Ironhold

30 to 45? Double that. Although there are three ways to get to Austin from here, two of them are physically dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and/or there's inclement weather. So most everyone takes I-35, causing it to be jammed. That being said, depending upon what kind of work you're doing and what job skills you have, you might find something in this area anyway. While the powers-that-be in Copperas Cove *insist* upon keeping Cove as a bedroom community (I'll believe that they're serious about the Hills shopping center when I see them break ground...), Killeen, Harker Heights, Belton, and Gatesville are all plowing ahead on expansion, with Belton actually now hosting its own Comic Con each August. Failing this, you've also got Temple and Waco to the northeast, both of which are major cities in their own right. Focus on what job listings you can find for your career field, and that'll tell you where it'd be best to set up camp, especially with everyone from California and New York coming in & driving up housing prices.

It's the local economies. For example, I live in Central Texas. Find Austin on a map, follow I-35 north until you hit Belton, then follow I-14 / US Highway 190 west until you get to Fort Hood. That's the part of the state I live in. Land here has traditionally been quite cheap, and as a result housing is plentiful. Thus, there were periods where it was actually cheaper to *buy* than rent, with military service members using local real estate companies as property managers for their homes while they were deployed abroad or reassigned elsewhere. This has helped to keep the overall cost-of-living down. Not only that, remember Fort Hood. A rather large chunk of the people who live and work here are tied to the base in some fashion. They could be actual military service members (in which case they can seek on-base housing instead of living in the city), civilians who work for the military in some fashion (such as clerks or working at an on-base eatery), retirees, or private companies who have contracts to support the military. This means local wages are often tethered to Uncle Sam's wallet, and so anyone who seeks to charge what people on military wages can't afford is going to be in trouble sooner rather than later if they don't have product that is affordable. For example, if you were to look around at the vehicles everyone drives, you'll see that people tend to have vehicles like the Kia Soul, Dodge Charger, Toyota Tacoma, and Chevy Suburban. "Luxury" brands like Cadillac and Lexus are rare, but not unheard of. If you're a young hotshot you're likely driving a Dodge Challenger, although you might find yourself up against the occasional Chevy Camaro, Chevy Corvette, or Nissan 370Z depending upon which neighborhood you blunder into. I haven't seen a Lamborghini around here in over a decade, and the only Porsche I'm aware of is a vintage number from the 80s someone keeps for car shows.

Something *else* that occurred to me while sketching out a different story idea. You have a daughter. She's the light of your life. You and your spouse daydream about her wedding. It's hard for you when she first moves out. It's even harder when she indicates that she's in a relationship with someone but is somewhat vague about who it is. It turns out that she somehow wound up in a relationship with a celebrity, superhero, covert operative, or someone else in that vein, someone who is constantly under either a spotlight or a microscope. For the sake of your own daughter's safety, she and her lover cannot even admit that they are in a relationship, at least not until after they are married. ...And speaking of marriage, forget whatever plans you had for a glorious ceremony. That same need for secrecy also means that it's going to have to be a tiny wedding in some place unexpected at an unorthodox time of day (for example, a temple two states over at 8 AM) so that they can be in and out in a way that minimizes chance encounters. Their wedding can't even be announced until well after the wedding. Once it's all out of the bag you can have whatever reception(s) you want. But they'll have to be well after the event. How would you feel?

In my area, a house that size in that condition would normally only go for $85K at most because of where it's located. The housing market has gotten so hot they were asking an extra $50K for it.

