~~ The little guy who actually did the service call for Ku Kox Cable dived under the house twice, repaired nothing, hooked up a Funky Meter to the modem (boy, is that an obscure bit of techno-speak or what?) and pronounced it all cured. Matter of fact, that it would run ever so much faster than it had been, due to the benevolent actions of himself, and the fact that he had gone under the Dwarf House not once, but twice.

~~ It runs about the same as always. Which means, slow and when it wants to.

~~ The Bills beat the Dolphins. Lightly rests the yoke of my afflictions this week.

~~ Ally and Maggie the Middlest took the grandson down to see the Great Grandparents last weekend, a 4 day affair. GG-P�s live in an area far away, requiring much high speed driving on bleak interstate roads. My wife is a very big fan of interstates, for they allow her to fervently mash that black chunk of rubber located under the right foot and listen to her SUV sing a song of expanse.

~~ Which explains why she called me, from some wasteland in Carolina, wailing wondering about why the car got a case of the shimmy�s whenever she tried to get above 65. I told her to just wind it up to 80 and everything would even out. I�m all about the simple solutions.

~~ Her next call (within mere minutes) was to inquire about what would happen if a CV joint should fail at high speed, and should that be a concern? I told her to just drive 65 and enjoy herself, as I was. Rare indeedy are the times that I get 4 days of solitude. Pretty sure that this recommendation didn�t go over quite so well.

~~ Read a phrase from a writer this week that I simply must jot down here, for it describes my Tall Boss so aptly. �That fellow is just looking for a reason to struggle.� Where I seek contentment and the easiest solution to the little problems (see reference to wheel shimmy above), the Tall Boss version of contentment seems to involve crisis, tail chasing solutions and losing money. Honestly, I�ve never seen him happier than when he made the statement �I�ve lost money on just about every job I�ve ever done.�

~~ You can bet I viewed that with my usual house blend of skepticism. Heaps of it, in fact. Followed shortly by a series of brutally sarcastic (if mumbled) remarks.

~~ A couple of entry�s ago I wrote about the school installation job which had occupied most of my summer. It ended happily, and pretty much on schedule. It was the biggest job the Tall Dog had ever taken on, and I made the comment to him that �If you didn�t make money on this job you never will� or something to that effect. It must have hurt him terribly, since he stuck me on a government job which involves A) the wearing of hardhats, B) signing into a pass office with armed guards every morning, C) OSHA types onsite in swarms, and D) a mucked-up schedule which no human being can hope to meet coupled with impossibly difficult work made more difficult due to Tall Dog tinkering. And stairs. 3 flights of stairs several times a day.

~~ Stairs and I mix poorly. Modern man invented the elevator for a reason. It�s one of the functional inventions modern man has done very well.

~~ Ally feels that the stairs have been good for me. That my legs and ass have benefited. This of course is the same woman who called me from the road about CV joints.

~~ We�re at T-minus 45 days or so to the Great Uprooting. Where the Dwarf House is abandoned, the Swamp House is occupied, and all will be feathers and delight. Updates to follow.

~~ I�m toying with the idea of a blog to take the place of this diary journal. Just toying, mind you. Outfoxed has been a Diaryland thing for better than 5 years now, I�ve got a certain loyalty to the place even if my output is infinitely smaller than it ought to be. At some point soon I�ll get the annual prod to pony up my dues, and I suspect that I�ll do that for at least one more year. But the idea of a more open environment has a certain appeal, as long as I can retain those blindly loyal readers. You know who you are.

~~ Just as an aside to my pal LAtheSage - No, it won�t be a sex blog. It just . . . won�t. The Horizontal Mambo and Thoughts from the Edge of Swampville? Good book idea, wouldn�t fly as a blog.

~~ At least not without lots of pictures.

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