Weekend waffles and midges
I hate midges. No, not midgets, midges, fat mosquito-looking bugs that do not bite but instead have been selectively bred through a million years of evolution to swarm into my face and annoy me. Central Florida has received very little rain in the past months or so (What ever happened to 'April Showers bring May flowers? Oh yeah, that's for states that actually have seasons.) as a result all the ponds and lakes and retention ponds are drying up and turning into stagnant puddles where these midges breed by the billions. They literally swarmed my house over the weekend. I had accidentally left the light on in the bathroom one night. I have one of those high power fluorescent screw in light bulbs in my bathroom and either through a cat door or a crack in my house the midges came swarming in to commit suicide in my bathroom. Thus my sink and counter and floor and tub and toilet held a large number of dead bugs. Disgusting does not even cover it. B-movie horror is what something like that belongs in.
Friday night I finally got around to bottling my strawberry mead. This batch came out tasting very light and not bad at all. I was nervous because the last batch I made from frozen strawberries came out horrid. If I had given a bottle of that stuff to anyone reading this, toss it out. I'll replace it with a bottle of good stuff.
Saturday I went to the dump. The dump, the dump, that lovely smelly lump. I had a few items I wanted to discard, among them a large broken wooden console television that I had taken from someone's garbage for reasons that currently escape me. I had laboriously hauled it home and into my front sun room where at sat for a month. Every time I walked out the front door I had passed it and wondered why I got it. Finally, sick of it, I hauled it to the dump.
I also tossed in a couple of useless bags of solidified concrete that I had been tripping over for a month. Alan rode along with me so he could smash some stuff. When we got to the top of dump mountain he had pulled the TV out and laid it down on it's back, and then pulled out the solid bag of concrete and with a Herculean grunt tossed it over head for it to hit the screen of the television.
Much to my amazement the concrete bag split open and the solid lump of concrete exploded into rubble. The screen of the TV hardly had a scratch. They just don't make them like that anymore. Annoyed, Alan rooted in the garbage until he found a chunk of metal that he tossed at the screen and was finally rewarded with the hollow 'whump' of a screen imploding.
After the dump we stopped into a garage sale that was being held at some school. TO my delight they had boxes and boxes of science fiction and fantasy books. Many of them were old school authors, Asimov, Phol, and so on. Quite a few of them I had not read before. So I piled them all into a box and staggered out with them. 25 cents a book. I now have reading material for the next couple of months.
Sunday I cut down a tree in my front yard. It had been dead for a while now and while I secretly hopes a miracle would happen and it would magically blossom back to life again, I have finally decided it has to go. It was not very large so I was able to chainsaw it down in a rather short amount of time. I was amazed at home many lizards lived on that thing. It was like a lizard condo. They were all jumping for cover whenever a tree limb went falling. After a while I had it all sawed down and loaded up in my truck. There is a stump left behind with a little hollow area in it. I'll keep that around for a bit and let it fill with rainwater so that I have a ready supply of stump water in case I have to remove some warts.
Later that day I took my car over to the carwash. I had not washed it in so long that some of the grit has become permanently embedded. I amused myself at the carwash by putting extra quarters in the suds machine just to see how high I could make a mountain of suds on my car. I then blasted it away with the high-pressure hose. My car really does not look a heck of a lot cleaner, but at least there are no blatantly obvious cat paw prints running down the windshield.
I shelled out a few more quarters and bought a cherry air freshener. The freshener was very powerful and it emitted an odor that smells exactly like an Icee machine. The kind of Icee that has that sports big polar bear that has had a lobotomy on the front of the machine. It was so strong I could just imagine looking behind me to the back seat and seeing a large dented and grimy icee machine grinding away and turning sickly sweet syrup into a frozen treat. I might get sick of the smell in the next day or two and toss it out the window. We'll wait and see.
Car washing builds a man a terrible waffle thirst so on a whim I went to waffle house for dinner. I had eggs, bacon, toast and a big waffle. I understand that it's extra for bacon, but why do you have to bring three slices of bacon on a completely separate plate? It was grimy and dank in the waffle house, but it was also quiet and deserted. I read my book and ate my waffle in peace. I attained waffle nirvana.
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