$62 Saturday

 I practiced last night before bed and it went even better than the session before. This is good. I just need to be very consistent about practicing. 

Yesterday I shipped stuff, did shopping, blah blah. And got 20 things ready to list and listed 10 of them. I'll list the other 10 tonight. 

Today I got out of here at 5, and miraculously, found myself set up at the Sunnyvale Whole Foods at just a bit after 6:30, thanks to the #522 bus. As I walked past Baraka Market on my way to the Whole Foods, I heard a lot of squawking, and saw that the parrots who used to hang out by the hardware store, are still here, and in force. The hardware store's history but ... not the parrots. 

Last night I'd finished a load of laundry that included the clothes I wear busking and I'd put a fan on the clothes, hung up in the loft, before going to sleep. So I had nice clean clothes on, and with how cold it's been getting at night, I brought a fleece jacket too. 

So I got there and the wind didn't beat me up too much at all, and I was glad to not be in the parking structure because not only was the first motorcycle there, but some idiot on a Harley had to pull in and park his stupid toy in such a way as to pretty much take over the area. Then after a while, left, noisily. Plus car alarms going off for some reason. 

So I happily stood out front and did my thing, and it felt a bit slow because it *was* a bit slow, but still, $62 isn't bad and is in line with a $40 an hour pay scale. 

It went pretty well, and one guy gave me a little bag of a type of popcorn they sell in Whole Foods, with a picture of a pink "Buddha" guy on it. It's not on my diet needless to say, so as I was getting near the end of my session, I handed it off to a guy with a shopping cart with all kinds of bags and things on it and hanging off of it, but it looked fairly organized. 

I finished up, and I might look at how to stay a bit later than 8 because the tips actually got better as it got a bit later, and the shopping cart guy started acting weird and cursing in some mix of Spanish and Crazy, and I thought, "Well, it's not my problem now..."  

I was putting things away and counting up when a young Whole Foods employee came up and wanted to know how to play "Long Long Time", the 1940s song that was in a recent Captain America movie. I said it's not that hard, but determined that he's really new at trumpet. So new he didn't have one yet. So I went through the standard advice; to rent one from West Valley Music, get a teacher or if he budget doesn't allow it, get one of the band books like Standard Of Excellence, and find people playing through it on YouTube. He said he hopes to see me out there more, and I'll have to put that song into my regular rotation. 

I packed up, walked past the crazy guy without incident because I'm the nice person who gave him popcorn haha, and walked out to Baraka Market for my yogurt drink and got on the bus back to my "home" Whole Foods. I went in for cheese and a couple of beef sticks for tomorrow so in theory all I'll have to do is ride there, park and lock the bike, use the loo, and go right to the bus stop. 

I also put on the fleece jacket which I'd left in the bike bag, because it was friggin' cold. While juggling various things, what goes into the bike bags and what clothing I'm changing out of and into, there were a couple of bums there talking with each other - hard to understand because there's this weird underclass accent/way of speaking that I find really rather difficult to understand. 

I said something to them like "Wow it's sure cold tonight!" and they agreed, and since I'd pulled my fleece jacket out of a very large, sturdy, zipper bag which I've got several of, I offered them the bag, which is a handy thing. The guy was thankful for it. 

The thing is, when I came back out after buying cheese and beef sticks, the two bums were still there and were only leaving to go off and do whatever else was planned for their evening. So  I figure they might have had a look through my bike bags because bums steal stuff. But when I got back here nothing was missing, except my little tube of lip balm. I guess they got that. Small victories. 

I was really hung up for a while on getting some "Chop Saver" lip balm which Craig at West Valley Music thinks the world of, and even gave me a tube of. That has disappeared, of course. So I had made serious plans to spend the few hours it takes to go over to West Valley Music and just buy some. I'd been thinking my cheapo Blistex is too greasy. But actually, it's not so greasy if I just use less of it. 

It's good if I can just get by with it, because  it's sold at a bunch of places and as I've mentioned, cheap. "Chop Saver" is enough of a hassle to obtain, even living here, must less living back home in Hawaii, that it would be easy to mail order it a few tubes at a time, and then losing a tube of it would be much more of a pain. 

So I just pulled out a new tube of Blistex out of the drawer here, and next time I'm at Walmart I'll buy a couple more.  

Paradoxical practice

 After doing a bunch of other things, I got some practice in before bed and it went really well. I feel like for the first time I got a bit of the feel for playing high notes without straining. 

Damned headache

 After getting back here and having dinner and staying up all night taking stuff apart, I developed a headache. I had visual disturbances too; haven't had those for a while but it's geometric patterns on the left side of my field of vision. 

In other words, I'm pretty sure I get a relatively painless, benign, version of the migraines that have been the bane of my older sister's existence. 

I really wanted to practice but I could not bring myself to, with the headache, so I went to bed. I had a weird dream where I was going to write the history of some big Asian market/company, like 99 Ranch but not 99 Ranch. Something like Yaohan maybe. I don't really have nightmares, just ordinary dreams but sometimes they can be kind of weird. 

I had two very large things to ship, both overseas. Both were above the weight/size limits and with one, the guy didn't even supply a viable address so I got to cancel both orders and have ending those listings. I'll just part the things out. 

I ended up packing two small things to go to the post office, taking those there, then going over to Nijiya Market by way of Oakland Road, to buy some coffee. Then stopped at the Amazon place for bubble mailers and found none. So those are going right out of style. 

