I’m glad I don’t have a boss to report to, except Miss Terry, because yesterday I didn’t accomplish one darn thing. That’s right, I was a total slacker. A waste of skin. Just taking up space on old planet Earth.
I had a whole bunch of e-mails to deal with in the morning and it took me almost two hours to sort through them and reply to those that needed a response.
As happens this time every year, and again in the spring, I had four or five different people wanting to know why they haven’t received the November–December issue of the Gypsy Journal. When I wrote back to ask them if they had started their winter travels to their Snowbird roosts every one of them had, and every one of them had also failed to give us their new address. The post office will not forward Standard Rate mail and if you don’t give us your new address your paper won’t reach you. Then we have to send you out a second paper at the First Class rate. We try to accommodate our subscribers, but we have had to drop a couple who won’t pay for the upgrade to First Class and expect us to eat the cost twice a year, spring and fall, when they hit the road and don’t give us their new address. One person replied, “Who has time for that crap? Just send the paper.” Really? You expect us to keep track of your travels and somehow just know where you will be at any given time? Half the time I don’t even know where we are, let alone where somebody else is.
About the time I finished up with the e-mail, Greg White called to check in, and I picked his brain about some computer technology for a book idea that came to me the other day. I wish I could write as fast as I come up with book ideas!
A little after noon, our friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Museum in Elkhart, Indiana stopped by to visit. We spent a couple of hours swapping lies, talking about RVing, fishing, and boats. Al is the only friend of mine who thinks I should have a boat, mostly because he wants to use it when he’s down here in Florida. What a guy!
After Al left, we ran into The Villages to make a bank deposit and mail out some orders that came in over the weekend. Then we drove a few miles more to Leesburg to stop at a couple of stores looking for the syrup for our Soda Club machine. We were looking for the cream soda flavor but nobody had any.
Several people had suggested we try the Speckled Butterbean, a restaurant in Wildwood, so we stopped to check it out on our way home. It is a country style buffet – think comfort food like fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. It was okay, but it seemed like almost everything I was interested in had onions in it, which I’m very allergic to. The fried chicken was good, but I think if we are going to go to a buffet we will go back to Golden Corral, which cost about the same amount and has many more choices for me.
By the time we got home it was 8 PM, and I spent the rest of the evening watching TV and goofing around on the Internet. I’ll tell you what, if somebody was paying me what I’m worth, I would be in the hole!
Thought For The Day – Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Sounds like a great day! I need to work on having more of those kind of days…
I am glad we have a digital only subscription, I have been trying to get my magazine subscriptions to go digital for many years now and slowly everyone is offering that option … now I just have to find an endless bandwidth solution so I don’t find myself with a week left on our service month all of the time. Of course it has to work in those remote places no one but Verizon seems to cover as well, LOL!
I’m not sure if you are aware of this or not yet but the newest square in the Villages has just opened.. It is called Brownwood and is just West of Hwy 301 on US 42…. Less then a mile on your left… You can’t miss the entrance….Not a lot of things open yet but the movie theater in the big barn is worth walking into even if you don’t want to see a movie… The authentic Western theme is fun to see.
Sorry about that Nick, I hadn’t realized how much the Speckled Butterbean used onions.
Ming Court on International Drive in Orlando is the best Chinese food I have ever eaten, just in case you venture into that part of the country. We used to own a business outside Ft Myers and would go to the Orange County convention center for trade shows and always ate at Ming Court.
We have just purchased a 27ft travel trailer, a Hill Country 13 and a F250 Ford Diesel truck to pull it and plan to start full-timing again on June 1st. I will make sure to switch to a digital subscription before we leave.
Oh my gosh Nick. Now you sound like the rest of us retirees, I always feel guilty when I watch the pace you and Terry go. I have really enjoyed your Keys stories.