a job: Work on your people skills. 

I get it, some jobs require a degree, or certification to even get an interview. You will need those to get through the HR department, (or more likely an AI Agent these days) to make it to the applicant pool for an interview. The hiring manager may look at the pool of applications and think, there are no qualified applicants, and they may be right. 

This is especially true these days where many positions are asking for someone with years of experience, all kinds of certifications, and degrees, but are only willing to pay half or two-thirds the going rate for someone with those qualifications. If no one in the pool has all the paper certifications, but they need to fill that spot, that is where your people skills can really shine. 

I have been involved in the hiring process throughout my career, being on interview panels, developing questions, and such. I haven't had too many people where I got them wrong, or plain got fooled. I use a bit more insight than others who look just at the paper application. Does this person know how to work? Have they ever started at the bottom and worked up? Can they explain themselves to others? Are they full of shit? 

That's the other end of the spectrum, people who are great talkers, but will not tell you "I don't know the answer to that." when they are stumped. They will just give make something up. Those folks are dangerous. 

So what is the conclusion? How can you have a better chance at your next interview? I wish I knew a foolproof way, but I have done some mentoring to young people through the years, and I do know one thing that works; Practice speaking in public. 

I know, that's like saying, just eat less and exercise to lose weight. Yeah it works, but for some people it's very hard to do. Well, just like doing hard things to get in shape, you can do some very simple, very challenging things to get your people skills in much better shape. 

Find a mentoring class in your community. If you're an adult, find a Toastmaster's club near you. That was the driving force behind the mentoring program I was working with. We would have ten or some high school kids, or young adults, gather once a week, and everyone at the table would take a paragraph and read it aloud for everyone. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, it was almost painful to hear these kids struggle to speak. 

The rules were simple, when you were not speaking, you sat quietly, and waited for them to finish. When they had completed that paragraph, everyone would pick one thing they thought they did well and tell that young person. No criticism, no jokes at their expense, just find one thing you thought they did well, or at least improved from the last time they spoke. 

It's amazing to see how young people don't know how to look someone in the eye, shake their hand, and introduce themselves. This was all part of that mentoring class. We practiced all these basic things, everytime we met. In a few months, the progress these kids made was outstanding. 

It's amazing what practice can do. I think it's one of those things where you need be okay with being terrible at something, so you can work at getting better at that skill. 

The employment market is changing so fast right now, it's truly frightening. Artificial Intelligence agents are going to replace so many data-entry, customer support, and administration jobs in the next few years, entire groups of white-collar jobs are going to be replaced. 

Let's say you are a customer service representative or back office administrator, what will you do when you HR pulls your entire 8 person team into a Friday morning meeting and tells you that they are firing all but two of you? 

You better have a set of people skills to grab that next job. It's going to be the thing that will separate you from the crowd. 

Places you like to be...

On my road trip to our new home in Tennessee, I had a lot of windshield time. It's about 2,400 miles there and another 2,400 back. After a rather foolish 29-hour drive straight through from Flagstaff Arizona to Centerville Tennessee, (don't ask) I started running around the small town of Centerville trying to get the power, water and natural gas turned on at the new house. It took me a few trips to different places, filling out forms, and writing checks to get all the utilities turned on. I don't know my new town, not really. 

Thankfully my phone gives me fairly good directions. Well, except when it sends you off the main highway, down some winding dirt road, to then get back on the main highway, saving you 13 seconds of trip time..... But I digress.

After unpacking my 20 foot horse trailer filled with about 40 Costco storage bins, I would sit in my reclining camping chair in my empty living room and look at my phone until it was time to sleep. I would be a bit bored at night watching Instagram reel and Youtube videos. I was waiting for AT&T to send me a replacement fiber router. The first one they sent was last owned by some deadbeat who didn't pay his bill, so they sent a do-not-go-to-the-internet code to the router. AT&T is supposed to wipe the config off these 'refurbished' routers before they go back out to new customers, but they didn't. In AT&T world, what is supposed to happen, and what actually happens, exist on two seperate planes of reality. 

Eventually, after three days, I did get my internet set up. 

Pretty cool to have fiber to your house out in the middle-of-nowhere Tennessee when it's not even available where I live in Tech-Centric California. But I had no TV at the house. Well, there was a 1990  television on the wall, but it had a coax port, and the Red, Yellow, and White RCA jacks as inputs, so basically it was a wall-mounted boat anchor. 

On one of my many trips to Walmart, I did walk by the electronics isle and found a sale rack of TVs. I figured we would buy a nice new one (or two) when we move for good, but I could not pass up a 43" Smart TV, with all the apps on it, for $118. It will go down in my basement cigar lounge when I get it finished. 

