73 Ham Radio

 I slept pretty late yesterday, and got up around 3 in the afternoon. Maybe a bit later like 4? I had mocha coffee etc. and loaded up the horn and tip box and headed out around 5. That means, by the 2-hour rule, I'd be in Sunnyvale at 7... 

I dropped off trash, picked up some bubble mailers, and rode over to Whole Foods. Petition Guy was there and I asked him if he was staying until closing and he said, "Probably". I said I'm heading off to Sunnyvale and should be back with plenty of time to talk. "What's going on in Sunnyvale?" he asked. I said, "Money!" 

I walked over to the train station and sure enough had just missed one train, so I had to wait around for a half-hour for the next one. At the platform, I was standing around and this Black guy came up and got in my face but in a friendly way, asking if my hair, Yeah it's short, but is it naturally that color, grey? I said yeah that's the natural color and it's grey because I'm 63. And I pointed out the grey hairs in his beard and he said Yeah he's 35 and I did something like say Well there you have it, and walked away. I'm pretty sure the guy was going to bug me for money, needed it for a ticket, blah blah yadda yadda. 

Funny thing about that; I'd tapped my Clipper card at the kiosk in the passageway, and as I took the card away it beeped and said to tap again, then I dunno, had me tap it a 3rd time and it said "TRAVEL OK" and had put all the balance back onto the card. So if they checked, on the train, that was gonna be my story but I rode for free. (And could have on the way back as no one checked tickets.) 

I got to Sunnyvale and walked over to the Whole Foods there and started playing, and sure enough, it was just a couple minutes before 7. 

So I played along, and there's plenty to work on, not only pieces but how well I"m articulating notes (needs work) evenness of tones (needs work) strong consistent air flow, good vibrato (needs work) and of course learning pieces which is probably the easiest part because I just play 'em in my head and then see if I can play 'em on the horn. 

There were a *lot* of people going in and out and some time before I got a tip, but then I got a $20 from a young boy who's walked past with his family, and then tips dribbled in, lots of $1's and a couple of $5's. 

At one point a Black lady obviously homeless, mentally ill, or por que no los dos, came along, dancing with her dirty blanket around here and making odd sounds. Yeah, that's all I need. So in the course of playing the piece I was playing, I played a couple of the higher notes very loudly and pointed at her, and she kind of gradually danced/wandered away. 

Pretty soon I'd been playing about an hour and a quarter and working out how to play "Experimental Film" by They Might Be Giants, and thought, Whew, it's about time to be outta here. At the very end of my planned hour and a half session, a lady came by and dropped in a $10. A nice way to end the day. 

I packed up and counted up. $73. There used to be a magazine called "73 Ham Radio" haha. There was also CQ, there's still QST, there was Radio-Electronics, Popular Electronics, The Monitoring Times, etc. 

That final $10 was really ratty and I wanted to spend it right away so I went into that Whole Foods and they didn't have pint bottles of Guinness, and I didn't want to spend $6+ on a Pliney because  I wanted a snack and a drink for $10 or less so I got a tall can of Lagunitas and two little packages of sliced salami for $8.50 and got rid of that $10. 

Now it was a quarter to nine and there's a train at 8:59 so I walked over to the station and got on it and pretty soon I was back at my home Whole Foods and it was a quarter after nine. And Petition Guy had packed up and left. It had cooled down and obviously he'd gotten cold and called it a day. 

I sat at a table and had my salami and beer, then rode for home. But I ended up on 1st street and decided I wanted more beer and something greasy to eat at the 7-11 which I'd not been in for ages. 

The place is still run by Indian guys who have to deal with a lot of guff. I wanted the 5 or so chicken wings they had in the hot case and one of what looked like a sausage muffin. The guy kept saying the chicken wings are no good, the muffin and the pizza slices are. I said it's find that the wings are dried out, I like to *chew* on them, so the guy got the wings out and a muffin, and I said "Wait a minute," and got a 6-pack of Lagunitas in bottles. So the guy said he's just charging me for the beer, the wings and muffin are free. They were playing Indian music and I said I liked their music and tried to explain how I like the intermediate tones that Western music doesn't have. He said it's Punjabi music, because of course they're Sikhs. 

