One Capacitor

 Up a little before 3. I have to ship a capacitor today. The capacitor, packed, will weigh about 50 lbs. 

I had my coffee and nuts etc., put some stuff away including stacking some heavy boxes up on top of one of our cabinets, going up and down a ladder, and then packed the capacitor. It came out at 55 lbs. I thought about packing a power supply, 20-odd lbs maybe 30 and stacking it on, and decided Nope. 

The ride up to FedEx went fine. I found little in the way of packing materials but got a nice haul of veggies; broccoli, peppers, cilantro from the dumpster by Grill-'Em. 

I got back here, put things away, and used the trailer to take some parts and junk  - not even valuable scrap metal - to the tall dumpster out by the road, and that was that. It's a great system - stash stuff in the trash enclosure then get rid of it when it's convenient. 

I've only spent $120 of my last pay check, so I have a budget of $30 I can spend on stuff, and that's not counting the $20 I have in my wallet. My at-home savings are also just under $200. Something like $197 I think. Saving in small bills is turning out to be easier to do. I'm not sure why I was saving in $100s because they're great for buying something big (like maybe a plane ticket outta here) but not good on a day-to-day basis. 

"You don't usually want a pistol, but when you do, you want it very much" - Mark Twain. That's my idea with the Glock. If things get really bad, I suspect I'll be very glad I got it. If things only continue on their slow shitty sink downward, that Glock might be trade-able for a passport, a plane ticket out, or a lump sum that can be used to start again somewhere. 

As I keep reminding Ken, that's why I practice the trumpet. It's a portable skill and until the virus came along, when I bothered to go out and play the thing I was making really decent money. Sure, the $40 an hour I could make for a couple of prime hours outside Whole Foods isn't scalable to 8 hours a day, but just getting two good hours; that $80 is a lot of money. 

If I were to go trumpet-only, I could try to get into one of those small offices I know of that they let people live in, and I'd go around to a lot of places just like Gabriel The Violinist does. Or I'd find a "Se Renta Un Cuerto" cheap room to rent and do the same. 

This is what I theorize for my "retirement" in fact. Theoretically I'm able to learn Hebrew and to convert, then theoretically I am able to move to Israel and since I don't dare budge until I've got Social Security coming in, I've got that to pay my rent and can do the rest off of busking. Possibly some other things like English teaching. I've got no certifications of course and it turns out they're very hard to get without a college degree, but I could teach as an "entertainer". The whole idea is to be a person who will always find a way. 

When I was a kid in Hawaii, we had a lot of these guys on TV, who'd do magic tricks or any kind of silly routine; some on local shows and many on shows from the mainland. Thinking back about their accents and how long ago WWII was (not that long ago then) I think a lot of these guys - and gals - we people who'd lost it all in the war; who'd been bankers and accountants and landowners and owned factories and so on, like in the book Maus, where Vladek loses everything, and when they came out of the camps; out the other end alive, it wasn't like they could get their stuff back. But fortunately they'd been good at telling jokes, or their parents had made them learn the piano or the violin.