Working like a menehune

 Last night, something like 11PM, I got my lazy ass out there and using Goof-Off which is really strong solvent, scrubbed the over-spray off of my parking lot painting job. Finally. 

Everything had to line up right. A time when it's not raining or too cold, when there's no one else around, and when the light's decent. So, it wasn't happening because good light = daytime, and that's when there are people around. 

So I got out this headlamp we have here, and did my work using that. Some guy was working on or in his car some distance away, and I did my thing, and we both got our tasks done. I do my best work when there's no one around. 

This is how the menehune worked back in Hawaii. If you needed a wall built (they were master stone workers) you set out a feast and the materials, and left them the hell alone. Come morning, the feast would be eaten and the wall built. 

I think it's going to be scientifically proven that the menehune were real people, and that they were the first humans in Hawaii. The waves of colonization went like this: Menehune - Marquesans - Tahitians (the Alii) - haoles ("those who have iron", Caucasians) - then everyone else, come one, come all. Right now it's a mix of whites and Asians who run the place, with Asians at least even with the whites if not ascendant. The final wave, the way world events are going, will be the Chinese owning and running things. If they bring back Yick Lung it'll be worth it. 

Yesterday, while foraging for shipping supplies, I found a pristine white "cloth" ABC Stores bag. Yep I took that buggah! And on my ride home, I saw a mango seed in the gutter. How strange to see that here on the mainland; it's a common sight in Hawaii at least on the leeward side. Ahh, Yick Lung pickled mango seed ... 

I was up last night finding two hard-to-find circuit boards to complete a big order, and taking a couple of things apart to have parts to list. So I was up until 7AM again.  I threw the scrap out front for the scavengers, and went to bed.

I woke up at 2:30. The landlord is still bugging us for the $1004.95 we owe them. I don't blame them if they're miffed. I don't get it, I'm keeping the numbers good and we're doing as well as we ever have. 

I'm tired of this grind and keep telling myself I need to just do it one more year and a third. I haven't been practicing due to worrying whether I'll have to clear out in three months. 

What'll it be like, being back home? I suppose hotel life will be nice, a good hot shower every day and all that. Money will go fast, so I'll probably get a storage unit, a small one, in case I end up "urban camping". But I'm going to try to round up a place to stay ahead of time, if I can. 

At least I have music! This is the one thing; I see this over and over on r/homeless on Reddit, that people end up homeless and they have nothing special that they do. No skills, no interests even. I think I've mentioned that it's about $400 to join the American Federation of Musicians, and after that about $160 a year I think. I'm wondering if I should join up because then upon moving to Hawaii I'd just change to the "local" that's there; from the San Francisco "local". 

At least I finally don't give a shit what my older sister, who will never let anyone not know she went to Punahou (elite prep school Obama went to), thinks. She ... is a very tiring person. She comes up with the most inane shit to say, and thinks she's smart when we says idiotic things like "We're not a democracy, we're a republic". Anyone can Google for 5 minutes and find out the truth on that, that a democracy is one type of a republic, and get a decent idea of how our governance works, but that's too much work for someone who went to Punahou and thus never need to think again. 

Her care about me follows a 1:1 pattern with how much money I have, appear to have, or looks like I might have. Thus, when I was out on my own as a young adult and very poor, I pretty much didn't exist. I only started to exist when I was taking college classes and on the electrical engineering track. Electrical engineering was considered the sure track to big money in the 80s. Her interest in me has gone up and down according to my finances, and since losing everything in the crash of '08 there's been no interest at all. 

She's lonely and needy and very tiring to be around. For more on this see r/BoomersBeingFools or r/RaisedByNarcissists haha. If I had to sit through another lunch at the Nordstrom's cafe listening to her agonize over whether to buy this or that $400 purse or ponder over how it'd go if she divorced her husband, I'd scream. She ought to be (of course she is!) proud of herself, she's the pure distilled essence of Boomer. 

It's not like we'll cross paths anyway. She hates beaches, and anything working-class. I took her to a sandwich shop that might have been a bit working-class and she was terrified. I won't run into her out picking shells, or fishing on a reef, or busking in Waikiki. 

 

Peaceful weekends?

 The gate between the halves of the parking lot, dividing our building from the problem building where the illegal night club and who knows what else is going on, remains closed. The result is a few confused pimps and ho's and the odd john, driving in, in the case of the ho's not wanting to walk around the end of the fence because mud and high heels don't go well together, and leaving. 

Plus, last night and the night before, there have been one or more police cars stationing themselves at the Rogers Avenue entrance, and on Friday night they did the standard roust 'em out routine. 

