I was up until past 7AM which is just messed up. If it were the Before Times, and I lived in a place where all-night busking was a thing, that might be excusable. Even here, in the Before Times, I used to be up busking by the Old Spaghetti Factory until midnight or even a bit after. That's all gone and done with now.
As it is, it's merely warm, mid-70s, but the wind is really making a ruckus outside. Howling and knocking things around.
I thought I saw a kid with a guitar yesterday, I really did. But as I rode closer I saw it was just a skateboard and I gave him a nod as I rode past.
Among other things, last night I went through the very heavy can of copper pennies I had and saved out the "wheat" pennies, maybe 20 or so, because those are cool. And the rest, I counted out into 8 $1 bags which I could try to sell to a coin shop, maybe. Or it's two yogurt drinks.
I also need to go through my clothes, esp. cold-weather clothes which I just don't seem to need much of these days. I think I wore a hat and gloves maybe 1-2 times last winter, or was it the winter before? I might not have worn them even once this last "winter". So I really only need one fleece pullover, my two basketball-themed long sleeved shirts, and maybe three jackets. My yellow one for visibility when it's barely cool, my orange one for visibility when it's a bit cold, and a black "Marmot" waterproof one that's handy if I have to go out in the rain. I need maybe 2 pairs of sweat pants to go through winter. So there's a lot of stuff that's going to get tossed over the fence at Goodwill, and then I need to take the minimal clothes I'm keeping and get caught up on washing them.
The same sort of thinking goes for books. It's a fun hobby collecting them, but I'm just going to start asking for cash from the used book store, said cash to go into the "get the fuck out of here" fund. Same goes for busking money.
The guns will have to go; almost everything will have to go. I need to get a scanner and scan all my important documents and stick them on the "cloud" and also put them on a few thumb drives or those tiny cards. More than one in case one gets lost I'll still have the others.
My whole plan depends on things holding together for the next few years, well enough that travel to Hawaii is still possible, and it'd be nice if things held together long enough after that that I might have a year or three to relax, even if half-starved and homeless, being back home where my memories are before I die in whatever ideological or climate wars come.
During the day I listened to KPFA instead of NPR, to get away from the alternating insurrection trials and fundraising. KPFA had an interesting discussion of black fatherhood. A guy said that when he was out with his kids, doing daddy stuff, it seemed to actually piss off some white people. Like he wasn't obeying the role he's supposed to, that of a deadbeat dad. It was like, if a black father could be a good father, then that means maybe blacks are not inferior, and that incites anger and fear. I can say that whites just about have the monopoly on being deadbeat dads and it's yet another case of projection. Plus, black culture has tons of aunts and uncles and tons of family, biological and not, while whites are completely atomized, so it's no wonder whites are looking over their shoulders, nervously.
That's a stunning difference between how things are done here on the mainland and back in Hawaii. In Hawaii it's all about family and connections, people you get to know and you don't just meet them once and never see them again; you meet them, say, at the local fishing store because you're both into fishing, and you have *some* connection with that person forever. It was kind of like that when I lived in "the rurals" here but the problem here is, 99% of the white people here in "the rurals" are right-wing nutcases once you scratch below the surface.
I went out at 8, not yet zombie hours and still light, found a few computers odds and ends like a fan, drives, and a couple of RAM sticks, and most notably, from the veggie dumpster a couple of peppers and a bunch of those huge "portobello" mushrooms that cost a lot in the market.
In other more cheerful news, someone on r/flute on Reddit mentioned buying a flute, which turns out to be an Aulos "Uta" Japanese flute called a shinobue, and while they argued over whether it's a "real" flute (that part seems to have been snipped out) I looked it up and ... now I want one. Aulos is the brand of that recorder I spent what little money I had on, back in 1979 or so, and tooted away faithfully every afternoon, doing scales and trying to do some songs out of a book I got that was probably too advanced for me - recorder method books were rare. But the reviews are decent and I have a soft spot for that maker and it's only about $30 delivered off of Amazon. So that will be my silly purchase out of my next pay check.
A shinobue is a side-blown flute, like the Western flute a tube that's closed at one end which is a relatively rare feature. And by the demo on the Mejiro site, they sound decent. In the anime "Nitaboh" the kid plays a shinobue when his shamisen is down for repairs. Also Robert, a guy who used to be a fixture in Japantown at various festivals, dresses as a wandering samurai or something and plays a bamboo shinobue. So if I don't take mine with me to Hawaii I can always hand it off to him because the last I heard, his bamboo one broke.
Maybe I'll see Robert at this next Obon festival. I'll jump in and dance if I remember the steps which I probably do, and Pokemon Ondo is too much fun to not do. And the one where you do jun-ken-po. I plan to spend a fair amount of money on food and things, whatever's out there.
I've not been practicing enough although I have been doing octave exercises fairly often, and I am, when I get my embouchure just right, able to do them pretty long. So much of flute is breath. People say trumpet is, but I think you can be minor-league at breathing and do all right on the trumpet, as long as you can do high pressure. But flute is real breathing.
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