My Body's Medium Rare

...But My Application's Well Done


Well, after spending most of the weekend's daylight hours roasting myself beside the swimming pool drinking white wine, smoking cheep cigars, and generally doing anything else I could come up with to avoid actually working, it looks like I'll be making it down to the Building inspectors office later this morning.

In addition to my application for a building permit and three sets of drawings (eight 11" x 17" pages each,) I'll also be tendering a check for $96 for the permit and another for $25 to cover the so-called "drawing review fee" that I just found out about in re-reading the instructions.

Isn't that a neat idea...demand that people send you drawings in triplicate and then charge a "fee" to actually look at them?

Only the government can get away with this type of crap, in my opinion.

I think that I'll start my own government office called the "Junk Mail Review Authority", then get some lawyers and a couple of judges to demand that random citizens be required to send me their junk mail along with their spare change to cover my costs to read it and throw it into the trashcan for them.

If you ever got caught wearing black or white socks with sandals while on vacation down here on our little island you can count on being included on my list of customers for my services.

Any way, the skin on my face and shoulders is in that just on the verge of being burned mode where my forehead keeps the wrinkles like I'm in a constant state of surprise or am thinking very seriously about something. I don't hurt or anything, but another 30 minutes here or there spent in the sun would push me across that invisible boundary from well baked to sunburned.

Now I have to shift gears and start flogging a couple of other projects, one a paying enterprise and another a non-paying venture, before an angry mob of band parents and a couple of businessmen from South Carolina appear on my doorstep wielding clubs and torches.

I've promised myself that I'll have my California smokestack project finished by the end of the month, and since the end of the month occurs this week I guess the writing is on the wall (or in this case on the computer monitor.)

Just in case you too have been busy earning a living or taking vacation, let me remind you that our national legislative bodies and executive (otherwise known as both houses of the US Congress and the President) are quietly resurrecting their "immigration reform bill" and will probably have something passed through at least one group of overpaid irresponsible elected morons later this week.

Using the same logic, I just wish that I could have broken into Switzerland in 1980 when I was 21 and gotten away with hanging out my own shingle as an engineer and ski instructor...without having to show a passport or visa or any other form of personal documentation.

Then instead of landing in jail on immigration charges or being deported back to Alabama, I would of had a bunch of limp wristed panty waisted liberals run around waiving their arms over their heads and pleading my case that I NEEDED to be allowed to remain in Europe because of the shortage of mountains, deep powder snow, and of blond headed blue eyed babes named Olga found wandering around in parkas and tight ski pants in the flatland forests of the southeastern United States.

No, that wouldn't happen then and it won't be happening any time in the near future...not until there is substantial quantities of frozen precipitation occurring in Hades.