A couple wants me to teach them the business of income tax forms. If they ask again, I may reconsider, but in reality they need experience, not education. Howard called, that’s professor Howard, whose IQ of roughly 2,000 inhibits his use of computer programs designed for dummies. He emailed all a photo of his new maid; I’ve presented that picture here. I think she has a pretty face.
That clunker of a computer Peggy gave me is now in operation and is a third smaller than the even older computer it replaced. It took three hours to get it working again for it had been used on some strange network that required hard drive partitions. The shop was full of crazies today, they just don’t want to hear anything about what they did wrong to get all those viruses. (We would rather not accept business from such sources but it provides a staple.) It was new to me, but Peggy’s computer had an on-board Ethernet adaptor failure and I had to replace it with a card. That adaptor is not normally a component that fails.We have two more bachelors, bringing the local candidates to over a dozen. Robert and Bill, both are my former students. The Cocaine Cowboy (John) is also back in the picture with a movie deal totaling several million bucks, but he is not a bachelor. I returned home just past dark to find Wallace has no appetite left whatsoever. We had a coffee each. Pudding-Tat has taken to sitting behind the glass door and staring down Millie-Belle. Are not female mammals supposed to naturally get along? I don’t mean at the phone company or anybody’s sisters, but just in general.
In the early evening, Peggy called. She says she is enthusiastic about my writing and has referred others to it. She talked about her daughter who lives in one of those states that begins with an “M”. Say, that reminds me, the new owner at the thrift store has been trying to get in touch. The connection is the shell shop where I met Peggy is right across the parking lot from the thrift.
On the way to the shop, I stopped at the Palm Paint & Hardware store. I noticed the wheelbarrows out front contained flowers. The owner explained the city has big rules against putting products on the sidewalk, although the sidewalk in question belonged to the property owner. So he put flowers inside to turn them into “planters”. He went on to say the city regularly gets on his case if he has the wrong advertising. For example, banners are allowed only three times a year for ten days at a stretch.
Hollywood, and South Florida in general, frankly do not hire employees with enough brains to reliably oversee such prohibition. It is thus clear that a banner bylaw is purposely designed to be “irregularly enforced”. The same town council purporting to keep our city free from the evils of non-permanent signage sees nothing ambivalent about allowing a massage parl …, pardon me, a 24-hour “aromatherapy” establishment in the same block as said hardware store.
It is no secret I think real estate agents who publish their picture are self-infatuated. While researching another matter, I may have stumbled on a precedent for this practice. Homesteading. It is also no secret I don’t like homesteading, and the reason is that one has to live on the land to qualify for title. Some people ought to be living out in the middle of the bush but generally, most of us prefer to live in town. Ever notice in Europe, the farmer lives in a village and walks out to tend his fields? My theory is that a picture in a real estate ad is intended to reinforce a false sense of reliability, the way old catalogs sent to homesteads used to include a picture of the store’s staff. Or worse, the store owner and his family. I’ll stick with this hypothesis until you come up with a better one.
We now begin the big Labor Day weekend. I’ve got nothing planned. The weather is blustery anyway. My vote is for relaxing straight through, maybe a Crib game at the Panera at most. I worked so many years that I’m unaccustomed to considering Labor Day as cause for celebration. Psychologically, I associate it with the end of summer, school starting and the onset of cold weather up north. I don’t care to recall how many years I woke up on my November birthday to a howling blizzard. I have not looked back, but I can confidently state Labor Day has never been a big event for me.
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