I read or heard from some authoritative source that I do not recall that if you do something consistently for 30 days you can either make or break a habit. Thirty days seems suspiciously convenient, but I have tried this with a few personal habits recently, and it seems to be holding.
My wife is six days into what will be about 30 days out at sea. What kind of feral nerd habits might I develop without direct supervision? We shall see.
One I’m working on now is draw everyday. I’ve yet to decide when or if I’m going to post my results.
Somehow, before she got on board, my wife managed to slip a lovely, heart-felt valentine in the mail that arrived today.
On my end, I drew a picture of a lizard and sent a photo of it by Facebook Messenger.
The first few months of the year is when I traditionally re-think all my blogging strategies. This year my notion is more but shorter posts distributed evenly across my now sprawling blog empire. More about that in Word Count below.
This doesn’t mean I won’t write and post the longer posts when they occur to me. But I’m not going to dig for them – or beat myself up for not digging for them. Short is the new done.
UnObtanium Bazaar has a new website (same URL). It’s a wordpress blog (the devil you know) because we are going to be more about creative content and less about internet commerce. The Bazaar is and always will be primarily a physical pop-up operation. [1000k] [Counting the first blog post]
Revised an Episode of Go Action Fun Time for Friday night. [500k].
Just finished writer’s group. [500k] where we have the kind of writer’s who use the Hilbert Transformation as a plot device (don’t fret – there’s no actual math in the manuscript – so far.).
Plus this post – which weighs in at just over 500.
This post contains no useful information about the actual animals.
We’ve been busy and things have piled up, so I have some announcements, and then some links to dump – er bounce of a reflective surface. I was going to try to build a metaphor around that, but this turned into an Armadillo thing.
We will open the full tent for our first big show of the year. Come by and be social, maybe drop some coin.
Happy to not be dead…
You might notice the new bareness of the website. we jumped ship from Wix, and I haven’t had time to rebuild it. No complaints regarding Wix except it was a lot more graphic goo-gahs than we needed and and a lot more money than we can justify.
I turned 57, and my cancer levels came back undetectable – meaning my final cause of death remains a mystery. My wife took this as good news and threw a party.
Those events, and the 14 boxes of Christmas I had to wrangle made for a busy month. Which is how I like it.
My good friend Mathew Howard has beaten me to a graphic novel about dinosaurs going into space.
My friend Joseph Schwartz has a new volume of his Thomas Berenford Chronicles: Wilder Fire. Straight-up fantasy action-adventure with a bit of noir at the edges.
I know these guys from the old Armadillo Writers group (which persists, but now only by Zoom). We were named for the now-defunct bar we once met at. The fate of that establishment is finally revealed by Reality TV Update.
No on left to sue us now…
A couple of things:
We left the bar when they closed the back meeting room we used to turn it into an office. We made do a the Duck and Decanter across the street until COVID forced us into Zoom.
We are still on Zoom. It’s just so much easier.
The loss of the lease was the final blow. I think they might have made it otherwise.
That lot is now empty.
LINKS FROM RECENT MEETINGS OF THAT GROUP:
[From Zoom’s chat function that I copied, pasted, checked out and now choose to reflect back to you]
Full disclosure: I don’t use either one of them. I pay for Microsoft because I long ago accepted that the world works in Word, and Excel is by far the better spreadsheet period. But those operating theories are expensive.
This will follow our Open House Trunk Show for UnObtanium Bazaar which will feature costumes and garb.
We have refreshments but you are encouraged to bring your own and share. Cheryl is organizing a friendship salad.
I am organizing Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster mix-off for those interested. If you don’t know what that is, or imagine that you might drive yourself home – you are not interested. Warning: there may be no survivors.
Fire outside – weather permitting.
[You do not have to be a nerd to be welcome. We are very tolerant…]
If you read this blog – you’re invited.
The Phoenix Suns did what they had to do, and likely closed their championship window by doing so. And I did what I had to do about nine months ago, and I am measurably diminished for it.
About nine months ago, the Suns changed ownership and almost before the ink dried, new owner, Matt Ishbia, pulled the trigger on a standing trade offer that previous ownership had balked over: they traded two starters and almost all of their worthwhile draft picks for Kevin Durant.
