Friday, December 11, 2020

Up and at 'em

 I didn't go to bed until at least 4, maybe 5. I woke up at 9, and was actually out the door with the bike trailer loaded with packages at a quarter after 9. 

The drop-offs went fine but it's exactly the wrong time to find packing materials. On the way back I stopped at the food truck in the tool place's parking lot and had chicken wings. 

I got back and put the trailer away but decided to keep wearing my orange reflective vest that I had on over my orange jacket because I could feel it actually getting colder instead of warmer and the vest is a little extra layer for warmth, plus the visibility issue. 

I rode over to the Amazon Hub (checked both little free libraries on the way and they're essentially empty) and got my latest book, "Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor Frankl so I have a nice book to read on the weekend. And I picked up some bubble mailers. One guy who works there, Richard, says he can save some aside for me so I'll see how that goes. 

I stopped at Nijiya on the way back and got some groceries, a bento, couple bottles of sake, and a 12-oz can of "Echigo Red Ale 5% alcohol" to go with the bento. I went over to the steps of the Issei building to eat and discovered I was shaky. I drank half of the beer and started in on the bento and discovered I really wasn't hungry. So I packaged it up again, finished the beer, and came back here. I checked the time and it was a quarter after noon so all of this took me 3 hours. 

This is the proper old-person way of doing things. Get out there early, check off all your errands, then come home and you can take it easy. This is why the special hours for old people in stores are always early ones because the old people are always down for shopping at 7 or 8 in the morning. I think it's based on only having a few hours at full energy and then you  get lethargic and doing things becomes a slog like it was for me packing boxes yesterday. 

I have a theory on why "Fat Orange and Stupid" is trying to stage a coup. It's not because he can, but it's wonderful for squeezing money out of his followers. And he desperately needs to do that because he owes some pretty nasty mobsters a lot of money. So they've told him he'd better pay them off or he might get polonium in his tea. He can't just sell off properties because it's too obvious, they may take too long to sell, and he may not actually have much equity in them. So this is his way of raising money quickly in the time window he has, which is about a month. 

When I got back here I put things, including the bento, away and got the other 10 Ebay things from last night listed. I usually just dash through them and Ken's been nagging me for a while to manually do the word-wrapping because Ebay isn't. And I kept telling him I do, and it turns out that even if I manually word-wrap when writing the item description, well, I checked one today and Ebay takes the carriage returns right out again and there was my description, running right off the right side of my screen, so I couldn't see some important info. 

However Ebay has a field where you can talk about the item's condition, and increasingly I've been putting more of the info I put in the item description in there because it's right up top near the price etc. The customer can click on that, it word-wraps fine, and it turns out Ebay allows enough characters in that thing to write a novella. This is great, actually, because I can be a lot wordier without worry, then put something short into the description field. I just feel kind of sheepish for not checking up on how the listings really looked for so long. 

Then I got the bento out of the fridge and ate it. It was my favorite one, that I think of as a school lunch bento because it's got everything. From left to right it's got a piece of pickled daikon for afters, 3 pieces of tomago, a sausage, two onigiri one with pickled seaweed and one with cooked salmon, a carrot, two pieces of chicken kara-age, and a piece of broccoli. 

Then I hung out with Andy Bumatai and the Hamajang Gang for an hour or so on YouTube and that's always fun. Andy had done this thing where he took a video of Riverdance (I think it's called) which is a long line of twitchy Irish people (I think) who do this stomping kind of dance all in sync. And synced up raggae music with it. It's hilarious. And I don't mean laid-back raggae but the stuff with the echo effects etc. He also mentioned doing one with an Obon dance and I said I really wanted to see that one - it's not as funny but it's very wholesome seeing 3-4 generations all dancing Obon together. 

After Andy signed off, I somehow came upon this Only In Japan dude, I think his name is John Daub, doing a live stream where he's out on a fishing boat, the kind where a handful of people pay and in the skipper takes them out fishing. This was in a really beautiful area in Japan so the scenery was top-rate. It was neat to see just for that. 

But they couldn't catch fish! And the jokes and banter about all kinds of fishing stuff and Spongebob and all that were pretty hilarious. Mr. Daub was a really good sport but mentioned he was hungry - the original plan was to catch fish and eat them on the boat. They finally caught a little one, and a slightly less little one, and then it was revealed there were "consolation fish" kept in a sort of bait tub built into the boat, and I mentioned a few were floating upside down. So, they could settle down and cook the consolation fish and the skipper probably had some sushi rice and stuff ready to pull out also - as a good host would - but it was decided they'd fish some more. 

Jokes abounded about going to a kombini (convenience store) or having a can of tuna handy and I mentioned Nissui canned mackerel and finally they caught a fugu. Someone said they ought to eat the fugu and at that point Mr. Daub kind of lost it and got all mad that someone would suggest that (my contribution was that they need to go to Kimagure Cook's place since he's fugu licensed) and Mr. Daub stayed angry which kind of made things funnier and I put the term "hangry" in to see if anyone caught on. 

It was all more involved than that, with the commenters. I said there's no beginner's luck in fishing and it's generally very demoralizing at first and you have to just keep going and get a feel for it and we joked about the jumping Asian carp and catching old boots and every fishing joke and trope under the sun. Live streams can be fun. 

Somewhere along here it started to rain, hard. I'd known rain was coming in which was one reason for my early launch out of here, but I was expecting drizzle, Instead, the area's gotten two good washings down, the 2nd one ongoing as I type.


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