January 1, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: January 1, 2016, round Florida lakes.
Five years ago today: January 1, 2012, some permanent resolutions.
Nine years ago today: January 1, 2008, bicycles and hard drives?
Random years ago today: January 1, 2007, what’s the altercation?

MORNING
           I got up a little grumpy and made a cherry pie. The crust, anyway, was made from scratch. Please make this a quiet day. Those expense stats I kept for 2016 are ready but you don’t get any tidbits until I run them past the censorship committee. That should happen at the coffee shop if I can find one open. Why, I’ll even do some yard work since it’s already warming up. That’s how I like my winters, a one-day cold spell. Stay home and play music. And maybe make that resolution to learn to make pie crusts twice as thick as I used to. That would be a worthy goal for 2017. No sense setting one’s sights too high.
           Since just y’day, I have progress on the Memphis song. It can be tricky to hit super low notes (in my range) on stage live. You can’t always count on being as relaxed on stage, it is too complex an environment. But you can get better at it over time. This song hits the same low “Johnny Cash” note I’ve done before, and use in my version of “These Boots”. If I play enough music, I won’t be grumpy.

           That’s a picture of the repaired megaphone. I resoldered the ground wire to the circuit board. It’s the Xmas present for Agt. R but he never had time to work it into his act. The reason it is a headline today is the construction. To get at that circuit board, I had to dissemble the contraption. It is entirely held to together by three long screws. That's a tough picture, but I'm leaving it. The repair is indicated by the pencil nib pointing inside that orange oval.

           For a country Sunday morning, ah, this is the way to go. The squirrels will eat good today. I decided to try again to make pancakes, which I cannot do. After I mixed the batter and let it sit, I spotted the mealy worms had gotten into my oldest batch of flour. So I practiced frying up and fed them to the wildlife. While this was going on, I think I heard Dolly Parton on the gospel radio. (To me, successful entertainers who claim to believe in Jesus are automatically suspect. Not unbelievers, just suspect.)
           If I’m not mistaken, she has recorded that 1970s rock hit tune about take me higher than I’ve ever been before and applied it to religion. That would be about her speed, she really began pushing her reputation as God-fearing around the time her recording career went on the wane. I was going to quote that dumpy movie she made about the traveling choir but I can’t even find the DVD.

           Then, there is my imitable style around women. While it could be argued the better women are my preference, it might also just be a case of me naturally gravitating to women who are more out there. And my method of dealing with them is the opposite of what they expect. I know zero pickup lines, I spend no money, I don’t even pay attention. What I play is their own game. From last night, here’s an example. The gal in question, the barmaid, is the day clerk at the hardware. Last night, she’s dressed to the nines—and it was not too shabby let me say.
           I’m not even sitting in her section but before I know it, she’s, um, leaning over my scribbler. So here was the conversation.

                      “I need some augur bits. Is the shop open tomorrow?”
                      “Yes, but I’m not working there all day.”
                      “I’m still gonna need the augur bits.”

Picture of the day.
Andromeda.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
           I’ve only found around half the broken bricks and pads needed to line the fire pit. You bet I was doing yard work on the holiday. If I’d known I adapted this quickly to suburban domestication, I would have bought [a house] years ago. But I’d still like to slap the first bastard who says, “Good for you.”
           In this picture of the shed model, I’m demonstrating where the concrete pad is located. It was not the previous floor, as it is buried too deep. Maybe put there as filler, but that wouldn’t make much sense either. If it’s only debris, into the fire pit it goes.

           Now that I’m officially old, let’s have a little respect. The peanut gallery can stay, but I’m not interested in any platitudes from the rest of you. You can go git yer own fire pit. I’ve already figured out whatever is under the dirt in the new shed is not a full size cement floor, so that’s where I’m getting the extra bricks. What, you don’t think I’d spend money on broken cement, do you? If so, maybe you could stand to get a little older yourself. Provided you’re not some useless jock, it really ain’t that bad.

