In comments Pat O’B reminds us that Sprinter, Wing, or Wang, whatever you call it, is not done with us quite yet.
The forecast for the Greater Duck! City Metropolitan Area calls for a rough aul’ day in the barrel, starting right about now and lasting until 2 a.m. tomorrow. From the National Weather Service:
Southwest winds 30 to 50 mph with gusts of 60 to 75 mph expected. … Damaging winds will blow down trees and power lines. Damage may occur to mobile homes, roofs, sheds, barns, outbuildings, and fences. Widespread power outages are expected.
Oof. Batten down the hatches, mateys.
We’re semiprepared for Apocalypse Junior.
The lanterns are charged, and the headlamps and flashlights all have fresh batteries, with a candle lantern in reserve.
Jugs of filtered water abound, and a few days of nonperishable edibles are close at hand, so we won’t have to eat the neighbors. Yet.
The ovens will be out of commission, but we have a gas cooktop, and a two-burner Coleman for backup.
Staying warm might be an issue — we have a Mr. Heater Portable Buddy and two fireplaces, but have never used either of them. We could end up warmer than we like (on fire) or colder (dead). Thus, the three-season sleeping bags in reserve.
We have battery banks for our iPhones, for all the good that will do us, because our cul-de-sac is a sinkhole that cellular signals float past unmolested unless the phones can mooch off the wifi.
Finally, my main MacBook Pro is plugged into an APC battery backup. This is likewise useless since without power the Innertubes will deflate, and trying to use the iPhone as a hotspot (see “cellular signals,” above) is the hee, and also the haw.
At least I can take copious notes on the End Times. I hope the alien archaeologists who stumble upon my chronicle are fluent in Snark.
• Musical note: The headline is taken from the Planxty tune of the same name. They know something about the shite weather in the auld sod, so they do.
On the roof, the only place I know, where you just have to wish to make it so.
Every day you are above the sod is a good one.
I was a little further above the sod than is my custom this morning, filling up four 39-gallon Hefty bags with the pine needles carpeting the northernmost corner of our roof.
Ordinarily this would give me some worthy topic for complaint (“Flat roofs are stupid,” and so on). But we don’t live in Turkey, or Syria, so we still have our stupid flat roof intact above our heads instead of in pieces smack dab on top of them.
Plus, we had a roofer take a look-see up there the other day, and he said he thought we didn’t need a completely new roof, just a few precautionary touchups here and there. And maybe someone should rake up that shaggy carpet of pine needles on the north side, he mused.
This roofer worked for the company that installed our roof back in 2007, and shortly thereafter launched his own operation with a lot of the same people from the previous outfit, which is no longer with us (due to personal matters rather than personnel matters).
So we’re inclined toward optimism, which regular visitors know is not Your Humble Narrator’s natural state of being.
Below the roof, down there where the sod lies, a landscaper whose work we have admired has had a walkaround — like the roofer, The Big Boss Man of his outfit — and one of his people just popped by to take some measurements. So we’re expecting a design proposal and cost estimate directly.
Maybe, just maybe, since it seems we might not have to put a new bonnet on El Rancho Pendejo, we can afford to have its grass skirt hemmed. Use a little less of our imaginary Colorado River water. Encourage the lawn-gobbling deer to browse elsewhere, which would endear us to our gardening neighbors.
Maybe it’s time for a stroll down Musical Memory Lane.
What/who were you listening to while growing up, or at least older?
My folks were into the big bands, so we had Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and the like blaring out of the stereo whenever they were in the mood (ho ho ho).
I liked that just fine, and still do. But we all chart our own musical courses, and mine led into some very different waters.
The Beatles hit “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, and while my sister was wowed, I snorted and thought, “These guys will never be as big as Elvis.” This was the first installment in our “I Will Never Be Smart” series, which continues 59 years later.
I eventually got into the Fab Four, like everyone else, but early on I leaned toward the Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Byrds, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, The Sir Douglas Quintet and just about any act coming out of Motown — the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
This goes to show the power of TV and AM radio in the mid-Sixties. Randolph AFB, Texas, was not exactly a multicultural paradise. To be blunt, it was light on Brits, Blacks, and surfers. But Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark, and AM radio helped us find them anyway.
If AM was the gateway drug, FM was the hard stuff. When we got transferred to Bibleburg in 1967 I discovered KKFM, and later KILO; the family console stereo had an FM receiver built in, and so did my mother’s 1962 Mercedes-Benz 220S.
So shit got loud, is what. Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. Iron Butterfly. Steppenwolf.
But along about the same time I was stumbling across Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone and Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Moody Blues, Cream, Traffic and Mountain. Then it was The Allman Brothers and Elton John, Leon Russell and Santana. The Stones were still hanging in there, but the Beatles were off the back.
There was a long stretch of country-hippie during my second tour in college — Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Charlie Daniels Band, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker, etc. — which made about as much sense as soul and surf, as I was a middle-class white boy from the ’burbs.
John Prine, Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt made the cut too, for obvious reasons. And the shapeshifting outfit George Carlin once called “Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Merrill, Lynch, Fenner, Pierce, Sacco & Vanzetti” was always warbling in the patchouli background wherever dope was smoked.
Tom Waits stumbled into my playlist somehow, after the Eagles covered his “Ol’ 55.” Los Lobos, too, possibly because I was running around with a crew of San Luis Valley vatos. Where Parliament-Funkadelic came from I have no idea, but suddenly they were there and they stayed and wasn’t nothin’ we could do but put a glide in our stride and a dip in our hip and head on up to the Mothership.
Rockers like ZZ Top and Bob Seger proved invaluable for road trips, which I undertook regularly, being indifferent to long-term employment.
I tiptoed into jazz via the back door — fusion combos like Crusaders and Return to Forever, and smooth-jazz dudes like Grover Washington Jr., Stanley Turrentine, and George Benson — and kept one ear tuned to classical because I had played piano and flute as a sprout.
This was a breeze, thanks to NPR. In Corvallis I could pick up three different NPR affiliates, each with its own specialty — jazz, classical, and whatever. Samey same in Bibleburg, with its excellent stations KRCC and KCME, and Denver with KUVO and KVOD.
I was late to punk, which may explain the Green Day discs in my collection. The Cars, Stray Cats, and Brian Setzer Orchestra are in there too, as are Stevie Ray Vaughan, James McMurtry, Planxty, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, Steve Earle, The Pogues, Warren Zevon, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Frank Zappa, Lyle Lovett, The Bueva Vista Social Club, Dire Straits, and Half Man Half Biscuit.
Good God awmighty. Each of the voices in my head likes a different kind of music! No wonder they’re arguing all the damn’ time.
I seem to remember catching him and Foghat at the City Aud in Bibleburg when I was a Mad Pup, not yet gone full Dog. But I was usually full of those gosh-darned old drugs back then and often saw and heard things that other people swore up and down were not really there.
The Yardbirds were definitely a part of my teenage playlist. And you have to tip your sombrero to a fella who’s down to punch it with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Keith Moon, and Nicky Hopkins (“Beck’s Bolero”) or slow it down with Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”).
But that train was comin’. And Jeff had to get on board.
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