May 12, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: May 12, 2018, remember the camper?
Five years ago today: May 12, 2014, needle-like pain.
Nine years ago today: May 12, 2010, remembering the Orinoco.
Random years ago today: May 12, 2007, internationally meaningless.

           Here’s the burro from the Octagon farm. Hard to believe a decent American family would try to keep one of these as a pet. What? Well, not since the Alamo, but I won’t say anything. The walk in the sun y’day had me tired enough to take time off. It took 3/4 of an hour to get the bug guts off my windshield and bumper, but the juice is acidic so you can’t leave it. Since I had all this extra bannock batter, I thought I’d use it as a coating to bake chicken, and that took all morning. I’ve never done it before, it just looked like chicken batter I’ve seen at the county fairs. Result? Fantastic, but it needs a secret recipe of herbs and spices. Forget dry coatings, this is better.

           I checked the price of a new pick-axe handle and decided to wait till I find one at the thrift. I don’t use a pick that much. Although the trade war tariffs are not supposed to start yet, many places have already bumped up their sticker prices. The whole pick-axe used to be $19, not just the handle is $14. Raising existing stock prices is not really fair play so I won’t mention any names. That would be unfair to Harbor Freight, who by the way persist in their foul habit of not stocking blades and other replacement parts for tools they sell.

           Howie was over to visit, and he’s got a problem I wish I had. His band is not country, but it is the most country-like group in the area. I guessed right on that one, they are in such demand he rarely gets weekends off any more. And not they have a Tuesday house gig. With five members, they aren’t making much at it, which is why you hear me crow about the advantages of a duo. At the going rate, a duo would produce $100 to $125 per night per member, plus tips. I’ve often lived several years at a time off my tips, and I’ve not forgotten this. He likes the emerging flowers, since the best view is actually from his yard.

           And I’ve decided to build up the flower patches the cheapest way possible. By burying a row of stakes cut from the felled tree branches soaked in glycol. The ground is soft enough to line them up in a trench and solve my disposal problem for all that timber. Never yet have I heard a good explanation why glycol anti-freeze preserves wood. But in this sandy soil, I’m going to soak the wood rather than just paint it. And it looks like I did get a snap of one of the animal feeding tubes. Shown here is a heavily-tattooed staff member delivering the noon meal.

           Next, JZ calls and fessed up that he can’t really stay with the cousin in Kentucky. The rumor is he wrecked the guy’s car, but the true version is that it was a Buick convertible and JZ and his pals were bombing around drinking and throwing beer cans into the back. They figured they’d have plenty of time to clean up until the cousin got home a day early. That’s back when the Buick was a Buick, so the cousin never forgave him. JZ has to get out of Miami for a while, that place is poisoning his thinking. You live in the third world long enough, it sets one to habits that are not congruent with getting ahead. While there’s a lot of lip service given to the live and let live philosophy, that living is invariably subsistence level.
           I’ve scratched out a few figures to get him here on the bathroom project. Pay him a thousand bucks, or so. But I cannot forget the time he took three days to replace a 15-gallon water heater. Another thing bothering me is I’m having to admit I must have passed that age barrier where it becomes impossible to meet anyone with anything going for them. However odd that sounds, what brings it up is when JZ tells me about the people he knows I’ve never met, I realize if I have trouble meeting accomplished people, wow. Others must have just given up so long ago they don’t miss it. As I reflect on what he’s saying, maybe I have already met all the noteworthy people I ever will in this life. That sucks, because I’ve never even met Arnold or Julia. True, they don’t stop at the Fubar for libations on some Fridays, but they don’t know what they’re missing.

Picture of the day.
Most expensive knitting yarn.
(except for silk)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Here’s a shot of the tour group, I dunno, the Four Stooges? That’s me in the upper left peep hole. It had rained, making the ground too muddy to kneel in, so let’s not hear too many off-color comments about the lower left peep hole. You gotta love the giant flamingo. Anyway, clockwise from the top, you got Alaine’s hubby, then Mary, then Alaine, and moi. Don’t recognize anyone? Good, otherwise the photo doesn’t get posted. For all the world knows, I could already be some famous writer creating this blog under a pseudonym because my real life isn’t all that gripping. Working alone on this house because I have no budget for a helper means things take three times longer than necessary, and in some spots, eight times as long. This is the only picture I had time for.

           It was luck I got any work done today. The heat, the fatigue, the Family Guy videos, and a good batch of coffee. I got most of the ceiling trim done but the last piece didn’t line up with any rafters or joists, so I’ll be in the attic soon. The trim is up, just not secure, so it is only a matter of hours until I start moving furniture. The project could be viewed as a couple years behind schedule, unless it is regarded that there was a lot more to it than the finished paint. The floor and walls had to be leveled, and it’s not like there was only carpentry work involved. That electrical took months and there’s a few spots not right yet. (Nothing below code, rather items like existing boxes now in thicker drywall need plastic extenders.