Ten years ago, Kevin Durant was an MVP candidate, a fixture to go deep in the playoffs, and reliably the guy pretending to guard Lebron James in the All Star game.
The current Kevin Durant literally limped into the Suns locker room – he came with an ankle injury – which he re-injured during warm-up on his first game back. Warm ups.
Ten months ago, the Suns were a likely second round playoff casualty with no cap space, but the normal ration of draft picks. A month later, they became a likely second round casualty (as they turned out to be) disastrously over the cap and with no draft picks. And everybody blamed…
DeAndre Ayton.
Let’s get this straight: is DeAndre Ayton the best player he could possibly be? Almost certainly not. But even with his goofy, soft touch, occasionally pouty approach to the game, he was the second best pure center the Suns had ever put on the court.
(Alvan Adams – if you’re wondering.)
We traded that guy for a center who would not start on most contending teams.
Not the problem, but too expensive to not be the solution.
Jusuf Nurkic was the starting center for the lottery-bound Portland Trailblazers, but other than perhaps interior passing, his game is inferior in every way to Ayton’s – including his reputation for checking out of games. And he’s older. And he’s had a lot of injuries.
But he comes at half the cost, and that was the real reason. The Suns were into double-jeopardy with the salary cap. They can’t move Booker – who IS the franchise at this point, and they can’t move either of their shiny new expensive trades (Durant and all-star guard Bradley Beal) so that left Ayton, who everybody whined about anyway.
This same logic sent Chris Paul packing. But unlike CP3, Ayton has been consistently healthy – even late into the playoffs. And we essentially got Bradley Beal, who, redundant as he might be with Booker, is a legit all-star.
It is likely true that they will not miss Ayton UNTIL the fourth quarter of a close game when they absolutely have to have that rebound. Ayton could get those in a way we haven’t had since Amare’ Stoudamire. Nurkic is going to be the other guy in the poster.
Had to be done, I suppose. Deep Sigh.
But the championship window has closed.
About ten months ago, we decided we were going to treat my prostate cancer with radiation. (More about this in the previous post). The worst part of that, long term, has turned out to be the Lupan injections.
Prostate cancer visualized
Prostate cancer feeds off testosterone. So, the theory, in addition to radiation, is to starve the cancer of testosterone. That’s what Lupan does – it suppresses my ability to make testosterone.
As a practical matter, that ahs aged me twenty years in terms of muscle recovery. I also get hot flashes. The effect on my sex life is predictable. Deeper Sigh.
Unlike the Suns, I will be out from under this in about 18 months.
The Suns will still be crippled by the contracts of their shiny sportscars. And likely remain second round play-off casualties.
Happily, the metrics for my success are not as stark. I do not need a whole lot of testosterone to program architectural lighting systems. The most physically aggressive thing I am likely to do on a jobsite is move a ladder down a hallway because the electricians have abandoned me, but I think I can solve this without them. And I’m not supposed to do that stuff anyway. Because our insurance thinks we are consultants.
An it hasn’t hurt word-count at all.
Through September I challenged myself to make word count for 30 days, and then didn’t actually keep good track. But I feel like I made my quota.
Yes- this counts towards word count. Okinushi and Xinji discover that Hippos are mean.
BEHOLD:
I have combined the Go Action Fun Time Basic Rules and the GAFT Setting Bible into a single document the Go Action Fun Time Show Bible, and I am on pace to have it available in PDF at least by Christmas.
It stands at just under 70k words, and with editing counting 1/10 that means 7k words.
We’ll get to all that, but first some announcements:
UnObtanium Bazaar will be at the Las Vegas Pirate fest this weekend!
We will be at London Bridge Ren Faire (in Lake Havasu City) next weekend.
I am watching the Suns with the sound off partly so I can write, but mostly because I am tired of the local commentators whining about the fouls. In basketball, the accountability is fairly straightforward for playing defense with your arms instead of your feet. You can make a case that the Suns have been unevenly targeted by officials, but that’s not why they are losing to the Lakers.
That is all tangential to what I want to write about.
