Practice and a bit of study

 Yesterday's whole afternoon was spent finding the things for, packing, and processing something like 15 refunds for (because it has to be done in little slices), ONE order. It was relief putting that ONE box on the bike trailer and taking off for FedEx with it. 

I then ate a beef on rice thing from H Mart, sans most of the rice of course, and rode up to 99 Ranch for a couple of things, and studied a bit at the Baguette. 

It's not the best study environment but beats none, as when I got back I got all involved finding more things, as I still had 20-odd to ship. I finally gave up on packing anything last night and did a practice session which was a good one. I learned there's a little key, between the middle and ring finger on the right hand, that changes B to Bb or is it the other way around? In any case, it's clumsy to do it otherwise, which is why that little key is a thing. Cool. 

And at least before I got more tired, I had a good vibrato. There are three kinds of vibrato; breath vibrato, jaw vibrato, and hand vibrato. At least in trumpet, breath vibrato was very much discourages. "Makes you sound like a bleating goat" was the opinion. I believe flute uses breath vibrato as the other two are impractical. On trumpet, "hand" vibrato simply involves using the hand to "vibrate" the trumpet against the lips. 

I never cared for hand vibrato, even though no less than Louis Armstrong and Maurice Andre' used it. And in old clips of classic jazz/swing bands, you can look down the row of trumpeters and see about half of them are using it. 

The other half are using jaw vibrato and that was my method. Why use my hand to shove the trumpet against my face in any form, when I'm trying to use less mouthpiece pressure, the enemy of good relaxed trumpet playing? And for better or worse, it's my go-to on clarinet. 

Since my goal is not the lofty one of becoming a classical clarinet player, I'm not going to worry about it. It's nice to see that even as a beginner I'm on the way to a sound the public will like. 

 

i drank a Guinness

 Yesterday I left here around 3:30 in the afternoon. I went to Nijiya and bought a can of coffee, since the bottles of coffee at Whole Foods are like 2X as much. Then I checked the little free library on 3rd and this loaf of home-made bread and a handful of candy canes were still there, so I took 'em. 

I got over to St. James Park and stopped where there were some geese, and got the bread out. Canada geese love bread, it turns out. So it was fun tossing pieces of bread to them. I parked the bike at the post office and mailed the packages I had, and left the candy canes on top of the trash can there, where some bum will be glad to find them no doubt. 

Then I went to the bank and deposited my pay check and my number and the bank's agreed to the penny I could tell, because this week it was a really easy to memorize number. 

Then I went to Whole Foods and got some chicken and onions and cabbage, and here's where the bad decision came in. I decided, since I'd been craving the flavor, and it's been such cold weather, to get a pint bottle of Guinness. I drank it all too because why waste? 

It *was* fairly good, but out the window went my plan to go to the big Goodwill on San Carlos, and it was all I could do to swing by the Amazon place for some bubble mailers and get back here. 

I got 25 things ready to photo and watched things on YouTube and went to bed at midnight. 

 

Up to "The Little Fish"

 I have one huge order, like 28 things, to pack and ship for one guy, but yesterday I packed all the other things and that was a dozen or so, maybe more. It was a decent load. Since I've spent my "allowance" I didn't buy anything anywhere. 

I might owe my life to a leaf, though. I was leaving the post office parking lot, to cut across Oakland Road. It was dark, traffic was stopped at the light  up on the corner so I was clear to go but wanted to make haste to make sure. I heard something run over a crunchy leaf to my right, and that alerted me that something/someone was coming on the bike lane coming the wrong way so I swerved just in time to let a guy on an e-bike, lights off, come by and he was hauling ass too. People have been killed in collisions with regular bikes, much less these heavy battery-powered monsters that are more like small motorcycles. If the leaf hadn't been there I don't know if I'd have sensed the thing coming, or sensed it in time. 

I picked up some bubble wrap and a couple of boxes, and stopped at Tom's to catch up on things because I haven't for a couple weeks. I told him about the leaf incident, and he nagged me again about not wearing a helmet. A don't think a helmet would have protected me from a side hit, and there's a reason "side impact air bags" were such a big thing in cars because the human body is a bit more vulnerable from that direction. I'll just have to watch out more carefully, especially because that guy might be a regular commuter alone that route and I'm pretty regular coming out of there at that time. 

