The bank gets nicer

I was up at 3 because I didn't go to bed nearly early enough to have an early start.

After coffee and chocolate and walnuts etc. I took off for the bank, and the guy working today was actually pretty nice. I even thanked him for being nice. My account balance was where it should be, and I've regained a little bit of confidence in the idea of banks at least for now.

Next I went over to Dai Thanh and got a few things, more canned fish, some of the really fine-grind coffee I've been using with a filter in my Vietnamese pour over coffee maker in a mix with French Market chicory coffee. They seemed to have all the things a market ought to have, even eggs. I remembered salt when I saw cans of Morton's there, and got a bag of cardamom seeds, used in a recipe for "biltong" which is a South African kind of beef jerkey, which I've wanted to try making for years.

I rode over to the Amazon pickup and got my trumpet valve oil and Uniden scanner, and then remembered that the biltong recipe also calls for a good amount of ground black pepper, and went back over to Dai Thanh where I paid about $11 for a big bag of it. I think it's a couple pounds.

Then I circled around and went to Whole Foods. The shelves are getting emptier there and I got a few cans of sardines and since 100% cacao chocolate chips are gone now, I got some cocoa butter and cocoa powder I can experiment making them with, when it comes to that. I also got some more vitamins, and all in all I spent a bit over $100.

I headed back, and stopped at Nijiya for a nice daikon radish, some celery which I like even at their prices, and a few other things including a sashimi on rice package because I generally get some sort of a treat on paycheck day. They were only letting 10 people in at a time and had one employee stationed out front - the guy I like to talk with; he's Caucasian but has taught himself Japanese and is pretty cool. I asked how he's holding out, financially, and he said he's down to 3 days a week but has savings, and I started to say I have some savings too...  But his job metering people in and out was keeping him pretty busy so he said, "I've love to talk more but I have to do this" and I said "All you need is a badge and a baton" and that got a real laugh out of him so that made me feel good.

I rode over to O'Reilley's auto parts where I got some HEET in the yellow bottles which is pure methanol and can be mixed with the high-test Chinese white liquor to a 70% concentration to use in place of the now unobtainable rubbing alcohol. I also got a couple of rolls of shop towels which is good because for now the two rolls I got before have fucking disappeared. In addition, I got a bottle of Ozium, air freshener much-beloved of stoners who smoke in their cars since I was a kid, but which I think I can (a) say I have some excuse to have and (b) can modify the nozzle of to make it spray a stream, and thus carry it in place of pepper spray. I got one of those half-sized cans of stuff for displacing water out of electrical connections for the same reason. I'm still certain I have a canister of pepper spray around here, it's just a matter of finding it.

What this all comes down to is I have to get much more, compulsively more, organized than I already am. I remember reading in saxophonist Art Pepper's autobiography Straight Life, about how when he was in prison for being a heroin addict, he and his cellmates kept their place so clean you could eat off of the floor. I'm not sure how much they had to organize, but I'm sure it was meticulously organized.

I got back here with the bike loaded up like a fat galleon, noting that Ms. Crackhead still has both of her junk cars out front, with a little generator going, and the pickup truck being worked on by some bums near the front is still being worked on, and got my ass in here and enjoyed my sashimi on rice.

It was, I guess, how it used to be in March out there. Cold, even if not as cold as mid-winter, with a cold wind blowing even when the sun was out. I only got rained on a little here and there. And when the sun was out, it was like the sun in Hawaii, very strong. There are just not many people out, and very few drivers - those few who are out seem to be disproportionately assholes so I had to keep using the same tricks of misdirection, evasion, occasionally hopping onto the sidewalk or going the wrong way, as I do when traffic is normal. There were plenty of bums out because if you're a bum, where are you going to go?

I got the scanner out and have it charging - it will charge off of any USB port or any wall wart supplying USB voltage and I have an extra one of those so it's got its own dedicated charger. The reviews say it works better with this one particular antenna, but it's $30 for effectively a BNC connector with a wire on it, so I"m just going to make one. The thing is, if the broadcast stations go kaput, there will still be radio chatter out there for me to listen to. I've wanted this particular model of scanner for years and I'm glad I finally got one. 

I'm glad I got a new rear wheel on my bike, too. I kind of felt like, I could keep having the hub adjusted and keep it oiled and I'd probably be fine for another year or two, but who knows? A brand new wheel sets the "counter" to zero, and now I don't know if I could get one - maybe, but I've not been by any bike shops. I should really get a set of tires and tubes for when I need to replace those next. I really should get a lot of things .... I'm starting to be more nervous about the bike perhaps being stolen, like when I went to O'Reilly's because there was a crazy guy kicking hell out of a street sign post and yelling, and when he saw me head for O'Reilly's  yelled "It'd better be opennnnnn!" and I was a bit nervous about him but he wandered up the street and I just locked the bike to itself having no post etc to lock it to. Without a bike my life gets a LOT harder in normal times, and now they've largely shut down public transit.