Enjoy this random picture of Miami Beach on a winter's day. Such pictures are becoming increasingly rare as the beach front gets crowded out by weirdos. Try Fort Lauderdale if you want to see the nice ones. And even then leave it until Spring Break. Or there can be a lot of hippos and beached whales.
Miami, Florida, 7:30 a.m. JZ lent me a drill, so I got hours done before it went over to pick up Frank at 10:30 a.m.. I got less than 30 minutes reading done, a book about Red Army World War II uniforms. I read everything else I've got several times. Got to do a swap meet soon.
It was 12 hours for me,
The case is heavy, over 150 pounds. We hit a snag in planning. Somehow 8-1/2 inch squares of solid material can be squeezed into 8 inches, and we didn't know until we did so. We suspect it has something to do with being able to roll between each other, where we had planned on perfect squares. Roll internally I mean, you got to take a look.
[Author's note: this paragraph makes more sense once you read the explanation below.]
There was one last part of the work where we had to lie on our backs on the floor and drill upwards. We didn't tell anyone about this, but just as we were about to, in comes Rob and breaks a glass ashtray. Perfect timing and the perfect spot to cause the maximum inconvenience. Happy birthday, to me this week.
This is one of the first mentions of JZ, there's a note here that his father is a doctor and his stepmother's name is Mary Jo. JZ and I have nothing in common except we get along fine. All his siblings are doctors and stockbrokers and JZ has been kicked out of the finest colleges in this land. We went to the Broward County fair last year to pick up women, but there weren't any. I was at their family place in Coral Gables for Christmas 2000.
Frank Bytheway is a pool filter technician and my partner on Project 21. One of his ancestors is found in an English alleyway with amnesia. So the constables call him John by the wayside. I met Frank at 642 Ocean Towers II on Key Biscayne. That's the condo they had to rebuild, because a mysterious fire had burned all the wooden stays before the concreted cured. He's learned a lot from the project, which was one of its basic incentives, (I don't want any more management experience), but he's far from being able to function independently except that a subsistence level. He gets a generous 30% of the project.
The referral to Rob screwing us around is a symptom. The irony was that I knew somebody was going to do it. This prediction was written down in several places, and dozens of unrelated parties knew about this prediction, right down the profiling, the person and the changes in that person's behavior that would cause the problems and delays. I'm referring to how whenever you try to get something done, some deadbeat loser will come along and try to trip you up.
I actually predicted it so accurately that there's a passage that said, “The least damaging part of this prediction is that it will be a natural born loser, not someone we know, but somebody who knows us through somebody we already associate with. They will start chipping at the edges, pretending they are only curious and interested, but building up a subliminal inventory of attack. It will be subconscious to the point of innocence, and since... nonetheless with the single-minded purpose of causing us the worst trouble”. We just didn't know it was going to be Rob.
Changes in behavior? Easy, this was the first time he'd ever been over on the weekend when Jamie wasn't home. Rob normally sits outside, but today he sat in a chair exactly where it was most inconvenient for Frank and I. We counted that we had to step back and let him into the kitchen 21 times before we quit at 8 PM. He "accidentally" kicked our power cord out twice and threw the door open during the windiest part of the day coating our $500 acrylic sheets with floor dust.
This behavior got progressively worse, until finally I had to move out just to complete the project.
You know, to this day, some people still have trouble understanding why am so secretive about my projects and what I do. It's because those people are unmitigated assholes who desperately want to stick their nose in other people's business. Geez, do I have to teach you everything?
