Category: Uncategorized

Perhaps A Different Color Of Green

After popping a couple antacids and ironing a dress shirt that brings out the burst blood vessels in my eyes, I headed out yesterday to celebrate Spring Interview Season as nervous as a Pakistani building inspector. The trepidation was warranted, but without going into unseemly details, I’ll simply mention the ongoing theme:

“What the hell do these people want me to say!”

They ask a question, I give a concise answer, they ask for additional detail while still smiling, I elaborate, and the smiles evaporate. It’s interesting to note at this point that I was nervous but you picked up on that, right? And that was the FIRST interview.

No! Wait! That wasn’t the real answer! I didn’t mean it! Wait! Yes I did! That was a real and very sincere answer! Maybe I can further elaborate! Oh! Have I gone on too long already?

sigh

The second interview went much better. How much, you ask? How about this: When the interview began, they were considering six other people. By the time the interview ended, they only thought that they had to consider two other people (even then, just as a courtesy). And yes, I like that a lot.

Now we wait.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,

– bob

It’s Green!

Well friends, it’s getting near my bedtime (sure it’s only 8:57, but I’m an early riser and I need a good solid nine to function properly), but I have a lot of preparation to do for the big day tomorrow. I hate to say it, but at this moment I’m slamming the Mountain Dew and blasting a techno stream from KCRW over iTunes so I can stay awake and get the rest of this stuff done.

I’m here to tell you that the Dew will really mess you up, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Kinda woozy, actually.

Two job interviews tomorrow, each job with upsides and dark underbellies. One doesn’t pay very well but promises security. The other is just the opposite, or so I’ve been told. I’ve also been told that either is mine for the taking.

Sounds like fun, eh?

BTW, the KCRW stream just crapped out. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.

Your best pal,

bob

Reference Alert!

Friends, I implore you. If you receive a phone call from a stranger who is asking you about me, please feel free to tell that person that I am the greatest guy in the whole wide world. I’m really neat, a snappy dresser, I don’t require male enhancement medications, that I can sing, dance and like the great taste of Nabisco Wheat Thins—A LOT! Also say that I’m friendly, easy to get along with, have a keen insight into the workings of today’s marketplace, my finger on the pulse of any demographic group they ask you about, that I can work well in small groups (or large groups or medium-sized groups).

What I’m asking, basically, is that you lie for me.

Is that so wrong?

Your very best pal ever,

bob

P.S. More on this thing in a bit. Just be cool, okay?

Oh Dear!

First off, the Socialists won the Spanish elections in a landslide. How’s that for the terrorists changing a political outcome? Aznar was no peach, but to corrupt a phrase, he was our peach. Does this mean that all the splodydopes (I still like that term, but I’m not sure why) have to do is blow something up before any election to get their way? Did Spanish voters give a bad dog the bone he was looking for?

What a terrible precedent.

So, anyway. How have you been? I’d tell you how I’m doing, but doing so would violate the rules here at Jaunty Central. I can tell you that there’s big news ahead (of some sort, that I can’t talk about right now, get it?).

I can say that the Cox Cable’s fine Innernut connection has finally come back to life. How long has it been? Two weeks?

…and no, I can’t explain it. Neither can they.

More later (really!),

bob

We’re Really At War

The bastards have struck again, this time in Madrid.

My leftist pals will shrug and say that ETA has a legitimate beef with the Spanish government. The families of the almost 200 victims will certainly disagree. Terror attacks can never be legitimate in what we hope is a civil society, but striving for that ideal frightens some people. The apologists; the doubters; the chatterers; and, clearly, the zealots.

Liberal democracy took another punch in the head today, the question for the next round is, do we take a dive or do we come out swinging?

You pick.

– bob

A Quick Note…

If you like your politics and you like your Wild Turkey and you like the F-word, you’ll love Wonkette. She makes hating politicians fun again!

Your pal,

bob

Mouldering Update!

Okay, there is no update. The mold problem in the previous post persists [as do the typos! – ed Weren’t you supposed to fix them? – bob Cut a figment of your imagination a little slack, won’t you? – ed You mean Kaus’ imagination? – bob Point taken. – ed]. I have refused to tackle the rebuild until things have dried out a bit, and that’s going to take some time. Certainly more than 48 hours.

I’d post pictures, but it’s all too disgusting and I know how sensitive you are. I understand that you want your chorizo omelette to stay right where it is. I can respect that.

