One year ago today: January 27, 2018, on police interrogation.
Five years ago today: January 27, 2014, WIP
Nine years ago today: January 27, 2010, Studebaker.
Random years ago today: January 27, 2016, a rambling post.
Elliott, the guy who invented the brake tool, is retiring. The tie to here is that means he’s worked his own business his whole life and still, in the end, will wind up a government dependent. The guy made all the right moves, expanded out of revenues, ships all over America and still never got rich. The new American system has, by this method, gutted the middle class. It’s the land of opportunity only if you parents left you with enough to afford the opportunity. He’s decided to retire on the Isle of Wight. Yes, the one in England. His family is from near York.
That was Nashville on the phone. I’m leaving as early as tomorrow, but I was just informed Monday is better. It’s a cold spell, and nobody I chum with likes those. She wanted a copy of my audiobook on disk, so I sent her what’s shown here. Hey, she appreciates the humor. Seriously, I was trying to rip down some CD tracks to MP3 so I could play them via the radio adapter on the trip. No luck, so I might go buy an el cheap unit. I must have deleted my ripping program (Media Player) to conserve space on my tiny primary hard drive. That’s this computer I’m on now. It is like 15 Gigs only, so as to force me to keep proper backup copies elsewhere.
How about another episode of things I don’t believe in. Last week, Nashville, aware that I’m painting the room, sent a request that I choose a dark green. How about that? So I replied with a photo, asking if this color was okay. Yes, it was perfect, would I go buy it? Ahem, m’lady, that picture was the room, it is already painted. See what a sensitive and swell guy I am? Wait, there’s more. The reason for the phone call this morning is that I had a monthly bank transfer in place to cover an obligation that ended last August. The duty expired, but apparently not the transfer. If this is the case, I may have a cool $4,260 sitting in my account a week from how. Which some of you have guessed is the real reason I’m heading to Nashville.
I’m in a typing mood, so sit back or return later. This is also your magazine-grade article for the day. Read, and you will learn things that would otherwise require specialized reading. Tales From The Trailer Court: you source for broad general knowledge whittled down to bite-size pieces. Today, let’s glance at lawns.
The biggest planted “crop” in Florida is lawngrass, some 5 million acres. Of that, 1 million acres are professionally managed, which explains why you see a yard maintenance truck blocking your drive to work twice a week. Presumably, my lawn will be part of the other category. If you see a lush green lawn in Florida, it is one of the following.
Bermudagrass
Carpetgrass
Centipedegrass
Seasahore Paspalum
St. Augustinegrass
Zoysiagrass.
Every one of them is a trade-off between a host of intertwined factors like durability, pest control, saltwater tolerance, and in my case, weed, shade, and drought resistance. I’m pretty convinced that if you have a lawn, you should also have an irrigation system. Once again, I find myself in the position of now knowing a single person who can help with any of this. Agt. R knows his trees, but his lawn is as bad as mine. Never mind the artifacts in this scan, it’s fingernail polish, and never you mind. Anyway, why can’t Monsanto use their knowledge to tackle something of this nature?
One almost given is an automatic sprinkler system. Not a problem, since I had budgeted the water here at Miami rates and the actual is a third of that cost. In other words, I could pay for three times as much water as I’m using. This is offset by inflation, mind you. That Cuban restaurant on the corner of Wilson had a lunch special. Empanada and coffee, so I didn’t check the price. Seven bucks. When I arrived in Florida on Xmas Eve 1999, that same meal was $1.50. I keep track of prices on what I buy as the true measure of inflation and prices of what I need have easily risen five times since then.
Russian billionaire's yacht.
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Don’t call me Mr. Efficiency when it comes to this renovation work. It seems like the slightest error makes me do things over and over. True, I’ve learned a lot, and one of the lessons is I could probably not do this for a living, even if I flipped the houses and made money every time. The spot of good news is that green paint is more than popular. I’m going to overpaint some of the charcoal walls as kind of a theme, since the two colors are compatible. Let me check if I have a photo that shows both. Ah, here we go. Top is the white ceiling, lacking any crown molding, to the left is the green, to the right is the charcoal. I have some window trim that I’ll try my hand at next opportunity.
However, I am determined this time to keep going until I find a system that works for me. One piece of good news is when I took the windows down for repair, some pieces broke. For once, luck was with me. The windows in the house are mostly identical, and no two matching pieces broke. Thus, I have a template for each piece I need to cut from new. It took another two hours to sandpaper the area, but it looks terrible until I get that trim in place. No counting the sill and apron, each window requires three pieces of trim at $6 each.
That’s not bad, but not exactly cheap either. I have to learn it sometime, so I’ll spend the money on enough mistakes to get it right. In my life, I only ever knew one finishing carpenter. Dan Umbach, and that was like forty years ago. I have not had a single moment of training on the matter. I wonder how the guy turned out. As a cost accountant, I did work with carpenters and such in a factory setting, carefully costing the work, but that atmosphere was not even close to the individual objects Dan could produce.
