Last night I decided the most bang for the buck I could get out of working would be to organize the cardboard boxes and shipping materials that were in a huge jumble in the loft. And I actually did it. Almost all the boxes except for a few large ones and some bags of packing material are in the one corner by the water heater (turned off) and I have all my wonderful floor space back. I also have to cut up a lot of boxes I'm not keeping, and dispose of them and a bunch of Styrofoam, but I can't believe how easy and effective it turned out to be.
The reason to do this is, among other things, that I can move the few pieces of furniture I have up there around to a better arrangement, and set up a clothes-drying rack so after things drip-dry downstairs, I can take them up there for the final drying.I also spent about $100 on "deck paint" a while back and need to get going on my plan to paint the loft and stairs leading up to it.
I went to bed past 6AM, with the crows taking away the beef fat scraps I'd left out for them. I drank about 100ml to get myself to sleep, but frankly I probably could have done fine with half as much, or none, and some "Sleepy Time" tea instead.
I woke up at 2, to the mellifluous sounds of a very noisy verbal fight between two female bums with a male bum acting as a sort of referee. I'm going to say it was between Crazy Chrissy, who fights with everyone, and Renee, another of the characters around here, who also fights with everyone but especially with Crazy Chrissie. Those two are rivals, competing for the same "johns" and often I'm sure, the same crack rock. The "referee" could be any one of a number of male scumbags who hover around here.
These chicks seem to be tolerated around here by the guys at Mr. Softee and the machine shop, as I've observed to Ken, because they are probably trading sex for use of the water hose, a pack of cigarettes, etc. In other words, they're bottom-level prostitutes. There's a trucking company up the street that's big enough to have a lot of trucks and even a little lounge, and so these flowers of womanhood are the necessary "lot lizards" no serious trucking operation can do without.
Health-wise I've got some "stuff" down in my lungs but feel OK otherwise.
I had my coffee etc and got into the bike tube change, and managed to drag myself through that annoying and grubby process, had everything back together and was actually about to head out on the bike when - PFPFPFPPFFFPPFFF! There was the sound of all the air leaving the tire, quickly. I took it all apart again and the lousy Slime brand tube had split at one of its seams. And the Slime inside had clogged up the valve to had to unscrew the valve core to get air in it to find the split.
I pondered what to do. No light rail running on weekends. I checked online and Lowe's doesn't sell bike tubes which is too bad because I could walk there. I called Ken and asked if he had a spare 26" tube at his house, and he doesn't. I asked him if he felt like coming by tomorrow night to pick up a load of packages to take them to the post office and fedex for me, and he's good with that. I told him tomorrow I'll take the light rail downtown and get a tube or two, and from now on keep a much deeper "larder" of things like tubes.
I mean, Ken doesn't have a spare tube, OK, he's got a bike he almost never rides and his main vehicle is his truck, which carries a spare, plus he's got about 3 other vehicles to choose from. I depend on my bike, and realistically should have a 2nd bike at least for taking on the train and exploring San Francisco.
I have a bunch of Amazon things to pick up also, one of them being a new sleeping bag. So I'll walk out to the light rail on Monday, perhaps stopping off at the old downtown post office with some packages, then walk over to my bank ATM and put one of my checks in I guess, then hop on a #22 bus to ACE Hardware where I should be able to buy a bike tube, then another #22 over to where the Amazon Hub is, and pick up my bunch of things, then light rail it back here.
My good bike tires will come in Friday, and I might get some backup tubes then too. I'm not happy with what I'm seeing on Amazon, and I'd rather pick up some things like extra tubes, rim bands, patch kit, etc from La Dolce Velo or Bike Express.
I *did* decide to buy a bottle of tea tree oil, to try using on my cellulitis on my ear. The Dettol won't come in for about a month, the little bottle of Vionex I have is very old and will run out, and tea tree oil I know at least works on things like foot fungus. People say they're using it with success on what sound like bacterial things too.