I can't think of what's changed. Persistence on my part, plus I'd started to mention that although the two buildings look alike, they're owned by two different entities. Our landlord is a good one, the other building being owned by an absentee landlord who allows all kinds of things to go on. Plus the unit on the Rogers Avenue end is hinky as hell as I've mentioned. 

So I've not had to call to complain once the gate has been closed, but the police are on top of things anyway. So they seem to be on a "clean up Rogers Avenue" regime, since a while back they'd mentioned they were cleaning out an illegal casino up the street. 

I packed a ton of things last night and got more together to pack.  

Oh yeah, and Our Most Zionist President(tm) did another one of his annoying false-flag things yesterday. Which means more of his wheedling voice on the radio. Funniest part was where they were rushing him to safety (after they'd rushed Fat Face out of there first) and he fell down because walking is hard. 

Anything to distract from the Epstein files, anything. That and the 2nd holocaust the small hats are doing with glee. 

Up until far too recently I really wondered why everyone over here, on the other side of the planet, was talking about "Israel" all the time. Finally "the penny dropped" as the Brits say. Everyone's talking about "Israel" all the time because the Zionists have an overwhelming influence on our lives. Everything from whether we have universal health care like they do (obviously we don't) to whether our fighting-age people will be sent off to die for the Zios, etc. 

Another thing that happened last night was The Squilla Incident. I'd seen frozen mantis shrimp/squilla in H Mart forever, and last night they had a package that was only about $12 (it's by weight) and decided to go for it. 

Big mistake. I tried shelling them raw, and that was a no-go. Plus there's a big dirty vein in them. So I boiled the tails and tried, again no go. There's hardly any meat in there and it's all pretty firmly attached to the shell. 

I ended up throwing them away and cooking something else for dinner. 

I think the people buying squilla are buying them for bait, or maybe some insane nostalgia thing. 

Anyway I packed this big order of a ton of circuit boards, did all the refunds, and took that and a CRT I'd packed that I felt very fortunate to have found a good box for, and took them to FedEx, went into H Mart for a few things and to use the loo, then tried the popcorn chicken at the new Ube boba and snacks place.

It was a bit of a wait to use the kiosk, then a bit of a wait for the food, but those nuggets were REALLY good. More like a meal than a snack. And who knew fresh basil is just what chicken nuggets need? I think I'll try the fried baby octopus next. 

Around back of H Mart I got today's freebee, which was 14 little packets of "Chocolate Pie" cookies, two per pack, some Year Of The Horse 2026 special grapes, and a bag of Chinese dates. I dropped off the grapes and dates at Tom's place. 

But first I went to Sprouts and got, or tried to find, my 6-pack of sour little bottles of Guinness because their price is about the best. I also wanted a 6-pack of Lagunitas in cans, which they didn't have, so I tried out "Fort Point" which is pretty good it turns out. I also talked a bit with the manager, who was stocking the beer section. 

As I headed to the checkout, I realized I had the wrong Guinness. It wasn't the original kind, it was this other newer kind. I went back and put it back, and got talking with the manager again; he's a friendly guy. I explained how the stuff I'd got is the same in the tall cans, and what I hoped to find is what I call the "sour little bottles", the original extra stout. He said he can check in back and see if he has it, "It won't be cold...." "Hey, this is British* beer we're talking about here" I said, and he went in back and came out with the right stuff. I was very thankful, and he said he felt good to make someone happy.  

(*Actually Irish beer, but the joke doesn't work that way.) 

I did my extra diligent search for packing stuff and came back with a good load of boxes and some filler. I even checked the dumpster at a new place, Jazz Imaging, and got some good stuff there and neatened their trash enclosure up a bit. 

 

3 Beers Less

 I woke up at 1:30 in the afternoon, with 3 beers left in the fridge. Now, right now my "ration" is 2 small bottles of Guinness, and a six-pack of IPA. I got away from Lagunitas "Little Sumpin'" because its alcohol content is higher. And, I allowed myself one more beer, in the afternoon, if I felt like one - that would be the beer I had at the British Bankers Club yesterday. 

But last night, after photographing 20 things and listing 10 of them, I settled in for the night and didn't feel like drinking any more beer and when I got up, saw that there were three cans of beer still in the fridge. And I felt better when I got up, too. 

If I can pare it down to three cans of IPA a day, that makes the 12-packs I've been buying at Whole Foods last much longer. Ideally I want to pare it down to the two small bottles or one pint bottle of Guinness a day because I swear the stuff makes me feel better. Supposedly it's got a lot of niacin in it and although there are niacin pills, there's the matter of bio-availability.  

