A few years ago, Miggy told us the tale of getting fit. He changed his diet, he added exercise, he did more, he ate less, and he weighed less.

At the time he was going through this, I was feeling pretty fat. Being fat made it difficult to want to do many things. I was fighting depression.

As part of the process of getting fit, I went to a local Zumba studio to use their treadmill. I started walking. Then I started walking rapidly. After a few months, I was actually jogging.

Unfortunately, my knee started to give me trouble. My doctor gave me a choice: jog and get a knee replacement or find something else to do.

I settled on a recumbent exercise bike. It helped. Then the panic hit. Things got bad.

Just as my doctor told me to stop jogging, my weight had plateaued at 285.

At my last doctor’s visit, the office scale read 312. This included full gear minus my EDC pistol. So spare magazines… Never , I’m making excuses for that very high number.

My morning weigh-in for the same day was 303.

Monday morning, my weight was 295. My weight loss for the week was 4 pounds, but I’m averaging about a pound a week.

For exercise I still have the exercise bike, but spending 2 or 3 hours using handsaws and hand planes to make things seems to be exercise as well.

I’m in this for the long run. In 1976 I was pleased to celebrate the 200th birthday of my country. I intend to celebrate the 300th as well.

In a post from Sunday, I’m Very Disappointed in You abc123 used a term I’ve not heard or maybe not noticed before, “Honest History.”

It is a term that I am going to add to my standard vocabulary. Phrases such as “inferior courts,” “Second Amendment protected,” and “criminal illegal alien.” All of these terms, in my opinion, create a truer representation of the situation than some word games being played by the media.

What is “honest history?” It is a statement of what happened to the best of our knowledge. There is nothing left out, nothing hidden, and no lies.

Was there slavery in the United States? Honest history requires us to say “yes.” We need to go on to report that it was horrific, immoral, and evil.

Honest history then requires us to fill out that picture. That not all white men were slave owners. That some slave owners were black. That the primarily white northerners spilled wealth and blood to free the slaves.

There were northern states that did not repeal their slavery laws until after the 13th Amendment was ratified.

Or how about the honest history of the trade triangle? Yankee ships left Boston with holds full of rum. They sailed to Africa, where the rum was traded for slaves. Slaves captured by blacks. The slaves were then transported to Caribbean islands, where they were traded for molasses. That molasses was transported to Boston to be turned into rum.

At every stop, the traders made a profit. Triangle trade routes are more profitable than bidirectional trade routes.

Honest history includes telling the history of women and underlings that contributed to great inventions. There is evidence, I don’t know how strong, that the cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney’s wife.

Today, there are too many people who can’t give us honest history. Compare the pure drivel of Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States. His telling of history is dishonest. It is told to hide the truth. There are more books debunking his drivel than Zinn wrote.

The 1619 Project is another example of dishonest history. Are parts of those histories true and correct? Likely. Do people come away from reading those books with an honest understanding and view of history? Unlikely.

I enjoy studying history. There is something I learned over time: different viewpoints make for different stories.

When I read stories about Vietnam, the story was often told from the viewpoint of a single soldier. I remember one book where a recon team was marching through the jungle. One of the soldiers had to switch to his glasses because his contacts were bothering him too much. Another had a bad case of diarrhea. This caused him to cut the bottom out of his pants so he could just squat over the side of the trail and let it all come out.

These were personal stories. They may or may not have been entirely fictional, but they allowed me to hike through jungles in my mind’s eye. They felt honest.

But there are other books that big picture. Oh my goodness, Winston Churchill’s The Second World War is a godawful read. Not because he was a poor author, but because his story is at such a high level you need notes and maps to follow along.

It is full of dates, names, and places. The names are generals and political leaders. The places could be as big as a country or as small as a town. Troop movements were often expressed in terms of corps being moved. I think the smallest unit I remember was a division.

Unless you know the geography much better than I do, it requires a map to follow.

