Brr-Brr-Brr-Brr-Brr!

 I listed 20 things on Ebay last night but more importantly, I did more voice exercises. Some of them are kind of silly, but I'm sure they're all good. I'm subscribed to "Jacobs Vocal Academy" on YouTube and they just have tons of "warmups" and "workouts" and they seem to be really pushing this sort of straw gadget you hum through that provides varying degrees of backpressure. Hah! Been there, done that, with the trumpet. 

I actually was up around 3, and was able to get right over to the bank for my 4:30 appointment, leaving here just a few minutes before 4, and getting there 10 minutes early. I had the pepper spray for Kate, and she was really happy since she's not been able to get any. She was really surprised that I'd not just said I'd get it and then flaked, but actually gone and gotten it. So that was nice. 

I went over to Whole Foods and got a couple types of cheese and other odds and ends, and a beer in the colorful can that's hard to tell from iced tea. 

Then I went over to the Amazon hub and got my little package of pencil leads and a bunch of bubble mailers, and had plenty of time to get over to Nijiya where I got a bunch more things and a bento to go along with my beer. I got this big "Tastes of Autumn" one which was a real treat but really larger than I needed. I had my bento and beer on the steps of the Issei building which is a nice place to eat. I'm back away from the sidewalk, and no one seems to go in or out of the building when I'm there. It's nice and peaceful. 

The singers were at it again, across the street so when I was done eating I went over there to see. It's an older couple, he's quite good, she, not so much. They were singing some Japanese  thing where they took turns. It was all pretty cool; they could have been singers in vaudeville or something long ago. He sounded operatic, actually. They wanted me to sing something and I tried Sweeping The Clouds Away but between the beer, having just eaten, and getting a bit emotional for some reason, it sounded rather awful. 

That bugged me quite a bit, but it just means I need to practice every day and work hard. I'm only very early into this. I got back here and did a couple of things like de-scale my kettle and de-ice my freezer. I did that last the quick way by setting up my fan on a ladder to blow air in there which melted the ice really fast as opposed to just letting it sit, unplugged, with the door open. There was a lot of ice in there.

When I was downtown I was surprised how un-busy it was. Maybe it's because I was out fairly early (it still was before 7 when I got back here) but Whole Foods wasn't very busy, there were no charity booths out front, only one of the Gypsy women with a drugged out kid and a sign "TWO LOST KIDS" wait a minute, did she drug two to death? What gives here? Not many zombies around although it's downtown so there are always zombies. By and large, it was pleasant to be out and around today. 

When this shutdown started I'd done things like take my trumpet and go play in the park where I'm far away from people but the sound does carry. And I went to play at some of the protests. And I went around playing "We'll Meet Again" when there was a big to-do about that tune. And I'd played Taps on the steps of the 1930s post office right at the time there were supposed to be trumpeters playing it all across the country. But since it's a trumpet, it's always been a big to-do. It's kind of hard to sit back and coast with a trumpet. 

But if I can get my voice into shape and then get a uke and learn some basic chords so I can play simple things like "You Are My Sunshine" and Waltzing Mathilda" and so on, I can see it being really rather fun to spend an afternoon just playing where I'm not too close to people but I'm out in the air and the trees etc. And that gets right back to when I was a little kid. I used to take my ukulele to the beach, and it's a fairly common thing for people to have a few ukes around when they're getting together in the park or whatever. It's pretty much where all those local musicians and comedians got started. 

And that's pretty much what I have in mind for my retirement in Hawaii. To go around to various places and just play and sing, and if someone tosses some dollars that's OK and if they don't that's OK too. I've learned so much about living cheaply that I could pretty much allocate $0 out of my Social Security for food and eat well. That might mean being paid $20 to play and sing at a certain fruit stand in Chinatown and get to take home a bag of fruit, or busking in Waikiki, or it might mean picking Ni'ihau shells. 

When I tried moving back in 2003 it did not go well. First, I needed to go through a financial crash to get out from under huge debts I had. I needed to fall off of the grid almost completely, and I was not prepared to do that. 2008 did that for me. I considered going back to Hawaii then, but told my older sister I'd probably be homeless, and she said, "Well, if you choose to be homeless"... and I tried to convey to her that it's quite often not a choice. I sold her a stunningly beautiful Kamaka ukulele I'd gotten (funny story) but stayed here on the mainland. In 2008 retirement age seemed very far off. 

(OK the funny story: I'd gone to Gryphon Strings in Palo Alto to buy a plain Kamaka, and had one lined up; I think I'd put a down payment on it or something. When I went to pick it up I wanted to see if they had any others of that size, Concert, with a better "action" and the guy, a different guy than the guy I'd dealt with initially, went in back and pulled out this beauty, and charged me the same as for the plain one.)

I've maintained since then that Hawaii can be a hard place to live when you're working age, but as a place to retire it can be pretty good. There are lower-priced places to live, various programs, even Section 8. In fact, the apartment right below the one I had in 2003 was Section 8, being rented to a young haole lady with a white Persian cat, and I think she was going to pay something like $250 a month. She was on disability for some reason. 

Such wandering thoughts ... I just did another unsuccessful search for a song my father wanted me to learn, it went "What's a nice girl like you, doing in a place like this?" and I guess it's about some low-class place where "the potato chips are soggy and they're watering the beer". 5-year-old me wondered at the idea of potato chips so soggy that their merely being close to the beer, on the table I guess, would make the beer get watery. I'm sure it's a song Dad sang with friends at Dartmouth college and I'd have to find some old Dartmouth'ians and see if they recognize the tune. But I guess he really got a kick out of my singing because we sure sang a lot. 

And I found it. So, Sammy Davis Jr. sang this in 1966, Dad would have been teaching it to me in 1968 or so... it's the tune all right, and there's even the line about the potato chips and the beer. Maybe Mr. Davis jazzed up a college drinking song? Or maybe Dad had even wider listening tastes than I thought.