Some good friends of mine are in New York on a little get away vacation, they are a younger couple and have a young toddler that will turn two shortly. This trip is for the parents only; the little darling is staying with Grandma & Pappa, where she is more than comfortable. The highlight of the trip was to go visit the Statue of Liberty, they flew out of Texas on Friday afternoon and will be in New York for five days. Needless to say, my friends are not happy right now with the US Federal government; long lines at the airport TSA security check almost caused them to miss their flight.
Their plan for Saturday was to go to Ellis Island and tour the statue except there was just one slight problem, the statue is under the control of the fed’s and the parks employees are “non-essential” so the word I got from them was the statue was closed, and will not re-open until the government shutdown is ended. Talk about bad luck, they had been planning this trip for quite a while, and didn’t even have a clue that this could happen.
I may have to suggest that they send the elected officials from Texas that are a part of this government shutdown a bill for ruining their vacation. Those same elected officials have funds to pay off the women, who have claimed sexual misconduct against them, I’m sure they can find some cash to make my friends whole on their loss. The bill will be nowhere near the $67,000 one elected Texas official paid to keep quiet one of his women accusers.
Enough with politics, I reluctantly talk politics every now and then, but it isn’t my favorite subject by any means. When I do talk politics, you will find me on the side of Texas becoming its own independent nation again, abolishing codes and statutes and returning common law as the law of the land. I really think that those things scare people, Americans talk about freedom & liberty but we have never in our lives ever experienced it, we just continue to live the lie and tell ourselves everything is okay.
How many of you have checked out the Steem Block Explorer website? Seriously, what are you waiting on?
The little fury guy named 
Every time I come across something new like this I generally find a couple things that I know nothing about, this creation is no exception in that regard. I see that I have 622,800 VESTS, what in the hell is a VEST? I know someone of you can explain it to me so fire away, I am sure curious about that, I have no idea what it is.
Another thing that I do know just a smidgen about is the witness program, but at the very bottom of the page it has my list of witnesses that I voted for. The thing about that witness deal is that when I signed up on steemit part of the signup process was to vote for witnesses. I had no idea about who I was voting for or what their position was on anything as it related to the block chain and steemit. Does anyone know how often you can vote or can I go back and change my votes? You people are a lot smarter than me when it comes to this kind of stuff so let me know. I don’t want to have to spend hours and hours doing research when you are sitting there with the answers.
There are quite a bunch of features that I like, it gives you a real time look at what your voting power is and it is displayed in % format, it also tells you what your full upVote is worth at the current %, so right now I’m at 98.35% and my vote is worth $0.12, it also lets me know that in 2 hours I’ll be at 100% strength if I don’t do anymore voting between now and the 2 hours. Yes, that will be hard for me to do, you know me well.
I’ve learned that if I space my votes out my power stays up pretty well, I have also learned that if I wait and upvote right before I call it a night and head for bed, that six or seven hours used as recovery time is well spent, I haven’t mastered voting in my sleep yet.
Another thing I wasn’t aware of is that there are some different prices for steem. I guess there is an open market price, and then there is a price called internal market price. The spread between those two prices is huge, right now the spread between them is about $4.20 , I don’t know all the details of this either but my guess is if you earn your steem & SBD, you can convert it in the internal market at a lower cost than in the free market. Please remember, I am not a crypto guy, so if you know this subject speak up and set the record straight for me please.
That last part about every word and transaction was what attracted me to steemit, permanent record of everything locked in for eternity, so keep that in mind when you go to blast some idiot you have had disagreement with, the FBI and CIA along with every other alphabet soup agency is aware of this place, no way to really hide in here or change your story after seven days is my understanding.