I rode home with my goodies and once back here, had my yes, tough and dry, wings and the sausage muffin which I added Kewpie mayo to and was pretty good, and drank 5 of the beers and ended up going to bed at 1AM. So I slept through whatever antics the illegal night club was up to. 

I woke up at 10, after having some pretty entertaining dreams. In one, I was using white paint to try to make a white T-shirt out of a black one. In another part, Ken (I think?) was with me and had found that this old derelict electronics store was actually open, run by an old derelict guy, and I was getting my bike ready to go on over to check it out. 

I counted my money and I've got $72 on hand right now. 

 

One to sing and one to honk

 Ahh, life in an industrial area ... the illegal night club had a bangin' night again and I made my reports ... cops finally called me back around 5AM when the nightclub was closing down. The 911 op did suggest calling Zoning, though, and that's a good idea. It would be funny, but not surprising, if it was a zoning violation that got the building seized. 

So the cops never came around, no need to by the time someone was free, and that was OK except for one ho hanging onto the side of a car with the potential "john" inside, noisily negotiating something. Maybe whether a blow job is an actual job? In any case, I got the horn out and my Wick mouthpiece which is markedly louder than the Yamaha mouthpiece that came with the horn. 

A few scales, with gusto, seemed to send them off. Ruins the mood I guess. 

Then a bit later (I'd done some cleaning of the cornet, valves and 3rd slide and so on and had it all back together) and about 6 lowlifes in a work truck with one of those cabs with seats in the back, came around for some trashy romance time. The lucky(?) guys had found a couple-few of the fattest, ugliest, ho's of the night and were doing .... things ... while crammed into this truck. Then hanging out, talking, etc. So I got the horn out and the Wick again, and worked on my "Die Fahne Hoch", a fine old song. Ruined the mood again and they were off. 

The Wick 4B is a very popular mouthpiece for "brass banding" as the Brits term it, and I learned to appreciate it a bit more. Not only its loudness, but I don't sacrifice as much range as I thought I'd be. So I'm really happy that I have the Yamaha mouthpiece that came with the horn, with a couple tiny dents, a brand-new identical one, and the Wick. 

 

Amazon Jews Again

 I got going early enough to take the bus over to Mountain View to busk, and I'm giving up on the place. Castro Street being pedestrian-only except for cross streets is great, but there are more buskers there than the area can support, they all have amplification, and as I've already mentioned, people in Mountain View are broke. 

The buskers are all probably local, as in it's a short walk to Castro Street, and if they make $10 after hours of doing whatever they do, it's food money. 

I played for 20 minutes and got no tips, not even any apparent notice, and wisely gave up. I got on the train to Sunnyvale and walked down to their Whole Foods and played by the doorway that leads to the parking area. This went well. I was able to play for 45 minutes or so, before I had to get back to the train station. I made $34, and a supposed $50 supposed Amazon supposed gift card, supposedly worth that much money. The poor well-meaning Indian guy with a small kid who gave it to me sure got ripped off. And I'd expect to be ripped off, my bank information stolen, perhaps my bank account cleaned out, if I attempted to use it online. 

I called it a pretty good day, though, and went to the train station. There was a confused Black couple first talking about whether to buy beef, chicken, or beef *and* chicken, and it was amusing me and I was going to tell them about the time I went to Black Bear Diner with a friend who was buying, and it was so noisy that my request for "steak and shrimp" got interpreted as "steak and ribs" and I had to eat this huge meal... but they were confused about which side the Northbound train was on, and I told them it was on the other side and that it's easy; just think of it like cars, the right lane is always going the way you're facing etc. 

I got back to my "home" Whole Foods and got a bunch of things amounting to a bit over the $50 on the gift card, and it turns out an Amazon gift card can't be spent at Whole Foods, which Amazon owns. I'm scared to death to use it online so I'm going to have to see how I can sell the thing for any sort of real money. Maybe a pawn shop or "We Buy Gift Cards" place in an especially skeezy part of town. 