I first moved to my present city in 1990 when the Army reassigned my dad to the local military base. As we moved over Winter Break, we didn't have a lot of time and so a relative agreed to put us up for the rest of the school year. My parents used the time to find a house, and we found a nice rental property about a mile or so away from where we already were. Not only was it a nice neighborhood, it meant that my brothers and I could stay in the same schools. The house itself had an odd layout (for example, since it was on an intersection, the front door faced one street but the garage another), and we had to install drainage to keep it from flooding, but there were two massive pear trees in the back yard that kept us in fresh fruit. About two years later, however, we were informed that the landlord was coming back and so we had to vacate. Thus, we moved to our present house on the other end of town. I drive past the old house when I'm running my delivery route, and noticed that after what seemed like years of being empty it was now being cleaned up and repaired. Sure enough, a for sale sign finally went up in the front yard. A sense of nostalgia caused me to look up the online real estate listings and I did a double-take. Yes, they removed a wall that was in an awkward location, a wall I honestly thought was structural. ...But the bathrooms and the kitchen were the exact same as they'd been when we lived there 30 years ago, barring the additional 30 years' wear and tear. Yet despite this the listing was for $135,500 and there was a tag reading "sale pending". Either the housing market in my part of Texas is getting super hot right now, or something screwy is going on. Anyone else have any such encounters regarding houses they once lived in?

I've been taking a look at mass shooting events since the early 2000s when I was super into politics. What I found is that the vast majority of shooters I looked at either: 1. had overt warning signs of mental instability 2. had a substance abuse issue 3. were known to the authorities, who failed to intervene 4. some combination thereof For example, the guy who shot up Virginia Tech was clearly unwell his entire life, but his family feared taking him for treatment because they presumed there would be a stigma. Or with Nidal Hassan, his co-workers at Walter Reed Army Hospital had every reason to believe he'd become unstable, but feared that since they were white and he was Middle Eastern any attempts to report him would end with *them* being flagged as "racist" and so they never spoke up. The school shooter in Florida? Numerous reports to law enforcement about erratic, unstable, and potentially dangerous behavior. No action. Sandy Hook? The shooter was *legally prohibited* from owning guns, so his mother bought them and he took them from her after killing her. Southerland Springs church shooting? The shooter was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force for domestic violence, but the Air Force failed to report this to the federal background check database and so it never turned up. Et cetra. It's this, the human element, that needs to be examined more closely.

I'm here in *Texas* and the news is flying fast & furious. Give it a few hours for the media to get the facts together.

Whenever WITSEC is in the media, it's even odds that the person being depicted is a whistleblower who is in imminent danger of physical retaliation, such as an accountant who realizes that the company they're working for is doing something funny with their money or a shipping clerk who realizes that what's being loaded on the trucks doesn't match the manifests. It's those kinds of hypothetical individuals I'm wondering about, innocent bystanders who are witness to a crime and are now in danger for having reported it.

That being said, a personal anecdote: Back when I was finishing my undergraduate work, a hurricane was projected to hit along the Texas / Mexico border. One of my brothers was living there with his family, and we agreed to host them for a few days. The catch? The college I was taking my 300 and 400 - level classes through was slowly migrating to doing examinations online so as to allow more actual in-class time for lectures and demonstrations. The same day that my brother and his family were due to arrive was the same day that my midterm in one of my capstone classes was to go online. To be more specific, the test would go live a mere hour before my brother and his family were due in. So I explained to my parents that at this time on this date, I needed to be online to do my test. Otherwise, there was no guarantee I'd be able to get it done with everyone around. Shortly before my test was supposed to start, my mom decided that the lawn needed to be mowed. So I pulled the mower out (it was a gasoline-powered mower), got it ready to go, and started it for her. I then went inside, fired up my laptop, and logged onto the college's online portal. Cue my test. Dad came home from work about 10 minutes into my test, meaning that I was still taking it and my mom was still out front mowing. He'd had a bad day at work, and so had forgotten that I said I had a test that evening. He saw my mom out front mowing the lawn, saw me on my laptop, and exploded. It took me three attempts, during which I had to repeatedly show him the screen, to explain that I was taking my midterm and that mom decided to mow the lawn despite this. For obvious reasons, although I finished my midterm I failed it miserably. Fortunately, I blew the class project out of the water and got a 90% on my final exam, so was still able to pass. Just another example of how hurricanes can affect people who don't even live near the path of one.

