Top Conservative minister, Peter Mackay is NOT running again.  Fellow Con John Blair opted out awhile back.  Other Cons are facing trials and investigations. The federal Cons seem to be coming apart at the seemingly unseamly seams (sorry).  The provincial Cons in Alberta imploded, exploded and erased themselves in a political Hari Kari just a few months back. Con-psuedo-lib, Christy Clark is remarkably absent from the media and is keeping her head down and her mouth shut (thank God).  She is, essentially, in hiding and has been for the last few months.  The right-wing side of the political spectrum is having to come to terms with their lack of popular support and their record-setting litany of errors. They are all embarrassed and smelling defeat.  Or should be.  All the signs are indicating yet another eradication of the Cons (first one: post Mulroney.  The one inflicted on Kim Campbell).

And that is NOT a good thing.

I have never had much time for the Progressive Conservatives, the Conservatives, the Canadian Alliance or the Psuedo-Liberals of BC that used to be the Social Credit because, for the most part, I simply disagreed with the policies they promote.  But, honestly, I have not disagreed with all of them.  Preston Manning’s Reform Party had a number of positions that I not only agreed with, I would have supported completely and even would have run for them.  For Preston Manning, I went right.

The planks in the Reform Party platform that I found irresistible were that the MP was allowed to represent their constituency first, the party second.  And, further, they would be allowed to speak their minds freely in the house and vote their conscience.  As I mentioned before, history shows that those planks were quickly dropped but it also shows that the ‘right’ is not always wrong.  At least it was that way for me.

In theory, Canada is a democracy.  At the very least, that means respecting the existence of differing opinions.  And you first have to have differing opinions before you can decide to respect them further or not.  Right-wingers provide differing opinions.  And I respect that.  I rarely agree with them, but I respect some of them.  I respected the ones stated above so much that I would have sent money and run for the party.  Had they kept to those, I would call myself a rightie today.  Or, better put, right-leaning.

Why?  Because those planks are the essence of democracy for me.  They are more important to me than this or that tax break or this or that social program.  Having my representative free to speak his or her mind and to have the option to vote as they see fit rather than as the party tells them to is almost enough to make democracy work.  I think. Add in proportional representation and you just might have a workable system in my opinion.

And it was Preston Manning and the cowboy-hats from Alberta that first put those ideas forward – to the extent that the party did, anyway.  They eventually dropped them but still, credit where it is due.

Which brings me to the point of this political blog: those democratic reforms were not posited by the Liberals.  Or the NDP.  Sadly, they are not even part of the GREENs platform today (although they did try for proportional representation in BC).

The current batch of Cons are bad guys and some of them might even make official ‘con’ status if they get convicted of things.  They clearly have to go.  But, just because we rid ourselves of riff raff, that does not mean we get good people in their stead.  History is replete with riff raff replacing riff raff.

Bottom line: we have to MAKE the next batch of political porkers do the right thing.  And that starts with telling them what that is.   I don’t trust them to find that out on their own.

Write your porker.

…from my season of politics.

It never really ends but even I can focus on other things now and again. That is part of what living OTG is all about – a chance to smell roses, a chance to dance in the spring (like the Jules Feiffer dancer below with Jules himself) or, for me, a chance to go weld something or hurt myself. Currently doing both these past few days.  For Sally, it is currently quilting – quilting like a woman obsessed.  Sally is the quilting version of the Jules Fieffer dancer.

But, I digress.

On to other things.

This time – another death.  An acquaintance of mine just died at the age of 57.  I didn’t like him much.  In fact, I disliked him.  Still do, actually.  Funny, don’t you think?  One would think that dying would be the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card but, in his case the jail remains locked, he just escaped those mortal bars earlier than I expected.

I won’t denigrate him too much more than I have already – simply by NOT mentioning his name.  Just a guy I didn’t like.  But I am writing about him because of two things: he died at 57.  OhMyGawd!  I am already 10 years older than that!

I just find that shocking, is all.  His death – my reality check. Sheesh.

