After Ken left last night, I actually felt tired and after eating something, I did random chores around here and got down to some flute practice. I found some watchable things on YouTube, and put in over an hour, working from about the beginning in the Wye book because of how I've not been practicing.
My tone sounds better, I think. I'm not sure if it's special exercises like all those octaves or just that I've been playing at all. The more time blowing into a flute, the better.
I went to bed at 5AM and woke up around 2, cleaned up a bit and was out of here a bit past 3. I dumped some trash and visited the bank ... my yearly Amazon Prime fee has come out of my account so while I was saving about $97 over the week, $150-odd came out. It could be worse!
I rode over to knock around Willow Glen, the last refuge of buskers. I saw a violinist but I think he was just ready to take off, because when I doubled back he was gone. Cranky Guitarist was there, playing away, bits of "Roundabout" by Yes and other odds and ends. A loud band was setting up, with drums and I thought maybe a flute player so I locked my bike up and walked over, but it turns out the flute sound was just "My synth" the guy said, gesturing toward the DX-7 he had there.
I went into BevMo thinking I'd try to track down a liquor called "Centerba" which Ken occasionally mentions, that has 100 herbs and "smells just like a freshly mowed lawn". It turns out they don't stock it, plus it's pretty expensive. I was figuring I might get a bottle of it for Ken and family for Christmas. A better choice, I think, is to get them a bottle of Tuaca, which is this weird super-aromatic stuff that a food writer might say "dances on the tongue". As opposed to Ken drinking his grass clippings and everyone else going, "ewww". The family could have a rollicking night on Tuaca and the bottle not last the night but they'll have fun and remember it.
I did, however, find something really great. I'd been wishing for years they made a non-alcoholic Guinness, and it turns out they do. I got a 4-pack of tall cans of that, and I can say that it's excellent. I also found a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, which had been a small bottle for $4-something at Whole Foods and impossible to find anywhere else, well, at BevMo it's $6-odd for a bottle twice as big so I got that also.
Downtown Willow Glen is a classic example of a downtown area that needs to be made pedestrian-only. Traffic there is horrible. So after snooping around a bit I got out of there.
Then I followed my usual route of Dai Thanh to Nijiya and in between them, the little free libraries where I picked up a book on Greek myths by Robert Graves and a softcover copy of "Civilization" by Kenneth Clark, which we had in hardcover when I was a kid.
I got back here, unloaded, went and got a few things out of the bountiful dumpster, and got back in. All the metal pieces were taken from the pile of racks, so I now have a free ad up for the cable management stuff which hopefully someone will take, and if not, I'm going to load it all onto the bike trailer and put it out by Old Bayshore.
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