A pint of Guinness a day means even if I'm in a non-drinking, non-smoking etc. place back home, I can go out busking and stop in somewhere and have a pint, and no harm no foul. 

Again it's National Weather Service 0 and NPR 1, as the National Weather Service predicted no rain, but as NPR predicted, there was rain. I packed some things that have to go by FedEx and could fit in the big plastic tub I use, and got rained on taking the stuff to FedEx, at one point taking shelter under the overhang of a business building, but got them there and then got stuff in H Mart and did an aggressive search for packing stuff and boxes on the way home. I got a good load, too. 

 

 

Farewell, Menlo Park

 I woke up around noon. I had packages all packed overnight, did some cleaning up and had black coffee and a couple of aspirin and left here around 1:30

I dropped off the packages at the post office, went to the bank and deposited my pay check, and locked the bike up at Whole Foods. Waiting for the train was perfect, in that it was about 10 minutes, no running required. 

I got over there to Menlo Park and conducted the last of my business there. This is part of the preparation for the move back to Hawaii. 

I stopped in at the good old British Bankers Club and tried the fish and chips, which were really good but the star of the show is that burger.  It was a young gal waiting on me and making drinks, and we got to talk a bit. There were guys down at the end of the (very long) bar who were apparently regulars and she and I joked a bit about this; apparently they get pretty drunk on a daily basis. Whoever ordered a martini didn't mind is being made with Beefeater, ugh. 

All in all it was nice, and I had a chance to read more in my Hilo Hattie book while waiting for trains, and think it's the best $5 I've spent in a long while. It even has the "origin story" of J. Akuhad Pupule, the radio personality who used to drive golf balls into to ocean where we kids would find them. A lot of the book is things you'd have to be local to know or care about. It's a gold mine of things to research. 

I got off the train in Sunnyvale and checked out the Goodwill there, and didn't find much. I ended up buying two T-shirts. I got on the next train back to Diridon, bought some beer and shrimp in Whole Foods, picked up bubble mailers on the ride home, and that's that. It's been windy and cold out there and tomorrow's supposed to be a bit more so. 

I've never been on Facebook, but I noticed that the quick, cheery, comments I put on Marvin Naylor's latest 4-5 posts have been removed so I won't post there any more. From reading his blog I know he gets cranky very easily, so I'll stop posting there. The poor guy's getting piddling amounts of money and he's good at playing the guitar, and has quite a collection of really neat guitars. Hopefully he's making something off of his YouTube channel. 

But this got me to, somehow, come across a "Facebook Group" called "Buskers AKA Musical Whores" no kidding it's called that, and wow. It's light years ahead of r/busking on Reddit though, because people really say how they feel. And Marvin Naylor is discussed in there. They don't say anything bad about him, because there's nothing bad to be said about him. It's just surprising to see busking discussed by anyone, anywhere, these days. 

Oh, and today's freebee: A rather nice Coleman LED "lantern" that I believe is rechargeable, may not be, I'll have to check it out, but I pressed the button and it works! Nice thing to have next time Ken's not able to pay the electric bill. 

The BBC

 British Bankers Club, of course. 

I woke up around 1, maybe 12:30 and last night had gotten 20 things together and ready to photograph and list on Ebay. I did some cleaning up and things like oiling the bike chain, and took off for Whole Foods via Hedding, so the quickest route. 

I have my pay check in hand but can't deposit it earlier than it's dated, and it's dated for tomorrow so today I was going to do something else. 

It's very windy and there's all kinds of stuff in the air so I was coughing and had a horrible fit of coughing and had to get off the bike right across from the jail, gargle a lot of Listerine, and gradually get better, then went on my way to Whole Foods.  

After a quick visit to the loo I walked over to the train station and was just in time for a train; myself and a lot of other people ran for it. So if I left here at 1:45 and that just barely worked, I'll want to leave here at 1 or a bit before, next time. 

I ended up sitting near some people who were talking, a couple of guys who are somehow involved with trains at a high level something like the whole Western end of the country, and some random guy, and when the random guy left I talked with the train guys a bit too. They hadn't heard of the Skyline on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, though. 

I walked over to the place and did my business and it went a lot better than I'd hoped it would, so as the Brits say, quid's in. 

On my walk back, I stopped in one thrift store and bought a really neat book about Hilo Hattie. Growing up in Hawaii, that had only been a name I'd seen on the side of some of the tour buses, but it turns out she was a real character. The book's not very polished, but the lady who wrote it talked to "hundreds of people" and it's got tons of information in it. Also tons of things I don't think you'd understand if you didn't grow up in Hawaii with your lifetime and Hattie's overlapping, in my case roughly 15 years. It's a treasure trove of things to look up. 

