One year ago today: July 18, 2018, what a mess.
Five years ago today: July 18, 2013, 50% chance of rain.
Nine years ago today: July 18, 2009, Marijuana U.
Random years ago today: July 18, 2007, end of the Blue Crows.,
I’ve decided to throw that sheet of plywood over the floor for now, and halt further work on the kitchen until we have a procedure with the hotdogs. The City may have passed bylaws preventing me from working on my own place, but that just refocuses the interior remodeling. And one thing you can say for my bedrooms, they make excellent mini-offices. The double circuits ensure something always works and the outlets are an efficient mix of ground fault interrupts, arc fault interrupts, and charging stations.
Here’s a candid shot of the east wall. Everything is stacked up there because I’m working on the west wall. Make sense? This is where I may put storage shelving and a full length prep counter. Right now it is the only good sized place I have to get things out of the way. Alas, I can’t do anything permanent there until I level the kitchen floor. That’s the last big project that disrupts the indoors, but it is a major undertaking. That’s where all the plumbing and electrical is focused.
I wasn’t kidding when I said there is some decline in the quality of coffee the past ten years. Have they genetically modified it? Anyway, the momentous decision of this week may be to, after some 28 years, to begin again adding sweetener to my brew. That is a disgrace to those who made coffee into what it is today. The first coffee I ever had I did not like as a product was Starbucks; it was cheap coffee with artificial flavors to disguise taste—and Yuppieland loved the crap from day one. Ah, the power of advertising over the lame and the average.
Be sure to check in later or tomorrow for the results of rehearsal [number] six. This is the one where many a guitar player drops out in discouragement. Some realize they’ve missed the boat but most don’t have what it takes to play the thing properly. I mean, how would you feel if somebody like me came along and proved the way you’ve been doing something all you life was wrong. We’ve all worked when younger for adults who had done things hackneyed their entire lives and musically what I do, I realize, can put many a lead guitarist in that position.
Do I regret that? No, because when it happens, it is not a taunt, but a chilling awareness on the guitarist’s part that he’s just been found out. I don’t stand in awe of the his awesomeness and that bass is not at all easy. I mean, it is easy the way a guitar player plays it, but not easy the way I do, and I can prove that by handing it to him for 30 seconds. Twood doesn’t have this conflict, since he openly admitted on day one that he realized he wanted to learn my technique because, uncharacteristically, he said whatever he’d done before was not working.
Speaking of that, not every tune lends itself to my style of rhythm bass. If you can imagine my rhythm bass played along with drum guitar, that’s a decent picture of how I arrange music for duos. So when I re-hear a tune that fits, that gets my attention. And this is the more true when it is some frivolous tune from my past that comes on the radio in this new light. Today’s candidate? I don’t recall who played it but think of that pattern to “Boney Maroney”. You know, the “making love underneath the apple tree” song.
Tattoo.
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Here’s something to take an extra look at. It is the now-repaired hot water line. The problem was the incompatibility of PVC and CPVC fittings. I didn’t know about this and none of the self-styled experts said a thing. The temporary fix of two days ago began leaking within 24 hours. I went on-line and found no advice how to address this. But I stumbled across to the old Ace Hardware out on Highway 17 and asked if they had a flex hose with ends that fit both brands of pipe. Oh, says the guy, why don’t you just use a PVC to CPVC adapter. What? If he’s not pulling my leg, I just wasted a week and had even expert plumbers tell me the two could not be coupled without a shark clip or and even more expensive no-hub.
Here it is folks, a composite photo showing me pointing to the coupling and a better view of the completed repair. When the next-generation of fact-by-majority-rule takes over, this will become an everyday occurrence. There it is, but it doesn’t exist because they all voted that it doesn’t. And no, they are not going to compensate you for wasting your time. American society and business practice has been nudging that direction for twenty years at least.