Churchill’s histories are honest with an honest statement of his point of view.

Today, we are much more likely to be told what to feel and think rather than an honest history.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? are the questions that should be asked and answered.

These questions might never be answered in a “news” story. But you will walk away knowing who you should hate. Who is the villain. Who is the victim.

Take the time to read any headline, and you can spot the biases and likely lies without even reading the rest of the story.

For me, anything cooked in coconut curry is going to be good. You could easily sub out the whitefish for tofu or chicken or anything else, and this would still taste wonderful. This diet friendly, delicious meal is a great way to use cheap whitefish protein in your meals.

Ingredients:

• 2 pollock fillets
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 red potatoes, diced
• 2 asparagus spears, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 tbsp red curry powder (or to taste)
• 15 oz can coconut milk
• 15 oz water
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 tbsp avocado oil, divided (or other neutral oil)
• fresh dill (for topping)

Add 2 tbsp of the oil to the cooking pot and heat over medium heat. Stir in the onion, carrots, and asparagus and saute until softened and starting to become clear. Stir in the red curry powder and cook for about 1 minute. Add in the can of coconut milk and then fill the can with water and add that to the pot.

In a skillet, heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil over medium-high heat. Cook the fish for about 1 minute per side to brown then remove from the heat and cube the fish. Try not to fully cook the fish or it will be too flaky to cube.

Bring the soup pot to a boil and add the diced potato. Reduce to a simmer, then cook for 5 minutes. Add the fish, salt and lime juice to the pot and simmer for 5 more minutes.

Salt to taste, then serve into bowls and top with fresh dill. Add a side of hot, crusty bread and some pickles to make the perfect meal!

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in Trump v. CASA which found that the courts do not have the authority to grant universal injunctions.

This put the left in a tailspin. If they can’t get universal injunctions, they can’t stop the Trump Administration in the courts. The current battle plan of the deep state, leftist *bleep*, is to delay, delay, delay.

During Trump’s first term, they neutered him by cutting him off from his trusted associates and then throwing up roadblocks at every occasion. The goal was to delay his actions until he was removed from office.

This time around, they are using the courts because Trump v2.0 is better, faster, and better equipped to deal with their games. He issues executive orders that explicitly state that he wants the law to be followed. He doesn’t zero a budget; he reduces it to the required minimum. He doesn’t close an agency; he just folds all their duties into other agencies and guts the workforce.

The Supreme Court left open an avenue for nationwide injunctions to take place. That path is a “class action.”

This requires a class certification. The court must determine if a group of individuals has similar claims that can be grouped together.

The investigation and filing process normally takes a few months to a year to complete. My understanding is that the average is closer to 12 months than 2 months.

After the investigation, the request for class certification is filed, and the court decides. This takes from 6 months to 2 years.

Our timeline, June 27, 2025, no more universal injunctions. On June 27th, the court orders the parties to file how Trump v CASA impacts this case by July 2nd. On July 2nd, the plaintiffs (bad guys) said that this is really a class action suit. On July 25, the court says that they are treating this as a certified class and grants an injunction.

We are about 10 days from reading another SCOTUS opinion and order telling this court to knock it the F___ off.

Note, the Washington Post is reporting this as a TRO. It is not. It is a preliminary injunction which can be appealed.

Maybe we’ll see the Second Circuit Court do the right thing. I doubt it, but the D.C. Circuit Court did.

I’ve been a teacher for 38 years. I still remember when I was taking my education classes early in my career, and my conservative uncle, who was a school superintendent in the Chicago suburbs, gave me a bit of advice that stuck with me. He said, “Do not join a teacher’s union.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. I guess I was too young and idealistic. But now, decades later, I understand exactly what he was trying to warn me about.

