Sounds Like Amnesty to Me

I don't know if all presidents have done it, but I read somewhere that there was some kind of amnesty program like that when Reagan was in office. I remember thinking at the time that it was a bad idea, but I must not have been too concerned about it because I soon forgot about it until years later when, like I said, I read about it somewhere. The reason I thought it was a bad idea was that it rewarded illegals while penalizing the guys who were trying to get into the country legally. Well, not exactly penalizing, but it sent the wrong message. Why bother with all the paperwork and waiting when you can just sneak in and, sooner of later, they will make you legal? I am a great believer in either enforcing a law or repealing it. When you have a law on the books that is not enforced it just breeds disrespect for the law in general. To my knowledge, this Mexican thing has never been enforced properly, so they might as well just open the gates and let everybody come and go as they please. To be fair, though, they ought to do the same for the Canadians.

I don't remember much about the Coal Age in Chicago, but I do remember that a lot of houses still had those coal chutes long afterwards. I don't think our house had one or, if it did, my dad got rid of it soon after we converted to fuel oil. Our fuel oil tank was in the back yard, up against the garage wall. My dad didn't like the looks of it, so he built a small shed to cover it up. After we converted to gas, we got rid of the tank, but not the shed. He later fenced that area in and made a dog pen out of it, cutting a dog sized hole in the shed to make it into a dog house. We had two big dogs at the time, and the shed was plenty big for both of them, but whichever dog got in there first wouldn't let the other dog in. So my dad divided the dog house in half with plywood and cut another doggie door on the other side. Soon after that, the weather got cold and both dogs started crowding in together on one side, and there were no more arguments about it.

Everything I know about creosote came from wood burning stoves, and it never occurred to me that coal furnaces would also produce it. They must have, though, because they had those chimney sweeps in Europe, with their tall hats and funny clothes. I saw one once peddling his ass down a street in Berlin. I thought that he was going to a costume party, but the other guys told me that he was a real chimney sweep. The uniform was a tradition with the trade, as was the bicycle he was riding with all his rods and brushes hooked up to it somehow. He seemed like a happy guy, smiling and waving back at all the passerby who cheerfully called out to him as he peddled along. The guys told me that the reason people were happy to see him was that, according to popular mythology, if you saw a chimney sweep in the morning, you would have good luck all day.

They still burned a lot of coal in Berlin when I was there, but it wasn't like the coal I've seen in the U.S. This stuff was somehow formed into uniform bricks that could be stacked up like regular building bricks. It must have been anthracite coal, because the chimneys in Berlin didn't make lot of smoke, and two bricks would heat the average apartment all night long. I understand that, during the Berlin Airlift, they actually flew that stuff in with all the other supplies after the Russians closed the border.

All our snow melted and I got up on the roof to clean our chimney yesterday. Winter weather is scheduled to return tonight, so I got it done just in time. Depending on how much snow we get, I may have to plow the driveway tomorrow. If not, I'm going deer hunting.