The Cheeky Bastard
Not really a very smooth beginning out here in Fence Post this time. I think I picked the wrong service provider for my Internet. I had a choice of two which considering the semi-remoteness of this locale is pretty good but I think choosing Embarq over Charter may have been a mistake. I have to drive 10 miles into Roxboro to check my email and make these posts in the parking lot of a small strip mall because my Internet is out and four tech support calls later I've finally gotten some decisive action but my Internet is still out. In the end I only had to just barely stretch the truth to convince them it is not a hardware or software issue on my end but something wrong with them. I've got "engineers" ready to pounce on the problem, maybe next week.
Let me unload a little more, oh the horror of my existence. Like I forgot to bring a pillow this time?, any pillow much less the 60 dollar pillow I prefer and I slept so poorly last night I could barely function this morning and working in the hell hole of a basement was out, couldn't do it, so thought I'd just lay about for a day and read, but I fell into a pretty good afternoon nap after one of my unsuccessful Embarq tech assistance calls, and woke up groggy as hell.
I got up and looked out the window and found out why the corn in my garden is coming along so well. He's watering it. I followed the line of hoses with my eyes and I'll be kiss my ass, that sonofabitch is watering the corn off of my fucking well. Oh I've been counting to ten most of the day after seeing that, got up to six thousand a couple of times but lost count and had to start over. I'm trying to chuckle about it in between plotting revenge. I turned the water off a minute ago, that's a minute after it had been running probably five hours.
And I skinned my shin too, tripping on the makeshift basement stairs the renter added by cutting a hole through the pine flooring in a closet.
I left my cat, Virginia, in Virginia. I don't even have a cat to play with. Oh cry for me, El Paso.
I'm trying to stay inside most of today. Whatever little bit of optimism I felt yesterday by the relative better look of this place between visits has been supplanted with a low grade dread for the amount of shit work still ahead, just to make the property look passable. Optimism too early in the game on a job like this is your worst enemy, got to keep the nose to grindstone and don't look up. But from this mattress on the floor I can only see the gently undulating leaves of a maple tree in the back yard. I know what unseemly manner of junk lies beneath it but I can't see it from here. Don't get off the boat and don't get out of bed.
6,241. That dickbob Claypool, plowing my earth, planting his seed in my dirt and watering it with my water with nary a word to me. That really does make him a motherfucker. I'm not cussing here, this is strictly definition.
1, 2, 3, 4...Oh hell, I don't have any real problems. I'm going to get back to reading Sublette's New Orleans history. A little historical perspective of what hard times really are, that's what I need. Not to say that the revenge plots have ceased...
The next day: this morning I got a little bit of my working groove back, getting up early, frying some eggs and microwaving yesterday's coffee and while the butter for the eggs slowly melted in the pan I hooked up the trailer and backed it up to the basement. I ate my eggs outside while a pregnant neighborhood cat snuck in the open door and I had to get up and shoo her out because it looks like she is going to drop any minute now and I am not a midwife. After breakfast I entered the basement.
With a flat shovel I scooped up piles and piles of bark mulch and soot which were coating the cement floor of the basement and loaded it into buckets and put the buckets onto the trailer along with leftover firewood and bed frames and lumber and aluminum ductwork elbows and boxes and old boots and coils of wire and empty jugs, nuts and bolts and rusty tools and chunks of cast iron from an old wood burning stove. An antique kitchen cabinet I have set aside but most everything else went into one of the metal piles or the burn pile. With a sledge hammer I broke apart the heavy wood couch and chair and the pieces sit on the pile now, awaiting the match. The cushions I will toss on one by one after the fire is blazing. The TVs and the VCRs and some other assorted junk has gone into a separate pile and are destined for a construction dumpster when I get around to getting one delivered. The bricks and cinder blocks are in the bricks and cinder blocks pile. I loaded up the trailer twice and another small load sits scattered outside the basement. I would leave it there for a few days to annoy Claypool but I saw him loading up the Winnebago this morning so I would guess he and family are off on one of their NASCAR junkets.
I don't know what happened to the guy that was going to get the rest of my car parts and metal but I'm not counting on him like I was. There is plenty to keep me busy for awhile without worrying about him. Pretty far down the list but obviously necessary is going to be the constructing of some sort of lock box to go over my well pump. The existing hollow plastic imitation granite boulder did not appear to be enough to keep that cheeky bastard Claypool away from it.
View current page
...more recent posts