This is a picture of what the oncoming sidewalk looks like biking along a Florida street. Riding on the sidewalk? Nobody bikes on the road for the same reason you don’t walk out there—too dangerous and very light penalties for vehicular manslaughter. If it makes anyone feel better, you will notice the lack of pedestrians. The heat index is easily over 120 degrees out along the north side of the streets this time of year. This is looking directly westbound during the late afternoon. I dislike bicyclists who hog the road as much as anyone else, and I also am against the sealing off of public streets for private or special interest groups such as bicycle racing. You may see me on the main road at rush hour on occasion. I assure you, it is because I can’t find a way around it.
For fun today, I crawled under the trailer and cleaned out the debris from the wall. Then I leveled the floor. Listen, by Florida standards, this was an exciting summer day. I like hauling the wheelbarrow. It reminds me of working for a living. Work is what one does when one cannot think. Wallace and I also stacked some of those plastic trellis pieces under the building. The former owners were nuts about the things. Facts I didn’t know, like how blood pressure can give you a backache. One of my prescriptions contains a chemical to keep some kind of water balance. I missed taking my dose just once in three months because it was Sunday and woke up with terrible back pains. It turns out the chemical was originally developed for diabetics. Not taking the pill made my kidneys work harder. And my back hurt. See, I’m smarter already.
At the grocery store, they ran out of dimes. I traded in some rolls I had in the car and saw them do a curious thing. They weighed them on the grocery scale. Have you ever seen that before? They can tell if the coins are correct and complete.
The new timers at my Internet café are already paying off. One customer none of us ever trusted walked out when asked to pay in advance. Good riddance. Bob K. was in today with some new computer thing he’s hatching, so we hooked him up a printer. I told him of Wallace and my conversation about “lap dog” and “lab dog”, which for some reason slayed the guy. And he is not supposed to laugh like that, doctor’s orders.
I ran some extra virus checks, it really was a slow day. I will still have to connect another computer soon to cover my peak periods. One of my customers downloads porn and keeps lacing my equipment with the Infostealer Trojan. That is another virus that sails right through Symantec, Norton and TrendMicro. I may have to redo the computer.
Later in the day, Mila came back to get the last of her belongings and finally met Wallace. The two of them were instantly like old family friends and Wallace said later he was impressed. They spent a three quarters of an hour looking at pictures on his computer. She is sharing a smaller place with more people and those arrangements never last long. I have the feeling she will be back. Personally, I hope so because I like the gal more than I like having a huge spare room. Now so does Wallace. I told you so.
Talk about a feast tonight. I admit that in my entire life, I have never had a stove with a broiler or a broiler that worked. Nor, for unexplained reasons, do we have an ordinary frying pan around this joint. The stove here is a weird brand called “Roper” with no glass door on the oven. Still we managed to broil some perfect boneless spare ribs to go with our pasta and peas. It was actually a lot of fun, topped off by the after dinner crib game which I won. That is the third game in history I’ve beat Wallace. It is only a game, but I won, I won!
Later, I see that some of my customers have already found another way to cheat. They pay the $2 deposit, but when finished, walk out without telling anybody. By the time somebody notices, the timer has fun ten or fifteen minutes over but who can tell? The constraint in operation here is that I cannot make the system too complicated for the guys who run the place when I’m not there. I should be taking keys or a driver’s license as a deposit, but I think instead I’ll raise the deposit to $5. That way, I make money no matter what and the average person does not stay on a full hour.
