I was up in time to pack some things and get 'em to FedEx and the post office.
Last night among other things I rounded up a lot of transformers, pretty big ones, about 20 of them, and put them out for the scavengers after taking them off of Ebay. Surprise surprise they were still there when I got up, so even the scavengers didn't want them. Lazy bums are lazy?
Probably because yesterday didn't really feel like a Monday, with my going downtown and depositing a pay check etc.
Yesterday I'd been working on reasons to go out, then found out the water was off. I thought maybe Ken hadn't paid the bill, but once I was all ready to go and getting the bike out, I went next door and asked the guys and their water was out too. They were probably puzzled that I was happy to hear it wasn't just me.
I went out, then, and bought a few gallons of water and some cilantro, and on the way back picked up tons of these little flat boxes from the computer repair place.
I got involved doing things, had dinner, and around midnight, as I was re-arranging things, decided it was a good idea to go back to the computer repair place and pickup the last of the little boxes and did so. It was good to get out of the heat.
I ended up staying up, taking a thing apart and rounding up small things and packing them and finding things that go into large combined orders, and stayed up until 8AM. This was actually kind of good, because that's when I got a knock on the door. It was repairmen asking about a repair request for the A/C.
I said I don't use A/C and for that matter, the guys on each side, they don't bother with it either. But as we puzzled over this, I mentioned the name of the place directly behind me, and it turns out they had the initials of the company on the repair order and didn't know the full name. When I mentioned the full name they realized it might just be them. So I was helpful, after all.
They run big machines and might use A/C but I'm guessing it was a matter of the spinny things on the roof not working because when the wind's been crazy here I've not heard them spinning, and they probably make a real difference. I saw that the repairmen had gone up onto the roof with a big ladder and went to bed.
And before beddy-bye, the water had come back on and I started a load of laundry.
That's what matters, that I got another practice in last night. I also photo'd but did not list 30 things last night like I should have. But at least I photo'd them.
The heat is annoying but hey it's summer.
In the practice I started to go into the next page, further than I had before in the Rubank book. The thing is, as nearly as I can figure, is (a) I need to put in the hours because that's how endurance is developed. And (b) there's a sort of bad habit of tensing up too much. This can come from (a) not enough hours so muscles get fatigued, and also a sort of bad habit to be trained out. What beats it all is consistency, practicing regularly every day.
The thing is, I honestly don't know from week to week when this job, this situation I have, is going to fall apart. Ken doesn't even know, because he thinks, like any Boomer, that he can keep re-financing and setting up this or that thinly disguised reverse mortgage, never reading the find print, and everything will be OK.
Interestingly, it was another quiet night last night, as there was a cop car stationed again at the entrance to the other building where the illegal night club operates, and it was really, really, quiet. It was nice in that respect.
I got a good practice in last night, and interestingly, the police stationed a car at the entrance to the other building from about 1AM to 4AM, long enough to make it nonprofitable for the illegal night club to operate, so it was a nice quiet night.
I was even able to play a high C which I hadn't done yet with this cornet and its conical mouthpiece.
I decided I had reasons, just barely enough, to justify riding downtown. I dropped off trash, dropped off donations, used up the mix of bird seed I'd made of millet, chia, roasted sesame, and flax seeds by sprinkling it on a large bare/weedy area by the freeway bridge where I heard a lot of small bird chirping.
I went to the Amazon place and found two or three bubble mailers, that's all. I rode down to Walmart and got a bottle of instant coffee and a package of notebook paper and a rather nice wooden ruler to use in photos because the orange one I recently got shows up closer to red in photos and really steals the show.
The ruler was 97c or so, and yet when I got home and peeled the sticker off, it had an RFID thing in it, so I guess Walmart can bust a kid for stealing a ruler. There's also a video camera in that area and a screen which I played with for a bit, watching the little green outline stay on my face however I moved my hands and arms around haha.
So I got done at Walmart for only about $14 and almost all of that was the coffee.
I went over to Whole Foods and only bought a bag of buckwheat flour. I love buckwheat noodles, called soba, but 100% buckwheat ones are very expensive. I'm thinking I might try making crepes, which I can spread my nutritional yeast + butter + olive oil mixture on. In the interest of this, I bought a frying pan yesterday which cost me almost $20, and that was the best deal in town, I know, because I checked the prices at Ross and Homegoods before buying the pan in H Mart.
The yeast is a pain in the rear to eat on its own. It's great spread on bread or something, but I'd rather not add a lot of bread to my diet. I can buy these really flat Indian/Asian tortilla things, as well as just buying flour tortillas, but I'd rather try to be a bit more healthy. Hence the buckwheat flour.
