By 11:00 A.M. I’m exhausted. I did get all the last traces of valuable gear, including the hot water tank, which you see in the Taurus. There is a truck driving around scrounging any thing not nailed down. I should sell them my old Florida room. Now I can focus on this place and seeing if I can make the new Florida room into something useful. Of course, then that would make it a Texas room, wouldn’t it?
I mentioned to Fred the supply of solid core exterior doors at Home Depot for $129. He needs to install a new entrance to his laundry room and was expecting to pay twice that. Maybe I can get some experience helping him install that, since I have zero training on how to do it right. Marion called and they may be into their new place on the 18th. This is not the original place she wanted, but it has a finished basement for a total of 13 rooms. She got some concessions out of the seller, including paying for new carpet and a year on all the appliances. Hey, Marion, that’s five more rooms than we got! I didn’t know she was a baseball fan. We’ve never had any reason to talk about sports in over twenty-five years, it seems. Her favorite team is the Toronto Blue Jays, which apparently is the only professional baseball team in Canada.
Then she mentioned the finances of sports, which is something I understand. It seems these Blue Jays are not getting the same press coverage as American teams. This causes a vicious circle because their players are not idolized and the team cannot attract top league players. Many a business I’ve seen fail over the same reason, so now I’ll keep any eye on these Blue Jays. Seein’s how Marion likes them and all, if things go really bad, they can borrow my station wagon.
The Fender guitar is back here. Will never caught the music bug. I explained to him there is no cause for discouragement. He has not yet seen that act that inspires him. Or met a groupie that makes all other women seem like fake cartoons. If he had, he would have purchased a better instrument by now. While we were talking, somebody played “Buffalo soldier” in the background.
So I read up on the topic. These blacks were called Buffalo soldiers because of a fur coat they often wore. If they did such a grand job of taming the west, where were the records of their battles? Where were their campaigns? After an hour, I could only find 5,000 soldiers total, of whom 2,000 were black. That means fewer men than used as extras in the John Wayne movies.
[Author’s note: I am writing specifically about the Apache Wars near the Mexican border, not the entire American frontier.]
There are plenty of pictures of 50 to 60 cavalrymen at a time, but on the facing pages the largest group of Apaches I could find in one picture was 23. Maybe 5,000 soldiers is not that many, but how many Apaches were there against these squadrons? I think I can now explain the lack of pitched battles. There was no enemy army. The total headcount of Apaches was thirty-eight, including Goyathlay.
This is starting to look like a house. The bad news is that the air conditioning on full blast cannot keep up during a heat wave. With additional fans you still have to stay in cutoffs. I think Mila may work in a bakery, or at least a shop that makes pies. She bribes me with strawberry cheesecake. Ah, but she has still not passed the Pudding-Tat test. I’ve got my video editing system set up again. Only do discover they are pressing some new kind of disk information on ordinary DVDs, it seems like a higher density dual layer. No matter, I’ll figure it out.
I also cut the first slab of ceiling insulation, although I have not glued anything in place. The directions are so confusing I took a panel over to Eric’s and between us we could not make sense of it. So I decided to just go ahead; I’ve got a 50% chance of getting it right. The foil side is going toward the part I want to stay cool. Eric is fascinated by the technology, pointing out that Marisa had never used the Florida room because of the heat. When I held the first panel in place for a fitting, there was an immediate difference. Merely holding it overhead blocks the radiant energy from the metal roof.
The panels themselves have certain rigidity but no structural strength. Since the room is exactly rectangular, I may just put a couple of rails along the existing walls and hang them in place without any glue. All I would need is, aha, some duct tape. This would also create a small dead air space and has the advantage of being a reversible process. Hey, I just figured out how to make a duct for Mila’s A/C with said materials. The position of her room means that only outside wall faces south, exactly where you do not want to put an A/C unit. She may have no choice but to leave her A/C on even while away.
Eric and I inspected the garden in mid-afternoon. Yep, somebody has to go in there and cut away that undergrowth. Don’t look at me, I can’t tell weeds from plants. Eric showed me some branches over an inch in diameter that weren’t there last year. I see some of the saplings have grown right through two layers of trellis.
Later, to relax I was trying to memorize a tricky beat on the bass when Mila walked in and said she knew that song. She had never played guitar, so I thought, give it a shot. Do this, do that. Folks, we may have a naturally talented person on our hands. Within ten minutes we were playing Yoakum, Cash and Sinatra. She still has to build up her callouses and wrists but she took to it instantly, almost knowing exactly where to stop and start. Will is never getting that guitar back now. She gets thrown off the minute I begin to play but I’ve assured her that is fixed by practice. I’ve seen this before and she could be on stage in a matter of weeks.
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