There is a peculiar challenge when running an organization of human beings in balancing accountability with accurate feedback.
Long ago, when I was a theatrical rigger, a building TD recounted for me an event that happened on a previous show: a curtain had been fouled up in the neighboring lineset and was left that way for the next operator to find.
“If I ever find out who did that,” the TD told me, “He’s fired.”
Which guaranteed he’d never discover which of several possible operators was responsible.
The natural impulse to punish the stupid or the careless can actually be counter-productive if it drives the focus from preventing errors to hiding errors. What this impulse demonstrates is a lack of trust in the workers.
In my lengthy but unscientific experience, workplace errors are evenly divided among three causes: lack of training , lack of resources, lack of attention. The first two are totally on management. It is the boss’s job to see that the worker knows what to do and has the means to do it. The third is 50/50 management worker, though that starts to tilt towards the worker the higher you go on the food-chain.
I could not, in my current job, credibly blame my lack of attention on my basically non-existent supervision. But it took me a long time to get there, including long stints as a supervisor.
The show makes the case, among many other accomplishments, that the inability to take responsibility for disastrous decisions – at any level – destroyed the Soviet Union.
It will also full-on give you nightmares.
The Suns have now lost. The whining continues. I turn it off.
An update on useful radiation: I have a standing appointment in the late afternoon of every weekday from next week until the endo of fucking May for radiation treatments.
I am told the treatments do not last long: 20-30 minutes depending on how close I manage to park.
We’ve been busy around here, what with comprehensive life-event changes and all. I could, I suppose craft some winding narrative that artfully leads us all down the winding road past all these changes and what we have learned from them, or I could just blurt out some answers.
Reflecting upon the remaining To Do list, I chose B.
Here are some answers to questions you asked (at least in my mind):
Married life is treating my very well, so far, thank you.
Yes, there have been some adjustments, but we’ve both been married before, and we have both shared a residence with each other for weeks at a time before, so most of the questions are “Where are we going to put this thing?”
We think we had a hundred people all told in and out of the house during the wedding. The goal was 60. We provisioned for 80. There were no disasters. Keep flying.
Somewhere in this pile is everything we need.
I was not actually that drunk. I dance that badly sober.
We do not need anything, thank you. We got way more than we asked for at the wedding. Also, we are middle-aged adults who both ended up with most of their respective households following the divorce.
Why yes, I did get copies of The Secret history of Empress Em in time for Westercon. Mainly because I had them shipped to the hotel in Tonopah. These are technically proof versions – you print one to see how it looks, but I printed ten because vending. I have [goes to count…] five left if you want one.
They might someday be collector items.
The first version is always the best? [Art by Rose Wolf]
Westercon (at least this year) was a social gathering for people to LARP SFF cons as they were 30 years ago, only without near as many people. It’s not feasible to go to Anaheim for this thing in 2023. We have been invited to Salt Lake City in 2024, where the organizers assure us it will not be this dull small.
Bongo soaking up the excitement of Westercon 74 in the Tonopah Convention Center.
Cheryl and I took a class in regency dancing, which was not the disaster you might have predicted watching me dance at my wedding.
If you don’t count the hotel cost, the limited version of the UnObtanium Bazaar made money – but mostly because of one customer. (I was supposed to have paid for this with points, but the credit card I used to reserve the room expired before we got there, and in transferring, we magically lost the points. Thanks for nothing, Best Western.
Gracie Shotz making the money.
The best bar in Tonopah stocks 100 different kinds of whiskey. I don’t remember the name, but they are the only bar open after 9pm.
Bongo at La Posada
The Las Posada Hotel is the best part of Winslow AZ, full stop. It was also the Actual Honeymoon portion of our journey, so Full Stop there, as well. If you are curious, La Posada will tell you all about itself.
We did not take a picture standing on the corner. Didn’t get to it. Oh darn.
Medieval Mayhem in Show Low is a fun little ren faire, and we will be going back. Learned some hard lessons about the bell tent vs rain, but this was nuisance, not crisis. For a fair that drew maybe a thousand people counting all the staff, we did pretty well.
