The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-giving-spam-a-bad-name.mp3[/podcast]audio — giving spam a bad name

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Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too.  Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM.  Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head.  What is it they’re after?  What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example:  Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens. ????????????????????????????!!!!                 I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say?  And what are they trying to sell?  Am I supposed to click on the website to find out?  It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice.  You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation.  And most of us aren’t.  You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her.  That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks.  Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal.  Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter.  Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me.  I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions.  It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet.  That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name.  Actually, if when someone who does know after opening  this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens.  Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-gyppo-john2.mp3[/podcast]audio — gyppo johnaudio — gyppo john

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Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here.  You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily.  Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.

It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried.  It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard.  A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness.  Probably not on the WASL test these days.  Unless you go to high school in Darrington.  A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me….  An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60.  Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most.  He’d tried the mills.  He’d called the specialty hardwood places.  He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops.  John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.

Such is life on the gentrified South End.  The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone.  Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge.  His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling.  Naw, those scrappy days are long gone.  Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs….  But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.

Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild.  Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong.  John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really,  what we lost.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-south-end-storage-solutions.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end storage solutions

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The South End apparently is suffering from growth pains judging by the sudden proliferation of storage units down here.  Further up-island they build fancy heated units and offer free use of a pickup truck to help haul stuff to their hot rented cubicles.  We used to use the old pickups as our storage units.  That, and beat up campers, unused truck canopies, chicken coops, falling down barns, well houses, just about anything with a roof that only moderately leaked …  and sometimes we just stored our overflow back behind the hacienda under those festive blue tarps that added a blast of color to the blackberry jungles beyond.

Folks figure it’s better to stash their overload than donate it to the thrift stores or haul it to the dump.  I got a friend who’s a certified Hoarder, what we used to call a Pack Rat before the medical community analyzed it and labeled it and declared it a subcategory of neuropathy, who filled his shack floor to ceiling, porch to mudroom and now rents space at the newly opened South End Storage Solutions.  Only costs him $150 a month, he says, but he may need to rent another unit pretty soon, which would put it in competition for a second mortgage.

Storage units are the drydock equivalent of boat moorage.  Folks think they’ll use em again, either the boat or their stuff, then pay for the privilege of ownership, month after month, year after year.  I had a pal, Landlubber Larry, who parked a racing ketch he was intending to restore to full glory, in the Everett Marina.  Paid $90,000 in moorage fees then couldn’t even give the boat away when destitution arrived at his door.  I guess folks think someday they’ll build a bigger house or a new addition to park their belongings, but until then, why not store it at South End Storage Solutions?

Trouble is, it’s an expensive solution.  Be cheaper really to build the addition.  Be way cheaper to do like the rest of us, just put it next to the blackberries and let them take care of it.  That’s the real South End Storage Solution.

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