This is JZ in an Immokalee liquor store. Notice the home-made 2x4 shelving. Too bad you can’t see the prices are also correspondingly low, around 2/3 of regular according to JP. He has his choice “Canadian Mist” rotgut, in the plastic bottle. This is a photo from the future, next Sunday actually. It is to spark your interest in a trip we are about to make.
I don’t pretend to follow politics, but I know when the state becomes too powerful. The talk is how the Feds strong-armed a 74 year old grandmother at the airport, and when she pushed back, she spent the night in jail. Charged with felony assault on an “officer”. How sick is that? I believe all laws giving favored protection to anyone should be abolished. Federal agents should have no more “protection” than anyone else. This whole airport security thing is a crock anyway. Fred called me in to the office early, seems all the people who were going to help him out today never showed. I knew there was no way he was going to the doctor and back in an hour, so I took along all my work for the day. Sure enough, he made it back just before closing. This gave me time to go fact-finding on Corkscrew, Florida. The official designation is “rural community”. That is practically the only information on the place, as the web site is dominated by a nearby bird sanctuary of the same name.
I cannot find any evidence of buildings even from 1,000 feet altitude. The lenses don’t go any lower, what a crappy space program we got for all that money. Yet there is mention of a “general store” on the road to Immokalee. Of course, all this means we have to mount an expedition into the very heart of uncharted territory. All that Brit stuff, but I mean bring back souvenirs, not take wives from the natives. Then, it depends on what the women look like, doesn’t it?
My quick phone call to the cardiologist confirms I need blood work. What is that? Seriously, I don’t know, I’ve never had a lifetime of Dr. Kildare and General Hospital, and it is not like I’ve ever been dreadfully ill for any length of time. I’m very weak from whatever I’ve got, so I’ll be going in next week. I just know they will mention cholesterol; they always do when you are over 30. Today, I had six tiny meatballs, and my Spanish olives were stuffed with anchovy. No other sources of cholesterol. But you watch, that will be on the list. Pardon me, I also had a spinach and feta cheese stuffed pretzel. Cheese is a source. But it is not like I’m scarfing down a triple pizza four nights a week.
An odd discovery. Office Max cannot use their own inventory database to cross-reference manufacturer’s product codes. Not yet admitting defeat, I cannot find a cartridge for my beautiful Minolta laser printer. Nor is it even in the store catalog. Wouldn’t you know it, something that works well is obsolete. The only defect I logged is that it only has one flashing light for all error conditions. It considers no toner to be an error condition. Took me an hour to figure out what was going on.
Wallace has been in touch and will be flying down with the dog, Millie. I will resist the urge to call her Millipede. The flight is 11 hours, it seems to me it used to be just over 8 hours in my day. I flew over Miami roughly 30 times before I ever lived there. Good, he will be in the new place while I finish moving things. I’ve pretty much decided to abandon all the junk here. I do have a ton of office supplies. Which brings me to another crossroads. Do I switch to Apple?
When I look at the piles of gear I’ve accumulated to keep a simple computer going, I have to wonder if it is worth it. I’m not hard on equipment yet I’ve had five major hard disk crashes in the past eight years. I have to keep two drives on the shelf just in case. Sure, that is pure envy when I look at the clean desks of people who own Macs. True, there is a lot more software for Windows, but how much of it do I ever use? And how much of that ever works right all the time?
I priced out DVD players for an hour. They seem to be going up in price, even the junk like Coby. They are now 2/3 the size of a laptop but should be, I think, in the $50 range by now. It is closer to $200. I can’t really afford anything right now, but optimism says I can at least window shop.
Last, I stopped for coffee at the Barn, and read an article on Idi Amin. When he kicked out all the Asians (that means Pakistanis), he turned their businesses over to his henchmen. They started selling expensive imported shirts based on the collar size. They were so uneducated, they thought these were the price tags. In America, we don’t do that. We let the henchmen pick on senior citizens. Now don’t say anything or your skull gets cracked. I mean, it wasn’t your grandmother and besides she should have let them strip search her, right? She had no legal right to protect herself from the assault, right? The Federal agent was just doing his job, right again? Don’t you get tired of being right all the time?
