June
2006
There seem to be a couple of advantages of getting old. One is that people are helpful,
and don't think it odd if you avoid heavy lifting. The other is that you occasionally
get a good deal. They have a "senior citizens" movie once a month at our theater,
admission $2. It's always on a Thursday at 10 AM, so we seldom get to go; but
this time, I wasn't teaching and Kathy got part of the morning off, so we went to see
"Casablanca". As in, "Play it again, Sam," which was never spoken in the movie.
Ingrid Bergman actually had the line, "Play it one more time, Sam." Anyhow, the plot
is OK and the music is great. Oh -- the guy that played Sam was a drummer; the piano
was played by someone else off-camera and he "finger-synched". Afterward, we went
to Golden Corral (a buffet) for lunch. Not dinner and a movie, but a movie and lunch
worked out well. They also had door prizes. Didn't win a door, but they drew my name
for an apple pie -- something that we really didn't need, as in it will surely go to
"waist."
Well, I got all inspired. We were doing a gig that weekend, and Ron, the guitarist,
came over to jam. After he left, I cranked out three "lead sheets" on the computer:
"As Time Goes By," "It Had To Be You," and "Perfidia." Come Friday, Ron hadn't
played any of them before but he reads music better than I ever hope to, and it
turned out OK. Too bad Al Blackmore, my jazz teacher 50 years ago, didn't have a
computer. He cranked out the music for each student individually with a blank music
score and a #1 pencil. Anyway, the gig went well and we got our "free" coffee for
the evening. Several friends showed up, including one couple who teach ballroom
dancing. Need I say that they got up and danced? (Don't tell our Baptist friends!)
At least we're drinking coffee and not the stuff that requires a license.
| At Our House | Geek Stuff | ||
|---|---|---|---|
As I write this, I'm actually getting tired of classical music. It's been
turned up to maximum volume all day. Why? Well, we have critters
again. (Some of you remember the account I
wrote when we moved in this house. That was a laugh a minute (not!).
That's when a family of raccoons (Mama and 2 kids) were living in the
attic. Well, to make a long story short:
Mothballs! Phew! Think I'll sleep in the basement.... |
No real adventures this month, but I got some stuff working.
| ||
So the bottom line there was that I had been outside laying block for a
retaining wall after maybe 4 hours of sleep the night before. Kind of
nuts, but the music inside the house was only barely tolerable and the
work needed to be done, preferably before it rained, which it did,
mightily. Came in quite tired (moved probably 500 lbs. of blocks and
mortar mix from the shed; yea, verily more like 800 lbs.), sleepy, and
now have to catch a
stupid bat! Well, look at the bright side: the blocks were "furnished"
by students who were graduating and tossed them out, the mortar mix was
leftover from last summer (woodshed project) and only a shell near the
outside of the bag had hardened, and I had some experience in laying
block from last year. So it's a "free" retaining wall where we filled
in behind and around the mailbox corner. And the bonus is that same day
they put in a sewer line up our back street (Presidential Drive) because
of the new construction at CE National, and there were literally cubic
yards of dirt left over that they didn't mind my getting some wheelbarrow
loads of. We put topsoil and manure on top and I think the little flowers
will be quite happy. They also did a real job on the Alpha dorm parking
lot, removing a section of sidewalk, lots of asphalt, a section of the
driveway up to the dining hall, the "mud volleyball" court (an improvement
if you ask me) and yards of grass, all replaced with "dead" dirt from the
trench. Hope they pave over the mess in the parking lot; the grass will
come back in a year or two. And to think that Kathy worries about the
people driving over the lawn when we're doing the Christmas Tree! The
"Bobcat" front-end loader, the big yellow power ("steam") shovel, dump
trucks and backhoe really tore up the lawn with their treads. Wotta mess!
So I went out to take these pictures above, and found out that they had cut down about a dozen trees. Almost messed up our plans. But I got several wheelbarrow loads of that dirt to backfill against my new block wall, then
Our friends the Kanodes came over for supper to tell us all about what's going on in Gulfport, where we will be soon. We recruited Dalton to help with loading the big pieces of the tree trunk. Kathy had already loaded one load of smaller stuff before supper, and we got two more loads of big stuff. Whew! It will take a little while to get that all split. I said if I could get in a cord of wood, I would take Saturday off, which we did, and went to the wedding of one of my students down near Dayton, OH. Much more restful than going after another cord of wood. Anyhow after supper Kathy took Kanodes' two kids out and they buried the bat. "Ashes to ashes, mud to mud," or however that goes. Went out and got wood nearly every day for over a week; most of the time, two pickup loads per day. Sometimes Kathy loaded small stuff as I cut away limbs, sometimes we hoisted bigger pieces together, and I loaded a ton or two of 100-lb pieces when there was no one else to help. One layer of 15-inch diameter hunks of oak figures out to about 1300 lb. On Friday, Jeff, a seminary student, came and helped. Among other things, he was state champion weight lifter for the "clean jerk" I think it's called. Anyway, after supper and one last load, we watched a video and ate chips and salsa. Another load on Saturday made my minimum 6 cords for the winter. Lots of oak and hickory in the mix, with some cherry. Think we'll rent a splitter for the really hard stuff. It's about like trying to split brass castings. But, ya know, the LORD takes care of us. On Saturday, we said we needed just one more load. We cut up and loaded half a truckload of small stuff, plus one cherry tree that was too gnarly for lumber. After we got that loaded, there were a couple of small things left. Couldn't start the stupid saw. Something broke in the mechanism for the starter pull rope. Well, that was that. But then, with three pieces of that cherry tree left on the ground, the wheel broke on the wheelbarrow (it was plastic, cheap) so we carried the pieces to the truck; not really heavy, just annoying. We took that as a sign that it was time to quit. Kathy called some friends and told them to come get the wood inasmuch as we're really done. On Friday, the construction crew hauled off most of the brush and all but two stumps and Monday it had to be clear to start excavation. So we invited the neighbors over for grilled T-bone at suppertime and basically took it easy for the rest of the day, only going out to find another wheel and to fill the spare gas container for the grill. It was a gorgeous day, mid-seventies, gentle breeze, not a cloud in the sky, when you'd rather hug a tree than cut one up for firewood. Ah, for a hammock!
I think the LORD had in mind
that we needed some toughening up before going to Gulfport to work on stuff.
We went down to put up a couple of "bunkhouses" with air conditioning before
the rest of our "Yankee" team got there. Temperatures are like 92 daytime
and 75 at night, with dewpoint about 72, plum mizzable without the A/C.
We'll give a full report next month, since it's a
2-week stint we're on.
I have heard that people along the coast, from Kennebunkport to Brownsville, have sticker shock on their insurance bills for the coming year. Premiums have taken a big jump. The Katrina payouts really strained the insurance companies and even so, dividing it up amongst all those people, the payouts were far too small. The word of the day is TANSTAAFL, coined by Robert A. Heinlein. It's an acronym for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." The money has to come from somewhere. It's just like the casinos. Sure, you can win big, but if you win a thousand bucks, somebody else has to lose a thousand bucks. Plus overhead. Businesses don't "have" money, they get it from you and me. Their costs go up, our costs go up. And it hits the poor folks hardest because there's no graduated scale on insurance premiums. So we went to Gulfport. Sure, they will probably be devastated again someday, but the LORD did not call us to lecture them on why Indiana is a better place to live. He called us to help our neighbors when they are in distress. Besides, we have tornadoes.... | |||
