August 7, 2018

August 7, 2018 Tuesday
Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 7, 2017, circuit 23 is a logic gate.
Five years ago today: August 7, 2013, so-called aspirin welding.
Nine years ago today: August 7, 2009, wristwatches & bicycles.
Random years ago today: August 7, 2007, the original trailer court.

           A trip to south Miami. These are not much to blog about compared to motorcycle travel, but I'll try to give you the rundown once I get back. Return for pix of Lake Placid, random road sightings, who knows. It's a car trip, for crying out loud.

           7:49 AM Leave here at 55,966 miles and quickly discover something. There is a way I can stop my odometer by half-pushing the trip meter to a certain setting. Hmmmm, a legal mileage that can be misstated. I monitored the inside temperature, it was 79.5% with the A/C full blast. That means it needs recharging now, as in today.

           8:49 AM Took a wrong turn and backtracked a bit into Avon Park. Always get your atlas and follow along. This was the scenic route. Little old family farms, the likes you no longer get out west due to agribusiness buyouts and Monsanto malicious prosecution events. Just past Sebring, I turned off Hwy 27 to go visit Debs, the gal who knows me as the Spiders & Snakes guy. She was riding around on a lawn tractor so I went for breakfast myself at the Interlaken Café. I took two photos of their sign, both of which have disappeared into MicroSoft never-never land. As in, you can never never find them again. 88.2°F
           This resulted in a short break, which resets the timer, so let me tell you some details. You can get biscuits and gravy or hash browns and gravy. This is the thick southern gravy with pork bits. But few people out east have seen my favorite: French fried & gravy. It’s a treat, and in the process, I met one sharp gal, the breakfast waitress. Half my age, but so my type. Alas, I could not just tell her to hop in and I’ll take her away from all this. You see, I could be mistaken, but she had a family resemblance to the to the staff.
           I gave her this blog address with a hint to drop me a comment. If she reads this, I’m telling her the answer is, “Yes”. And let her determine what the question is.

           [Author's note: the above recipe is french fries with white or biscuit gravy. This is NOT poutine, which is a cheese sauce.I have no photo of the combination, but here is a pic of the gravy. Once again, I find it necessary to point out I am NOT claiming to be the first, but that I have no precedent. Don't believe me? Try to find a pic on-line of french fries with this gravy.
           This is not the old brown gravy thing from the 70s Maybe it is a repeat, I wouldn't know. But I do know I have to ask for it and the thrust here is that the dish does not have any popular name that I know of. This dish evolved from my habit of stopping at the first place I could after fasting for my blood tests. Thus, one of the suggested appellations is "Diet Killer". Often I had been fasting in excess of 18 hours.
           No, I am not going to name it in honor of my ex-wife, as in "Fast F*cker".]

           10:51 AM Leave Lake Placid and it was 104.9° inside the car. The A/C is losing the battle against the Florida summer heat. The afternoon storm clouds are already forming over Lake Okeechobee. I’m stick to Hwy 27 all the way since the priority today is speed while on the road. This A/C cannot keep up.

           11: 51 AM gas up time in Clewiston, across from the Middle School. Or more accurately, the Middle of Nowhere School. I packed a lunch, enough for both ways of this trip, so when I do stop, I can take things leisurely. I called ahead to JZ to be ready to tackle this A/C recharge. I can do it myself, but it goes faster with a helper. On full, the inside temp never goes below 91.0°F

Picture of the day.
Scottish cheerleaders.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           12:51 PM past the Gator Alley underpass and on south of Ft. Lauderdale. I am already surprised how light the traffic is. That’s good for me, but rarely a good sign for the third world that Miami has become. Unless that place is like Mexico City, a 24-hour traffic jam, the place is losing money. No, not rush hour. I didn’t say that. I said a traffic jam. I took Krome Avenue all the way to 88th, which is Kendall, which goes right past JZ’s place. 92.2°F

           1:51 PM I got the last guest parking spot next to the car wash. and had to lug my gear across the entire complex. Everybody was tired, so we drove to the market and got a slab of ribs and corn. I found a geography book I’d never seen before, went in my room and fell asleep reading. Being refreshingly tired after a long trip is probably the only good thing about car travel that matches motorcycle travel. I missed my sidecar the whole way. I’d rather the trip take eight hours and get caught in a rainstorm and have to stop four or five times for coffee. The odometer reads 56,216 miles. 95.0°F

           This photo is representative of the changes since I became a Florida homeowner. It is a pest repellent that claims to use only natural ingredients. The connection here is JZ’s contention that if it isn’t poisonous, it will never work. He did the landscaping at the house in Gables Estates for years, you may remember my referral to his storage shed as “the gas chamber”. So we have a bet over this product. The label says to shake it around your perimeter and it will repel all manner of insects and rodents for that amazingly short interval that American advertisers call “up to”. This one says “up to six months”.
           And I think I know what happened to all today’s photos. Android and the retard-friendly touch pad. Retards love a computer touch pad, I hate them. First thing I do after I log on is disable the touch pad and plug in a mouse. But there is that brief moment between releasing the on button and hitting the control. My entire 2018-08-07 directory is missing, along with some 57 excellent photos of today’s adventures.

ADDENDUM

           I finished watching “Julie & Julia”, which weakened toward the end but snapped up my interest because of the realistic portrayal of how the American lady wrote her blog. The movie is dated 2009, so the script was written even earlier. Very few blogs ever survive or amount to anything, yet here was a story about the nuances of blog writing that would only be known by somebody who had done it for years, and done it, um, what’s the words I need? I can’t pin it down, but it’s a realm of experience that a news or sports blogger would not experience. If we generously reckon that one tenth of one percent of blogs make it past the first year, the odds are still against a movie getting it right, so much so that it may have been unintentional—but it is accurate as hell.
           Harrumph. I’m at a loss to describe something. The movie is based on books by the two real persons, but their focus is cooking and I’m trying to isolate the blog as a strangely precise element in a movie that does not appear to know it has such qualities. Those who blog as a job don’t go through the subtle transmutations which I can easily identify with as the movie progresses. It’s more an effect noticed pretty much only by those who have done it and maybe I’m just surprised it could have happened often enough that it appears in the movies.

           For instance, watch her type. I know that even a speed typist will slow down to 65.1 words per minute when they are emotionally or personally involved win what they are writing. I know exactly how they will act when they type a passage that they will stop and then delete. They even exhibit a different posture when they are thinking rather than remembering. It’s a dozen more behaviorisms that become fine-tuned only in those that do it, and this movie doesn’t miss a beat on that count.
           There. You finally witnessed me write myself into a corner.

Last Laugh

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++