Truckin'....

Pictures of trucks wound up bookending my day today, but that word also homages the Dead, who have a connection to our entertainment of the last three nights.

But first, back to Sunday.  After Eleanor had spent two grueling days working on the wall tile grout, I got in there to work on ripping up the rest of the ceramic tile floor:




I resumed Sunday afternoon by tackling the tiles marked above in red. Removing them involves use of a scraping tool blade, a hammer, and an ancient book of Anglo-Saxon curses. Each of those six took a good 5-10 minutes, with much pounding and use of the curse book. I told Eleanor to expect three at a time to be about the limit of my hurting left hand and knees.  I had lunch, and resumed.

The six marked in blue? Came up, basically, by my breathing on them. This of course makes sense, since they're closer to the tub and have had 20  years of endless moisturizing of the sticky goo on their underside. I told her the estimate had been revised.

I announced my goal for the afternoon to be knocking off the remaining 25 surrounded by purple. I expected them to be divided into 30 percent easy and 70 percent curse.  I was wrong:



Those 25 came up before the start of the second quarter of the Bills game I was listening to, and the whole thing was done by the time they were done:P  The only things I didn't remove were those immediately surrounding The Throne (and basically holding it up through the rot underneath).

And the cat.

The Dead references arrived Sunday night when Eleanor recommended this series, which she's seen ads for over the past several weeks but where the price just dropped to a more affordable eight Amazon bucks for all ten episodes. (Pro tip: HD is often all they show as a price unless you click "other options," and SD is fine for us.) The series mostly follows two married musicians on tour- Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams; I've seen them twice- opening first for Lucy Kaplansky and then, in late 2019, downtown for Tuna. They were amazingly talented and kind at the table. Then COVID shut shit down and almost took Larry's life, but he blessedly recovered.  Both Tunas appear in the third episode we finished tonight, and Dead alumni Bob Weir and Phil Lesh make later cameos.  Lucy's not in it, but her old singing pals Shawn Colvin and Roseanne Cash have already shown up.  The director is a music lover who discovered Larry and Teresa in an Ardmore PA music hall and fell in love with them. Tonight, we saw how the unbridled yet illegal love of music wound up creating entire archives of bootleg performance tapes from the 70s and back, and that these live on in uploaded Youtube clips.  People just want to rewatch the show they went to see live, said one of these chroniclers.  And sure enough, somebody (not me) did that with the Buffalo show where they opened for, and then joined, Jorma and Jack:
 

Watch on YouTube

It was a great evening, which I can now relive. (Oh, and the fifth player on that stage?  I noted, when I saw this show: one of Hot Tuna's roadies is an accomplished guitarist in his own right; Myron Hart, not son of the Dead's Mickey Hart, but rather son of Myron "Pete" Hart of the Hart Brothers.)

Another great evening came after I fell asleep Sunday night. The Mets were finishing their series with the crosstown Yankees, and this time won another seesaw game, punctuated by an onfield brawl that began despite no player ever touching an enemy player or even saying a word. Rather, Mets baserunners were whistling at the opposing dugout- taunting the Yankees for having been caught whistling pitch signals during the Saturday night game I did watch in part- and the Bronx Bummers retaliated by making thumbs-down gestures at Mets who, last month, offered similar signals to their booing hometown fans during a bad streak.  I remembered it the next morning, when I took checks to the bank, saw this guy in line, and started whistling "Meet the Mets" at him.



Don't worry; no bank-clearing brawl eruputed.

While I was doing that, with the dog in tow, things were getting busy at home. For within an hour, the new furnace, central AC unit and toilet all arrived. The latter came via a Lowes truck and awaits further repairs and is in the garage for now, but the other two arrived in this truck:



They're not just installers, they're artistes!

Pepper was with me at the bank, and later in the office for a bit, because she went her usual barky self when the guys came in.  Of the feline crowd, Zoey ran to hide, Jack resumed his spot guarding the bare floor in the bathroom, and Bronzini was all, I'm good, I'll just sit on your clean wash like I always do:P



Good news is, when I did get home for good, the furnace was all in and fully operational. Bad news is, the AC is partly in and not operational; they come back Friday to finish it. And since a cool crisp Saturday, the temp and humidity have been going up up up here, with the next two days promising more of the same before they get the new system operational. The internal furnace fan works, but it doesn't seem to push as much air as the previous one.  So it's been a sticky day here, or so I'm told, because I spent my day, from just past 7 until a bit after 4, on the road and passing, or not passing, various trucks.

----

First came a parade of four of these on the 90 eastbound:



I didn't see snouts, or hear nickering, or smell the irresitable aroma of COVID-fighting horse paste, but there were definitely Budweiser Clydesdales in there. Looks like they have a gig in western Massachusetts at the end of the week, although I'm guessing they'll be stopping in Albany first to restock the supply of horseshit.

After passing them, I passed the day quickly. Originally four separate phone call-ins to courts in different places at different numbers, it was down to three by the time I got in. I again saved the first guy's horsemeat bacon for another day, and did well with the second, only to get a usually jovial judge totally mad about my clients for not listening to me but ultimately got them another trip around the oval as well.

That left two hours to head back to meet Mr. Pony from the phone calls last week. I wound up being a few minutes late for that, thanks to more unfortunate truck encounters than the equine ones of the morning. First, I got stuck behind a combine moving along Main Street's semi-rural stretch, slowing me down a good 10-15 minutes on the drive. Not to be outdone, though?  At the very suburban intersection of Main and Transit, I got stuck behind, wait for it,....




....a chicken truck.

Probably too afraid to get vaccinated:P

But it all worked out, other than the very hot house tonight, but I'm going to shower and sleep off the day before heading back to the starting gate in about ten hours.