I listed 20 small things last night and although I felt tired, I remembered that "practice is not negotiable" and practiced. It went OK, a lot of it is coming down to developing a steady, consistent, holding position. I noticed one neat thing, that I wasn't even thinking about it when I fingered C, which is the trickiest note so far. That's a really good sign.
I woke up at about 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon, which is OK for now. I actually woke up at noon which is when I want to get up tomorrow, then went back for more sleep.
On the radio right now they were talking about a Chinese comedian who decided to visit family here in the US just when covid was becoming a thing, and a different person, a lady, also. Trips to China were 6 and 7 grand. It was cheaper to have her furniture shipped and her cat sent to another country for her to go and pick up, she said.
I checked just now and it seems to be 3 grand, 1-way. This is what people in the US don't see. We're a sinking, largely poor country with a few rich people and some wealthy (and rather scary) corporations. China meanwhile is raising its people out of poverty, said poverty being a legacy of the "century of humiliation" the West imposed on it. Of course it would cost a ton to go from a sinking ship like the US to a world power like China.
At its worst, some people would have had to pay $12k to get back to China, and one guy said he should have, because with no work and no income here in this shithole country (he didn't say that) he'd have been better off.
I packed one thing, a very large capacitor, and took that to FedEx, and on the way back, the EMT training place was throwing out tons of over the counter medicines and AED batteries and stuff, so I loaded a box up and both Whole Foods bags too. And at the electric lighting place I found another reel bolt, not quite the same as the one I'd turned into my "explainer" but it's something.
I got back here and cooked up some ramen and neatened the place up, cleaned the office and bathroom and so on, and Ken came by at the usual time but he stayed in his truck and handed me my check all made out, and kept a mask on while we talked for a bit. There was a nice breeze going between us and I stayed back a bit so we were able to talk. Mainly about all the oil wells in Southern California. I wished him well and will see him again next week.
I've got a book I ordered that came to Ken's house and "some letters and stuff" so I'll get those next week too. Basically it's taking the book a "mere" month to get to me, which is how it was when I was a kid. You ordered thing and it was just taken for granted that they took weeks to come and everyone was OK with that. You had magazine subscriptions and things like the book of the month club and no one felt things were too slow.
People will have to slow down again. The internet is probably not going to be around in 10 years. As it is, it's becoming more and more awful. For instance, I hate cars, and I hate the present Ponzi schemes called "cryptocurrency" and so I get tons of ads for ... cars and crypto. I get ads for all kinds of other stupid shit I either don't ever buy or actively dislike. Watching video is becoming like when people had cable TV and you had channels that were scrambled but if it was a movie you really wanted to see, you might try, for a while, to watch it through the scrambling before giving up. And there were laserdiscs, the larger and higher-"fi" counterparts to today's DVDs.
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