One year ago today: July 2, 2016, generic political response template.
Five years ago today: July 2, 2012, prime number theory, defanged.
Nine years ago today: July 2, 2008, Pudding on patrol.
Random years ago today: July 2, 2009, it’s 40% ground glass.
Up early, I thought to finish the undercoat on the bedroom north wall. I’ve learned a lot about the drywall and paint stages. One thing I can confirm, the better the work done under all the finishing, the better the room turns out. You hear a lot of tales from the trailer court that you can drywall or paint over any mistakes, but I find it easy to tell when something is off. This picture shows a wall that I coated with a product called drywall sealer, where the other walls got an undercoat of primer. I didn’t even know drywall needed sealing.
This humdrum picture could have been spiced up with a nice Russian model babe, but it’s Sunday. Instead, you are looking at how shiny this sealer is, the picture shows the whitish reflection of the south window even through the drapes. It’s not a gloss finish, yet it really is that smooth. Don’t be too critical of the rest of the photo. That A/C is a junker and the far upper corner is not painted yet for a reason. This portion is to be removed later to get at the electrical wiring. Enough work, I’ll tell you what I did last evening.
I dropped in at Karaoke, one of the worst. It’s old people singing those Broadway tunes. The gal I almost invited to Thanksgiving last year was on duty and her mother was sitting there. Ohhhh, big problem, the mother is, I think, my age. She’s overtly friendly a bit and then outright asks me my age. I told her I was 73. Her mother hen instinct cut in, ah, so once again that is what it was all about. This is hardly the first time in my life I’ve dated women who’s mothers were my age. I confirm the reaction is considerably more severe than plain old jealousy.
Can you imagine the effect of a mother watching a man her own age take out her daughter? Well, throw in some extras, like the guy is a winner and the daughter is going places in style. Hurts like a bitch, I’ll bet, seeing your daughter riding around in a Cadillac and jetting to Hawaii with a man your age. Especially when you haven’t had a man ask you out on a second date in 15 years. I hope it is served real cold.
Why the attitude? Because what these women are seeing only what they want to see. And that is the money. They presume the only reason older men have value is money, but the catch with their theory is that I don’t have any. If a younger woman dates me, there has to me some other explanation. There is. The whole world knows that as a young man, I made sure when I got old I’d have other things to offer. My kingdom to meet a woman of the same stripe. And it’s been decades since I met a woman my own age who had a damn thing to offer.
when you do meet older women, they are only after one thing and, son, you don’t make enough of it. Ever. Thus, my advice to women over 30 who date only whom their mother’s approve is to ask yourself what is really going on. And to those over 30s who debate whether dating older men is a good thing or a bad thing, stop worrying. Because keep that attitude very long, and soon the older men won’t date you. Quid pro like whatever.
The doctor is in.
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This photo is the bedroom just mentioned with the unpainted but ‘sealed” walls. Bright or what. It made the blog because I am finally going to be sleeping in my own bedroom. This is the cramped quarters, but hey, this is three times the size of the room I had at the trailer court. There are 25 draws for storage and a nice carpet on the floor. That fan on the counter is temporary, and I’ll be installing a new air conditioner soon. This is where I’ll be living for up to another year while I finish the old living room back into a bedroom and kitchen space.
My plan is to rip up the living room floor, salvaging the best of the oak pieces. Once the joists are exposed, I’ll shift two sheets of 5/8” sub-flooring around the space as needed to work and hold my tools. Hence, at any given time I’ll have that 64 square feet of space. I’ll have pictures, but my plan is to replace only the new bedroom area at first. A refresher if you’ve forgotten, but this was originally a two bedroom where one wall was torn down to create a huge living room. A lady lived there for years, letting the rest of the building just sit.
Some kitchen piping has been upgraded but in truth, I’m afraid to look under there. The kitchen gets touched last The water pressure in this house has never been that great. To take a decent shower, you have to ask everybody not to use the sinks or hoses. Don’t expect fast results because I’ve learned to run in the electrical before bothering with the other renovations. And you remember how long each receptacle took last time. It is too handy to have lots of working plugs to do it any other way. Again, every second receptacle is on alternating breakers.
Who remembers the time Sweden decided they had a national problem with car radiators rusting out. So the government, knowing that distilled water made the radiators last longer, distributed, I think it was, ten thousand distillation water stills to the population. Top quality government grade stills. A month later, when liquor sales revenue plummeted to nothing, they realized their mistake and recalled the stills. And got only 65 of them back. Is this an urban legend? Tomorrow, I look it up.
Another milestone in my unending quest for a guitar player who is talented enough to take orders. At 7:00PM Agt. R has a scheduled lesson. He’s got 10,000 hours to go, but there is a wild card. I can show him exactly what not to waste time on. Aha, nobody told you that part about the 10,000 hours, I’ll bet. A lot of it is wasted if you are flying blind. This is where I’ve broken the mold before, taking a complete beginner to stage work in a matter of weeks. True, they cannot function independently and play any other material, but that is how it is with millions of other guitarists who only think they are above that. Check later today for results.
“Just remember, we’re all in this alone.”