The second reason is that, even though he was a bad actor in my life, he was still an actor in my life.  This guy occupied some of my life space.  He was an influence.  Like Darth Vader, to be sure, but still an influence.  He gave lessons from the dark side.  He caused trouble.  To be fair, he caused a little trouble for me but he caused a lot for others and I was caught up and involved in trying to make things right.  More than a few times.  We were adversaries in a way.  But it wasn’t personal.  He was in the adversary business and I was in the solution business.  Our paths crossed.  And crossed.  And crossed.

He was like a skin rash that just wouldn’t go away.  Well, it was that way for at least a decade or so. NOW he has gone away.  Now he is gone.  And, to be fair, I haven’t really given him much thought for the last twenty years.  So, I think he is well and truly gone for me. Now.

That’s it.

That’s the blog.

Just a reflection of how even the bad people fill in your life spaces.  How things you want to go away never really go away.  Even when they go away, they are still there in a weird kind of way.  Memory.  Experience.  Scars.  Victories. Losses. Stories.

I am not happy for his demise.  I didn’t hate him.  I could have happily gone through my life without ever having met him but, on the other hand, I will never forget the encounters, the stories, the lessons learned.  In some twisted way, he is indelibly etched in my life and he is part of what makes me what I am.  I am almost OK with that, even though it seemed so ugly at the time.  Who would have thunk that a real-life Darth Vader-type would make such an impression?

And I am sure that someone must have loved him.  I never met any of them but I know of one who liked him and they were friends.  Inexplicable in the extreme for me.  Still, even the dark side has friends, I guess.  Someone misses him.

Maybe, in some small, twisted way I do, too.  At the very least he was the enemy I knew.

It seems that NOT VOTING is a popular consideration amongst many of us.  The idea being that NOT voting is a benign revolt, a subtle rejection of the system, a vote of non-confidence, as it were.  Cutting our noses off to spite our face is essentially what that is.

And that’s an error.  NOT voting is what the parties in power actually want.  All three of the major parties want lesser turnout, not more.  The ideal voting scenario for them is that only the rabid faithful vote and the rest of the general rabble don’t vote at all – for whatever reason they choose to cling to.

Why?  Because the big three can influence their own groups to get out the vote for them. The rest of the population is a crapshoot.  “Because our card-carrying ‘rabid faithful’ can maybe outnumber theirs especially if theirs don’t bother to vote.  And, further, we can cheat and do dirty tricks like busing uninformed immigrants around the place for no more than a free lunch and bit of speechifying.  They’ll vote for us and their vote at least cancels out the other party’s rabid faithful. With luck, the whole damn thing will be decided by just the few of us.”

In other words; they know they will vote.  Being able to count on others NOT voting is the second best thing for them.   

Small turnouts result in incumbents winning.  Small turnouts cannot create change.  Small turnouts indicate ambivalence, not resistance.  Small turnouts serve the BIG three.  You can either vote for Harper and he gets your vote or else you can NOT vote and he gets the equivalent of half a vote.  To vote against Harper you HAVE to actually cast a distinctly different vote and unless that distinctly different vote goes to the winning party, it will amount to only half a vote.  In effect.

Say, for instance, you vote Green but the Liberals win.  Your Green vote ultimately means nothing except that Harper didn’t get it.  The Liberals didn’t get it either but, because they won, that vote didn’t matter to them.  It didn’t help the Greens or the NDP either but it was, at least, half – effective.  It was a half-vote.  It was closer to the none-vote than a  NON vote would have been, actually. ‘Cause the NON vote only serves the incumbent well.

If you voted Liberal and they won, your vote counted fully.  It meant something to the successful party.  That is the only time it really counts as a real, fully empowered vote. In our system, you have to guess right to be fully effective.  It is this kind of reasoning behind the ‘vote strategically’ movement that wants us all to pre-determine which party has the best chance of unseating a Conservative and then voting for that one – whoever it is.  The idea is: any rep but a Con.

I don’t like that.  It means we eliminate choices.  Eventually it is just Republicans vs Democrats, Ford vs Chev, the American League vs the National league.  I am inclined to voting my conscience instead.  I want to perpetuate the semblance of choice by retaining some.   Plus I believe minority governments work better.

But this time, I am voting strategically.  I will be casting my vote for whichever NON CON running has the best chance to unseat the incumbent.  I would cast that vote for the Rhinoceros Party if they were the front-runner.  The Bloc, even.

