Lose or lose

 Up a bit before 4. The election is still up in the air but to me it's a case of lose vs. lose. Hopefully Biden wins, but the fact remains that roughly half the country thinks Low-Budget Orange Hitler is a good leader. 

Regardless of the drunkenness and the despair and the uselessness last night, I still did some voice exercises. It's really not hard. Just like slapping the trumpet on my face and doing some lip slurs and bugle calls, it's not hard to do scales, octaves, and make up little things. 

I'm on a 4-8 year plan. In 4 years I'll be able to get the minimum Social Security. If I can hold out for 8 more years here I'll get half again more and there are perks for being over 65. But getting good on voice and uke would be a huge game-changer.

I also have to think about the health of Ken and his wife. They're both pretty old and if anything happens to either one of them, things are going to fall apart here. Which means I'd have to come up with some other situation for myself in short order. That would mean liquidating everything I can and hopping back to Hawaii because I can be homeless here or homeless there, and I'd rather be homeless there. 

I really hope I get at least the minimum 4 years of stability here. I need to work up my voice and uke skills, and I need to work up connections in the Jodo Shinshu community here, because lots of the people here have family in Hawaii. It'll be at least 2 more years before the virus clears out, and then I need to get out among the various ukulele groups and so on, and make connections. 

As an example, one old friend, a doctor, had a cottage he rented out for $200 a month. No this wasn't back in the 80s, this was 2003. Another old friend had a room he rented out for $150 and wished he'd known I was coming by, because he'd have rented it to me. Again, this is 2003. Not terribly long ago. 

I wanted to make an early run to the post office and FedEx but didn't get out of here until a quarter after 6 which is normally fine. But the FedEx had closed at 6 because they're moving to their new office right next door. So I came back with 4 large packages for FexEd. What a drag! Also a few packing things and some cilantro. 

I got back and put things away, found all the things I need to pack which kind of amazed me, put things I'd listed away, and pretty soon Ken was here. He brought by a lot of boxes for shipping, wrote me out my check, and pretty soon we were settled down and talking about the usual techie, history, a little politics, things. He'll take the four boxes to FedEx tomorrow, which is good because I need to ship a ton of stuff. In fact, I told Ken, I'm probably not going to take my check to the bank this week, but will deposit it next week.