A Rare Autumnal Soaker That's Just In Time

⌘
I gotta do something about the floor my executive style office chair rolls around on. The wheels on the chair have seen their best days. I bought the chair on sale for about half price, but it still cost me plenty. It's got more levers for adjusting things than the average office chair, I suppose, but the wheels don't turn so easy now as they once did. Every other feature of the chair still works as advertised.

I been pricing the cost of replacement wheels. They would have to be better wheels that worked right. The supply houses want $7 a piece for 5 wheels. The wheels I've shopped for would have to be jury-rigged to work at all, because they're not specifically designed for use on an office chair, and the ones that are designed that way are not engineered well. Why would I bother to replace crap with newer crap? Except for the worn out wheels, this chair is just what I need, but I might not be willing to spring for wheels that might not work like I need them to. I'm thinking about buying just one to see if they'll do what I want them to, and if it don't work I can take it back for a refund. If it does work, then $35 to make a chair I'm otherwise happy with mo' bettah is actually fairly cheap when I think about the cost of buying a new one I might end up not liking so well.

I gotta have a comfortable chair beneath me to address the two keyboards that take up most of my time these days. The material its rolling around on now was not designed for this use. It's chipboard sub-flooring which is not holding up under the two hundred twenty pounds of pressure I put on the seat of the chair. If I don't get a tougher sort of fancy linoleum to put between the hard rubber wheels of the chair and the chipboard, the chips that make up the chipboard will come unglued one at a time until the floor is uneven and pockmarked. Then, all the work I did to get the chipboard down will have been in vain.

I built the hootch I live in. Mostly by myself, but a friend helped me remodel it when I had let it go down. Currently, the best I can say about it is that it's dried in for the time being, and it keeps me out of the weather and has a stove and a bathroom, but it ain't nothing to brag about. In fact the pictures of the place Saddam Hussein was captured at reminded me a lot of the bare essentials I gather about me to make living in one place for a long time seems to require. Not much, but more than I've ever gathered around me before when I'm not married. I've lived here allone longer than I was married to both of my ex-wives put together.

I just went downstairs and got my second cup of coffee from the French Coffee maker I bought cheap at Wal-Mart just to see how it worked, and if it worked at all. I'd never heard of such a thing until recently, and I've never seen one used by somebody else, so I flat didn't know. Now I do, and as far as whether I'm positively impressed by this device… I am… it allows a few dregs to seep through the stainless steel screen filter. The pot itself is made of glass, and it works like a charm.

Cleaning it is pretty easy too. I just remove the stainless steel filter and the plunger that makes it a "press", dump the grounds out in the yard, and refill the pot with hot water from the sink faucet, squeeze a dollop of dishwashing liquid into the hot water in the pot, and then use the plunger to wash the glass pot and the plunger simultaneously by moving the plunger up and down inside the pot like I'm churning butter. When I rinse the soap out I got a shiny clean pot for the next ti-me I get the urge for caffeine.

This process for brewing coffee satisfies some deep yearning, but it's obviously not for my childhood. Any coffee I had before I moved out of my parents house came as some sort of small reward. My mother used to buy green coffee beans at the A & P grocery store when we went to the regional towns nearest the little villages we lived in. When we moved to another town (there were actually only three of them in North Carolina) the regional town stayed the same, but when we moved here we had a choice of four fairly large towns to choose from nearby, including the state capital which is only an hour or so away.

As towns go, this one is probably only called a town rather than a village because it's the county seat, and it has a courthouse right in the center of town (where it's always a nuisance as far as traffic is concerned), but there is only around 7,000 official residents inside the "city" limits, and only 40-50,000 people in the entire county.

Like a lot of the small crossroads and railroad towns here in the coastal plains, the downtown area is fairly deserted and people do all their shopping at the three small strip malls in the suburbs around town. The strip mall where Wal-Mart SuperCenter is located has captured the markets around here. People literally "dress up" to shop there. That's because there isn't much choice. I think some of the local people shop at Piggly Wiggly out of spite for Wal-Mart taking over the Mom & Pop stores businesses. The difference in price can be exorbitant.

I have to write about what I know, but writing about what I know also questions whether what I know is valuable, and FOR what? The fact is that I don't do much these days that's in keeping with employed people who spend much of their time working for the money they need to live as high on the hog as they can afford.

One thing I can know about without going into town to pick up the local gossip is the weather as it cameos and goes at my house. It's sprinkling rain presently and has been all night. It's not a steady rain so much as that it's a steady plopping of large drops that makes a distinct noise when it hits the roof and the wooden deck just outside my open door. I gotta buy a screen door one of these days.

I've arranged it so that about the only e-mail I'm getting these days if from the AppleScript discussion group. It's a fairly busy group. There are regular contributors who tend to write several times a day, but a bunch of people pop in with plausible concepts that reveal a deeper understanding of wot's what? The conversation goes much deeper than mere AppleScript sometimes and references other programming languages. Especial Cocoa and some language called XCode. So, it seems plain to me why I haven't written but once, and that was an attempt at humor (which failed, btw).

I'm eating this one-pot stew/tomato-ey/italian sausage thingie that is a true cooking experiment for me. I started out by frying up some sweet onions that have a lotta purple in them, and once I get the crisp outta them and get them caramelizing a bit I start adding the slices of italian sausage and garlic and various kinds of diced tomatoes along with chopped green peppers, and a jalapeno for some spicy hotness.

As has become somewhat of a habit lately, I came back upstairs to write while this rude mixture cooked down into a sort of personal rue I'm concocting, and when I write time flies, and this rue I was cooking down cooked down a little too much, but it didn't taste too burnt to eat, if you've got a cast-iron stomach like I do.

I added a couple of cans of diced tomatoes to weaken what burnt taste there was, and added some more fresh chopped onions and peppers to give it a little bit of a fresher taste (okay, it was real close to being overcooked) and that helped a lot. I've kept adding to this rue daily, such that now I gotta go to the grocery store and get some more vegetables.

Today, however, I'm gonna add a couple of chicken breast that I'll thaw on top of the rue, and then cube the chicken up to let it cook enough to kill whatever, cut the stove off, and let the chicken marinate in the two-day old rue. It's turning out to be sort of a spicy, tomatory Brunswick stew. Maybe I'll stop by and get some Carolina style pulled barbecue meat to use in this rue. That would truly be Brunswick stew. Well… maybe. '-)
♤