Interesting Situations

This gallery in Clearwater, Florida, gets in touch with me, who knows how they got my name, and they want me to re-hang some paintings in a nursing home; they had a contract through god knows whom, to hang a bunch of art. Six pieces, if I understand this missive correctly, are hung incorrectly, and someone on the design team wants the situation rectified. So they wonder what I would charge them to re-hang the paintings. If they had to send a crew, flying in, renting a car, renting a room, meals, it would cost a fortune, but I'm local, and my name popped up. They can't not know the situation they find themselves in, how over the barrel. I don't need or want to re-hang their paintings, but I'm the number they call. So what would you charge? A moral issue. I agree to go look at the situation, my contact person is Erin, and I imagine her ankles. She sounds hot, sultry, southern, a taste of coastal North Carolina, slightly salty. Still, I'm the one that would have to re-hang the paintings, and I'm here, Tommy on the spot. (That's a reach, but you realize that.) Katy put her foot in the door. I'm not trying to be difficult, it just comes naturally, where do you draw the line? What is the line, technically, and when do you cross it? The truck is definitely not well and even D says to get rid of it while it still runs. So we went to a car lot he passes on the way to work to look at a Jeep Liberty, 2002, for 6 thousand. A nice vehicle, clean, dark blue, I'll drive it Monday and look at everything D told me to check. I need a dependable vehicle, one less thing to be paranoid about. Put up panels and painted pedestals, left work half-an-hour early and drove slowly home. Everything is budding, especially along the river, and things could get ugly if we have another hard freeze (by all rights we should), especially with the fruit trees. The oaks are fine, they have back-up buds, and the walnuts don't leaf-out until the end of May no matter what. Even up here, on the driveway, the blackberries are budded; and the floating egg casings from the bullfrog orgy are in plain sight. The sugars in that embryonic sack will protect the unborn tadpoles to a certain extent, but if the puddles freeze solid, everything dies. No salamanders yet, which I view as an ominous portent. Because the winter has been so mild, I have plenty of firewood, and I have designs on starting to drop small trees near the house for next year, managing my tree-farm. After the frogs are gone, I want to drain the puddles, a 25 foot ditch is all it would take, and fill the depressions with rubble. I need to be able to drive up to the house, this hiking-in shit is getting old. I'm nearly out of water, because this time of year I'm usually melting snow for drinking water. I have a ramp of exterior plywood, 16 feet long and 18 inches wide, that I harvest snow from, I use a designated dust pan for this, the only other people I know who harvest drinking water this way use dust-pans. Is that weird or not? The Chinese frog legs finally hit the remaindered bin, and I bought a bunch. I do love frog legs. I usually just cook them in butter with garlic, sometimes I add mushrooms or cranberries, but usually just salt and pepper and maybe one other thing, whatever catches my eye.