But I feel that is a compromise to my ethics.  I really do.  I really feel we should be able to vote our conscience.  This time, we can’t.  So I am going to vote strategically instead.  I am not proud of this.

I was frightened into it.  A cynic friend of mine jokingly pointed out, “The Greens are funded by the Conservatives!  Remember Elizabeth May used to be Mulroney’s right hand. The Greens keep the Cons in!”

“WHAT!!!!  ARE YOU MAD????”

“Think about it, Dave.  The fewer people who vote, the more likely are the Cons to get back in because the incumbents benefit by low turnout.  Green votes are ‘left leaning’ so they split the ‘left side’ of the political spectrum.  There is only one party officially on the ‘right side’ and so any right-wing oriented voter has to vote Conservative.  If you really wanted to get rid of the Cons you would start four more parties all with right wing platforms to split the right wing vote.  Start a Republican Party, a SoCred Party, a Nazi-fascist Party and a Totalitarian Monarchy Party. That might just do it.  As it is now, the left is divided in thirds and the undivided right-wing Cons win with that system.”

“Oh, Gawd!  We need proportional representation so, so bad.”

I

Most of us don’t really know the power of the chip – as in computers and the internet and all that. For instance, already 62% of all traffic on the internet traffic is driven by machines. Robots.  The term used to describe this phenomena is M2M (machine to machine).  It is a smidge frightening to consider how much of our lives are already machine-determined.

But that is NOT news.

The growth of that new ‘power’ is news, however.  It is, of course, exponential and the growth is already uncheckable.  Unhindered.  They can’t stop it.  Like Moore’s Law that prophesied the doubling of computer power every two years, so is that machine power being more and more distributed among non-sentient watchers and actors.  Put another way: the internet today is the size – relatively speaking – of a golf ball.  By 2025 it will be the size of the sun.

Apparently we make more transistors today than we grow grains of rice!

“So, what has that to do with politics?”

Everything.

Michael Soma was convicted of ‘interfering’ with the 2011 Federal election.  He was the one ‘tapped’ to take the fall for the robo-call scam that deceived voters during the last federal election to favour the Conservatives.  Back when the internet was not even the size of the alluded-to golf ball, our politicians were employing ‘dirty tricks’ (like Nixon) updated to suit the times.  Soma was the then-wunderkind who applied the robo-calling plan.  There are other plans.  There are other strategies.  There are other wunderkinds. And they all change with the times.

And the times they have been a-changing.  Quickly.

There are numerous proven incidents of electronic voting tampering and many more suspected (who can forget Bush vs Gore?) for the longest time.  I doubt very much that that kind of skullduggery will change.  So why wouldn’t a party that is already proven to employ such tactics NOT do it again?  Especially since the tactics have been improved so much in the last few years?

Put another way: I do not know of one person who voted Conservative in the last election. I do know some who admit to having voted that way two elections back but I no longer know (with one possible exception) of anyone who would vote Conservative today.

My statement: If they win again, they cheated.  Whether we ever find out the truth, whether they are ever caught, whether or not the people ever suspect it, I am sure they already cheat (Soma) and, with improved computer power, they are going to cheat better and more effectively than before.  At the very least, they have a few more Michael Somas to throw under the bus – that is for sure.

Bottom line: voting may already be totally shanghaied.

Writing about politics suggests reciting acts of government incompetence and malice, slandering personalities and generally arguing for the beheadings of those currently inflicting (mostly financial) misery on our lives.

And so, let’s say we did and move on.

The reason for that on-the-surface tolerance is simple: those who already hate the Conservative Party as much as I do, already know of their collective absurdity from climate denial to election-fixing, from cut-backs in essential services to bigotry instead of justice. We know of their wanton spending on submarines that don’t work, helicopters that don’t fly and fighter jets that come without engines.  Their sense of entitlement and elitism is also well-known as is their complete disregard of citizens and their accelerated descent into ignorance rather than science.   And then there is the constant but simple-minded propaganda and the equally as constant assault on our freedoms and wallets….just to name a few.

There are way too many more.

So, none of that really needs repeating for us, the enlightened know-it-alls.  We already know it all.