Also - Just because you're not close to the coastline does not mean that you'll be unaffected. I live four hours northwest of Houston, Texas, which is on the coast. You'd think that such a distance would offer protection from anything going wrong, correct? Except... 1. The sheer total area that's affected by a hurricane is so great that if something was to hit Houston, I could still reasonably expect strong storms in my area. 2. Evacuees fleeing Houston could easily come over to my part of Texas, if not further out, in order to get out of the direct area of effect. This would present an immediate need for charitable assistance, lodging, and supplies as these people have to find resources and a place to stay while they're up here. 3. Houston is a major shipping port, so anything going in or out of Houston would be delayed until the hurricane passed and the damage was cleaned up. So that's physical goods and resources tied up for the duration. If you live within 4 - 8 hours of an area that is going to get hit, you can reasonably expect local-area disruptions. Plan accordingly.

In December 2019, I had a feeling I needed to purchase a couple of cases of US military rations (and a case of low-sodium civilian equivalents) that I saw on Amazon. When the Covid lockdowns hit, we still had those cases, plus a large supply of bottled water, sitting in the house. We felt comfort in knowing that if anything ever happened to the local food supply, my parents and I had military rations for a while. When the lockdown was lifted and family decided to come up for Thanksgiving, my parents decided that the rations were now just taking up space and put them in storage. They were *still* in the storage facility when the 2021 blizzard hit Texas, leaving us without power for three days. It was only *then* that my parents understood why I'd felt so compelled to stock up, as instead of spending those three days living off of tuna sandwiches and soup we could have had actual, solid food.

Had an idea for a series premised on a couple of characters being in witness protection. This led me to wonder... What would the church do if a member wound up in witness protection? Would there be some way that they could signal church authorities of who they really are so that their membership could continue? Would they be required to join the church all over again and have their ordinances done twice?

And it's an *orange* kitty, too...

My mother's attending physician misread the ultrasound and told her that I'd be born with a terminal condition. He wanted her to abort and try again. She went to the temple and felt inspired to continue the pregnancy. My birth certificate was filed with the *pathology* department. Welcome to the wonderful world of military health care.

As I've mentioned before, I have an MBA and have been trained in what is essentially psychological warfare. This has allowed me to predict several things that have happened over the years, even if only in general terms. I've been telling everyone for some time now that we're looking at a period of great cultural, societal, and even legal upheaval as a lot of unpaid bills come due and the consequences of the last few decades' "social experiments" come about. ...And yet there are people who are *still* taken by surprise when such-and-such event happens despite my warning that such a thing could occur. It's frustrating, I agree.

In regards to Covid - When the vaccines first came out, I had a strong feeling that I needed to wait as long as humanly possible before getting my vaccines. Well, my hand was forced in the summer of 2021. I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it was only if vaccinated. I got both Moderna shots, and the second shot, combined with the manual labor I was doing that day, laid me flat with dangerously high blood pressure. Well, come fall 2021 the Associated Press is reporting that five different European medical boards are investigating the Moderna vaccine after allegations of it causing... cardiovascular health issues in certain populations. I have a heart condition, and so had I known about this I'd have asked for a different vaccine. I think that's why I was feeling that I needed to wait, because I needed to read about these reports so I could make a more informed choice for the sake of my health.

"Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you ever imagined." People quibble all the time about achieving some sort of physical immortality, wherein they expect to be able to live in the flesh forever, typically in a fashion that renders them ageless and perfect. They don't factor in the prospect of *eternal* life and everything they have to gain on the other side. Nor do they factor in the sort of immortality that is achieved when tales of your deeds are still being told generations after your passing. This is a kind of Valhalla unto itself. So yes, it's entirely possible that there was a "joy" in the sense of "Do what you must, for I have already won".

In 2008, when Barack Obama was still on the campaign trail, he was giving an interview at a radio station. He *intended* to recount a story involving his maternal grandmother, and as part of the story was talking about how his grandmother, like many white people of the day, held what we would now regard as racist views. His intention was to use his family as a reflection of how much American society had changed over the decades. During his recounting, however, he referred to his grandmother as a "typical white person". By all appearances, this was simply yet another incident in which Obama didn't choose his words as well as he should have. But it still gave large swaths of Americans the impression that Obama held anti-white sentiments and would pursue a policy of racism if elected. Obama's many blunders when it came to discussing race-related issues further reinforced this notion, such that he inadvertently encouraged much of the very same militant "us vs. them" mindset he had been hoping to quell. Throw in Obama and his people showing signs of increasingly being out of touch with the everyday concerns of most Americans and Hillary's increasingly bizarre political campaign (remember when she "overheated" in 80 Fahrenheit weather and had to be carried back to her vehicle?), and it's no wonder Trump won in 2016.

