Happy Birthday Calzone!

Happy Birthday Cal! Much enjoying your hillbilly thread. Keep up the fun. All the best to you, and Maggie.
 
Happy Birthday, Cal!

Your Pro Reverb story is pure gold. I'm happy to hear it landed in the hands of someone who can genuinely appreciate it. Enjoy!
 
CMur12 said:
Happy Birthday, Cal!

(Let me know if you would like some help with your Spanish. :p)

- Murray
Click to expand...

Murry,

In my past I was married to a Latina. We fought all the time. The relationship was very one sided, and when we fought it was in Spanish.

At one point when traveling through Central America locals would ask me where I was from because I had no Gringo accent.

I also could read a newspaper. Like in my posts Spanish speaking natives said that I had a very different and distinct way of using language.

So decades have passed and my Spanish is so-so rusty that it is like learning the language all over again.

In Peekskill, a city, they have a sizable immigrant population, and a command of Spanish will be very useful.

One of my retirement goals is to get literate and fluent again.

So you should know that "Maggie" and I live in sin basically because I want to avoid the marriage penalty and pay higher taxes.

My friends say that by common law we are married because we have been together for over 20 years. Because of my reputation of being a bad boy I happen to like living in sin. It annoys people, LOL, and that also is something I am well known for.

For a glimp of what our life is about visit WWW.AccidentalIcon.com. Maggie's Instagram is #IconAccidental.

So don't tell anyone, but "Maggie" is my imaginary girlfriend. It is a persona that I created that is part Martha Stewart's older sister who is mucho OCD and Lyn (her real name) my gal.

So it all started where I started to call her Maggie, and then it got to a point where when I called her Lyn she found it odd and strange. How annoying is that? LOL.

Calvin-August the annoying Hill-Billy.

I like this tag. Kinda like "WeeGee The Famous."
 
If and when your divorce proceedings come to discussions about a 'package', make sure you have all the paperwork ready. You'll learn that it's a negotiation and proper preparation will provide you with extra income. Cheers, OtL
 
dof said:
Happy Birthday, Cal!

Your Pro Reverb story is pure gold. I'm happy to hear it landed in the hands of someone who can genuinely appreciate it. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

DOF,

I picked up the amp, walked about 50 feet to the corner, and hailed a cab. $15.00 later I was home.

Of course "Maggie" does not appreciate any of my treasures. "You have too much stuff," she says.

I have strange luck, perhaps because I wander around walking so much. I found a brand new Targus computer knapsack that was bought at an Apple Store. How do I know this? It still had the Apple Store tags on it. My forensics suggest that perhaps there was a snatch and grab commited on the 6 train of some clueless hipster and they ditched the knapsack to get away with the computer.

This is where being a street photographer and having an eye helps out.

I found a Les Paul case, made in Canada, but with an Epiphone logo, I found vintage Leica tripod that I found on Broadway near the old Leica Gallery (sadly now closed). I found a Manfrotto light stand sitting on the curb that was a rental that someone left behind, likely when loading a cab or car service.

I almost stepped on and crushed a Contax T3 that I found by my loft, when I lived on the Southside of Williamsburg. The hipsters that lived on the conquered Northside walked their dogs on the feral Southside and never picked up. In otherwords the Southside was booby trapped and dangerous to walk around in many ways.

At the last minute my reflex kicked in because the black case gave me the first impression that it was another dog turd.

I ended up selling the T3. The shutter delay made it impossible for me to get my shot. Also I could not dumb down all the features enough to make it just like an old manual film camera.

Anyways you can't make all this stuff up.

Finding our Baby-Victorian also was lucky. The house has not only good bones, but also retains mucho original detail. Most/many of the over 100 year old houses in my neighborhood have been gut renovated destroying all the original detail and retro features.

The market is so tight that I could likely flip my house "as-is" and make $40K-$50K. How crazy is that?

So somehow I have remarkable luck, but at this point I kinda know and believe it is "divine intervention" because I should be dead many times.

Boy was I an angry and crazy kid. People were afraid of me. LOL. My friends voted that I was the person most likely for their head to explode.

I invented a term called "You Suck Factor," that kinda goes unsaid when many people are green with envy.

Snarky Joe from the NYC Meet-Up though crushes me at the Annual Camera Beauty Contests that we normally have in January-February.

He seems to target me with cameras that are rare, pristine, original that somehow are the deals of a lifetime. He really annoys me, LOL, and that is pretty hard to do.

"You Suck Joe." Why do I love him?

Cal
 
jszokoli said:
So Cal, sounds like your age is counting backwards...

Best of luck with the house. Will you still visit us in the city when things are back to 'normal'??

Joe
Click to expand...

Joe,

Of course. I have my reputation to uphold. You know, annoy people.