In another thrift store I got a Hawaii Volcanoes National Park T-shirt so there was a bit of a theme here I guess. 

I hadn't eaten yet, although it was late afternoon by now. I was going to go to a sandwich shop by the train station, so I walked over there, and noticed the restaurant "British Bankers Club" has a big patio and really their proper front door, not what I'd seen on the street walking by so many times, right there. I looked at the menu and the happy hour prices were right in line with those of the sandwich shop. 

So I went in there and tried the "happy burger" and their IPA which was $9 for I guess a pint. It was the best burger I've ever had, too. It's not just that I hadn't eaten yet, it's that it was really, really good. And a lot nicer than eating in the crowded sandwich shop, as the place only opens at 4 in the afternoon for the evening shift, so it was just me, sitting at the bar, and a few people who wanted to eat out on the patio, in the wind. 

The waitress/bartender (or at least beer-pourer) was from Chile and we ended up talking about all kinds of things. So that was fun too. 

I felt like I would almost fall asleep on the train ride back, but at least I had an interesting view because it was now commuter hours and I had to go to the upper deck to get a seat. Then it was just a walk back to Whole Foods, buy some beer, ride over to the Amazon place to pick up bubble mailers, and ride back here. 

It's really cold (for the time of year) and blustery out there and it's supposed to be a bit rainy on Saturday. Normally the busking season doesn't start until May so I'm not really surprised. 

Today's freebees: 2 single-serving bags cheddar/sour cream potato chips, 2 bags "Smartfood" popcorn, two little bags peanuts, one little bag pistachios. I could have hauled off the whole box, full of all kinds of chips, candy bars, instant pot noodles, yadda yadda but I only wanted to take what I really like, because it's stuff left outside a different food place and kind of a known point for food to be left out so there are people I'd be leaving in the lurch if I took it all. 

 

 

The Small-Hat Wearing SPLC Doing What It Does

 Trouble is, people are noticing. 

I woke up at 1 in the afternoon and turned on the radio and even on NPR, they're talking about how the Southern Poverty Law Center's antics have caught up with them, It's been a simple case of "cobra farming". In India, years ago, they paid a bounty for cobras. The result was people started farming cobras to turn them in. The SPLC has been manufacturing the thing they claim to fight. 

This is a standard small-hat tactic. 

I left here around 3, went downtown and did my usual route; drop off trash, drop off donations at the Japantown little free library, go by the Amazon place for some bubble mailers, then over to the bank to deposit the check Ken had dropped off Friday night. Then came back here by way of 1st Street and U-Save Liquor where I-Saved on a six pack of those sour little bottles of Guinness. 

I got back in here, put the trailer on the bike and loaded it up with the packages I'd packed last night, and took 'em to the post office, and stopped at 99 Ranch for some packs of ramen, then rode back here, following my route to find packing stuff. I didn't find much filler like bubble wrap, but I found some good boxes. 

I had a dinner of H-Mart kim chee and Wal-Mart Swiss cheese, and finished the load of laundry I had going, and cleaned up the bathroom and had just about given up on Ken coming over and was starting to round up a batch of things to list on Ebay, when he showed up. 

I got my check, and all's fine and dandy. He's not sure when he can pay the "NNN" thing to the landlord, since he's waiting for his employer to pay him. But he's getting his Social Security which he's using for things like paying the rent here. We talked finances a bit. No, it's not any car loans; his cars are all paid off. Home insurance has gone up a bit, but the main thing, it seems, is credit cards. He's trying to get a consolidation loan .... 

The thing is, he'll probably pull it off. He's an early Boomer with a big house on a small lot and N+1 cars, and banks love those types. And that will probably lessen the stress for Oh I don't know, probably a year or so anyway. 

 

 

More financial instability

 Woke up at 3, got some good sleep I guess except crazy dreams. I stayed within my "beer budget" which right now is 2 small bottles of Guinness and 6 cans of Lagunitas IPA (not the "little sumpin' sumpin' which is a bit higher in alcohol content) and I think  I want to go to where I'm having 1-2 small bottles of Guinness a day because I swear, drinking it is making me feel better but more than that is just excess.

This way when I'm back in Hawaii even if I live in a no smoking/no drinking room, I can pop into a bar and have a pint if I've had a good say busking. 

So yes I woke up at 3 in the afternoon, and looked at the .. drops falling down. Still raining. In fact a particularly heavy downpour came through. 

Last night I'd photographed 30 things and listed 10 of them then kind of ran out of steam and called it a night. Today I am greeted by an email from the landlord ... we owe 'em something like $1004.95. They actually used Gemini which got the math a bit wrong, they come up with $1004.97 and I calculated it and got $1004.42 but ... I count money like an engineer, not an accountant and I'm not going to bring it up. 

