Paint

 Last night, I wanted to accomplish three things: List at least 10 items, give myself a haircut, and get started painting the loft. I got all three of them done, too. 

I listed 15 items, in fact. I vacuumed the back (front because it faces the front of the building?) wall area and got to work, first with a brush because there's gaps and pipes and things, then got to work with thise cute little mini-roller I'd bought years ago when I got the paint, and which turns out to work really well. So I got the first coat down on the first strip of the loft and that's how it will go, in strips while I move things around. 

Then the haircut and I've just got to say, if you don't mind cutting our hair really short, it's best to not even use those plastic "shoes" that come with clippers. I can adjust the length of cut with a little lever on the side of my clippers so I can do some shaping and without any "shoe" the clippers cut hair like butter. It's frankly a joy to do. Did that, shaved my neckline, and bada-bing I was done. 

By then it was almost noon and I really needed sleep so I slept until 4 when I woke up again. I got a long letter from Pat, a friend back in Hawaii. He's living in some kind of a shipping container house on a quarter-acre on the Big Island. This seems really strange, because back when I knew him, the rumor was he was just passing time* until he'd get a big inheritance of a million or more dollars. 

*This was considered to explain why he was such a lackadaisical student intern tech, even more so than the other techs. Meanwhile I took the job as a job and outworked all the other techs which frankly wasn't hard, and eventually a casual observer might be excused for thinking I was on the regular payroll as a junior engineer.

I actually thought Pat was a transplant but apparently he grew up in Hawaii just like I did. It sounds like he grew up solidly middle-class rather than middle-class falling into deep poverty, but we know the same beaches on the windward side of Oahu so that alone forms a strong bond. 

I left at the usual time, did my drop-offs at the post office, and stopped at H Mart. I got a little package of Swiss cheese for $4 and looked at the mushrooms; those really nice ones I'd gotten before are fresh shiitake so no wonder they're so good. Around back, in the "Organic Dumpster" there was quite a "salad" and I took celery, long curly peppers, and more shiitake mushrooms. 

There was nothing at the EMT training place. Oh, well. I stopped by Tom's to drop off the Nichi Bei newspaper which has a guide to all the Obon festivals and we hung out and talked. I told him all about "The Saga Of Mike", which he'd never heard, about a guy named, you guessed it, Mike, who lived at the rural place I did and that Tom's visited a ton. Gossip, gossip, gossip, it can be so much fun... in the end Mike hung himself so it doesn't matter anyway. 

I checked the bountiful dumpster and this time it was headphones, so I took a bunch of headphones of two different types and a couple of other gadgets. It's always something different there.