His children aren’t tho and I’ve got a bad feeling this is going to be the start of some twisted fucked up monarchy.

The answer to medical debt or trying to survive without health care … murder a health insurance CEO, get thrown in jail and receive medical care while incarcerated.

The list I thought of is a list of the most common things I use in any kit for just a homeowner doing things around the house.

If the person isn’t interested in doing things around the house any more than they have to … then the kit is enough to do the most basic things.

If the person is interested in doing things around the house … then the toolbox can be filled with more and more things.

I like building/repairing/renovating/tinkering/mechanics and anything like that and after 30 years I have a ton of stuff and the main kit I carry around in my truck basically would allow me to do just about anything. Not a professional but capable enough to do about 80 to 90 percent of most things that is in, on, around, over or under a house.

I think that can come after because for some people, a powered drill is a bit of an expense they can’t afford. I had to go without a good powered drill of my own for about a year after I got my first home. I borrowed a lot of things back then. I did have a drill but it was a 1950s black and decker wired one that was on its last legs. It took me about two / three years before I got my first brand new drill and it was wired because it was cheap. Wired drills are cheaper, last longer - they are less convenient but at least they get the job done. Then it took me about five years later before I got a good cordless one for about $200. Then it took me about ten years later when I got a lithium battery powered Dewalt impact driver and drill set and its all I ever use now.

You can start off with a cheap battery powered drill but honestly, I’d just wait until you can afford a $200-$300 impact/drill set (they usually go on sale at some point) and that set will last you years or decades of use. If you buy a cheap one (like I did), the battery will die prematurely in a year and you’ll end up buying another one … do this three or four times over four years and the cost would have been saved if you had just bought one good powered drill to begin with.

Ask me how I know because the first powered drills I bought were cheap $100 specials - they were good but the batteries never last … even just sitting eventually just drains the batteries and slowly kills them.

It was good advice about 20 years ago … hell, I remember furnishing my first home with a used mattress back then. I remember I had to daily take it out and place in the sun and wind for a week every day, flipping it every few hours … to get rid of the horrible cigarette smell from someone who was a chain smoker!

It’s not a good idea any more because of the danger of bed bugs.

I would rather sleep on the floor or keep your present arrangement than take the risk of buying a used mattress.

The biggest risk of a used mattress is in carrying bed bugs which is everywhere now, more so in the past decade because they outlawed toxic insecticides that kept them in control in the past. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing they no longer allow DDT but it meant a resurgence of bed bugs.

Bed bugs are not to be taken lightly as it will cost you a lot of money time and agony if you ever get infested with them. You basically have to shut your life down for about a month to get rid of them and even then there’s still a chance you won’t get rid of them.

Mmmmm … spackle … delicious spackle

Get a small tool box and start collecting tools inside it.

Basics to start with are:

• hammer
• screwdrivers (get the three major ones - flat, Philips (cross) and Robertson (square))
• screwdriver with multiple replaceable heads (get one with as many heads as you can)
• pliers (buy a set of at least three types) (also make sure at least one of these has a wire cutter)
• vice grips
• Allen key set (metric and imperial)
• adjustable wrench
• exacto knife (with replaceable blade)
• crow bar (at least 12" long but bigger is better) (don’t get smaller because you can use the flat screwdriver for anything smaller … a good size piece of iron is good for lots of uses)

To me this would be a good start. This is basically what I started with about 30 years ago and now I have a garage full of tools to literally build a house.

Every time you have something to fix or repair, use your kit and make sure to put everything back. And often you may need a special tool to get your job done, if you can afford it buy it and add it to your kit. The cost of the new tool will repay itself as you use it again later.

And if you are not mechanically inclined than don’t feel a need to grow the kit either. These basics will help with most situations.

I’m not a young person and I’m in the same boat

I think Rocket has a problem

As an Indigenous Canadian … when someone asks me where something, someone, some town, some location, the sun or a celestial object is located … I turn my head and point with my lips.

And my distance measurements are usually answered first by asking ‘why?’ … and if they give an acceptable response, I’ll tell them the distance is either … ‘not far’ … ‘far’ … or ‘very far’

It’s to the point right now that a young person 20 years of age could spend a decade just watching all the old classics from the past 80 years to enjoy great films. If they stopped making movies tomorrow, there’s more than enough content now for people to watch.

My wife wants to keep watching the latest stuff but if it were up to me, I’d just take the time to watch at least all of the AFI top 100 films… last I checked I think I’ve only seen about 30 of them and I thought I watched a lot of films. My last rough count of watched films that I could list was over 1,500 films. And I still have a waiting list of hundreds more I want to see.

I’m a Trek fan and I thought I watched lots but I’ve only seen about half of all the TV series and most of the films.

That’s also not counting all the other TV series I’d like to see from the past … MASH, All In The Family, Adam’s Family, The original Batman series, The Munsters, X Files, Walking Dead, Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica, Twilight Zone, The Office … and on and on

If my spouse wasn’t so stuck in watching the latest stuff I’d probably be happy just spending my time catching up on everything I wasn’t able to see for the past 30-40 years.

I’m indigenous Canadian, brown skinned long haired big tall dark 100% Ojibway Cree on both sides of my family from northern Ontario.

Unless you are white Caucasian, dealing with law enforcement is always a risk. As a teen and young man, I was always a suspect every time I dealt with the police, a criminal that had to prove on my own that I wasn’t. And I was one of the lucky ones because I had a lot of older family look out for me. So many of my friends who didn’t have the same protection just ended up miserable as they got trapped inside the system. They grew up being treated like criminals that no one was surprised that they became criminals.

There are non-profits around every community and city and settlement pretty much throughout the world … they’re called libraries that house plain old paper books that are more or less free to read for anyone interested.

Most of the useful, relevant, education, informative and useful content we need as individuals is already freely available in open source books and reading material in license free ebooks and websites - the internet archive has a ton of content - wikipedia is also a great resource and if it doesn’t have the relevant or objective information you want, it is usually a starting point for the reader to find more.

The majority of the rest of the internet … I’d say about 80% to 90% of it is just useless mindless repeated, rehashed, reposted content from what is already available in libraries … or it’s just useless entertainment nonsense to fill people’s time with bits of information to make us laugh, smile or worry.

What doctor has time to do that? I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything.

The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job. If no one is there to push things along, no one is going to magically appear to help you … that is a fantasy that seldom and rarely happens, even in our publicly funded system.

You or someone who is capable should advocate for you every step of the way, otherwise you will just get lost and forgotten in the system … whether you are in the US or Canada.

If I’m just being asked to be born in a randomized way in a randomized location to a randomized family in randomized situations … then no

If I had a choice of where, when and what circumstances I would like to be born in? … then yes I would like those odds better and would like to be born.

In international political language it’s called plausible deniability … they want to give advice direction support or even supplies to guide and show you how to do something and even point you the way, but if you get caught or get in trouble … they throw up their hands “I don’t know this guy, never heard of him and what he did was terrible, what’s wrong with people that they’re driven to do these things?”

I do my best and buy about half my food from local farmers (and that isn’t easy in northern Ontario, especially during winter) … a bit expensive, but so is buying from the grocery store too, so it works out.

If corporations can convince people that Coke is better than Pepsi … or vice versa … then it will just take time to make people forget about all this. They can market and promote any idea … just some ideas are more expensive to promote than others … and it will take them a lot of time and effort to spin this story in their favour … but eventually, they always do.

I don’t like to admit that people are complacent … but hell, we’ve all got a great track record for it … I hope not this time, but I’ve been disappointed far too many times before.