Oddly Covid led to buying this Baby-Victorian which was a timely lucky find.

I deduce that the big changes that account for the sudden increase in longevity are just two main factors: not living in a polluted city; and my version of the Covid-15 (weight loss due to the change to a more plant based diet). No joke is that I'm a skinny bitch, and truely I have the build of a muscular 15 year old.

Because I'm a lazy-slacker and because of Covid my hair is past my belly button and nearing my skinny waste. 5'-10" and perhaps 137 pounds. A 30 inch waist Paul Smith jeans that use to be tight fits low on my hips ghetto style and is baggy.

Of course now I have the bad-attitude of a short-timer. If I get furloughed perhaps they are doing me a favor now that my pension is frozen and I can't gain years of service on my pension.

Suddenly I find that the only reason why I am still working is for medical insurance. I have a high deductible medical plan and a Health Spending Account (HSA). When I'm 64 I'll have enough tax differed funds available to build a medical coverage "bridge" till MediCare kicks in.

At my hospital I will get the basic Medicare Part "B" paid for for the rest of my life as a benefit. This is a good deal.

So you can expect close to 5 more decades of me annoying you. LOL.

In the end the Baby-Victorian with just under 1500 square feet of living space is an ideal size for me. Some of the restrictions of space likely will prevent me from going too crazy like say, "Crazy Dan." I want to be, or will have to be more like "Devil Christian" and be mighty clever.

Calvin-August the Feral uncivilized Hill-Billy (AKA: skinny bitch)
 
50 more years!?!?
Oh my!

Kudos to you for wanting the historical details of your house. I have always wanted a cool old house that wouldn't be a total money pit. They do exist. Ad it came to be, my wife won and we have a late 60s ranch in a very desirable neighborhood. Can't complain, but I can still dream.
 
valdas said:
Any genealogical links to Dorian Gray? :)
Click to expand...

V,

My dad was an illiterate E-legal immigrant who jumped ship in New York Harbor in the late twenties. At this time the Chinese exclusion laws of 1885 were still in effect. We were poor and he had a brutal hard life, but he lived till 94.

He was stubborn, and if he wanted to live to 100 he could have. His quality of life was bad, but this taught me a powerful lesson that to enjoy a great quality of life one must enjoy good health.

I do what I can. Much of what I can control is diet and exercise.

"Maggie" still gets stuff delivered to our old address in East Harlem about 2.5 miles away. Don't tell my boss, but I took an extended lunch to retrieve the Fed-Ex parcel.

At my old luxury building yesterday we got sent an e-mail from our "Cyberdoorman" and was informed a package was waiting for us in the locked package room.

So its been over a month since we moved out and I no longer have the FOB to gain entrance to the building or package room, but I go anyways figuring somehow I will get in.

Oddly whenever I do this somehow it all works out. So 5 extra miles of walking today. That's on top of a 2.1 mile walk to Metro North, and then another 2.5 mile walk from Grand Central Terminal to my lab on the Upper Eastside.

I still have to walk back to Grand Central and then home from the Peekskill train station.

So today broken up I will have walked over half a Marathon.

Kinda funny when I was 49 that one of my coworkers at a Friday meeting offered me his bib so I could run the New York Marathon in his place. He had overtrained and was too ill to race, also know that he was a pretty elite marathoner.

So basically I had only one full day to get ready. To get a bib is a big commitment of time. You have to participate in all these events to qualify, so you kinda waste half a year's worth of weekends to get a bib.

So you know I'm a lazy-slacker, and I was "just minding my own business," when I get an opportunity of a lifetime. At that time you could buy someone's bib on EBAY for $800.00.

So "Maggie" was worried that I would follow in the footsteps of the original Marathoner who ran 26.2 miles to deliver a message and then expired and died.

Realize that just in the week prior some Champion in Central Park was qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Team as a Marathon runner dropped at mile 7 and died. "Don't tell Maggie."

So Maggie made me promise I would not race, but on the Statin Island Ferry this stoner offered me some hash brownies and informed me that if I finished under 5 hours that my name would be printed in a special section of the New York Times.

They issue an RFID that is secured to one of your running shoes. Maggie downloaded the app so she could track me, and it did not take long for her to figure out, "That FXXX'er is racing," from the readout on her Blackberry.

On South 2d Street and Bedford Avenue I knew she would be present as a spectator, I ran out of the crowd, kissed her on the cheek, and said, I gotta go," before she could yell at me or smack me.

So I made a painful mistake and stopped for 7 minutes to pee at a Porta-Potty. This allowed lactic acid to spike at Greenpoint the halfway point. The second half was all about threshold of pain.