Dan was also the guy who confirmed my suspicions that it was not necessary to learn carpentry with hand tools. I told you how I was conned into sweeping floors and such with a promise to be taught how to use the machines. Dan could take tools like a drill press and make beautiful inlays and things like plaques with ivory trim. Except for the final sanding and oiling, he exclusively used power tools. Why didn’t I get myself a trade? Let me explain that one, so you’ll not conclude I was just plain too dumb.
In my teens, I desperately needed job experience. I was already suspecting my parents would not honor their promise to put me through university. But as you know, I was browbeaten every time I brought up the question of how much they had put away so far. Instead, I was promised if I labored on the farm, they would pay, but if I dared to try to get any other kind of job, the deal was off. I did not learn about that condition until later in the game, when I could have found a real job in town.
The end result of this was when I graduated from High School, I had zero job experience, except labor, which would never pay enough to go through school. Go figure, if it did pay enough, there would be an annual quota of unskilled laborers finally getting their post-grads. My position was even worse. My job skills were so non-existent, if I dared take any work, I’d never get back to school. My world was surrounded by people who thought they could do that and were still slogging away at some mill.
Nor could I now take a trade for a career. If I had to borrow money for an education, which is what finally happened, I had no choice but to aim for the highest paying “job” I could afford. My plan was to get my Bachelor of Science. To pay for it, I resorted to a combination of student loans and summer jobs piling lumber. I quickly learned the summer job barely covered my living expenses, I was never able to save anything, and next semester meant another student loan.
The rest is history. As recorded elsewhere in this blog, my own parents conned me. When I finally graduated, I was so far in student loan debt, I did not break even until I was in my mid-thirties. However, this is not to be confused with the student loan crisis of today. That is the result of bad politicking. Before all this free-trade and no-tariff nonsense, a good university degree was a guarantee of a decent job in America. I watched as the hippie generation became the ascendant voting crowd, but also saw how their leftist leanings made them complacent to how badly they were bankrupting the store.
That was a sight, to watch those comfortable middle-class hippies talk about distributing the wealth. They had never known hardships, and like the entitlement people of today, thought the well would never run dry. They fell to the old pressure that if you want to cut down on welfare, you were a redneck, and for a hippie, that was the ultimate insult. Why, they’ll prove they are good people by voting for peace—at their neighbor’s expense.
ADDENDUM
I’ll wrap it up here. Two items. The worth of a degree, and strangers in town. When I say a degree was a meal ticket in my day, it was true. You never saw a PhD driving a cab, although you sometimes heard of it. I’ve told how the field did not matter much, only the presence or absence of a degree. Alas, nobody had told me that when it would have changed my life. I thought it mattered, but I was later to meet bureaucrats with all kinds of obscure certificates on the wall. Did I mention my dentist back then was originally an entymologist, a bug doctor? So was the inspector at the post office. As long as you had any degree, it got you a $20,000 a year job.
[Author’s note: today, multiply by ten. My first new car was $2,000. My rich girlfriend’s father bought their two-storey house on Medford Crescent for $20,000. It was said he pulled in $40,000 a year. My tuition per semester was $450. And a cheeseburger with fries was 75 cents.]
The system worked because the infrastructure was there. The corporate world knew that university was tough. There was no bullshit or qualms about letting the weak fail or drop out. It was expected. The league of professional students existed, but they didn’t run the place. The prettiest girls got the highest marks, but they also learned a thing or two because basically they were sleeping with their tutors. The argument here is that very few people got through the post-secondary meat-grinder without seriously learning a thing or two.
Back then, university was not a continuation of grade school. For that matter, I use things I learned in university (and in my case also college) in my daily operations. Can’t say that over what they taught me in high school, but that is where I learned how to read and write. As opposed to whatever they teach the students of today. From what I can see now, the universities have adopted the no-idiot-left-behind philosophy of the government indoctrination program.
Stranger. There must have been some kind of convention or celebrity wedding in the area. All kinds of people not from these parts kind of domineering downtown. They’re dressed like stock brokers and parading around their trophy wives. They had the only club in town packed to the rafters. I dropped in for a look, they had the aura of real estate hucksters. Even their Karaoke choices were disco-rap. Some of the younger wives were okay on the eyes. Get this. I was there for a late night check on my e-mail and this was apparently conspicuous. Well, it always is in that joint, meaning I’m the only one who actually gets things done on a computer in there. That’s been confirmed many a time, it is real work.
I catch a few of the wives glancing my way. But I also catch their husbands or whatever watching them. So, to have a little fun, I haul out the LA Times crossword of the day and complete it in ink as they whisper and point. I finish it in two beers, and the one wife that’s kind of the ringleader walks around and leans between me and the person in the next chair to make an order. She is plainly looking at the completed crossword. She goes back to the group, hauls out a so-called smart phone, and shows the men yep, I really had the answers, which seemed to vilify whatever they had been saying about me.
I sang one song and left.