Your lonely pal,

bob

P.S. So Mr. Smartypants, if you’re having so many problems with your Internet connection with Cox, how were you able to post this post? – Hyperventilating In Jamul Dear Hyper, I simply hijacked my neighbor’s unsecured wireless network! My guess is that they’re either on dial-up or on DSL but very far away considering the slow connection speeds. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate their connection, because I certainly do! – Mr. Smartypants

UPDATE: This post has been significantly altered and I can’t tell you why. Sorry.

Beyond The Pool…

Hey there!

You must be beside yourself wondering what I’ve been up to.

That makes two of us.

On Stoopid Tuesday I voted, at the urging of our Governor, to put the state in hock up to its eyeballs with a fifteen billion dollar bond measure. I even threw caution to the wind and voted to allow budgets to be approved by a simple majority as opposed to the current two-thirds rule. That measure failed, but the bond didn’t. Chalk that up to the power of Arnie (I guess), or perhaps the power of the his fellow travelers like our senior U.S. senator. We’re not partisan, not here, not a chance!

We’ll be paying that nonsense off for decades, but hell, as long as we’re taking care of the deficit its not a big deal. I tried that line with the missus trying to sell a solar electric system that I’d been pitched yesterday, but no dice. The initial outlay is twelve grand, which is wholly out of the question at the moment considering our finances, but it pays for itself in eleven years. Think about that for a minute. The system has an optimal lifetime of thirty years, so we end up with completely free electricity for at least nineteen years, and after that the solar cells tend to degrade a little, in a gradual downward slope.

We don’t pay very much for electricity right now, but the sales guy promised that San Diego Gas & Electric will certainly raise rates five percent annually! Good Lord! This is something like Armageddon!

Clearly something has to be done and that something is getting off of the grid. They want us dead—or worse! Unfortunately, twelve notes in the key of G are just not there right now. Maybe the MAN is holding us down just so that we won’t go off and do something dumb like stop giving them money.

For the time being, I think I’ll have to oblige.

By the way, did I mention the mold? Mould? Martians? (there’s an Opportunity for humor here, I just know it. – ed Memo to Sean O`Keefe: The Amazon Tip Jar is in the link bar on the right. -bob)

My nephew’s dad owns a condo in town and his tenants must have thought that the water leak in the kitchen would just go away. It didn’t. The cabinets are trashed as is the drywall behind them. The tile on the countertop is popping up, the grout is gone. It’s a stinking, living, breathing mess and I’ve committed myself to fixing it. Okay, I’m going to at least help fix it.

The problem is that I haven’t figured out where the leak is yet. And that’s a big problem.

More in a bit…

Your pal,

bob

Pool Blogging! – Part Twelve

I’m back in the desert for another day and a half. There are still some things to button up, but it’s nice to know that don’t have to worry about a shortage of jobs. You could even say that I suddenly have too much work—from helping my Dad, to my neighbor who is channeling the Medicis by offering me over a month’s worth of work on her house, to working on my nephew’s dad’s house.

How about all of that? Did I mention the job interview last week?

It’s an embarrassment of riches I tell you!

What will I do? Everything?

By the way, we installed some additional accent lights in the Olde Palm Springs Pool under the waterfall today. While we know that they work, we don’t really know how they look simply because we haven’t seen them at night. I presume that it looks neat, but who knows?

Your pal,

bob

Pool Blogging! – Part Eleven and A Half

We spent a long day waiting for the plaster guys to show up and subsequently watching them intently to ensure that they didn’t screw it up this time too. It looks fine so far, but we’ll have to wait until everybody is perfectly happy. Not “gee, that’s a lot better” happy, more like “wow!” happy. You know?

So, here’s a pretty good job description. Let’s see what you think:

You get a Class A driver’s license so you can operate a tandem axle truck with a mixer and a pump on the back. Then you drive to the job, uncoil some hoses and connect them to your pumps. The workers arrive and you hand them the other end of the hose with a remote control. You don’t have to really talk to them, or have them yell at you to start and stop the pump because they can control the flow from their end.

Next you mix a batch of plaster, pour it into the pump and stand around waiting for the workers to squirt out as much as they need. Finally, you collect the hoses, blow the plaster that collected inside them into the gutter and leave. You don’t hang around to help the plasterer, you don’t clean his tools, you just clean your own truck and leave. Total time on site? Maybe twenty minutes. What does the guy get paid you ask? A lot.

