The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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

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…..

[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

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.

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

I got a bank in Stanwoodopolis, what they advertise as a ‘hometown’ bank.  If you like the whole home town knowing your bizness, this bank’s for you.  Me, I pretty much don’t care who knows my bizness, but after burning a lot of bank bridges over the years in quixotic battles over surprise fees, surcharges, lack of services, I’m pretty much down to few options left.  The missus is worried we’ll be burying cash and coins out in the woods from now on, but I tell her, don’t worry, the one thing that’s recession proof is the folks who brought us the recession.  Banks. There will always be another one waiting open armed and open jawed.

I don’t know what it is exactly that makes me dislike a good small town fiduciary firm.  But since I’ve never borrowed money from one, maybe I resent all the little fees they tack on for holding my loot and lending it to my neighbors at a tidy profit  — apparently not enough profit for these folks.  They want the debit fees, the exorbitant overcharge fees, all the rest that gouges the poor folks most, all that very tiny print in the terms of the contract nobody can read.

So maybe I carry a bit of a chip up there on my epaulets.  And okay, fairly often I’ve had the security guard summoned to stand over my shoulder.  You know … just in case I go postal.  That’s usually when the account closes, the cashier’s check is issued and I mosey down to the next legal usurer.

My current bank, the ‘hometown’ bank, recently cashed one of my rare paychecks.  My checks are from government agencies for  payment on my so-called artworks, mostly from 1% for Art projects.  I don’t come in often but when I do, the checks are larger than a usual payday check.  Pay year, really.  Pay month, at least.  The teller noticed this after a few years.  Profile this:  Suspicious character, goodwill clothes, seedy hat, a bit too friendly, big fat check.  For Deposit Only.  She finally asks what it is I do for a living.  Art, I say, and when pressed, although not under oath, I add Public Art.  Hmm, she says.  Takes a little longer than depositing a rebate check, but we finally get it done.

But this last one, sizeable, issued by the State of Washington, her state, the one she pays taxes to, I guess it was too much for my teller.  “You don’t mind me saying this,” she says, plenty volume enough for all of our hometown bank customers to hear, “I don’t really like that us taxpayers have to pay for art.  No offense…..”

“None taken,” I say.  But don’t say, “I don’t much care for filthy parasitic bankers either or undertrained underpaid minions who do their bidding in the name of unbridled capitalism.  No offense, hope you don’t mind.”

But it is, after all, a hometown Andy of Mayberry bank, my hometown bank, at least temporarily.  Good neighbors, see?  Course, it’s harder all the time to argue with the missus who only uses out of town banks for her bizness.  She cashes her librarian check through direct electronic deposit where nobody  says,” Hey, I don’t read and I really don’t much care for free libraries.  My taxes, my dime, my opinion, ignorant or not.  Hope you don’t mind my saying so….”

Trouble is, I do.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-nails-and-more.mp3[/podcast]audio — nails and more

Johnny the Hammer runs Piranha Brothers Construction with his partner Crazy Eddie.  They fight tooth and nail, but for a time in those halcyon years when most of Seattle and half of California were migrating north like spawn crazed humpies, they had enough work that they could run a house or more each and stay out of each other’s hair.  Well, at least Johnny had hair.  Under his baseball cap, Eddie was bald and pale as an ostrich egg, although not near as smooth.  More than a couple of times he’d been coldcocked by beams coming down on his noggin in mishaps and the result was he had permanent lumps in that hard skull of his that never subsided.

Johnny says that’s what makes Eddie so damn stupid — all the sense he ever had got knocked out of him early.  Still, he builds a better house than Johnny and even though Johnny hates to admit it, he calls Eddie when some blueprint gets overly complicated or a fancy roof  design’s flashing gives him too long a pause.  Besides a magnetic attraction to toppling 6×6’s, Eddie’s got a head for details and complexity.  Can’t read well, but he visualizes every stud and roughout as if he had a photo developing in the darkroom of his brain.

Johnny must’ve told this story a hundred times of Eddie getting all excited about the new shop that opened on the South End.  Nails and More.  This was back in the days when the two still could call themselves friends, still worked on one house at a time.  If they had one to work on….  Eddie had been arguing with the counterman at the Lumber Yard over some charge he had questioned and, by god, he was ticked off by the end of the argument and eager for a new vendor.  Any vendor.  Even if it meant driving off island and paying cash.

One morning he took off mid-hammer stroke on the McMansion the Crosby’s of Palo Alto were having Piranha Bros. build on the bluffs of the west side and drove his one ton old Ford up toward Elger Bay Store where the sign he’d noticed that morning had finally seduced him with its siren call:                                                   NAILS AND MORE                                                  GRAND OPENING

He was hoping a little too hard the ‘MORE’ was lumber and possibly even some electric and plumbing.

Maybe it was too little coffee.  Maybe too much.  When he got inside the door and before his eyes could adjust from full sunlight, Sherri, the new owner, greeted him with a Come right on in, I’m Sherri and you’re my first customer and I’m not going to charge you for this visit.  On the house!

Hoo boy, Eddie couldn’t believe his ears.  Visions of free shingles, siding, 2×6’s, bandoliers of nails for his pneumatic —- all floated up like a Christmas in Camaloch.   When his eyes finally adjusted, he realized his mistake.  Couldn’t come right out and admit it, naturally, so Eddie, indeed, unwittingly became Sherri’s first customer.  Full nail trim and cuticle treatment, but he passed on the ‘More’.  “Gotta get back on the job,” he mumbled and fled into the sunlight.

Eddie dated Sherri for awhile that year and it was remarked upon by all the Piranha Bros.’ crews how, despite the cuts and callouses, Eddie’s hands were as immaculately manicured as a golf course green.  Course, never in his presence.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-south-end-yacht-club2.mp3[/podcast]audio –south end yacht club