>
>
>my brother in law; if you go to his shop ;
>will show you his bottom;
>
Pyrate:
Bottoms... my brother has a flat bottom and therefore he can never keep
his pants up. This, I think, is why spenders were invented. Hope your
brother-in-law does not have the flat bottom affliction as well. My
brother also has some sort of throat valve problem and can't keep his
lunch down. Recently he told me that since his truck has cloth
upholstery he never... ever flatulates in it on the theory that cloth
holds gas and therefore lowers the resale value of the vehicle.
Whenever... he pulls over to the side of the road and gets out for a
breather. He also operates two cell phones while driving. We worry about
him.
Week in review:
Monday... don't remember much of what happened on Monday. Played with
Ivory soap to clean Carrara marble for fireplace in Hartford. The
Tungsten-C Palm Pilot with the wireless network router hooked to cable
broadband is amazing. Very nice getting the weather forecast and radar
on the go. Able to scan short specs on the doc-feeder
scanner/fax/printer into OCR then Adobe and onto the Palm. Access to
5,283 contacts in our pocket. David and I make notes and beam them
between us and when we go to a meeting we check up on each other to make
sure we have covered all of our talking points -- this came in handy
with the 7 hours meeting/visit/lunch/pleasure junket on the Friday
before. I figured out how to cut off the top of the plastic pretzel
container to fit it into the sink so that we can now flush the toilet in
the office. Working in the dark in the bathroom is a problem but we know
where everything is supposed to be and we should have electric lights in
there fairly soon. David insists on being driven to the house when
nature calls. Young kids today just expect so much!
Tuesday: David & I went on ferry to CT. Did not stop at Barnum museum,
better yet, visited w/ Leland at his Tor. Note to self: when a friend
asks you what you are up to try not to sit there looking dumb with your
mouth open. Quick response with a straight face: I am sitting here
talking with you. Our new canned response: We are seeking partnerships
in win-win-business relationships. Would you like fries with that?
(Alternate chorus, Would you like to Super Size?) I had to repeat aloud
this mantra at least 50 times before we got home that evening --
fortunate for Leland he did not have to hear this silliness.
Regardless... a lovely word is regardless and I enjoy using it... on the
ferry to CT David explained to me his strategic thoughts regarding the
best means to always win at Warcraft III multi-player. Manipulation of
the undead, or the dead or the skeletons and all these little knights
and goblins is very important. I was reading Twain in Roughing It where
they are trying to light matches in a snow storm. So I wrote David out a
quick list of players for PCLS and asked him to figure out a strategy.
Business as computer strategy game -- you need to know your players and
a lot of dynamic graphing helps make it feel like it is going someplace.
Our tactic was to give Leland our list and our dear friend, and his
lovely wife, gave us all kinds of neat hints. In order to establish a
comfort level with our potential win-win business relationships we
should try to appear serious and business-like and not laughable and
flippant in our marketing materials. OK... as soon as we figure out how
to do it we will be serious. It is difficult to explain what something
is when you are making it new. We all see everything from what we know.
I want to build an optimal expression of what I know, and call it a
business and invite my friends to play. [What for me is an end-game
strategy to finish out my career is for David a front-end strategy to
maximise the available resources in order for him to maintain his
freedom of individuality with a goal to be his own person. In working
for others, as in an employee of a company where one sacrifices their
humor or their principles to the necessity of conformity to profit, one
is never fully realized as one's own person. The goal for PCLS is for
everyone to be their own person and to work together towards an optimal
self-expression with sustainable profit.] Simply shaving off the fu-goat
beard was not enough. We then went to Hartford where we delivered the
Carrara marble for the fireplace into storage, and we set some brick. It
was old brick and I have been advised knowledgeably that I will need to
remember to collect old brick if I am to move to CT. It had been a long
time since we had set any brick and it was fun. It was particularly fun
because we had to be very very clean. It was not until Thursday that we
dumped the bag of mortar cement on the back seat of the car... the same
day we had to pay umpteen dollars to get the brakes fixed. On the way
back on the ferry, back to Tuesday, we sat in the bar, which is at the
front of the ferry and usually more comfortable than in the regular
passenger compartment. A couple asked the bartender for some hi-proof
orange liquer, Triple Sec, that is commonly used for cooking duck, which
David seemed to know quite a bit about drinking. Forget about Vodka
Breath, sniff for the scent of sweet oranges. David says the stuff costs
$60 a bottle. At David's school there was a fellow that attended as a
commuter but actually slept on various couches for the cost of an
expensive bottle of liquer. The enterprising young man was a bartender
nights and weekends and got a discount on his booze. The bartender on
the ferry had no idea what the stuff was and for the very pleased man
and woman poured out about a cups worth on ice for each for the cost of
a ferry beer, $5.00 of Sam Adams in a plastic cup -- not even a bottle's
worth. The happy couple were smiling, cuddling and proud of themselves
for their thrift and did not fall off the boat leastways that we saw
when we departed.
