Two days, four lamp fixtures installed

Good thing I don't do this for a living.  I'd loose my shirt.  But the job is done, the living room is put back together. The lights all light.  Every time you throw the switch. 
    Why did it go so slow?  Well weather didn't help.  It was 90 both days.  I worked up enough sweat that I could smell myself.  And I'm getting old.  I took a couple of breaks each day.  Then that wall-to-wall carnivorous carpet didn't help. It ate up everything.   Every dropped tool disappeared and required a lengthy search. A #2 Phillips screwdriver rolled all the way under a book case.  I had to move the whole loaded 1000 lb bookcase to retrieve it.  Dropped screws disappeared  never to return. Good thing I had spares.
   The new fluorescent lamps look nice.  The burn a lot more white than the traditional "cool-white" tubes which actually were quite blue, lacked much red, and made red and brown things look awful.  And they strike immediately when you flip the switch.  They don't even have heaters at the ends.    
   I had the lights lighting by 3 PM, but I didn't have the curtains rehung, the defuser re installed, the crud vacuumed up, the cobwebs vacuumed out of corners, the furniture replaced and the floor lamps plugged back in until 5 PM. 
  At which point I mixed a tall gin and tonic and settled down to watch Fox News. 

Is college worth it?

Depends.  Do you have any options?  The skilled trades pay as well as many college jobs.  Plumber, electrician, welder, machinist, mason, carpenter, heavy equipment operator, trucker, HVAC, railroad engineer, lineman, and others are well paid, and depression proof, you can always find work.  For guys who enjoy working with their hands, and who have an entry into the skilled trades, this can be a a good way to go.  You need to decide whether such a life would be satisfying to you.  Many guys like it, then a lot of guys really want to be white collar, which needs a college degree these days.  Know thyself.  
  Another option, enlist in the armed forces.  It's free, They will take you if you don't have a criminal record, aren't too fat, and don't do drugs.  The services offer good technical training and good experience.  Enlisting, even in wartime, isn't very dangerous.  During Viet Nam, the services lost more men to motor vehicle accidents than they did to enemy action.  After a hitch in the service, you will do MUCH better in college, should you decide to go that way, and they probably still have GI benefits to help pay for college.  They did when I got back from Viet Nam, and I suspect they still do.  You want to check this out before enlisting.  Also, remember that recruiting sergeants will tell you anything you want to hear.  Double check on their promises.  Internet is good for this.   One other thought, if you aren't sure what you want to do in your life, you will be a lot more sure after your hitch.  A final thought, the services are fun.  I enjoyed my tour of duty.
   When you go to college, you ought to have an idea of what you want to do after graduation.  And take courses that will make you employable.  Colleges offer a lot of totally worthless courses that just eat up your time and money.
   And, if you go to college, you gotta graduate.  If you flunk out, you have spent the money and have nothing to show for it.  If you like your major, and enjoy reading and writing, and you did well in high school, it isn't hard to keep it together for four years and graduate.  If reading bores you, and writing comes hard to you, and you just scraped by high school with a C average,  you may not make it thru college.  And you still have to pay off your college loans even if you don't graduate.   
  

To evaluate the Iraqi military

A TV pundit just said that.  The mission of the 300-500 Americans Obama rushed back into Iraqi last week is to evaluate the Iraqi military.  You mean after training the Iraqis for years, funding them, supplying weapons, and leaving 5000 cookie pushers in the US embassy in Baghdad we don't have a fair idea of what the Iraqi military is worth?  ??   Especially after some 30,000 Iraqi troops allowed 1000 ISIS terrorists to take Mosul away from them?  Same pundit goes on to say evaluation is  is done by data analysis. 
   No way.  To evaluate a combat unit, you inspect it.  An experienced sergeant can tell in short order whether a unit will fight effectively, or not. 
   So much for our knowledgeable media.  This pundit doesn't know squat

Let there be light, again.

