One year ago today: March 1, 2018, skillset of a dogcatcher.
Five years ago today: March 1, 2014, Cheddar soup fine print.
Nine years ago today: March 1, 2010, duct tape, of course.
Random years ago today: March 1, 2004, It's really mail order . . .
Friday, my day off. Mostly yard work and writing letters, events that used to be mutually exclusive in my daily routines. I boiled up another ten pounds of chicken, fooled around in the shed, and got into the riffs on more Neil Diamond hits. I found them fascinating in the sense that Diamond only sings, so the music has a slight disjoint with the vocals that I happen to like. The bass line to a tune I never before played turned out pretty energetic. Listen to “Longfellow Serenade”. I’ve taken some of his octave walkdowns and turned them into my specialty four octave patterns. These long impossible-sounding patterns are one way I make sure the audience is paying attention.
[Author's note: I just viewed that last paragraph on-line and that is one terrible picture. But, it was the most unusual/novel/new/different thing that happened this morning. So it stays.]
It’s time for a mood picture. This is the old clay pot beside the birdbath. Its use is to hold the dead tree limb shown here so the birds can land beside the water and hop into it. The oddity is that the pot is light brown in color. It has acquired that patina from the most shade of the location. The fungus or mould or whatever has avoided everything except the material on the pot. I just know there is a scientific explanation for this, but it is going to have to wait until I can play more Neil Diamond.
I’ve never sung anything by him either, so I ask you, is it time to give it a whirl. This is the process of how my song list most often gets modified. I suppose a lot of guitarists can claim the same, that what other people play influences them. Yeah, well, influence is, musically, an over-used term. I swear, too many guitarists are also influenced by Moon phases. They could more accurately say they are influenced by other guitar players, because they sure don’t pick a lot of music for its own sake.
In that way, their approach is the opposite of mine. I often pick the tune before I listen to the bass line. Most guitar players I know can’t hear anything but the guitar part at first. In my own defense, I claim not to berate all guitar players, but only the average ones. It’s that there are so damn many of them. On an equally important topic, I’m going downtown later for some 60-grit 21” sanding belts. Them, I can always work with, because unlike guitar players, the instrument has a little adjustment knob that keeps the operative part roughly centered in the right direction. Whoa, subtle or what!
Here’s a panel photo showing the progress on the window frames up front. This work moves slow and I don’t think there are any tools to automate it. I tried those little triangular sanding pads on the oscillating tool, and you just wear out the tips of the pads every few minutes. Shown here is the work on the pieces level with the ground, and obviously the most over-painted. These are near completion but I’ll bet it doesn’t look that way. The major goops and layers have been scraped, stripped, and sanded down to what you see here, my guess in some spots as many as seven layers. Lots of crud.
The window sashes all move again, sometimes a little too freely. That means they slide up and down, but will rattle in the wind. However, I’m confident there is a technology to deal with that. The windows are intended to be operational with permanent (but removable) screens on the outside. The design of the house means every large room has at least two windows on different walls to allow for a cross current. It actually works surprisingly well. After an abortive attempt to fix the old screens, I may build new from scratch.
Miss India 2018.
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Next is your progress report on the box. Here’s the latest, before the addition of any hardware. The box is the same scraps you saw before with the addition of trim from pieces of those old shutters I never used. The box won’t stand close inspection, it was built to make maximum use of existing board sizes. I have not yet advanced to building a box to match specifications for other purposes. I had some excellent exterior wood stain especially to learn it’s effect on this wood, but it got wet inside the can so back it goes to the used paint store tomorrow.
To my detractors, who might say I still write “old-fashioned” letters. Yep, and they are more secure, more appreciated, and lot more fun to receive. All this “modern” texting, e-mail, tweeting, and crap, I went through ten and twenty years before you ever heard of it. I was on-line back in the modem days. And I saw all the problems of today a mile away. My letters, far from being “old-fashioned” are light years ahead of the shallow “social media” making the rounds lately. As with the rest of my life, one day all the really old-fashioned coots will follow my lead, maybe by 2030. But it is still following. They can never catch up.
On the trip to the post office, I see the van of that guitarist from Auburndale. I dropped in and there he was, playing to a totally inattentive audience. He must have remembered the chat we had about that. He said he had my contact info and song list. I stayed for an entire set, and he got the lesson the hard way that I was right on the audience thing. Everybody was absorbed in table talk, let me see if I can mentally count how many. Twenty-three people plus myself. And he could have been playing to an empty room. He said this time he would call.
ADDENDUM
Blog history. Many years ago it was a March 1 that I decided to start writing things down. I was in my early teens but had already developed a sense of how fleeting life can be if you don’t leave some sort of mark. Other’s had reached the same conclusion, but they got to do things like land on the Moon and assassinate Kennedys. Back then, other than becoming a published author, I knew of no avenue open to people born into my nothing position. No money, no talent, no hope. Now I just know some ass-clown out there is going to say there’s always hope. See, told ya. People who say that cannot define hope. It was around two months later, May 1 of that year that I first systematically wrote. Alas, all those records are long since lost. To keep records safe over the years, well, you need money for that, too.
They also taste different, a lighter taste but more harsh. One ingredient says licorice extract, but does not specify what that might be. But we are hoping it has nothing to do with shoe polish. If I go out tonight, one of my standards has become King’s “Exes & Ohs”, but the Karaoke version is several notes too low. And the local jockeys can’t change the pitch, for that matter most of them probably don’t know it can be done.
Yep, I did go out, but just to post this blog. I’m so nice that nobody notices. I stopped by at Charlas, who is intent on measuring every situation in the universe by her set of rules. Sounds harsh? Naw, she knows that’s her personality and that is restorative to get her view on matters, especially man-woman matters. I don’t know her story, but I’m acquainted with how it appears on the outside. Married, staying together for the sake of the kids, type behavior, except I don’t think there are any kids. Anyway, she’s the nice lady that gives me neat yard plants. And my mother-in-law tongues grew much faster than hers. Some of mine are already nearly five feet tall. What? Maybe later, gang. Haven’t you see enough damn pictures of my yard plants?