Wednesday: I took the train into Manhattan to see a lawyer by
appointment and when I got there on time and everything he was in court.
I was told that he is a good lawyer and that I should be able to haggle
his fee. I told his receptionist not to worry and I rescheduled. My
haggle strategy at this point is to explain to him that I understand
that he is a good lawyer, that my friend recommended him highly and that
my friend anticipates my reporting back, and that I will have traveled
260 miles to see him. I then went off and did a mock-up of composite
patching on the brownstone with fifteen bathrooms. I think that I spoke
with the owner, leastways (often leastways beats out regardless like
with flipping a double-headed coin) there was a dapper fellow on a
bicycle who was quite curious about the "restoration" process. I'm
always curious about it as well and so we seemed to hit it off fairly
polite. The dampness of late makes great weather for composite patching.
Thursday: On this day we cleaned out the garage, though mostly David
cleaned out the garage while I tried to figure out work proposals.
Debcaves came out and not only gave us good cheer in helping to clean,
but made a camp fire in the back yard. Great fun was had by all. I also
found a dessicated squirrel in the "attic" of the garage and we took
pictures, this was before I fell off the ladder, of Debcaves being
attacked in the throat by the mummified critter, a valiant effort to
survive. The rain is not only putting water in the ground up to our
ankles but our being very close to the Atlantic it puts water into the
air and everywhere. Very nice morning and evening fogs in the oaks we
have been having. All of our paper is soft when it comes out of the
printer. Note: our unfortunate neighbor whose door I once cut the bottom
off of because he had kidnapped our dog (this was after lengthy
negotiations in which we offered to loan him our dog if he would be so
kind as to let us know when he had such a need so that we did not have
to keep driving to the pound for no good reason), the reclusive vile
paranoid person that we never know if he is home or not; I have the sump
in our basement rigged up so that the water pumps out into our driveway.
Water in the driveway just naturally flows into his basement... but he
gets back at us by growing a jungle of weed stock that overtakes our
property and by calling the chicken police, even when we have no
chickens. I'm not sure if it was this day or another day but David has
been trying to set up the new e-mail account in the office. We could
only make it work with Outlook, which is a program that I got out of the
habit of knowing anything about. My humble attempt at revolution! He
would get it working fine and then I would start up Outlook Express,
because it was THE icon that I saw... and then I would tell him that the
e-mail did not work. It was driving him nuts. Several times. It was
driving me nuts. Then we figured out the problem was that we were not
using the same program. There is a difference between Outlook and
Outlook Express. Hell if I know!
Friday: John Sr. came to visit the new office and we showed him around
and then took him to the beach were it was quiet and pretty much empty.
We did see a Piping Plover. There were four lifeguards on duty. Sr.
mentioned that someday he would like to learn to surf -- there was a
bunch of surfers out in their black wet suits bobbing around in the same
water nearby sort of to where Flight 800 crashed -- and David related
his one attempt in which when he went to stand up on the board it
slipped down behind him, came up, bashed him in the face, his foot was
tied to the board that then went spinning along in the wave slamming
against him and pulling his face through the stones and shells held
beneath the water and beyond the tide line. Sr. changed his mind about
surfing, we hope. Now that the garage is cleaned out we got a load of
equipment and tools and we were tired out so we went to the office to
work some more. We cannot seem to get the flash card reader to work with
the computers we want them to work with, it works with other people's
computers but not ours, and though we have an ability to take lots and
lots of pictures it is a pain-in-the-ass to get them off the camera. An
inordinate (another nice word) amount of time is spent looking for car
keys and Palm pilots and styluses and such. I was in such a dizzy that I
staid up until 2 AM writing a story. This morning I took Kathy to the
train so that she can go into Queens to her dentist and after we missed
the first train, we saw it leave the station, I took her to another
station and when we were almost there she gasped and told me that she
had forgot her teeth.
][<en
--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>
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