So I paid real, actual, money for the stuff I'd picked out, loaded the stuff on the bike, and checked again with customer service and yep, you can't use it in a real store for real things. 

In the end I have to consider it A Nice Gesture(tm) by the Indian guy, who obviously didn't know any better, and why a Whole Foods employee would sell him a card that can't be used there is a Jewish mystery, as in the poor goyim working there probably instructed to "Always push those Amazon cards!"

So the kind, well-meaning young Indian dad got Jewed, and I'll get maybe $20 for the card if I sell it to Ken so I guess I'm getting Jewed too, but between the guy giving me the card, he can't be faulted for falling for the one of the parasites' scams. 

This is the first, and hopefully the last, time I get given a gift card, and all in all the day worked out well because Sunnyvale was hopping. Murphy Street looked promising, and if there had been someone else at the parking structure doorway, it looked like I'd have done fine at the front, by the movie theater, entrance. $34 for 45 minutes isn't bad at all. 

What I need to do is try out different Whole Foods stores, and have 3-4 of them picked out that are good. I know the one on Hamilton is awful, and the Los Altos one is actually worse.  The Sunnyvale one is actually really nice, and by trying out others, I should end up with a set of them I can rotate them. 

And yet, upon being back here and checking, there are not that many Whole Foods stores in this area. The only one with perhaps some promise is the one out near De Anza college and it's very much a "maybe" because it's in the middle of its big parking lot and so I can't set up and say I'm playing on a space that's "public". But I have Sunnyvale and The Alameda, and that's a good two, plus I haven't tried playing at H Mart or 99 Ranch by me, both of them being super-super busy on weekends.  

When I got back, Petition Guy was talking with a female bum, talking about where there are bushes along the Guadalupe River and where there used to be, and so on.  His own personal living situation is hellish enough that the young zombess would be wise to stick to the bushes. 

So I didn't get to regale him with an account of my "day". I rode home, and, remembering I'd seen it on the way out, grabbed a box of "Ritter Sport Joghurt" bars, about 48 of them, threw the box on top of the bike seat, and walked it in. So yeah over $200 worth of the things if one is counting. And they taste pretty good too. The nearby "Natural Foods" place that's really low-key, as in no signage or anything, randomly puts out things like that. 

RIP CBS.

 CBS, home of Walter Cronkite and 60 Minutes and well, a century of journalism and news, is now dead. It got the small-hat treatment. As someone said on Reddit, "truth might leak out over those airwaves". 

I was up early enough to pack a few more things, and get out of here to check a place called "Interstate" for spray paint stencils. They had one they'd made and the customer apparently never picked up, for the super deal of $50+ I said I'd check around. 

I rode the rest of the loop around and came across another place, "AWP" which had a nice stencil for $25 or $30, and somehow that and a can of parking lot white striping paint, the kind of can you hold upside down, came to about $34. Sold. 

I got back here and took the things I had packed to the post office, made a stop at H Mart for hamburger and more sour little bottles of Guinness (it's actually great with plenty if ice, just don't let anyone from Ireland see this). It's hot as hell out there. 

I made another stop at Lowe's for masking tape. 

Once I got back here I started up a cup of Guinness and plenty of ice, about 1/3 of the volume ice, and masked off the lines in the parking lot right in front of here, and between two lines, the cement stopper in front of the door, and two "NO PARKINGs" courtesy of the stencil, the one can of spray paint was done. But that's OK, apparently the paint's cheap and I can get another can next week and it's good enough for now. 

I'd been telling myself I'd go and get stencils and do this for a while now, but that last run in with that Karen was enough. 

I stayed in after painting and tried to think cool thoughts, then left here around 7 I guess. I stopped at Nijiya for coffee pour over things and some cash back so I'd have cash on hand no matter what. And picked up some bubble mailers at the Amazon place. Then I went right over to Whole Foods to busk. 

Petition Guy was there, and I started right in just a few minutes before 8. It went pretty well. I played lots of different songs, and a lot of the tips came with glowing compliments. Petition Guy was getting signatures too. I had plenty of time to talk with him, and he feels we don't interfere with each other at all. I don't think so either. I think it helps both of us for people to see us talking, obviously friends. 

