One year ago today: August 12, 2014.
Five years ago today: August 12, 2010, unused parade float idea.
Six years ago today: August 12, 2009, going guitarless.
MORNING
Here’s the scooter dash, with the newest version of the waterproof clock. The cover of the speedometer is too yellow to see through, what an utter failing on the part of modern plastics industry. If it was transparent, you’d see the 15,700 miles on this old girl. That’s not all glare from the plastic parts, a lot of that is faded paint. These scooters are not expected to last half this long. I can only read the dash because I know where everything is.
I prefer the train and absolutely hate Greyhound after what they did to me in Savannah. I’m not ruling anything out, maybe Amtrak runs a better service. The point is, I need a long, uninterrupted trip to practice my new navigation tables. It turns out air tables are not as accurate as marine tables, but let me explain what fooled me. It was lack of experience.
You see, I told how I had practiced only on land, never at sea. Thus I read but never learned the chapter on EP, which is “estimated position”. The reason is that on land, one’s position is not affected by forces such as wind, current, tides, and wave action. Hence, my calculations were based on a highly accurate DR, or dead reckoning start point. And the results were, arithmetically, meticulous, like an accountant was responsible.
NOON
Who recalls I told everyone to do something I could not (members not allowed to buy in), which was invest in this cholesterol medicine I’ve been the lab rat for a few years with? It was just approved and hit the market at, get this, $1,200 per month. Ouch, but we know for sure it works. At least for me. Since I know everyone was paying attention last time, I won’t repeat the name of the company. The nearby photo is a sample, not the one I use.
However, my participation still pays off. Not only do they give me free treatment, they pay me for each office visit. So that’s $15,000 a year in total value, plus I’m in the study another three years. And another five fee years thereafter on free. It was an instant remedy for me, dropping my levels by 2/3 after injection one.
My health worker says she just returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic and liked it better than Panama or Costa Rica. As a firm believer in back-up plans, I will look into the place over the next short while. Stay tuned for the most interesting of what I find. I would not advise anyone who is on a fixed income to plan more than five more years without an escape route.
Next I called young Jag, my teenage guitar player. He’s halfway through college. But he isn’t using the Fender acoustic, so he’s dropping it off here tomorrow morning. Yep, of all the guitar players I met in this town, he was the only one who went the distance. Learned twenty new songs that he’d never hear before. And certainly, he had never heard of Johnny Cash or Trisha Yearwood. We played out after just a few weeks, and in the end I still use many of our set videos for my own advertising footage.
I ran into the Hippie the other day at the bank, and reminded him I am still looking for that rhythm player who can’t sing. The only response I got was that he only knew a lot of rhythm players who can’t play. Speaking of old tires, my Honda mechanic says to save my flat, but to patch it really well on the inside. For emergency use only, but I’m going to drop by the shoemaker’s and get a nice patch of tough old boot leather. After that, JZ says they make tire liners. How come I’ve never seen one? Well, they exist and they are $35 per tire.
Which is a tenth of what I’ve spent total on repairing this flat. They don’t make the liners for high-speed tires (like cars and motorcycles) because they add weight and are tricky to balance. That’s where I first heard about dynabeads.
NIGHT
Imagine my surprise, I was finishing the books with a documentary about Austrian lakes playing out in the computer room. The electric bill is always fifty cents a day higher than it should be, so I check the totals. Then bam! There he is. They are interviewing a guy who looks exactly like me. What the? I look again and again, and it is me, right down to the bald spot. He is exactly what I will look like in another ten years. Same taste in shirts, too.
Roofing cement. Who remembers that expensive gallon I bought to fix a roof leak over at Wally’s Folly? It wasn’t exactly cheap, around $20, I’d say. Wallace always forgot, conveniently, that I told him the place was a fixer-upper. But in the end, I was the only one who sunk real money into the joint, while all he did was watch the ceiling cave in and criticize my earlier repairs.
Then moaned more because I stopped some of those repairs half-way the moment he proved what a (female body part) he was. Who recalls that? He wouldn’t let me repair anything (because it was never good enough) yet would not pay to get someone else in to do the work—while the ceiling tiles are hitting the floor. I mean, how does one get that stupid all in one lifetime? Actually, two lifetimes. Patsie inherited the trait.
I kept the bucket until today, when I donated it to Fred to fix a similar leak in his patio. Strange, we figured, how the can had rusted through at the bottom. If it is supposed to patch his roof for thirty years, then how come it couldn’t patch the bottom of the can sitting inside my shed for five years? It requires the application of mesh, so we used that old roll of screen door material from the time I had to buy the whole roll. Worked like a charm.
That’s the legacy of Wallace in Florida. By 2015, remembered only for patching the roofs of strangers. Because all I remember is that beautiful triple-wide, bought at the bottom of the market crash, lost because of idiocy.
And millet is back in the picture. I’ve found several ways to cook it so it doesn’t taste like millet. I may get through that bag of it yet. Treat it like rice and you should be okay. In other news, JZ and I did put an upper limit on how much to spend on a property for me to live in. Auctions taught us how rare cash money is these days, so we will use this to our advantage. Somebody will bite once we advertise. But I can tell you right now, the other guy pays the closing costs and supplies a written guarantee of what is wrong with the place.
Don’t like it? Fine. Let them try to find somebody else who has cash. If they want to play that game, it would be a good time to remember what Stalin said about quantity at some point having a quality of its own.
Last Laugh
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