One year ago today: December 27, 2022, beware the Wal*Mart grannies.
Five years ago today: December 27, 2018, my first $1k over-budget . . .
Nine years ago today: December 27, 2014, some satellite code.
Random years ago today: December 27, 2007, 296 teaching jobs.
We’re not any cleaner but we are $200 richer. The septic is unclogged and I do believe if I had to, I could rig one up myself. This was a non-prefab built in place by an old school plumber and I learned a lot. It has only one tank and a single leach pipe around ten feet long. I uncovered that but left it in place. The cure was to feet a probe down the far end to determine the position of the clog. Then use a Forstner bit to drill an access hole for the pressure washer wand.
The deal was $100 if I tried, $200 if I got it running. I left the wand on until clear water appeared back in the tank, which is proof enough. This means, folks, if Caltier meets their goal of 7% (they are already at 6.34%) that fund could finish ’23 with just over $16,800. Making it, as predicted, the top performer. What’s the trade-off for the $200? Well, I put in close to nine hours over two days, and there’s another couple hours to finish and clean up. Call it twelve hours. So, $16.66 per hour and I had to use my own tools, ergo I lost money.
Here is the skid-shack appearance of my shop-vac lean-to. Yep, she’s rustic, but this is the view from way in the back yard where you don’t want to crawl through. It surely looks like the maybe $50 I spent on it and serves its purpose 100% well. Double that if this causes me to clean up the doggie pen area, which is now covered with vines, branches, leaves, and spare parts. I intend to make it the storage area for everything presently around the rest of the back yard.
What I gained from the septic repair was more confidence in my endurance quotient and that an equivalent pace of walking the dogs can be maintained a full hour. I’m not the least work-tired, which augurs well for the jam session tonight. Kudos if you go the pun. During the job, I noticed a large tree had uprooted in the neighbor’s yard. One large branch fell between two trees on my side. If they had not been there, it would have flattened my chicken coop. Instead the coop is just pushed over at an angle. All that has to be cut away, major work. But I’m facing it with renewed confidence.
Trent sends greeting, he’s in Gatlinburg. The guy gets around, that’s for sure. His options to schedule his work would have made me jealous in my career at the phone place. We were paid for what we know, now what we do, but I was a union-man. I had to be there even when my part of the work was done. Don’t mis-read me, the phone company is a great job, if they would only leave you alone to do it. Instead, you have one supervisor for every three employees, watching every move you make. There was plenty of time off, I suppose, if you had a lot of relatives and interests nearby. Or if you associated holidays with expensive hotel rooms that made you feel right at home and considered Hawaii as traveling overseas.
I will be off balance all of today. Same as years ago, I have never seen proof that a vegetarian diet can hamper recovery. I can state it makes me worry. Some sources say humans were once herbivores and only recently changed their diet. Geologically that’s still what, a million years or so. It must be proteins and such, plus if we were not meant to eat meat, the Big Guy would not have made barbequed chicken taste so good.
Robot orchard “burro”.
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This afternoon sets a different pace, I had time to blast through the bass lines on tonight’s likely jam tunes. And I aced it exactly. You know I already care not for the emotions of most musicians. The crowd was sparse due to Xmas, maybe eight people, all watching sports on the overhead. When the guitarist chose “Seminole Wind” I was ready. Here’s where I point out that most often, a good job on the bass is not recognized every time. Rather, the whole band gets kudos for a good job. The place was dead, a couple new women walked in and they were strange. So getting a rousing applause means something. But I can say for sure old Keith never got that kind of a response on that song before.
So when I say that tune brought down the house, that means by comparison to before. I can say it really sounded impressive and the Prez know exactly what was going on. We never rehearsed it that way but he’s well along in the duo trade and that was his cue to smack that mandolin. Keith, the jam DJ, now regularly leaves us and sits down for a pizza or sandwich. (Which reminds me, the Prez is apparently celebrated for his “hamburger pizza” so get that recipe.) The Prez & I regularly play an hour, like me, he doesn’t care if we take any breaks or not.
No pics, I forgot the camera out in the van. The place filled up a bit, as we played an hour past the slated finish time (9:00PM). The duo mechanics as we’ve learned them are paying off. We were able to fake two tunes we’ve never rehearsed before, in fact, one I’ve never even heard before. The Prez knows all these “listening” bands and the player’s names. Mention the vocalist from Alabama around me and you get a blank stare.
To answer an obvious question, no Keith is not our de facto guitarist. All that’s happened is after a couple months we can ace his material. He has not learned even one of our tunes, placing him squarely in the guitar-think hive mind in my books. He also has one of those personalities geared to the arithmetic mean and thus is not a good candidate for being in a dynamic band situation. Such folks are popular in their own circles but that does not change the fact that it is a closed circle. Any real go-getter would upset the status quo.
Earlier [in the day] I was slacking off which I blame on working hard. I showed up at the jam moving half-speed. But getting on stage got my second wind. That playing past the usual stop time by an hour us made possible by my little duo as we now know the others don’t have enough material. The club is more like a short-order café when it isn’t busy. A home-like atmosphere whewre you can order most any popular food from next door and most patrons know each other. Half the crowd tonight were newcomers, but local enough to know live entertainment on a weeknight is scarce.
My band does well by itself, but should the right guitarist come along, think Taylor Swift on acoustic, this would be a true cut above what’s usual in this town. This jam would do better if we started an hour later. I stayed after and wrote a couple letters. I mentioned the two strange ladies, they had a non-stop intense conversation-slash-discussion going on the entire time and paid no attention to the band or anything else. But when cashing out, they came way over to the far end of the counter. It was clear they wanted to see if I was really writing anything and not just doodling. And people wonder why I like Taylor Swift.
ADDENDUM
This next part is not required reading. While researching analog to digital conversion, I found there are many ways this is done. The one I understood works like so. The incoming analog signal is fed into a comparator, then a [logic] gate, then a counter. This happens incredibly fast. The presence of the signal causes the comparator to open the gate and keep it open until the comparator senses equal voltages. The pulses that get through are counted, the result is your digital value.
As a treat for reading this far, here is a list of “first things” some lottery winners did with their winnings, sometimes known as “from jackpot to jack squat”:
Started a TV show with female wrestlers.
Recorded a song with old college band.
Breast enlargement for her sister.
Lost it all at Atlantic City in two years.
Hired a financial planner who stole it all.
Donated $1 million to marijuana legalization.
Traveled the world, first stop: Florida.
Took $1,000 per week for the rest of her life. The smart one.
