The Waiting Man

Random stuff from the last few days...

Do I have grounds to issue a 'Cease & Desist' order to my former employer, who is telling clients who ask for me, that I'm "on leave"? On leave?? I left that place a year ago... & there's no way on your god's green earth I'm ever going back!!

I don't understand what's so bad about telling people I don't work there any more... It's not like there's some kind of deathly stigma attached to it...

On a related note, my 2nd client I do measures & estimates for wanted me to work out a plan that had been sent to him from a client who turns out to be building a house in the next street over from WaitingManor. The initial plans were devoid of measurements & indication of scale, so couldn't be estimated. When I pointed this out, he arranged to have revised plans sent, which he then forwarded to me, so I could get them printed at A3 size then estimate it for him. I had a couple of issues with that: Firstly - I don't work for him, so why am I having to take time out of my day to go to Officeworks & get plans printed? Why can't he do it?!? It's his client after all... Secondly, why can't I just walk 'round the corner & measure the place? Apparently, he doesn't want to pay me for a site visit................. & so expects me to just print plans & estimate them for free................ Right.............

I think it's time he & I had a little chat about this - & about his pleading with me to work at his other store on weekends. I already do 5½ - 6 days a week, WHY would I then sacrifice my only time off to travel an hour+ to the north-western edge of town to stand around in a flooring showroom that's also full of rugs - my physical nemesis?!?! Long-Suffering Partner would never forgive me if I did that... & neither would my right shoulder... I place a pretty high price on my skills these days... & an even higher one on my endangered free time. In fact, the latter could be said to be priceless

L-SP & I are part of a group taking turns to feed a stray/street cat colony near a timber yard. We've been doing it for almost a year now & while the cats are eerily silent - no meows, no purrs, no yowling, no nothing, they've come to accept us & usually when we arrive on our allotted evenings, there's about 12-15 of them who are looking forward to, if not seeing us, then seeing the food we dish out at least. Over the last few weeks I noticed there was one male cat who was crowding right up against me when I ladle the food out of the cans, not-so-inadvertently getting himself a kind of pat/stroke by walking under my arm & hand. Last week, he finally consented to some actual petting & even swatted away another cat who saw this & wanted to get in on the action... Yesterday, he was back & consented to more pats & even let the other cat get some in as well. There was a 3rd cat who saw this & when I reached out to her, she came over, looked me right in the eyes & lashed out with her paw'n'claws, drawing blood just above my knuckle & below my wedding ring. Nice shot!! No hard feelings... well, not on my part anyway. She, on the other hand, continued to give me baleful glares the rest of the time we were there, as if to say "Keep your filthy human hands off my friends, or there'll be more where that came from Buster!". Didn't stop her eating any of the food I put out though, I noticed...

A quick trip tomorrow up the Central Coast to buy a Tongue Drum spotted on Gumtree - an Australian community sales site - by the other Pelican Daughter, who sent me the link. So... the musical menagerie I'm surrounded by in this little room where I'm typing, is about to gain a new member. Which reminds me - I need to replace the high G string on Huddie, my new 12 string, who's currently an 11 string, thanks to the recent humidity affecting his tuning & as I was remedying that, the extremely thin high G went Twwaanngzzxxccddzzzblblblpffft!! about a semitone shy of its proper note - somewhere around F# ish... Not altogether unexpected, nor uncommon, but a bit annoying because the only string gauge I didn't have amongst my spares was... well, you can guess

Bed...

Some big birds...



A Cassowary - native to the rainforests of Australia's top end. You do NOT want to encounter one of these guys in the wild... they're aggressively territorial & the kind of bird that reminds you they're not too far descended from dinosaurs



An Emu - found all over the place once you get out of the cities & towns. Not as bad-tempered as the Cassowary, but still best to steer clear of them!

Tuesday & another domestic day, clearing, cleaning & reorganising the garage to try & fit both Dorian the workhorse & Laura the roadtripper in there, along with all the various other bits'n'pieces. Then defrosting the freezer, cutting my hand in 2 places, sweeping out the kitchen & entry hall. Then the usual trip to the supermarket to do battle with the panicking, starving hordes & back home to plan what I can do around here tomorrow...

Excitement, adventure & really wild things, I know...

Yep... old keyboard dead from alcohol poisoning. New keyboard, courtesy of Long-Suffering Partner, installed & I'm getting used to the feel of it - as well as the strangely muted sound of the keys. And it has a separate number section on the right, which is all I ask from a keyboard

I can also still type one-handed without too much difficulty... Not for the reason you may think (you dirty-minded buggers!!), but because of Bella's insistent habit of climbing onto me when I'm at my desk & settling on my chest, supported by my left arm

Anyway, have a video of a favourite song by Tom Waits... I found this while looking the song up for a reply to my previous entry & it's too good to not put on a front page...

