Take a gander at this unusual pose. It sometimes takes a moment to realize what it is. Another classic, this is actually a tree in the local park. The photo is turned upside down. I thought from a distance it reminded me of a reclining lady in a green blouse.
I got JZ out of the hay at 8:45 a.m. That’s after just under and hour and a half to get over there. We tore his place apart but that document (the trailer title) never arrived. JZ has the double tasks of his job and taking care of his dad, so I can’t blame him for not calling me when it was overdue.This entailed another mad dash back to the title agency to find out what gives. They made a few phone calls and told me they would be sending a duplicate. You know, people in Florida don’t offer to help you out so quickly, so I suspect they forgot to order the original. Either way, the check is being readied, and I want a holiday.
The holiday I want is to go back to Texas for ten days. My budget says I can’t stay longer and even then, I’m considering riding the bus out there. My car gets 32 highway mph and it is a 3,218 mile round trip. A hundred gallons of gas these days costs $325. I’m doing the math for you. I don’t want to chance not going because every time I start a full time job, it puts that trip off at least another two years.
It is the same scenario as 2003 [the California trip], but half the distance. There are no Amtrak runs between Florida and the Midwest. You have to go to Chicago first. The train is $348 and the airfare is $322. Notice how everything is fine-tuned to the same price range? The train takes three or four days each way (although that would be an excellent trip) and the Dallas airport is 100 miles from where I need to go.
One of those Greyhound advance tickets could get me there and back for $148 and I like bus travel. You see a lot more because you are nearly fifteen feet off the roadway. I wish it wasn’t the dead of winter, since I’d love to take my mountain cruiser [bicycle]. As the area I’ll be visiting is only 18 square blocks, a bicycle would solve the local transportation problem. Downside – the bus trip takes 42 hours and that can be grueling.
This blog has been sold. That’s not exactly true but so what? Robert, the man I spoke with momentarily y’day has read a bit of the material. He basically says this blog does not fit into any know category (you already knew that) and it may represent a niche market. He went on to add that niche markets are the type that can do “exceedingly well these days”. Wouldn’t that be nice? The deal is he plugs the blog for three months, doing all the leg work but taking 100% of any ad revenue he generates. After that, I can decide to keep him on or not. (In the end, Robert was not up to the task.)
If a few of you out there are picking up that I am finally getting some facts and straight answers, yes, you got it. With my luck, I’ll get a writing contract the day after I take a full-time job. Still, I now know what books pay and that my blog is unique. It took eight weeks of daily effort to sift out this information and that explains why most people never do it. This doesn’t make me a writer, mind you. I’m just happy to be out there.
After closing time, I walked over to Lippmann Center. It is a club for seniors that one of my students kept inviting me to visit. So for the first time since I was twelve, I looked at stamp collections. They have a weekly show of coins and stamps. Coins I can understand. I don’t buy the theory that stamp collecting teaches you about places. The talk was all about quality and price, never about the event or person pictured on the stamp. What I did notice is that the stamps of even small, backward and bankrupt countries are of exceptionally high quality. Obviously stamp-making machines is a cornered market.
There was not much traffic in anything but American stamps. That is, the Nigerian display was a tad deserted. Except for American stamps, some of which had postmarks, all other stamps had to be in perfect condition. One of my childhood buddies, Charles Jeffrey, had a stamp collection, a boring hobby for a boring guy. He had these binders that had printed spaces for certain stamps and one was supposed to buy them and stick them there, not knowing that sticking stamps destroys their value. The stamp show does, I must say, have excellent free coffee.
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