Now, with real prunes

Up at around 1 then woke up again around 4. I'd been up until at least 4AM taking some microscopes apart, because the parts sell for much more than the complete ones, which we can barely give away. 

After coffee etc. I reluctantly headed for downtown. The air was hazy again and while the sun was out, there were not shadows because there was a heavy layer of smoke in the air. 

My first stop was Nijiya where I got a bento and a can of beer and $40 cash back. I ate and drank over at the benches, and saved the rice for "my" birds here. 

Next was to park the bike at Whole Foods, and I walked down to the drug store. Printer paper has gone up in price everywhere it seems, and their cheapest seems to be about $7. Most types they had were over $10. I looked at the fruit juices and got a 2-liter bottle of Sunsweet prune juice because how can I be making what's often called "pruno" without doing some that's got actual prunes in it? 

I also picked out a "handle" of the cheapest vodka which isn't as nasty as that Chinese stuff, and who knows what the cashier thought I was going to do with a prune juice and vodka, but it came to less than $20 for both. 

I found two good books in the blessing boxes; one of Don Delillo short stories and one called "Riding The Yellow Trolley Car" about which a reviewer says, "Imagine yourself in a large, gaily festoooned trolley car, yellow on the outside, bulging on the inside with people you figured you would never get to know in your lifetime - people like Louis Armstrong, Robert Penn Warren, Frank Sinatra, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jiggs and Maggie, Diane Sawyer, Paul McCartney, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett. Well, here you are, with Mr. Kennedy as your concerned host, taking you down the aisle of the trolley car and introducing you, one at a time, to those figures he has met or written about over the past forty years: a master of fiction showing you how non-fiction can become a high art form, indeed. With the author of Ironweed and Very Old Bones, and his other fable Albany sagas, you are in very good hands."

I swung by the Amazon hub and picked up two things I'd ordered; some champagne yeast and a "rescue" knife which is something I've wanted for a while. I found exactly one leftover bubble mailer where I usually get several, so it's good I found all those small boxes yesterday. 

It was pretty peaceful downtown and deader than I've ever seen it. People know the virus numbers are up, then there's this smoke. So it was very quiet. I saw a few "classic" cars driving around, and odd things like people sitting in chairs out on their yard in front of their buildings. It was so peaceful and quiet that even the crazies and various zombies weren't out on the street. 

So on the ride home I did something I do more and more: Geeking out on the weird architecture around here. There are some of the oddest-looking houses. It's not just the Victorian beauties with tall "witch hat" towers, although some of those look like they were designed under the influence of absinthe; it's some of the other weird constructions I see around here. Is a certain house, that looks like a combination of Old California Spanish and Frankl Lloyd Wright, exactly that, or some weird design built by the original owner? People often used to build their own houses, after all. And there's weird stuff around Japantown, like a house where a lot of trouble was gone through to put this little curved part on the front of the roof, why is this? And there are some truly bizarre little buildings around, tiny little gas stations left over from the 20s maybe. 

I don't regret for a moment giving all that art stuff I had to a homeless guy with mean art chops downtown, but I'm beginning to think it might be kind of fun to take some of the odd stuff around here, take a photo or two of it to use as a reference, then do a painting of it. There are two different guys doing this on the San Francisco sub-reddit and I really like coming across their watercolors of various houses up in The City. 

I stopped at TAK Market and got a beer and a beef stick, and came back here and had beer, the beef stick, (scrounged) radishes, and some pork pate'. 

Later I "racked" my tomato wine since it'd gone completely quiescent, pouring it off into three 1-liter bottles. I tried some and it just tastes like a wine. Nice balance of sweet and tangy, and good potency. Not tomato-y at all. What's nice to know is, for distilling, a popular recipe for beginners is "Birdwatcher's" which uses tomato paste. Dumping in cans of tomato paste is a lot less time-consuming than processing tomatoes.