Update #4

On the highway of life, take the long way.

I finally moved! The fateful day was May 21, 2005. I laughed, I cried but I left Hialeah behind...

The Move

The day before the move I got a call from an old friend of mine that had moved back to Miami. He also offered to help so now we had three people helping me move, Pablo, GuIllermo and myself. Using my native Puerto Rican wisdom, since I planned to give just about everything to Goodwill and I own a pickup truck, I decided to finally use it and carry the stuff over to the donation site. I come to find out that I could not donate the furniture at the donation site 10 blocks from my apartment. I had to go to the headquarters and donate over there. I had already donated most of the small stuff, sheets sets, books, etc. and the only things I had left were a dining room set, refrigerator, two Window AC units, ceiling fans, etc. I also found out that I VASTLY underestimated the capacity of my truck bed. After about 9 trips to Goodwill, we finished donating everything. Well, not everything. At one point, Pablo got tired of driving around Miami and he walked across the street and talked to an lady that ran an ALF. She was willing to take some of the items and that saved us several trips! I had originally thought that if we started at 8:30 AM we would be done by lunchtime. Such is the stuff dreams are made of, we began at 8:30 AM but we finished at 5:00 PM. You see why there is such a low demand for Puerto Rican wisdom?? It works, but it's just not very fast...

I left that place BARE! I took the fridge, both AC units (the third one was owned by the landlord) and all three ceiling fans. There was dust everywhere and two large gaping holes in the walls, where the AC units were. Man I hope several families of lizards moved in after I left. As many of you know, my landlord, his dad and myself did not part on very good terms. Since I didn't need them any more, I left all of my researched property records on the real estate they owned right there in the middle of the floor. Heh heh

Why the middle of the floor? To make that 70 year old bend over! Yeah, that's right! I went there! You know he was cursing me out as his decrepit, arthritic hips and knees reduced by one the total number of actions they can take before they leave him an immobile, flailing shell of a man. I was thinking of also putting a MedicAlert (remember those? "I've fallen and I can't get up!") but I think that he would've completely missed the allusion. I also thought of putting a clapper there, you know, so he could at least have some functionality while immobile ("clap on, fal la la, clap off, fa la la,...THE CLAPPER") but that gave me pause. Not only would that be yet another wasted joke, suppose he got a pacemaker installed (if he didn't already have one)? You have to clap twice, to make it work, would that cause the infamous, but rarely spoken of...CLAP OF DEATH?!?! Not to be confused with a bad case of the clap but an actual CLAP OF DEATH. The first clap would be like the cocking of a gun...click/clap, then a tense, pregnant pause before...clap, then...nothing.

Beat beat, beat beat...clap...beat beat, beat beat, clap.........................................................................

I don't think I could take it. Would I be implicated in the death? Would it be murder? Would it be suicide? Would I be safe if I got him a smart clapper? I had yet another thought to throw caution to the wind and leave two tickets to a concert along with a clapper there. I would buy another pair of tickets and take my own clapper along and watch the fun as the audience erupted in applause at the end of a song. You guys ever seen an old fart dance like a 20 year old??? He'd be like an old epileptic Lord of the Dance!!!

Why did I want to go to Goodwill, you ask? For the tax write-off! I'm thinking that Goodwill has a pretty good racket going on. You go and donate your old stuff to them, they clean it up and sell it for a markup. Granted, they don't mark it up a lot but they got it for nothing! By my reckoning, that means that if you divide the markup by the cost, you get like a what, INFINITY percent profit margin!?!?! The actual accounting definition of Goodwill is "the value paid over the fair market value of a good or service." How appropriate that Goodwill makes a living out of goodwill.

Then, to give incentive (not incentivize, that's not a word!) for people to donate, the government lets you deduct a certain percentage of the value of donated goods from your taxes. The result being that the government, collects less money the more people donate. Hmmm...so that means that I will pay less taxes this year and the teeming masses will have paid a proportionately larger share of taxes for my benefit. Well then, to all of you who decided not to HELP ME PAINT OR MOVE!!! THERE YOU GO!!!! You paid for your indifference to my pleas for help! SERVES YOU RIGHT!!! I GOT YOU ANYWAYS!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATRONAGE! I WILL TRY TO REMEMBER YOU WHEN I AM LIVING IT UP USING MY TAX SAVINGS!!! And for the few, the proud, the ones who did help, don't get to cocky, I paid for your lunch...we're even.

The night before the move, the furniture guys came over an built my stuff. They were nice enough guys but I had the impression that furniture builders were pretty much experts, maybe not. They got there around 8:00 PM and Jeanne (by now you should know which one) and myself stood around watching them read the instructions and try to build my stuff. We were so bored that we walked over to the corner store and bought them some Powerade.

We come back and in order to expedite things, I started helping them out and while they built my couch and TV stand, I put the last pieces of my bed together. I noticed that some pieces didn't quite fit and upon further inspection, determined that the guys had put the frame on upside down!! They had to disassemble the frame, flip it over, and reassemble it.