When I go to run my delivery routes, I'm 2 - 4 hours on the road by myself with just my thoughts. At some point, I got to musing what it would take at minimum to stock an actual library from scratch and what I could do just from what was reasonably available (local retail + what I had on-hand + a few mulligans from Amazon like an encyclopedia set). This morphed into me feeling that I needed to spring for a large-print quad. Shortly after it arrived, I was talking with some people in the stake who were doing prison ministry. Turns out that an elderly inmate was needing a large-print quad so that he could actually read his scriptures, and the prison branch didn't have the budget to purchase one.

To put it bluntly? We, as a church, are among the last "acceptable targets". This means that both sides of the social and political divide feel that we're "fair game" for mockery, ridicule, disdain, and hit pieces. This show, and others that depict us in such a negative light, are a symptom of a greater disease. We're going to be dealing with this for some time to come.

Hate to say it, but there *are* a growing number of self-described "progressive" and "woke" types who do, in fact, hold the beliefs that Carb has outlined. These people tend to be hotheads, people with sheltered existences who have never truly known hardship and so don't have a benchmark, and/or people who are so caught up in their personal drama and ideals that they no longer have full touch with reality. As a result, they very often wind up offending and patronizing the very people they mean to support, promote, and "protect". For example, comic book industry veteran Christopher Priest - who is himself black - has claimed that some editors are so obsessed with their female, LGBT, and racial minority characters having "authentic" voices that they'll only assign projects to people who are "just like" their characters. In Priest's case, many editors were only calling him to write black characters despite his vast portfolio and fan support. Thus, he ends up as head writer on "Vampirella", as Dynamite was the biggest company willing to assign him a job based on his resume instead of his skin color.

Different industries are getting affected by different forces right now, and the Covid lockdowns didn't help. Take, for example, the US comic book industry. Mainstream publishers were already bleeding sales because a large swath of writers, artists, and editors were out of touch with what audiences wanted, causing people to turn elsewhere for entertainment. This led to comic book fans taking their money elsewhere... that is, foreign titles, non-traditional titles (like collections of newspaper comic strips), and indie titles. That many of these options are more bang for the buck price-wise is further leading to people leaving the mainstream publishers behind. Most comic companies in the US relied on Diamond Comic Distribution for actual retail-level distribution pre-Covid, giving them a de facto oligopoly position. But when one of their three main warehouses was shut down as "non-essential", Diamond halted all national operations. This forced the mainstream publishers, and even some indies, to order "pencils down" as they were on margins so thin that they couldn't pay for completed work until sales and distribution re-started. I think indie house Alterna was the only real publisher to get any product out during the lockdown, as they had inadvertently developed a manufacturing and distribution system that was Covid-resistant. So now the industry is in crisis, but far too many mainstream publishers are refusing to recognize that there's even a problem in the first place and so aren't working to adjust their offerings and marketing mix accordingly. For them, the "recession" is already here, and likely going to last for a while.

According to an interview Donny gave some years ago, it's apparently quite common *for* people to believe that they're husband and wife instead of siblings, and trying to explain things doesn't always go as planned.

What are some positive little bits about the church you've seen in the media lately? ** As I type this, I'm listening to a rebroadcast of "American Top 40 with Casey Kasem", the 1 May 1976 episode. He just did a trivia question in which someone asked what group in the so-called "Rock Era" had the most members when it hit the top 40. Turns out that the answer is the Tabernacle Choir, which had over 400 members when they recorded "Battle Hymn of the Republic". He further noted that "Music And The Spoken Word", which was broadcast on CBS at the time, had set a record for longest-running show, and that a particular individual whose name I didn't catch was still with the Choir despite being in his 70s.

There's a massive laundry list of situations from the past 18+ years where US government "experts" and officials have been dead wrong on various topics, leaving many Americans outright dead. And now the government says it wants its own personal Ministry of Truth?