  Last week I flipped on the living room fluorescent lights.  The lights instead of lighting, did their end-of-life thing, blinking and glowing and refusing to light up.  So I went down to Franconia Hardware to buy new tubes.  The existing tubes were showing black burn marks on their ends.  Awfulness.  Mike Ford down at Franconia told me they had stopped making real fluorescent tubes three years ago.  Some how I missed that bit of lefty-greenie aggression.  I'd heard about the war on 100 watt light bulbs, but some how I missed the war on  40 watt fluorescent tubes.  The new tubes are only 32 watts, a fantastic saving of eight whole watts per tube, but they don't work in the regular fixtures. 
  So I went out to a real electrical supply house to buy four new dependable new style fixtures.  $32 a fixture, less tubes.  He only had 3 fixtures, when I needed four, but he promised to deliver up to my place the next day. Not too shabby.  
  So next day, I started in replacing four fixtures.  It was a fine summer day, in the 90's. Good daylight  so I could see what I was doing.  I'm old school, I still use a Yankee screwdriver instead of those cute battery drill-drivers. Got the first two old fixtures down, got the new ones up.  What with one thing or another, it was 3:30 when I was done.  Decided to leave the other two fixtures for  tomorrow. 
   The new lights are nice and bright, and whiter than the old "cool white" tubes.
   By tomorrow evening the whole job ought to be done.  

Is paying for RU 485 the end of the world?

Lots and lots of talk about the Hobby Lobby case.  Lots of outrage.  But all the case says is that small family owned businesses whose owners object to four (out of twenty) contraception drugs as abortion drugs don't have to pay for them on the company health plan.  Employees can pay for them out of pocket, or, find another company to work for. 
  Is this that big a deal?  What does everyone think?  The TV newsies are really talking this one up. 

Congress rating drops to 7%. Gallup Poll

That's pretty bad.  That's rewrite the Constitution bad.  The war drums are sounding in the hills.  Have you heard the Convention of States talk?  That's a call to a second Constitutional Convention, to rewrite the Constitution. Congress needs to do something before it gets rewritten out of existence.
A lot of this ire comes from voters who don't get their bills passed, or who see bills they dislike passed (Obamacare for example). 
If Congress wants to survive, it needs to connect with the voters.  The leadership needs to have some full time flacks to get the word out.  We voters want to know what was in the bill, and why the party supposed it or opposed it.  We want to know when a bill is killed by arbitrary action, by Harry Reid or who ever.   I heard some House member say the House had passed seven bills to revive the economy and the Senate had trash canned them all.  Sounds good, but that's the first time I ever heard that, and the Congressmen didn't  list the bills in question. 
   The newsies don't cover this.  Most of them don't understand much, few of them will do the hard work of research, it's easier to just pontificate.  And their editors would prefer to run "lifestyle" stories.  Even the Wall St Journal is pushing a slick paper insert that is mostly about selling fancy clothes and houses.  Like I care where to buy $400 a pair shoes. 
  But a good Republican or Democratic flack could  explain  his party's angle on each bill, make it interesting, and circulate it around the blogosphere, to the few print publications that still do real news, to Matt Drudge, to Glenn Reynolds, and even to the newspapers, even though newspapers are pretty much a lost cause these days. 
   We voters might think better of Congress if we knew what was going on. 

We need some scalps

Great Depression 2.0 started six years ago.  I know there was some malfeasance, skullduggery, and just plain stupidity in the big banks.  That crashed the world economy and threw millions out of work. But nobody has gone on trial let alone gone to jail. 
The IRS scandal.  Lois Lerner got retired, she keeps her pension.  Nobody else has been prosecuted or gone to jail.
The VA scandal.  The head of VA retired.  Nobody else has even got their name in the papers, let alone prosecuted or jailed. 
   I say Obama is going easy on this slime.  The banks, the IRS and the VA would work a lot better after jailing their top three levels of management.
   Even GM canned 8 people over the ignition switch disaster.  Are we saying that GM is more hard core than DOJ?