Friday, September 16, 2022

An abnormal to me, normal schedule

 Yesterday, after having had a few hours of sleep, it was all I could do to stay up until midnight and then I hit the sack, hard. I'd only been "allowed" a few hours' sleep because of course as soon as it's 8AM I had to get the required spam phone calls or at least one, purporting to be from my medical plan but I'm not that easily fooled. 

So I was staggering by midnight and went to bed, and woke up at 6AM for some reason so I stayed up. I packed the few things that had sold, and at 10:30 left for downtown. I dropped the packages off at the post office and by that time I'd dropped a big can of corned beef hash and some other stuff off at the little free library in Japantown. 

I decided I'd take the bus to Sunnyvale, look around the old place and eat somewhere, so I waited for a while at the bus stop in front of Whole Foods where I'd locked up the bike. It took a while, and so did the ride, but I figured, that's OK because I'll take the train back; that'll be easy. 

I looked around in the Goodwill and ate a "red sea" curry at the little Thai place where I used to do that rather often when I lived in Sunnyvale, and looked around at places, and saw that there was a rather decent lunchtime crowd since they've shut off Murphy Street to traffic and there are a lot of chairs and tables outside. And by now it was close to 1, so I was seeing the tail-end of the lunch crowd. It looked like a good busking situation. 

After eating I had an espresso at the Bean Scene, which really hasn't changed over the years. I had a laugh with the guy who made my drink about the "Gritty Kitty" which they still serve. It's a sort of coffee-flavored shake with coffee beans tossed in the blender too. It's ... gritty. 

I'd actually started out to have a (expensive) bowl of ramen at the ramen place, but after I sat down they started playing loudish rap music and I suddenly thought, "Wow, I'm going to overpay for ramen, and I've got to listen to this?" and walked out, saying I forgot the time and had to meet someone. 

After I'd looked at everything, and I'd already bought a package of oil-cured olives at the Halal market by the bus stop on El Camino, I decided it was time to hop on a train and get back. That turned out to be more involved than I'd planned, because first I guess they were single-tracking so everyone had to wait on the northbound side, and then that was called off so those of us going South went back to our side, but it was all moot because for the longest time no trains came. Then two came through, one right after the other, going North, and after a while one came through going South and it was a quick ride back to Diridon. 

Once back, I treated myself to a bag of train station popcorn, and sat on a bench and ate it while watching all the lost people and people figuring out the ticket machines and the odd crazy. A crazy guy kept saying "Si" to this one machine with a touch screen, and interacting with it in his crazy way. This is when I realized that if there are lots of robots around ever, they will interact with all the crazy people because a robot designed to interact with the public is not going to know when to ignore someone. 

I walked back over to Whole Foods and bought a bag of walnuts and rode over to Dai Thanh and got some veggies, and got back here. We're supposed to have some serious rain come through from Sunday to Tuesday, so while I rode I thought about how I'll best use my Saturday, tomorrow. 

I got back here, put things away, and headed back out to get rid of a bag of trash, check the "bountiful" dumpster (it wasn't even there - I think the gravy train has just about ended here) and get a few things at H Mart. That all went without a hitch, only coming back here, there were zombies fighting in a parking lot nearby and when I got to my front door, there was a zombie on a bike digging around in the pile of stuff featuring what's left of the Coke cooler and I just got in here as quickly as I could while being unobtrusive about it. 

I think the schedule of midnight to 8AM is a good one. Ken seems to take pains to not stay (much) after midnight when he comes over, and I can go to bed just about immediately after he leaves. Getting up at 8, I can get a lot done before noon. When I was a repair tech, my daily goal was to get a lot done before noon because then I knew the day would be a good, productive one. It would allow me to get to places before they close, to busk during lunch hour, and to go to and busk at farmer's markets on the weekends. 

All of this ties in to being back in Hawaii. People are generally early risers there, to get things done before it gets too hot.

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