Beware o' the blob.

If the wind is blowing from the northwest at 10 knots, I will blob today. If the wind is blowin' from the southeast at 20 knots I will not blob today. If the wind........... Aw, fer crying out loud, I will blob. Be warned. I am dreadfully low on material.

Maudeen is doing very well with her new blog. She has fabulous stories from her childhood and many current items, also.
Most of our condos in here must have a strange magnetic field in the posts that support the carports, and these fields attract auto bumpers. Bang. Thump. Whoops. You get the picture. Jennifer says that when she bumped her post a few years back, her son, Zack, told everyone he had been in a major accident, with whiplash, seatbelt rash and much emotional suffering.

Well, we lost a post last week. A very elderly lady tried to pull into our carport, thinking it belonged to our neighbor Marcie. I called Marcie's husband, Paul, and mentioned it to him. He said that she was so helpless in her old age that he would rather not mention it to her, but merely pay the damage himself. I told him that I didn't expect the LOL to pay for it and that I would take care of it. (You thought LOL meant laugh out loud when it really means Little Old Lady, huh?)

In a subsequent phone conversation, Marcie offered to pay half the damages. Let's tabulate. The redwood posts were $33. The cedar ones were about $19. I found one made of pine or fir for $6. Here is my dilemma. Do I charge Paul and Marcie $3 or do I charge $3.14 including tax. I'm getting a splitting headache dealing with this issue. Another issue is this: Should I have gotten a waterlogged fir post for $3 that might warp and ooze pine-tar for years to come, or gotten the cedar one which would have resisted beetles and warping for decades? Oh, the pain, the pain. We already had some primer and brown paint, so the paint isn't anything they should pay. Oh, I'm sure they'll bring it up.

On the day of the accident, we discovered that our screen door into the patio from the carport was sticking quite badly. It took us a full week to realize that the LOL had also bumped our fence, driving the fence one inch south, leaving us with a fence to move northward. This should be easy, unless the 38 year old fence posts have been snapped at ground level. This will not be easy to determine, considering that the posts are completely hidden behind the fence slats. Doing a ricketiness test will do no good, because the whole fence is a rickety mess already.

Maybe I could casually approach Paul and Marcie with: $3.14 for the post, $2.50 for the paint. $0.00 for the labor and $1299.99 for "possible damage" to the fence. I am sooooo clever. Wait a minute. What am I doing discounting my labor? Here's the solution to the whole problem. If the wind is blowing from the north at ten knots, I will bill them for $1500.00. If the wind is.............

And you thought I was just being silly when I said "Beware of the Blob."