I was done at 9:20 and had made $42. There wasn't time to sit and relax with some food, so I just bought an 8-pack of tall Guinnesss cans, which were at a very good price, and hung out a bit with Petition Guy before leaving for home. 

I pooped along, riding home, enjoying the peacefulness and quiet of the little neighborhoods. It's amazing that there are so many of these little houses that people grew up in, like Ken did, in the same house all along, and whether it's a rich neighborhood in Menlo Park or a not-so-rich neighborhood south of 280 in San Jose here, it's home to someone. 

Our neighborhood of Portlock Road wasn't so snooty, I never thought, as a kid there. Sure it seems about half the people with houses on the beach has a swimming pool too, and one lady had an indoor pool with a little island in it. And there were the Kaisers, as in Henry J. Kaiser and Kaiser Cement, they were up at the end of the road. One of the "Kaiser Kids" had a pale yellow Corvette which I loved to see, as it seemed like such a "cool" color in that generally hot, sunny neighborhood. 

But there was also Mike Noise, who lived with his mother and an incredibly dirty sheep dog, and often this or that man around, but none really identified to us as Mike's father. Mike could draw on his sheets, Peanuts sheets with Snoopy and Charlie Brown and the gang, who with Mikes help with a pen, were all uttering the most filthy and naughty things, which I loved and envied and are why I bugged my mom to buy me sheets like that, although I never had the guts to "improve" them the way Mike had. 

The other Mike was Mike Hertz, as in Hertz Rent-A-Car.  They were not poor and no doodled-on sheets there. In fact Mike Hertz had more toys than I'd seen anywhere. And there was Miss Wilder, the Wilders being one of the old, powerful families in Hawaii. Kind of like the Biddles of New England. She has a Steinway grand piano in her living room and would not teach me how to play it. I'm still miffed about that. But she took me to places like a symphony concert and the newspaper office where she was greeted like royalty and there one of the guys made a little lead "slug" with my name on it. I didn't like my name so I didn't keep it for very many years, but this is the kind of personage Miss Wilder was. 

So Portlock Road was a strange place, with single moms and elderly spinsters who probably never thought about things so vulgar as money and children of single parents who were probably who I learned to properly spell "fuck" from, and kids who'd throw rocks at you, and all kinds of characters I wish I could catch up with now. I guess this is what I think of in the back of my mind when I ride through these quiet little neighborhoods. 

I got back here and saw that the overspray from my insufficient masking off of my painting is a problem, and tried "Goof Off" and a tooth brush on some of it and that seems to work. 

About the busking, I'm having the high notes come out well, and I not only love my unreasonably expensive cornet, but I'm kind of glad it's stuck me with traditional cornet type mouthpieces, since it takes "short shank" ones and the only ones of that type are all deep cup types. The sound is very sensitive to mouth cavity shape, which I don't remember being more than a very slight thing with the 7C/3C type mouthpieces. 

And I'm effectively kept from just going out and buying another student trumpet to busk with because the cornet seems to really go over well with the public, and because if I'm flying to Hawaii in a year and a half, I need to sell off all I can, slim down, not buy more instruments. 

 

Morning after the almost like a day off

 Well, I managed to finish off a six pack of those sour little Guinness bottles, and at something like 3AM I felt like I needed something fatty and protein-y, so I cooked up one of my 4 oz. servings of hamburger I had in the freezer and ate that, drank one last small bottle of Guinness I had here, and went to bed. I slept OK, and woke up a bit after 3 in the afternoon. 

Some Karen type parked her SUV in front of the door here and sat, running the engine so I tried to run her off, and all in all it wasn't a great scene. Fat Karen pointed out that it's not marked "No Parking" and I said just wait, I'll have it marked. It is a very valid point. 

I packed things, took 'em to the post office, found packing stuff, the usual routine, and came in with the bike and trailer laden with stuff. I saw the cops were talking to the people to one side of this place but on the other side. So, being nosy, I wanted an excuse to just happen to pass by and see what's up. 