           I’m joking a bit. One of the most influential fathers in my life had a farm twenty miles south of ours. His name was George, and he ruled by good example and it was an amazing thing for a kid like me to see. If he ever punished his children, it must have been in private. I remember what he told his kids, how the day after he turned 64, how he got up that morning and said to himself, “I’ve got to wake up and go to work every day for another year.”
           When I’m 64, I’m going go out, get drunk, then learn that Beatles song on the topic. Today, I’m shopping at Wal*Mart. I need a ton of household supplies and I can’t afford Winn/Dixie. Or put more accurately, I don’t want to afford it. Meanwhile, the neighbor up the street sees me doing this yard work, so he gets his kids out raking and cleaning the driveway. I can hear the kids talking and I’m amazed to hear they are getting paid a fair rate for the chores. They knew it and worked merrily along.

           That is such a contrast to my upbringing, I leaned closer to eavesdrop. Three bucks an hour for the youngest one, maybe seven or eight years old. I could not put that into perspective with my childhood, where I never got paid. For that matter, I was often promised payment and never got that either. These kids in one hour made just enough to go to the movies. In my day, at my paper route, which required around 40 minutes per day after school and on Saturday, I can calculate what I earned at that. By comparing how long I had to work for the price of a movie ticket. I made maximum 25¢ per day 6 days per week, or $1.50 on a good week. (Note that because of this, I did not get any allowance as did the non-working kids in the house.)
           Every day, I had a large Coca-Cola (10¢) at the hotel restaurant and played one song on the juke box. I watched the waitresses come and go over the years. Some local gal, never the really pretty ones, would take the job for a bit, then get married and run off. It was a grim life cycle. I would always have five “extras” which I’d sell on the hotel steps. If I sold all, I’d go across the street to the confectionery and have a Dixie cup ice cream. If you noticed I never bought anything that showed or never took anything home, you’re catching on.

           I went to the movies every Saturday for 25¢, so if you figure I made 37.5¢ per hour, I earned the price of a movie slightly faster than the kids raking that yard. The comparison ends there, as my parents never paid me to do yard work. Odd, because they had no trouble paying strangers for such work. They said that’s because I got “free room and board”. Yet they were more than willing to pay a stranger enough to house and feed his kids, but don’t speak up. Whap! Wow man, what happened to the side of your head? Well, tough. I told you not to speak up.

AFTERNOON
           The siesta ungrumpied me. But I’m still not ready for any guff. I read another chapter in the navigation book. It was about piloting ships. Naw, not for me. It pales compared to celestial navigation which would be performed on the open seas. The arithmetic is similar but I dunno, guiding some barge up the coastline lacks any oomph. Maybe I could do it. It’s that celestial navigation is, to me, more academic. Less work-a-day.

           It was more work this afternoon, including look into that soft brake condition on the scooter. Why, that looks like nothing more than low on fluid. Ah, but why is it low on fluid? The eternal question, “Why?”
           I dunno, which is sort of the eternal answer. I don’t have any extra fluid. This is a rare problem, as in once every three or four years, so wait it out until tomorrow. Instead, admire this brick lining of my fire pit. No, I’m not making it any deeper or wider. Just enough for a wheel barrow full at a time. Turns out Agt. R. has a pile of bricks in the back yard. That will work out okay.

           I made it to Wal*Mart and was again slammed by the prices. Paper towels, trash bags, bleach, toilet tank tablets, bleach, and such. $26.80. That’s the inflation I’m talking about, the ordinary things most people have to buy. That’s the “basket of goods” that doesn’t change over time, the things you have to buy because there are no substitutes.
           The inelastic demand for things people customarily need to get by, that’s what is hitting home. It will be a while before I have to consider another source of income, but I see that day is getting closer. With music, I’ll never starve, but that is not the point. Maybe I will begin to recycle plastic grocery bags for garbage and pollute the environment. You can blame the Libtard policies for that. They’re the ones that spent your future on welfare today.