Then it was down to Walmart for the shipping trip there I'd been promising myself. I had $60-odd on me and ended up speinding $41, leaving me with a $20 to put on my Clipper card. Of course it's OK to dip into my money in the bank, but the game is to do so as little as possible. 

When I got back the big pile of metal scrap from taking things apart overnight was still outside the door here.  

 

One year and one month

 Right now it's basically one year and one month until I leave. 

 I listed 20 things last night so that's good. 

I did some practice before bed and it was awful. I'm thinking I should not take one day off, but should take a day doing long tones and such exercises for my rest day. 

 

A little trail of Big Macs

 Pedonald is so brave, he was so unafraid of the Iranis, that he hid out in a catering truck while Air Force One flew without him, and he flew on some smaller plane. 

No other US president has done this kind of shell game. Not during wartime or peacetime or any time. 

I wonder how his handlers got him into the truck? I imagine it's like getting a cat into a cat carrier, and imagine them making a little trail of Big Macs to lure him in. 

I did a lot of packing last night - overnight - because I had something like 30 things to ship. And also, took the 8x4 foot sheet of fiberglass, which is VERY heavy, 100 lbs easy, and "walked" it because I could not drag it, across the parking lot and got it stashed in the trash enclosure where it's essentially invisible and no longer our problem. Yay! 

I did my shipping run and didn't find much of anything for materials on the way back, just a couple of useful small boxes. 

Dinner was "freebee beef broccoli". How that works is, I found a nice big head of broccoli behind H Mart so that was the broccoli, and as for the beef, that's an interesting story. 

After my last busking session on Sunday, when I got on the bus there was one pair of seats, the pair I like to sit at, with a paper grocery bag sitting there. So I decided to just sit on down and put my stuff next to the grocery bag, and have a little look to see what's inside. Trash, probably. 

Instead I saw a couple of bags of chips, some kind of potato chips fried in avocado oil or something like that, and some other kind. And underneath, a package of bacon. The bacon was not as cold as it should be, so the bag had been sitting on the bus for a little while at least. So I just played it cool until I got to the Diridon Station stop and got off, and gave the chips away to a couple of guys; "I'll never turn down free food!" said one. 

I now had an opportunity to dig in the bag more, as it was pretty heavy for just a package of bacon left now. Under that, was what felt like a big cold burrito, but a quick glance told me it was a big package of hamburger so again I just played it cool and walked over to "my" Whole Foods and stashed my goodies away in the bike bag, did my shopping, and rode home. 

One home I could really investigate things. After all, if the stuff was bad the birds would always eat it. The bacon was the "sugar free" type I'd been considering trying, and the hamburger was the Whole Foods store kind, that had been on sale. There was the receipt in the bag and it was from Sunnyvale Whole Foods. The place I'd just been busking at. 

This makes for some very puzzling logistics. The original owner of the stuff had bought it at the Sunnyvale Whole Foods. But the bacon was not as cold as it ought to be, and if it *was* as cold as it ought to be, it means the buyer would have walked to the other nearby bus stop, by the PF Changs, and then gotten right off. 

The only way it all makes sense is if someone bought this stuff, got on the #522 going *North* and forgot their stuff somewhere along the line, then of course the bus would have turned around in ... Palo Alto. And come back, now being a Southbound bus, and then I got on. No one would have disturbed the bag. 

I know this last because those bags of chips were in it, and chips are  a classic hand-to-mouth food, the only kind of food bums can consume, as it's beyond them to cook or wash or peel or prepare in anyway, anything they eat. They live, and eat, at the animal level like a squirrel or a stray cat. The chips *were* below the level of the top of the bag, so it would take someone actually peering inside, and I guess no one had had the opportunity. 

Since  I gave the chips away to a couple of bummy guys anyway, let's say a bum had glommed onto that bag of stuff. Well,  again, bums don't prepare or cook their food in any way. They'd have thrown away the bacon and the hamburger. Or let's say no one had disturbed the bag until the bus went off service for the night. It would come down to the driver or whoever cleans the bus to do something with it; eat the chips and by now, discard the now-too-warm bacon and hamburger. 

So my taking the bag kind of looks like the best case scenario. I put the bacon in the freezer until it was firm enough to work with, and cut it up into portions and those went into the freezer. And likewise the hamburger, cooled for a while in the fridge and then portioned out into 6 portions since there was a pound and a half of it. 

And tonight I cooked up one of the portions, and it's fine. I like the hamburger from H Mart the best, but it's hard to beat the price for this stuff. 

I kind of feel bad for whoever bought the stuff, but if they're buying chips cooked in avocado oil and fancy bacon, they're not hurting too bad. Public transit giveth, and public transit taketh away ... years ago I bought a nice table easel and left it on the light rail. 

 

 

I'm down

 2-1/2 lbs woot! Yeah it doesn't sound like that much, since a person's weight can fluctuate more than that on a single day. Which is why I only weigh myself on Mondays, right after getting out of bed, so it's a consistent time and at least in theory, set of conditions. 

 

$88 Sunday

 Standing out on the sidewalk at the Sunnyvale Whole Foods *is* better, even if the wind gets tiring. I played the same 6:30 to 8:00 time slot I've been doing, and it was all out there in that wind except a couple of times where I moved to the parking structure to get out of said wind, and moving back out after a few minutes.