It’s late Sunday and I’m finally posting this thing. I’m getting out of blogging, for a while. I’ve been having problems lately. My memory is going, my temper is getting shorter and more random and things I should be able to do are becoming more difficult. Last week I posted 25 words or so and didn’t say anything. I’ve decided to retire for a while. Everything is beginning to bother me but I can’t post it coherently. So, it’s better to keep my mouth shut and not make an ass out of myself. I don’t have all that many followers so a lot of people won’t be put out by my absence.
I’ll be back when I’m better. See you in the funnies.
It finally happened this weekend. Ruben, the super, came over and finished the purge. He hauled all of the trash consisting of books on cassette, over-sized clothes and books the library won’t take to the great dumpster in the sky. The coda was preceded by a visit by my nieces and a grand nephew. The overture was highlighted by tossing n organ out of a window. Think about it. Noise. Splintering wood. An open place. Perhaps some forethought would have saved them, but I wanted them gone and impulse control wasn’t turned on.
Hi, I had something else planned for today but stuff happened. Once I get a hand on WordPress’ new page set-up. I must be missing notifications because my post is being entered in a new format. There were supposed to be some visuals with my bloviating.
The building super spent this morning clearing out the front room of the apartment. I helped, some. We were soaked with sweat about twenty minutes into the job. I moved detritus out to the hall and he loaded it onto the truck. He made a run to the library with most of the books I’ve accumulated since the last purge. (Read major clean-up) My nieces were in the night before to pick out anything they wanted from what their mother had left behind. There was a ton of stuff neither I nor they wanted. My niece Michelle is a no-nonsense type. She hunkered into the stuff and began filling trash bags without remorse. Her sister is a tad sentimental and if left to her own devices would save most, Michelle, no freakin’ way She tossed stuff into garbage bags like a Price is Right contestant trying to find the price tag for a brand new car, But even with her efforts stuff had to go. The super should meet Michelle, they’d make a lovely pair. She’d toss and he’d haul. So this morning the super and I hit the remainder and for me it was as close to my cardio work out. Heart rate up, lots of sweat out. We got it down to two items. I’ve got pictures of how he got and organ and a hutch out. Wait until next week.
I’ve been doing walking meditation on the treadmill at the gym. I keep the pace reasonable and crank up the elevation. I start with Step, Step, Step and fall into the zone. I have to hang onto the rails because my balance kinda sucks and falling off the treadmill is a no-no when you’re walking. For those ultra-long distance runners falling it’s entertaining. ( Don’t tell me you haven’t thought that)
My new addiction is Rehab Addict on the DYI Network. A nice blond lady rehabs houses,
See you in the funnies. Be nice to one another. Pay it forward.
In New Britain the Stanley family made money. They don’t any more but if you go into any tool section of Wal-Mart or hardware store, you’ll find Stanley Tools. I worked for Stanley Works, as we in town call it, and avoided getting fired by joining the military. They gave the town a lot but mainly two parks, Stanley Quarter and A.W. Stanley Parks. Here’s some shots of the parks:
I’ll be taking more pictures, hopefully better and introducing where I live to the people who follow me.
See you in the funnies. Oh yeah, I’m officially retired as of this week and have the Medicare card to prove it.
The Toshiba is back in the shop. One more trip and I’m buying a shotgun and using it on the laptop. It seems fair, the thing is giving me an ulcer.
Walnut Hill Park was designed by Olmstead. He also did Central Park and some others in Connecticut. Now the weather’s better, I’ll take more shots of the local parks.
See you in the funnies. RIP Tommy Ramone.
This is where I went to talk to various military types prior to my getting a “Congratulations, your number has been chosen” letter notifying me that I was eligible for a vacation in Southeast Asia. I didn’t want to go but was too much of a coward to join an organized movement or leave the country. It still stands, empty. Hopefully still with the post office boxes that were gilt on the door and a combination lock. I visited every week to check the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List just in case I passed one on the street. The walls were too thick and there wasn’t enough space inside for everything concerning mail.
This is what we have now. From this angle the cars look like piglets suckling on an emaciated sow. It’s too modern, and there’s no Ten Most Wanted List inside. There’s no art involved. It’s just another faux modern building erected to keep the profile low and look efficient. The mail boxes are grey metal and dull. The only entertainment is waiting in line with people who truly have no idea how the Post Office functions. You go in with a plan; if you need stamps have enough money to pay, if you’re shipping have an idea of the weight and have enough money to ship it. In other words think before you go in.
Odd bits: Glasses for TV and general wear have gone from optional to mandatory. New reading glasses are coming. Getting older is a bitch. The cataracts are slowly getting worse but the eye doctor knows about it and is watching. Finally figured pictures to blog out.
Have a good week and enjoy the weather.