So I beat the 5 hour mark by 26 seconds. In Central Park I was kinda hallucinating, because I saw this sign that said "4 miles to the finish" a few times.

I cursed and kept on running. The next day I could not walk, and I called into work to request a sick day. My old boss, a jerk, wanted to charge me a vacation day, so I argued if I called and mentioned that my head ached I would get a sick day, the only difference is that my legs hurt. Jerk.

So I have this photo that was made into a trophy like plaque that has my coworker's East Indian unpronoucable name that is comprised of 26 or 27 letters of the alphabet. I'm wearing a bike jersey that is 3/4 zip with my chest exposed looking mighty good, but perhaps I only know the suffering that I was experiencing.

One of the reasons why I was able to perform this feat was earlier in life I was a bicycle racer (both mountain and road), and because of this I had a "great base" and knew how I could push my body.

BTW "Maggie" was mighty annoyed with me. LOL.

I recently bought an 2015 Audi A4 that only has 16K miles on it. Effectively it is a new car even though it is 6 years old. I could drive to the Metro North Station, but I would rather not abuse my car.

Somehow I found a car that was owned by Joe rich guy that was parked in a garage at his beach house in the Hamptons for little money.

Scot Nicole, the President of IBIS cycles, and former NORBA Trials Champian says that basically I "ran a Marathon off the couch."

Calvin-August
 
This “hard and brutal life” is often a key to longevity. Due to two things you mentioned - diet (not by choice, often by necessity) and exercise (hard physical work which is cardio training). This, combined with good genes is a secret of longevity. I guess Cuba is a good example. But we also need to add one more important factor - happiness (or at least the lack of constant stress). Because the stress is the killer.
It looks you have it all right.
 
Belated happy birthday Cal!


Glad you could get the house going. Now it'll be fun to set it up and look forward to that retirement.
 
valdas said:
This “hard and brutal life” is often a key to longevity. Due to two things you mentioned - diet (not by choice, often by necessity) and exercise (hard physical work which is cardio training). This, combined with good genes is a secret of longevity. I guess Cuba is a good example. But the we also need to add one important factor - happiness (or at least lack of constant stress). Because the stress is the killer.
It looks you have it all right.
Click to expand...

V,

You make a great points.

Early in life my life was brutal, but the difference between me and my dad is that for me as time went on life eventually became easier.

Sadly only about 1/3rd of Americans have enough resources to retire.

The only thing I can say from experience is that poverty is like a nonstop punishment.

Right now I have no stress and in fact I am a lazy slacker who can work hard. I believe I can do impressive things, but this is only to satisfy myself.

My gal is a celeb and famous. They still run the GoDaddy commercial and she still gets royalty checks, but I would not want to wish fame on anyone. You loose a lot of freedom and as an artist freedom means a lot.

I have a small body which is one of the keys that accounts for a lot.

Calvin-August
 
Only just noticed this thread. Know this, (as someone on RFF is given to saying), your positivity is always a powerful tonic. That’s on top of your photographic and communication genius. Hope you had a great birthday.
 
Calzone said:
Murry,

In my past I was married to a Latina. We fought all the time. The relationship was very one sided, and when we fought it was in Spanish.

At one point when traveling through Central America locals would ask me where I was from because I had no Gringo accent.

I also could read a newspaper. Like in my posts Spanish speaking natives said that I had a very different and distinct way of using language.

So decades have passed and my Spanish is so-so rusty that it is like learning the language all over again.

In Peekskill, a city, they have a sizable immigrant population, and a command of Spanish will be very useful.

One of my retirement goals is to get literate and fluent again.

So you should know that "Maggie" and I live in sin basically because I want to avoid the marriage penalty and pay higher taxes.

My friends say that by common law we are married because we have been together for over 20 years. Because of my reputation of being a bad boy I happen to like living in sin. It annoys people, LOL, and that also is something I am well known for.

For a glimp of what our life is about visit WWW.AccidentalIcon.com. Maggie's Instagram is #IconAccidental.

So don't tell anyone, but "Maggie" is my imaginary girlfriend. It is a persona that I created that is part Martha Stewart's older sister who is mucho OCD and Lyn (her real name) my gal.

So it all started where I started to call her Maggie, and then it got to a point where when I called her Lyn she found it odd and strange. How annoying is that? LOL.

Calvin-August the annoying Hill-Billy.

I like this tag. Kinda like "WeeGee The Famous."
Click to expand...


Cal, I was going by your tongue-in-cheek Spanglish. I'm pleased to know you once had such good command of the language and that you should be able to recover it fairly easily. Do carry on!

- Murray
 
Congrats from Thailand as well :)

5487809476_e79013c36c_c.jpg


photo taken 10 years ago when I visit NYC and had opportunity to join RFF meet.
 
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