And there are worse ways to spend a July Saturday if you live in Phoenix – just saying.
The Dodge Journey is less like a long SUV and more like a short mini-van. And the touch screen interface is way more complicated than it needs to be. But it holds a lot of stuff, and gave us no problems until it was time to tow the trailer.
The Journey on the journey.
The Dodge Journey will not recognize that is has a towing harness unless you get the dealership to flash the computer. This cannot be accomplished in either Show Low or Payson on a Monday morning. Happily, I have long experience with derelict vehicles and know how to mitigate/hide the fact that I had no effective brake lights – all the way down the mountain.
Now that the trailer we borrowed (Thanks James!) is returned, getting this done is a low priority, but I have a bad feeling that when it happens, there will be a story.
I have hiked exactly twice in South Mountain Park since I moved here. There has been a basically continuous excessive heat advisory for most of that span.
WORD COUNT:
I write virtually nothing in the two weeks of wedding/vending/honeymoon/vending. The week after was spent sorting boxes so we could get the boxes we had to sort so we could unload the show and sort that. That madness goes on (for months, perhaps), but I was able to get some words down since last Tuesday:
Editing a section of Events on Loki = 500 words
It was actually close to 2000 total words, but editing is not writing.
Events on Loki is the novella-length prequel to Empress M and other works in that universe.
Writer’s Group = 500 words
Adapting Tom Swift (Sr) into a sample cast member of Go Action Fun Time: 1000 words.
The senior Tom Swift, who premiered in 1910, is largely public domain. I didn’t create any original art for him, but I can’t cite the images I’m stealing appropriating with any confidence. So, these are place-holders.
Ember – the last of the Aziza.
Creating Ember, the last Aziza, a cast member for Go Action Fun Time: 1000 words.
Image for Ember = 2000
Full color adds a thousand words. Reminder to myself to cancel my free trial of Adobe stock images (the background source.
Ember is #36. I now have my full Sample Cast for Go Action Fun Time. Huzzah!
Through a combination of poor fortune and self-created folly, Dilkon proved to be expensive, with each of the expeditions being more expensive than the last.
Let’s pause here to clarify: I do not mean travel expenses. My company picks that up. And while the work was more troublesome than it needed to be, that was a product of the locale and personnel involved, and not generally instructive. Also, there were more than the three trips I am about to describe, but these were the major expeditions.
We have already described one adventure related to this job. This would turn out to be foreshadowing.
1st Visit- January 2022
Navajo burger
There are two places I found to eat lunch in Dilkon, and by that I mean pick up the food and eat it in your car. The Navajo Nation was (and still is at this writing) 100% masks indoors, and indoor dining is out-of-the-question. There is a food stand in a dirt lot that will sell you a Navajo burger, a double green-chile burger in a pita of some sort. Or you could go to the pizza place, and get a slice or pie of arguably the best pizza for 50 miles in any direction. (It is honestly decent if not outstanding pizza.
Having learned the day before that a Navajo burger will sit in my stomach like a boulder for three hours, I had gotten some pizza, driven back to the jobsite and ate my slices while listening the NPR station I could kinda-get out there on the car radio. When I finished, I tossed my crusts to the stray, or at least unleashed dogs waiting for that, and went back in to work.
I came back out at the end of the day to discover my battery dead. I then discovered that I had not gotten back (or replaced) the jumper cables I had loaned to my child.
Happily, one of the electricians hadn’t left yet. After failing to jump the car with his cables, we ruled the battery dead. Dilkon has a grocery store, and two convenience stores, none of which carry jumper cables, much less car batteries.
Good fortune balanced poor fortune when it turned out the electrician passed through Winslow, where my hotel was, on his way back to north of Flagstaff somewhere.
His daily commute was close to 90 minutes. I added twenty more at the auto parts store (just down the road from my hotel) where I purchased the second most expensive battery on the shelf (cheap parts die with simple radio play in deeply rural parking lots) and a set of jumper cables.
He added five more minutes picking me up in the pre-dawn gloom the next morning.
It’s forty minutes from Winslow to Dilkon, during which I learned a a lot about this man’s family problems and his relationship to Jesus, none of which is fodder for this space. I also learned that people in and around Dilkon have been driving as far New Mexico for simple medical services.
