One year ago today: August 14, 2016, $5 breakfast special.
Five years ago today: August 14, 2012, the promised land dot com.
Nine years ago today: August 14, 2008, Symantec loses ground.
Random years ago today: August 14, 2011, faking the Death March.
A day of logistics, but done right. See here the insulation and tarpaper stacked and ready to go. The insulation has seriously increased in pric but it has absolutely proven its worth. This is just a part of the day, I had to really put Agt. R to work. We drove to the lumberyard in Bartow to get his employee discount and stopped at the old café. Just in time, because the day before, they had catered a banquet and had all this smoked chicken and candied yam left over. Imagine if you can the two of us trying to haul lumber and trash barrels with the aroma of the chicken in the cab of the truck.
One change in the work environment is obvious. You always get people coming around asking for work. However, whenever Agt. R and I are working, there is nothing else for anybody to do except get in our way. We have six months of work stacked up whenever we get around to it. This is a paradox in that yes, there is more work than we need. But his profit margins are so much higher when company officers are on a project that by comparison, hiring somebody as a laborer is counter-productive. It becomes more lucrative to put in a few hours ourselves than to go longer than to line up work for an employee and check on it afterward. Isn’t that the way it always is.
Amtrak. I checked the route schedules and came up with nothing. Of the possible combinations of four trains a day, I had already chosen the best one when I first went to Winter Haven. It would not make sense to travel except overnight on the train, and I’m thinking on it. The light is still good until 8:30PM, so find out where I could travel overnight. After dark, I would hang out on the train until the next day. How far could I get to catch the southbound and return the following day, viewing what I’d missed in the dark northbound?
One possibility is take a 12-hour trip to New York City, arriving at 11-ish the second day. Then hopping the return train at 3-ish to get here the third day. It’s a total of 24 hours on the train, but a certain amount would be sleeping. What a great little holiday, the train to New York City for coffee. The downside is the ticket would not be the $75 round trips I’m used to. Make that more like $325. But, if you allow $160 for two nights in a hotel, it might now work out too badly. Give me time to think about it.
Tomorrow that tarpaper gets started. As before, I can see the daylight between the clapboards and at the seams. This is the heavier tarpaper, the one that made further soundproofing unnecessary in the bedroom. I’m happy with that, in fact, before too long, I had to each smoked chicken and go crash for half the day in that silent cocoon of a bedroom. For all my talk, my working days have really been over for quite some years now. The only break I really took today was to practice music, and I was on the bass, not the guitar. I should know better.
Budapest.
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Here’s that kerosene blower heater I talked about. The one that needs some kind of new switch. This is like a small jet engine. If you haven’t seen these before, they are considerably more powerful than the light-duty types often seen on construction sites. This brand is designed to heat greenhouses. I’ll see about downloading the manual and find out what it needs.
Same guy, and I’d asked him about places to play. He didn’t know any at the time, but this afternoon gave me the contact of a newly renovated Legion in, get this south Florida, Haines City. Me? Play in the uber-famous Haines City, wouldn’t that be ironic? The dude says they rebuilt the stage and they are definitely, not maybe, hiring single acts and they don’t care how good or bad you are. “Go on”, I said, “go on.”
Haines City was once a fairly major stop on the north-south Florida run. It’s another of this area’s “lost communities” that began their decline when the autobahn-inspired interstate highway system bypassed them. Some say on purpose. One by one they have become by local majority vote, what’s the word, “historic”? That’s it, historic communities, although too much of the architecture goes back only as far as the 1950s.
Myself, I’m an old train station and hotel buff, but to tell you the truth, most of these backwater towns are not worth a drive-past. Many sport one local non-franchise café. Otherwise, they are sad reminders of the time when America peaked. Some are near enough to cities to hang on as bedroom communities and the special status of Haines City is from some unknown clerk at the highways department. He decided to leave up the old mileage signs along the state and county roadsides. And side roads. Hence, along places like North Miami Avenue in Little Haiti, there is a sign saying “Haines City 276”, though that road doesn’t even really go there any more.
You can’t beat the towns for motorcycle trips. The roadways are still maintained by the state and you can cruise for a quarter-hour not seeing anybody. In fact, I’ve got tomorrow afternoon off, so check back with me. I usually zip around the towns that have a restored district and I’ll hit thrifts and museums. The old America is still there, unlike south Florida where thrifts are full of nothing but third world junk. There are also towns like Lake Wales, Dade City, and Bartow, which have edifices built for communities five times the size of their current population. Have you seen that hotel in Haines City? The town could move in there. Just kidding, but you get my point.
