Not a giant sucking sound

 I woke up at 4. I'd done so much last night that I'd drank a fair amount to get to sleep then woke up at something like 1, decided I could shut my eyes a little more, then it was 4. I wanted to check my bank account balance before 5, when people were at the bank. 

So I got dressed and didn't even bother to put my bedding away, and got going. I chewed some gum along the way to not have awful breath (dinner had been sardines with onions and Parmesan cheese) and got over to the ATM and was able to check my balance. It checks out. Either I hadn't counted something, hadn't counted something and Amazon had taken out the $120 or so for Prime, or both. And I remember a while back my account showing about $100 more than it should have and I don't remember freaking out then. If my card had been "skimmed" or scammed somehow, I suspect there'd be Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" (or maybe a very small one) as my account was drained. In which case it'd be time to hit the panic button and report my card as lost and disavow all transactions after a certain time. And probably get it resolved. 

But all seems OK. My card expires after this month but Ken says one of the pieces of mail for me at the house is "from back east" so that's probably a new one. 

After that, I went over to CVS and got a flu shot. The poor lady taking care of everyone, a little Vietnamese lady with a squeaky voice, was in a terrible hurry and after some paperwork and waiting, she was ready to shoot me up. "I hope you're not in a hurry when you're doing the shot!" I joked. "Oh, no, I never hurry! It will never hurt when I do the shot!" she replied. She jabbed it in there good and I felt blood run down my arm, which she wiped up. "You have good blood! Never get a stroke!" she exclaimed. She put a bandage on and massaged the area, and I sat for a bit putting pressure on it then it seemed OK. 

I got a few things but it wasn't enough to use the $5 off on $20 card I was given, but they let me keep that card for later. So I've done just what they said on the radio to do: got a flu shot. 

I went over to the Amazon hub and picked up the shofar. No fancy packaging, just thrown in an Amazon bubble mailer. I went across the street to 7-11 for some chicken wings and beer. "No beer!" I was told. "Our mother doesn't like it!". This is probably a good thing because that 7-11 is an attractive place for bums and it'd be much worse with beer in the picture. 

So I took my chicken wings and rode to TAK market which turned out to be Kelley's Liquors. They have every weird kind of fruit flavored gop you can imagine, but I finally found a can of Lagunitas' "Sumpin' Easy" which is very close to their standard IPA and has another advantage - from any distance, the can looks just like a can of Arizona iced tea. Perfect for drinking in the park. 

I rode over to the park and ate my chicken wings and drank my beer, and watched some people do all kinds of really interesting exercises, like sprint forward then "sprint" back, etc. I thought maybe it was football drills so when one guy passed me going to his car and back, I asked what the exercises were. They are for judo, it turns out, and he's from Maui. I said one of my sisters is married to a police chief on Maui but actually lives on Kaua'i'. What impressed me about the exercises is, they can all be done anywhere, even here in the shop. 

Then I came back here. I'd picked up a beautiful cabbage someone had left out. There was two cabbages and some apples and limes and some cans of stuff like chicken, so I just took a cabbage. 

That beef I got yesterday turned out not to be a deal at all. By the time I'd trimmed it and packaged it, it came out to something like $15 a pound, plus there's the time involved trimming it. I about a pound of fat and gunk I put out for the birds, and the bones went into the blackberry patch. Feh. If I'd timed things a little bit better today, I could have stopped by Nijiya and gotten some beef all cut up and ready to weigh into 4-oz portions today. I think the way the Koreans would use the beef I got would be to use it in a soup or stew, where every last bit of fat etc is boiled off of it and used. Then throw the bones to the dog. 

After getting back here and putting stuff away including my bedding, I got the shofar out and tried it out. It's ... about as bad as you'd expect a shofar bought sight unseen would be. I'm uncertain whether to return it, and already have it ready to return in a box with the QR code Amazon gave me on it, or keep it and fix it up. It was supposed to be 16" to 18" in size and is barely 15". Fixing it up will mean taking maybe as much as another inch off. And the exterior is crudely sanded down, which I really don't like. But on the other hand, it probably is really from Israel, and how soon am I going to get to a local Judaica store to get one that's "right" and probably pay 2X as much? 

I had a couple of cold hot dogs with an interesting sauce, half and half mustard and Kewpie mayo, which was pretty good. Then I cleaned the bathroom thoroughly, vacuumed the shop, cleaned the fan because it gets dirty after even a week, and then decided to snip out the center of the front "cage" around the fan so I could get in there and clean the blades, and it works better too. 

Ken came over at the expected time, brought some packing stuff and stuff to sell, we moved some things around, and sat and talked a bit. I gave him the rent bill for September and I got my pay check, a form to request a mail-in ballot, and my new debit card. 

Dinner was beef with cabbage, just a couple leaves off of the head of cabbage I'd found. I really like cabbage. 

I did a practice while watching some documentary on YouTube then packed all the things that were showing up "overdue" in red like they're library books. If I'm up in time which I should be, I'll pack some more.