It didn't cool down today like it did last night, so I decided I'd go to Walmart and that would get me out in the breeze for a while. As I passed by, the cops were gone. Maybe they'd followed someone in from the main road, or there was some car they were looking for, who knows. 

I went to Nijiya just 10 minutes or so before closing, and got a can of cold coffee and a couple of boiled eggs, which were only there because they'd fallen down between that display and the next one (quail eggs), the place was really shopped out. I sat out front, in the heat, and ate my eggs and washed them down with some coffee. 

I went by the Amazon place and found 6 bubble mailers, so that's rather good. And went down to Walmart and first thing, put my heavy jar of pennies through the Coinstar. That got me $6.90. I got the things I was after, and some cheesy made in Canada potato chips which I had with the rest of the cold coffee. 

Then I rode over to Whole Foods but they had some streets closed down so I rode over to Almaden and then over to Whole Foods. Skinny Petition Guy was there, and I talked a bit, then went in and got a pint of Guinness and some "healthy" pork rinds (bleh) and at at the bar upstairs because the upstairs was practically empty. The guy I sat next to seemed to recognize me and asked me to hit him with some rock and roll trivia so I told him "Surfin' USA" was actually written by Chuck Berry and a couple of other snippets. That seemed to please him pretty well. He didn't want any pork rinds though. 

We talked about the Sharks losing again, and on the TV they were calling it a losing streak and I said it can't be called a losing streak until it's 3 games so it's only become one, now. The bartender was hustling around, closing things up, and I guzzled the Guinness and went back downstairs. 

The bike racks were hardly visible, being buried in a huge crowd of intermediate school students, who were now done with their field trip, to see a Sharks game. Skinny Guy and I talked a bit, and he rambled on about being given all these stocks by his family that he sold to buy new movie cameras and stuff, and I talked about how when I was 18 my father told me I had to be out, and I joined the Army and when it was time to go to the airport, both my father and my older sister had told me they'd take me, and when the time came they were not to be found, and I took a cab there, which I only had money for because I'd been working at the local gas station. 

I rode home by my twisty way, along Montgomery to a zig-zag through the quiet neighborhood by Bellermine, through a tiny part of Bellermine, then on Hedding, over the hill the train tracks are underneath, and on home. 

I got back here and found some useful plastic bags in the welding place's trash and put in some metallic bags I never use, and basically did some re-arranging of the parking lot junk, keeping a couple of useful things like a brass ball valve and a broom. 

A bit later I gave myself a haircut and put the wrapped up clippings in the welding place's trash too. It's nice getting a cut for essentially $0 since Ken pays the electric bill around here, whenever I like. 

 

Almost like a day off

 Last night I was preparing to get the place all cleaned and ready for Ken to come over, and he called around 9. He had a cold or something, with aches and pains and wasn't coming by. We agreed he should just come by next week, and get better; no need to come by this week as we can catch up next week. 

So it felt almost like a vacation. I got 20 things ready to list, easy as I'd taken two large things apart last night. 

 

92F out there

 I woke up at 3:30 in the afternoon and it was 92F out there. 

Practice before bed went surprisingly well. Regular practice plus busking should get me further along. It's just that the day job has to take first precedent right now. As I've told people, it's $57 a day I can count on, and a safe place to live. 

It had cooled down to 91F when I'd packed what I had time to pack, and got out of here. First a dropoff to FedEx, then the post office. Whew it's warm! Dropped off the post office stuff and went over to 99 Ranch for TP, and a bag of "double choc" Loecker "Quadratrini wafers. Those are dark chocolate filling and dark chocolate wafers, and well, seem to stop me up a bit. 

I'm having my breakfast mocha and 2 oz. of quadratini and 2 oz. more of quadratini later in the evening. I'm not sure it's the answer; the answer is probably eating broccoli every day. But it works better than not eating it, and I have a budget of $3-$4 a day for intestinal help, since I've been spending that on Yakult and kim chee, to no avail. 

I'm not saying quadratini are super healthy, but the double choc ones are less sweet, and the stuff's made in Austria, my first choice of source for quadratrini and painters who become politicians.