Victoria Day

... Which means not a damn thing in the US. However, given that a picture of The Queen Herself is on one side of the silver coins I got, I have to think a kind thought about Old Queeny.

I was going to stay in because I thought it would be wet out, but it was dry, and beautiful out there. Also, I'd told a customer I'd mail their projector bulb today, so even though I only had a few packages packed, I was out the door at 5.

I dropped off the packages (they've put a new handle on the chute at the post office, we'll see how long that lasts) and did some shopping at H Mart. Because of this weird new economy, pots and pans are expensive, but H Mart had some big cheap aluminum pots perfect for boiling water.

I'd done a load of laundry last night because I'm just about out of clean clothes and am starting to stink. And it's hard to clean up without clean clothes to change into. It all went tickety-boo, except that I discovered that two full kettles of hot water in the mix brings the water all the way up to tepid. Two electric kettles full is one liter, so I wanted something that holds maybe two liters, that I could use on my Iwatani butane stove. This large Korean aluminum pot is perfect. It can probably hold 3 liters. And it was only $12 or so.

I also got a beer, a roasted "yellow corvina" fish, other odds and ends, and in the end of course my card didn't work. And somewhere I'd spent some money, so I didn't have as much cash as I thought I did. So I put some things back, but certainly not the pot, the fish, the beer, or a package of Yakult.

I rode around the back and found a shady curb to sit on, and enjoyed my fish and about 1/2 the beer. I've wondered why this particular fish, corvina/croaker, is to popular in that market but this one was really good. Close to the flavor of a Hawaiian fish called a weke moana, which is my all time favorite.

I had the pot to "up" my laundry game, and my next step was go to to Lowe's which I'd not been to for several months, and the idea was to get a piece of hose that might fit one of my funnels, to use a funnel-and-hose system to get water from the sink in the bathroom to the tall trash can I'm doing my laundry in. But I decided to just get a PVC elbow and a piece of PVC pipe, and try that. I also got more batteries including C's because when the power was out yesterday, I found myself wondering how many C's I had for my emergency radio. Scotch-Brite pads, a Lowe's bucket because why not; it all came to about $41.

I scrounged a few boxes and things, including from Sanmina but this time it was a pretty quick grab and go, and "harvested" a slightly but not too foosty bell pepper from one of my veggie dumpsters. So beef and pepper tonight I think.

I did other things like took some fennel from a fennel plant that grows near the CalTrans yard, and gathered 15 salsify seeds from the plant growing by AAA. And in the complex here, the guys in the welding place had left two tubs out, one with all kinds of electronic stuff and one with some old fans. I took the one full of 'tronics in here, and will list the good stuff on Ebay.

I guess we're going into an economic Depression but what I went through in the 70s really felt like a Depression. I was underweight and undersized, and at one point had one "good" T-shirt and that was borrowed from the gym teacher at high school. This is probably why I never got into "prepping" when I was much younger. You'd think, hey, going through hunger, danger, etc. would make a person a natural prepper.

But I survived a level so low that saving or preparing was futile. Anything you saved would be taken from you. If you got food you ate it right away. If you earned a few dollars to buy a dozen eggs and a can of chili to make a dinner for your group, you bought it and cooked and ate, then and there. Anything you tried to save, would be taken by someone bigger, stronger, smarter, with less morals. So it was literally hand-to-mouth.

I suppose this is how it was in the original hunter-gatherer societies. There was no saving-up or holding back if anyone was hungry. I could not think of saving money behind if my sisters were hungry.

But the way society is set up now, it makes sense to be a prepper. The government even occasionally encourages us to prep, in case there's an earthquake or something.

If I'd only been moderately poor growing up instead of really fucking poor, I'd have kept more of a "pantry" and done more of my own cooking. I should have had bags of flour etc under my bed in my poor college days, but I think I had the mental assumption that any food stores would be stolen by the people who owned the rooming house because they had a key to my room. I subsisted largely on take-out type food I could eat in private in my room and safely store in my stomach.

People talk about their Depression-era parents washing and re-using aluminum foil, I guess I was at the level of learning what leaves can be used instead of aluminum foil, and don't ever buy aluminum foil because it will be stolen. (Banana and ti leaves can be used in the place of aluminum foil in a lot of applications by the way.)

I was just getting ready to do some practice when Ken came by. I thought he might come by tonight because it's not raining, and after writing out my pay check, he and I got to work moving this big ugly "liquid scintillation counter" from where it was, to the back of his truck. Then we dug out a high voltage power supply he wants to use for testing all these ignitron tubes he's gotten in, and we opened it up and had a look inside. I said, "Well, the two main factors with a high voltage power supply will be the fact that capacitors age, and dust and dirt are conductive - but then why am I telling you this? I'm just a technician and you're the engineer!".

I made Ken a cup of tea and we talked about the usual techie stuff. Ken did this really amazing "TED Talk" about water purification systems and I had to bust out laughing, and say he'd better stay healthy and live to be 100 because we're gonna need him.

Ken took off, and I decided I've been missing too many practices, so I've got to practice some trumpet. I got in a pretty intense half hour, doing the Irons exercises I've been doing. And my endurance was a bit better than yesterday's practice. I was just finishing when my phone rang - it was Ken, saying he'd found my package of bike tube repair kits I'd ordered on Amazon. They'd gotten hidden under stuff in his truck. Maybe my crack about his "Archeological filing system" in that thing that make him want to clear it out a bit. I went on Amazon and cancelled my request for a refund.

Practice done, I cooked up some beef with the bell pepper I'd scrounged, and the second course was the rest of the "7th street" artichokes. I seem to be keeping my veggies stocked pretty well, just scrounging and harvesting. I've got salsify buds, mallow leaves, and the makings of a nasturtium salad in the fridge.

Ken had brought by my bottle of Dettol, and also what looked like a scary notice from the IRS. It was that letter from Der Fuehrer people have been getting, and I said I'm glad to get it, to keep as a souvenir. "It's like getting a letter from Nixon, or Hitler himself!" I bubbled.