Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The play sirens and have silence etc in Israel. I know when I am there those sirens are going to remind me of the good old Civil Defense sirens they test on the first working day of the month in Hawaii.

It's kind of funny, living on the mainland so long and looking back, Hawaii's sort of a compound of military bases that has a tourism racket on the side. It's as common to see a military vehicle or a convoy of them on the road as a tourism bus. So they're pretty big on having working sirens etc.

I was "supposed" to go downtown and try depositing my paycheck using the ATM and do some other things, but I didn't. I just didn't feel like going out. I eventually cooked up some bacon and eggs, had a ginseng drink, and finally got in an hour of practice with the noise from the Mr. Softee trucks to hide behind. It was actually a pretty good practice because it was an hour of Irons exercises and when I called it quits my upper lip really needed a break.

You're not supposed to think about your lip too much in trumpet playing, but how it works is the lower lip is like the mouthpiece on a clarinet, and your upper lip the reed that vibrates against the mouthpiece. And it takes just putting in playing time to keep everything in shape. Just the skin on the lips has to be exercised to keep it in condition. Doing the tongue-level stuff to play higher notes is like learning to pronounce word-sounds that are not in your language, plus the midsection has to be pretty strong and it has to coordinate with what the mouth is doing, etc.

So it was go downtown or practice and I think I made the right choice. I'll get this paycheck thing figured out, and it's not like I'll run out of money any time soon. It's not that I have a lot but that I don't need to spend much.

After the ice cream trucks were done making their noise, the bums showed up and did their meth-y things. I cooked up some beef and vegetables and ate that. I'm eating really well these days.