I got back here and futzed around here doing I don't know what, and got a good amount of practice in. I swear I've not practiced for a week! I went through the book up to the page with "The Little Fish", which is as far as I went before I apparently took a week off. Things are sounding more smooth, I'm making less mistakes, and come to think of it I didn't make one inadvertent squeak. 

I need to practice every day, because I want to get out there busking ASAP. For the money? Not necessarily, because the money's taking care of itself although more money is always handy. For instance, the French class I'm taking cost me $435. That's the class, the books, and a year's membership in Alliance Francaise. That's a month's busking anyway.

The main thing is busking provides some very good practice, and with the clarinet I should be free of the rather restrictive limitations I had on trumpet. I need to come up with a list of 10 songs that I really want to busk with, such as "Summertime" and "My Favorite Things" and even good old "Autumn Leaves". 

 

Alphabet Francaise

 Haha I'm so happy with myself that I seem to have the French pronunciations down pat, of the alphabet. I need to learn numbers, too, and repeat them daily like I'm doing with the alphabet. 

I also need to study ahead; we've done Unit 0 and next Monday night will be Unit 1, and I need to study up on that so in class I won't be going in "cold". 

One thing I love about this French business is, at different levels you can take tests, so you're certified for level A2 or B1 or whatever. Apparently getting to B2 makes a big difference in things since this seems to be what people strive for. 

I'm really hoping I can get to the point where I'm able to read books and watch movies/TV in French, because then I should be off and running. Along with being signed up for the present lesson I'm also a member of Alliance Francaise for a year, and they have a big library of books. I can hardly wait to at least try out Ferdinand The Bull, Babar, and such things. Then French translations of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway stories would be neat to be able to read. Then on to things like Jules Verne in the original. 

My friends back in Hawaii are useless. Sure, the guy in Honolulu, the guy with two houses and a condo and all that, is into Qanon nonsense and thinks Mango Mussolini hung the sun and the moon, but now I'm getting crazy stuff from the guy on the Big Island. If you ask him he'd say he's a "liberal" and he doesn't know how truly he's speaking because he really *is* one, it appears.

As in, he's a vegetarian and very self-righteous about it, yet keeps a few cats to kill native birds and to feed the same amount of meat a person would eat, or even a bit more. And said meat shipped in from 1000s of miles away. And he *must* have a car, and he *must* have the gov't pay for him to fly back and forth to Oahu for doctor's visits for his mystery illness that keeps him from working. And his girlfriend can't work either.... 

In other words, he's a textbook example of every haole hippy Hawaii was cursed with in the 70s. I grew up seeing these losers up close. I grew up a hungry kid but by Hippy God hippies never went hungry, and if you were a kid and went without, well it was your fault for being smaller and weaker. 

A hero of mine, cartoonist Robert Crumb, hated the hippies. Crumb came from actual working-class poverty, his father a hard-boiled WWII vet. He worked his way up, and lived super cheap and deprived himself to save up money (I think he put money into stocks) to not be dependent on any system. That's the key to live. Save your money, live modestly, even radically modestly. Crumb started in with a big greeting-card company and in a role that traditionally one was locked in for one's entire career. But not Crumb! He started an in-house comic strip and got himself noticed and got going. 

I'm certain the biggest mental block I have against doing art is it takes "stuff" and I resent any way of making a living that requires more living space than a pup tent. But Crumb had the good judgement to stick to pen and ink which takes the least amount of "stuff". I prefer music because it takes the least "stuff" of all as long as one sticks to a small, non-amplified instrument. But pen-and-ink is close. And Crumb's a huge music lover with a vast collection of blues records. And he escaped the US to France. My hero! 

Yesterday I checked the hours of the Nichi Bei store in Japantown and they were supposed to close at 4:30. I packed one thing that had to go out, and got the bunch of Japanese language books I had, and took them over there to donate to them, along with a huge, thick, cartoon biography of Osamu Tezuka which I figured I'd never get around to reading; I've only started on it. Well, they were not open, and I got there a bit before 4. 

So I took the books over to the Little Free Library and put them in there, keeping the Tezuka one. Maybe I *will* get around to reading it. And, the Little Free Library had a copy of "In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts" by Gabor Mate' so I took that one. 

Then I went to Walmart to get some things. I had $7 cash and $9 or so in quarters, and left with my things and $2 in quarters. I'm back to following the plan of putting each pay check into the bank and taking out half. 

