One year ago today: October 31, 2015, America hold’s its breath.
Five years ago today: October 31, 2011, gold is wealth.
Nine years ago today: October 31, 2007, a better helicopter view.
Random years ago today: October 31, 2006, computer lessons should be free . . .
MORNING
This was hardly your average Monday. That’s a judgment call. How about once more I tell you what happened and you make up your own mind. I mentioned my tarp walls y’day, so I took the red scooter to the Thrift to see if I could find some super-cheap wall coverings (fancy bedsheets) and instead wound up buying five movie DVDs. I took pity on Zeke like you said I would and set out a dish of chicken bones.
I soon found myself at the library, where I contacted a few guitarists. By mistake, one was another bass player, but may I say he certainly had a realistic attitude over what is involved getting a successful band happening. We were both seeking the same situation, so cancel that. But don’t cancel completely. I didn’t tell him I could fake the guitar. But if it comes to that, he had more stage personality over the phone than 90% of any guitar players I’ve talked to in the past ten years. Maybe the dude can play real bass.
While I’ve got you here, I bought another set of Wal*Mart tarps to continue on my undertaking, you know, to section off the areas I’m working on without getting dust all over my guests—when I have some. And the laundry, did I mention the laundry? I’m exhausted, okay?
This old house creaks at night. It took a little while to figure out what the strange noises were, but since they were “mechanical” in tone. There can be no doubt these are the source of many haunted house tales. It occurs, according to my digital thermometer, just after the temperature outside falls either below 65°F or 20°F in total. It’s a series of creaks and snaps, exactly like somebody walking on an old floor.
But what about the plops? That one took a little longer. All that was in the bathroom, where the rod in the towel rack is loose and can spin. If you hang a towel on it to dry even a little imbalanced, it will eventually slid off and plop on the floor. Now for your morning dosage of trivia.
When I was at the market (see more info below), I met a gal who thought she was buying rice. Thought? Yes, it is an affair of close terms on the package label. Right beside the brown rice, which is rice, there was the wild rice, which is not rice. She thought they were both the same thing. Nope, wild rice is a type of grass seed that grows in marshy areas. It’s essentially a weed and as far as I know is not grown commercially on a large scale. It resembles rice but is not a good alternative if you like rice as a side dish. I do.
The Galapagos.
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NOON
I also closed the books for October, and it was a disaster of a month for the budget. Do the math, $530 for motorcycle repairs and $370 for felling the trees. Both expenses unanticipated. The money had to come from somewheres, you know. Pssst, Ken, that’s real cash money. Not write a check and worry about it later money. True, it’s only $900, but I just bought a house and under the circumstances, that isn’t chump change. If anything goes wrong in the next 24 hours, I’ll be . . . well, I’ll be like most people, wouldn’t I? And I don’t like living that close to the edge.
Not too exhausted to go grocery shopping, I scootered to the market. I’m in the mood for mini-chicken-Kievs again, so I’m standing in the checkout. This black lady sees all the chicken and says she can guess what’s for supper. I replied close, but it’s chicken Kiev.
She’s never heard of it, it, she says, maybe I was joshing. So I gave her the recipe off the top of my head. She parked her shopping cart and headed straight back for the chicken cooler. Nobody tell her I’ve only made them once before and this time I’m using chicken thighs. There, I mentioned food again.
Which reminds me, I stopped at the Mongolia for their famous, if rather pricey, potato salad. That Karaoke gal was there and she lit up like Xmas when I came in. She is no longer doing Karaoke, which apparently she finds distasteful. I can see that. She tells me she has two waitressing jobs and likes that better. She is doing this in a quite warm and inviting fashion. Probably figures I’m slow to catch on.
Two jobs, I joked, she must be raising a family. (Note how clever I am at extracting information, har-dee-har.) Nope, she says, just her, as she walks past my table with a tray of dishes. It was that tone of voice, guys, as she spoke, she gave me the old hip nudge on the shoulder, as in wake up, you fool. Like she’s known me her whole life. Now she must really think I’m slow. What’s holding me back? The attraction was not immediate, or if it was, she took a while to react. And I’ve learned my lesson about relationships that are that slow to start.
NIGHT
I had the house model out, pondering the situation now that I’ve got some experience. I got JZ on the line. We discussed various options but he’s falling out of touch with the progress here, which was not supposed to happen that way. He reports that although south Florida is a paradise if you want a used car, a used truck is a more difficult find. I agree, you can go back far enough in this blog to find how we wasted a lot of time on this before, I think that was three years ago. Here is a picture of the red scooter up at Wal*Mart an hour ago.