So here I was, going to Whole Foods and just buying one staple thing. No extras, no bottle of coffee or snack from the hot bar or anything. That's how the economy is now and I hope they're getting used to it.
Since I can't post links on here, I can only describe what I was just reading on r/hawaii on Reddit.
People are talking about who moved from Hawaii to the mainland for cheaper living. Right away I started laughing internally because in my experience the mainland is more expensive than Hawaii, by quite a bit.
But they're talking about having engineering jobs and such jobs, jobs that take special connections to get and a quarter-million or more for the education to get started. Jobs that apparently it's against the order of the Universe for me to get, no matter how smart and hard-working and I know; I tried.
So horray for them, I guess.
In my experience, if you're making the same $5 or $10 an hour in Hawaii or on the mainland, your $5 or $10 an hour will go almost twice as far in Hawaii. This is because in Hawaii you can live like a local, which means no A/C because no real local ever needs it or misses it, maybe in a 2nd or 3rd floor walk-up with an extra charge for parking but who cares because no one in their right mind would have a car, given how expensive they are.
So for one instance one commenter talks about topping out at $77k for his engineering job and the same job starts at $90k on the mainland but is generally $125k, well, great for him.
The most I've made, with my own Ebay thing going, was a gross around $70k. Taxable income was about half that. So the most I've made is $35k, which is just a bit more than minimum wage pays here in California. But then there are California expenses, 2X Hawaii expenses, for everything.
And my Social Security, about $1400 a month I think, or $16k, will be the same here or back in Hawaii. I'd be a fool not to go where expenses are 1/2 or at most 2/3rds what they are here. Plus it being easier to get around, this area being arranged where everything is 30 miles from everything else.
What's funny about Social Security is, I'm allowed to make a bit more per year than I do now, about $20.6k, before they "claw back" some of the monthly payment. And even then, if my understanding is correct, the money "clawed back" is kept for me and added to my payment at age 70.
I actually practiced last night. I need to get back in shape to get out there busking regularly.
I finished a load of laundry and hung it up, did my Mop & Glo routine in the bathroom and on the plastic chair shield thing under my desk, vacuumed, had the place all spiffy, and right on time, Ken showed up. This is becoming the exception to the rule.
He'd brought a hamburger for me because Real Americans must eat at least one hamburger or... they turn ghey or something. Ken had one too and fries, and his blood sugar alarm kept going off because his blood sugar was high. He told me he's forgotten to bring insulin so he'll just have to deal with it.
We talked a bit and then I raised the subject of a pay check. This started a big search through his car and he was sure he didn't have his check book, and I said, "Let me get my flashlight and be a second set of eyes" and started searching myself when, miraculously, he found it.
So I got my check, but dated for Monday. So I guess if I'm lucky, each week I'll get the pay from the week before.
I asked again if he'd gotten involved with Bitcoin or "crypto" of any type because it's halved in value over the last 6 months and would fit in well with the money problems we've been having. He said that no, it was more a matter of timing. He throws money at problems, on credit. So he's paying a loan on his new furnace and on some other things.
I asked about this reverse mortgage thing he's getting into, and he said it's an HEI, and mentioned the name of the company again but they're so dodgy I don't remember the name now, only that it's an "HEI" and totally, totally, not a reverse mortgage. No, this is better because it can be traded on the open market ... wtf? Anyway he's waiting for an appraiser to come around and put a value on his house and that's why it's been taking so long.
He said the main reason to get into this is to pay off high-interest things like credit cards. and I said that might be one of the very few "use cases" for something like this. Ken, myself, and a friend of ours have all gone through this, where credit cards at say 6%, went up to around 36%.
I talked about how, when I lost everything in the crash of 2008, I was sure I'd have to do a bankruptcy, but I hit the books and learned that a bankruptcy only makes sense when one has an asset they want to protect, like a house. In my case it made more sense to just drop off the grid for a while. Ken can't do this, of course.
However Ken pulls his fat out of the fire, the effects should last a year or so and that's all I need. Of course I made more noises about the eminent sensibility of waiting until I'm at my "full retirement age" of 67 to retire, which means a little over 3 more years.
I packed 10 things and took them to the post office, went up to Dai Thanh Market for a few things, then to 99 Ranch then H Mart, then on my way back found a bunch of neat stuff behind the gym, like 4-5 different kinds of seeds (millet, flax, etc.) to make a bird seed mix for the birds, and 4 kinds of instant dashi, 2 kinds of katsuobushi, and ryukakusan for if I get a cold plus some health food store cold tablets, probably homeopathic but who knows may they'll work. Plus a few things I decided to toss or donate, plus I left behind a lot of things I didn't want like tons of toothpaste and medicines, flour, dried figs, things like that. Instant dashi is great for soup, better than salt.
