One year ago today: November 30, 2022, whatever happened to HondaJet.
Five years ago today: November 30, 2018, I try sound-proofing.
Nine years ago today: November 30, 2014, they turned into cannibals.
Random years ago today: November 30, 2011, no concept of honesty . . . .
Having vivid memories of my old shoulder injury, I let the Reb sleep in. As quietly as possible, I fed the pets, cleared the driveway, did the dishes, and got most of the tidying up done. She is not going to be able to work that vacuum cleaner and forget the leaves until I get back. I left Florida in kind of a hurry, so we’ve made arrangements for her to get some help for a few weeks until I can tie up the loose ends and drive back to Tennessee. My guess is probably three weeks. The doggie walk was especially long, they have a sense of when either of us a leaving and are getting harder to fool every time. If the big doggies sees a suitcase, he will not let us out the door.
This view shows the doggies in the van. I had places a small piece of memory foam, seen here, as an aid for the little doggie to get up between the sears, where he loves to sit. It works but he prefers to plump up against it and whine like he was abandoned.
One change for this tragic situation is I’ve activated texting. Golly, I must be so old fashioned. Either that or I rejected texting as a retrograde technology for dumbies to embrace back in the 90s. Tell them it is new and they’ll buy a $600 phone to exchange messages that are slower than Morse Code.* I’ve met millennials who actually think texting is a modern development. I guess their history classes never mentioned teletype machines. And I hope that one day, some millennial “invents” a phone that you can answer by picking it up with one hand and saying “hello”.
Did I mention my “smart phone” has no answer button. First, the phone cannot be set to ring lound enough to be heard if you are not holding it. But it sits there with a blank black screen. No way exists to tap or swipe it, the only button that functions is the off-on, which half the time drops the call. I’ve shown the phone to several “experts” and it turns out they don’t have a clue. Folks, we are not only in the era of the cellular phone, but also the cellular “genius”. The only thing they really know how to use is their own equipment, so that’s why they call each other geniuses but almost nobody else ever does.
Swiss euthenasia room.
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Noon found me south of Murfreesboro, where I took the side roads to Shelbyville, Tullahoma, Winchester, then a most beautiful highway through the mountains. It’s that same story-book setting a described in 2018, late fall with the leaves gone. A good choice, this was one of the best drives yet, there was one stretch of road with no traffic for 80 miles. Other than gas, my only stop was Shelbyville for coffee. I went downtown just to say I’d been there. It’s your typical 1800s “eastern” town with lots of brick buildings and shops full of stuff I never buy.
By dark, I was in more of the mountain passes, which don’t present the same views as the valleys. So I kept driving until well after dark. By the time I got to that stretch south of Gunterville, there was nothing to see. I kept driving and arrived at the insane roadways of Gadsden, taking nearly an hour to get through there by GPS. No wrong turns, but this is not the first time GPS has sent me down 15 miles of residential streets thinking it’s a shortcut. After that town, I’m on my old motorcycle routes. Meaning nothing new. So I drove all the way to Dothan, the surprisingly large city you never heard of.
Dothan is like Houston or Dallas, a series of concentric roads around downtown. This makes for spectacular rush-hours, even if they were not constantly tearing it up in sections. I was four hours late getting out of Tennessee so I made up the camper bed, then stopped for a few beers at the Wild Buck. Where some lady at the pool table took a shine to me. The layout of the club was that if you wanted anything, a pen from the car, a trip to the men’s room, the juke box, anything, you had to walk down this aisle and there she was, every time, in your way, which took a keen eye and good timing on her part to block you way that far from the pool tables.
I was there to get some work done. When it comes to money planning, I have to be sitting down but distractions don’t much bother me. That’s unless the distractions start getting up front and close, but anyway, I sketched out three alternative plans for the Reb and I. You might say when I’m on the road, I do my planning in the bar and my thinking in the car. It was much warmer this side of the mountains, so I did not set the alarm. This episode has me so rattled, I woke up too early anyway, around 4:30AM, but return tomorrow for that tale from the trailer court.
There’s a feeling I can’t shrug that I could be doing more but I realize even I would need help. Example, the dogs have to be able to get out into the back yard. When the temperature drops, the sliding door begins to stick. I mounted a special over-size handle onto the frame a couple days ago. But soon it took two hands and major strength to move it. So I got down there and scraped the tracks clean of old grease, down to the bare metal, getting my hands numb and cold. Then a trip to get some special lube and pretty soon there’s a half day when I could not be doing chores. Unlike my cabin, which is messy, the house in Tennessee requires major upkeep.
As it went, I was there an extra day without getting anything done that helps the immediate situation. I need this extra-long drive (almost 200 miles longer) to blank my mind from the situation. I need to plan ahead and I’m in the immediate.mode. Unless things get worse, which is unlikely now that we’ve stabilized the situation, most things will just slow down. Like Caltier for example. They paid a dividend of $98 for November, bringing the yearly total to 6.4%. Near enough to their goal of 7% to make that almost a certainty. They continue to meet my parameters.
ADDENDUM
For the record, what we call Morse code isn’t. Morse had developed a rather complicated system of four “bits”. I looked at it once and it’s a mess. If I recall, he had it so the silences were as important as the dots and dashes. Anyway, when the international community decided to standardize the telegraph system, they chose the Austrian “two” bits, that is, the sounds we call Morse code today. Since Germany was first to adopt it, one could rightfully call it German code.
