One year ago today: July 20, 2017, military codes.
Five years ago today: July 20, 2013, how to be a bad date.
Nine years ago today: July 20, 2009, Millie in Key West.
Random years ago today: July 20, 2011, a severe impediment.
Texas health food. I’m allowing eggs again, a couple per week. (One egg a day is all the cholesterol you need, folks.) Made thin like pie in a cast iron skillet. Not in a pan like bread. All natural ingredients plus one tablespoon of brown sugar, makes it a bit nicer. I use milk instead of buttermilk and less salt, b but otherwise this is traditional. And you eat it with a fork, although if done right you can pick it up like a slice of pizza. This morning I was all over town to find the diffusing rings for the gas burners, no luck.
And these record hot days are not helping. You get drenched whether it rains or not. The Gulf convection cycle is in full tilt when we get both morning and after noon downpours, but I don’t care, I’m painting the inside of the hotdog cart again, this time after I caulk all the joints And I’ll redo all the wiring splices, this time I will solder them and butt splice. I’m placing a battery cutoff as well, it’s cheaper than buying a backup battery or even jumper cables at this time.
Now Gawd Almighty she is hot today. Hotter than the media wants us to know. It’s amazing how well they keep this a secret. And we all have the flu still, but the fever is gone leaving us with sore throats. So everybody is half cranky , which does not mean we lose all sense of humor. We’ve all seen the scantily clad girls running hotdog carts, so Char told us one of her ex-boyfriends had a cart and his motto was “No bikinis, just great weinies.”
$3,520 Limited Edition
Austin Martin baby carriage.
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We gave the food cart an impromptu field test and it failed. All of the water containers have been soaked in a mild bleach solution, so I decided to empty and flush all the tanks. Everything went fine until I tried to ignite the water heater. The likely snag is our lack of experience with it. It is supposed to auto-ignite when the water pressure is above 20 psi, which it should be but we have no way of measuring this. The manual says there should be a series of audible clicks, but I hear only one. There is a tiny pilot light that comes on, then fades. Replacing the batteries did not help. The pump comes on and there is a healthy flow of water, but no heat. Ah, well, this will be solved, but I am definitely installing that battery cut off switch.
I always wondered why the refills never lasted as long as the factory bottles. We dug out a kitchen scale and did some careful measuring. The refilling is done from a twenty pound tank, I’ve shown Agt. R the safe way to do that. So he filled two and I filled two. The scale shows the weight of an empty can to be one pound. But a refilled can gains just eight ounces, a half pound. That explains things, but the physics are all wrong. Propane is a liquid under pressure and the refilling should completely top up the bottles. What happens to the extra half pound?
The half bottles are still four hours of heat but I’m on a quest to find out what principle is at work here. By 5:00PM I was bagged tired, which is a good sign. I’m encouraged when I put in anything over an hour but I did give myself a sore back, first time in years. That’s not counting the side effects of any prescriptions, I mean. No, this is a sore back from lifting and that’s one exercise I definitely do not get any exercise over. It was on my cardiologist’s no-no list so long ago, and I consider myself lucky to still be around. So I quit working there and then.
Giving me time to go over some music. I have to keep ahead of Twood, who reports that he not only looks forward to rehearsals, but has begun to prefer playing guitar the way I coached him. The breakthrough came, he declares, when I told him to keep on playing like I said even if it sounds wrong and this stage. All the other guitar players who refused to play it that way should hear us now. But, I’ve created a monster. You see, I’ve said many a time, “Guitar is easy”, and he’s figured that out. Now he can play tunes in a few minutes that give me a real run for my money on the bass.
A prime example is Freddy Fender’s “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”. The next time you give it a listen, maybe think my bassist’s point of view. That characteristic accompaniment is strictly a guitar passage, but he’s busy playing the rhythm, so I have to play it on bass. But guitar parts like that are not all that adaptable to bass, and Freddy’s stop-start singing style might be easy for someone strumming. We all know bass players can’t sing. So try playing that guitar part on a bass and singing and you’ll see what I mean.
Another challenge is finding a tune that seems great for duo work and discovering it is anything but. That would apply to “Boney Maroney”. That saxophone riff should be a snap. It isn’t, and I resorted to picking it out on the piano to find out why it didn’t sound right on the bass. It can be faked easy enough, but I could hear one note off that changed the characteristic of the passage, and that is one of my top rules—you cannot change the music that way. No Zydeco versions. What’s more, now I realize every guitar band I’ve heard do this song played that note wrong.
Then it hit me. Guitar players avoid thirds because it places their hand in the wrong position to play most lead breaks. While the same principle applies to bass, it is even more awkward because the frets are bigger. Then I said to myself, what am I, some kind of guitar-minded wimp? I scrutinized that saxophone riff note for note and realized the first half is in bass-hand position; the second half is guitar-hand. There is no way to be both places at once. Unless, unless, then it hit me. I’ve always made it a point to glamorize the way I can move completely over the fretboard, you know, in case Taylor ever walks in.
Instead of changing hand positions, why not move blindingly fast down the fretboard for that one note (Eb) and back up again? I grabbed the bass and went over and over it for a half hour. I can do it, and it must look like magic. Darn rights I’m gonna do that on stage. Nothing gets my attention better than a new technique that draws the audience eye, especially the cowgirl audience. I must perfect it, if only for that reason. What’s difficult at home, it can be doubly so on stage, so stay with me.
[Author’s note: it seems impossible to find a picture of Ritchie Valens 45 rpm recording of the song “Boney Maroney” anywhere on the Internet.]
Later, the original Valens version is in Ab, so I changed it to G and A to see which was in my range. They both are, but, it seems the A version is somewhat flashier to play. So guess which one I chose. And, there is also a way to, well, hold on, let me describe something first. Placing a capo on a bass can be used for a different effect than on a guitar. I tend to fret every note, so placing a capo anywhere below my lowest note has no effect. But, what if I wanted to hit an open note that was not normally in the stringed instrument scale? Plainly the saxophone has no such restriction.
So what happens if I put the capo in the “wrong” place for the purpose of hitting notes normally difficult or impossible? There’s a few times I wanted to hit both a C and a C# at the same time for effect. That saxophone note has got me thinking. Hmmm, the capo as a weapon of crowd reaction. Check with me later.
ADDENDUM
[Author's note: on consulting with the seller, he never saw these rings. So the people who might know where they are moved back to Ohio in 2015. We cannot test the main burners until we find replacements--or reinstall a whole new heating system. Welcome to Florida.]
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