I dunnno, light orange?

 Up at 2. The air's upgraded to the light end of orange now. I couldn't get interested in going anywhere yesterday, with the air so yucky. 

I did, however, do another Windex scrub and water rinse bath and it's a pretty good system. I feel as clean as when I used to stay over at Ken's house once a week and take two showers, and that first of the two was where I'd really get clean and feel wonderful the next day. That's how I feel now. 

For decades my go-to had been Simple Green because it rinses so clean compared to body wash etc., but Windex is a revelation. It doesn't leave any residue to speak of so it's very easy to really scrub with it and then rinse with a little water. Except for my head/hair, I was able to wash up with barely over a liter of water. This becomes more important in the winter when it's a matter of how much water I have to heat. 

It's been a process of noticing that Windex works better than most things for cleaning grubby hands. "That's why I keep a bottle of it in my truck" observed Ken. Then using it for a quickie hair wash but always following that up with rubbing alcohol (not worth it; it uses up too much materials and a hair wash with warm/hot water is so much better) to trying out a scrub with Windex then wipe off system which is OK, then this. It seems a trivial thing but to me it's not. If I were living in a van or something, I now have a way to get clean enough for any job interview. 

My plunger washer thing is a similar step up. It's a bit of trouble, but then I can do laundry at 2AM if I feel like it, and it's really less hassle than loading my laundry up on the bike and riding to/from the laundromat, and dealing with the quirky machines and quirky people. 

I got a good practice in last night too. I've started to work out "Hava Nagila" but not sure I have it right yet. It always goes this way. Learning "We'll Meet Again" I had to watch that final bit of Dr. Strangelove umpteen times and now it's like old hat. 

Apparently Pete Townshend of The Who got that gig by playing "Hava Nagila". He showed up and was told if he could play it he had the position, and he played it, and the rest was history. It seems a lot of Jewish backers were behind a lot of these great bands, like that Epstein guy and The Beatles. 

Ebay sales are back up and I'm busier. This means getting more hardcore about a strict schedule. This is why I got up "earlier" today, because it seems too weird to be packing packages at 4AM. So instead I practiced while watching stuff like a movie I found, "The Little Traitor", an absolute gem of an Israeli film. Those are rare and a real treasure when I find one. So far I've seen "Dear Mr. Waldman", "Ptitm", and one about a teenage kid discovering girls and defying the British. There's tons more if I'll just learn Hebrew. 

But my idea is to find a way to have Saturday completely free, pretty much done, and have Friday as free as possible which would mean on Friday taking off first thing with a load of packages and then having the rest of the day to clean up, neaten up, and be prepared to have something like a Sabbath. That might be tricky with Ebay and Ken's expectations, but I think I can get the both of them used to it. I might have to use some subterfuge like a fictional big trumpet gig and actually take the trumpet with me and go busk here and there, which is NOT kosher if observing a real Shabbos, but it'd be a tool to move toward one. 

I got about 8 things packed, starting with the customers who'd told me they need their things quick, and at 5:30 decided if I don't eat something I'll be too tempted to buy the $8 shrimp appetizer from Ono Hawaiian Kitchen so I scrambled two eggs and ate those and it was a very smart move. $1 worth of eggs saved me buying an $8 thing that really isn't very keto. 

I did my drop offs and found two onions and a tomato on the way back, and unloaded everything and took off again at a quarter after 7, and rode up to H Mart for some shopping. I ended up spending $72-odd, half of it being a package of "cheap" beef short ribs, which I'll trim the meat off of and see how much I got for my money - if it ends up not more than $12 a pound I'm ahead of the game. They don't seem to have small packages of anything there any more. If you're buying beef, you're buying at least 4 pounds at a time. At least it's not as bad as I'm hearing people say on Reddit, $10 a pound for low grade ground beef in the Midwest of all places. 

I got back here with my goodies and took a very full "organic" bucket to the blackberry patch and by now it really was dark. I'd had to put my bike lights on when I came back from H Mart. 

Next I holed up in here, put packing stuff away, and made an onion, tomato, and Romaine lettuce salad with a couple of Hebrew National franks dice up fine, in. That came out well.