All this bike stuff, though, makes me reflect on a thing I still regret not doing when I lost everything in the 2007 crash. At the time, I wish I'd taken all the money I could get together or borrow, and driven up to Colorado Springs, Colorado and taken the full bicycle mechanic course plus the optional wheel-building course taught at the Barnett Bicycle Institute. I'd have driven my Prius up there, found a cheap room or motel to stay at, kept a cover on the Prius to keep the license place from being read where I had it parked as I'd have stopped making payments and would have seen how far I could get before it was repo'd (probably a month or two after I'd graduated Barnett at least) and then at least I'd be able to say I had credentials as a bike mechanic.
I could have swung it then. I'd have had my Prius to sleep in if nothing else, I know Colorado Springs fairly well, and I had the money on hand or enough room on the credit cards I was soon to default on anyway, to do it. But I didn't.
I'd rather be a good trumpet player and an adequate bike mechanic anyway.
I got in a decent practice, cooked up a bowl of miso soup, salmon tonight, although the only fresh vegetables I have on hand now are a bit of cabbage and a few small shallots. However, I did some reading online and it turns out that weed called malva, cheeseweed, or mallow, is very edible. People in the Middle East even use the larger leaves to make dolmas instead of grape leaves. I could go pick some by the now-closed 24hour Fitness and try it.
A lot of people are having real crises of meaning during this shutdown. It's even made me think, in terms of what exactly is my purpose? Sartre and Camus tell us that it's all meaningless and it's up to us to choose a purpose, and maybe people will think about this now that so many don't have jobs, school, etc to keep them busy. To think that for a few years, my whole purpose was so the Blue Cross Animal Hospital would have clean floors and cages, a few cat and dog washes done, and things like that. Later, I was allowed to exist given I kept the floors of the local Foodland supermarket clean, or kept the brass in the USS Bowfin submarine memorial polished and made the local college money by getting suckered into the scam that is college loans. Er, I mean, just college.
The Ebay stuff I do now at least takes some smarts, and organization, decision-making, skill in dealing with customers, and even a fair amount of physical fitness. It's a *bit* less insulting. But in the end, being a good trumpet player takes a lot too, and I'd rather be known for that. Until the shutdown I was beginning to wonder how I might be able to rent a small office or something to sleep in maybe during the day, and just be a busker. I can probably make the same $300 a week I do now, working for Ken. But until the shutdown is over, I'll just keep practicing. And if I didn't have so many things I'll have to carry on Monday, I'd take my cornet and play it a bit downtown. Juggling bike tubes, a pair of shoes, a rolled up sleeping bag, some other small Amazon things, and any odds or ends I decide to buy, will be enough.
But I need to get into the habit of having the cornet with me when I can, and playing it "for the people".
I got back to work on the loft. I did something I've wanted to since the shutdown started; I took the bags of spaghetti out of the boxes they'd come in and put them into fresher boxes with plenty of Roach-Prufe which is diatomaceous earth with boric acid in it, dusted in. Two bags had gone rotten and one, probably ok but yucky so I discarded it, was stuck between the two bad ones. But one surprise is that not all of the spaghetti is reddish and supposedly "chili pepper" flavored; a bit more than half of it is jet black because it's squid-ink spaghetti. Now I can be sure no one else will want to eat it. I've had squid ink bread, and it tasted just like regular bread, just very black in color. I was over in Japan eating in the hotel, the usual "international traveler cuisine" I call it, sort of Western-ish and calculated to be interesting and of good quality, but not *too* interesting. So I was eating these slices of bread with butter along with my meal, and the bread was jet-black but I just figured it was food coloring for some strange Japanese reason. Someone in the group I was with apparently saw me and said to his dining companion, "How do you like that squid-ink bread?" loud enough for me to hear. Well, I had a bad cold and had eaten about all I wanted to eat anyway, so I put that piece of bread right down and I'm sure the guy got a good laugh out of it, but really, the bread tasted like any other bread you'd find in an expensive hotel's restaurant.
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