I now had a real life TV. After logging into all my subscription services, I noticed Hulu started a new season of The Bear. I liked that show, so I started watching the new season. 

It started with a flashback to the main character talking to his older brother. They were talking about how restaurants are special places. You go there all the time, you know the people, they know you. If the place is good, you can't wait to get there on a really good day, or a special day, to celebrate. If you have a really crappy day, you can't wait to get there either, just to relax and unwind from your crappy day. It was a nice scene. I watched three episodes of season four, and when I got back home after another three days of windshield time, my wife was a bit grumpy that I had started a new season without her. So we watched the first few episodes together. 

That first scene rang true to me again. But it really hit me that night as I slept. I was dreaming about certain places, and by places I mean stores, restaurants and even bars that I used to 'know' here in Yolo County. The Capay Junction, Hennigan and Shull sporting goods, Morrisons, the original El Charro on East Street. Places that are gone, or have changed owners, or are just sitting there shut down. That night I dreamed about walking through the front door of a place I loved, on the corner of Main and First Street in Woodland. Diamond E Western. 

I drifted back to the Woodland of the 80's, when there were small little stores that catered to specific customers. Back before Walmart, back before Amazon, the internet, and cell-phones. Yes, these times existed not that long ago. We aren't talking about lost times from some ancient history class where people thought the earth was flat. This was just a few decades ago when I was a young man who just moved to Yolo County and needed to buy some Wrangler jeans. 

This might seem illogical to you younger people out there, but when I was your age, there was no Yelp, or Google, or computers, or anything. You had the Yellow Pages. Yes, it was an actual printed phone book with very thin pages that had people's home phone numbers listed alphabetically, in the front part, the white pages. In the back, the yellow pages had businesses pay money to have their business listed.  It could be just your business name, address, and phone number, or be complete with your logo, slogan, and photo. You could have your Yellow Page ad in various sizes depending on how much money you spent. The bigger the ad, the bigger, and more successful the company, or at least that is what the Yellow Pages sales people would tell business owners. There was no 'search bar' or help in that book. If you didn't know the name of the company, or didn't know exactly what you were looking for, you were in for a long, frustrating time. 

One good thing if your business was on a busy street, you could have your name on your building. That is where I found Diamond E Western. At the corner of Main Street and First in Woodland. I went in to grab a pair of Wrangler jeans. Now, this was the still the 80's, so the Wranglers I wore were the original 13MWZ Cowboy Cut blue jeans made in North Carolina. I still have a pair in my closet to this day. (although that high waist doesn't fit so well around my gut these days)

When you walked in the door, there by the window display was the epicenter of the business, the front register. Nestled beside the glass top display cases, with belt buckles, western jewelry, and silver mounted Copenhagen can lids, was the register. Behind that front counter is where I first met Fran Schmauderer. She was wonderful. 

Fran ran Diamond E, along with her son Dave. It didn't take long to become friends with both of them. I would be in there often, looking for a curb-chain for a bridle, or a new latigo for a ranch saddle or some other kind of horse tack. Within a year, I would just stop by if I was in town just to say hi. Fran had a cast of characters over the years who worked at Diamond E, and I got to know most of them. 

When a new one would show up, she would give them the run down, and see how they did. You could see Fran's firm hand sometime come down if a customer walked in, and the new person would not engage with them directly. These are our customers, she would say, do they need help? Do they know what they are looking for? Can you help them find it? Can we order it if we don't have it? She was old school, and she was great. 

I'm sure I gave her some trouble at times. If is was summer, and we didn't have cattle in the hills, I would come by and just chat with Dave for an hour. This was about 50 minutes too long in Fran's world if it was inventory time, or Dave had orders to get out. 

When we left Yolo County for Sacramento in the mid 90's we lost touch with a lot of people. Fran and Dave were some of those folks. If I came through town, I would stop by Diamond E and say hello. It was always nice to take our son Steven into the shop, he was pretty small at the time, and probably doesn't remember the crew at Diamond E, but they were always great with him. 

I think Fran passed in the early 2000's just about the time we moved back to Esparto. I was quite sad to hear about her passing. I knew how much she cared for Dave and how much he loved her back. Working with someone for all those years, I'm sure they had it out more than once, but I can't really think of one, without thinking of the other. 

I haven't seen Dave in years. I hear he's going through some medical issues right now, and I'll be praying for him. Dave's a good one.

I think back to that scene in The Bear, and places where you like to be.

Diamond E was one of those places where you liked to be. I miss it.