purg.atory

“In order to check for updates, you must install an update for Windows Update.” I should have gotten a screenshot.

That man really needs to shut up.

I set up the boat today so I could get pictures. I’ve got five shots that I felt were worth sharing. The first is a wide-angle shot showing the boat next to our van. The van is Chevy’s 15 passenger beast, about 20 feet long. The boat’s specs say it is 11 feet long.

The second picture looks at the boat from the bow end. If you blow the picture up to full size, you can fuzzily see the batteries under the transom seat.

The third picture is a view of the interior of the boat from the side, looking towards the bow. The tripod chair was something I picked up this afternoon for $9 at Sportsman’s warehouse. It looks promising, we’ll see how well it works when the boat is actually out on the water. I have my eye on a thing or three from Cabelas, we might pick up a set early next week.

The fourth picture is the motor. Although I wish that either it were a 12V motor or that I had a single 24V battery, it’s worked out very well. You can see part of the transom seat and the transom motor mount itself in this picture.

The last picture shows my anchor, its chain and rope, and the chair bag I am using for rope storage and delivery.

Kathy has told me that she will shorten the bag for me - the rope only takes up about a third of the space inside it, so the bag could be cut in half and still work perfectly. In the long-term, I believe I need a single larger bag that can hold both the anchor and the whole rode. I’d like to put a large grommet in the bottom, which would serve two purposes. One purpose is drainage, so the bag can let water out easily. The other is to let a short section of rope hang out which would be tied to the boat. That would ensure that I never lose my anchor on the bottom of the lake due to carelessness, but not interfere when rope is deployed or stored.

I just got my property valuation and tax notice for the house. What I found therein amounts to a mixed bag of good and bad news.

My land value went up somewhere in the vague neighborhood of 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333 percent. The value of the house itself went down by about 26 percent. This makes for a loss in value of the whole package of about 11.3 percent. Those of you who can still remember beginning algebra now have a story problem - what percentages do the land and the building comprise of the total? Please show your work!

The good news is that the property tax burden for this year is now lighter by nearly $400. The bad news is that my house value has dropped by quite a lot. There is a good side even to the bad news, though. It simply means that recently inflated property values are coming back in line with reality. I hope that the housing bubble is completely burst and things will now level off.

Perusing the taxing entities is interesting. More than half of my taxes go to the Jordan School District. The next biggest chunks go to the county and to the city. Much smaller chunks pay for the county library system, water infrastructure, mosquito abatement, a multi-county assessment, and a county assessment.

A few weeks ago, we bought a couple of innertube-y towable things that came with the tow rope, but I’m completely at a loss as to how it attaches to the inflatable, or to the boat. The tube has a cover with a loop made of strap material, and the two ends of the tow rope have loops spliced into them. How do I deal with this? I can thread the whole rope through the loop for one end, but what do I do for the other after I’ve done that? I can’t pass the tube or the boat through the loop!