Thanksgiving 2018 Week

Jimbaux wants to be the magazine she bases life on.

After the intense week that I had the week before Thanksgiving, I had another eventful and memorable week of Thanksgiving.

Wait, don’t I say stuff like that often?  I wonder if it is a function of the “hypersensitivity to experience” that is a hallmark of high-functioning autism, and I think that that explains why jobs and careers initially exhilarate me before boring me.

Oh, and have I ever mentioned that I just love Seether?

Monday The 19th

We start the week in Schriever, where a westbound BNSF Railway unit windmill parts train was parked – apparently crewless – on the siding.

That pond is a leftover borrow pit from the days of steam locomotives.

Schriever is 55 railroad miles west of the beginning of what started in Algiers as the New Orleans, Opelousas & Great Western Railroad.  Construction of the last few miles before reaching Schriever was quite arduous, and the entire affair, linking the Houma-Thibodaux area to the rest of civilization, was a major local affair.  The section of the railroad between the Lafourche Crossing and Schriever, about five miles, is the only section of the railroad between New Orleans and Lafayette – and maybe even Houston – that doesn’t have a highway or even a public road of any quality paralleling it!

Two branchlines were built off of the mainline in Schriever.  One was the Houma Branch, abandoned in about 1990, on whose stub centerbeam flatcars are still unloaded to this day, as I photographed on Election Day.  The other, actually starting about a mile to the east at the eastern end of the Schriever siding, was my beloved Napoleonville Branch, having been removed in April 1998.

Those are windmill nacelles, and I find these windmill parts trains interesting.

Like so many places, Schriever ain’t what it once was.

Tuesday The 20th

Tuesday was . . . . weird.

With the factory giving my enslaved self the “week off,” I took the occasion to bring the truck into the shop for some needed servicing, including an oil and filter change, a tire rotation, a front-end alignment, and, unscheduled, a brake replacement.  Figuring, even before I knew about the brakes, that this would take plenty of time, I arranged some hangout time with a friend who met me at the coffee shop next door; it was a good conversation.

After she left, I got caught up on a few more chapters (or maybe it was one more chapter) of Progress And Poverty, which you must read, which you can get for free and with free shipping.

We absolutely need land-value taxation, replacing other forms of taxation, in order to live up to our stated ideals.

We are owned by landowners; we landless persons are slaves.

We need to end this injustice; we need unconditional basic income, and we needed it yesterday.

God did not make the Earth for only certain persons at the forced exclusion of others; we should not have to pay a few persons who did not create the Earth for the right to exist on it.

There are no political rights without economic rights, and there are no economic rights without political rights.

https://www.facebook.com/basicincomequotes/videos/745036492540176/

 

As the repairs took longer, I ended up walking over to the Applebee’s for lunch.

I like the fish and chips there, and it’s the only time that I ever eat at Applebee’s.

Back at the shop, I noticed some news about someone whom I briefly knew.

I don’t want to talk about it, as it will reveal too much about how I know her, but I think that wage slavery, of which Henry George was discussing on the pages of his book that you just saw, played a role in the tragedy for which she is going to jail.

I decided to just take a walk through Fats City.

It was a decent way to pass the time.

These are all cellular telephone pictures, hence the poor quality.

I then passed by Lakeside Camera and decided to go inside, which was a good chance to look for a lens hood for my Canon 70-200mm/f2.8 lens.  The place had no such thing in stock, I didn’t want to ask to order something as trivial as that, and I’ll just keep using the tape on the hood that I still have.

While I was at it, I asked if there were any 17-40mm/f4 lenses in stock.  There weren’t.

Yeah, no thanks.  Also, I can’t really justify spending about $700 on a lens now anyway, and not only because I don’t take pictures as much as I once did.

It’s just that I do really miss my 17-40mm/f4 lens, which went missing – stolen, I assume – in Maryland in 2011.  It was a great lens, and the 16-85mm/f3.5-5.6 IS lens that I have as a replacement just is not, in my estimation, as cool.

I guess that in some ways, what has happened to this place, a once-happening camera store where I got my first SLR camera in 2011 (by which time digital photography had almost made it obsolete), a result of how the economy has changed due to digitization, is sad, but I guess that that is progress.

It was when I got home that night that I discovered something that got me hot and bothered, got me emboldened.  I wrote last week about how I learned last week of a door in the world of romance closing on me; well, I learned tonight (Tuesday) who that door is!  Well, now I know what to do!

