Quiet Sunday

I woke up at about 1 and was out of bed at 1:30 or so. I'm still chuckling about the drama with the bum cars last night, the little red one backing away from the silver minivan, like a scared little crab, all the way out to the front entrance. So the area was clear of bum cars overnight, then two nice cars showed up today, a Mercedes and a Jaguar, so probably local drug dealers. This is a good place to hide out, away from da copz (although da copz come through pretty often due to the fights etc.) and it's easy to come in here off of the freeway. So a dealer can hang out in the parking lot here, get on their phone and put out that they've just got in some nice fentanyl or whatever it is they're dealing, do the deal, come back in etc.  The white Mercedes is the most interesting because apparently they've taken the rear and rear seat windows and just painted them black.

I'm concerned about the cellulitis patches on my face. I washed my face really well with hot water, and re-applied the Mupirocin, but I don't have enough for a full 10-day course. I might have to go to O'Conner hospital because they'll have my medical history, and see about getting those green pills again. In the meantime all I can do is keep washing the areas well, use the Mupirocin, and stop drinking alcohol entirely. Trouble with cellulitis on my ear has been associated with alcohol-drinking.

As Ken said, "The liver isn't a filter, it's more of a factory" by which he meant that the liver makes all kinds of things the rest of the body needs, like stuff for the immune system.

Apparently mupirocin-resistant MRSA is a thing now, but those green pills sure seemed to work well. I just needed a second course of them. I'd made the mistake of joking about getting the shits from them, and that made the doctor think that was a problem. But it really wasn't. I'd had it happen once, and because of that I ducked into this little Thai place downtown, thought I'd have to buy food to use their loo, it turned out they had a loo around the side of the building for anyone to use and did I ever use it. Then I had the best spring rolls I've ever had. Other than that one time, I was fine as long as I drank my Yakult every day.

So I've drank my Yakult today, and I've also just ordered a couple of .9999 Australian silver coins off of Amazon, to the tune of about $70, to make colloidal silver solutions with. I'll have those in about a week, right when my Mupirocin will run out.

I cooked up the rest of the milk thistle leaves. Boiled in two waters, they were really like a kind of spinach. I had a picture of 'em on here, because it's a pretty plant, with a distinct "milk" pattern on the leaves. But putting up a picture utterly fucks up this site. Anything typed after the picture becomes part of the title of the picture so the rest of the post would be 2/3rds the size print, and looking like the photo has one hell of a long title. So the new rule is: No photos.

The internet in general is slowing down, eBay's slowing down, and I've been having to turn off everything else that's electric in the room to get my printer to print, that's how marginal electricity is getting around here. I'm really glad I'm not banking on the internet, or electricity itself. Playing trumpet doesn't require those things, and I should probably figure out which trumpet books I still ought to have in my library so when it all shuts down I'll have "the" books.

I'm not sure how being a trumpet player will be especially helpful in an electricity-less apocalyptic wasteland, but I'm not sure what else would be all that helpful, either. Selco, a guy who survived in the Yugoslavia breakup, told in one of his blog entries about a guy who was the prototypical long-haired, willowly, guitar guy, just the type you'd think wouldn't last long at all but in their apocalypse, there was no electricity, no batteries, no radios, so ... no music. So while tougher types were killed for sport, the local warlord kept him around because he was their only source of music and he lived. In any apocalypse worth the name, there's lots of dying so at the very least lots of people will want me to play Taps.

It turns out that in rubbing all that tea tree oil on problem places like my right ear, a place on my chin, and a place on my left cheek, I'd burned and killed the outer layer of skin. I'd given myself good old chemical burns. When the silver coins come in, see what kind of silver preparations I can come up with. By then the only problem area will be, as always, my ear. It turns out silver preparations are the final line of defense against bacteria that are Mupirocin-resistant, which is what I think I may be dealing with.

I didn't practice because, lazily, I didn't take advantage of the about 2-hour time window when the ice cream trucks are making noise. After they were gone, I was considering it, then when I used the bathroom could hear someone next door or in the ice cream place was listening to a movie or music or something, and the last thing they need is trumpet exercises. Oh, well.

Tonight's dinner was miso soup with fried mackerel in it, and wow it was good. 

OK I'll cheat and put my photos last. It *is* a pretty plant. The spines are all around the edges of the leaves, and once you trim the edges off with scissors, the leaves are fine to handle.