So, it’s nice to be part of a project that is clearly necessary. We have surprisingly few of those.
2nd Visit – Late February – early March 2022
On my way back from Two Rivers (next to last post – I’ve been busy) the power steering died in the truck.
Verity – new to me.
While I bought Verity as a back-up vehicle, Oliver, my child, has been using it as a primary vehicle to and forth from Phoenix College and related young adult adventures. Oliver lacks the size and skill to manage a pick-up truck without power steering.
Warned that it could be a while before I had the time or money to fixt the truck, Oliver convinced one of their young adult friends to fix it – at my expense, but not at a lot of expense.
The repair happened while I was in Dilkon.
Then as Oliver drove the newly nimble Verity about the oil light came on. Knowing the oil had been recently changed, Oliver chose to ignore it and keep driving – until Verity threw a rod.
Throwing a rod is generally fatal to twenty-year-old pick-ups.
Verity + Rattletrap
Yet times are strange. I bought that thing for about $5k – pre-pandemic. The replacement cost for a similar vehicle now would be something like $7-8k as I understand the market now. The part-time mechanic (who likely destroyed the thing in the first place) has offered to replace the engine at cost. He thinks that could be below $3k. I am not so certain. I have tasked Oliver with that research, and that is ongoing.
Bongo at Homolovi
Meanwhile , Lyft charges appear randomly on one of my credit cards.
This visit took place two days before Unobtanium was to appear at the Las Vegas Pirate Fest. My tow vehicle is dead in my backyard, and while Ruby has a towing hitch (that I had installed) the Subaru Forester is not a good towing vehicle. Las Vegas is 350 miles and four good climbs from Phoenix.
My first thought was to rent a van. Inventory inside the van, tent and gear in Rattle-trap. But no one, I mean no one, rents a van with a tow hitch.
U-Haul, however, will rent a pick-up with a tow hitch – even for an out-of-state run. So I thought I had done that.
I burn back home from Dilkon, slide into U-Haul minutes before closing, and discover they have not the pick-up I had confirmed and paid for.
I towed Rattletrap to Las Vegas in a 12’ box truck, which had plenty of capacity but over-all cost me $800 I’ll never get back. Impoverished and emboldened by that experience I then towed that same rig with Ruby, my Subaru Forester, on the shorter and flatter run to Lake Havasu City for the London Bridge Ren Faire.
Ruby+Rattletrap at LBRF
The listed towing capacity of a 2015 Subaru Forester is 1500#. I don’t know how much Rattletrap plus the Unobtanium tent and inventory actually weigh, but Ruby can tow it as long as we stay under 75 mph.
Traversing I-10 westbound at or near the posted limit does not improve the scenic value of the journey.
FTR – London Bridge RF actually takes place on the shadeless, packed dirt expanse of the county rodeo grounds.
UnObtanium at London Bridge RF complete with tent.
When the smoke cleared:
The Dilkon Medical Center is still not open (medical facilities dawdle forever before opening) by my lighting is complete.
Ruby survived her Reservation country and towing adventures.
If you don’t count the U-Haul fee, UnObtanium made money at both events.
We plan to return to both next year.
And Verity still sits in my backyard, with her new roof rack still in place. If you want or need a 2001 Dodge Dakota with a blown engine, make me an offer.
I have been spending two-three hours a day just prepping and packing for what should be considered a minor faire in Yuma. (Las post. We’ll wait). But my usual partner in prep is busy readying a house to sell, and all her resources are either in storage or at my place, so it has fallen on me.
It’s OK. I have found the time. But the cost is any original copy for this post other than basic news above and wordcount at the end. In between, is a poem I wrote at a Faire (LV Medieval? They are already running together.) in November of 2020.
Careful What You Wish For
This is how is starts
Just a spark
An idea
Where the metal of a thought strikes the stone,
Falls into the dry, gentle tinder of the possible
And with careful breath
Expands into flame.
Careful what you wish for
Good, brave pilgrim
Lest your dreams set your life on fire.
