Fires in snow land.

 364th say sober. Rain's coming in and I contemplated staying up all night and making my post office and FedEx run in the morning but I was, for some reason, so tired that while I got a batch of things ready to list on Ebay, I didn't even list anything. Just packed things to get shipped. 

I practiced a bit over an hour on the flute headjoint, the old octave exercise, before bed. 

I woke up at 1:30 or so. Flagstaff, and Prescott, Arizona have large fires. This is unusual as April is a month during which Flagstaff would often be snowed in, and Prescott not far behind. I lived in the Prescott area for a year after losing everything in the 2008 crash, and it's a very right-wing area. I'm glad I got out of there and wasn't around to see it become even more right-wing with the election of the Dump. Who knows what they think of the fire. God's Wrath because of Teh Gayz or something no doubt. 

I packed a few more things and got going at about a quarter to 3. The wind was going the opposite way of what it usually does, so the ride was easy going out. I stopped in to check out a cafe I pass all the time, but am usually too late. The cafe turned out to be the kind where the (hot) waitresses were wearing hardly anything and it's $14 for 7 chicken wings. So I said "Later" and I was outta there. The post office drop-off went fine, and I had to fight the wind on the way back.

I dropped off the FedEx stuff and then took my usual route out of there around the back. I picked out a few good boxes from the dumpster, and found 9 bottles of Coke Zero someone had tossed on the curb - probably the distributor or H Mart, where 1-2 in the box had gotten damaged. I set about rinsing the ones that needed rinsing and some lady bitched at me from the loudspeaker "Loitering by the trash enclosure, you need to leave immediately" she had this sort of defeated tone like Mrs Crabapple from The Simpsons. I finished what I was doing and threw the box away, and took off. 

I checked the medical place and their dumpster was out but no finds. The Hyundai place had a huge box out, full of packing stuff. Random pieces of bubble wrap, various hardnesses of foam, etc. I took the whole thing and put it on the bike trailer which made quite a bit load, but it worked fine. 

I stopped by Tom's and he was in, awake, sober(ish?) etc. We hung out and talked a bit, and a bum walking along on the other side of the street stopped to check a box on the curb, and went on. I walked over and checked the box and it was a 12-pack of Budweiser in cans, missing maybe 2. So I took it and gave it to Tom. 

I really don't know how shitfaced Tom is at any given time. I brought up how he'd talked about moving to New Orleans, and first he said, "I said that?" and then launched into how he's go a friend there and so on. He also thought, since I knew Rob's name was Rob, that I'd met Rob, the retired carpenter he works with now. But no, I just knew the name. So Tom could not remember if he'd introduced us or not. And he's not been away, just "going to bed by 6 or 7". He says he's been up by 6 in the morning, so it makes sense to get to bed early, but that would normally be by 10; I've been there. But going to bed by 6 means work is done (he "clocks out" from his remote job around 5 I'm pretty sure) and it's time to hit the bottle. 

So today's freebees were 9 bottles of Coke Zero for me and 10 cans of beer for Tom. 

I got back here and bagged up the packing stuff in 7 large-ish plastic bags and put the box in the trash enclosure. 

Dinner was two 4-oz. servings of beef I'd frozen at the end of March, with diced raw onion and mustard and mayo. Exactly what I put on a burger minus the bun. Even if the beef cost me $6 it was better than spending a bit over $10 at Five Guys, and the office would only smell like a burger not curry or anything when Ken comes over. 

I had the bathroom cleaned and the office vacuumed when Ken came over. I got my check from him and we hung out for a while; he needed some connectors that he decided to just take off of a couple of plug-ins he had, and I took the fronts off of the plug-ins for him to take home for the connectors, and since the plug-ins were little treasures boxes of ICs in sockets, after Ken left I took the IC's out and put the stripped plug-ins out for the scavengers. It was raining heavily by then. 

It's supposed to rain tomorrow with perhaps some thunder and lightning and hail, then clear up a bit late Friday.  So I've got a day in tomorrow.

I have no idea if busking is going to happen this weekend. I certainly need to get all the experience/earnings in I can, since it's the one thing I can count on being able to do regardless of access to the internet, electricity, banking, etc.