Mick

Is this one of you dorks talking to me on the phone right now?

If so I applaud you: "My family has been supplying internet hardware to the government since the 1890s..."

My fear is that it's a real person's real life. :(

Councilman McLeod just came by again. His tactic today was to state that they were just going to put the fence in a certain place they chose, and then he waited for me to acquiesce. After a long pause wherein I didn't answer that at all he said that they had even agreed that they would bring it out to a point a little further out. I said that when they stole my property they agreed to fence to here. I was afraid that it was going to be like one of those phone-slamming things wherein if, at any time during the conversation, I said anything remotely affirmative I would have a new telco, so I kept my few comments short and on point.
Now here's the part where I almost choked him: He pulled out his little plat and offhandedly remarked that our front fence was a little on the public right of way^[1]. "Hmm, I guess the highway department handles that."
Filthy.</p>

[1] Our front fence is a little in the right of way because it goes around a huge tree. We could move the fence to the other side of the tree, but the tree would still be there...

Short version of a long story like you get at the beginning of the second half of a two part televisor show:

1. In the course of converting our property back to a non-commercial residence we fence off the driveway/road thingy that allowed people to get to where a building had been before the conversion. -Does that make sense?
2. Anyway, our neighbor goes to the City Council meeting every Monday night for months and begs them to sue us. The City Council, in a move really without precedent or reason, sues us for $20,000.00 and our driveway. -Well, the reason was, I suppose, to frighten us into begging them to just take it and let us live.
3. Finally, the city gets a lawyer who has done this sort of thing and condemns and buys from our mortgage company a bit of our property to open as a public roadway. -This is the way normal cities do this kind of thing all the time and there's nothing I can really do about it. I contend that there's no reason for them to waste more tax money on my driveway, but my voice goes unheard.
4. Our agreement with the city is that they bought .07 acre from us at a price they felt was reasonable and they gave us a letter relinquishing any claims they might have on the rest of our property and agreed to build a new fence along the line adjacent to the property they bought. The Mayor made a point that they would use the gates they were tearing down as part of the new fence, thus saving several dollars in fencing materials. In the meeting with the City's attorney he made some notations on a plat that we would stake out where we wanted the gates to go and on that same plat he wrote out and made an arrow to the pin where the fence would end on the south end.

Okay, I think we're caught up now, except for this little footnote: The pin the demarks the south end of the line between what they bought and what they left is nearly into the intersection of what used to be our driveway and the roadway behind our house and, needless to say, will not make travel on either of these two roads convenient.
The location of this pin, installed in the roadway during a survey made by the city, was no secret. I mentioned, when making my arguments against the city taking this action, that this wasn't going to help anyone. I pointed out to the city's attorney that this arrangement was going to make it very difficult for poor Miss Bryson to get into her driveway, but I was pooh-poohed at every turn.
I mentioned that the city cheaped out even though they got to pick their own low, low price and bought the bare minimum of our land. This is going to result in a very thin roadway and the only way we're ever going to be able to get heavy equipment into the yard (for, perhaps, building a brand-new shop!) is to put the gates at the extreme south end of the new fence. So Mrs. bumper takes a bit of red paint and delineates where the gates should go.
So, suddenly, a little paint on the ground where the city made us move our property line had caused a minor uproar. Councilman McLeod is, I guess, their liaison to us because we've known him a long time. He came to see us twice yesterday and the Mayor stopped by once. The Mayor didn't stay very long, just long enough to say that the pin was in the wrong place and someone other than the surveyors must have placed it there. I opined that it might have been rogue stake fairies and he left in a huff. McLeod said that they really thought I would just want to move my property line in a little on my own, after all, that's what good neighbors would do. I pointed out the 30 feet I had left when I got to decide where my property line was and accused his city council buddies of being ghouls for putting a fencepost right behind Poor Miss Bryson's garage. "What are they trying to do, lock her in? That's crazy! But I already told you guys that, I guess you know what you're doing."
I'm interested to see what they do next, but after they served papers on my wife and me, caused my poor saint-of-a-granny to lose precious sleep for a year and my dad to nearly go homicidal I don't really feel so full of gratitude that I really want to give them some more of my property just so they can look good. No matter how close it is to the election.

This little syntactic quirk always gives me pause, but I never really thought about it until this morning because everyone I talked to did it. This is the formulation: $personal_possessive_article $software_product. So people refer to "my Outlook" or "my Internet Explorer" or "my sed". Okay, it's never sed(1). I don't know if that's telling or not.

My friends never use this formula unless, perhaps, they do feel some responsibility for the project. Even in that case I don't think I've heard it from (what I adjudge to be) the cognoscenti. I don't think these people who use this construction would apply it to other mass produced copies of something: "my 'Dark Side of the Moon'". "my The Catcher in the Rye".

Oh well.

So I'm giving this interview about musical things and I tell the reporter that if she would describe me as a cross between Eric Johnson and Chris Duarte there would be a crisp hundred dollar bill in it for her. I made certain that she understood not to attribute that to me and that she knew it was a joke, because, really, it would be crazy to compare oneself to those guys. I'm seriously a little afraid to play guitar in this town because one of those guys might walk by and be offended at the foul stench of my musical skillz.
So of course I'm described as "an electric guitar player who considers himself a cross between Chris Duarte and Eric Johnson."
Embarrassing. Yeah, I guess it is.

Except, of course, the guitar god quiz.



You are Stevie Ray Vaughan. You may not be pretty to look at, but deep within your soul burns a fire of raw blues energy and attitude. There's never any doubt where you're coming from, and you do it with a flare that is unmatched.
And on stage, you don't really care what kind of faces you're making, so long as you keep churning out the licks.


What Guitar God Are You?

I got spam today, and I'm in it!
( Read more... ) The short story is that Deekster and I will be playing at Capital Car Credit on South Congress during the "First Thursday" party. If you're there stop by and say "hey".

I stopped off to see my boy Casey at Strait and ended up with the Roger Mayer Axis Fuzz. It took me a while to make room for it on the board, and then a little longer to cut up cable, but that thing is the bomb.
I haven't quite settled on an order, but that shown in the picture is probably pretty close to just the opposite of the way I want it. I definitely want the delay/reverb stuff near the end of the line. I like the tube overdrive after the Vision Wah, that thing really does some cool things when the input changes. I'd like to see how the wah reacts to the hotter input of having the Axis Fuzz on the input side.
Once I decide I'm really going to clean up those cords. Really.

The powers that be at Hidden Agenda have remixed Betty Ford Baby. Get it before The Man discovers it.

Just walking around taking pictures. I like this thing: 33 floors, baby. Remember, dope elevation for the horizontal distance, windage for the hypotenuse.

I think the most important thing is to resist the urge to welcome myself to a lj account with some kind of lame comment about lj or why I'm here or some stupid "Frist Post!" thing that belies a confident disregard for whether my journal may be completely empty.