They want Ken to drop by their office with a check by Friday. I'm nervous because I've got the paycheck Ken had dropped off Friday night, and want to deposit it but it's really rainy and stormy out there. It's supposed to clear up tomorrow in the afternoon, and I plan to get that check into the bank as soon as I can because Ken does things moment by moment, financially speaking. If I don't deposit the check, Ken will assume the money's still in his bank and something will bounce - either the check to the landlord or my check. 

I wrote to my pal Pat in Pahoa, not that I want to come stay with him, but just as someone to talk to and also he might know some people back on Oahu. I need to write to a couple of people too. Email is not reliable these days, but the US mail is still working.  

The way things are going, I'm leaving anywhere from mid-September of this year to mid-September of next year. If we're kicked out when our lease ends on August 31st, Ken's going to go into "frantic mode" and I don't want to be around for that.  I'll go stay in a hotel, finish off my final affairs and buy plane tickets, and leave. 

So between now and August 31, I need to sell off everything I don't need, get a good set of luggage, set up an account with the Navy Federal Credit Union because they're in Hawaii and here in SF, and I will use them for my Social Security check to go into. Once I've got my Real ID done, I'll set my present bank to stop sending me physical bank statements because I never read 'em anyway, and their main use is as something proving I live at my present legal address. 

I'm really hoping I can arrange to "land" with someone in Hawaii. Pat was trying to arrange that with our friend Dave but Dave turned out to be useless. But he may know other people. Otherwise the good old Waikiki Monarch it is. 

I don't know what's changed in Ken's finances to make things so difficult lately. I've theorized it's the new SUV his wife bought, but if she bought it with her own money then that's not it. But another thing has come to mind: Home insurance has spiked recently. That could easily have risen by a thousand or more per month. I suppose it doesn't matter what's made Ken's finances shaky, only *that* they are shaky and I need to base my actions on that. 

I have thought long and hard about just staying here. I'd not have the moving expenses I have been saving for and thus would have a good "nut" in the bank. There's a plethora, there I said it, plethora, of busking locations. The weather by and large is very healthy (it's the lower humidity and on average it's cooler than the weather in Hawaii). I'd still have Ken and Suzy as friends, although at their ages they could blow away in the wind in soon. 

But there's an underlying thing that's been lurking like a whale below the surface. I'm not local to here. I'm not even local to Orange County down South, and certainly not to Los Angeles county, even if I was born there. People talk about where they want to high school, places their worked their first jobs, things they saw changing, all those things that give you a sense of the history of your home, and I feel none of that here on the mainland. My schools, my college time, jobs, places I lived growing up, different experiences, are all on the dear old island of Oahu. 

There's an excellent discussion on Reddit about this, something like "Growing up haole" and it seems like being local, local-ness, matters much more now, and race, while still always very important and life-defining anywhere in the US, isn't the only consideration. Being local is things like going to school there, preferably during your formative years, knowing the local places, knowing the local cuisine, etc. Being local is not having A/C and never thinking about missing it. It's knowing all the bus lines. It's knowing how to live without a lot of money, because most of the local people never had money and a huge portion of them came over as plantation workers. 

It's things like body language, tones of speech, even what I'll call "eye language". In Japanese culture there's a great emphasis on being able to "read the air" and this has carried over to Hawaii local culture. This is what can get you pegged as Haole, as in mainland non-local haole. There's a huge sense of entitlement with those types, that I've seen even here on the mainland with regard to Hawaii. 

I'm not sure how to describe this, but two notable examples: One, a nice younger guy who rides a cargo bike and I've met several times by the bike racks at Whole Foods. I made the mistake of mentioning perhaps retiring back to Hawaii where I'd grown up, and I wish I could recall his exact words, but the feeling was something like, "You'd better not screw up my portion of Hawaii". I stopped mentioning Hawaii at all around him. The second example is the guy who owns "Skewers And Brew" downtown. I mentioned going back to Hawaii and he immediately sort of demanded information from me, where should he live on Oahu that's high-end, where his wife can do her shopping trips etc. I said they'd like it best in Hawaii Kai or Kahala, the two most expensive parts of the island and nice and upper-end. It was his demanding information like he was owed a place there that was really weird. 

So, here on the mainland, not only didn't I get to talk about where my first jobs were or where I went to high school or fun things I did growing up, but I couldn't talk about where I *had* gone to high school and where/what fun things I'd done growing up. Because then I'd have to say I grew up in Hawaii and then things would get really weird.