Buttons & Abby

 awesomeness, blather, cats  No Responses »
Jun 282025
 

Buttons is about 16. While nowhere near the oldest a cat can get, it is, sad to say, old for a cat. All my prior cats made it to 10 or at best 11, so Buttons has outlasted them all. And sadder to say, he has some medical issues that, left unchecked, will end him pretty quickly. So several times a day I have to force some meds into him, a process he *really* doesn’t like, but is tolerant of. Even with the meds he gets occasional relapses; but prior to the current meds  some months back he had incidents that came close to The End. So… he could have years left, or I can post bad news tomorrow. That’s just the way it is.

Abby, on the other hand, is only about 2. Young, vigorous and loves to fight, she’ll merrily throw down with Billy or Banshee, practicing the very best cat-judo moves. However, she is remarkably gentle with Buttons. Seems she knows he’s The Honored Elder and is to be treated with respect and restraint. She lets him sleep, and sleep he does… he could easily sleep 20+ hours a day.

Every now and then he feels particularly good, and engages in play. Here he is trying to bait Abby into some level of a fight. I was gratified to see that while she played with him, she did not play rough.

 

 Posted by at 10:55 am

Ebay is getting expensive

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, Crazy, Gah., projects  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

For about 20 years I’ve been buying aerospace documentation on ebay. For a good chunk of those I’ve crowdfunded the purchases of really expensive stuff. And by “really expensive” I’ve meant something like “hundreds of dollars for a single report.” Split the purchase price between one or two dozen people, send all of them high-rez scans, and the price can be quite affordable and everybody is happy. Huzzah.

But recently a new trend has emerged: exorbitantly high opening bids. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue: if the opening bid is stupidly high, nobody buys. the item goes unsold and often the seller will come down in price. Woo. But the recent development is buyers who are willing and able to buy, repeatedly, extremely expensive stuff. For example, a seller apparently got hold of an estate with a bunch of Republic Aviation stuff. For aerospace projects fans, there have been some fantastic items… and I’ve utterly failed to obtain any of them because the opening bids aren’t hundred,s they’re thousands… and someone else out there has really deep pockets and has been snapping them up. I tried bidding on one early document; with crowdfunders I was able to bid over $1,600 in the last few seconds, thinking I was the only bidder… but I got sniped by someone who bid several times at higher amounts. Since then I’ve watched numerous items sell for even more in the last seconds, apparently to the same buyer. I’ve repeatedly contacted the seller about buying scans, photocopies or even just complete sets of photos of the documents, but such requests have gone unanswered. So these things are *poof* gone forever.

Now, these are documents that I was unaware existed before I saw the listing, and I’ve lost no money. So objectively I’m not worse off than before… but it’s incredibly frustrating to see such things, know that at least theoretically I could have had access to them, and now they’ve gone from one black hole to another black hole.

 

A couple examples, reports on the Republic AP-77 design from the mid-1950’s, a tactical bomber for the USAF with clear XF-103 heritage.

 

And…

 

What can I do about it? Not a damned thing, unless I finally win the Lotto.

 

If I *do* win the Lotto, I’m not telling anyone. But there will be signs.

 Posted by at 12:52 pm

200 K

 blather, Meh.  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

Sadly not $200,000 or 200,000 followers willing to do my bidding, but 200,000 miles on my car a few days ago. Not much of a milestone I suppose, but it’s what I got.

 Posted by at 12:32 pm

Hello? Is this thing still on?

 blather  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

Yeesh, it’s been months since I’ve blog posted much of anything. Of course all my yapping is now done at Twitter (@UnwantedBlog), where I post a handful of things a day. But even with that, I write a hell of a lot less than during my blogging days. It’s a lot easier to tweet. Question: anybody care?

 Posted by at 2:36 am