I got 15 things ready to list, including researching and taking apart one gadget because the parts were worth more than the whole, but by the time the stuff was ready I decided I'd done enough and called it a night.
I got my hour of practice in and am just up to "Muffins" in the Wye book - again. The thing is, there are two beginner Wye books, and I'm only partway into the first one. I need to get a lot more determined. The book so far has a lot of exercises and a lot more work on time signatures and things like slurs and staccato than you'd expect in a beginner book, but when the student only knows a handful of notes, you have to keep it interesting somehow.
The other series of books, 1-4, that I have that teach flute by way of popular music the student will know, get into things like Annie's Song and Greensleeves pretty early on, but I still have to get further along than I am now.
A guy wants to buy the cornet, for $200. He says the ad isn't on Craig's List any more, and I said it's still here, for sale, and I'll have to look into why the ad is gone. Anyway, the guy wants to pay $200 and he'll either come here or I can take it to the Portuguese Music Hall in Little Portugal which might be interesting. It won't feel so bad that I'm taking a huge loss on the thing if it's going to someone who plays there. The truth is simply that I really overpaid for the thing.
My practice went OK I guess. I did some octave exercises on the headjoint to warm up or something but mainly because they're kinda fun. And did my practice, doing a lot of playing an exercise and then playing it an octave up. But I sounded pretty crappy. The flute keeps moving around in my hands and making the sound bad. I think more practice will solve this.
Ken had brought over the cable I'd bought on Amazon, so I was able to charge up the Galaxy S9 phone, which should bring about $200 on Craig's List. I've messed around with it a bit and I just have no interest.
Plus I want to put the trumpet onto Craig's List because like the cornet, I'm not using it and don't plan to.
Ken called and said the large package I'd handed off to him to ship, can't be shipped as packed w/o spending a bit over $400 which he didn't want to do. But, he said, we can split it up into two packages and pay a mere $80 each. I said when he comes by tonight to bring it by, I can pack it into something smaller while he waits.
While waiting, I thought up a plan. The package has two plug-ins. We had four, which meant two just like 'em were still on the shelf here. So I took those, packed them in a smaller, lighter box, and weighed it etc., and not only did Ebay show viable shipping methods but the one box with the two things came to $90 so I went ahead and bought/printed the label and packaged it up. And called Ken, telling him it's a done deal and all he has to do is drop the bigger box off, because I can just take the smaller one on my post office run on Tuesday.
So Ken came by the usual time, dropped off the bigger box, I showed him the smaller one and explained how it worked out, and then we unloaded a lot of stuff to list so there will be no shortage of things to put on Ebay.
On r/collapse on Reddit, one of my regular reads, someone started a thread about how almost everyone there is eager for the Apocalypse or something. Many may be, but in my own case it's a combination of things that keeps me reading that sub-reddit every day. One is that it's not a bad source for a lot of news, most of it "doomy" but then most news is these days. Also, it makes me feel a bit less alone. Yeah I have Ken for a friend and see him on average for an hour or so once a week, which is a lot of friend-time for a Silicon Valley person to have. But Ken is as pure a "suburbian" as I have seen, with his beliefs that one will live forever, that the more cars a person owns the better, that real estate goes up forever and thus his daughter losing her 401k to buying a place (N. Las Vegas) that will soon have no water, is an excellent financial move, that Trump/Trumpism is "no danger to anyone" (since to a suburbian, "everyone" is that tiny slice of "pure whites" and no one else) and so on. These beliefs are not very easy to relate to. And lastly, I'm gambling that things are going to hold together for a bit longer. That we might be in something closer to 1929 than 1939.
We *are* going to end up with some fairly serious warfare soon. We've got a healthy proxy war going on in Ukraine, and it looks like we might get something going in or around Taiwan. Wars are what capitalism does because wars are profitable. It really doesn't matter who wins as long as it's kept away from the US mainland. And it really doesn't matter how many or few of our own troops we send over. What matters is selling lots of war toys. Things have to be kept nice and hot, but not too hot, or it becomes a nuclear war which everyone loses.
If various wars become hot enough, we'll start to see things like travel restrictions and economic depression on the home front. But in 1929, a Jew could still travel around Europe or even travel to the US, assuming the US would let them in, whereas by 1939 that was all off the table. Do I have ten years? Do I have two? I am hoping I have two. So I read r/collapse to fill in what I see when I'm out doing errands, and hear on the radio.
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