The First Days

Now I have a few pieces of nice furniture and boxes of stuff stacked everywhere. Jeanne & I start to rearrange all the major stuff and we put the TV on the stand. Jeanne connects the cable to the TV and for the first time in my life, I have cable. Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it. I am too cheap to pay for cable outright! It is included in my monthly maintenance fee and I have all the basic channels. On Sunday night, as I relaxed on my couch among the boxes I watched my first cable show on my own TV. What show was it? You'll never guess. It was the Dog Whisperer. WTF?!?! THE DOG WHISPERER?? Yeah, there was nothing on and with such a stupid name as that, I wanted to see what it was about. Did it deal with a pet psychic? Was it a game of telephone for canines? It's actually about a guy who is an animal behaviorist that coaches people on how to manage their dogs. The guy's pretty good but it's sort of like watching NASCAR. The race is boring but you really want to see a crash. I was waiting for the guy to get bit. Didn't happen though.

During the unpacking, my computer desk got damaged and I decided to get a new one. (Sorry Pablo. Not that I don't appreciate your help or discount the many injuries you sustained as we disassembled the desk but it was looking pretty ragged. By the way, did you lose that fingernail?) I went to OfficeMax and found a pretty nice one at a decent price. I brought it back home and slaved to get it off the truck and into the elevator. I took apart the old desk and made trips to the dumpster downstairs taking one board at a time. I unpacked the new desk and began reading the instructions. In BIG BOLD letters the instructions cautioned against back injury and stated that the building of a desk was a job for two. "Pshaw!!!" I said. relying on my Puerto Rican wisdom. "It's only a desk" I thought. I can build it myself. Following the instructions was easy enough except that these instructions did not have any WORDS AT ALL. They only had pictures. Well, it did have some words in the steps, but they were mostly like, "An assistant is required to flip the unit over", "With an assistant, hold Board C while blah blah blah"...unimportant stuff.

I must admit that an assistant, while not absolutely necessary, will make the task of building a large, unwieldy computer desk much easier and faster. It will also potentially prevent several undesirable incidents such as: dropping extremely heavy particle boards on your toes as you work barefoot, having the top half of the desk pin you under its weight as you try to place it on the desk's bottom half, the incorrect placement of several support boards in reverse and having to spend 1 hour figuring out why board V, affixed with screws AX5645 and spacers SP58 will not fit into board D, which has its respective sunken holes ON THE OTHER SIDE. THEN after looking at the same simple cartoon picture you find out that BOARD A, THE ONE THAT CRUSHED YOUR TOES, is backwards and EVERYTHING has to be UNDONE, BOARD A has to be FLIPPED OVER AND MOVED AGAIN...I wore shoes (sandals) this time...it's NATIVE Puerto Rican wisdom, I can't help it...

Computer Problems

Now I have my desk ready and looking pretty. I have sufficiently healed so that I can deal with more semi-heavy lifting. I decided to ravage one old PC and take out its hard drive and install it into the newer one. After a few phone calls to tech support (i.e. Pablo) I got it to work. I set up my PC and waited a few days for my DSL move request to be complete.

I connect my router and modem to the PC and get ready to surf and check my email for the first time in about 2 weeks. I see a disturbing little yellow light on the modem. Greeat. Something's wrong. I go through the usual tasks to try and refresh the connection but nothing works. I call Earthlink DSL tech support to find out what's going on. After navigating though an automated voice prompt maze, I get to speak to a very polite foreign guy with an EXTREMELY heavy accent. I think he was toying with me and was purposefully masking his vowels. We went through several steps but he had to send me over to a level 2 tech. After spending 12 minutes on hold, 5 minutes listening to various vowel-less apologies I get transferred to a Level 2 tech named Manny. Manny was nice enough and after telling me hello and his name. He started apologizing. Now I wasn't angry or anything and I thought wow, this guy really turned up his compassion meter tonight! Guess what? It was damage control. He tells me the system is frozen and they can't get any information. He asked me to call back in one hour to see if the system was back up. What exactly do tech support guys do if their systems go down? They just sit there? Why bother answering phone calls?

I get another phone call the next day and I call tech support back. The move service form was not recorded and they would have to open a new order. It would only take three business days to get my service up. I said fine but it actually needed up a better deal. Since it was a new order, I was able to get a discounted rate for the first 3 months and after that, my service would actually be cheaper than the one I had previously.

Star Wars

Jeanne and I went to see Star Wars.We went during the day so the crowd wasn't that bad. The movie was ok, but the acting was not that great. At this point, near the end of the franchise, I began to think about the first movie and I see that the entire story really revolves around capes, not the Force, not the Empire, not about a messianic savior but capes.

It's actually a vicious fight for power that sets the brown capes versus the black capes. Star Wars has Obi Wan in a brown cape training Luke to fight not one but TWO dark capes, Darth Vader & The Emperor. Using the knowledge of Revenge of the Sith, I see that The Emperor has a legitimate reason to wear a cape (I guess plastic surgery isn't as popular in the future) but Darth Vader? The guy's in a cybernetic suit that keeps him alive! I am assuming that the engineers actually thought of something called temperature control, when putting a person in there. I was under the impression that the little red buttons on his suit were used for hot & cold A/C.

