So The Front blew through

leaving the sky overcast, a fair north wind blowing, and temps twenty-some degrees cooler than yesterday, which was unseasonably hot.  I took advantage of the better-weather-for-working-in-the-yard and went out to pick up more pecans, and got about two gallons’ worth of mixed Mahans and San Sabas from the front yard.  Harvesting in the front is a lot slower than doing the back, because to get the San Sabas, I not only have to rake, I have to crawl on my hands and knees to flush out the ones buried in the grass, a talent at which San Sabas are remarkably adept because of their li’l-dinky size.  After a couple of hours, it began to rain and thunder so I gave up, declaring success at raking a bunch of the front yard and pitching into the street lots and lots of unripe nuts that the trees dropped early, so passing cars can smash them to atoms and hurry up their biodegradation.  (Not to mention that getting those rotten nuts that never ripened in the first place out of the yard and into the street keeps me from wasting so much time picking them up again and again.  Pecan trees will do that if they get heat or water stressed; they abort part of the crop down to whatever the tree can support.)

I haven’t tried to sort out the Burketts and Comanches yet, because I’ve only got a couple of gallons of them gathered so far, but I did separate the others and now have a grocery sack full of Mahans, and another a third full of San Sabas—probably ten pounds of the former and three of the latter, which is OK going for now.  It isn’t up to two years ago, when I harvested 170 pounds, but the season’s not over yet, either.

(Edit:  Better’n I thought—I have fifteen pounds of Mahans, twelve of San Sabas, and six of mixed Burketts and Comanches.)

The infernal state employment commission is taking its own time getting my new unemployment claim processed.  Because I worked for the Federal government this year and last, the unemployment insurance people have NO idea how much I earned.  You see, the Feds don’t have to report employees’ earned income to the states so they don’t, leaving everyone in the dark.  To make TWC happy, I had to fax in an affidavit swearing to the amounts I earned in each of the last six quarters, with paycheck counterfoils to back them up.  I did get a letter from them yesterday saying I qualify for $330 a week, but who knows when they’ll actually get around to writing me an unemployment check?  This has got all my creditors in a doodah, particularly Citibank.  They are the peskiest people to deal with, and can’t ever seem to bother to check their own records to find out someone else in Collections already spoke with me, so I get calls two or three days running about the same balance.  I snarl at ’em about failing to read their own notes, and whoever-it-is-THIS-time belatedly finds the notes from the day(s) before and apologizes, but next month it’s the same story.  The sooner I can be rid of them the better, I say.  Of course, getting rid of them means I’ll have to cancel my Conoco card, which is annoying because Conoco has some of the least expensive gas in town, but the aggravation isn’t worth it.

But in the meantime . . . I picked up another editing job for Holt, Rinehart, collating and cross-checking page references for workbooks that go with a reader (the same series I wrote for last year, although not the same grade levels, so I won’t see any of my own work).  I gotta hurry up with getting it done because the money I get paid on that job will, I expect, be whatever I have to buy a motorcycle so I can commute to work in Round Rock (twenty miles away).  And I must have other transportation; I can’t be taking the car to work weird hours and leave everyone else stranded.

KAUS 262253Z 35004KT 10SM BKN110 OVC130 13/09 A3017 RMK AO2 RAE02 SLP217 P0000 T01280094

Conditions at 16:53 CST:

Temperature 55° F. (13° C.), dew point 48° F. (9° C.), humidity 67%, wind 350° at 5 mph (7 Kmph) , barometer 30.17” (1022 hPa)→, sky overcast, visibility 10 miles and falling.

A long-lost uncle was commanded by Little Audrey for the nuclear dragon.  Fnord.