One might write all that stuff to convince the swing-voters, tho, the ones who voted Conservative a time or two but are now having doubts.  This is the audience for political writing but, let’s face it – not for me.  No one of the Conservative Party persuasion would be reading me and, if they were, it would not be for my political acumen.  Maybe ravens. Not politics.  Those people who might read me and also might possibly vote Conservative can be counted on one hand without using the thumb.

“So, what’s the point, then?”

There are two points: I have to do what I can.  And I may have a point that you can use to sway a swinger or two.

“Do you?”

Only one, really.  And it is a simple one.  It works.  It resonates even with card-carrying Conservatives.  Please try it.  Here goes:  Conservative is a brand name, not their philosophy.  CONSERVATIVE is a name.  A N-A-M-E.  It means nothing.  It is no different than Mighty Ducks or Moose or Oddfellows.  It is just marketing – pure and simple.  Those voters who consider themselves conservative people are NOT necessarily CONSERVATIVE PARTY think-alikes.  In fact, most small-c conservative people wouldn’t act like Stephen Harper, Mike Duffy or Pamela Wallin even once in their lifetime.

We have to tell people that the name is just a name.  ALL names are just names – just branding – just marketing – just image.  We have to make them understand that Conservative Party has no relationship whatsoever to being a conservative-minded person.  That is the only message someone who votes differently from you can accept. That news-flash has a chance of changing some votes.  Even better: it is not too offensive.

If you get on a roll, you can include the Liberals but don’t push your luck.  

I have to write a bit politically from now on.  Til October 19th, anyway.  I know it is irritating. Sorry.  But, here’s the dilemma – for evil to be done good men only have to do nothing.  I have to do what I can to get rid of Stephen Harper and the mindset he represents.  I humbly request that you consider the points raised in this blog and, if you can’t vote Green, please make a point of voting to get rid of Harper.  I am not asking you to vote my way, just don’t vote the old way.  It is time we all united to rid ourselves of this bigoted fool who is an embarassment to our country.

If the economy is important to you, vote Green. If waste, destruction and debt are more to your liking, vote Conservative or Liberal. It may seem counter-intuitive to you and it is absolutely contradicting the myth spread by the old-time parties but the facts are clear; the new economy is going Green and the old economics of the established parties are elitist and have created nothing but decay and indebtedness for the average citizen. In fact, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have managed the worst economic growth since the depression era at a record setting low of 1.77%.

Canada is hugely in debt. We owe 1.2 trillion dollars or 66% of our gross domestic output. And that does not include the provincial debt which raises the figures considerably. It is generally regarded that 80% is the point-of-no-return. We are too close to national bankruptcy. Given that we are one of the richest, most resource-full nations on the planet and, outrageously, with the fewest people, how is it possible that even a mediocre or slightly corrupt manager could run the country so deeply into the red?

But they did.  Sorta like they did in Alberta.

The Canadian Establishment got rich, the Canadian population became indebted and our economy is mired in a 19th century robber-baron mindset with our ill-informed economic hopes pinned on the almost non-existent jobs of the expiring Sunset industries. We grow wheat, sell trees, coal and oil. We even sell water but only for a pittance. We used to sell fish but we killed them all. We even sold our national railroad to Bill Gates. Face it: our old way of doing business does not work.

But here’s the real shock: only 4% of the population is employed in those sectors. That means that the rich are getting rich off our nation’s resources and hiring only a few citizens to help them do it. And there is no trickle down.  You are simply being robbed.

Most Canadians already know that we have been largely mismanaged in so many ways for far too long a time. What they want to know is what to do about it.  And they may not know that the newly emerging Green economy looms promising on our horizon if we make changes to our thinking and vote differently. We can and we will – if we keep the old Duffy/duffers away from the controls – be prospering in a land of abundance.

Sounds like a hippy, eh?

But Elon Musk is no hippy and he is prospering. He got his start in the cauldron of capitalism with the innovation of PayPal.  And he is now as Green as Kermit. See Solar City. See Tesla Motors.