Tagged: cataracts, getting older, post office
As a kid on those summer days when the sun rose to its high point at noon and the stayed there until six at night here was one thing all of the kids on my street waited for. You have to picture a street oiled and sanded by the city trucks with the smell of used motor oil mixing with that undefinable smell of overgrown weeds that were rampant anywhere a developer hadn’t built a house. It was intoxicating. The street hadn’t been paved properly yet, so the oil and sand kept the dust down and gave city workers something to do with dump trucks that usually plowed snow. The neighborhood kids ran up and down the street ruing PF Keds and school shoes that had outlived their usefulness. There was no stickball or massive games of hopscotch. Just unbridled games of tag that ran over onto fresh lawns. All of the motion belied a waiting. Every kid was waiting for one man. He’d have jingle bells as a harbinger but he didn’t wear a red suit. He was dressed in an immaculate white suit driving a white Good Humor truck. On our street the Good Humor man showed after six because the more lucrative housing project was nearby with at least twenty kids at each stop. On the suburb streets there was maybe ten or eleven kids. It didn’t matter, we waited. One kid would hear the bells and then another and another until we were all digging in our pockets for change we’d scrounged through doing chores or ‘borrowed’ from our parent’s or sibling’s change. When the truck turned up the street we tried to figure where the driver would stop. Line precedence was important. The good stuff went quick. The treasured Toasted Almond treat was coveted but if you were at the end of the line your chances of ending up with a lame bi-flavored popsicle increased as every one of your friends stepped away from the truck peeling the paper wrapper off and biting into their treat.
It was thus for most of the summers. Until there was a different set of bells. Not with the same timbre as Good Humor. They sounded cheaper, a bit tinny. When the truck finally made an appearance on our street, we saw why. It was a jerry-rigged cooler on the back of a pick-up and the bells came via an electronic megaphone. This guy was cheaper than GH and the ice cream was the same brands that you could find in the supermarket. He wore jeans and a tee-shirt and usually had a cigarette in his mouth when he climbed out of the cab. He wasn’t patient. We were moved through the line and he was gone to the next street. The Good Humor man stopped coming and we were left to the mercies of somebody named Jimmy.
I told the above two stories to tell you two more.
I was in the military from 1967 to 1971. A good portion was spent in tech school. First in Mississippi and the in Illinois. I was stationed in Biloxi to study electronics but pneumonia and over-reaching on my part got me sent to Rantoul IL. One thing both places had in common was Pizza Pop. That was a guy who drove up to your barracks door in his car and yelled “Pizza Pop” as loud as he could. He’d near be run over by students who wanted a sixty cent pizza you wouldn’t eat drunk on Free Pizza Night at the sleaziest bar you could possibly imagine, and for me that don’t take too much effort. Wash this down with a soda pop so acidy that it ate your teeth if you let it stay in your mouth too long. I ate my share. It was a standard at both tech schools. The pizza, the soda, identical. The Pizza Pop guys? NCOs supplementing their government paycheck.
This story is in the present. I know when summer has arrived when that annoying ice cream truck with the “Happy Time” music playing on a loop. In might vary, but I doubt it. Some evil b*****d is franchising the whole thing and hopes to take over the world. It starts in May and ends near October and kids pester their parents so they could get an over-sugared iced treat. For parents it’s a tough choice; give up the dough and have a hyper kid to wrestle into bed or withhold the cash and be a cruel parent with a kid with DCS on speed dial.
Have a nice week. The apartment is redolent with the aroma of a primo batch of chili.
My laptop crashed on Friday. Ya think I might have been screwed? I was checking my e-mail and it went batcrap crazy. I called Xfinity and after two hours I was on the back-up and the tech was sipping a cool beverage. The back-up isn’t all that bad as it has Windows Office and Cloud on it so the docs aren’t lost. Saturday was planned for a yoga class. Couldn’t make it. Went on-line to read e-mails and got panicky messages about my computer’s security. I called Norton and got to talk to Maeryselle. She transferred the security package to the back-up. She was nice enough to do the job without tying up the land line. I watched Top Gear and sipped a cool beverage.
The back-up works and I’m seriously thinking of frisbeeing the Toshiba out the window or,… take it to a pawn shop and tell them it’s perfect and all I want is maybe two hundred dollars. Nah, I can’t do that, but it looks really aerodynamic.
Got to go for glasses tomorrow. Can’t see the freakin’ TV and it’s about seven feet away. Can’t read squat even though I’ve got glasses. As you get older, your eyes get worse year by year. If you get new glasses give the old ones to the local Lions Club.
Am taking a course “Make It Funny” on-line. Hope it helps this blog.
I’ve got nothing really worth reading today, so I’ll sign off. Be nice to one another. The stranger you meet might be me and you’ll get a mention in the blog.
Tagged: Cat picture, computer crash
Here’s the thing, we’ve sent the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf. The troops are there to make sure that our people get out safely if the new nutjobs take total control. If it had been the George W. Bush to the Persian Gulf the “Mission Accomplished” banner would be up and Dubya would be telling us the war was over and we had to go into Syria, Afghanistan and possibly any other place that needs our influence. With H.W. we’ll check it out and see if the people are “proper”. You know, White , Christian and oil rich.
Finally got a 50 mm lens for my camera. Now I’ll be able to go out and put my world as I see it here. I’ve showed pics before but this’ll get a wider view. One place I’m thinking of visiting is Nathan Hale’s home in Coventry CT. He was the first and the most inept. He got caught, and hanged. There’s a statue of him in front of the CIA Building. Why put a spy that got caught as a hero? Was he a beard for another agent? Or are they just looking for someone they can have as a symbol since the real heroes can’t be identified.
Tried to get into my picture files to post a picture but I don’t know how. I’ll look it up.
Sleep is still elusive or at least it has shifted about ninety degrees.