The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been cleaning house this past couple of weeks.  Okay, cleaning shack.  All right, full disclosure here, I’m cleaning shacks, sheds, sauna, wellhouse, studio, woodshop, root cellar, anything with walls and all the accumulated stuff inside.  Started out putting some cedar planks on the bike shed, sorta Martha Stewart the inside, which resulted in a lot of extraneous boat gear getting evicted.  Reduce the clutter, keep the bike shed strictly bike.  Course that kicked a ball down field.  Now I had to find a place for oars and fishing poles and life preservers and tackle boxes full of rusty lures and monofilament tangles.

Undaunted, I hauled my homemade sailboat, the S.S Pterodactyl, scourge of  the South End Seas,  out of its drydock and cleaned it bilge to gunwale.  Sure I felt bad for the family of mice, but isn’t it more humane to send them packing on dry land than walking the plank some storm tossed sailing venture?  So that added more gear, everything from buoys to crabpots, to the growing pile of homeless stuff.  Eyeballing my lawnmower/chainsaw/ rototiller shed, I crawled in through everything from a 1930’s wringer washer, back behind truck parts of trucks long since scrapped and crushed, plus odds and ends of what some might hope were antiques but are actually rusted junk.

I emptied it.  Then refilled it, christened it the BOATHAUS, and moved the new debris out onto the lawn.  Some stuff got moved into the studio, some to the garden shed, a lot into the burn pile, a small mountain for the dump runs, a few things for the woodworking shop, some odds and ends went to the garden fence where objects of marginal interest get hung, but when the dust cleared there was still an antique store’s worth of my life’s detritus, although not really salvageable after all my neglect.

Maybe when the radioactive tsunami litter rolls in I can slip this stuff in down at the beach, scribble on some Asian looking cuneiform, then let the beachcombers have a field day.  My only fear is I’ll inadvertently buy half of it back from them at their garage sales in five years.  Course, maybe by then I can build a couple more sheds….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-heat-advisory.mp3[/podcast]audio —- heat advisory

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I came in from weeding nettles that were stealing light and moisture from my vegetables in their cold little garden plot and I noticed I had broken a sweat.  It’s a couple days from August so I assumed summer might have arrived when I had my flannel-clad back turned.  Hot!  Man, it felt real hot.  The rest of the country’s sizzling, maybe it’s our turn to fry.

And yessir, when I struggled up my hill to the house, tearing off layers, one for winter, another for spring, and reached the only working thermometer, it was practically at the Red Zone, mercury ready to blow right out through the glass tube top.  67 degrees, it read.  I cleaned my sweat smeared glasses on my red bandana and peered once more.  Couple degrees shy of 70.  But the way the temperature was boiling up, I would’ve bet dollars to icecubes we were going to bust right through the big Seven O.  I opened up a couple of windows even though the house was a little chilly, but I like to live dangerously.  Plus it would be good to introduce some fresh atmosphere into the hermetically sealed rooms that held mostly 2011 gases and odors.

The meteorologists on the evening news would be writing their copy already.  Heat alerts and advisories.  Don’t lock your dog in the SUV with the windows rolled up — Woofsy will look like a brat in a microwave when you get back.  Drink lots of fluids.  Tie a wet towel around your neck, but not too tight!  Stay indoors if you don’t have a pool.  Run the air conditioner at maximum coldness, full fan.  Don’t wear your winter coats.  And whatever you do, slather on sunscreen every half hour with SPC 500 or more.  Use lard if you have it.

Thank God for the TV weatherfolks is all I can say.  Save us a body count nobody wants.  I just pity the poor yahoos who don’t watch TV, the ones crawling in their longjohns across a lawn rapidly going to desert, desperately trying to reach a faucet.  And the sun, the implacable searing sun, cranking toward 70, beating down on their uncovered heads, another victim caught unawares and definitely unprepared by a stealth Sound End summer.  Don’t let this happen to you!

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-ranger-skeeter.mp3[/podcast]audio —-ranger skeeter

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I take care of a little park down here on the South End.  Ranger Skeeter.  It’s actually a county park but the county only has one real park ‘ranger’ to take care of all its parks so if we want it maintained, we have to do it ourselves.  It’s got no toilet so you can guess what we find in the woods.  It’s got no garbage can so you can imagine what’s in the parking lot.  Believe me, being the cleanup guy will make a person darkly cynical about human nature.

For awhile I would get cases of empty beer bottles, Rolling Rock empties to be exact.  We got a transfer dump station that takes them for free that all us South Enders have to drive by on any trip to the closest real grocery store, but no, our boy dropped them for over a year at the park.  Go figure.  When folks steal clothes from the Donation Bin at Tyee Store, they often times take them to the park, sort out what they want, then scatter the rest.  Lately, I’ve got the latex remains of my own Lover’s Lane showing up.  Kind of puts a chill on the rural ambiance.  Probably syringes next…..

The other day a kid had dug a pit back in the woods, filled it with sharp stakes pointing up and covered it over with leaves and twigs, a nice little booby trap.  I guess he thought this was Viet Nam and the war wasn’t quite over yet.  Or else he was waging his very own small but personal war on what little tourism the park pulls in.  I suppose I should start watching for IED’s out by the daffodil beds.

My pals think I’m a mental defective for mowing this patch of park, clearing fallen trees, re-routing trails, planting flowers and shrubs, putting up sculptures for the vandals to steal and hanging birdhouses, all for the few folks that wander down this way and stumble into the park.  Hardly anybody uses it.  Except folks I wish didn’t.  I tell my cronies it’s the only park on the South End, that’s why.  But there are days when I agree with em…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-making-money-the-old-fashioned-way1.mp3[/podcast]audio — making money the old fashioned way

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The South End Senior Center —what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center— is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore.  A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing.  Barns and shops are often built this way.  So is our Senior Center.  Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff — which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones.  Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door.  This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought.  Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses.  A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters.  Believe me, an hour would be plenty.  Or a perm at the Cut and Curl.  An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy.  Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala.  Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers.  The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making.  The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor.  And made even more.  Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building.  The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years.  If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it.  Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-my-hometown-bank1.mp3[/podcast]audio — my hometown bank

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