No work today! And for that, I am grateful. Still, when I have a day off it's usually spent cleaning out the garage. Tools and trash and sawdust pile up for weeks on end while I go in and out of there between jobs. I finished the biggest job of the year yesterday and am just happy to have it behind me. The thing is heeeuuujjj! I adjusted the rafter spacing by an inch. I know this concerns you, but it just seemed like there were too many rafters. There were also too many sets of engineering plans. The set I was referring to says my new rafter spacing is fine and dandy, but of course the customer used the other set of plans to pull the permit. There is some concern it won't pass inspection, so I didn't get paid yesterday. It's a holiday week. Who knows when the inspector will come?

But this customer is a real nice guy, (like they all are.) He's recently retired and seemed to be looking for someone to talk to every day, since his wife is at work. He'd wander out on his heeeeuuujjj patio each afternoon and chat with me, while I pretended that I didn't have chronic leaden-stomached nausea. He began to tell me his life story last Thursday and I felt like I was going to hurl the whole time. At one point, I just wondered where the story was going to end. It should have been obvious: it ended with us standing right there on the patio beneath his unfinished shade structure.

Mrs. Ditchman asked Little Ditchman if she wanted to help make a "pumpkin cheesecake" this morning. This got a perfectly cocked head out of her, like a golden retriever hearing a new noise. Seems the words "pumpkin", "cheese" and "cake" aren't really supposed to go together. The kid might be right. We'll see.

I stopped at the grocery on the way home and bought dinner: CRAB. I love CRAB! Love it. It was on sale and I thought we'd celebrate the big job ending, (even though we haven't been paid yet) which is why I went for it. Rung up on the cash register at $54.00 but I had a club card, so it came down to $20. What savings! Gone are the days when things could just be marked down -now you need to be in the club. I'm in a million clubs, and am very popular with junk mail as a result. My uniquely adept form-filling abilities qualify me to be in such a prestigious array of clubs. My wallet is a vast repository of club cards and they drive me beats-all batty when I have to fumble through them at the checkout stand. One time I had a register lady chide me for all the cards I had and I just looked at her like, whose fault is this? Oddly, last week I was overcharged ten bucks for a bottle of wine. Didn't get my club savings, which is the whole reason I bought it. She carded me and I actually showed her my I.D., which screwed up everything. The savings didn't come up in the computer, so it couldn't possibly exist, but I went back and showed her -had to take her down the aisle and point out the tag on the rack. She was astonished that a mistake could possibly have been made, and ripped the tag off right then and there, cursing some thoughtless stock boy under her breath, and depressing some hapless shopper standing behind us. She gave me ten bucks. I guess that's how it works with price increases at grocery stores: Rip, Snarl, Redeem. The free market at work.

There should be one club card. You could have a million clubs, just one card. Put it on your iPod. Bluetooth the thing. Use my fingerprint. Scan my buttcrack. Really, who cares? Has anyone ever actually been denied club savings for not having a card? The checkout person usually has one hanging from her apron and she just scans it for you! ("Club card?" "Use yours.") The whole thing has reached absurd proportions. Still, I am a "Super Saver" with nearly a thousand "Rewards Points" in the current "earn cycle" with a "verified total savings" of well over $30! And that's just in my last purchase! I know it's true because it was verified. Imagine how much I could save if I used my "gift card points", "coupons", and "double coupons": they'd be paying me to take all that wine and CRAB off their busy, troubled hands!

Anyway, I'm going to bring it all up at the next club meeting.

~