My boss says I should be going back to night shift in late February- probably- and I miss working nights but we are doing good work training on days in a special new schedule I and my boss dreamed up. Having dreamed it up she anointed me to implement our first training program on the new regime and here I am still working during daylight hours in the 911 center. Belen was waving hi! while her sister-in-law Nelly was looking pensive. Don't be fooled they are tough opinionated Cuban women and they keep me toeing the line obediently.
I found out what Waste Management does when they come across a recycling bin filled with trash. They put a polite note on the bin and try to educate the owner. Fat chance. I saw my friends Robert and Dolly had bought a big blue recycling bin for use in their home in the county and I decided to do the same so now we have a 45 Gallon bin and we seem to be filling it easily for weekly pick up. Our trash output is minuscule by comparison.
I love these old fashioned signs "Tag Applied For" like they are fooling anyone. If you don't have a tag it can't be on the road if it is supposed to have one and if you really have applied for a tag they will pass it over the counter to you when you pay for it.
Here's another one. I'm a non smoker but anyone who thinks a Key Lime Pie flavored cigar sounds good should be one too. Grotesque.
We saw two movies at the Key West Film festival and they were both monumental downers. In Big Sur Jack Kerouac went through a ghastly depression and all the interesting people he knew in his life were kept at arm's length making the movie a depressive monologue under the dripping redwoods and above crashing ocean waves all under foggy skies. The last time I rode Big Sur it was summer and I froze my ass off from Carpinteria to Carmel even though my Yamaha 650 Maxim was equipped with a full Vetter fairing, so my love affair with Big Sur is a mixed memory. Oh and monstrously priced hamburgers at the Nepenthe restaurant. No wonder Kerouac was depressed. We walked out before the end, else we'd have slit our wrists.
Then we went back to the Tropic Cinema to see August: Osage County a two hour epic of women screaming at each other and everyone incestuously chewing each other to pieces in a giant old suffocating farmhouse, set in Armpit Oklahoma. All I could tell my wife as we left the screening at the end was that my family wasn't as bad but they were real while those harridans on screen were at least fictional.
I really like my old age in this crazy town a mixture of culture, madness, sunlight and heat. What a brew.