A Potemkin Pot

 179th day sober. I got my practice in last night, and am surely improving. Still on open strings, but still pretty fun to do while watching some documentary on YouTube. I've been finishing up my practices with the kind of "long bow" exercises my teacher was so big on when I was taking those few lessons, long ago. 

I was up around 3:30 and had coffee etc. packed a few things which turned out to be surprisingly big in that they took surprisingly big boxes to pack well, and did my post office and FedEx run. It was actually kind of warm, and I wonder if I'll have to get the hat and gloves out at all this winter. 

I picked up a ton of office break room type packets of pills from the medical place and some AED pads to put on Ebay etc., and a few manuals to list also. 

I'd had the trumpet soaking in a Dawn solution for days, and scrubbed the parts and put it, in parts, upstairs to dry. Then I cleaned the bathroom; the toilet's not flushing at all so it's a Potemkin pot. It looks all fine and well but it doesn't work. It's OK in a way, I can whiz in this container I keep for reasons like that then empty that into the sink and rinse it, and well, I have systems for everything. But I hope whatever's wrong with the plumbing resolves itself somehow. That's sort of the game around here. The toilet's always acting up and it's up to me to let someone else complain about the system so I'm not the complainer. 

Ken came by as I was scrubbing the sink, and loaded me up with a ton of stuff to list. Then I fixed him tea and we talked while I went through the pills, sorting out the decongestant ones "we eat like candy" for Ken and his family. I mean, there are adhesive bandages and cough drops and all kinds of goodies in there, even a little bag of Cheez-Its which Ken got as he needed something starchy/sugary for his blood sugar. When he was done with those, I fixed him up with some haw flakes. 

He didn't think the haw flakes tasted like much, and I explained that I liked them because of the day I was really hungry, had had nothing to eat and was with my mother downtown and all we could afford was this little package of haw flakes that was like 29c, and how those things really saved my day. I went on to say it's my impression that a lot of things in the Asian stores are like that, they don't taste that great but people are nostalgic for them; foods that got them through hard times. I mentioned eating sweet potato leaves as a kid and what a great discovery they were. Everyone thought they were poisonous so no one considered them food, and that's how I was able to get them. If we tried growing anything in a garden it would all be stolen. But something people thought was poisonous, was accessible to me. That's how you get by in hard times, you eat things that most people won't touch, so you develop these quirky tastes in food. 

I sorted out all the decongestant pills for Ken and put them in two gallon zipper bags, so it was a lot of pills. And I got my check of course.