Ted’s essays

HACKED

I have been operating five websites for a long time, more than that at times, and three of them for over a decade. I have had exactly ONE paid advertisement in all that time. All other expenses have been out of my pocket. Bad actors recently infected one or more of them. Costs of removing the infection and preventing future pollutants will exceed costs of hosting, and put a serious hit on my pocketbook. This particular community service hobby is getting more expensive than I care to afford. I am dropping maintenance and expense of two of them immediately. I apologize for those barbarians who took these away from you. Users and destroyers are everywhere. Resist them wherever you can. […]

driving … or not

While wearing my baby teeth I was racing toy cars over road-race courses of my own making on the carpet. Smallest of the bunch, I was beating all other home-made coasters on our downhill courses, making maneuvers others did not dare. In bicycle boonie-crashing I had no peers, not from muscle mass, of which I had none, but, well, I am and have always been a driver. Graduating to internal combustion engines, and automobiles didn’t change much in relative skill levels, just put me into a new league. Autocrossing had my Porsche 912, then Porsche 356B, the Porsche 356A Speedster winning consistently. At the time I thought my cars were magical. My 650 single-carb BSA was the lowest horsepower in […]

more on the cabin for sale

Conner Cabin from the bridgeWe spent over four years making this perfect for the two of us, but it is a bit snug with my Mom here too. We are moving to more appropriate housing and leaving our lovely riverside home behind. Major remodeling along with addition of the adjacent lot to our lease transformed this river-front home into a real find. UPDATE: The official listing information (at the bottom of the page) calls this a 756 square foot home. That is what we bought, but the 8-foot by 21-foot studio space is very much an integral part of the home. In reality, this is more accurately calculated as a 924 square foot home. I had a conversation with someone […]

FOR SALE – tidy cabin on The Bitterroot

Conner Cabin from the bridgeWe spent over four years making this perfect for the two of us, but it is a bit snug with my Mom here too. We are moving to more appropriate housing and leaving our lovely riverside home behind. Major remodeling along with addition of the adjacent lot to our lease transformed this river-front home into a real find. I published many posts including pictures taken in our yard under the heading “Post Card From Conner“. That is what living here is like. looking upstream from the front lawn Four seasons in a location many spend extravagantly to visit on their vacations. Fishermen float by our front lawn in $900 per-day guided trips. The prior owner and […]

shame on us

My postings here were distracted by impressive events on the home front. We trusted, loved, gave without measure of ourselves and resources. We were building family: a strong nuclear, multi-generational family in an extraordinarily healthy community. In our dream the kids, who had a bad habit of moving on every year or two, would find our world so perfect in every way that they would cherish, treasure, and work together with us to build a dream we all could share. After all, they said so. Repeatedly. The Woman and the Snake An old woman was walking down the road when she saw a gang of thugs beating a poisonous snake. She screamed at the thugs and rescued the snake, taking […]

Montana Trombone Chorale

The evening of August 3rd had an event that was BIG and BOLD on my calendar. The Montana Trombone Chorale came to the Hamilton Band Shell to perform for an enthusiastic, discerning audience. High on my list of musical dreams would be to play in such a group. Listening and watching them play is almost as good… and very much a delight. I apologize for the quality of my videos. I am using my much-loved Canon SX710 a bit beyond its capability for taking great still photos and making short video clips by recording these tunes. But you can certainly see and hear what these folks brought to our community. Now if I can just get something like this going […]

out to lunch

I apologize for the absence of current postings. Support for the next generation just blew up in our faces. Who-da-thunk helping would be punished? It is a complicated psychology wherein the helpees have to deamonize the helpers in order to justify their failure to uphold their part of the bargain. Nevertheless, we have been thoroughly deamoninzed. Our world will be stabilizing in a few days. The future is bright. I will get back to sharing my world views here shortly. Gotta go get trained with combat carbines tomorrow. Not that I expect to be significantly useful in that area, but stepping up from marginal competence would be good. TTFN