Well, the election results are pretty much all in, and the election didn't turn out as horrible as many thought it would turn out to be. "Dr." Oz got thrown out, some other bad guys got thrown out, a bunch of good guys won, here in San Jose we might be stuck with that Mahan idiot but I'm sure he'll do a bad enough job that he'll immunize the city against voting for any Republicans for mayor for a while.
I did my practice last night, and did a new page in the book, page 24. I remember the illustration of the "native' swinging a bull-roarer but I don't remember if I played that page in the past. I may have looked at the music on the page to see what was ahead and not played it but counted out the rhythm of the notes.
I got to bed around 8AM I think, woke up at 1:30, "rested my eyes" and got up at 4.
I packed 4 large/heavy things to take to FedEx, and took off at about 6:30. I got a real fright too, as I passed by a side-street that's had a bum camp. I heard the most horrifying sound, and was trying to figure out if it was a zombie making horrible zombie sounds, and it was gaining on me. I finally figured out that it was a zombie in a zombie truck with a zombie dog/puppy that was barking/howling it's undead head off, its voice all weird-sounding from hollering for its very existence for an extended period of time. Maybe the thing was traded for a rock of crack, or maybe it was going to be the centerpiece of tonight's cookout. Not My Business and I was glad to get away from there.
As I was packing Ken had called to say he'll come by tomorrow night instead of tonight. Also, the post office is closed on Friday so I'll have to ship out all I can tomorrow. My bank will be closed on Friday so I'll have to wait until next week to deposit the check I'll get tomorrow night. Good old Veterans' Day - making life complicated for veterans. I didn't even realize this Friday was a holiday until someone said something about it on the radio.
There's a lot of talk about the election results on the radio, and also the perennial mention of how the minimum wage in (blank) isn't enough for a person to rent a 2-bedroom apartment. Well, in my experience that was always the case. The old-time "social contract" was, at least up through the 90s, that if you worked, you got to sleep under a roof.
So I checked the Hawaii minimum wage, which is $12, and did the math, showing a month's income is about 2 grand and after taxes are taken out, 25%, that leaves $1500, which is enough to live on and rent a single room. Even these days. At 1/3 of one's take-home pay, it means $500 for a room and the other $1000 to do other things with. At 1/3 of gross pay that's about $700 for room rent which is very do-able even these days.
The key to making these numbers work is to not smoke, not drink, and not waste money on a motor vehicle. A lot of people complain about the high cost of living there because of the island thing of feeling like you're missing out if you don't have a car like mainland people do, and drink like mainland people do, and at least in the past, smoke cigs like they do on the mainland (even if you find Marlboros rank and can only smoke Kools, the official cigarette of the 50th state).
On Reddit someone is congratulating themselves on getting an electrical engineering degree and making $60k a year. Well, a full time job at Hawaii's minimum wage will earn you $25k a year, and if you can double that, by getting some grubby but necessary blue collar job, ideally for some branch of government, then you'll get that same amount without going a quarter-million dollars into debt for a degree that's damned hard to get, and comes with a side of zero job security and the probability of having to cash out and live off of your 401k and stack shelves at the dollar store every 7-10 years because such is the life of a tech worker.
Even on my old early-mid 1980s financial routine, if I worked at it I could save $200 a month and as noted earlier, that's $2400 a year, and after 4 years just about 10 grand. If I'd stayed the hell away from college and just worked and enjoyed myself, I'd have a solid middle-class life now. Just work, go fishing and shelling and learning music when not working, and save, and all this while I was young and healthy so there'd be no chance of losing it all due to illness, and then I'd be set. There was even a time I could have bought the old house on Portlock Road and who knows, that time may come again because the US economy seems to be going through more and more extreme oscillations.
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