The water tower in Hallandale, kitty-corner from the Friendly Inn. It is one of the places I checked for a gig. They really don’t have a stage there and you have to play outside on a kind of patio, next to the grill. When I first discovered the Friendly Inn, I thought it was the pumping station although it is a good distance from the tower. I glanced up through the palms and thought it was a nice Florida touch as we don’t have (or need) water towers out west.
That was Alain in the phone, I guess dad is not well again. I called to see if JP might be over there, as they are still renovating her kitchen. Major renovation, I mean, it has been months and they are still building the new cabinets. Myself, I can’t get by that long without cooking but then, I don’t work in a restaurant either. I brought up the topic of her fridge, and the scoop is that it is not working well enough to give it away. It poses a problem for this trailer, which I should discuss. Florida in the summertime. I’m staying inside noshing on frozen Jello, made with diet lemon-lime soda instead of water. There is 80% cloud cover so it is not anywhere near as hot as it could be this time of year. Comparing heat to cold is easy for me, I’ve lived in both. I know one thing for certain, that one cannot get most productive activities done in this life without both privacy and shirt-sleeve comfort. Even Pudding knows to follow me around, as I tend to air-condition the room I’ll be working in noticeably cooler than the others. (Pudding, the cameras reveal, is smarter than the average cat by quite a margin.)
The opposite situation is where heat is required for comfort. (Hey, I admit it was lack of privacy, not heat, that prevented me from writing sooner [in life] than I did.) Most people know that there are two basic options with heat or cold, but there is a third when it comes to heat. Explanation. In the cold you can heat your house or put on more clothes. In the heat, you can cool your house or take off more clothes. The parallel then stops because in the heat, you have another choice – increase the circulation with fans.
Fans do not cool down a room but are a third choice. Now, I mentioned comfort, and fans tend to blow papers around despite the best “vacuum” I can devise. What I mean is to position fans on both sides so that there is a lack of breeze right in the center, but good circulation. Lots of people wonder about this until they experience it. You are cooler than if you position the fans in a “wind tunnel”. Try it.
My choice is an AC unit or a fridge, in case you are wondering where this is leading. It is one or the other unless I disobey financial reason and invest more than is warranted on the trailer. Yet, the comfort factor is a determinant in my productivity, which is not at all the same as merely wanting to get cozy watching TV, nosiree. Since I am applying the surefootedness of my usual logic, is there a compromise? Possibly. Since this trailer gets swallowed by progress in ten months, I don’t have to buy quality, do I?
How about some el cheapo appliances that won’t last a year? Such things are easy to acquire in Florida. Just buy anything on sale. A hundred dollar AC and a hundred dollar fridge. Didn’t I see some remanufactured AC’s at Big Lots a week ago? I’m not dumb enough to buy a used AC but a hundred bucks on a fridge won’t bother me a bit. I’ll zip over there later today, it is only noon now. Moments later, the monsoon has arrived, so I’m back at the keyboard for a while.
While spending the next hour working on cloning a MAC address, I had the TV monitor scan the available channels endlessly. Something else that was endless was the advertising for college training. If that is a sign of the times, we are in deep trouble. I mean, exactly how many hundreds of thousands of chefs, radio broadcasters and belly dancers can be absorbed by what is left of the 1900’s American system? You cannot build a great economy selling each other news reports.
Later by early evening, I see that I may have given the wrong impression about writing long ago. I did write when I was younger, but none of it survived. Destruction of such things was a fact of life when I grew up, as in, “You wouldn’t let us read it so we burned it.” Everything I ever wrote prior to 1979 was destroyed. Mind you, since then the story is remarkably complete, if that’s any consolation.
Well past dark I worked on computers. I can actually field strip and reassemble one in an hour now. It is the installations that take time. Another first, I had a cable heat up and smoke red hot on the old HP. I also got Dickens computer ready to go except for his CD/DVD burners but as usual, despite the best precautions, I cannot get the sound card to work. It is much faster than the existing unit and has half again the RAM.
Then I installed another 40 GB disk drive on this unit. I like to keep certain files off the drive with the opsys. Well be danged if I can remember the DOS command to format in NTFS. (New Technology File System). The related problem is I cannot locate my XP manual. A $90 book that weighs twenty pounds does not just disappear. (XP can be used to format a disk without installing the software.)
