A note to SOTW Jim (just to keep the troops posted and to save needless repetition) --


Jim --

I had dinner with my friend Tom Leete tonight. We made pigs of ourselves at Golden Corral since we were unfettered by our usual omnipresent female consciences... you know, those girls who are supposed to keep us in line but rarely succeed. Tom left his wife behind in South Carolina while he is here getting things cooking at his new shop and I'm pretending that the Redhead isn't expecting me to show up after midnight to see her safely back to her house.

My friend Tom was talking about his new lumber yard, the Contractor Yard in Kissimmee. Tom is all stoked because he is back running a yard, something he has done in the past before he went up to South Carolina and became a mega bigshot with Pelican Hardware... a sort of Home Depot joint... (he was one of the inventors of Home Depot before then and one of the main dudes in the Scotties organization before then.... bla bla bla). This Contractor Yard outfit has 26 stores and this particular one has had some serious problems in the last 6 months so he is here to turn it around.The place is gold mine with the right management, and he's just the guy to do the job. Anyhow, he said that what he was looking for was "outside sales guys"... you know better than me what that means. I heard you say that you were a sales guy in the past, and I think you said you worked in the building trades somehow... welllll... I said that you were looking and Tommy cheered up and asked for you to send him your resume with some contact info and he would plug you in. So....

His email address is Tom.Leete@contractoryard.com

I don't know much about Galveston but here in Central Fla. they have a place called Sailorman's over in Daytona that has all kinds of used gear. Surely they have that kind of place out there in the wilds of Texas. What can it take? A heat exchange unit. What's it doing? Trying to sink your boat? Miserable pieces of shit.

As for myself... the blog thing is a fairly new phenom for me so I'm still learning. I know that the guys at BlogSpot seem to be very energetic in a sort of early 60s kind of way and they make lots and lots of code that is cheerful to an old hacker like yours truly, but the site mechanism itself is definitely a work in progress. I think that they started out as a sort of hacker afterthought and then got gobbled up by Google and haven't actually groked the fact that there are thousands and thousands of kids out there who want to blog. No comment code or backtrack. Heck, I can't even get my archive to work right. But I haven't really tried too hard to fix anything. They do give you direct access to the root code so there are all kinds of possibilities. It all reminds me of the good old days of shareware and Linux programming. I just haven't done anything about it. Getting lazy in my old age I guess.

Let's see: where to tie it up... I usually keep my boat in Sanford on the St. John's River. That has direct access to the Atlantic there at Jacksonville. If you want a guided tour you can go to the library section of my website and read my little travellog. It's at http://www.raindogsurety.com/boat_stories.htm . I wrote those things for a rag called Liveaboard magazine a couple of years ago. Sanford is the last stop on the St. John's River for anything of any size. Beyond that point you need a canoe. They have a nice marina in downtown Sanford that I will probably be staying at when I move the tub back around from Titusville where it has been sitting up on stilts for the last couple of months at Nelsons (I've had an account there since I was a teenager and it is the only place I'll buy a can of bottom paint). There is also a very nice marina called Hidden Harbor out on the river outside of town which is right on I-4 and very easy to get to Orlando from. But... if you are working in Kissimmee that might be a hike for you. It might actually be easier for you to stay over on Merritt Island on the Cape. That would give you about a 30-45 minute commute up Hwy 192 to get to the Contractor Yard.If you're over there there are several very salty marinas right at the connector between the Indian River and the ocean, all fairly inexpensive and within shouting distance of the Gulf Stream. Most folks who live over there and commute to Orlando (and there are a shitload of them) go back and forth on the beeline, a toll road that bypasses all of the traffic and dumps you out in the heart of Mickey. Very tidy.

Needless to say, it would be great to get you over here in the sunshine and away from the frozen west. They tell me that when the wind stops blowing out there in Texas, that the chickens fall over in the yard. Is that true?

Bob