This is how it goes
The fire finding fuel
Turning hope and passion into work
Takes the air from all things unrelated
Fills all the empty rooms with smoke.
Careful what you wish for
Good, brave pilgrim
Lest your dreams set your life on fire.
Tis a riddle that confounds us
Since stories have been told
Turning passion into artwork
Then artwork into gold.
For the joy of the discovery
Cannot be bought or sold
And so the poets starve to death.
This is how it ends
With yourself behind
Your table full of dreams
And strangers walking by without a glance.
And you die, bit by bit,
Until one good soul turns around
Lays down a coin
And gives your dream a chance.
And this is how it goes
Bit by bit
Coin by coin
As the hours turn to days turn to years.
And you pause
When you are asked about your job.
You don’t have a job anymore.
Abd you smile
As you think
“Well maybe if I …
No.
But if I … maybe…”
That is how it starts.
Careful what you wish for.
WORD COUNT:
I finished the half chapter of Two of 64 – 1300 words.
In time for writer’s group = 500 words.
I took a hike and took notes. = 500 words.
You can read about that at Are We Lost Yet = 1000 words.
I’ve survived 55 rotations around the sun on this planet, and not much has changed from the last anniversary of this rotation. But things have been set up and are in motion. A year from now the only thing about my life likely to be the same will be my job. I like my job. I’ve had nearly 40 different jobs – I know what to look for now.
On or around my birthday I share my wisdom, and perhaps we’ll talk about jobs. But first we have news.
It will be our fist full set-up since Pirate Fest last April. We are kinda curious what we have in store ourselves.
It will also be my first chance to put the new book on the shelf since its release last November. You can be one of the first to buy a signed copy.
“Life is too short to do a job you hate.”
This was my grandfather’s advice, and I have tried to follow it. Happily, I genuinely enjoy working, so there are few of my 35+ jobs I have actually hated, and I did not stay in them very long.
My current employer, R C Lurie, is employee-owned with profit sharing and an ESOP – Employee Stock Option Plan – in addition to treating me well. It was, when I started, a lateral move financially from Rhino Staging, but that has since improved.
It still feels weird getting a raise without having to threaten to quit.
Most of this is, in truth profit sharing. Because the inmates run the asylum we are employee owned, raises and bonuses tend to reflect how the company is doing as a whole, and have very little to do with individual merit.
I get paid to climb around in other people’s buildings, help them solve problems and write reports about it. These are all things I enjoy, or at least do not mind.
It is my goal to make this the last job I hold. Never say never, but my plan is to keep this until my side hustles (see above) become too lucrative to keep on the side any longer.
Anyway, that’s partly why Cheryl is looking for houses in Phoenix and I am not passing around resumes in Las Vegas.
WORD COUNT:
I try to do 5000 words (or that equivalent) every seven days.
So from last Tuesday:
A half chapter of the sequel to Empress Em (One of 64). = 1500 words
Writer’s Group = 500 word equivalent
[Meeting and interviews count as 500 words].
Revision of Felicity Moore, teenage witch for the sample cast of Go Action Fun Time. = 1000 words.
Felicity Moore – still in progress.
Line-art for same= 500 word equivalent.
Coloring for same = 1000 word equivalent. (Colors take a lot longer than line-art, even inked.)
4500 words.
So close. I took the weekend off to celebrate my birthday.
Somewhere in my strange and voluminous files, I have a folder with notes for a science fantasy setting, a post-apocalyptic Earth where magic now worked because reasons, and that was the tag-line. I think I called it Warp World, but that name has long been trademarked by others.
But I want to move on to real life. Much like my divorce, I am projecting that the only thing that will remain the same about the basic facts of my life in the near to mid-term is my day job.
In short, Cheryl is moving to Phoenix, and I am moving in with her. To be clear: she is buying the house with proceeds from selling her house in Las Vegas, which has a comparably hot real-estate market. So financially, it will be a lateral move for her. Her mother, who co-owns that house, is also part of that financing. I am not. I will just reside there. The legalities of this are both private and, trust me, boring.
