One year ago today: October 19, 2018,my still-working cassette.
Five years ago today: October 19, 2014, the superbike.
Nine years ago today: October 19, 2010, blog anniversary, 49cc.
Random years ago today: October 19, 2007, PO-TA-TOES!!!
A tropical storm will keep me indoors, this is a bad one for rain. (Most gulf storms are wind.) Really excessive rain gets things damp under the house, precluding that work. But let me tell you, those two new joists work wonders. The eerie creaking of the house diminished and doors that used to close themselves, I have to now walk back. As ever, I’ll get used to it. Last evening I went back to the club knowing the skinny lady would be there. I wonder if she only owns that one pair of jeans? Anyway, I gave her my specific contact information this time. No promises, but I vaguely remember the day when she played guitar and it was good enough.
The blog randomizer says to mention food, so here’s half a coconut. Did you know chickens won’t eat coconut? Even if you mash it up nicely for them with a hand sledge. They love tomato. We never had chickens on the farm, so this is all new incoming for me. I’m heading into Winter Haven in a couple hours when the sun comes up, so leave me some slack to catch up with you. Oh, and the new joist, being close to the point where the two wings of the building meet, have mostly stopped that slow leak in the hallway I could not find. I’m going to reinforce the flooring even more, we’ll not have a repeat of that problem in my lifetime.
Did I tell you the ugliest lady in the place came on to me? The room was full but it was those thirty-forty-something marrieds kicking up their heels. The brand of mediocrity I came to know and love working at the phone company, that bunch. My spot in that club is way over by the end next to the chip rack. You can’t see the band but nobody usually goes over there. It has the disadvantage of being under a flat screen, so it is hard to tell if they are looking at you. She was. I’d seen her right away across the room but, in a sentiment women think only they have, I thought she could not possibly, you know, her and I, that thing. I hear the peanut gallery. Maybe she had a great personality. Maybe so, but unless that is coupled with a host of other positives, sitting there waiting for me to make a move isn’t cutting it.
She finally came over to see what I was writing. Sure. I explained it was a turtle coop. (Right, you’ve heard of a chicken coop?) Yugg, in a room full of miners why would she pick me? I know, because I knew which end of a pencil to use and wasn’t afraid to do so. Maybe she had bought into that age-appropriate nonsense or noticed I could use both pencil-ends. I gave her the pencil and let her write on the page. This goes a ways to proving my theory that old women in country bars are the telemarketers of the singles scene. Makes me wonder if Gentlemen Host is still around. They used to get huge cruise line discounts for single men over 55 who could dance to push the scads of old ladies around the and chat them up. Here’s her handiwork.
Now unlike myself, I want you to be fair and open-minded when reviewing this. She might be a top-flite engineer whose sophistication the world cannot decipher for another 50 years. Let’s see, 3/4 on 1/2, what could she mean by that? Today that is, not forty years ago. And look, she thinks big. 4x4 and eight of them. That’s one damn sturdy turtle coop. Makes you wonder what she had in mind. Then she wrote BAR in a box. Browning Automatic Rifle? It’s a mystery for the ages, right up there with Tesla.
Enough of these fun and games. The sun is up. The rain is torrential. The coffee shop in Winter Haven is open. And I am out of here.
Istanbul.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The chores are done and I needed a day off. The scooter puts me back on track. I threw an extra $10 gas in the car and drove in the rain for several hours. I found two new Thirfts, one with over 600 DVDs that I did not have time to sift through. They also have a router table that I could not afford. I still have two payments on the scooter. But, if it is there on Tuesday, it is mine.
This would have been a collector’s item if it worked. An 8-track tape player with a small shelf of tapes. The lights came on but no sound and I could not hear the motor whirring. So, even for $12, I didn’t buy it even as a draw for the hotdog cart. Which we may be set for the local soccer events shortly. I drove through some new areas of Winter Haven and Auburndale, stopping at a mom & pop for biscuits and gravy. It was so-so, small portions, they didn’t have coffee made. So I switched to a tea thinking the same price. Nope, brought the bill to $7.25. The waitresses are trained to call everybody sweetheart.
