Up at 2. I got a decent practice in last night, and believe I learned something: When your tone is rough, it's probably not your lips. It's probably your air. Use that solar plexus and hear your tone clean up.
I got stuff ready to list on Ebay, but then drank too much and got involved watching a documentary on YouTube about how the Greenland Norse thrived and then failed. Pretty interesting actually. I grew up with big "coffee table" books on subjects like Greenland and the Vikings and so on, because my father seemed to have a fascination with far-away places.
Maybe it was that, you could have a bad day and come home and look at beautiful glossy pictures of Viking ships and read about how they died off cold and alone, so they'd had a worse time than you did. The more I think about it though, the more I've concluded that my family are all batshit insane without much in the way of other distinguishing features.
I had a headache, so chewed two aspirin, had some black coffee, took some stuff I needed to get rid of, and rode for Japantown. My first drop off was some odds and ends, not trash but kind of trivial things I wanted to pass on to anyone interested, and that bag was dropped off in front of the Goodwill on 7th.
Next drop-off was a large sealed bottle of olive oil I'd had for a couple of years. They say olive oil can go bad, and in any case I just don't use the stuff these days, and that went into the "little free library" box on 6th. It's books and food now. I didn't see any books I wanted to read so I just left the oil.
A bag of paper, couple thick manuals in too bad shape to put on Ebay, etc., went in a white recycling dumpster on 5th, which had a "flat" of cans of coconut juice in it. I decided not to take those, but put them on top because someone will want them.
Drop offs done, it was time to pick things up. I locked the bike a little way from Nijiya, and went in for a shopping trip. Mainly I wanted to pick up some Yakult, which strangely H Mart didn't have yesterday. And I got a number of different things, and got $40 cash back too. I got a small bento and a beer in a red can, because I thought I'd eat in the park and there's no way beer ever comes in a red can so I could drink the beer with no hassles, but the wind was really strong and I decided to just get back to the shop.
There were bums around and I had to use the old rule of, "Pretend you don't see them, and they'll pretend they don't see you". I had to pace myself to avoid bums on bikes, wait for the next light etc.
On the way back, I stopped by the vegetable dumpster on 10th and this time it was bitter melons and eggplants. Also banana flowers, which seemed to be spoiled beyond redemption. How you'd eat a banana flower anyway is beyond me. So tonight's dinner will be beef with bitter melon and eggplant.
Coming back in here, I had to duck into an alley to avoid a Mad Max looking truck that looked like it might want to run me over, and use my usual sneaky cyclist's survival tricks, but then I never stopped using them; it's just back up to 100%. I noticed as I came into the complex here that the little red car, the one that had backed away from the attacking minivan like a brave little crab, flashing its headlights when the van got too close, is sitting out at the curb with signs on it saying it's for sale for $850. "Ha! You give me $850 and maybe I'll think about it!" I said out loud. Now that I think about it, the bum who owns it may have actually been inside it, sleeping or something and maybe they heard that.
My ear is actually healing up nicely. Maybe that's the key: Burn a layer of skin off with tea tree oil, then use mupirocin, which can now get in better. I'd really burned my cheek, and peeled the dead skin off too soon, so it looks pretty awful. But a mask covers it and it will be better soon. And I guess on Thursday I'll pick up my Australian silver rounds and can try making colloidal silver or other sorts of silver compounds.
After all my spending this week, checking the numbers, I'll be up by $100 this week in savings. In other words, out of my $300 pay check, I'll have only spent about $200. That's actually the ideal. Less restaurant eating, and I venture to guess that if I'm gathering a lot of my veggies from here 'n' there, that saves me money too. I wonder if I should commit to being a "free veggie" person, in that I either forage or dumpster-dive all my veg? It might mean eating a lot more onions and odd ball things, but it might make a real difference. I might also learn more about pickling.
The thing is, I've been buying a lot of "buy once" items. The coins are a one-time since it's a lifetime supply of colloidal silver. The Crocs should last a while but if they fit well, I'll go ahead and get a 2nd pair. But I don't need two giant Chinese choppy-knives, for instance. So getting back to "really normal" spending might mean saving at my ideal rate of $100 a week and keeping on it.
In fact, my real ideal plan is to sock away the money I earn from Ken and live off of busking but who knows when that will be back on the table.
I wrote an email to my aunt who's sitting in her huge house in the area near Pasadena that the rich white people went to when "the coloreds" moved into Pasadena. I want to keep in touch with her just because occasionally she leaks bits of information and also, while there's a very very small chance the old dragon will do anything with her hoard of money but sit on it and take it with her (somehow) when she dies, the chance that she leaves me something is larger than zero.
I didn't get a practice in because I missed the window of time where the ice cream trucks were making noise. One of the drug dealer cars (the Jaguar) was in the corner of the parking lot and a couple of people were whooping it up, laughing etc. Got some of the good stuff I guess.
Dinner was beef with bitter melon, eggplant, and other veggies. Bitter melon is aptly named, and that's after boiling it and rinsing it before adding it to the other stuff. The eggplant was good, though. Veggies from any dumpster are going to be past their prime, but I'd rather have eggplant a bit past its prime for the fiber. Bitter melon, ehhh... I might want to gather more to hang upstairs so the seeds mature and try toasting the seeds.
I put some things away, did a long software update, and packed a bunch of things. I'd turned my printer off, and sprayed connector cleaner on the USB cable connections and power connections, but actually only printed when it was pretty late. My theory is the problem was resistance building up in the connections. Or, that people using other machines around here are either making the power voltage low or putting noise on the power, making my printer very difficult to get to print. So I realized I needed to pack (and print labels for) stuff that's "due" now, in the middle of the night when it's cool and there aren't shops running all kinds of equipment all around me, so that when I test my theory in the warm, noisy, daytime and the printer goes on the fritz again, I won't be able to pack the due-to-go packages.
I went upstairs and took two steel rods I had around here and bent them like long S-hooks and hung up the curtain rod, to hang laundry from. Then I took the large shallow flat box I'd picked up from Sanmina and took a large plastic bag and cut it making it a sheet of plastic, and lined the box/tray with plastic. That will be the tray to catch drips from stuff that's drip-drying. I also sorted my laundry because socks are probably highest priority, underwear, t-shirts, etc. Lowest is winter stuff I won't wear again for months.
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