The big news right now is, 30,000 tech jobs gone, and counting. The numbers will get bigger, of course. Tech has proven to be a very bad field to go into, aside for a tiny upper crust of talented and mostly lucky people. It's proven to be a worse career gamble than art or music, because at least in art or music you can set up on the sidewalk and make a decent living.
A decent living these days means enough to pay for a storage unit, daily food, and to replace one's tent and sleeping bag occasionally when the homeless camp you're in gets "swept".
I listed 20 things last night, and got an hour's practice in on the shinobue. It's a simple matter of developing breath strength, and learning the "feel" of going to the higher octave which I'm learning is all about that feel. My bad habit is tensing up like a trumpet player.
I really wish, when I'd heard that quite good flute player being hassled at San Pedro Square, I'd gone and hung out with the guy, maybe bought him dinner, heard his story.
I slept until 3, then went back to sleep and had what I call a "worry dream" where it's made up of things I worry about. In the dream, my bike got stolen and utterly stripped. The frame wasn't even worth keeping.
On the light rail the other day, a young guy got on with a folding bike that looked pretty decent, a Durban "Metro" and the guy looked like a worker rather than a bum, so I told him it was a neat bike and asked how much it had cost. "I got it for $50 from a guy". OK then. It turns out they cost about $400 new and can be bought from Amazon.
Considering I'm leaving in 2 years, is spending $400 on a folding bike worth it? It would make a nice 2nd bike that I'd actually have room to store. I could even buy a bracket for my Burley trailer and pull the trailer with it. And it would be easy to take on the train up to the city and explore around. And it uses 20-inch tires which are a really common size and easy to get.
Once I'm back in Hawaii I'd not mind spending on a nice folding bike, even one of the expensive $1000+ ones, because I could buy a piece of carpet runner to set it down on and keep it in the room I'll rent. A folding bike could be a life-changer. Since I'd enjoy riding all the way around the island, Kaena Point included, on any bike, a folder could work fine too.
As for my Catastrophic Flat, a can of what we motorcyclists used to call "Spray And Pray" could have gotten me right back on the road. But a folding bike could probably be taken on DaBus to get home from something like that. It'd certainly not be a problem for a cab.
So a $400 folding bike would be $200/year for the extra quality of life a folding bike could give me. That might be worth it. I'll have to think about this some more.
As soon as the sun got low today the zombies came out. First a zombess on what looked like an electric bike with the electric stuff stripped off. Just looking around... Then some zombies milling around the now closed and locked dumpster that looked like it was just full of cardboard boxes anyway. Maybe one of them has learned to pick locks. They didn't dig for long, though, and they all went back to Crack Alley, AKA the stretch of Rogers Avenue across from the cement plant.
Then a zombie on a bike towing a shopping cart by a rope - the shopping cart swung back and forth across a wide arc but the zombie didn't seem to mind - or notice - a bit.
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