And I am better than he is!

https://www.facebook.com/TheGiftOfTrees/posts/1903797293079660

 

And it weirds me out to hear myself say that, because I have never been a competitive person in that traditional sense, only competitive with my former self, my self of yesterday.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2054621047928436&id=145765538814006

 

Regardless, I need to tell her how I really feel about her.  I never have actually told her, because there was always some wall that was separating us, a different wall at different times.

https://www.facebook.com/TheGiftOfTrees/posts/1909042505888472

 

Telling her how I feel about her has practically no chance of leading to any reunion, but at least it would mean that I would finally stop carrying this heavy weight around.

Wednesday The 21st

I had thought about attempting to chase the Chip Local – I still call it that, even though Chip retired more than six years ago – to Morgan City on Wednesday, but that ended up not happening, for reasons that I don’t remember, but I was super busy doing an enormous amount of work on my week away from the terrible factory.

Thursday The 22nd

I met with family on Thanksgiving Day.  I had planned to hit the gym that morning, but that didn’t happen; I was too busy working on Jimbaux’s Journal!

Friday The 23rd

Photographically speaking, the week ended well.  I almost should make what I present below into a separate post, but it’s too late for that now.

We start in Abbeville at the rice mill.

Supposedly, the place almost closed within the last year, but a decision was made to keep it open at least for another season.

‘Twas good to see five cars spotted at the mill for rice loading.

So long, Abbeville; I guess that I will be back for Christmas.

I was hoping to see a train on the Abbeville Branch, and I knew that that was highly unlikely; I didn’t have time to mess around, as I had to get back home so that I could do plenty of prep work for showing back up at the factory on Monday, and then I stumbled upon this.

The train was parked just north of US Highway 90, and, yes, that’s either the last or one of the last two CF7s still on the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s roster.

So, my guess is that the railroad served the mill on Wednesday, got the train almost all the way back to the terminal in New Iberia, and just tied the train down here due to hitting the hours-of-service limit.

Seeing the 1500, which the childhood Jim saw pulling trains on the Napoleonville Branch – or, as it was called by then, the Supreme Branch – more than a quarter of a century ago, on this train really touched me, and really made me sad that I wasn’t able to see and chase this train out on its run on the line.  In the five times that I have photographed a moving train on the branch to the rice mill (I am not counting that pipe train to the Pesson Spur that I photographed right around here in 2003), not one of the times did a CF7 do the honors.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a crew arrived shortly thereafter to move this thing into town, but I didn’t have time to stick around or to even investigate, and, since the shot opportunities on the short remainder of its path into town aren’t that great, chasing the train from this spot wouldn’t be a great use of my time anyway.

About 75 miles later, however, I did actually make one diversion.  In keeping with the theme of the Napoleonville Branch, I stopped on the western side of Thibodaux at old Lafourche Sugars, one of 11 remaining raw sugar factories in southern Louisiana.

In the middle of the 19th Century, there were more than 1,500 raw sugar factories in southern Louisiana!  This is an excellent argument for unconditional basic income; we are producing more raw sugar now, with only 11 mills, than we did in 1850 with more than 1,500 miles, which means way less labor input, and, yet, we live in a country in which tens of thousands of farmers every year go broke not because they can’t grow crops but because they can’t sell what they grow!

all while millions of Americans struggle with food insecurity!

and while there is an epidemic of suicide among farmers!

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2050282225028985&id=145765538814006

 

HELLO!  Wake the hell up, people!  The answer(s) to this problem are staring at you right in your face!

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2010002849056923&id=145765538814006

 

Get over yourselves, save your posterity, and demand unconditional basic income now!

On a field trip in elementary school, I got to tour the inside of this place.

I had to make another ‘diversion,’ to the farm to pick some oranges, as I needed to stock up for my next few weeks in Whoadieville.

I will be back here around Christmas to pick a bunch more of these things, provided that other family members don’t get to them first!

I wish that I had my own orange farm, and I wish that I could survive doing just that.

I might be able to do that if I lived in the kind of society that Henry George envisioned, but, sadly, the land has been taken, the owners have not paid for it, and the rest of us are slaves, without compensation for what has been taken from us.

I guess that that’s all for now.  Happy Thanksgiving, and I may pop back up around Christmas, but, until then, I have some truly grueling weeks at the factory.

Peace.

 

Jim