One year ago today: November 29, 2024, Norene.
Five years ago today: November 29, 2020, my “pre-box” era.
Nine years ago today: November 29, 2016, and important 27 inches.
Random years ago today: November 29, 2013, some travel highlights.
We awake to cabin living at its finest, a water leak. Or should that be the most famous of Florida’s “non-cabins”? No panic or sweat, folks, this sort of adventure is relatively commonplace around here and the cost of avoiding the odd repairs nowadays appears to be in the $200,000 range. You want ease, you pay for it. On the other side where I’m at, I’ve gotten to know the personality of this old girl, referred to in my assets as “Cabin 509”. No, I’m not changing the title to “Tales From The Cabin”, I’m just saying there is a lot to really living in your own place if you do the maintenance yourself. Is it really “your” lawn if you pay somebody else to mow it?
Other than moving the floor panels, which is always an onerous chore, this repair was over in the time it took to sip a coffee. It was light work (some may disagree) made lighter by having all the proper tools, and said tools stored in nice, locatable, laser-labeled wooden boxes of recent origin. I’m now to record the mechanics of this leak. The materials are the best available for this sort of, well since it is two differing materials, I call it a fusion. Unseen in how inside that double-ended jaw splice, the pipes are inside to almost touching.
Then, with the end-caps, a pair of heavy-duty rubber (maybe silicon) gaskets firmly pinch and seal, trust me, these expensive joint pieces are worth every penny. Same with how I took the time to install extra stop-cocks (valves) on every new section. I can trouble-shoot any leaks simply by turning off the cocks until the water stops. The fail on this joint is the building itself, it is still settling after 70+ years. This places a slight, but constant, strain on this joint, which, by the way, is located here for that very reason—ease of access.
The metal side is fine, as the pressure causes the gasket to “bite” tightly into the pipe surface, which you can see has a rough finish. The plastic side is smooth. Even the slightest movement seems to relax the grip, and over time you get this third failure at the same spot. So today, we design two preventative measures. One is a marking ring that will reveal if the joint has moved, and two, a small collar around the pipe that adds resistance to the plastic section.
The one remaining question is if I deserve that third cup of coffee. Check with me later. Oh, and the pretty college girl in the video is just to make sure you were paying attention. This could be a great day yet, as moving that floor did not tire me out. Or maybe I just think that because of the pretty gal.
Now let’s talk music. It is the annual Snowbird let’s-start-a-band season and Craigslist did not disappoint. Suddenly everybody is forming a band again, and I see my old lead player is out of jail, I’d recognize his carefully worded ad anywhere. He plays lead breaks only and just stands there the rest of the song. The (now customary) four +/- ads for an experienced bassist where “experience” means you already play their material so they don’t have to do any actual work. After all, you are just a bassist, and all they have to do is follow along, right?
One page got my attention, Lakeland band that specified over 60 and local gigs only. This is more important than it seems. You must avoid the annual crop of newcomers who think they can recreate the 70s—if (like the Hippie) they could only find some underlings who knew how to listen and do what they were told, dammit. And whose taste in music did not so totally suck.
Then I took my time and played bass for awhile. Do you think it is true, these rumors that there are people who don’t play a musical instrument for at least an hour a day? What would they do instead? Watch television or something?
Qawra Best Western.
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Ever on the lookout, I see a retired vet is seeking a mortgage for the property he is renting. The only reason I’m looking it is that this might include the land. I know that area from driving around and I could afford that investment if I had to. Running the numbers shows that it could produce a stream of income for 20 years, but that’s risky nowadays. One more Biden and your savings are worth about as much as an Israeli ceasefire.
There’s another picture below, showing the interior. This type of property is very rentable at over $1,000 per month. But my spidey-sense tells me things are going wrong in that a/rea of Florida. This is the fifth consecutive year of no Snowbirds. How about we just wait and see?
Ann Coulter, and I admit to having read less than half her books, is back on the charts for the reason I read any of them. She takes top spot for accurate predictions of the world today often 15 years in advance. Pretty amazing. She rarely named Trump but she was right about a lot. The case against Trump in Georgia was dropped but ignored by the media. What won’t be ignored is how Georgia law that allows defendants to recover attorney fees when prosecution drops a case. If so, Fulton County now owes Trump about ten million dollars. Serves them right.
A response already, the “band” in Lakeland is a startup, so not a band at all. I get the impression it is a guitarist and drummer who want to play the community center circuit. They have no ready list, mentioning Beatles and Petty, exactly the material you don’t want for the trailer park circuit. But, let’s hear what they have to say. Remind myself this is the band that wants a bassist “over 65” but they don’t seem to know what they are doing. They want to “get folks our age up and dancing”, which tells me they have not tried this before.
There is something about the ad, who recalls that group with the guy whose father was the drummer? It can’t be, but that is the vibe I’m getting. The guitar player was excellent, it’s posted here somewhere but I’m too lazy to go look. Anyway, the guy was a former pro, but was still floored by my bass playing. That’s the guy who kept looking at my left hand to try figuring out how I was getting the right sound without any pedals, etc. He was sold, but he had this sour-ass old drummer who kept galloping.
This gave me a choice, stick with a steady pace on the guitarist, or speed up with the drummer. Since such a drummer is useless, I opted for staying on tempo. This pissed off the jerk and sure enough, a few days later the guitar player calls to say the drummer convince him that sooner or later, I would cause an argument in the band. (Yeah, with him.) Anyway, who would choose a third-rate drummer over an excellent bassist? Aha, it’s his father.
I had noticed, as I would, that the guitar player was the one single-handedly holding such a band together. As is usual, they are not very good at it. So I followed some of the links in their ad and found it was not their live material. It was sites of rock videos which means little to me. But, it would make sense because said guitarist was definitely dreaming of recreating the 70s and that old coot of a drummer had finally croaked. That’s all for today, hopefully you had a better Saturday.
ADDENDUM
Using the line that I was low on coffee, I drove to the south end and spent $50. I listened to our Algerian now taking a stand against the French colonizers of his grandfather’s day. An Algeria where it is okay to sleep with your neighbor’s slave girls, but not your own. His speech pattern has also changed to liberal, constantly trying to slip in false facts but complaining if you stop him on the spot. It reminded me of how any look into my own past would find “dead” times when I had to associate with such people. In fact, allow me to explain why you cannot just ignore these people, you have to shut them out of your life.
For me, such a period would be most of the years I was 9, 10, and 11. That’s when I learned to focus my energies on things that could not be divided. This is a process that takes time, but I have one example that tells the tale. I wanted to go downtown on the new bus system and was told I had to take my brother. What could go wrong with that?
I spent the next month explaining to every kid in school that while my brother was there, “we” did not sneak on the bus, “we” did not smoke a joint, and “we” did not steal any candy. Okay, but how does that explain the dead time, why not just quit going downtown with your brother? Ah, I already told you that. Try it. Your mail disappears, you never get your phone messages, your bicycle tire keeps going flat. No, the only viable solution is to quit going downtown. The result is the apparent down time. But now I have to keep listening [to this audiobook] to see how many of the characters go full retard.