Our pump tender had coiled up his last hose and was heading home when he turned to me, smiled, simply said “easy money,” and was gone. Just like that.

By the way, this guy likes to do five pools a day, but usually can only get in four.

What a pity!

…and where the hell was my career counselor!

Just starting to get it,

bob

Pool Blogging – Part Eleven (for real!)

– or –

Dad Doesn’t Get Mad,

He Just Makes You Do It Again.

Howdy friends,

I went home to enjoy the very wet weekend and “pup-sit” while at the same time, a group of highly paid, highly skilled tile engineers set upon the spa at the Exxon-Mobil House to affect repairs. The verdict?

Their repair was so much worse than the originally terrible job and ITS subsequent repair that the entire innards of the spa had to come out.

All the tile, all of the plaster. All of it.

Then, while you’re at it, just go ahead and put all new tile in today.

…and maybe it might be a good idea to make it level this time…

Of course, to be fair I should mention that the guys that the tile contractor sent out today were very conscientious (could it be due to the fact that Dad was hovering over them every step of the way?), but why did he send the junior varsity squad out the first time? Has he learned his lesson perhaps? Maybe?

I ended up doing a little more of what I came here to do. I finished up a little more wiring, made sure that the motorized valves swung in the right direction—and in the direction that the computer thought that they were going. Nope, not too taxing at all. The rain has screwed us up. The tile and plaster guys have screwed us up. These jobs won’t be done until, you know, they’re done, so let’s get them done already!

Oh, and it’s going to rain heavily again tomorrow night. Lovely.

But you’re having a good week, aren’t you?

Your best pal,

bob

P.S. I thought I’d let you know that the photos are doctored to remove the tile company’s logo from the gentleman’s shirt and to obscure the logo on their truck. And that’s my dirty little disclosure of the day. You’re welcome.

The Termites Get A Headache

At the San Diego Interior Design & Landscape Expo there was a lot of interest in fake things. Metal-clad wood, epoxy-filled wood, plastic wood, imitation rocks, cast concrete slate, stamped brick. The only guy I met who was really interested in real wood was the owner of a garage door company. Even then, he built his roll-up doors cum carriage doors with mahogany veneer covered plywood. Despite that, he was the most legitimate craftsman in the joint. How could I tell? My spider sense tingling?

It was the missing digits. Like your shop teacher. The first philanges on his right thumb and index finger had gone missing. Clearly there’s a lesson there, but the only one I took away was to always clamp your work. Fortunately, I’d learned that lesson a long time ago from my own shop teacher. The one who said that he could build a stronger house by gluing all the joints instead of nailing them.The one who held up his own three-fingered hand to illustrate the importance of “respecting the equipment.” Of course, he also railed against the “do it quickly on the cheap” bastards who built homes with those common nails. He also drank vodka and smoked cigars with my English teacher in his office during their lunch break.

That explains a couple of things, doesn’t it?

Other things I didn’t need to know from the show were these:

• A plexiglas septic tank is a bad idea.
• Using whole potatoes to illustrate the flush-potential of your new toilet is off-putting.
• 2004 will be known as the year of Mediterranean Chic in interior design. If I never see another lion’s head spewing water, dark stone archway, or blue tile table it’ll be too soon.
• Ten horsepower pumps in above-ground spas are now the norm. I guess you need that when you have forty or fifty jets, but great jumpin’ Jeebus! Ten horses is enough to blow you clean out of the water! Good thing they have sturdy handles near your knees in the benches.
• Those same spa manufacturers are in a feature race, the horsepower and jet count being only two. How many speakers? Two? We’ve got four. We’ve got ten! Eight above, and two woofers under the water! We’ve got an AM/FM tuner built into the side of ours. Oh yeah? We’ve got Sirius satellite radio! (no, I’m not kidding.)

That’s only scratching the surface, but you get the idea. It was silly, indulgent, and I’m sure that the fools here in San Diego will snap that crap up like winning lottery tickets.

Meow,

bob

Pool Blogging! – Part Ten (kinda)

The Friends of The Friendless Squad have showered me with neat ideas on how to make a living once my Dad is done with his current projects. I’ll share a couple for your edification (for you linkers and searchers, they don’t involve “secret currency,” “bichon frieses,” “naked Hemet girls,” “pizza by the metre,” or “Russian cockroaches.” Thanks for taking a look though.)