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on union membership. Sometimes I joined the NEA (National Education Association), sometimes I didn’t. If there was no pressure, I stayed out. If everyone else around me was joining, I’d go along with it. For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been a member off and on. But this year, as I prepare to move to a new school in a larger city where nobody knows me, I’ve made a clear decision: I will not be joining the teachers’ union again—especially after what I’ve seen recently.

In the past few weeks, I’ve read several articles that left me stunned. One headline from the Washington Free Beacon hit me like a ton of bricks: “Largest Teachers’ Union in the United States Erases Jews From the Holocaust.” According to the article, the NEA described Holocaust victims as “12 million people from various faiths”—never once mentioning the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. That omission is not just disappointing—it’s disgraceful.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that the NEA is no longer focused on students, academics, or educational excellence. Their priority now seems to be pushing political and ideological narratives. I’ve read how they’ve voiced support for groups aligned with Hamas and use language that downplays the suffering of Jewish people while glorifying the Palestinian “Nakba” and vilifying the state of Israel. According to their 2025 handbook, they want to “educate” the public about the Nakba, which literally means “catastrophe,” framing the founding of Israel in 1948 as a disaster rather than a historic triumph for the Jewish people and a vital democratic ally of the United States.

This is not why I became a teacher.

I’ve also seen videos from PragerU, like the story of a gym teacher who was fired because she wouldn’t allow a biological male to enter the girls’ locker room. She was then investigated simply for expressing Christian beliefs in her personal life. They actually questioned whether her faith could be “accommodated.” This isn’t just anti-education. It’s anti-freedom.

I am deeply disappointed, not just in the NEA, but in how so many educators have fallen in line with an agenda that is increasingly radical, anti-patriotic, and anti-Israel. The NEA has strayed far from its mission. It is now a political machine, not a professional organization serving teachers and students.

As someone who has dedicated nearly four decades to education, I feel disillusioned. I love my country. I support Israel. I believe in the importance of free speech, faith, and honest history. But I can no longer support an organization that undermines these values.

So goodbye, NEA. I’m walking away—with a clear conscience and my eyes wide open.

It isn’t perfect, but it is better than it was.

Tools To Make Tools

I finished my tool toot Friday. Yesterday I started work on another tool, a shooting board.

The tools I’ve made so far:

• Workbench – Functional, needs more bracing
• Winding Sticks – Used to visualize twist in a board
• Crotch board – A V notch in a flat board used to hold a board on edge for planing.
• A round-head mallet — used for hitting things
• A tooltote — to carry tools more easily

The tooltote is an exercise in barely good enough. There are so many mistakes made, and yet it still works. Not only is it functional, but I want to use it.

Once I clear space on the workbench, this will reside at the back of the workbench to organize the tools I need. The front section is large enough to hold a #4 plane, a block plane, and a #5 jack plane. The back section is a bit narrower. It currently holds my chisels. Marking and measuring tools and a rasp.

I will remove the rasp to make the tote more useful for other things, such as a marking knife, try square, and straight edge.

I need more Planes

I will start the search for a ‘fore’ plane in the near future. A ‘fore’ plane is the plane you use before all the others. This plane is used to remove lots of material rapidly. It is used in a way similar to a scrub plane.

I already have my #4 smoothing plane. I’m still tuning it. The bed isn’t flat enough yet which causes the corners to dig in a bit too much. My #5 jack plane needs some work on the iron to finish bringing it back to life. It is a joy to use. My #7 requires much work on the flats of the iron. Mostly because of rust issues.

Part of the care and feeding of these tools is to keep the soles and plates lightly oiled so they don’t stick to the wood. I’m working towards that.

This leads me to “specialty” planes. There are three specialty planes that are required for general work. The first is a router plane. This plane is used for smoothing the bottom of a hand-cut dado or other pockets in the face of a board. Think of mortising a hinge.

I found a mini version; I’m going to make a wooden version of a more normal size.

The next plane needed is something for smoothing shoulders or making rabbets. I might have found a cheap used version. If so, this will be a huge improvement in my game. In the same vein, there are rabbet planes that are designed to cut right to a shoulder.