And of course, the most memorable line of all 6 movies is...no, not "Luke, I am your father". That's so 1970's!!! Get with the program, we are all more sensitive nowadays, we know we had so-so relationships with our parents but we are still nostalgic for the good 'ol days. The best line IS.."Luke, hold me like you did by the lake in Naboo"

In Revenge of the Sith, capes play a prominent role. They foreshadow EVERYTHING. Anytime, anyone takes of his cape, something is going to happen...

[cape off]

lightsaber fight

[cape on]

bad dialog

[cape off]

spaceship chase

[cape on]

"Luke, hold me like you did in the lake by Naboo."

[cape off]

A potential cape guy has to choose between wearing a brown or black cape. He chooses black. One other guy gets so disfigured so he has to buy a cape

[cape on]

guy gets burnt in lava

[cape stays off due to lack of shoulders]

dark cape guy comes to help shoulder less, potential cape guy and the burnt guy gets a cyber suit...with....A CAPE

[cape on]

movie ends

The First Dinner (as opposed to the Last Supper)

One week later, I finally had the chance to cook my first meal! I rushed home from work and walked over to my friendly neighborhood Food Giant. By the way, in a short period of time, there will be a Starbucks right by the Food Giant...can you hear the property values rising?!?!?!

I bought a few things and among them were some meat products that I decided to try and prepare for human consumption. I made it a specific point to buy paper thin steaks that would cook easily. I have the habit of never knowing when a particular piece of food is done. It either ends up burnt or as soon as I sit down to eat, I find it frozen and raw in the middle.

So these steaks were so thin you could get a paper cut from them. I put some of the famous Goya adobo which I bought on it and let it sit for maybe, 1 minute. I'm guessing that was enough of a marinade. I turned on the range and guess what? I put it on medium...then it hit me! Temperature! Although I admit that my skills in the kitchen are severely lacking, there was a variable that I was not taking into account...TEMPERATURE!!! My specialty has always been eating, not cooking. My cooking experience has been limited to a high school foods class where I was heavily supervised and watching my dear mom concoct Latin dishes. She was extremely familiar with the old 25 year old range we had. I on the other hand was a complete amateur.

Up until this point, I had only been dimly aware of the continual spectrum of temperature degrees. I always thought, yeah, that probably does exists, but not in my neck of the woods. If I play around with that, I'll get burned (pun intended), that's for other people, those risk takers. The old range we had was used so much that the labels on the dials were nonexistent. As far as my conscious mind knew, there were only two temperatures where you could set a range on, HIGH and OFF. Which was which? Well, they both clicked when you got to them and if the knob was pointing slightly to the right, that was HIGH. If the knob was straight up and down, that was OFF. I thought it was a simple system and it worked marvelously for pasta and boiling eggs. I thought I could make it work for meat if I just shortened the time I cooked. Well, that ended up with my over or severely undercooked states of meat. I know now what it feels like to discover fire and not know what to do with it.

I managed to cook the steak so that it actually smelled great and I put it on my brand new dinnerware. Now I looked and I came to the bleak realization that Adobo, steak, chicken, Bounty paper towels, milk and cereal do not a dinner make (that was my shopping list)! I had nothing to eat with the steak. I did the next best thing, as a side dish to my main course of steak, I served myself a bowl of Honey Nut Clusters. Can't get better than that...ugh. If I only would've had a the foresight to buy some pork, I could've offended the majority of the world's population and two of the three major religions with one meal! Unkosher, unIslamic and distasteful, all in one fell swoop.

Communication Issues

I bought a new smart phone and I find that service everywhere is excellent EXCEPT in my condo. Since that was my main source of communication until my phone line became active it was pretty frustrating.

I did make a new phone friend though, sort of. We have never met but I feel close to Mr. Stokes. He seems to be a middle aged smoker who is trying to quit the habit, but not of his own free will. How do I know this?

Apparently either he had my cell phone number or one very similar to mine. I get very frequent misdials asking for Mr. Stokes(I also get a few calls asking for Santiago). One very persistent caller was a customer service rep for Marlboro. Apparently, Mr. Stokes had ordered a few cartons of cigarettes and Marlboro was trying to contact him and fix a few issues they had with his order. According to the rep, the order couldn't go out until they fixed the problems. I guess Mr. Stokes isn't smoking as much these days.

I finally get my phone line repaired and the very next day I get my first unsolicited phone call as I get home from work...a telemarketer. My family doesn't know yet that I have moved but the telemarketers have already hunted me down....

And finally, a few of you have been gracious enough to let me know that you are actually enjoying these updates. I'm glad that you find them entertaining. For the rest of you who I have not heard from....YOU BASTARDS!!! THROW A GUY A BONE!! You don't have to like what I write...you don't have to read what I write, shit...you don't even have to help me move (which, as many of you already know, most of you didn't...enough said) but I still consider you friends of mine!!! AT THE VERY LEAST LET ME KNOW YOU'RE ALIVE!!!!