An early start to beat the heat. Pudding-Tat has made her first foray into the outside world. I got an armchair view how an adult cat explores a new environment. And totally new it was, she has never seen birds or lizards before. I’ve moved the patio furniture in. There is a new daily ritual called sweeping the leaves. Pudding-Tat ignores the birds although the louder ones startle her. She loves chasing the lizards but does not stand a chance unless she surprises one. I also found out JP’s cheap camera loses pictures when the batteries die. At least the Argus kept them for nearly a month.. Now that Spanish sumbitch broke into my old place around 8:30 last night. He correctly surmised I would have the alarm off between trips. He got my battery drill ($35) and my video monitor ($50). It’s unfortunate because I would have been long moved by now if my friends had shown up to help me move like they said they would.
In the new place, I’m discovering the things that only show up by living here. For example, the closet rods are too close to the wall and have to be moved forward three inches. The hot water tap on the clothes washer leaks when in use. The air condition in Mila’s room rattles when it starts. Nothing major. The clothes washer is twice the size I had expected, a bonus. I’ll go buy a new drill and a wheelbarrow. I could borrow, but a place this size tells me to go get my own. Notice the very un-Florida thinking process.
Speaking of Florida, there is a friend of Mila’s whom I won’t get along with. They work together and Mila brought her over for a few minutes y’day. The friend has that what I call “Immigrant Perception” of America. This is where they think we exist only by screwing each other out of money, and fancy themselves even better at it than we are. You want examples? Okay. When I say my friend didn’t show up, that is not an offer to hire your friend at $35 per hour. When I say I’m considering a big TV, that is not an offer to buy your old one for $400. You get the idea, but I’m also very good at cutting such conversations short. Hey, I’ve had the practice.
Here’s a test for you. There is another nationality that would argue the points above. I’ll give the clues, you see if you can pick the nationality. Clue 1: “Are you saying my friend isn’t worth the $35 per hour?” Clue 2: “Are you saying my old TV isn’t worth the $400?” That’s plenty, but here’s another in case you’re stumped. Clue 3: “What do you MEAN you don’t want to talk to me right now?”
The Home Depot tab ran up to $130, including the hedge trimmer for $30. The new battery drill was on sale but the wheelbarrow was $46, including $10 for “assembly”. They didn’t have any unassembled ones and they wouldn’t knock off the ten bucks if I took it apart, da bastawds! The other customers, but not the store manager, thought it an adequate wisecrack when I walked out the door that, “Guess I won’t be buying any refrigerators here.”
I must bring the fridge from the old place to store “long term” things, like soda. While the fridge here is new, it is a bad interior design that fills up too quickly. I need my soda because of the heat. I didn’t trim the hedge, I made it look as if somebody was going to finish trimming it, an old ploy. (I learned that trick reading “maskirovka” a term which applies to methods used by the Soviets during World War II that continually fooled the otherwise superior German intelligence as to what was really going on. The more your enemy thinks he knows, the more he thinks he is also right.)
Then I was back inside cooling off. I need something heavier duty to get the tree branches cut back. I cut the hedge just to four feet high and left the rest for dark. The trimmings are drying out in the wheelbarrow. You know, I don’t know if we’re allowed to throw those into the dumpster. Ah, the tribulations of home ownership.
In the pet door department we have a choice. The logical place is somewhere along the west wall into the patio area. Except for the steps outside the sliding glass door, the trailer is too high for the cat to get back in. The other doors lead to the street or the neighbor’s yard. Patio it is. There is no place to put a regular pet door. The alternative is a clear strip of panels that fits along the entire sliding door, top to bottom, with the pet door on the bottom panel. This confines the entire sliding door to a narrower opening. I don’t know about assembly—they don’t tell you about that until you get up to the cashier. But if you want a latch so you can still lock your patio door, they are “available”.
One has to be careful, however, this is still short-sighted Florida. For example, whoever put those stairs made them twice as big as needed, plainly forgetting that only one half of the glass opens. So they skimped and made it exactly as wide as the door instead of the usual few inches of overlap. Now every time you go through the door, you must be careful to step near the middle, which is not the center of the door that opens. No big deal, but just a warning that Florida is this type of nagging inefficiency a million times over. Each is trivial, but when you add ‘em up, you find out why winners are so far between in this area. By comparison, Wallace and I are paragons of organization, money, mobility, tools, experience, technology, logistics and good old “highway savvy”. The trade off is that the resulting door will be too narrow to move ordinary sized furniture through. (Fortunately, we have a second door.)
Later I made another run over to the old place and dismantled most of the salvageable parts. Upon closer inspection, I see the burglar first tried prying the latch, but when that failed, he simply broke one of the small jalousie screens, reached in and turned the deadbolt. I hope he isn’t dumb enough to try that a second time. Remember those nasty rat traps I wasn’t using? Next, for fun, I measured out the storage room and noticed a new 36x80” exterior door can easily be installed with three cuts and by building a cripple and header. Around an hour’s work to do it right. The existing door, just leave it where it is [it will be blocked off from the inside anyway].
For the record, 2x4” studs cost $2.58 each. Does that mean I used to pile $7,740 worth of lumber an hour myself working on the Montana green chain? Let me do some math here. If my hourly rate of pay when I was 20 had kept pace with the increase in prices, how much should I be making today at that job? Well, I knew they were selling the lumber for 54 times what they were paying me, so what is $7,740 divided by 54? Gee, they’d have to be paying me $143 per hour. However, that is the type of exploitation considered normal when I was 20. No wonder the hippy movement rejected such materialism, and I had a union job!