           By evening it was possible to work in the yard. I painted the sawhorses with the cheapest brown barn paint I’ve ever seen. It is paint, methinks, designed to cover up just enough of the older paint to make it appear freshly painted. It got dark, or I’d get you pictures of this awful stuff. No wonder it was free. I stained more trim and watered the flowers. The new flowerbed near the birdbath is beginning to show an even batch of sprouts but now I can’t tell from the weeds. I’ve yanked anything getting too big too fast and now I’m certain to be making mistakes.
           Plywood flooring. Should I even worry about flooring for now? Let me think on that over coffee over in Winter Haven tomorrow. Remind me to shop for more DVDs. I’ll watch most things, but give me action. I’m down to movies about old actors who are losing it acting in movies about old actors who are losing it. And I ready to join any movement that kicks that loco Woody Allen out of anything to do with the movies. The guy is a spastic, paranoid, deadbeat loser in real life as he is in his excuses for movies. Sure, I watch a few of his self-pity productions when I was a kid, but only because he tended to hire good looking starlets. Back when they were good-looking. Mmmmm, no tattoos, natural blondes, and even naturaler breasts. Something 99% of millennials with their open border attitudes will only ever read about in history books. And blogs, the blogs that survive. You’ll see which those are.

           And if you want a writer who semi-predicted most of the mess that millennials have made of things, haul out any of the 1980s works by my hero, Louis Grizzard. Read “When My Love Returns From The Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old To Care?’” That’s where he modernizes the game of Monopoly. Community Chest is now a stripper club and the tokens are now a cruise missile, a Nike running shoe, and a Tesla. The railroads are all Chapter Eleven and Free Parking is a toxic waste dump. Or the millennial version of Clue. They now allow DNA testing, Ninja weapons, and the revolver is a mail-order Uzi. The characters are the same, but they are now queer, divorced, Ethiopian, illegitimate, welfare queens, or kingpins.
           But my favorite Grizzard witticism of all time is how the TV evangelist Oral Roberts started his record company. It failed because the hole in the middle of his records kept healing. (However, the way these evangelists bilk ignorant and desperate seniors is no joke. But, as Facebook proved, you don’t get ignorant overnight, so tough luck.)

           [Author’s note: don’t bet any money on it, but I believe the Grizzard book named above is the source of the joke about how they removed Tammy Faye Bakker’s makeup and found Jimmy Hoffa.]

ADDENDUM
           The diet pills I used had a compound in them to make it too bitter for addicts to crush them. It was not without side effects, one of which it caused terrible bad breath at night. But more permanently, it left the roof of my mouth quite tender. Now, months after I self-quit, I still have trouble sipping hot coffee. That’s a game-changer for me. Coffee is my social networking. I’ve made an appointment with a specialist in July. In yet another annual coincidence (that’s what I should call them), I weigh exactly today what I did in 2010. Did I just say “naturaler”?

           Here’s a book on making wooden wheels, an entertaining enough topic for me, but too expensive. A random touch of insomnia has me reading record books, but in the sense of categories canceled by the Guinness people. They don’t report living in mine shafts, yet they continue to publish records that involve not doing something, like having the longest fingernails or beards. Um, such records tend to be held by people from India, where it makes sort of twisted sense to distinguish oneself the other billion inhabitants without actually accomplishing anything. And don’t call me racist. Indian is a nationality, not a race, plus I’ve been in India and you haven’t. I would not go back there if you paid me.

           Then there was a chapter on novel defenses. A psychiatrist in New York who poinked a patient said that since he was not present at the ceremony, the Hippocratic oath did not apply to him. Or the prisoner who got ten years saying the entire sentence was invalid because it included three leap years. And America remains the land of the frivolous civil law suit, with the blind lady claiming she could not read the recipes Weight Watchers includes with its diet plans.
           Y’know, this is more than offset by the ridiculously low awards given for personal suffering in other countries. Canada will give you nothing for anguish and a German couple was awarded a piddling $1,500 when a tour company sold them a Caribbean cruise without telling them 500 of the other passengers were a Swiss yodeling society. Reminds me of my second Hawaiian vacation, where we got a great price on the hotel room, but the building was uninhabitable. That’s due to a Jesus freak convention dominating the lobby with prayer sessions and singing boring hymns throughout the complementary breakfast buffet.

           That was the last time I traveled with a pre-arranged itinerary—and I’m glad I learned that lesson so early in life. If they won’t tell who else will be on a tour, don’t go. One of my worst experiences was the one and only time I went on a “singles vacation”. I was the only never-married person on that airplane and they were a particularly disgusting lot of divorcees. I used to be ashamed of my generation’s corruption of the word “single”. That was before I saw what the Internet gangsters did to the word “free”.
           Another silent statistic is these young Asian brides who marry old white men to get into America. The plan is the same, he dies in the saddle and they now have his fortune (or American welfare, same thing) and citizenship. This happens often enough there should be subdivisions of these women by now. Yet, I’ve met only two, both young and pretty. And they said the same thing that I’ve heard it from other quarters. They cannot find any decent American men to date, much less marry. I believe them. They eventually returned to the East. They say birds can sing only to others of their own kind.

Last Laugh