~ Lily Tomlin
I’m reading another Tom Clancy. I now read this author for information more than entertainment. I chose his book about the 1991 war in Iran because I know so little about it above what was, in those days, talked about at work. I do not agree with oil politics so I did not support intervention. I say again, I support the troops but I do not support the people who send them to wars in places that are none of America’s business. I’ve been an isolationist pacifist my entire life. None of my heroes or role models have ever been in the military.
So far the book is following a well-worn path. Like the phone company, each department is its own most important and the others are there as support. This quickly resolves into a mass of non-congruent cells. Each department would like to become independent of this mess because it strains the resources. Soon, internal competition replaces winning the war as the primary goal of the organization.
You’ve seen this in so many wars. Commandos screaming for air support. Infantry yelling for artillery. Tankers waiting on the fuel trucks. How bad is it? Doesn’t anyone remember the Iran hostage situation where Jimmy Carter tried to send in the helicopters? That was the beginning of the end for America’s warrior reputation. Plus, since those hostages had been repeatedly warned to get out but stayed anyway, I would rescue them but send them the bill. Imagine, using our military to go get civilians who were out there mainly to avoid paying taxes in the USA.
Able to take Clancy maybe a half-hour at a stretch, I found an old downloaded movie called “Some Kind Of Wonderful” (328,333 KB) that was so bad but full of good acting. It’s the poor guy scores a date with the rich girl, not realizing his true love is the tomboy next door. The dialog was written by people over 40, totally out of character. As for the “poor” teens, I wonder what I could have done with a fraction of their resources. The kid borrows a Rolls Royce from the garage he works and gets in the back door of an art museum because the school punk’s father is the night security guard.
The script lost all reality of what being a teen is all about, and lost it in the first ten minutes. After that it is predictable except for the incredibly and unbelievably over-mature dialogues between the teens and also with their parents. “Dad, it’s always what you wanted. When does my life become my own?” Myself, I would have scored with both the women as quickly as possible and went looking for more. I dunno, maybe poverty affected me differently than other men. I know guys who quit school to get a job to get a car to get chicks. By age ten, I distinctly remember, I seriously knew that was not the answer.
Because that was the year I put my foot down and demanded to be allowed to take piano lessons.
ADDENDUM
Yep, time to get on stage. I could not find any place last evening with decent entertainment. Lakeland is small enough that Saturday is still an off-night. What we are dealing with here is the old downhill spiral. The club skimps on entertainment so they get third-rate acts which in turn don’t bring in the crowds. Round and round she goes. Down the drain.
It is further evident that the clubs hire the cheapest entertainers they can, which doesn’t help. There are actually very few options around town as all of the clubs and pubs are survivors and nobody else has entertainment. Pardon me, there are a few restaurants with the occasional piano or harp player. Those are too specialized to consider competition. And it might be wise at this point to remind the reader that my motive for being on stage is something other than money.
I have an aversion to playing the same clubs I hang out. The city is not big enough. The other option is the private clubs, like the Legion, I’d be okay with that. I guess I’m just saying I’m watching out for my own best interests in circumstances where every mistake has unintended consequences. Remember, I’m neither a Hatfield nor a McCoy. And life is full of situations where if you don’t take sides, they’ll all gang up on you.
How did the guitar lesson go? Great, because I have an avid learner who understands he is getting world-class instructions for free. There is no damage that needs undoing, since he has never learned a note on any instrument before. He’s not just learning chords, he’s learning what to practice, what to ignore, what to focus on, and why some things are more important than others. I would have given anything for somebody to have told me these things when I was a kid.
You want details. Well, okay, I insisted on some things to be memorized, such as the circle of fifths. When I’m teaching, the rewards of each step closely follow the learning. I was taught music the other way, where each step was given equal importance and had to be learned mainly by repetition. I don’t teach like that. By including a bit of theory at each point, by the end of the evening, we were playing simple songs. The same simple songs he may be playing on stage in a few weeks. He’s an avid learner. We’d talked about the process before and he is pretty amazed by how closely that conversation follows into reality. He is amused by my slang terms for a lot of the early mistakes.
However, make no mistake about this. I don’t have time for part-time learners. Agt. R understands from here that he will never listen to guitar music the same, but nor will he ever go hungry. One unexpected positive is that he learned months ago to always ask when I do something different than standard. That is, don’t crab over what’s different like the New York guy, but ask for the reason. It’s no different with music, and he was astonished by how things made sense in a hurry.
Example, I’d show him that I wanted him to use a different finger pattern than I was using. I’d explain why, and pow, he’d sometimes guess from that the very song—this is from a non-musician, my friends. Or he’d laugh and realize why every other guitarist except me has a characteristic sound in certain ways, and I’d explain that they don’t like thirds. The point is, the guy easily spots the connections between what I say and what happens next. All good teachers appreciate students who do this naturally.
It’s too early to get any hopes up. He was particularly impressed by my old standby of demonstrating to all beginners that how I play bass can completely alter the guitar sound. He only knows the one strum I’ve showed him and already he was getting lost in the groove. If he keeps this up, it will move directly toward stage time. Then he can get paid for some of those 10,000 hours. That’s how I did it.
Last Laugh
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