The 2nd week in a row that Debtors Prison has screwed with my roster. In fact, it's probably the 52nd... though I can't claim that consecutively. Hell, if we're not thinking consecutively, it's probably the 104th, if not more. I've definitely been there too long!!

Radio silence from my Mother & Sister. which suits Long-Suffering Partner & I just fine. They'll need us looong before we need them. We're a pretty self-sufficient & resourceful pair. They... are not

The exotic musical instrument collection here at WaitingManor just increased, with the addition of a Hohner Melodica, which joins the kalimba, electric kazoo, cajon, slit drum, djembe, cigar-box guitar, mandola, resonator steel guitar, prayer cymbals, whirly tube (though I prefer the name 'Corrugaphone'!), egg shakers, Indonesian gong... & probably a few other things I can't see in here at the moment. L-SP found the melodica on a local website, going for just $40 (new ones are $125), with a case & 2 mouthpieces. I said yes before she'd even mentioned it was in a suburb about 40 minutes drive from home, but still worth it!! Though I do hope L-SP learns something else to play, other than the intro to 'The Final Countdown'...

We've been having a tropical heatwave in Sydney for the last few days, with tomorrow promising to be the hottest one so far - reaching 37 celsius on the coast & into the low 40s in the city's west. So - what are the odds I'll have to drive out there for work at some point tomorrow... probably early afternoon... I wouldn't even take that bet. I've definitely been there too long...

Day off... which means the usual stuff - laundry, local brunch, more laundry, vacuuming, sweeping & then getting rid of a lot of excess DVD cases before more vacuuming. In between all that, for the last 3 days I've been downloading & installing Cubase LE, which came with my new soundcard. The additional plug-ins & effects & sundry studio trickery are taking forever to download & install, but hopefully will be worth it once everything is up & running

I have 2 projects for the new equipment. First & most obvious, I have 20+ years worth of unused music, which I refer to as my 'Homeless Songs' - ones which were either never used in the bands/projects I've worked in, or were never done the way I'd like them... or were never even presented to them, as they were stylistically too different to what the band/project was. I have basic recordings of a lot of these scattered across various discs, as well as lodged permanently in my head, as they are the pieces I play most often when I play at home. Hopefully, the time has come to do them Frank Sinatra's way... I mean my way

Secondly, I want to plug my turntable into the recorder & transfer a lot of old & fragile vinyl LPs to digital. I have records & recordings from the earliest days of the LP record, as well as a bunch of older 78s - not sure how I'll record them from my Victrola, but it's worth a try. Certainly my Charlie Patton blues albums & Django Reinhardt recordings will get priority, along with other 50s-70s rarities I've inherited in my Father's record collection...

Pretty sure I'll need another HUGE memory external hard drive... maybe 2

Dinner with a long-time friend of ours this evening, at a favourite Ramen place. It feels weird to have eaten, then wandered around the nearby shops, visited L-SP's Mother & to now be home & the sun hasn't even set properly yet... It's been a looong day

In a sign of things to, probably, come... my newsfeed threw in this story today, about the best board games to play at home

Given that we'll certainly be spending NYE at home & possibly a lot more nights to come, as Sydney's Covid clusters expand & multiply, maybe it's time to learn a few games. I've always though that Terry Pratchett's semi-fictional Cripple Mr Onion sounded a bit far-fetched & complicated, but apparently, there are real rules & cards... so it could be the trick to whiling away those evenings at home

I wonder if anyone's come up with a Thud board yet? Why yes... Yes they have...

To the sea...

I had plans for the day... do some photo work, maybe fire up the guitars & effects, re-design the computer/music room to accommodate more stuff. Well - one out of three will have to do... We did get other things done - take Laura to the mechanic, only to be told we'll have to bring her back in a few weeks, once the warranty repair is authorised, then headed over to the inner-west to pick up a 27" monitor screen & visit a recommended butchery, then a 3 store search for a particular sauce. Dinner had better be worth it!!

And we watched Monty Python's Meaning Of Life this afternoon, part of L-SP's voyage of discovery, learning where I get a lot of my everyday quotes & expressions from. So many have come from Python & its offshoots - Fawlty Towers, Ripping Yarns... I don't know how I feel about having my sources revealed - a little less clever & a bit more of a shameless plagiarist... or a highly selective bower-bird with exceptional taste in humour?!

