Found at Fry’s yesterday - fifty simoleans. No more iPod slopping around in the console with 500 cords. It charges, too.

Big Jim Rummel is doing a Most Recognized Gun list (start here). Pretty neat. I don’t think he tried too hard to find a good snap of the AK-47, though.

I had to drive to north Ft. frickin’ Worth this afternoon to pick up tractor parts (”we only got two of your bearing cones left…don’t know when we’re getting more.“). I did NOT miss rush hour. Yeah, I have a crack staff that could have mosied up during the day. But gas costs $3 a gallon, there’s not enough in petty cash, and no one can write their own check that I’ll pay back. I really wonder why the hell I bother, sometimes.

So, just to torture myself, I stopped in Cleburne and looked at diesel F-250 4×4s. $38,000, at the Employee Discount price for the non-box-stock ones. Jeepers, that’s stiff for a durn truck. But at $75 to fill up with gas, and doing that twice a week, and with gas costing the same as diesel, and pretty much double the miles per gallon for diesel, I’d make up the bigger part of the payment in fuel savings. Diesel engines last forever, too. I don’t know about the F-250 trannies, though…assuming they’re strong, it could be the last truck I ever have to buy. I’ll have to check that out. I’ve never owned a diesel engine truck. They’re too noisy for my tastes. But 25-30mpg highway can make up for a LOT of noise. I like the “truck” dashboard, too — the F-150 interiors are getting too gaudy for my tastes. Well, I called my man at the Ford house to see what he has available and can he get me some deals on rebates and such. It seems like total overkill, and it is, but they ain’t putting diesels in the little trucks yet.

Interesting, too, that they had this wacko Screaming Yellow Zonker “Amarillo” model that was exactly what I would buy. Except it was yellow. Bright Funky A-Hole Yellow. For a truck. I’d feel like I was wearing a tu-tu and rhinestone cat-eye glasses driving that thing around. It was marked down…guess they’re not moving many HEY LOOK AT ME! yellow trucks these days. But for the right price, I’d do it, I reckon, and just wear a huge feathery Mardi Gras mask while I’m driving. The black leather seats were a bit stupid, too…I don’t think those marketers spent much time in Texas before they chose that combo. Nope, give me the fire-engine red w/ gray int.

Some of the He-Men wanted to see pictures from the Great Flood of Naught-Four, so here ya go, kids. This is from the gate going down to the river. I’m standing in water, and it came up some more after that.

“No Vehicles Past This Point”

Pecan trees drop a lot of branches, and riverfronts generate lots of brushy scrub. We’re constantly pruning, cutting, and hauling, especially with all the beautiful rain we had last summer. So yesterday we burned a brush pile that had been accumulating over the last couple of years. Since yesterday was the first warm, dry day in a week, of course. Being that it turned into that kind of day, we kind of had to stay on top of it. I was walking around the perimeter and flipping stuff into the center to keep it going and to speed the process, as we were losing daylight. I reached down to flip one board in. It was one-half second later when I realized that the board was nailed to a piece of galvanized tin that had been roasting under hot coals for at least six hours. No, I wasn’t wearing gloves. I now have three humongous blisters on my middle three fingers of my right hand, and I am typing with the very tips of them…practically with my fingernails.

I did have enough dumb animal sense to keep the hand in an ice-water bath for the next two hours, so it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. But sometimes, I am so stupid, it makes me wonder why I’m still drawing breath.

Now I must go sterilize the needle and drain these bad boys.

I had completely forgotten about this. A month ago, I opened my phone bill, and found a flier for DSL from my phone company down here in the sticks. I called up, naturally, since the one thing lacking down here was anything approaching high-speed internet. I went through the little automated order process, and was informed then that I would be informed later about availability. I promptly forgot about it — since I’m a hike from town, I expected to be rejected. I never heard another word from them about it.

Well, lo and behold, when I got here this evening, there’s a little box waitiing for me from Valor, and inside was a little ADSL modem. Needless to say, I ripped it right open, and started plugging it all in. Bingo! DSL for the hayseed!

It’s not horribly fast, something like 100KB up and 300KB down, but it’s always-on, and it’s only an extra $25 per month for the life of my service since I signed up so dang quick. I’ll take that. It even supports my day-job VPN. I think I’ll run to town and get a cheapie firewall router, then figure out how to shoot a signal over to the trailer for my hands, and down to the campground for the customers. Wireless Internets should be a differentiator, no?

For my pal, Kramer – a fascinating rags-to-riches story about Japanese bass pro Takahiro Omori by Ray Kix in the (huh?) Dallas Observer:

He comes to America with no money and fewer friends, knowing the English language only as it relates to bass fishing. Takahiro Omori loves bass fishing. But not the Japanese kind: The bass over there are too small, the competition in the professional tournaments too easy.

He tells his parents he wants to be a pro fisherman in America, where the bass are grumpier, heavier and smarter. And the men who catch them are the best in the world.

His parents think he’s nuts. Why not go to college? Why not get a real job?