I burned some vacation over the holidays, and we spent a lot of it packing and storing the accumulated crap possessions that have gathered over the past decade plus in her 3000’ + residence. Some of that is UnObtanium inventory, which will finally be unified with my portion of that inventory on the same property somewhere close and sometime soon.
Verity (the truck), Rattletrap (the trailer) waiting in front of Cheryl’s soon to be former residence for me to get my shit together.
There were some practical lessons learned:
A hand-truck totally pays for itself when you are moving big piles of boxes from point A to point B. Yes, $120 or so at the hardware store for the good one. Worth It.
You can buy a roof rack at Harbor Freight ($320) that will sort-of clamp on to any pick-up truck, and therefore sort-of clamped onto mine.
Installing a roof-rack that sort-of fits your truck is where you realize how real the disparity is between Cheryl’s collection of household tools and my bags and boxes of accumulated rigging tools. But we now own a set of large size metric sockets, which I am not certain I had anyway. (US theatrical rigging is almost all SAE).
I do not miss beating the crap out of my hands on a daily basis.
I used the roof rack to transport the UnObtanium tent, thereby keeping it out of Rattletrap, because I otherwise filled that trailer with UB inventory.
The bell tent turns out to be 6 meters, not 5, so the pole I had imported from China is too small. That’s a $260 mistake that will require a $320 fix, because…
This is not the way…
We also spent about $200 on garment bags which should both protect the clothes and speed up install and strike.
Having all the inventory at the same address will mean not only can we load and unload easier for shows, but we realistically sell things on-line as well. Between us, Cheryl and I have enough antiques to stock a small shop – at least for a few months.
So we might have a consignment booth as well. But that, like many of our life’s details, depends upon where we end up.
I’ve been going through the vinegar lately, courtesy of several circumstances whose only common thread in the involvement of vinegar and myself. I could blather, in good blog style, another two paragraphs before getting to actual content. The research on vinegar is right there on the other screen. But let us assume you have a useful familiarity with the common household acid and get right to the things.
Vinegar deters ants. I have a small invasion going on in my kitchen, and the front-line treatment is vinegar. It’s not pesticide, but that’s ok. I don’t desire to exterminate the ants. I just want them to stay out of the kitchen.
Vinegar will kill the buggers on contact. The true value is that it will wipe away the chemical trail they follow across my countertop. This works until they blaze another trail. So, this insurgency may persist until I find whatever hole they are getting in through. Then I can solve the problem for good – not with vinegar, but with grout.
Vinegar relieves ear-itches.
Or so we all hope.
The rest can be explained better by photo:
Still not actually my dog.
Vinegar kills mold. Unobtanium (specifically Cheryl) has acquired several Easy-up shades and a 5 meter bell tent. The bell tent did not come with poles, which is a $60 proposition, but that still saves us like $700, if we can mitigate the mold inside the tent and one of the Easy-ups.
A generous treatment of vinegar and the bright Vegas sunshine seems to have mitigated at least the mold smell off the Easy-up.
When the poles get here, we’ll set up the big tent and empty a gallon of vinegar via spray bottle underneath the relentless Vegas sun.
Tangential to Unobtanium becoming more of a lifestyle than a hobby, I have asked Cheryl to marry me, and she said yes.
Kinda buried the lead there, didn’t I?
The plan is to merge our lives in Arizona, due to the fact that I have a good day job, and she is basically a pirate seamstress who just needs to get to an airport.
So I fear we are 6-9 months from blogging about real-state in this space.
Meanwhile, she is in Vegas digging out from spending all summer at sea. She has been out with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for those not in on the joke. What should have been 5 weeks of costume alteration and repair turned into 3 full months due to the various quarantines.
I went to Vegas, picked her up at the airport, like a good boyfriend, and then the next morning asked her to marry me over breakfast. This approximates our third anniversary as a couple, thought that is, I swear, coincidental. So, we are no longer boyfriend/girlfriend. It is worse than that now.
No longer my girlfriend…
I do not expect her in Phoenix until the end of October for Goth Christmas Halloween.
Meanwhile, she has outfits to sew, and I have lies to fabricate.
If you want to go down the hole with vinegar versatility, the links below will start you on that journey.
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What Have We Learned? 