Day off today, in what's shaping up to be a bit of a fractured week - I think I've got Thursday off as well, then working through to & over the weekend. Blargh...

The weather has settled a little bit, though it's still pretty cold. With L-SP sleeping off her 12 hour night shift, I'm wondering how to spend the day. Hopefully not answering any more texts & calls from work, like I've been doing for the last 2 hours. I'm not the one supposed to be working from home!!

From the 2016 USA Trip Archive:

A peaceful sunset on Marina Beach, California

From the top of Hunt's Mesa, above Monument Valley... it's a loooong way down!!

Sunday, so... off to work, pretending it's Monday

Yesterday was a pretty typical lockdown/isolation day - helped by the fact that L-SP was on day-shift... so I went up to our current favourite café for food & coffee, then found ways of amusing myself around the place, including recording a bassline for a friend to either learn, dissect, or dismiss for a piece I wrote a while ago, then recording some quick bass sample sounds for another project with another friend... I do have friends... I'm just not as good as I could be at keeping up with them...

Then some work on old photos with my newer version of Photoshop, that does stuff the old versions didn't do, so a trawl through the archive to see what can be done with shots I thought were misses. This is one...



Taken back in 2016, so long ago I have no idea where - it's not like clouds give you any kind of reference landmarks... Definitely on Earth though

Spotted these guys growing on the side of the road, while taking the 4-legged houseguest for her last walk before handing her back to L-SP's sister, whose home has returned to animal-friendly mode. Only had my phone on me, but as L-SP says - the best camera you can have, is the one you have with you

We had our canine houseguest for 6 weeks... it didn't feel like that long, except for some times - usually when she was being a little annoying &, especially, at 6am every day, when I had to hand-feed her a tablet she was quite adept at seeming to swallow, before letting it drop out of her mouth... sometimes I didn't discover that until hours later. My record was 4 attempts... eventually learning to keep my hand under & around her mouth for about 30 seconds, to be sure it had gone down

My PC is home at last, having had the equivalent of a heart transplant & being kept for observation. A new power supply is expected to solve the recurrent BSODs that 'hospitalised' it in early December, under threat of, at best, replacement with a Mac, at worst, reprogramming with a 12 pound sledgehammer. So this may be the last entry done on the borrowed laptop with the dodgy space bar which has played havoc with my grammarphilia... or phobia. I'll be spending the rest of this morning, probably, re-plugging & re-installing, then downloading the sizeable backlog of photos from my 2 main cameras... stand by for photospam - even more than usual. On the plus side, it means I won't rant about pandemic politics for a little while, despite the Don's daily attempts to appear more stupid than he did yesterday

I wasn't on social media yesterday. No Dreamwidth/LiveJournal, no Instagram... I did my usual rounds of news & info websites, so I'm pretty up to date, but have no idea what people think of any of it, or which parts they've made jokes or memes about... & I don't have any FOMO about it, apart from ending a pretty good run of consecutive days posting on here, but I'm sure no one else noticed

We're preparing to spend Easter the way Jesus apparently did - locked up in a tomb with no visitors. Maybe we'll take the re-enactment a step further & just sleep through it as well... emerging blinking & stumbling into Sunday at some point, thinking it's a miracle. My guitar student & his Dad want me to come over on either Friday or Saturday, but given the travel restrictions in place are being strictly enforced, I don't fancy explaining to the police how guitar lessons are an essential service & I can certainly do without the $1000 fine that would surely be issued

There is the possibility of my PC being ready for collection on the weekend though... which is a more impressive feat than Jesus - he was only dead for 3 days before coming back to life, my PC has been dead for 4 months!!! Which is even better than Lazarus, so JC loses out on 2 counts there. And with L-SP's work-issued letter of travel exemption, I'd have a much better chance with the police if I tell them we're picking up a computer for the home office. Now to find a good USB external soundcard & software to record music with - my 1st band, who came back to life last year (more resurrections... maybe I'm the Messiah... I've certainly been a very naughty boy, in my time) & there is talk of recording more tracks for an album release sometime soon, so I'll need that software sooner or later, especially if this social isolation keeps up for the months they're predicting. I fired up our digital piano on Tuesday & have a few little ideas worth keeping, on something better than my phone...

