Today was laundry day and when I strip my bed down, Piper swoops in. I give up trying to make it right away, she owns it.
My start time with the new job is 0945, bankers hours. From 1000 to 1400 today we handled 145 tubers, from grandmas to three year olds. I truly haven't worked this hard in years. Every time I made it back to base after dropping an over-capacity load of 14-15 people at the start point, another group were ready to go. After a couple of hours I had to start working pickups in to get everyone back. The company is only on it's second year but this was a record. Happy covid Memorial Day!
Part of the drill is to tell everyone to look for our flags in a tree by the disk golf course. That's where they stop, get out, and wait for me to pick them up. Only a few floated by today. Here's the spot:
We had a hundred floaters today. That's a lot of runs up and down Shoal Creek with tubes piled high in a trailer on the back of an old twelve passenger school bus. Everyone had fun and now we rock into Memorial Day tomorrow. Nobody wore a mask, nobody coughed and not one person let the word covid enter our space.
OldManJim is out having fun by the creek this summer, doing what I do well, driving people around. Ricky and I started the morning out cruising through the David Crocket Park campground, smiling and waving at the folks as they woke up and making sure everyone saw our old yellow bus towing a tube trailer with the company logo on the side. I felt like the ice cream truck just without the music.
The day went well, lots of happy tubers and our ability to arrive at the pickup spot within minutes of the end of their two hour float was spot on.
I'm also having great fun with my new phone and new Facebook page, reconnecting with old friends and making plans for some late summer visits out West.
My truck has been having electrical issues lately and I just figured that my old Interstate battery was on it's last legs. She wouldn't start this morning so my neighbor hooked his rig up for a jump start, and nothing happened, dead. We then jiggled the battery and she came back to life.
Then I drove to O'Reillys for a new battery. As the store guy Kenneth was installing it he went Oh shit, do you see that? Hmmm, not something you really want to hear about your old truck, but I'm really glad he spotted it. The ground wire was broken and hanging by a single wire at the chassis. Electrical issues solved! He snipped the wire, put a new clamp on and then ran a ground from the clamp to the old ground spot.
This guy went above and beyond the call of duty for a battery sale and I have myself a new parts store.
I connected my new Samsung S20+ to my Yamaha YAS-207BL Soundbar with Bluetooth and cast the phone's screen on to my 65" 4K TCL TV.
Pretty sick for a 73 year old great-grandfather living in Tennessee.
Ricky is my new boss at Crockett Shoals Tubing and I grabbed this shot today to put on the website. I hope he likes it as much as I love my new gig. It's a good physical job getting people in and out of the water, handling the heavy tailgate of the tube trailer, combined with the pleasure of driving fun people along the back roads of downtown Lawrenceburg, TN.
I started my new job today. It was a great opening day, at least fifty happy tubers throughout the day enjoyed a stress free two hour cruise down Shoal Creek with driving services from the top to the bottom provided by me. I've had a lot of different driving jobs over the many years and this one is sweet, and unique.
OMG, OldManJim bought a phone. Sheesh, what next, eat a steak? It all started when I casually searched online for the best Android phone and the Samsung S20+ kept hitting the top spot. I'm a Spectrum customer and they offer an unlimited plan for $45 so I called them and talked to a sweety from South Carolina named Jasmine. (hope I got her name right because I gave her my website link :-)
I was going to pick up an unlocked model from Amazon but she talked me into the Spectrum monthly bundle and my new S20+ 5G black should arrive in a few days. Why now after years without a phone? I'm starting a new job tomorrow that pretty much requires one and the extra money coming in will pay for the phone. Now excuse me while I run to the store and buy that steak. (ok, maybe not...)
I really like my new mobile template and it would be perfect for any web presence. It has a one page structure which means as you scroll to the end, you have viewed the site. The menu below the header image drops you right down to it's content and a scroll button appears on the lower right to take you right back to top.
It's responsive in that if viewed on a computer, laptop, or tablet it will make use of the space and float the aside content to the right as a second column, while a phone will simply present everything sequentially.
This is a holy grail for me as I've been lazy in the past and not supported mobile as I should. Alright, slap me upside the face and we can move on now.
Here's my New App. Drop by and check it out if you like.
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