April 9, 2018

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 9, 2017, mystery object.
Five years ago today: March 9, 2013, deciding to be famous.
Nine years ago today: March 9, 2009, looking into CD+G.
Random years ago today: March 9, 2005, the Hippie tries a con.

           This is a 1939 John Deere. My neighbor, who fixes these things up, just got back from a big show and has four tractors in the yard. This one, I’ve never seen before, not even back on the farm where all the equipment was ancient. All of these tractors are fully restored and operating. That’s quite the hobby. At the other extreme is the poor quality of the repair to my scooter. They broke the gas gauge, the headlight cover is cracked, and the left turn signal beeper doesn’t work. And even the brake job they were supposed to do, the rear tire lever is spongy, it works but it doesn’t grab.

           I bought what I thought was a French cookbook. It’s more a story about French culture from a lady who lived there ten years. Few things normally interest me less, but she has a style of comparing it to American manners that got me reading story between the recipes. The average French person eats fifty pounds of cheese per year and all the meat recipes use a lot of paprika, which I happen to like. Generally I would find the cooking labor intensive, like stirring some of the sauces for five minutes and all that melted unsalted butter. Get a microwave.

           [Author’s note: to be fair, there are around 80 recipes in the book. Around ten of them are for mayonnaise or similar and recipes that use them. Mayonnaise has not been in my diet since the turn of the century. It plain is not good for you. The recipes for things like pie crusts are identical to making sugar cookies, if you read the ingredients. And while most of the dishes call for unsalted butter, later salt is added. Hey, French cooking is supposed to be good, not efficient.]

           Batten the hatches. A big windstorm went through overnight and this morning, taking some of the roofing off my work shed. Nope, I don’t mind the extra work because it is my work shed. That’s where I was until the wind died down, making clipboards for receipts. Yes, I follow my budget closely and that’s why it works. I made up an extra for Agt. R. Because I know if he gets that subsidy, he’ll be audited for sure. And my experience is that if that first audit goes smoothly because the paperwork is organized, you may never be bothered again. The opposite is also the case.

Picture of the day.
Breath underwater?
(Triton artificial gill.)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Here’s a picture (by request) of the receipt clipboard. It’s just a convenient step to keep things basically organized. The dates are highlighted in pink marker because Millennials are so stupid they’ve move the dates from their proper location in the upper right hand corner. This is their version of “thinking out of the box”. Creating more work for you to go hunting for the dates. My god, if that is their concept of progress, I shudder to think what a gruesome mess they are going to make of things in the near future.

           This is not a complete system, these are only the budget items that can be a hassle to keep any other way. By convention the far left are for coffee. Position two is always groceries. Then building materials, then household and general. Fifth is office expenses, which is normally the largest batch. And the sixth? Empty because as of last September, I pay for vehicle expenses totally in cash. But four people asked to see it, so here she be. The corners are drilled and countersunk because this board is designed to be attached to 16”o.c. studs.

           My shoulder acted up, providing me an excellent excuse to take the afternoon off. I started reading a book, “Orbit”. Off to a slow start, it is light reading considering the subject. This guy wins a free ride on a private space ship. Shortly after launch, a micro-meteor pierces the cabin and the pilot’s forehead. Stuck alone with no way to communicate, he has five days of air left. Back on Earth, the politicians and bureaucrats know they can’t rescue him, but vie for brownie points over who tried the hardest.
           Back on the spacecraft, the guy decides to enter his experiences into a laptop, knowing the orbit will remain stable for 80 years. However, some kid in Australia starts receiving the one-way transmission as e-mail. (Insert smart comment here that if Aussie hackers can read your e-mail, the laptop must be running Windows.) The story begins to move along at this point, as the story goes viral. Otherwise, the characters a stereotypical. The guy is divorced, his son doesn’t talk to him, the generals and NASA people are all Tom Clancy-ish, the newspaper reporters are tenaciously overworked prying into people’s private affairs, and watch out for the flurry of office romances these things bring on.

           Now music. We need more material and the logical starting point is tunes on my discard list. I already know them and my guitarist is no help in that direction. It is time to move forward, we have been going over the same material for months now. She has to learn her parts or go on flubbing. We are out of the bush league now and it is past the point where she should be contributing on stage. She knows all this and also knows that once on stage, I keep going no matter what, an ability that has shocked many a guitarist back into reality.
           I’ve had time to get feedback and my easy stage manner is a ubiquitous compliment. It is mainly guitar players who say anything about my playing the lead breaks. My “Logic Gone Bad”, a comedy spot between some tunes, is destined to be a standard. (Sample. “I don’t know about this eBay. I searched for a lighter and all I got was 13,000 matches.)

           So, time to press on with the new tunes and if my guitarist gets left behind, so be it. Again, there is nothing difficult about any of the chording. She is messing up the instrumentals, but we’ve gone over that in detail and it is up to her to find some method of memorizing. It seems obvious she is following my vocals to keep oriented and she was warned about that on day one. You have to know the structure of the song and that takes maybe five minutes at most. The gigs are serving to tighten things up but they should have been tight many moons ago.
           This doesn’t take the band in a new direction but it steps on the gas pedal. For now, I kind of clobber the lead breaks because I play them as agreed—exactly like the MP3. She gets lost at the first or second chord change, which makes her look bad, makes the band sound bad, and often destroys the effect of the unique bass line. Nonetheless, I will continue to press for more gigs. It was never a goal of this band to practice to improve musicianship. Keep checking back.
           I got another date tomorrow afternoon. A lady from Puerto Rico. Sharp little lady.

ADDENDUM
           You can read about the gig in y’day’s post, right now I want to record some related data. That’s the purpose of a journal, to record what you don’t necessarily want to memorize. This is day 130 of my diet. It has been over 18-1/2 weeks since I last had anything like a full meal. And I’ve lost only 26 pounds, over half of it in the first month. After that your system seems to tighten up and get by on less. The loss rate slows, even with plenty of exercise. It’s true what they say that you get used to being hungry, but that is not a constant. You don’t know what hungry is until around day 120.
           The connection with the gig is that I’ve been losing inches. I have a favorite pair of stage pants that always did fit snugly everywhere it counts. But it has been years since I was able to even get them around my hips. Imagine my glee when Sunday morning I was just able to squeeze into them and zip up the fly. Darn rights I wore those to the dance. They were tight around the waist but the very fact I could button them up means I’ve lost ten inches off my midsection.
           And I got the girl. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Last Laugh

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