Today’s high point was jamming with Arnel at Boston’s. We have over a half-hour of good solid material every week. Too many other musicians who show up always play the exact same tunes. (Not that they are getting any better at it over the years.) I stopped at Jimbo’s to see how the Thursday blues session was going. It does not appear to be going anywhere.Don’t be looking at me. It took over a year before I started making a go of it. Now every time I play there, I make an average of $45 more per gig than I ever did in the last band I played in (Space Hippie). That band was lucky to play three gigs per year and those tended to be half-way across town.
Ever more people are starting to clue in there is a deep and (for our lifetimes) permanent depression happening. A little over a million of them this year alone and those are jobs that are gone forever. We don’t need any more $40 per hour union factory workers. The free ride is over, America. Don’t expect any mercy from my direction. I’ve long since had it with people who never gave a damn about me as long as they were comfortable in the short run.
A good example would be all the co-workers who used to repeatedly vote against me at the meetings. I wanted an increase in non-taxable benefits, they wanted a bigger paycheck so they could plunge deeper into debt. I listened to then brag about how much their mortgaged houses were worth. Most of them clearly thought they were going to get away with it.
The Dow-Jones stands at half the value a year ago (14,000 to 7,000), which is about right. All that “wealth” was contrived, it never really existed, just like I said. Like now I’m going to bail out people who spent like crazy their whole lives forcing prices out of sight who now fancy themselves clever enough to jump in at the end and invest?
Cakewalk. By coincidence, this is the same application the Hippie had on his computer. I can tell you right now he never got anything accomplished with it. The entire setup is far to complicated to use without special training. I also tested twelve conversion programs that had one thing in common—none of them will input those VOB files from a commercial disk. That is, none of them will do what they said.
Flame of the Woods, the hedge plant. I found several on-line sources that confirm it is a good choice for Florida and one source that says it grows too fast. That makes maintenance a problem. I kept bumping into a disturbing trend or combination of trends. It seems that more and more of what is available on-line turns out to be the same few companies wearing a variety of disguises. And, at least for garden supply outfits, not one of them will tell you prices unless you sign up. I don’t think I should have to tell anyone my life history to find out the price of a potted plant.
All sources state the worst choice for a hedge or windbreak is fig trees. Guess what our little forest is full of? The grounds are starting to look civilized. Wallace can confirm that many 8-hour days of work were required to get it that way. For the most part, the briars are trimmed back. We can actually walk in there and can see the individual trees. Five wheelbarrow loads of trimming. The French guy came over and I gave him the tiles that were taking up space in the utility room. I could have got twenty bucks, but I weighed that against the opportunity for goodwill and our reputations. It made him happy. There is a lot of yard work going on all around here. I remind you that we are having a cold spell. It is chilly, down to below fifty at night. Normal for this season is 76 perfect degrees.