Other items discussed were the options of actually raising this house a full half a foot and putting in a real foundation. This would not make it much higher than others in the vicinity. And central air conditioning. I know nothing of duct work, but he’s done it before. The price tag seems to be around $7,500 but he’ll need to see the details before that’s more than a guess. And the need for that work shed is growing. If nothing else, it would force me to learn a lot about putting in a foundation. The driveway is plenty big enough for a cement truck to back right into the yard.
The model shows only the house, not the foundation. That is my next urgent project, trust me, there is no substitute for a good model. And few people can build as neat a model as quickly as a robotics buff. I sometimes take the model with me on a nothing night to the club, where Agt. R is familiar with the layout and the plans. He’s a former lumber supply employee and can tell you exactly what materials are required. It’s also a great icebreaker for women, who probably associate the model with being a dollhouse. You’d be surprised how often it attracts a conversation—but always a conversation that leads nowhere.
In the music department, I’m auditioning the guitar player from the VFW tomorrow. That’s the guy that plays around twelve songs, sort of, and can sing, sort of. I can’t not give him a kick at the can since he lives less than a mile away. I’ve seen the guy play unofficially, meaning he sometimes takes out his guitar in a dead bar and plays a few tunes. He’s married but on a first-name basis with every bar bunny in the territory.
The focus is always to see if we’ve got a sound. I don’t think there has every been a study of the mechanics behind the audition. But it is akin to a job interview, with everybody wanting to present their bestl. I don’t fall for that, at least not as much as I used to. I let them show off for a few tunes. Then it’s time for a demonstration of how quickly they can learn new material and equally important, how well they take to the learning process. If you skip this step, the outcome is predictable. You’ll wind up learning his stale song list and that’s as far as the group will ever go.
ADDENDUM
Like clockwork, every spring and fall, I reconsider the idea of returning to university. But the cost-benefit analysis drives me away. I’m too old for another meaningful career and getting a degree just for status has become a standing joke on campus. They laugh all the way to the bank. They are praise addicts, making such a big deal of 91 year old graduates and such. Here is a nice picture of a twig sprouting in a saw-off telephone pole. This is to remind you that Florida is almost a jungle. Anyway, I was talking about useless liberal arts courses.
Arts courses are nearly the opposite. The professors use the lecture as a forum to present their personal opinions, and grade exams on how accurately the students parrot those views. This is obscene. Over time, these faculties get infiltrated by some severely disturbed individuals. The message, however, was always the same: Liberalism.
There was peer pressure to pretend you were in the course to make the world a better place (or some crap like that) and not for individual gain. In my opinion, such fake nonsense has no place in the education system. It is indoctrination and should be treated as such. Some may say that every course carries the standpoint of the instructor. This is true, but in a computer science course, the instructor cannot fail you if you disagree with his personal outlook.
But why would a non-Liberal, such as myself, take such courses? Because it was required. Back then, courses were divided into three groups. To graduate from any of the “hard” sciences, you were required to pass a minimum number of these leftist courses (you had to pass) before the school would grant you a degree. Note that the reverse was not true, liberal arts types were never required to take any “science” courses.
As a result, I’ve eye-witnessed some strange situations. I’ve taken courses where the entire content was in the assigned reading while the professor used the lecture hall to rant about unrelated political topics. I’ve met students who avoided these courses until the end and were forced to return for an extra semester to get their degrees. And I’ve seen cases where a liberal professor tries to teach a science course and nearly blows a fuse because it is possible for the student to prove him wrong.
[Author’s note: I did a fair amount of professor-baiting in my time. I’ve never been a fan of programming by committee. That’s your first sign of a libtard professor—she wants you to work as a team AND assigns the team members “to prevent elitism”. I regularly used counter-measures against these people. Such as co-opting the comment section to specify which lines of code were written by me, or to use the comments to indicate which segments I disagreed with. If I hated the prof, I’d throw in anti-teamwork comments as well, you see, no professor could ever tell a student to cut back on comments in the code.
This is the same era when I developed my dislike for C+ code and for the people who do it. They are a strange bunch to who logic seems “upside down”. To that bunch, it seems somehow logical to begin by creating “instances” of “objects” and error routines. As if errors are an expected part of their performance. To this day, my programming often contains as many lines of comments as code. I regularly specify exactly what each module or line does. If you’ve been here a while you’ve seen that when I post examples my comments are as exact as the code. Regard this as the explanation why.]
Last Laugh
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