Capitalism is NOT the problem. Capitalism motivates, initiates, energizes and promotes our ideas. It feeds off the natural inventiveness of the human animal. But, like a dog, it can be used for good or trained and directed towards aggression and doing harm. Our old leaders bred for Dobermans and Rotweilers and more than a few emerged as Pitt Bulls. Their dogs protected the elite and did harm to passersby. And they still are.

Green Natural Capitalism, on the other hand, works with nature, cooperates with others and, like Google says, ‘does no evil.’ Think Standard Poodle. Or Portugese Water Dog. Natural Capitalism is harnessing the positive and limiting the negative. Natural Capitalism is a good dog.

Natural Capitalism is also a book authored by Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken. Read it.

Synopsis: Ray Anderson saw the Green difference. He was a manufacturer of carpets. Then he took some trash to the dump and saw that his product was occupying a large part of it.  Ray re-worked his company to one that leases carpet and recycles all of the old carpet into new. In the process, Interface Corporation grew ten-fold. And the dump stopped seeing carpet.

“But we are just ordinary people with huge mortgages. We can’t do that!”

Yes, you can. Alan Hammond took the concept of local farmers selling direct to customers and gave us Granville Island Public market. Regular Canadians are doing it all the time.

Granville Island Brewery. Interior wineries. Small, boutique hotels. Virtually all your local service and hospitality industries. Builders, teachers, millwrights. Healthcare. They are all (95%) local. That is economy.  That is community. And that is sustainable.

In other words, your dentist keeps your teeth in order, your local grocer increasingly tries to go local, your neighbor replaces roofs and the kid next door did your lawn last week. What did Kinder Morgan do for you lately? Enbridge? Exxon?

The truth is that all of them (even Exxon) have contributed to the modern marketplace but some do more for you than others. Some are doing better for the planet and your children’s future than others, as well. Put your support where it counts.

Reject the global corporate mindset. It is not hard to do. Do we need a natural gas plant that sells our resources to a Malaysian petro-giant? Do you think your price of natural gas will be lower? Are you going to work at the plant? Do you think the shareholders of the company reaping the profits are your neighbours?

Vote differently and be part of a local, sustainable and green business. That’s where the future is.

…same ‘ol…..

Guests in groups, pairs, droves, flocks and clumps.  Working in spastic intervals between interrupting dollops of pick-up, drop-off, hospitality and first aid.  Lots of dish-washing. Beer.  Wine.  Finger-food….all the live-long-day.

Whoopee.

Some local cesspool-on-two legs at the school recently gifted me with the head-cold from Hell. They must have touched me when I wasn’t looking.  I swear, the main advantage I can see with the school system is strengthening your own kids immune system.  And, of course, eliminating old people who no longer have small children from using the food system. It’s a jungle.

The Inuit were kinder sending their old folks out on ice floes. Now we slyly invite geriatrics into the ‘lab’ to talk to the kids and later put a little check by their name: David Cox, soon-to-be-leaving-us.

You want a plot?  I’ll give you plot – death by infectious classroom.

I actually like kids but I am starting to feel that I need perspex when we meet.  A large cube for me.  A larger cube with disinfectant spray for them.   It would be fine.  The pope likes it.

Maybe we could just boil them first?

We so rarely get ill nowadays, it is a shock when it happens.  Really.  “What the hell!?  Is my head melting or something?  What is all this goo?  And why am I shaking and sweating for no reason?”  

Trauma, collateral damage from tools, old-fashioned, ordinary damage, fluke-accident damage, and lots and lots of blood-letting and pain to be sure. They are common, even daily occurrences for me.  But ‘sick’?  Hardly ever.

One needs a kid to inflict that kind of misery.  We had eleven the other day.  The class is usually 13 but two kids were home ill.  Duh!

When meeting a group of kids, I now feel like an Aztec/Mayan meeting the new Spaniards…you just know it isn’t going to end well…. “Why don’t you kids just stand there…you know…downwind…? Hold this perspex in front of you when speaking. “

Oh, don’t worry.  I’ll be fine.  Worry about Sal.  She has to live with me while I am drooling and coughing and whinging and demanding more tea.  I’d hate to be her.  Bad enough being me.  I’ll get back on that funicular project when my mucous isn’t obliterating the welding and clogging up the drill press.   