But Omori doesn’t want a real job. A real job would mean following dutifully in his father’s corporate footsteps. Omori wants to follow his own.

So, in 1992, at the age of 21, Omori lands in Dallas, without a career, without a college degree. And because of this, because of everything he’s left behind, there’s something else Omori’s without as he steps off the plane: the love of his father, who has more or less disowned him.

Over the next 12 years, Takahiro Omori will struggle as perhaps no other pro fisherman has. He’ll sleep for years in a beat-up van. Sneak into motel rooms to shower. Eat infrequently. Endure prejudice from the bubbas in his sport. Endure the comments of his father, when they’re on speaking terms.

Yet Takahiro Omori will never complain.

He will only work harder. Drive to more tournaments than anyone else, fish for more days, for more hours per day, than anyone else. Move to Lake Fork, an hour and a half southeast of Dallas, where the bass do not come bigger. Spend his evenings away from the lake thinking of fishing or, better yet, modifying his lures for the next day’s casts.

Takahiro Omori will become a man whose obsession is bass fishing. Even his peers, the best anglers in the world, will marvel at it. The obsession will border on the pathologic.

There are two reasons for this. Omori wants to win more than you do. And he fears, even today, that he is a failure in his father’s eyes.

Really, even if you’re not obsessed with Mr. Bass, it’s a damn good story. I had no idea that the Japanese were bassers…but it’s the second-largest sport in that country. I find that amazing.

The stage roof is finished. I even had my fat bohunkus up there screwing down the galvanized aluminum sheets that make up the roof qua roof. My advice is, if you’re gonna be screwing aluminum into steel, go with the 18v cordless drill. The 12v can get through about 60 self-tapping screws before needing a recharge. Which meant climbing up and down the shaky old lader about 15 times. In the immortal words of Tim Allen — MORE POWER!

Along those lines, if someone wanted to buy me this Ridgid cordless combo kit…well, I wouldn’t kick,

Need or want? Well…

I’m also somewhat reassured about the strength of the roof if it will hold me. I’m less re-assured about the viability of this “investment.” Buyer’s (and builder’s) remorse, if you will. That’s a lot of time and money that could have been better spent on projects with a shorter-term payoff and/or greater long-term potential. So, won’t you please come to my little festival and ease my troubled mind?

If it helps, we’ve got a cool front coming through that’s put the evening temps in the 50s. That’s totally unheard of in August. We’ve been blessed. Let’s all hope that blessing doesn’t come with rain.

I hope you’ll excuse me, as I am in a severely pissy mood. I came down here to the ranch, to the 120° stone house, on Thursday night, for the express purpose of finishing the roof on the stage tomorrow morning. Two hands, plus me, a couple of power drills and some ladders — boom, done!

Turns out my brother, my alleged top hand, just up and decided to go to stinkin’ Tulsa with my mom for the annual Maternal Grandmother Family Reunion. Gone, goodbye, sayanora - without so much as a word or a fare-thee-well.

I don’t mind him going with my mom so much as I do severely mind being left high and dry. I specifically said that I would be down to finish up the damn roof on Friday, so be sure to get all the chores done and all the decks cleared so that we could knock it out for next weekend. Now it looks like it’ll be me and the new guy tomorrow, by our lonesome. It’s way too late to round up a crew. To make it even worse, the damn river’s up, thanks to a huge thunderstorm up around Possum Kingdom, and I was chortling as I drove over the bridge, thinking what a great kayak ride we’d have on Sunday morning since all the work would be done. Not now.

I’m so mad I could chew tenpenny nails. Can you fire a brother?

CARDS UPDATE: Being the hothead that I am, I went and played some online poker. Took 2nd in a $20 SNG. Had the chip lead going into heads-up, then just lost my damn head. 4s is not a good hand — repeat after me — a pair of 4s suck, even if they’re top pair, top kicker. I worked my way back up to a respectable stack, but ultimately lost to a nicely played AQo. But I’ve got enough sense to shut her down now. Gonna watch some crap movies, I guess. I’m down to a nice simmer. Besides, there’s damn flying bugs all over the monitor. Maybe I can use that as an excuse for losing — I thought it was an A, but then it moved, and it was a 4.

If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m a partner in a little music festival we hold in August. “Partner” means I’m responsible for keeping the terlets clean, the grass mowed, the electricity flowing, and the trash picked up, by the way. I gots no musical control (well, a little, but not a heck of a lot.) Still, I need to help make this thing as profitable as possible, seeing how I’ve spent almost $4000 on improvements this year just for the musicians. And I’ve got another couple grand of spendy-spendy to go.

Soooo…if you think you might want to reach 500+ sunburned, half-drunk hayseeds with pockets full of cash, this is the place to do it. Say, maybe, some of you lawyers, or some of you web designers, or some of you other musicians, or some of you poker-heads, or heck, even just advertise your durn blog.

