More events for those who like them. At 9:00 AM I was in the Sushi Thai restaurant, where I never went before because of the name. There simply could not be any authentic such places in this area because they could not compete with all the illegal Cuban restaurants. Sure enough, it used to be something like Ed’s Diner and that is all it is. I met with a new client who needs 20 hours work per week, mostly bookkeeping.
On the way, I noticed a trailer court that featured those ridiculously tiny prefabs for sale. To those honored few who to to read this journal before it was a blog, think of those tiny retirement boxes in Everglades City four or five years ago. Selling them as “retirement cabins” for $60,000 each. They are 8x20 feet, around the 2/3 the size of my kitchen and living room. You buy them to die in. It would have made sense if they were on private land, one thing there is plenty of on the Gulf [of Mexico] coast, but they were rental pads crammed 20 to an acre.
You can see three of them in this picture, but notice the size of the first one, roughly the equivalent of a large garden shed. People buy these to die in when they can’t afford a condo for the same purpose. There is no lifestyle, no amenities and two miles inland from the Atlantic, certainly no views or easy beach access. Even with a very tiny kitchenette, they have room for one small daybed. I could not get any closer because the security was watching me take the picture, and who wants to deal with those nine dollar an hour pricks. Next time I’ll get you some, for on the way out I noticed by standing on my bike pedals I could see over the security wall.
Back at the shop, I spent several hours examining my business card competition. The only thing close was a page for Kingston, Ontario, which I had trouble finding on the wall map. It is on the north east bank of Lake Ontario. Tell you what, let me get my compass and distance it from some place in Canada that I know where it is. There, Windsor, across from Detroit. Kingston is 375 miles from Windsor and 150 miles from Montreal. My God.
There is no headway against the Mozilla problems. I may have to ignore my preferred browser because it does not correctly interpret my CSS instructions. While I hope they break the MS monopoly, they had damn well better start cleaning up their act pronto. No excuse for incompatibility with the W3C standard on this one, guys. Firefox totally ignores the float commands. At least Mozilla could have made available a free list of fixes but not even that.
After work I shopped for a heavy duty bicycle tube. They cost a couple dollars more but there is hardly any comparison. The rubber is three times as thick. I got home before the afternoon rains and spent an hour on the bicycles. Three regular tubes with the same problem of pinhole leaks after a few days means patching is not an option. Give me a couple days to put the new tube through the paces.. I fixed JZs new Jamis Boss cruiser and took it out for a test run. This is the 21-speed missing the gear wire, so it defaults to the highest gear (smallest rear sprocket).
Wow, what a machine. I can barely manage 16.2 mph pedaling like a maniac but with virtually the same effort, I can easily hit 20.7 mph on that bike. JP is likely to regularly do better. Mind you, starting off is slightly worse, but that will be taken care of by the gears once we get the wire.. The bike is also very high, your head is close to 80” off the ground. Makes my one speed look like a toy. The gear skips a bit, but everything looks intact.
By nightfall, I called Marion. If the new contract works out, I’ll be out West for a week in November, probably the 16th through the 26th. I can’t find Wallace’s atlas, but by then Marion will be living around 56 miles from where I need to be. Yeah, that’s only a six hour bike ride, but Washington has at least two things Florida doesn’t. Hills, and winter. We spent an hour on the phone. Part of the convo was about how employers and other parties are now requiring that you pass a credit check. The credit binge in America is so bad they have derogatory terms for people who don’t borrow. Marion informs me I have a “ghost” credit rating,the kind kid who just got out of high school has, what you might term “Nothing bad yet”.
I did find out something new today. The average sales of a new book. The new contract involves keeping track of writer’s royalties for [translated] sales overseas. Come on, guess how many books you could expect to sell if you got published today. Three thousand. That is it folks. From what I’ve seen, your cut would be around $648. That explains the proliferation of short, simple books. Diets, how-to and astrology. Gotta pay the bills, you know.
[Author's note 2020: this is the first date I was able to edit after Google messed up the archive editing feature. Thank goodness I never trusted Google's auto-date feature and manually named every blog by the posting date instead of a catchy title.
True the tiny houses in Everglades city are 36% larger than my cabin--but they also cost 440% more.]
