I had to be at the Berger Auditorium for my 3:45 appointment and left here at 3:30. There was a long line everyone started with, and about halfway along we were given papers to fill out and pens, and I had everything all in order on a clipboard so they were impressed with me. We shuffled along, and the line moved pretty well actually, and soon were inside the building where we went through all kinds of twisty passages and finally to a large room where we were sent to this or that desk to get vaccinated. That all went well and the shot didn't hurt much at all. I also got an appointment card for my 2nd shot on May 10th I think.
There was an area for people to sit, officially for 15 minutes, in case they were going to have a reaction but I probably only sat around for 5 and figured I was fine, and left.
I came right back here and gathered up the packages I'd packed including some that should have gone out on Friday, and dropped those off at the post office. On the way I'd stopped at Fry's to see how they were doing and found out they had a lot of bubble mailers for sale, the "small" ones being $15 for 100 of them and of a size I'd call medium or even large. I told the guy I'd be back.
After the post office I stopped by a place called California Fish Grill I'd been riding by for months and got fish and chips. It was pretty good and only $11. There was so much there that I couldn't finish it, not even all the fish. So I bagged what I couldn't finish for the birds.
I went into H Mart and got my sake and odds and ends, including some sashimi for later, and rode back here with that stuff, put it away, hooked up the bike trailer, grabbed some cash in case their credit card system is acting like it generally does, and rode over to Fry's. I picked out 4 sealed boxes of "small" bubble mailers which I figured would be $60 and tax, but the guy only charged me a bit under $50. So I guess you get a discount when you buy 400 of something from Fry's...
I loaded them onto the bike in a tall stack and bungee'd it down and took off, and the whole bike trailer fell over! I dunno if a wheel caught on something or I took off too fast or if a weird wind gust got me, but the trailer on its load were on their side and a black guy in the parking lot yelled out, "Good Job!" which was pretty funny. I got it all set up again and rode very cautiously now, and he called out again asking what I'm buying and I said bubble mailers, you know, mailing envelopes.
I rode at least as carefully as when I was carrying loads of lab glass. I got back here OK, then gathered up some trash and took it on the trailer to the FedEx dumpster and pulled out a nice HP monitor box, then stopped here in the complex at the HVAC place and got a nice huge Mitsubishi air conditioner box. That will be to put on the floor under my futon; I use a large cardboard box for this purpose and when it gets "tired" I replace it.
In global warming news, I saw bindweed flowering at the Berger Auditorium and thought, WTF, it's April! I thought, maybe it's a localized condition, but nope, saw it flowering by the post office too. It was a late-summer going into autumn marker when I lived in Gilroy, 35 miles south of here. I'm late to the game for picking brassica buds but geez, flowering bindweed, now? Oh and CalTrans has trimmed back the blackberries up the road here although I spotted some other happy looking blackberry plants nearby and the post office seems to have completely eliminated the purslane they had growing on their bank by the sidewalk, it almost makes me want to buy some purslane seeds and plant them around.
At least Hawaii is lazy and neglectful, and the same broken traffic light control box that I personally saw destroyed from a few feet away in the mid-80s was still destroyed, with some temporary thing sitting on top, in 2003 when I was last back home. And there are all sorts of plants growing everywhere and the possibilities for guerrilla gardening are rife there.
I didn't practice last night other than a few breathing exercises and I watched a bunch of "Bush Tucker Guy" on YouTube, he's an Australian who was into finding wild foods.... it made me homesick for things I did as a kid like how to get jelly out of a banana flower, and taught me new things like chewing a green casaurina cone which never occurred to me to stave off thirst, we just took a few drinks out of valley streams.
Around midnight, I finally got around to putting my newly purchased boxes of bubble mailers upstairs in the loft, and decided to take my old under-futon cardboard box and put it over where I'd gotten the new one, on the stack there, and also get rid of a box that was from sports equipment or something, large and long and not a size I need and only single-wall so nothing special. I was walking back from the first operation when a bum rode up next to where the long box was sitting and as I got my pepper spray out and walked right up alongside the building so the bum would have to make more effort to get at me, he blargled something angry at me in Bum, a language I am not at all conversant in, and took off with the long box - saved me some work!
Really, going out after dark around here, even just in the parking lot right outside, and expecting no bums to come traveling through is sort of like setting up to have a picnic in the park and expecting no ants. They're out there, due to meth they don't sleep for days, and sometimes they treasure (to me) utterly worthless boxes. Maybe he's gonna burn it for fuel.
In the Army we had a gal named Wilda something, she was Black and I think came from some little speck-on-the-map town as the way she spoke English was ... hard to understand. It was kind of the old joke about the ACcent on the wrong sylABLE. We used to joke around and me and a guy had a routine where we'd pick up a filter for one of the generators and call it a "voice filter" and speak clearly through it then move it away and then talk like her. But I could understand her if I listened a bit. But the bums around here; I can't understand 'em at all. I suppose it's like a speaker of Received Pronunciation or "BBC English" trying to understand Cockney slang with a bit of Gypsy cant thrown in.
In any case, unlike picnic ants, bums will stab a person for $2 so it's best to avoid. I should have gone out earlier and taken more than one weapon with me.
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