When I’m next at the Fort at No. 4, I’m going to see if I can borrow one of the molding planes. A simple roundover or a fancier edging tool is what I’m looking for.

Cheating

If I buy a piece of 1×6 pine from the lumberyard, it will be smooth. It won’t be flat. It is likely to have twist. This means that if I’m lucky, after preparing the board I’ll have something around 5/8 thick, not 3/4.

My sawmill is providing me 4/4 rough-sawn lumber that is not smooth, but it is nearly flat and has almost no twist. Because of his quality, after preparing both faces, I will have a board 15/16 thick.

Because my target thickness is 3/4 (12/16), I have to remove nearly 1/4 of the wood. Turning wood into shavings is fun but requires time and effort.

So I cheat. I resaw my boards from 15/16 down to 13/16s. This reduces the handwork greatly.

Before I sharpened my handsaw into a rip saw I used the band saw to rip a board I used in my workbench.

Pre-drilling and countersinks

While it is unlikely that an #8 screw will split soft pine, it is always better to drill a pilot hole. The all-in-one version I’ve tried using isn’t working for me.

The nice thing about the all-in-one drill is that the drill bit is tapered, leading to a hole that is big enough to not grip the screw in one board but small enough to grip the wood on the far side, allowing the screw to pull the two pieces of wood together. The builtin counter sink acts like a depth stop and does leave a counter sink for the screw.

And it does a horrible job. I will be switching to doing this in three steps. First, drill the pilot hole, then drill the clearance hole in the outside board, and finally countersink the outside hole. If I do it this way, I know that all parts will be done correctly. Fewer stripped holes.

Screw Lengths

You’re doing it wrong! Yeah, that’s what I keep hearing in my head.

There are two types of screwed connections in normal woodworking. I.e., ignoring pocket screw construction. You can screw two pieces of wood together face-to-face, or you can screw face-to-edge.

When screwing face-to-face, it looks like the proper length should be the total thickness minus 1/4″. This gives the maximum hold without poking through the other board.

For attaching through a face into end grain, I should be using 2 1/2″ or 3″ screws. I didn’t know.

Nails

Period-correct nails are still available today. I picked up a pound of artsy-fartsy wrought iron rose-head nails to use on the 6-board box. But with what I just learned about screw length, I think I will pick up some two or three inch cut nails.

The only issue I know of when using cut nails is that you have to pre-drill to avoid cracking the boards. But you want the hole to be as small as possible to increase the grip of the nails.

Conclusion

Today I should finish the shooting board. This means I’ll be able to start my first 6-board box soon.

We are into the 2025 term. The Justices are on vacation, yet they are still issuing opinions relating to orders almost weekly.

This is another win for Trump. So far every case to reach the Supreme Court has been a win for the Trump Administration.

The left is having hissy fits.

The frustration in the Court’s opinion is highlighted here. “…squarely controlled…” is court speak for “We told you ungrateful incompetent rogue judges how to do this already! Don’t you make me stop this car!” The following does not differ in any pertinent respect: telling those same self-important, agenda-driven hacks that they were told how to do exactly this type of case.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion. His opinion is that the Court should just grant certiorari and issue a full opinion.

The inferior courts continue to play games to get what they want. It is just stupid.

They keep losing, but it makes for great headlines.

So tomorrow we will hear about the great Justice Kagan and how she brought the heat down on the conservatives of the Court.

Vinegar is one of those items that should be in every prep pack. It’s useful for SO many things! What can you use vinegar for?