Town day yesterday.  About 450 pounds schlepped back to the house.  Haven’t been to town for a month or so due to small supplementary infusions of goods from guests who visited just as some things ran out.  Guests with good larder-timing are especially appreciated.  But we were overdue for a lot of things.  So, it was hard to complain about the day.  But I did anyway.  Whinged and groused all day like some old geek.

One of the parcels was a small crane.  It weighed 100 pounds.  One hundred pounds has never been light but neither has it ever been too heavy.  But getting that puppy off the boat, up the beach and onto the deck was an age-determining experience.  I guess I measure my age now by what I can carry up hill.  And I am definitely getting older. It is not only annoying and limiting but it can cause aches and pains.  Worse, there is all that whinging and grousing.

But it is interesting…the timing of the lower funicular is getting more pressing.  We can both feel it.  We are going to need the assistance.  If we had to, we could do the basic schlep for five more years and likely ten if we developed some kind of now-and-then delivery system in addition to the big barge.  But the lower funicular will make that ten years a piece of cake. I can feel the urgency in my lower back and see it in Sal’s growing reluctance to choose the heavy boxes.  We are going slower, packing smaller boxes and have developed unconscious and conscious habits that minimize extra or unnecessary effort but we have to do more. The writing is on the wall.

When we were younger and had a two story house, Sal would put things on the stairs. Puzzled, I’d ask, “How come there are books and sweaters and stuff on the stairs?”

“They are there for when I was going to go upstairs anyway.  No sense in making an extra trip.”

Well, we have taken that ‘be-efficient’ mentality to sophisticated levels.  We shop with that in mind, we leave things at half-way points, we eat up all the leftovers and even buy with ‘leftovers’ in mind.  It is amazing how efficient one can become with supplies, not out of sacrifice or skimping, but simply from doing the most with the least amount of town effort.

I was reminded of that this shopping trip, of course, because every trip is an exercise in efficiency.  But also from a note from the newbies to the area; “We took a small load over to the property and then went home and stopped for a bite to eat.  We were exhausted. You’re right — everything gets handled at least six times!  And then you ache the next day!”

When we do a town day, I buy half a rotisserie chicken and some deli salads with the groceries for dinner later on.  Every time.  Why?  Because we don’t have the energy to do any kind of from-scratch cooking and even heating leftovers is a pain, BBQ chicken is our fast and convenient go-to, last second dinner.

Over time our town trips have become more efficient–our packing more efficient, our movements more efficient–and we have developed systems to increase those efficiencies.  The shopping itself becomes more efficient as our menus result in less garbage, our bulk-buying becomes second nature, re-packing in the parking lot to get rid of non required packaging becomes a habit. Even things such as Sal’s growing reluctance to buy anything liquid because we should be able to find the same product dehydrated and not have to carry water starts to show up.

Strange – but this is a different meaning to the old saw, less is more.  In our case, we get more so as to carry it less often.

Low Fun Cart (LFC) = lower funicular cart.

I have to make one of those.  I am going to use some of the HUGE angle track that I have left over from previous projects.   It is heavy stuff.  I will make the base of the cart from that.  I estimate the lower half of the cart will weigh about 500 pounds when it is done.   The top larger half will weigh around 150 – 200 pounds because it is made of lighter gauge, smaller dimensional steel.

Drilling and bolting the funicular base together

I will use the heavy stuff for the lower half of the cart where the weight will help keep the centre of gravity lower.  I have to do that because the ‘deck’ of the upper cart-body will be ‘lifted’ off the tracks to the level of the deck and that lift at the front is about 3 feet high and it is about 6 feet high at the back because the tracks are at an angle and the arrival deck is, as you have seen in the recent previous blogs, level.

Everything I am carrying up the tracks will be placed on the top deck of that cart so it can and will be top heavy at times.

Adding diagonal piece to stabilize base

Can’t imagine it?  Imagine a big wedge 5 feet wide, 12 feet long, pointy at the front and and 6 feet high at the back end.  The sharp front of the wedge is then ‘nipped off’ four feet back so that the front is now ‘blunt’ and the remainder of the wedge is now only 8 feet long. The blunt front ‘nose’ is 3 feet high compared to the blunt back end which is still 6 feet high.   The wedge is NOT solid.  It is a ‘cage’ made up of steel bars with the top side (deck) made of a heavy gauge wire.  The struts or legs or posts are heavy gauge 1×1 steel tube as are any cross support struts.

