One year ago today: May 5, 2016, unconditional is a condition . . .
Five years ago today: May 5, 2012, advice to matchmakers.
Nine years ago today: May 5, 2008, how wars get started?
Random years ago today: May 5, 2015, $175 per hour.
It’s finally raining, what a, um, great opportunity to spend time in my nice new work shed. Here’s a system I found interesting since it is apparently illegal in Florida to cool your house with underground water. This uses an underground pipe through the cool soil. There is a “solar chimney” on the roof, painted black. Convection causes suction that draws air through the buried pipe soil up into the house interior. At five feet underground, the soil stays at a constant temperature year round, so potentially it could heat the house a bit in the winter.
The article does the math to show that length of pipe touches 50 square feet of soil. It cautions that even a small room can draw enough air to heat the soil, so install some kind of shut off valve. What an interesting concept, and the sandy soil over at the shed is very easy to dig five feet down. I don’t know about tree roots, but the location is handy.
Tell you what. Without any commitment, I’ll take the measurements in the garden and price out the PVC. The work would then be 100% grunt labor. Like plumbing, and I could probably use some experience at that. I mean, what if I find out a ten foot piece of PVC is only twenty bucks or something. Compare that to air conditioning the shed. Besides, if the air really is cool, then I could assist it with a fan. I never skimp on fans.
I reposted my ad for a guitar player, once again stating that lead players need not apply. I got an instant response from one who wanted to know “what I meant by that”. So I told him and he was pissed but he agreed with me. Even if he could play exactly what I wanted, he was a lead player and I could never trust him to show up for the next gig. He thought about it, said, “You’re right.” And dropped off.
Then I found some PVC pipe for only $11.25 for ten feet. It says sewer pipe, but not “schedule 40” which was twice the price. But pipe is meant to go underground, right? I also downloaded the installation manual for the asphalt roofing. After reading it, I’ve decided attach some furring strips as cross-members. That was my big morning, how was yours? I’m going to tackle the screen door this afternoon, since it cooled off after the storm. I’m afraid until I actually find a real guitar player, this is about as exciting as life is going to get around here.
So I had an extra coffee and read the want ads. Kind of sad, the way so many women get with their wants when they have so little to offer for it. On occasion I’ll see one that sounds sincere, but to date they are always so far away. Ha, ha, I just got that. To date, they are too far away? What can I say, in Florida the available women over 40 are a little too available. So the screen door it is. I might go out tonight just for a change, and because I know there has been a lady asking around about me. Ah, small towns. She’s been asking why I’m never at the club on Friday and Saturday. Yes, this strikes me as odd because I usually go out on Saturday nights, but rarely the same place two weeks in a row. Maybe she’s just got terrible timing?
Dear reader, in case anyone has forgotten, I am not some desperate masher. I’ve got the gift of gab, I can sing and dance, I can get shacked up in my own house with a woman any time I want. The problem is not breaking the ice, nor fear of rejection, nor lack of incentive. I’ve got the money, the time, and the personality. My standards are quite normal, a good-looking gal with a little talent, a job, and her own car. I insist on no kids, but that’s hardly unreasonable if you plain don’t want them. I’m not looking too hard, too little, or in the wrong places, and the only people who would say that are born troublemakers.
The problem is finding a woman with a little personality who is easy on the eyes. That’s one nut I haven’t cracked. Me and fifty million other guys, but I remind you that a lot of this is due to a miscalculation I made when I was a teen. I figured as women get older, they wised up and would gravitate toward men of better quality than the ones they had before. See the logic? If a woman dumped some unemployed moron who did drugs and played pool, she would be smarter than to date another of the same. Life proved me completely wrong on that count, but on the other hand, the same logic made sure I went to school, stayed sober, made good money, and never picked up hookers.
It also produces the phenomenon of how I turn down more women than most guys. I know when something isn’t going to work and I don’t waste time on those who aren’t my type. Let me tell you about the last time I went out, roughly a week ago. The bar was empty so I began working the crossword puzzle with the barmaid, who is not my type either. By around some 100 lbs. Anyway, in walks this other lady dressed to the nines in the middle of the late afternoon. Instantly setting off all my alarm signals, she sits one chair away and starts going on about how smart I am. I agree, it was the New York Times puzzle. Gee, lady, thanks for telling me I'm smart, I had no idea.
She’s not contributing or joining in. It was like listening to Emilia go on about how exciting it was to be with me without ever reciprocating. Wow, wouldn’t we all like some dynamic personality to come along and provide our life’s entertainment? The lady must have said it around twenty times before I got up and moved to the far end of the bar where “the light was better”. In the end, I was right. The next guy that walked in bought her four doubles and hauled her out the door toward the barn. He even looked like a pool player.