First is the neat idea from my favorite Navy bride. It started as using the Pool Blogging as a marketing tool, but morphed into real documentation for construction projects. Log the progress on the web for absentee clients, then produce a nice photo album for presentation at the end. I think contractors will like the idea because it keeps them from having to answer late night status phone calls. Clients will like it because they can get an update on their terms and be able to look at a chronology of their project. It’s a jobsite blog! I like it a bunch.

I liked it so much that I spent last evening cooking up a flyer for the contractors I had hoped to meet at the San Diego Interior Design & Landscape Expo at the Convention Center earlier today. I chatted up the principles in the booths (surprising lack of Booth Betties there. I was shocked, shocked!), but in the end I chickened out. At the end of the day, I hadn’t handed out a single flyer. I did get a lot of business cards though. Many more phone numbers, and plenty of literature.

Maybe I can sell the service through a targeted email blast…

…oh yeah, they call that spam.

The other idea is just to go to work. I’ve got plenty of small home improvement jobs that will last me for weeks and weeks. The problem I fear is that they won’t pay me weeks and weeks worth of wages, especially if I bid the jobs appropriately. Let’s put it this way, I’ve got weeks and weeks of work, but only a couple weeks worth of income.

What’s wrong with this?

I think that’s obvious.

Your favorite impoverished monkey,

bob

By the way, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about with the references above, I encourage you to search on any of those terms yourself. Mr. Jaunty shows up for each of them. Jah only knows why.

Pool Blogging! – Part Nine

Joy.

I’ve been plumbing this nightmare for two days, scratching my head, and thinking of ways to get around the inherent problems. The solution let me to this:

…a tangled mess of throttling valves, check valves, and diverters to be sure. The result, however, was worth all of the agonizing.

Behold…

Candy-ass water shaping at its finest. Lovely fountain, a level spillway, and a pool that isn’t unnecessarily drained. There’s good work here. Don’t you think?

And the neat thing is that since we got it right, it should continue to provide people with enjoyment for decades. I’m a big fan of permanence, of the ability to craft a piece that will last. I’ve said it before and repeat it here for the newcomers (howdy!), I don’t have kids, so my legacy is my work. If I can create an enduring thing, that is the reward. If it’s beautiful as well, that’s icing on the cake.

I think this job will stand the test of time and I’m glad to have been a small part of it. The homeowner arrives this weekend. I hope he agrees.

Your pal,

bob

A Quick Get Well Update

The story I’d received about our friend’s biking accident turns out to have been very wrong. The crash simply involved a misunderstanding. The rider wanted to go one way and the bike wanted to head the other way. The bike apparently won that battle and our poor pal used the wholly wrong implement to stop her forward momentum—her face.

Oh, there are other corrections too. No tree involved. A couple cracked vertebrae instead of seven chipped ones. Three months in a brace as opposed to six. All told, I was wrong on the numbers and even most of the circumstance, but very right in wishing this powerful lady a speedy recovery.

And to the folks staffing a certain university hospital in Hillcrest, you might not be so happy when the wires holding her jaw shut are removed. I understand that you have a little explaining to do about the level of her care.

Pool Blogging! – Part Eight

You and I clearly understand that you don’t want the water from the spa flowing back into the pool when the spa is running. Only a dullard would blink when explaining the system of check and throttle valves you might need to keep that from happening.

Well ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself as Dullard Numero Uno.

Sure, I had an epiphany about three hours into building the thing, but until then there was plenty of head-scratching, pacing, and general bewilderment. (That’s not so strange—for you. – ed Thanks chief! – bob)

On another note, it was a warm but overcast day today in the desert. I was deceived by the clouds into thinking that I wouldn’t need a hat, or sunscreen. That was a mistake. Granted, I was no picture of beauty to begin with, but now I’m burnt and scaly as well. This however might give me an advantage in looking for a construction job.

Writers need writing samples, maybe the only thing construction guys need is a good, weathered tan to give them “gravitas.” It seems to be the only thing a lot of these folks I’ve encountered during my pool adventure have going for them. (Are you impugning their professional credentials? Isn’t that slander? – ed You bet! On both counts! If you had seen the tile job these brain surgeons committed to the ages and called “good,” you would’ve expelled your Atkins-friendly wrap. – bob Okay, I need to lose a little weight, no need to get personal. – ed)

Your closest pal in the universe,

bob