Next, you got the swamp-draining going on in DC and the libtards don’t like it. Oh, have you seen their newest tack? To have “libtard” declared a word that only “third graders” would use. Ha, just lets us know what gets their goat. Anyway, Trump continues to do the right thing, if slowly, which is to weed out the bureaucrats who “disagree” with government policy. Their job is to follow policy, not pass judgment on it. Good work, Don, but let’s both pick up the pace and get down to the lower levels. These anti-patriotic department heads are not acting in isolation.
As for the violent incidents in Virginia in the news, I would like to hear the other side of the story. That’s not going to happen with today's newspapers. I wonder, who gave the media the right to declare any gathering of white patriots a “supremist” activity? Do only non-whites and queers have a right to march down the streets? It is emerging that the police knew there was going to be violence incited not by the marchers, but by the protesters. And they were ordered to stand by until after the trouble commenced. Somebody is behind that.
The libtards got what they wanted. A few facts that can be fanned into belligerent emotional issues amongst the half-educated masses. Whaaa, Trump, they say, did not criticize the “bad guys” in strong enough language. Yes he did, he condemned violence on both sides. Whaaa, say the critics, instead of running the country, Trump is more concerned with kicking out people who don’t agree with his agenda. Gee, I wonder where on earth Mr. Trump got that from?
“I hope the guy who invented AutoCorrect burns in hello.”
~ Dunno
You like watching me renovate the rooms, don’t you? Learn along with me. It must be fun watching me clown around pretending to know what I’m doing. Take a look at this wall as I point out the good and the bad. The two old studs close together are the position of the original partition that was torn out to make one big living room. This arrangement, instead of a proper box, is consistent with other cost-cutting measures I’ve uncovered. What isn’t apparent is that the stud on the left is treated lumber and the one on the right isn’t. It is almost totally flaked by termite trails.
The electric and sound proofing eat up around half the budget for each room. It’s economical enough to spend that extra, but I don’t have to run two circuits and I could use cheaper tarpaper, etc. For the difference of maybe a hundred bucks all told, it is better to consider the huge leap in value this work makes for in the equity of this place. I grabbed a siesta by 4:00PM when I checked the monitor and where the sun was shining on the bare clapboards, it was 91°F inside the house. No wonder I headed for the back room. If I was smart, I’d put a refrigerator back there.
Before that, I ran up and down every note of every fret on my bass. It’s true, it needs work. There is some fret buzz, but I attribute that to the strings being worn slowly down over the years. If you can imagine the string floating just above the frets. If one of the lower portions of the strings gets just a little flattened from use, the length above it moves that fraction closer to the other frets. Looks like, over time, I’ve compensated for that and now it’s caught up with me.
Am I nuts? Instead of practicing guitar, I spent two hours inventing a new bass line to “Midnight Special”, a song that was ancient before I was born. It’s a dynamite bass line that emulates that original Johnny Rivers loping rhythm. I came up with passing notes so smooth you can’t believe it will fit. I got that catchy swing drum rhythm to fit into the notes and designed these descending bass runs that roll over the vocals enough to mesmerize people who are listening instead of dancing. Yet, it is a bass run so it counts for little. Face it. I’m a bass man until the day I die.
ADDENDUM
Good news, bad news. The budget for the canceled trip to Tennessee is going into the living room in better quality materials. Wait, there’s a little more bad news, for all of, sigh, humanity. The budget money came from the clinic who is paying top dollar for my blood. And that is coming to a close. They have drawn so much blood from me that if they made anything from it, then every person on Earth theoretically has my molecules. Don’t worry, Ken, blood has no DNA, so you are in no danger of evolving into a human. You know, the species that expect you to pay your bills.
In September, I may intentionally have a prescription drug that leaves an enduring marker. I had to ask my self what’s more important. The fact that 14 years after the heart attack, I’m still overweight, or the possible salvation of mankind. I wrote down two lists, one of what I’ve done for people and the other what they’ve done for me. Chances are I’ll be taking the diet drug, meaning goodbye to one of the last sources of narcotic-free blood forever. I’ve had small doses before as painkillers, but nothing detectable. This new regimen is six months long, so the markers will be permanent enough to take me off the list. But my chances of dying from being overweight have outstripped the odds dying from any of my heart troubles.
You’ll agree when you see my new picture window. You may not see it any time soon, as I’m only framing in the cutout, not actually installing that window until I get some help or some experience. I figured out was wrong with the bedroom fitting. The original carpenter had set the windows on some blocks to make them precisely square, nailed the casings in place, then removed the blocks. Fooled me in a wink.
Last Laugh
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