• making drinks (shrub, sekanjabin, switchel, haymakers, etc.)
• baking (you can use it to make a buttermilk substitute)
• all purpose cleaner (AMAZING on windows)
• preservation (pickles, meats, etc.)
• descaling (clean scale from coffee makers, kettles, etc.)
• removes stains (especially yellowing along collar lines)
• weed killer (on its own it’s okay, mixed with Dawn detergent it’s better than most commercial mixes)
• insect repellent (I’ve read this one but haven’t tried it)
• wound cleaning
• treating nail fungus
• cleans chrome and helps windows be no-frost
• soothes a sunburn
• great for disinfecting cutting boards, especially wooden ones
• white vinegar in laundry helps remove general stains

I’m sure I missed stuff, but man, we use vinegar all over the place in our house. From salads to shower drains (where it kills off those little irritating gnats that come from drains), it’s basically an all purpose item to have in your go bag.

But what if you don’t have vinegar on hand? Fear not, it’s not actually difficult to make!

Making vinegar from scratch can be such a sinch, and coupled with its indispensability in the kitchen, makes it a worthwhile endeavor. The process of getting to vinegar is simple:

1. start with a sugary liquid
2. let the sugars ferment into alcohol by way of our friendly local wild yeast
3. then with continued air exposure the alcohol will be eaten up by native acetobacter making it into vinegar. Boom!

An even simpler overview:

1. crush fruit in your fermentation vessel of choice
2. leave it be until it tastes like vinegar.
3. strain the solids. So easy!

From: Ferment Pitsburgh

Basically, vinegar is made from scraps, the stuff you’d normally toss in the garbage. You can use apple cores, skins, bruised stuff even. You can use old wine that’s already starting to turn to vinegar, too.

A very basic apple cider vinegar recipe that I have used:

Read More

DoJ is Pro 2A?

In a strange twist of events, the federal DoJ has filed multiple briefs with the Supreme Court supporting the Second Amendment-protected rights of The People. Amazing!

They have also done things at the circuit court level to close out future attacks on the Second Amendment.

It is a great time to be alive.

Sharp Yesterday Means Dull Today

My progress as a woodworker has been frustrated many times. The most common frustration? The tool is no longer sharp.

Yesterday, I was fitting the bottom to my tool tote. I’m sweating like a pig. It is dripping onto my glasses, making me even more misirable.

When I came in for a break, I told Ally that this is the first time I wished I was using my power tools. With very little effort, I could have set up the table saw and fitted the bottom in just a few minutes. Planing the ends flat and with the correct angle was painful.

Then, for grins, I pulled the blade out of the plane, did a hand touch-up, and then put the iron back in the plane. What had been a fine sawdust became end-grain shavings. Not more than 10 minutes later I had a great fit.

What Do You Mean Rip Cut Saws Rip Boards Better?

There is a scary moment when you first modify a tool to “fix” it or make it work for you. I think my first time was when I cut the shank of 3/4″ to JT-3 from 3″ to 1.5″. It worked perfectly, but cutting a piece off my new adapter? That was scary.

Modern handsaws are basically shit. Most people don’t know how to use them. Most people won’t even bother to learn how to use them. Most people would consider it too much work.

Older saws can be had for a reasonable price, but they are not ready to use.

The reason that new saws are so bad is that they are designed to do everything and to leave the best edge possible.

You can find old saws with 4 Teeth Per Inch (TPI). It was seldom that you found an old saw with more than 10 TPI, with a few being 15 TPI.

There is a good reason for that: the coarser the pitch, the faster the saw cuts.

Saw teeth have several parameters to them. The TPI, the angle of the tooth, the set, and the shape of the tooth.

When you crosscut , you want to sever the fibers. This requires a knife-like action. This is accomplished by putting a cutting edge on the saw tooth, alternating teeth. This cuts the wood fiber before removing the waste.

When you are rip cutting, you do not need that knife-like action. What you want is a chisel-like action. This is accomplished by having a 90° angle of attack that shears the fibers under the blade.

Modern saws are marketed to do both. They have a crosscut grind to the teeth, and they have a high TPI count. They do not do either type of cutting “well.” They do both adequately.

Thursday I took a new saw blade and “sharpened” it. That is to say I reshaped the shape of the each tooth to be that chisel profile. Then I tested it.

