Wednesday morning began well: good exercise, stretching; a bunch of small chores, some solutions to some home tasks, a wonderful Maureen breakfast. Through it all, i listened to an LP.

i have resumed listening to LPs, delaying again my six-month old project to turn them all to digital, courtesy of the new magic turntable i got in October.

But today was special. i picked out Judy Collins #3 album. i forget how much i loved to listen to Judy Collins during transits between Korea and Vietnam in 1970. She and Nina Simone are two of my favorite all-time singers. Thinking about it, i sort of came up with Judy and Nina putting social injustice in the limelight. Somehow, Judy’s songs resonated with me more than Joan Baez.

i wondered if my two daughters have listened to Ms Collins. Blythe, when staying with me went through most, if not all of my record albums, but i don’t know if Judy caught her attention. i’m not sure if Sarah listened to any of my four Judy Collins’ albums.

On this album, Judy sings my favorite version of “Deportee,” written by Woodie Guthrie and also sung by Joan Baez and Willy Nelson. i also prefer Judy’s version of Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” better than Pete’s or the much better known version from the Byrds.

And then in 1979, her rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” was always included in “Baby’s” repertoire in the Subic Officer’s Club (Subic Bay, Philippines Naval Base) dining room evening show. “Baby” was a large Filipino with an incredible voice. She could cover almost any singer’s great songs. But the show stopper was “Send in the Clowns.” Stephen Sondheim wrote the song for his musical “A Little Night Music.” Sinatra and Collins took it to huge popularity. Judy did it best, and it’s included on her “Judith” album, which i bought primarily because “Send in the Clowns” was included.

But in 1979, LCDR Mike Peck, LT Pete Toennies, LTJG OW Wright (then later Al Pavich replaced OW), and yours truly, after a couple too many of “Le Bomb Bombs (a killer drink we discovered from the bar at the Peninsula Club in Singapore), would get up from our almost nightly dinner at the O’ Club, and wait. Then when Baby would reach the point in the song when the title is sung, the four of us would prance across the dance floor in a what was likely a ghastly semblance to a line dance.

Funny how a good morning start, and an old LP can make my day.

This came from an email to me from my USS Hawkins shipmate, Norm O’Neal. As i began to read, i kept thinking about how Ray Boggs would have loved this. Ray, my father-in-law and one of my best friends ever, was a dyed in the wool through and through engineer. But there aren’t many who have had a better sense of humor, and i don’t know many people who could laugh at himself as well as Ray. i hope you either remember him while reading this or admire him if you never, unfortunately, knew him.

I apologize for the spacing, but i didn’t want to screw with the formatting and take another half-hour to post this.

Ray would understand.

i hope you don’t mind, Writer’s Almanac, for my re-posting this on my website, but although i find Joyce incredible, Beckett mesmerizes me when i read his stuff, and in this excerpt from your daily email today, i found Beckett’s thoughts (in green lettering below) personal, as though he had written those words for me.

It’s the birthday of Samuel Beckett (books by this author), born in Foxrock, Ireland, a Dublin suburb (1906). He studied French literature in college and then went to Paris, where he met James Joyce, who by that time was almost blind and working on Finnegans Wake. Beckett became his assistant. He read books to Joyce, took dictation, and walked with him around Paris. He idolized Joyce so much that he began to smoke like Joyce and walk like Joyce. He tried to write in Joyce’s meandering style, but Beckett said, “I realized that my own way was in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Beckett eventually found his own voice and wrote many novels and plays, including his most famous, Waiting for Godot (1952). In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He wrote, “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Beckett wrote, “My mistakes are my life.”

And, “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

And, “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

He also said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

There’s this incredible little corner of the city and the world in the Southwest corner.

India Street winds from downtown San Diego where it is the hub of what was the Italian fishing community and is now old Italian and haute cuisine eateries alongside new high rise condos. India Street parallels Interstate 5 north pass the airport until it dead ends into Washington Street.

i can feel the city history’s on this journey, even wondering what it was like when Richard Henry Dana traveled a similar route in 1732-34 (San Diego was a major part of Dana’s great book, Two Years Before the Mast). But i travel to the little corner at the end of India Street because i like to eat good food.

Perhaps our favorite dining in San Diego is at the Wine Vault and Bistro, an upstairs wonder in atmosphere and incredible pre fixe paired wine menus. The food, the wine, and the atmosphere just can’t be beat in our estimation. El Indio is one of the best known border Mexican restaurants. Many of the diners order and then take their meal across the street to a concrete picnic area.