Today was my normal weekday off, while L-SP is working from home, because she can... It almost felt like a Saturday, or maybe Sunday from my childhood around the neighbourhood - hardly any cars on the street, lots of children (& parents!) on bikes & dogs being walked up & down the street all day - poor things, they're probably not used to this - even if they do get walked every day, it's usually by the dogwalking service, but now it's 2 or 3 of the family unit instead... My first duty of the day was to take our canine houseguest to the Vet, for a follow-up on a lingering ear infection. The Vet was pleased with the results, so off we went to buy breakfast rolls & coffee to take home, as L-SP had started work pretty early & besides - who makes Portuguese chicken, avocado, bacon, chilli & cheese rolls for breakfast, other than one of our favourite semi-local cafés?

Once that was done, the reality of the new normality set in... I had nowhere to go, couldn't go out & find a photogenic spot, most shops were closed, no pub, club, or cinema... not that I go to any of them that often, but it's nice to know the option is there - & now it isn't. I was loath to pursue my normal internet habit of reading about 5 different news & info sites, as I'm trying to cut back on reading things that make me angry...

So, out with the acoustic guitar (no electric, as L-SP was on a conference call & didn't need a soundtrack, or even hold music) for about an hour of brushing up on techniques & some of my pieces earmarked for development. Then I spotted my Irish Bouzouki in a dusty corner & picked it up to give it a clean, tune & a play. Well... one & a half out of three ain't bad - while tuning up, I broke an admittedly quite rusty string. Which at least means I now have an excuse to go to one of the more esoteric guitar shops to get a new set of 8 strings... that's a silver lining!

A load of washing, some catching up on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, a walk round the block with the 4-legged guest & now it's time to feed 2 animals & 2 humans, before watching the latest episode of WestWorld. All very peaceful, but I think I need a project... Is this how ill-advised & prepared home renovations get started? Is our insurance paid up??

Been playing guitar a bit more, lately... Been playing more guitars lately too

... on the just & the unjust alike.
But mainly on the just
For the unjust hath stolen the just's umbrella

After a baking hot weekend, which saw us use 3 fans in our bedroom at WaitingManor, just to bring the temperature down to a level you could sleep in, the rain began last night & continues this morning. Not stormy downpours, but a nice, constant fall that is more useful - as it gives the soil & plants time to soak it in, without having the topsoil washed away by too much water, or trees losing their limbs from too much wind

One of our large gum trees in the back yard did drop a branch though... Not a huge one, but big enough to do some damage to the plants underneath it! Fortunately Bella was neither climbing that tree at the time, nor walking past it at the wrong moment

Having finally picked up a copy of Leonard Cohen's posthumous album 'Thanks For The Dance', about 10 days ago, I played it for the first time last night & came over all misty-eyed. It's a short album, only about 35-40 minutes & you couldn't say Leonard does much singing on it (some may argue he never did!), but he intones & recites in an affecting way which, barrel-scraping future releases aside, we'll never hear again - signing off with the words:

"Listen to the hummingbird, whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me..."

Sorry Len, I think I'll still be listening to you in both my near & distant futures. Besides, there aren't many hummingbirds around in Sydney at the best of times

Ahh... Saturday, according to the calendar on the PC...

It's been a pretty draining week actually. Work has officially entered the end-of-year, crazy, "Oh my god, it's nearly December, the family are coming from out-of-town & this place is a mess. I know, I'll install new flooring everywhere, that shouldn't take long, right?!", period, so I've been doing a lot of driving around, then doing marathons on the computer estimating & quoting, then out on what I refer to as 'Fuckup Patrol', doing the rounds of various jobs in progress bringing more materials, or replacing wrong ones

L-SP has been on various day & night shifts, so I've hardly seen her for the last 7-8 days. We are, on the plus side, a lot closer to our mutual time off in early December & neither of us has killed a cow-orker yet

The work ute may be dead though... or at least, coughing up blood. I was driving home on Thursday evening & as I turned a corner, there was a clunk & all of a sudden it sounded like an entire Chapter of Hell's Angels were behind me & the ute lost a fair degree of get-up-and-go. There's obviously an exhaust/muffler issue & while I was able to nurse the now extremely loud invalid home, I took Laura to work on Friday, as the thought of driving the ute, with its horde-of-angry-motorcycles exhaust, in peak-hour traffic did not appeal. I may take it tomorrow though, just to get it out of WaitingManor's garage & make it someone else's problem & a none-too-subtle reminder to the Boss that we now really need that new ute he's been promising for 18 months

I made it rain today!! I did a load of washing & hung it out to dry this morning. It hasn't been a stinking hot day, for a welcome change & it's been a little cloudy, but good old Murphy ensured that, just after I decided everything needed maybe another 45 minutes on the line to be properly dry, it rained for 5 minutes. Maybe if I'd decided to wash the car, it would have rained a bit longer...