I bought a book on how to grow nut trees. To anchor the new joists through the old wood, which has already been reinforced once, I bought two 9” lag bolts. Two lousy bolts cost me $6.50. My boycott of the Auburndale library was up over a year ago, so I went in during a two-hour rainstorm and scanned in about 70 pages of material ranging from bird-house designs to picket fence technology. Did you know that the original pointed pickets were to stop people from grabbing the top of the fence to climb it. And they are now making saxophones and trombones out of plastic.
With the scooter handy, you may notice a minor shift back to more varied pictures. It is now easier to stop to take a look. Hey, you got spared today of more pictures of rotten joists and dusty tools. That’s what I should do this time in Tennessee. Repair all the birdhouses in the back yard. They’ve been woefully neglected. I’ve also got the plans for a bat house. If it’s true the bats each a thousand insects each day of feeding, they’re welcome around here. I see them time to time but know little of their habits. The books say up to a hundred of them will live in a small bat house. Shove over, there’s room.
The cardinals are back. They’ve found the window feeder and the female will now tolerate some movement inside the kitchen. Sharing the food I’ve got a pair of what appear in my booklet as tufted titmouse or similar birds. They have a routine of back and forth sharing. Still no evidence of the cardinals using the ball-shaped feeder.
ADDENDUM
Odd, I thought all DVD burners could easily burn CDs. My standalone LG (Lucky Goldstar) M-Disc won’t. Closer inspection shows it does specify external DVD writer. Have I reached the stage where CDs are obsolete? I see them for sale everywhere, but I have not bought a commercial CD in my life. Hold on, back in the early 80s when the only affordable disks were pirated copies, I bought one in Mexico. We played it over and over at the shop but found no discernible sound improvement over good quality magnetic oxide tape. It was more durable, that we agreed. But they were too much like record albums without the neat cover art.
That’s where you shell out $20 to get the one or two popular tracks on the whole collection. The Establishment has never admitted it was their own rip-off policy that accounted for the dazzling rise of Napster. Before they shut it down, people had downloaded all the specific tunes they really needed. The successful quashing of Napster also heralded the end of a music era. Usually you can tell when that happens when music suddenly starts to all sound alike. Exception—new country, because it really is all alike. Myself, I have around 8,000 tunes harvested (a better description than ‘pirated”) for learning purposes, but I know where I can get another 180,000 any time.
The self-limiting factor is the number of tunes that are suitable for my stage presentation. These are the ones picked out to be learned for live performance. I hit the same ceiling as most musicians, you run out of choices at around the 200 mark. That is still a lot of music, considering the average player probably knows maybe 80 of them well. My upper boundary seems to bounce around the 65 mark. And the last 20 of those, I don’t habitually play unless I get paid. My most-played tune remains “Folsom Prison Blues” and my top ten haven’t changed much.
Let me find you what the records show for the past five years. This is only semi-accurate because not every instance is recorded, so order isn’t important. My top ten as performed live are:
Folsom Prison Blues – Johnny Cash
Guitars, Cadillacs – Dwight Yoakum
Don’t Rock Juke Box – Alan Jackson
These Boots – Nancy Sinatra
Spiders & Snakes – Jim Stafford
Oh Lonesome Me – Don Gibson
Cocaine Blues – Johnny Cash
Six Days On Road – Ferlin Husky
Midnight Special – Johnny Rivers
That’s What I Like About You – Trisha Yearwood
Not one of these is new, with Alan Jackson being the closest I have to new country. And why am I not podcasting and self-publishing by now? I’ve had three previous offers to monetize this blog, but none came back with a working formula. And I will allow advertising provided the user has the option to turn it off completely and permanently. Sorry you millennial-heads, you would have to actually think and come up with something, from what we’ve seen, not your strong suit.
The other factor at work on my list is a type of event that seems to only happen in America. An example is when rock and roll was still struggling. Along came Elvis who cranked it up overnight, leaving an entire generation of established singers with little chance but to switch over or duke it out with one or two more hits in their lifetimes. Most of them couldn’t and it was into this vacuum that The Beatles stepped. The problem is that you cannot tell until it is over that it even happened. Somehow, I feel this vacuum exists today but without the musical breakthrough that usually initiates it.