Nashville, Tennessee.
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I see I bought the wrong type of roofing material. The directions, once I printed them up, say the slope should be 3” per foot, and it’s a twelve-foot shed. I’ve got more like 1/2” per foot. But I need that work shed, so onward we go. I’ve put more cash into that structure than the master bedroom. Mind you, the bedroom never had a tree fall on it. I finally took down the screen door and reinforced it. The thing never did fit right but that’s the way I build doors. I also fixed the shed door, all of this kept me busy for six hours. That, folks, is a very good sign.
That pumpkin plant in the back yard might be poison ivy. Something got my left shin. Just a surface nip, not a fang or insect bite. If so, that’s a first in years. That prompted me to move it inside where I fixed that corner where the drywall was bending a tad too much. This work vindicates my policy of installing “too many” electrical outlets. Inside the work shed, there are 24 outlets (that’s twelve duplex receptacles), since I don’t care for those 4-foot power bars.
I don’t like to admit it but usually wind up saying it anyway, even this light work tuckers me. So let me grab the tree-planting book and take a break. Turn on adultery radio and listen to music older than I am. And the libtard news, that’s always enough to make me want to get back to swinging a hammer. I’ll listen for the call sign and tell you what station it is, honestly, I don’t really know after all these months. But the liberals have me convinced you are “lucky enough to have a job that you can afford to pay taxes”. Codicil: if you can’t afford to pay them, the liberals will come put you in jail.
The nation needs a new set of privacy laws and better statues of limitation. I first mentioned the danger of misuse surrounding databases way back in the 70s. No names, but another acquaintance of mine just got a $3,000 tax bill for summer work he did on his neighbor’s farm when he was 18. That’s over 40 years ago. He says he only made $8,000 so most of the bill was fees and fines. This is total exploitation, this entering age-old paper records into a database and scanning the fields with penalty assessment in mind. While billionaire drug lords and corporate thieves walk free. Mr. Trump, curb your brood.
“I used to tell jokes about unemployed people
but none of them worked.”
Here’s a photo of that repaired drywall corner. Doesn’t look like much, does it? I assure you it was a bitch of a job. That drywall had to come down while I cut custom-sized furring strips . It’s done now and I deserve a break.
He was at the jam a week ago and said he would now be interested in seeing if we could work this thing, that he has an acoustic guitar, and has finally concluded that playing in any band is better than waiting for the ideal to come along. We’ve also talked a little music theory which he learned, but never saw anybody apply it the way I do, which doesn’t surprise me. Most musicians I know have an aversion to textbooks, research, and music they can’t play.
And I don’t play jazz, rap, broadway, or guitar ballads. There was one excellent band in the club, if you didn’t look close you’d think it was a backwoods Cajun band. Wrong, these are uptown boys and I know the guitar player’s daughter down in Miami. He’s the guy who walked into my show at Jimbos with Chas, the sax player, but he didn’t play. That night the rest of us brought down the house. That was Chas, his piano player, and myself, with Cowboy Mike making faces in the background. Well, I recognized him and was fronting the band tonight and what a show.
They play the role of old-boy musicians, but these guys are over the top. That drummer was from a reggae band in Ft. Lauderdale and the rest of the band was top-notch. Alas, they had one of those background bass players who was so subdued I didn’t notice him for the first hour. His notes blended so much with the keyboards I never saw him over in the corner.
The guitar player is a master at getting the right sounds out of his instrument without resorting to toys and pedals. I won’t name names, but he is that 80 year old black guy who wears Hawaiian shirts and wears straw hats. His daughter is the guitar player who used to come around my computer place back in Hollywood. Her and I almost started a band together so many times, but she was also an excellent singer and knew fifty places that would take her, so we never got around to rehearsing.
But the old guy, he’s in full agreement with what I think about the stand-up bass. See, talk to another pro instead of these indoctrinated Millennials and you’ll get the same story. The stand-up bass is over-rated, unexpressive, and plain boring after ten minutes. The only time I liked the stand-up was a band on the west coast called the “Nervous Fellows”. The guy didn’t so much play it as slap and kick it, and spin it around. Plus, he was a head-banger who wet his hair so it spun off drops like he was sweating. His bass playing was, however, as lackluster as the instrument.
ADDENDUM
Adultery radio is call sign WKFL 1170 AM, billing itself as “Kickin’ Country”, out of Bushnell and Cypress Gardens, in central Florida. I say what I do because every third song is about divorce or fooling around. I am not criticizing, I am merely observing.
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