I’m also looking to place localized BlogAds, as well. If you’re in Texas, OK, AR, or LA, drop me a line in the comments, and I’ll give it due consideration. For an example of the ad, go see TexasGigs…my bride is kind enough to run one for me.

That is all…carry on.

I’m sitting here in kind of a weird mood, trying to get in a musical frame of mind. We’ve got the big August festival coming up, but I’m in a blue funk about a mile wide and a mile deep. I think it’s tightly coupled with some facts:

- this damn Lux bidness has been a stinking knockout over the last 12 months. It was a year ago that we got the CNN writeup, and now I’ve got people emailing me that they saw this Tiny Bidness in the Spirit Magazine on the Greyound of the Skies. The Fox 4 news piece, backed up with Travel & Leisure. It’s very odd.

- I found more crap ripped off by the white-trash, knuckle-dragging bikers from last weekend. About $100 worth of stuff, to be about precise. It hurts me to be so harsh against the Harley crowd, because I’ve got two scooter clubs that come in, hold their annual parties, clean up really well, and go home. I really enjoy being around them. Not so this bunch, not by a dang mile. Filthy, foul-mouthed, piggish, stupid, and too quick to get their dukes up. We pay for security, but it seems there’s always a knife fight or a knuckle sandwich shoved down someone’s throat. I hate that with the white-hot fury of 10,000 suns. It ain’t what I’m about.

- Believe it or not, I really like just sitting down at the river when it’s nice and quiet. I’ve hardly had a chance to do that this year. Too many events. I ain’t even had room to build a little fire and cook a hot dog. That’s one reason I’ve got this overnight kayak trip stuck in my head. I’m making lists of what I can fit in my current kayak, and how much I can fit in the new kayak that I ain’t bought yet and don’t really have the money for.

- Bouncy super-ball-rubber checks are chewing my pocketbook to pieces. Two of them, at just about the worst time you could ask for, since I was planning to use the theoretical money that they represent to buy the materials needed for the stage roof, something that needs doing, but only if I’m gonna keep doing events, and I’m not so sure I want to jack around with the crowds of pigs who drop their damn bottle caps, beer tab pulls, cigarette butts, water bottle sucker-tops, and skidmarked underwear where ever they happen to be standing. I’m kinda saying there ain’t that great a payback, financially. Psychically, it’s no question. But psychic payback only works for the extremely poor and the extremely rich. The rest of us have to write a check for the guy to come out and suck the poop out of the portajons on Saturday.

- A support staff that does the job down here at about 80-90%. I keep telling them, over and over and over, that it’s the little things that make a difference to people, that extra 10%. Yet I still find vases full of 3-week-old flowers. Or rather, the dessicated husks of flowers, with their dehydrated petals littering the table in a 3 ft. circle. My problem is that they do a really, really great job on that 80-90%. And it’s my brother, along with the usual family-adopted stray — ain’t like I can fire them. I just get tired-head from repeating “pick up the cigarette butts and take the aluminum cans out of the fire ring.”

- All the work left to be done is daunting me. Stage roof, RV payments, fences and gates, bartering for hotel rooms, selling program ads, blah-blah-blah. Getting ice arranged (those a-holes have gone up more than 50% per bag this year.) Fixing electrical problems…gawd, electrical problems. Kill me now.

But, in the end, I know that it’s kinda-sorta worth it, because I’ll have a good time, and I’ll be glad it’s all over for another year. I just wish it wasn’t so damn hard to do so.

Hey! Everybody have a kick-ass weekend, OK? I’ve got some ground venison (courtesy of my pard Teddy) that I’m gonna make into 1 lb. Supremo Burgers (with pepperjack cheese), so I’m not really a big whiny baby. That alone will make it a good weekend. If I can sneak in some river time, why, I’ll be a jolly fat guy!

Last week, I had about 200 bikers scattered around my little piece of the Brazos, and I lost, oh, I’d reckon somewhere in the first set of four figures. Money-out-of-the-pocket lost, too, not lost-revenue lost.

This week, I’ve managed to make that in one night and there are fewer, quieter, cleaner (as in littering, not personally dirty (but probably that, too)) people.

I’m generally pretty slow, but I think that The Wife might be on to something with this idea.

I still think my idea, a herd of beeves of some nature, would have been best for all parties, since I could get the bro to feed them if I didn’t feel like coming down. Here’s what I really and truly want to do - the Texas Longhorn:

Moo.

Everybody laughs, but one of these days…

Well, I guess I better finish up my big panicky story from yesterday. There’s a whole bunch of pictures under the MORE button that illustrate this tale, but the bottom line is that everything and everyone is safe, and we were ultimately only slightly threatened. It still threw me for a loop. And I’m still pretty nervous about snakes.

So if you want to see the dumb pictures, click below…
Read the rest of this entry »

Damn, man…the Iggster has cat trouble. Not good, my friends.

Not being a cat person, I can’t relate. Being a goofy animal person, I can relate. Best wishes and a little prayer to Monty. May he come out the other end of this trial goofier and cattier than ever.