One year ago today: November 12, 2021, deep van surgery.
Five years ago today: November 12, 2017, learning PWM.
Nine years ago today: November 12, 2013, a frozen Grand Canyon.
Random years ago today: November 12, 2015, new to central Florida.
I plan to go to Karaoke tonight, but first the craft show when the sun comes up in a few hours. I cannot find my best red shirt, meaning around here somewhere is a suitcase from Tennessee that I have not unpacked since March. Find it and I’ll make you the best chicken sandwich in town. It must be in the silo, but where? No election news is getting past the censors (I mean radio, not computer news). Hence, I’ll stick with the rumor there was a red wave and the left is desperately trying to contain it. I don’t understand politics at the level I understand why the Senate is now the issue, but Trump says they’ve taken the House.
Arriving an hour before the crowd, I first toured the antique car show. Antique, vintage, whatever, Americans knew how to build a classic car and the rest of the world are wannabe copycats. That hitch in my back slowed me down but I was able to eyeball most of the stalls and displays. It is craft, but craft by the ton and nothing new. Everything on sale you just know you’ve read the plans for it in a book somewhere along the line. Wilford called, he’ll be here in an hour or so, I found a dry bench and sat myself down.
It’s noon and I’m back. Wilford & I checked out the craft show, and it is the same as where I set up the hotdog cart so many years ago. Except now it is five times the size. The price per booth is $65 for crafts, $115 for food vending. The city says because they spend so much on advertising, though you’ll never convince me advertising prices need to go up same as groceries. A cool morning fooled me into wearing a long sleeve shirt and by 10:00AM I was melting. Lots of people but I did not see anybody spending lots of money. The crafts were confined to bracelets, kitchen things, and lots of painted little signs like “don’t get your tinsel in a tangle”.
There was nothing close to things I could make and sell, nothing looked home-made. Except nobody was selling small wooden toys. Even so, I would not sit in the shade for so many hours myself. Consign them to somebody and go home. There were lawn swings for sale at $515 each including delivery and setup. There was also the antique car show if you like walking that much more than I do.
I bumped into Tiffany, the gal who used to serve at the club. She got a real job at the grocery store. She makes wreaths, as in Halloween and Xmas stuff selling in the $100 range. We’d like to cooperate on something but no product has come to mind yet. She pointed to a couple wreaths mentioning she has up to $70 in materials and that’s not counting her labor. Myself, I have to make a profit on each item sold, an approach she likes but can’t do with artsy stuff.
I scored some pallets on the way for groceries and made a short video of how I dismantle them how. Without pushing things, three pallets takes around 15 minutes of easy work each, including most of the stacking. Here’s what I call an Etsy picture, this pile of lumber sells there for up to $60, but half that is the average. That would seem about right for the effort involved. You have to go get the pallets, bring them back, drag them into the yard, and so on. Return this afternoon for a possible two videos.
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Here you are already. The significance of these videos (no sound) is that 19 years ago this Xmas, such work was explicitly out of the question for me. These are not posed shots as I would do that in the back yard. Shown are the pallets freshly thrown off the van by the cabin door. It was already late so I walked back to the red shed for the pry bar. This is the expensive pallet style bar that is three times heavier than it needs to be.
I’ve more than enough lumber here to build a smaller but more specialized lumber rack for these short pieces of pallet wood. It may not be well-exposed in these pictures, but I’ve also picked up on choosing only the best pallet wood. It can be awfully dry and brittle. To me, that is just another category of wood, I use them for dry brittle boxes. Those who smoke cigars know the wood I mean, only mine is even cheaper and rougher.
There is nothing special about this work or these scenes except that I don’t mind the work. I’ve traditionally been more fond of specialized brain-work and this is about as dumbed-down as it gets. With a radio for company, I seem able to keep this pace up for a full pallet at a time—with consequences like needing the odd extra half day of sleep. Let’s not quibble about that, the important thing is look at this work. Once again, I point out to those who say it is not exercise, that after a heart attack, any activity possible is better than vegetating and no exercise because you might croak. So maybe cracking pallets is the right amount of labor for me.
The downside is none of this work is on the cabin, where I should be focused. Let’s get to some news. The UK has successfully fired a 50kW laser. That’s enough to destroy an airplane with a single shot around 2 miles away. Computerized targeting systems are so accurate these days it could probably shoot down hundreds of targets per second. After 2-1/2 years in orbit, Boeing’s miniature robot plane has landed. The flight included tests of the long-predicted microwave that could beam sunlight back to Earth as electricity. NASA continues to hand us that line that it is testing how vegetable seeds grow in outer space. What’s scary is they may be telling the truth on that one.