Here’s a (below) the offending piece, now cut out of the circuit. I took this part in to three hardware stores and also asked two plumbers who were in that department while I was there. No such piece, they all said. Not like me, who would have said I don’t know if there is such a thing. The staff and these goobers stated they knew for a fact there was not.
In the end, the repair took about what it would have if anybody out there had the savvy to tell me about the adapter. That is, the repair was maybe 40 minutes. Y’know, it could have taken longer, because I’m made an unrelated boo-boo. Thinking I could still be using faulty information, I threw two pans of garlic chicken in the oven. Use your imagination. It’s a rainy day, there I am under the foundation and what is practically right above my head. Yep, the heavenly aroma from that oven. And this is day 230 of my diet. You can bet your marbles I was working fast.
You can have all the roast chicken you want. At least I can, because I cannot physically eat enough chicken in a day to exceed my limits. In my off moments, I downloaded “Boney Maroney”. I see it is well-covered so I used Wiki to find the original. Somebody called Ritchie Valens. That is around the same time I told you about the early boomers and late boomers, with 1954 as the dividing line. This must have come from before then, culturally, because it is my older sister’s music.
I know a lot of these tunes because she had a transistor radio. The one local station played “teen music” from 4:00 - 6:00 PM, heavily interlaced with the things they knew teens were most interested in. Government news, politics, hog prices, national weather, used car ads, and cigarette commercials. Sometimes they’d play a good five or six songs over those two hours. Now, that 1954 demarcation is not a vague point in time. In the class one year ahead of me, that is, one year older, there was not one person with long hair, nor one person who liked The Beatles. None of them ever became hippies or protesters. So these millennials are by far not the first generation in modern times to live by doing what they were told.
Maybe by the time I was a teen, there were hippies in the big cities, but there was nothing like it in the small towns. That bunch, just a year older than me, they essentially disappeared into the maw of progress. Most of them became housewives, aluminum siding salesmen, or Polk County Corrections Officers. Pathetic really. And while the year is distinct, not so everyone involved. I was the first to have long hair and protest the social order. When other males around my age saw me scoring with women they could only dream of, they wrongly presumed it had something to do with having long hair. So by the dozen they jumped on the bandwagon. But, as my brothers can tell you, this fooled nobody.
ADDENDUM
Sure, I’m discovering the math book fascinating. For years I’ve complained about the lack of sources that could explain it so I understand. Routine teaching methods have no effect on me a percentage of the time and I’ve been called an idiot over it. This book is telling me the interrelationships of the math processes, a far more effective approach for me, since I can then make further deductions on my own. That, in my case, is a precise term, I do almost all my math by deduction and it’s frustrating when nothing works and I can’t imagine the reasons.
This new book is helping throw new light on the reasons. Right now that light is 5 watts but I have hopes. My goal is a better understanding of how prime numbers are used for encryption, or if I can’t get that far, at least some idea of how it is done.
Now even later, I have good news. In a way, it could be fantastic news. Twood not only did the homework, there can be no doubt he has been sincerely pursuing this material. You can tell when somebody is fudging the practicing. This guy has been working hard. For example, he asked for some e-mailed MP3s, so I sent him a batch file I already had which included the requests plus some extras. When I got there today, he had also learned the extras. More encouragingly is that some of those tunes I was just learning myself, so he put me to the test.
This is the stage where many [and to date most] guitarists quit, that is, they know they are not going to win you over to their song list. He’s catching on to the whole picture, such as playing what you know is right even if it sounds funny. And he is post 1954, meaning he knows a lot of the shoo-wap tunes but has never played them until they cropped up now. For the record, the tunes before ’54 on my list were not early rock and roll, but genuine classics like “Midnight Special”. I kind of hope this guy, Twood, keeps up this momentum. We’ll be playing out in a matter of weeks.
Another indicator is that he’s finding the music fun to play with this method because he’s picking the same favorites I did. “Hotel California” is not fun to play, but “Folsom Prison” is.
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