Partially completed base – three sets of wheels are hidden beneath the sides

Sorta like an exaggerated boat trailer with a higher, more complex structure.

The heaviest lift will be easy for the steel structure and the winch….the BIGGEST lift would be Sally’s little boat loaded with supplies….totaling maybe 1000 pounds…tops 1500 pounds (that would be huge!).  Fifteen hundred pounds would pose no problem pulling and lifting and carrying. BUT….that load is on the top of the wedge – on the ‘deck’ of it.  There could be as much as 1500 pounds on the top, elevated at 3 to 6 feet off the tracks.  If that tipped over, we’d have a problem.

But the cart is almost square.  In fact, by some wizardry of physics it may just be.  The cart is five feet wide and the wedge goes from three to six feet high suggesting that 5 feet back (and four feet down) might be the middle of the whole cage-mass.  So, the cart would have the same physical dynamics as a cube 5×5.  And a cube won’t tip.

Or would it?

I don’t know.  I ‘wing’ stuff like this.  Gut-feel mechanical engineering.  I DO know that so long as the load is centered and stable, I am good to go.  It is NOT unlike a big power boat on top of a skinny, bony trailer. Probably better.

I also know that 90% of the time, the load will be light (300 pounds or so) as a result of an out-on-the-town-shopping day and so ‘no worries’.  The only time I will be a bit concerned is when we use Sal’s little boat like a small barge to carry something really heavy (say, another large winch?) and I will have the boat, the load and the other stuff all on top of what I am hoping is a cart-acting-like-a-cube.

When (if) I lift my own boat, I am dealing with a ton.  Maybe a smidge more.  That will be 2000 pounds on top of something that weights 750.  Even if the cart is square and the load centered and balanced that is still top-heavy in the extreme.  That is when ‘winging it’ gets tested.

And you wonder what I do all day?

I wrote a book.  NOT a great one.  But it was fun to do and, at times, it is amusing to read in a self-destruction kind of way. It was one of the things on my bucket list (well, the list had it that I would try to improve my writing and the book was a natural consequence of that effort).

I tend to preach and rant and cajole and be obnoxious as a person and as an author.  It is my style.  In life and in writing.  And that likely showed up in the book, too. Sal tried to edit me down to polite society but character flaws show up between the lines. I know that. I am NOT pretty.  Nor attractive.  I really didn’t expect to influence anyone sane nor did I attempt to teach or inform as I am still at the sophomore stage of this new lifestyle myself.

So, imagine my surprise…………

…when I was contacted by a reader who asked to meet.  That was a few months ago.  He was from the prairies but had decided to move to the west coast.  He had read the book and was interested in living OTG.  I met X and his wife, Y, in town, we had coffee, I signed the book and we talked OTG for awhile.  It was nice.

Then X&Y wanted to visit the area and explore possibilities and well…………to make a long story short………….they just bought some land in the area and are going to live OTG!

OMG!!!

Now the first thing to remember is what I just wrote above: “I really didn’t expect to influence anyone sane…..”  

So that is worry #1.

But they seem nice enough so let’s set that worry aside and go to: “…..nor did I attempt to teach or inform as I am still at the sophomore stage of this new lifestyle myself.”

But I have already offered advice.  I can’t help myself.  Can you imagine?  The blind and halt leading the blind.  That is worry #2.

“Oh, Dave!  Stop being so dramatic.  They are likely over 21 and had their own dreams and aspirations (bucket-list) to fulfill.  You were and are quite incidental to all that they are doing.  Relax!”  

I know that to be true.  I had trouble influencing my kids when they were toddlers.  And no hope of doing so today.  So, I am pretty much in the clear of being charged as a bad influence.  I know that.  Still, not everyone can survive the self-abuse, accidents, mayhem and catastrophe that comes with the OTG territory.  There will be blood.

If they survive the first two years, they are likely good.  Lame, perhaps.  Scarred, for sure. I just hope they don’t carry a grudge.

Congratulations X & Y.  Welcome to OTG!