Santa Barbara, Really Didn’t Need My Help

Now I’m not saying it was a wasted trip, quite the opposite, this was one of my better command decisions. When we first got out on the pier, we stopped and talked with a carpenter replacing planks. I never put a tape on them, I would say they were 4×10s douglas fir at about 20 feet. Looking at the deck of the pier, you could see, over the years, many different ways or fastening down the deck had been used, that the challenge was in getting the old planks out. We told this guy we were carpenters from LA, that work was bad, that we were checking out what Santa Barbara had going on. This guy was working from a big stack of timbers, looked like he planned being there a while, he had a laborer helping him roll the timbers in place. Not a bad job, out on the pier, maybe a little too much sun at times, from what I saw, a couple men could spend a lifetime keeping up with this pier. It got a little unfriendly, when Buck and I, told this guy, we wanted his job, he told us we should go back to LA as planned, that he knew what he had going, that he’d fight to keep it. We all laughed a little longer, it was interesting work, like any remodel, its not straight forward, in the end, if you can notice someones tracks, a sign of someone having done work on it, its a pretty poor job. There were some elevation issues I was curious of, on one end of the timbers, there was about a 1 1/2 – 2 inch difference, in matching the level of the existing deck. He told us he had a special chain saw technique, that we wouldn’t be able to watch, that we would have to leave, that he spent enough time with us, that he had better get some work done. One thing we noticed in Santa Barbara, is a lot of men come wandering out of the bushes, looking totally disoriented, we saw this over and over, throughout the day. A lot of what appear to be homelessness, some wandering people, some just quietly sit. Now I don’t know what goes on in those bushes, no one else in town payed much notice to it, I commented on it, to a woman at the station, while waiting on my southbound train, she accepted this, as a norm in her world. All in all, I would say the homeless in this town, are a pretty smart bunch, they seem to be welcomed in the community, I saw no trouble, none of the forced interaction, that you might find in Venice, everybody got along. If there was a choice for me to make, forced upon me, by some circumstance occurring in my life, where I become homeless, I would go to the beach. Any how, the point is, I feel better now, I have a plan, I haven’t worked in 10 months, this could happen. I could, if I didn’t have the $25 train fare, peddle up to Santa Barbara, you always need a backup plan. I have seen on the news, film of homeless camps, springing up in towns and cities across the country, these are my people, we’re the same, but for the grace of god, there I go. Now my only issue will be working out how to keep my Blackberry going, speaking of Blackberry, this is a shout out to Danny at Blackberry Support. Something strange happened with my Blackberry, friends were the first to let me know of the problem, I went to the Sprint Store on Sunset for help. I don’t know why it is, that when things go wrong for me, they go wrong, in a unique and interesting way, the guy at the Sprint Store was baffled. This is where Danny comes in, the Sprint Store guy handed off to Blackberry Support, Dan is the man, it took him better than a day, to chase this one down. He didn’t know why this occurred. He just fixed it. He told me it had been a challenge. He seemed satisfied with his work, proud. These are the kind of things that feed most of our souls, to create the shade that others can benefit by.