One year ago today: July 10, 2022, looking for atmospheres . . . .
Five years ago today: July 10, 2018, Tampa’s permanent traffic jam.
Nine years ago today: July 10, 2014, the single shaky beat.
Random years ago today: July 10, 2015, plastered shut.
I’ve been away three days and something ate all by flower buds. Probably squirrels, they are voracious. We start over, this time with wire mesh. I spent the morning in the library, too lazy to fix this home computer. It’s forgetting it’s own settings, my first clue the problem could be as simple as a coin cell, the little battery on the motherboard. The library is going the route of the whiskey tax. That’s where the government raises the price of whiskey because they are not making enough tax and sales go down so the up the price and so on. The library is encouraging anybody to show up and that brings in the tards and gimps. They were there in force this morning. Howling, gagging, barfing, and staring.
I’ve had time to assimilate the weekend and the eye doctor is giving me serious warnings. Get the new glasses and wear them all the time. Writing back west for the money, I’ve also had to cancel any trips to Tennessee except near-emergencies. There will be other areas trimmed including my hobby budget. That one can be self-defeating. If you cease your hobby, other things could cost more. But what I mean here is I can fall back on a number of hobbies that cost less than electronics and such. For that matter, playing music costs nothing.
I may not finish the Christmas book. By half-way it is little more than a diatribe of some unmarried dame over twenty already jealous as hell over younger women, including her own sister. She also seems to have dated every boy in down before she left. It’s page after page of put-downs over the father’s girlfriend, a hair-dresser. I relegated that book to the reading room, a sort of last-chance holding area. The Civil War book is taking precedent.
This upcoming Wednesday is slated for a budget review in regards to the massive price increases everywhere. America has no place of refuge, no place you can go and lead a reasonably private and comfortable life. And those are important qualities. Very few people here know how to grow food or skin a rabbit.
Who remembers Mary, I think it is Mary? The nosy busy granny who plays not guitar but answered my ad for a duo a month back? That one. Well, instead of getting deleted, her addy wound up on my safe & sound list. This is the group of us who have semi-agreed to keep an eye on each when traveling, although years later I am the only one who followed through. Mary is both a critic and expert on everything and no matter what random event is mentioned in my travels, she’s been there, done that. She is such a fault-finder that I asked if she wanted to be dropped from the list. No way. It seems to have become her best source of material.
For example, you may be aware of rules governing pictures and personal information on the blog. It is not uncommon to broadcast a video with the top half of people’s faces cropped off. This is plain common sense. Now Mary thinks she is the one who spotted the missing parts and demands to know why. So I admit to trifling and sending snarky replies just for reaction. Well! Alex Jones, the blog guy who hates on-line experts, would have a field day with this gal.
Chernobyl today.
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She’s a blast furnace out there today. I made one trip to Wal*mart™ to replace this computer battery. It improved a few items but now I can’t get any Internet. It’s that same bullshit from the 1990s these millennials have not fixed yet. You connect to your devices but the won’t there is no signal and no easy way to find out the cause. That little cycle of “device is working property” but the system still won’t work. This brings Caltier to a standstill.
Are you sure you don’t want any papayas? I’ll wait if you want to go check. Mine are kind tof like these at Wal*Mart™ except they are a big smaller and quite a lot greener. Bring your own ladder and help yourself. I heard of an ancient Russian kid’s game. The winner is the first one who does not think of a papaya. (And I’m the one crabby about the lady bitching over her dad’s new girlfriend?)
Leaving me with little to do, I kept listening to the audiobook and it has finally got to an interesting chapter. I know the Arabic words for oasis, well, and wadi. The story has become very accurate in time and geography. They even got the correct name of the hospital Rommel was treated at in Vienna. Now I’m back interested for details. I know they did not kill anybody important and the teams were re-assigned to raid mostly Italian supply dumps and avoid getting anywhere near German armed forces. The Libyan desert is generally more passable than the sand dunes of Egypt. Remind me to check a few of the place names tomorrow. I wonder if GPS or Google maps are any good at finding desert oases.
Later, it has to be Boost and the only way to deal with them in this situation is to pay next month’s bill in advance. It’s how they nickel and dime their customers. Boost Mobile typifies the outcome of a decade or two of downhill sliding in America. I was still working when the decline began in the 1990s. In addition to doing your job, companies everywhere began demanding you also play nice as if you were salesmen and be a team player. This was based on the idiot’s view that Japan had undergone some miracle in productivity, when in fact they were rebuilding from zero using American money and a known path to modernization.
By the mid-90s, it became as much of a struggle to deal with customers and co-workers as getting the job done. This delighted the weaklings of society to no end. But it had two sides. They could dictate how you treated them on the surface yet full well knowing you detested them. The result was follow on generations of X, Y, & Z who know they are skating on thin ice and are scrambling to take over the system before this all catches up with them. It enables crap companies like Boost to thrive where such outfits would never have gotten off the ground in real America. Why do I use them? They are the only service in this area.
ADDENDUM
While I don’t see this blog as the go-to source for unusual topics, let’s talk pallets. Meanwhile, do not forget that “papaya” also starts with a “p”. Because some people, I heard, suddenly decide out of the blue they want papaya. When visiting Miami, there is a perpetual topic that comes up—hobbies. It’s like this, I have a workshed and JZ does not. Now JZ has been a pallet scrounge for extra cash since his teens. On the other hand, I began experimenting with that lumber just a few years ago. Let’s talk lumber, because in my smart-ass opinion anybody with a curious mindset would, in this amount of time, wondered what the brands meant.
Rich kids never complain about how hard it was to even travel to the town where colleges even existed. But you can bet they never rode the bus. Back to pallets, I’d mentioned I would like to learn to grade the lumber and JZ is taken aback. No, not all pallets are made of the same wood. He classifies them into new wood and old wood. Turns out he does not know how to read the brands either. Here is a generic same. What you are most interested in is the treatment code, which appears as “DB-HT”. There are many codes, this one specifies the pallet wood is debarked and heat treated. This is not to “cure” the lumber, but to kill insect pests that could be transported to new environments as the pallets are shipped.
Next thing he’s saying he does not know pallets because of his old girlfriend. What? He spelled it out but I don’t get the connection. Either you know your pallets or you have not done the homework, right? If you need time to study, just turn off the TV, I mean, you are not addicted to something geared that low, are you? And another thing, he didn’t spot Rummikub was based on the card game rummy. Oh, I see, rummy goes by many other names. This, folks, is why I take the odd day off and go sort my pallet slats.