In soft pine, a full stroke was cutting somewhere between an inch and a half and two inches. Three or four times as well as it was cutting before the reshaping.

Obama Fights Back

The Obama sycophants, on command from the holy one, have stood up and screamed that the referral that Tulsi Gabbard made to the DoJ is just a distraction.

The argument is something like Trump is in the Epstein files. He doesn’t want you to know what we all know, that he is a kiddy diddler and a rapist. This referral is just to distract the MAGAots.

How do we know? Because Trump said he wasn’t in the files. He is lying.

How do we know he is lying? Because he was lying in his first term.

How do we know he was lying in his first term? The media told us so.

How did the media know he was lying? Because Trump always lies.

You can’t make this shit up.

Epstein

The world turns; now the Democrats are demanding the files be released.

There is a huge issue with the files, and every Democrat who is listed in the files will scream it to the skies.

The chain of custody has been broken because untrusted agents could have modified the content.

The files have been in the Biden DoJ for 3 or 4 years. Who had access, who could have modified the content, and who could have added or removed content? None of that can be trusted today.

For the Democrat caught with his pants down the same will be said. They will claim that the Trump Administration modified the content.

Obama Has Immunity!

Did he order these things done as part of his duties as the President of the United States?

No? Then he doesn’t have immunity.

Question of the week

Are you going to keep your Sig P320? Sell it? Buy them as they flood the market?

The Trump Administration has announced numbers for tariffs collected. The number is huge, something like $77 billion. Of course the panic vendors are now screaming that this means that Americans paid $77 billion in taxes. They also claim that the tariffs are causing the price of everything to skyrocket.

Let’s take the case of a lowly woodworker making a stool. The stool is made from two pieces of 2×4 by 8 ft.

Because the woodworker wants to up his game, he decides to use a different wood; he chooses Canadian maple.

A quick check on wood prices shows that hard maple is running $6 per board foot. The amount of lumber needed is 2*4*8/12 = 5.33 bf.

Or, 2*4*96 / 144 = 5.33 bf

At a cost of $6 per board foot, this means the cost of the lumber will be $32.

The woodworker uses a $25/hour labor rate. It will take him 3 hours to build the stool using hand tools and rough-cut lumber. That is $75 in labor.

There is another cost for the finish and time for finishing. We are ignoring that part of the equation. He also adds a 20% profit for the business.

Putting it all together, we get $32 for the wood, $75 for the labor, and $21.40 for profit, for a total sale price of $128.40.

Now say that there is a 25% tariff put on importing that wood from Canada. This would be $8 that needs to be paid to the US government.

From a bit of insider knowledge, I know that the $8 can be paid by the company shipping the wood, making the 25% come out of their profit. They might split the cost 50/50, or they can pass the entire cost on to the buyer, our woodworker.

Assuming our woodworker gets the entire $8 passed on to them, let’s see what that does to the cost of our stool.

$40 for the wood, $75 for labor, and $23 for profit, giving a total price for the stool of $138. With a 25% tariff on the cost of the materials, we see a $9.60 increase in the price. That is a 7.5% increase in the price of the stool.

The truth of the matter is that many products only use pennies of tariffed materials in their goods. Hershey increased the price of their chocolate recently. While the left is screaming “Tariffs!” the fact is that cocoa costs went up. The tariffs are a small part of the increase in costs.

The more value added in the US, the more the profit margin is the less impact tariffs have on your costs.

I do know people who are having a difficult time because of the tariffs. Their product uses a gizmo they import from China. That gizmo is not made in the US because there was no profit in making that gizmo here.

Until there is a US competitor for those gizmos, she is going to have to pay the tariffs on those gizmos. She has announced a very modest increase in the price of her goods to cover her increased costs. She feels miserable for doing so.

Regardless, our economy seems to be doing much better in 2025 than it was in 2024.