TAOFLEDERMAUS

Up at a bit after 1.

My attempts to pin my T-shirt neck up with a safety pins were just as much a fail as my attempts with a binder clip, even trying out a large binder clip. I ordered a barber's cape for $10 off of Amazon. I also found and ordered the smaller bike pump, maker name "Lezyne", no wonder I could not think of it... when I get it I'll put the larger one in with my bike stuff as a back-up, and carry the little one. That company makes great pumps. If I'd been able to think of the name, I'd have just ordered one of the small ones at the same time I ordered new bike bags, but I didn't even think about needing a new pump until I was putting things into the top bag on the new bike bags.

I'm going to check the Amazon hub on my way back today to see if the cape's in, but in any case I have another solution: to use one of my woven shirts and button it up to the very top button, which should make it "seal" at the neck and no little pieces of hair go down. 

The blackberries I picked yesterday were delicious, and lots of rinsing took care of the ants and other debris. Dinner was some ground beef from Nijiya and the 2nd bunch of scrounged spinach and garlic, mushrooms, etc. Sad to say, the ground beef just tasted like ... hamburger. I was thinking I could move to a cheaper type of beef but the stuff is really Meh.

I spent too much time watching videos but YouTuber "TAOFLEDERMAUS" who's an experimenter after my own heart. He experiments with bullets and ammo and shooting in general. I've certainly done plenty of the same, trying to come up with exploding pellets using caps etc glued on the front of an airgun pellet and other various schemes. Primer Powered Pellets were probably my most asinine experiment in terms of the expense and hassle for the results. I actually bought a Ruger Single-Six to mess with these, and I found the best .22 ammo to use is the really cheap bulk-pack stuff because the manufacturer knows it's shit so they put in about 2X the normal amount of primer to make sure they'll go bang. Even then they're really lame and stupid. Don't do this.

One experiment I've thought of is to put little ceramic balls into hollow-point pellets and that should make a pellet that will break a tempered glass window even if they're at a fairly low velocity because physics. Maybe I'll suggest that idea to him.

Oh another thing lately: Our Ebay sales are back down in the toilet. I don't know why; we got a neutral from one guy (valid point, I should have wrapped each of the as-is electronic thingies he bought separately) our on-time shipping is good, etc. So I don't think it's a falling down on our part. I thought it might be the shutdown, but places are going back into shutdown yet our sales are awful this week. That leads me to believe the $1200 checks everyone got were some factor. Broke-ass MF's like the majority of the population would have spend them on necessities, but techie types with decent finances may have seen them as permission to buy techie stuff from us. 

But now that I think about it, I think the sudden drop was because this last week was when people had to actually pay their taxes, and they're paying attention to that instead of to our Ebay listings. If that's true, sales will pop right back up.

Two "interesting" things happened when I was riding back here today. First, I was riding along 10th street from Hedding and heard a noise behind me and there was a bum with a bag of cans on a bike behind me so I turned into a parking lot and circled, to get him out ahead of me where I could keep an eye on him. Then I rode along a distance behind him. But the guy kept going slower and slower, until we were both at an actual walking pace. It was kind of funny because he had trouble going that slow with a big bag of cans on his handlebars and kept wobbling. But, he could drop the cans in a flash and jump me so I ducked into this gas station thing where you pay with a card that's used by ambulance drivers and truckers and so on. I figured if I have to make a stand, might as well where there are plenty of cameras and maybe a friendly trucker will pull in. When I came out, the guy was pedaling as normal speed back the way he'd come. Go jump someone else, asshole.

And, closer to here, someone in a small silver or grey car by the freeway off ramp called out something like "Hey, buddy!" at me a couple of times so I turned on the gas  and then ducked through an alley between two buildings, hoping the creep(s) didn't follow me. What did I see coming by Crazy Chrissie in her shitty grey car. Had it been her, and had time to zoom ahead and circle around? I got my pepper spray that shoots further out, and was not subtle about it, and she didn't circle around and I rode back in here and as usual, got in here quick.

I was going to pick some blackberries from the bushes but it's better to be safe than sorry. It may be better to let the bushes "rest" a day anyway.

Actually once I got the bike back in here, I felt safe enough to walk over by the front of the Mr. Softeee and saw that the guy'd put a heavy duty lock on his water spigot, so he indeed had had enough of Crazy Chrissy and her antics. Between that and the regular patrols by the security guard car I don't see a lot of bum activity here lately.