Oh, Henry!

 299th day sober. I practiced for maybe 45 minutes last night, felt tired and called it a night. 

Tons of war talk on the radio and online of course. I woke up around 2, and was out of bed and having coffee and aspirin for my headache by 3. 

On the radio, as I was putting my bedding away, they happily explained how Nixon went to China, trying to "understand all he could" for a week, and under the guidance of Henry Kissinger. They gleefully went on to explain that Kissinger was the one who urged Nixon to buddy up to China, and that shortly thereafter he (Kissinger) retired from being an "elder statesman" and became a "business person" (not businessman but "business person" maybe to make it sound slightly less venal?) and urged the US to do things that benefited the Chinese Communist Party and .... Kissinger's business. 

I have to laugh about this, not being averse to the Chinese Communist Party at all. But, the US's stance being very anti-Communist and Kissinger doing things not to further the US's anti-Communist stance but his own profit instead, is comedy gold. And for them to come right out and talk about this, right out in the open, on NPR, is amazing. 

I have no illusions about NPR. I listen to NPR all the time and it's pretty much the soundtrack around here. But I know it's the American Pravda of the American Brezhnev Era. If they say Kissinger was essentially a 2-bit finagler, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. 

The problem with this, they said, is that it not only "strengthened" Kissinger's business, but also the Chinese Communist Party. You know, that thing the US was officially against strengthening. So now we have a powerful China. I hope they're laughing it up over there. In Ukraine the bomb shelters have been turned into brothels, and in the US the gangsters running the place have strengthened China to the detriment of the US to line their own pockets. 

And on Ukraine, they actually breathed a bit about maybe there are some Ukrainians who don't like the US-installed neo-Nazi leadership and maybe Putin has a point about de-Nazification. Then it was right back to the standard line. 

It's been in the low 30's overnight (sounds balmy in Celsius but 32 is freezing in Fahrenheit). When I headed out for downtown it was 60 but I knew it would get a lot colder when the sun was going down and I was right. I dropped off 9 packages at the post office first, then went to the bank and deposited my check and everything added up right. 

Next I went over to Dai Thanh for odds and ends, including some "Canadian style" fresh noodles, like, huh? They're the same type of noodles as come in a fresh ramen kit but probably have some flavor to them or something that makes them like the noodles you'd find in a Chinese or Vietnamese place in ... Canada? 

By the time I went over to the Amazon place to pick up my coffee filters and a few bubble mailers, it really felt like February. The wind was cold and things even looked kind of grey and wintry. There were a fair number of crazed zombies staggering around and yelling and so on, so I really didn't feel like hanging around downtown. 

I rode for home, visiting the little free libraries and leaving off a new 2022 calendar and a bag of OTC medicines in each. I picked up a couple of books. I stopped at Nijiya and got a bunch of stuff plus a "school lunch" bento so when I got back here I ate that. The guys next door had a cookout with beer and nice cooking smells so that was a happy thing to have going on. 

Among other things tonight I looked up things on YouTube about the Yamaha 362H flute I'm pretty certain on buying, and rounded up 20 things to list on Ebay. Eventually my stomach started growling and I cooked up some ramen, and while doing so, I had a thought: How many Japanese companies are making trumpets vs. making flutes? For trumpets there's only one: Yamaha. Jupiter doesn't count because they're Korean. For flutes, I'm learning there are flute companies all over the place but Japan has tons. There's got to be at least 20 of them. 

This pretty much answers my question of which instrument would be better accepted back home in Hawaii which is a pretty heavily Japanese place. And Asian in general. It explains the very flute-heavy music inside 99 Ranch. Buddha played a flute, after all. So if I can attain a decent level of skill I might find that most people I'm around like it more when I play for tips on flute or shakuhachi than on trumpet...