One year ago today: February 14, 2023, Watermelon? Seriously?
Five years ago today: February 14, 2019, I am still determined . . .
Nine years ago today: February 14, 2015, the war in Ukraine.
Random years ago today: February 14, 2013, I meant “usually always”.
Valentine’s Day, the occasion invented by the card printing industry. Tampa radio reports one outfit is marketing a WD-40 scented cologne. Myself, today is like Xmas, just another day but I can appreciate the sort of people who celebrate such things. While I should be doing chores, I spent the day in the shed pursuing my plan to build a matching set of boxes. That is just something I’ve never done, and yep, there’s a lot more to it than carefully cutting two matching sets of wooden pieces. I was after the technology only, if I was going to produce them, I’d design jigs. Challenges included making the panel slots wider, for which I had no router bits or chisels. I designed a set of spacers, and a kind of scraper tool from an old paint mixer blade.
These are JeePee designs, but with much better plywood top and bottom panels. I’ve nothing planned to store in them yet. The boxes are long and narrow, another innovation for me, designed to hold instruments rather than tools. One of the pieces broke during cutting, but experience allowed me to duplicate it in probably ten minutes. I enjoy this hobby and did not even take coffee breaks, a practice that sometimes comes back to remind me that is folly after a certain age. I’m getting low on hardware, and hardware is getting pricey. Why did lumber make my blog headline today? Because I got three phone calls.
How’s lumber related to calls? It’s a reminder that other people who should have known better are now stuck with nothing to do in their later years. The topics of the calls were confirmation that I was right that Carnation is the best evaporated milk, that inflation works for you if you invest in the correct things, and insurance is expensive. Duh, yeah, I think tomorrow, I’ll go saw some more lumber and relax.
Falkland Islands, 40 years later.
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This is the demo circuit now mounted more permanently on a slab of lumber. It’s the same circuit as on the breadboard last day, the PNP transistor. On-line is a demonstration of how the Internet world is chock full of non-experts. Diagrams and sketchs by the ton showing a link in the circuit that cannot be there or the thing will not work. That’s why once in a while you’ll see these commented pictures, this one pointing to the wire that is not there. Normally for internal use, I know some of you understand where these are coming from. This shows clearly the entire circuit and power supply. This is a working model, to be delivered to Wilford, who knows he’s wise to test it completely—everything will be on the exam.
Fast forward to the jam session. I was not happy with the resutls tonight, as that Keith character returned and he’s your basic loser, the type that figures a bass player is a flunky who follows orders. Mind you, that is typical of Florida guitarists and I rarely hold that against them—I just don’t join their bands or let them join mine. There is an on-going problem with the guy, in that his PA mixer is set up wrong, but he won’t set it right. Week after week he goes on about the feedback and and bad levels, but he won’t fix it and won’t let anybody else fix it. He admits he knows nothing about such equipment. So I finally told him he either has to fix it or quit complaining. It’s been 15 weeks.
You know what he did? He called me an asshole, not because I wanted to set the PA correctly, but because I said I wanted to. Now you figure that one out. So I checked with the manager and several of the servers to find out he’s been calling me that for weeks. We all know people who have been doing things wrong for 40 years and how they react when meeting somebody who does it right. But on top fhat, a lowly bass player! So, he’s been intentionally leaving the PA set wrong, Why would he do that? Possibly he’s planning to woo away my guitar player, which is not an overly strange possibility. I don’t think with an attitude like his that reconciliation is worthwhile. There is but little chance of such people even getting along with somebody who does things differently, much less someone who actually does it right.
To worsen the mix, my guitar player likes playing in third-rate bands, this is not uncommon. I arrived at 8:00PM and he’d showed up at 7:00PM. He’d jammed an hour and soon as I got on stage I spotted the rot. He was playing everything the same at the same tempo. He no longer responded to my cues to change to the correct tempo after starting and his picking during instrumentals, while better than before, was the same basic style in every song. That’s a big part of my definition of third-rate. I’d hate to lose the guy but nor can we let him drag what we’ve accomplished back down to that level. So you’ll know, I have another guitarist showing interest, but he is another five miles further away.
I’ll presume the Prez knows better than to throw in with a non-professional who has not learned a new tune in decades—but you never know. The carrot I plan is another similar but paying gig. For that reason I dialed the old number from Kooters and to my good surprise, Cher answered. She’s the gal who was barkeep for all those years and finally married a nice rich guy, only to be diagnosed with cancer a year later. None of this is gossip, by the way. She has influence and connections, so we met up at Kooters, the dud club. I should mention things have not gone as I predicted, in fact, it has gotten worse. That massive sub-division across the way, walking distance, has not improved their ratios.
I think, in a parallel universe, Cher and I would have been an unbeatable force. Like the Reb & I, we tackled the same gremlins, but without the same resources, we came out of it with different and unharmonious values. But in another similarity, toward the end, real life has channelized us into a mutual agreement on what remains to be done, what needs to be done. While I’m too old to help from scratch, she was a bookkeeper and knows how to work a spreadsheet. Even if investing is not her bag, what a boon to have somebody one could farm the spreadsheeting out to.
Cher is no longer part of the team over there but retains influence. She has always liked dancing and I agreed to show her some basics. Just you watch, she will know how to turn those basics into a show and a half. I said years ago she could have been the one. For now, I want that Saturday after-dart-show slot and she may be the ticket. She knows the situation over there, and while she has not given any details, has said something has to change. My input says Wednesday bingo and a Saturday show could make a difference. We'd hate to see that club fail. That would add to Friday Karaoke, making them the only local spot with entertainment more that twice a week..