I got back here and listed the 25 things I had lined up and photographed, cleaned the place up, and Ken came by and I got my pay check and we talked for a while as usual. When he left it was half after midnight. 

 

There are transcripts

 Last night along with getting 25 things camera-ready for listing on Ebay, I dug into what I'll call the smartphone problem. 

In the French book we're using in the class, Edito A1 + the Cahier de Activites, or workbook, you'll supposed to have a smart phone in your hand at all times, and not only use the QR code on each page, but actually "take a photo" of each page, the access that page's audio files. 

I can see why they do this; it's to make sure people have bought the actual books. The "photo" of each page probably has to be in color, so you'd have to have a color printout of each page .... cheaper to buy the books! 

This is all well and fine, since most people have a smart phone welded to one hand already. But I'm a holdout, and I looked around quite a bit for the 2nd edition audio files to no avail. But then I remembered something I'd noticed when I first got the books which is that there's a written transcript of each audio file, page by page, in the back of the book. 

It's like having a math book with all the answers in the back. But of course in math the correct answer is almost coincidental, it's all about learning to apply the correct process. Likewise, the answers are all written out for me but since there's audio to learn the sound and pronunciation of French, this means I'll be doing things a bit differently. 

Instead of just listening, I'll be first choosing the right answer (hopefully) and then referring to the transcript and reading it in my mind or even out loud, in the proper French accent/pronunciation. In a way, I'll learn those bits better than a student who just listens and guesses the right answer and moves on. 

Plus there's a ton of material on YouTube, not on Edito 2nd Edition of course, but tons of stuff on each but on learning French. Plus tons of helpful stuff on avoiding "studentisms" like stop saying "je m'appelle" so damn much.  "Je suis" is better most of the time, apparently. 

 

RIP Erich Von Daniken

 Well, it's a sad day, as beloved writer of utter horseshit Erich Von Daniken has left us. His books were complete nonsense, but they were *interesting* nonsense, and were very popular when I was a teen. 

Oh yeah and the Dilbert guy died. Anyway, I took some powdered Parmesan cheese and combined that with butter to make a sort of spread, and had that on crackers for dinner last night. It was surprisingly good. 

 

First class session

 I was up at 8:30 in the morning which is about right, since I went to bed "around" 1AM. 

I packed things to ship, and let here at about a quarter to 3. Lasts night I'd bought a couple of shirts and a new pair of sweat pants at Ross,  and everything fit OK. So I was layered up nicely for the cold. I dropped off the packages at the downtown post office, and rode over to Diridon Station, which has been re-done with new paint on a bunch of things and new "graphics" on the shelters etc. That's kind of nice. 

I got down there with plenty of time to spare, and rode around the shopping center the class is in, and found the bike rack which is good because with some of these shopping centers, they don't like bikes parked randomly around. 

I used up some time looking through my books, sitting on a planter in front of the Purple Onion, and will have to try to remember to bring some nuts for the little birds there next time.

When it was class time we students gradually filtered in. It's 8 students, 4 gals and 4 guys. And it's quite a mix, a regular United Nations. I've got a Russian or Ukrainian, not sure which yet, guy named Vladimir on my right, a guy from the island of Dominica to my left whose brother lives in Switzerland, and there's an Indian guy on the other side of him. The gals are a mix too. 

Our teacher is a wonderful Irani lady, and the class went well. We learned some very basic things and the French pronunciation of the alphabet. The funniest one is "y", which is called something like igrik, pronounced ee-greek, or the ee sound as used by the Greeks, at least that's what we were told. 

The only possible hitch is that the book and workbook are set up assuming you have a smart phone in your hand and that's how you access the audio files, which it looks like we're going to use a lot. You scan a QR code for each page. I'll have to see if I can use my laptop. 

When class was done it was good and cold out, but I was OK due to my dressing for it. The light rail on the way back had plenty of bums, but no one acting crazy so that was good. I rode it up to Karina Station so I just had the short ride back here. That station's had a make-over too and interestingly the trash cans have been changed to a type with transparent sides and look pretty easy to get into too. I think the idea is that if the trash pickers can see exactly what's in there, they can see if it's worth it at all to dig in a particular can, and if they do dig, they can go right to the stuff they want, and make less of a mess.