Next to the Wine Vault is Shakespeare’s, a no-kidding English pub. Great British fare and i’ve never had anything but Guinness draught there, not even a “black and tan” (Guinness and Harp for the Irish version, Guinness and Bass Ale as the one i know best).

Close by is Saffron. Maureen claims it is the best Thai restaurant in San Diego, and i can’t argue with that. On the corner is Gelato Vero Caffe, which offers possibly the best gelato in the world.

Turning toward the bay on Washington and passing under the interstate is 57 Degrees. It’s a wine and beer tasting place with incredible appetizers, with an expansive array of wines from all over the world, over 100 bottled beers, and all twenty-eight San Diego craft breweries on tap.

Before the drive gets to all of this eating stuff, the roadside businesses hide a very informal, small, and casual place called Blue Water. For several years, we ignored it after it was established in 2006. But once Maureen just dropped in to check it out, it’s become one of our most frequented spots for fresh seafood.

We stopped for lunch today. There are all sorts of wonderful tacos, sandwiches, and full meals, but it is damn near impossible for me to not order their mussels. Today’s special was “bourbon, butter, jalapeño, and lime mussels and clams.”

Just about perfect.

About a year ago, my niece, Dr. Kate Jewell Hanson, commented to Maureen and me that her father, my younger brother Joe, was a “putterer.” i applauded her assessment, but questioned the accuracy.

From what i’ve observed, Joe’s puttering is like painting their entire house in Queechee, Vermont. It seems like every time i call him, he’s doing a major putter.

i, on the  other hand, am a piddler, not a putterer (except on the golf course where i am not a very good putterer but do it a lot more than i should, or is that a “puttee”?), i have become more of a piddler, as our mother would have said, after stopping real work when i left Pacific Tugboat Services almost two years ago. i keep coming up with all of these magnificent ideas of incredible home improvements, which quickly become a bunch of tasks that need to be done before getting to the real one…and only one or two actually getting done.

Then, of course, i go way, way off track. Example: we have been working toward reducing all of the crap we have in our makeshift garage attic, made by my father and me with some old scrap plywood and discarded closet doors. A major part of that hoard upstairs is artwork that has been replaced in the house throughout the years. i like nearly all of that. So rather than giving it away, i looked for other options.

Since the first house Maureen and i have owned, i have had an office. This was primarily because i have always wanted to be a writer, and i have a rather ridiculous amount of books. The current home office is one of my favorite places on earth.

So what do i do with the artwork. i have made a second office in my garage workspace, the third car port in our three-car garage. i have kept a lot of my father-in-law Ray Boggs’ garage workshop pieces and tools. i have my own workshop and yard tools. Now i have a desk my father made for Sarah and the wall is now covered with artwork and photos of Blythe, Sarah, and grandson Sam.

After this bit of piddling, i decided to get organized, as in eternally not getting there. My sister Martha, brother Joe, and the goofy guy gathered at Martha’s home on Signal Mountain a little over a year ago to select photos from our parents, Aunt Bettye Kate Hall, and our grandparents for a digital keepsake Martha is scanning.

Both Blythe and Sarah had requested to have their grandparents’ photos not used in the project. So what we did not put in the project Martha, Joe, and i began, i took to Austin. But there was not enough time to adequately distribute them, so i brought them back to the Southwest corner. Added to that is a rather incredible amount of paperwork saved for books not written. i realized when going through the paperwork nearly all of the Navy related documents included my SSN, which must be redacted before tossing, or shredded.

So i made the shelves, found most of the stuff in a myriad of storage places and collected them. The intent is to go through them, keep the actual photo or paper if it might mean something to daughters or other family members, record them digitally, and shred or otherwise dispose of what i don’t keep.

i figure if i continue at the current pace, this will take me about forty-seven years, nine months, and seven days, or my one hundred and twentieth birthday.

But my garage is becoming my getaway place. i have an old computer speaker system, to which i hook up my iPod, which has 4700 songs on it from my 45’s, some LPs, and CD’s. i plan to add my cassettes and the rest of the LP’s and maybe even a couple of boxes of reel-to-reel’s up in the garage attic, which will more than double the current music list. This task will take about as long as the sorting project.

For now, i put the iPod on “shuffle,” sit at my (Sarah’s) desk, look at photos of my loved ones and some cherished artwork, write some stuff, play solitaire, read, or just sit and listen to Jimmy Reed, Ella, Frank, Dvorak, Handel, Jimmy Smith, Nina, and many others.

While listening, i think life ain’t bad. There have been a bunch of hiccups, and there are still some things that need to be fixed (besides the unending list of projects). Even with the hiccups, i’ve had a pretty good life, and no, it ain’t bad. It ain’t bad.