           Normally I avoid abbreviations until they become generic terms, but I like SJW. Social Justice Warriors. It is how Libtards fancy themselves as they steal your money for their programs and call you racist if you object. I just like the term. SJW. That would not prevent me from still calling them Libtards, a term I consider synonymous with thievery.
           Or how about the Israeli police interviewing the Prime Minister for corruption. That’s rich, the Keystone Kops trying to snag Lex Luthor. Mind you, the police are experts at tripping up people’s alibis, just look at the example of the RCMP. Still, that’s one interview I’d like to watch. The master crook (any politician) against the B-team (your average cops). Both sparring for advantage, both watching for any crack they can wedge open. To hell with facts and truth, this is 2017, dammit! Ain’

Country Song Lyric of the Day:
“I Want a Beer as Cold as My Ex-Wife's Heart.”
NIGHT
           My 30 ton jack has still not arrived. Tomorrow I’m going over there to talk to the manager. That’s four trips for me and three for Agt. R, who generously let me pay to put it on his credit card. But that same dork who I told to go away is insisting again the jack does not exist because he can’t find it on the computer. (They are out of lobster because the computer said so?) This has taken close to a month and enough is enough. Even if I get it on order, that’s another two weeks before it arrives.

           So, I worked on the shed, including the shed model. Several passes with the model shows that this is the most economical way to go. I thought so, but I’ll stick with the robotics experience that says build the model no matter how sure you are you’ve got it right in your head. Have I finally learned to take it easy? When Wal*Mart and stick models are the big events of the day, maybe so—and that would be nice. Imagine, a day when I could sit on say, a rocking chair, and call that a fine accomplishment. And it would be, because right now, I don’t have a rocking chair or a porch to set it on.

           Who remembers that little hand plane I thought would be so handy? It isn’t, but I have found a use for it. Being solid metal, it is the right size and shape for weighing down glued parts that are otherwise too awkward to clamp. What? Oh, I guess I should repeat the cause of the models getting so much blog time. It turns out more that a few people in town find them very fascinating. And enough of them are girl people to make a difference. Did you know of the dozens of women I’ve talked to since I arrived, I’ve never been the one to break the ice yet? And anybody who says that isn’t an important observation has something wrong in the attic.
           I priced out a Blue Ray disk player and big screens while I was shopping, these have become a distinct possibility for my long-term plan to watch DVD movies. I have some Blue Ray disks but can’t play them yet. It’s the say technology, so I imagine a Blue Ray player would also handle DVDs, etc. Any laser should be able to read a lower sample rate. Don’t worry, I’ll check it out before I buy. To this day, I have a habit of reading a book while watching movies, to kind of pick up the pace during the slow scenes.

ADDENDUM
           What’s to add? Just a bunch of tidbits that don’t fit into any of the above. I bought a package of 41 flavor jelly beans. I horsed around with Willie’s, “It’s All Goin’ To Pot” often enough that I can play the lead break better on bass than the original guitar. This isn’t bragging, Bill, it’s the novelty of playing it by bending bass strings. This is my specialty but again I’m not saying I’m first. Just saying that I have not seen anyone else do it and that I came up with the idea without any conscious precedent. Now the song is a hoot to play.
           But the Memphis intro is the opposite. I can’t even get it on the keyboard. Tomorrow I’m finding a computer shop to see if he’s got an old XP laptop, or at least something without that horrid tracking pad arrangement that I can’t type on. You know the ones, where the keypad is set back across a strip supposed to prop up your wrists. It’s bullshit. I don’t like it and it is useless—which I can state because of the millions of words I’ve typed in my life.

           Either that, or once again take my small Acer setup to the library and use one of the conference rooms to hack past their download blocking. Oh, if I reported that Google needed a log-on to use youTube, it was a new library interface. Fooled me, but I was in a hurry. But with Google, it won’t be long. I still have no Internet service at home. It’s not the cost, it is the service contract that’s putting me off. It’s a credit application, and the last time I filled one of those out thinking it was something else (a hospital admissions form), I lost my Cadillac. Have you learned your lesson as permanently as I learned mine?


Last Laugh

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