Honorary Valentine's Day for the working class. Yes, I was on my bicycle in downtown Miami. Wouldn't it be nice to be so popular every day? Normally I get up to fifteen deliveries done but this year was slow. I did just five in five hours. Everywhere from the court room to this tax collection office that had bullet-proof doors. The stuffing has gone right out of the downtown businesses. There is still lots of hustle and bustle and like they say, the people are there but the money isn't. Back to the picture, that strip with the railing along the bottom right is the aerial trackway for the People Mover. That is, driverless bus caravans that help distribute the crime evenly all over downtown.Lunch at Quizno's. JP was there, so was the lovely Alaine. As usual, Corey served up the best sandwich in town. The attention to detail and quality is evident as soon as you walk in the door. They take every extra step to ensure it. For example, even the few frozen products they use, like the lemonade mix, is thawed in the fridge to ensure consistent quality. JP had no time to chat, he'd been off with a cold for a few days and was making up for lost time.
Alaine and I went shopping and got caught in the Art Festival traffic. This is the famous Coral Gables show that JP and I hang around sometimes. It wasn't supposed to start until tomorrow, but tell that to all the cars. Alaine wanted to get some stone crab and will only shop at the best places. We got lost in all those newly sealed off streets south of Dixie. And I found out today's trivia as follows.
When we arrived at the fish market, the owner personally came out to talk to Alaine. I did not know that there is a quality difference caused by the placement of the crabs in the holding tanks. That's your trivia. The seafood tastes different whether the animal was transported near the top or bottem and how near to the sides of the tank. I saw the fish guy smelling each crab leg and asked Alaine, who explained all this to me. I believe the best seafood comes from the top center of the tank. There is something socially eerie about that fact.
We dropped the food off and I finally saw the wall Corey built. Now I see what all the fuss was. It is a fifteen foot high coral block wall across the entire back yard. Myself, I would not have survived that amount of heavy lifting. I know there is a picture of part of it around here, so keep checking back if you are curious about such things. The coral blocks give it a very Caribbean look, which is odd, as I thought coral was endangered. Not so, I see it everywhere these days.
Because Valentine's was moved back a day, I didn't have time to put the finishing touches on my new stage act. It seems like a giant musical leap has taken place in one week, but you know what they say about law and sausages. The reality is several months of seemingly unrelated work are being pulled together to produce the final product. Like everything with computers, none of the formats were ever directly compatible. Therefore, I played a regular set and look forward to better days.
I pulled the flat screen monitor from my home computer and will get that thing to work by tomorrow. It turns out laptops need a function to enable remote screens. (It was F5.) Even then, you get an effect called screen extension, which I do not want. I need two screens to show the same thing. It took an hour just to find out what the manufacturer's called all this. The extended screen is called multi-monitor, what I wanted was a cloned screen. Except they don't call it that, rather it is a box in control panel settings that you uncheck. Is this one of them things you're "supposed to know".
